Ask A Genius 1400: Language, Sexuality, and the Jarring Ironies of Desire
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/06/03
Rick Rosner is an accomplished television writer with credits on shows like Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Crank Yankers, and The Man Show. Over his career, he has earned multiple Writers Guild Award nominations—winning one—and an Emmy nomination. Rosner holds a broad academic background, graduating with the equivalent of eight majors. Based in Los Angeles, he continues to write and develop ideas while spending time with his wife, daughter, and two dogs.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen is the publisher of In-Sight Publishing (ISBN: 978-1-0692343) and Editor-in-Chief of In-Sight: Interviews (ISSN: 2369-6885). He writes for The Good Men Project, International Policy Digest (ISSN: 2332–9416), The Humanist (Print: ISSN 0018-7399; Online: ISSN 2163-3576), Basic Income Earth Network (UK Registered Charity 1177066), A Further Inquiry, and other media. He is a member in good standing of numerous media organizations.
Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen riff on the linguistic and cultural contradictions in how society frames sexuality, from the slur-laden term “bent” to the paradoxes of straight and gay attraction. The conversation veers into sex, identity, and desire—poking at taboos, stereotypes, and raw biological drives underlying modern sexual norms.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Here’s a small thing though: people say “straight” and then “gay.” But the opposite of straight is curve—yet we don’t use curve for gay.
Rick Rosner: Use bent. Bent is a word. It’s a kind of curve—but less elegant.
Jacobsen: Yes.
Rosner: Yes. But it’s also a slur. There was a play—Bent—set among homosexual prisoners in a Nazi concentration camp. So I assume there’s some historical accuracy to that. In World War II, “bent” was used as a slur for gay men.
Being straight is gay, by the way. The straightest guys in the world are pirates fucking other pirates—because they’re so manly, they can only be turned on by the manliest of other men.
Straight guys are so fucking gay that they have to fuck women who wear pretty dresses and have pretty hair. It’s pretty fucking gay. It’s crazy that high heels on a woman will give guys a boner. Long, flowing hair? Boner. That’s weird.
Now, for gay guys—a scar that starts above the eyebrow, skips the eye, and continues down the cheek… a Dolph Lundgren-style buzz cut… platinum blond hair… faded on the sides… pec muscles so defined you can hold a pencil under them when flexed—that gives manly gay men a boner.
What’s the straightest thing about gay culture? What’s the gayest thing about straight culture?
The straightest thing about gay culture? All the fucking. Guys piling on each other because they can. Because everyone wants to jizz.
Who wouldn’t want to jizz a million times a day—surrounded by people who give you angry boners? That’s a dream only a few straight people ever realize—and then they go to prison for it.
Like Diddy. He probably did some gay stuff too. But he had the resources to throw baby oil parties and spray jizz everywhere—which, apparently, he did. And now, he might go to prison for life.
Back in the bathhouse era before AIDS, gay men—those who were into it—might have had a thousand partners a year. Three different guys a day, every day, all year long. Not the best strategy for avoiding AIDS, as it turned out. But those are Wilt Chamberlain numbers. So there you go. Straight or gay, we all want to get the jizz out.I tell Carole that all the time. She asks, Why would a guy do that?—in response to some sex scandal—and I go: Had to get the jizz out. So there you go.
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