Ask A Genius 1001: Mostly, No Means No, Yes Means Yes, and Ick Means Ick

Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/07/05

Rick Rosner, American Comedy Writer, www.rickrosner.org

Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Independent Journalist, www.in-sightpublishing.com

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I was joking with JD today because I did it yesterday. I did Lance and JD’s session, which was three and a half hours long. 

Rick Rosner: That’s a lot. 

Jacobsen: Lance was probably two and a half hours, then an hour and fifteen. I was joking with JD, saying that going to Lance’s sessions, “You go from art to Trump stuff, and Rick goes from math and cosmology to masturbation,” to “by the way, I was trying to get a girlfriend in high school.”

Rick Rosner: Yes, that’s fair. But I saw a tweet today from a trans woman, a very attractive trans woman, slash, a comedian who also happens to be very pretty, whom I follow on Twitter. She was talking about the number of straight guys who hit her up for sex on the down low. She was postulating, if I remember correctly, that the main problem most straight guys have with trans women is genital shaming. What she meant by that is they’re afraid that they have decided to be with a woman with male genitals, but they fear being shamed if their friends and family find out about it. I replied to her tweet, saying I’m guessing that’s correct. 

Based on what I see in AI porn, there are specific channels, which I haven’t clicked on, that are nothing but AI trans porn. Even in regular AI porn, close to a third of the images include women with male genitals. To me, the marketplace knows that if AI is being asked to make these images, then guys, in general, are interested and encouraging those images. I have some thoughts about why. It’s not because they’re interested in trans women; it’s because gigantic male genitals are dirtier or more flamboyantly pornographic than female genitals. An outie can be more spectacular in a manufactured image than an innie. You see this with other parts of the body where in AI porn, there are images of women with three-foot-long breasts and three-inch nipples. And in half of the images or more, the women are drenched with semen, even though it makes no sense.

Given the action of the images of women being with each other, and yet they’re still covered with cum, where does the cum come from? No cum and big, no genitals are more visually impressive, say. Nevertheless, it shows that I would guess largely straight porn consumers are interested in trans women for the most part, based on what shows up in the porn marketplace. What does this mean for the future? It means it’s a continuation of existing trends, including increasing acceptance of people, regardless of their appearance. I grew up at a time when appearance was strongly linked to sexual success. The hottest people hooked up the most. And we’ve been trending away from that because we’re more accepting and educated. My friends and I didn’t know jack shit about anything. 

All we knew was that cheerleaders were cute, so we all wanted a cheerleader girlfriend. We were fucking idiots, but the culture was a fucking idiot too. So, increased awareness of different kinds of people often leads to acceptance of people with different appearances. Also, you get to talk to more people via social media, people you may not have talked to in the 70s in your little town. There weren’t very many trans people in a town of 8,000 people in 1975. There was no porn either. Now we’re buried under an avalanche. There’s an endless supply of porn, which is what most people want, especially most guys. 

I’ve talked about this before, if you have a spank bank, an image repository of a bunch of stuff that you can think about in your imagination based on porn that you’ve consumed, that puts less pressure on being aroused by your partner. These are both trends that are going to continue. Another trend we talk about is less coupling up and less sex in the flesh because it’s hard to couple up. It’s harder. It takes more effort to couple up than not to. Do what you want, not better yourself to increase your chances, and do not look for somebody you can stand to be with who can stand to be with you. One aspect of the future I’m considering in the book I’m writing set in the future is maybe at some point in the book, flesh on flesh, sex with an actual person has become rare enough that you could almost consider it a kink or a luxury that belongs to people with the time, the money, the gumption to hook up. And that an increasing percentage of people make do on their own.

Jacobsen: Do you think the appeal to particular pieces of a person, whether it’s boobs or butts or penises or vaginas or faces or whatever else, is sufficiently rejected by someone based on their internal feeling of the act? I don’t think people’s preferences should necessarily be coerced. When an individual doesn’t want to be coerced into full attraction to someone, they shouldn’t feel that. 

Rosner: Yes, but everybody has their type and often, a component of their type is how hot they are. There’sThere needs to be more hot people at my college, the University of Colorado. I went there for a long time and noticed that three or four thousand students out of twenty thousand were fixated on the hottest one thousand students. On weekends, because somebody was flying them on a ski weekend in Europe, or they go away for a week to pose for Vogue. Robert Redford went to CU. He went there long enough ago that maybe there wasn’t as much of a hot contingent, but Robert Redford was the hottest guy in America for a decade or so. 

The hot people probably want to live their glamorous lives, not realizing that for every one of them, there were half a dozen people who were fixated on them. It’s the tyranny of hotness that everybody else is struggling to make do in their shadows. Eventually, people grow up and learn to compromise or lower their expectations or see the beauty in other than perfectly beautiful people. I got lucky with Carole. She’s very attractive but didn’t present as necessarily super duper hot when we met. She’s cute but grew up with low self-esteem and social uncertainty, making her a bargain. There’s this, what’s the guy from “A Beautiful Mind,” John, what’s his face? 

Jacobsen: John Nash…

Rosner: …talked about a whole strategy: if you’re in a place where you can meet somebody, or you’re looking to hook up with somebody. His strategy was to look for the most desirable people in the place and eliminate them from consideration. Then, throw yourself at the most attractive remaining people because everybody will be doing what the CU people did, focusing on the hot 1,000. That leaves everybody else with people not paying attention to them. I met Carole at a Jewish singles dance in Denver. It wasn’t the coolest thing to be a Jewish single in Denver then. So I knew going to that dance would be a fool’s errand, but I was obligating myself to go on one fool’s errand a week to get myself out of a rut after a terrible breakup. So I went, and I showed up as being more attractive relative to the other guys at the dance than I would have in a Denver nightclub because many of the guys were nebishes.

Jacobsen: What’s a nebishe? 

Rosner: A schlemiel? A putz?

Jacobsen: A putz. A schlemiel, I don’t know. A nebishe, I don’t know, but a putz, I know.

Rosner: It’s not particularly dashing or slick. The opening of hooking up with people who are not the hottest humans has been a positive thing. And it’s something that the internet has opened up. When I was in the market for girlfriends, you went to bars to meet people. So there are some aspects of meeting people in bars, as we’ve talked about, that have advantages over trying to meet people in everyday life. At the time, you might read a “How to Meet Girls, How to Pick Up Girls” book, and it would say they were crappy books with bad, not very helpful advice. One piece of advice was to go to the places where women are, the grocery store, and do what modern pickup artists call a cold approach in a grocery store. 

Walking up to a woman and saying, “You look so interesting. I had to talk to you.” That’s very hard to pull off. You’re going to have to try that on dozens and dozens of women before it starts to have a chance of working for you. In a bar, the barriers to meeting somebody are lower because it raises the likelihood that if you’re in a bar and somebody else is in a bar in 1982, there’s a higher probability that you’re both there to try to meet somebody than at the grocery store. And the lights are low, so it helps if you could be better looking. The music is loud, so it helps if you could be more articulate. You might be drunk. They might be drunk, which helps again if you’re less than articulate. It’s all designed to help people who might do poorly at meeting people in real life. But bars have been replaced with social media, where you can cultivate your best online self and be seen by thousands more than you would see in a bar.

Given that there are so many people available online, if you’re inclined to experiment sexually, you might try a putz. You might try somebody less than perfect. It’s opened up the marketplace. At the same time, to get back to the future of sex, even though the marketplace has been opened up, the number of people who are willing to go all the way into coupling up and having babies has been declining and will continue to decline. Other areas of life, mainly entertainment, become increasingly compelling.

So the Stacy case said that it’s maybe primarily a fear of social shaming that scares straight men away from trans women, but there are also other secondary considerations. You may have to touch somebody’s dick, which seems only reasonable if you think about it. If you’re with a trans person, and they’re touching your genitals, it makes sense that they’ll want their genitals touched, too. At the most superficial level of thinking, you’re afraid of touching somebody else’s dick. If you analyze that fear, one of the fears is, what if you enjoy touching a dick? What if this flips the switch in you, and all of a sudden, you can’t get enough of dick? That’s one fear. This is like playing Family Feud. What are the top five? We asked a hundred people, a hundred guys, why might they be uneasy getting with a trans person, and you’re guessing what the answers might be. They don’t want to. 

Jacobsen: I will give a practical example rather than a theoretical one. A lesbian activist friend of mine raised this. She, in her heart of hearts, feels genuinely attracted to women who were born female and socialized as girls and women but is not sexually attracted to trans women who were born male, socialized as boys or men, and then transitioned to being a girl or a woman. So for her, she doesn’t want to have the attempts at some coercion of the lesbian community, which is directed towards the lesbian community to not only accept and affirm trans women, which is a separate issue, but to accept and date against her personal feeling of ick in terms of that relationship status and sexual relations. She does not feel sexual attraction to them and is more repelled by the attempts to coerce attraction. So, saying the fact that she, as a lesbian, is attracted to women who were born female and socialized as girls and women but not to trans women is to be transphobic when she’s more than supporting the movement and so forth, but it’s against the coercive aspect of being called that, using negative social reinforcement.

Rosner: I didn’t quite understand what you’re saying, but you have a friend who’s female, who’s attracted to women but not trans women because she feels that there’s trickery involved or something?

Jacobsen: She’s not attracted and is against the attempt at social negative reinforcement. Otherwise, you are transphobic. So what if you, to be a good lesbian, have to include being attracted to trans women in your repertoire, and she doesn’t like the coercive aspect of that? Because it goes against what she innately feels, she does not feel attracted to trans women. 

Rosner: That’s her right. I’m trying to come up with ideas as to why. 

Jacobsen: I don’t mean to put you on the spot. This is a sensitive time in American discourse, but that’s a small minority within a minority concern. But these kinds of things come up, right? So they come to me, and I must reflect on them and then convey them.

Rosner: Yes. In the future, as barriers come down, as people decide to give less and less of a shit about this kind of stuff, which doesn’t mean they’ll quit caring altogether, but certainly, even though there’s much freaking out about trans people among a bunch of mostly conservative people, there’s more acceptance in general and more visibility and more trans people out there. Being part of the world, not hiding it.

Jacobsen: There’s a principle there. In the same way, we make organized, summative statements on consent culture: “No means no.” Things like this, which I mostly agree with. Anyways, could there be something for my lesbian friend, “Ick means ick”?

Rosner: Right. 

Jacobsen: In the same way, a gay man is not attracted to women that way, and a lesbian woman is not attracted to men that way. There’s an ick factor. Ick means ick.

Rosner: It’s an affirmation of that. That’s how you feel about that. Then you should be. Yes. Until you apply the romcom formula and meet the one. That could be a perfectly reasonable romcom plot for now, or maybe three years from now, about a confirmed guy. “The Crying Game” was about that. In its primitive way, a guy falls in love with a woman until he finds out she has a dick.

I need to remember how that was resolved, but I’m sure not well, given that it was made in the 90s. I don’t know. But you could make a rom-com, probably now, but certainly two or three years from now, where a guy, a popular football quarterback, who usually has a hot girlfriend and is contemptuous of trans people, falls for the new girl at school and turns out she’s trans. The comedy is that he reluctantly, and then less reluctantly, steps up and decides that he likes her as a person and finds her hot. Yes, she’s got a dick. Yes, he’s going to get made fun of for it, but he has to go with his heart and also his boner because she’s super hot. That would be a movie made in 2026. That would be dated by 2030 because it would be right. So, what else? I had one more point; maybe I can’t remember it. But shit! Gold star lesbians. Do you know what a gold star lesbian is, right?

Jacobsen: No.

Rosner: A gold star lesbian is a gay woman who has never had any level of sexual contact with a man. They knew early, had no interest, and got with women. However, in the future, there will be fewer Gold Star members for every orientation and combination of gender and orientation. Interesting point. It’s a standard thing that it’s no big deal now and hasn’t been a big deal in, I don’t know, 15, 20 years for a woman, particularly a hot woman, to have made out with some girls, other women, maybe even had a girlfriend in college. It was her wild days, it was her experimenting days, and then if she settles down and ends up married, nobody gives a fuck. Nobody gives a fuck if she doesn’t end up married. There’s very little social stigma for women, especially attractive women, to have had some sexual contact with women. I expect that footprint to increase in the future. More guys will experiment with guys before settling into heterosexual relationships. I would guess. I don’t know what the dynamics are. I always suspect that super hot gay guys have, a huge percentage of them, gotten with women early on and may even still, as circumstances permit. But that gold starkness is going to be eroded.

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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. ©Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use or duplication of material without express permission from Scott Douglas Jacobsen strictly prohibited, excerpts and links must use full credit to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with direction to the original content.