The reason why straight men are having sex with other men, according to a sexologist

Sexual content follows... Obviously.

Graham Norton once joked that the difference between a straight man and a gay man was 'about four and half pints of lager in my experience'.

This answer, may actually be closer to the truth than one might expect.

Some would simply say of men sleeping with men that 'They're not straight, they're gay'.

This is a topic that sexologist Dr Nikki Goldstein explored for NewsAU.

Are these men secretly gay and in hiding?

Sexual pleasure not sexual attraction

This is one of the reasons Goldstein found for why straight men are sleeping with men.

While her research and interviews did find some men were in fact gay or bisexual.

Goldstein reports that one gay man she spoke to, Max*, often found it easy to find a straight man interested in sex.

It’s pretty easy to find if you know where you are looking. Probably any toilet you go to is a beat.

The fact the man was also married was later confirmed by a text to Max that claimed 'You give head as good as my wife does'.

Another described a 'glory hole' set up in their apartment, where anonymous men could come to get off, without knowing the gender or identity of the person on the other side.

In this instance again, the point is pleasure rather than attraction.

Max again:

The majority of straight men who are going to a glory hole are going because they don’t want to see who is on the other side. It is about just getting off.

Is it that easy to find another girl who is just willing to give a blow job and say nothing more? Guys know what other guys are like. Guys just want to (get off). It sounds harsh, but it’s true.

'A different sexual experience'

Goldstein said it was much easier to find gay men who had slept with straight men, than it was to find any straight men who would admit to sleeping with men.

One, 'Paul', came forward. Goldstein said:

He had an occasional urge to have a different sexual experience, one you can have with a guy

Paul explained:

Try to understand it and embrace it. I think there are so many more men out than the world realises, than woman realise, that enjoy a different type of stimulation.

I would think that society would be amused by the number of men that are out there that seek a slightly different adventure and it doesn’t necessarily mean in any way shape or form that they are gay or bi. They are just wanting to experiment and have a bit of fun just like we see girls out there on the dance floor.

Paul used the analogy of trying a different ride at a theme park.

But does even wanting to 'try a different ride' make you bisexual rather than a straight man having sex?

Or are we too obsessed with labels?

In 2015, Dr Jane Ward explored the phenomenon for her book 'Not Gay: Sex Between Straight White Men'.

She found that homosexual contact is 'normal part of the male experience'.

Ward also spoke about the disparity between how we treat women who experiment with the sexuality, and men who do the same.

If you look at this belief that women's sexuality is more receptive - it’s more fluid, it’s triggered by external stimuli, that women have the capacity to be sort of aroused by anything and everything - it really just reinforces what we want to believe about women, which is that women are always sexually available people.

With men, on the other hand, the idea that they have this hardwired heterosexual impulse to spread their seed and that that's relatively inflexible, also kind of reinforces the party line about heteronormativity and also frankly, patriarchy.

Race was another factor which Ward thought was key to understanding 'straight' sex between two men.

I would argue that because white men have been understood as the idealised, most normal, sort of exemplars of normal human sexuality, there's a lot of work and attention that goes into excusing anything they do or rationalising anything they do that might disrupt that view, and that's not the case for women or for men of colour.

*Goldstein altered the names for the purposes of her News AU article.

HT News AU

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