Dickotomy - The Dichotomy of Dick

As a gay man I have observed a strange phenomenon when it comes to the pursuit of dick both in my own behaviour and in the behaviour of other gay men. I am going to refer to this a the dichotomy of dick - or dickotomy.

The shortest explanation I can give, is that the more emotional potential a connection has, the more resistant we seem to be when it comes to sexual advances and their timings.

One thing I love about Bluesky is the communal acceptance that Horny-on-main is the default, this is enabled by the fact that you can tag posts as adult or nudity using labels and anyone who hasn't opted in to seeing posts of that nature won't see it. You have to enable adult content when you join, it's off by default.

Being so free with sexual expression in an online space without actually hiding or limiting your identity has a maturity that it encourages when it comes to sex. In the real world we aren't horny constantly, we respond to social cues, body language, flirting, and other indications of interest to understand whether someone is receptive to our advances, and most decent people respect boundaries and don't make advances when they aren't wanted.

Seeing etiquette evolve in an online space where sex isn't so taboo has emphasized that mature relationship with sex, people interact with horny posts with horny replies but content that isn't remotely related to sex gets completely non-sexual interactions. People are respectful which is refreshing in any online space.

The observation of "dickotomy" however comes from recognizing that even in an online space the less emotionally attracted to someone I am, the less inhibited I am sexually, probably because there is no emotional "risk" at play, either it's hot or it's not, and if it's not, there's no lasting disappointment.

The problem comes when you are more emotionally invested in someone and feel a deeper connection has potential, you still want to be sexual when it's appropriate but there's a consciousness that the freakier you are the more the risk of losing that emotional connection becomes if they don't connect with you in that way, you have to be conscious of timing and aware of the fact that posts happen at a point in time and when it comes to sex, timing is important. The timelessness of other social networks blurred those lines, especially those that abandoned chronological feeds.

It's also odd because this is a first time experiencing this in an online space for me. As far as offline spaces are concerned I've felt this way for the better part of 3 decades now and it's always been something that I found difficult to navigate - part of the reason why my "slut phase" was so wild was because pursuing sexual pleasure without the complexity of emotional relationships was freeing, or as someone said on Bluesky, "Sex is everywhere, chemistry isn't" - this resonated for me because particularly when it comes to Bluesky having a space where people are open and expressive about their sexuality in every way hasn't actually made it easier to find emotional connections, those still take a lot more work.

I've met a few people now through Bluesky that I'm interested in getting to know on a personal level and I've made that clear to them, and there are many more I would be interested in but have no indication that is reciprocated so I don't overstep my boundaries. Bluesky has the potential to fulfil the promise of social media - to actually be social - I haven't experienced this since the very early days of Facebook when it was a students-only network and you could actually meet people through it.

As for offline connections, when I first came out as gay and started expressing my sexuality more, my group of friends changed over time and ended up with a heavy gender-bias with most of my friends being women; I mentioned this to the few gay friends I had at the time and the pointed response I got was "That's because it's harder to make friends with someone you want to fuck" which brings us back to that issue of emotional resistance, not being attracted to women made it easier to connect with them on an emotional level, and being attracted to men created a resistance to an emotional connection that even now at times it's still hard to navigate.

In a perfect world what you want is for both to develop in tandem, a sexual attraction and an emotional attachment, rather poignantly the trouble with tandems is that everyone who rides one has to pedal at the same speed. If one person gets ahead of the another it causes everything to stumble. That's where I find myself now, with potential emotional attachments, some growing at a faster pace than I am used to and some moving slower than I would like.

I know the advice some people will give is going to be to move at your own pace and find someone who matches your freak, and if that was the only thing I was after then I'd probably agree. The collateral damage of spoiled potential friendships.

I also know that some people will advise using an alt account for horny time and a main for your emotional investments and the problem with that is simple - you will never find an emotional connection through an alt account. People who have them focus on one thing all the time when they use them because that's what they are for.

The beauty of Bluesky is that it's not a porn site, it's a site that happens to have porn on it in addition to everything else, you get to see all facets of the person behind the account and get a better idea of who they are - I also think it's one of the reasons I've seen less confrontation on Bluesky than any other social network I've used because there is no "my dick's bigger than yours" mentalities because that's not a mystery, the other reason being the less inhibited you are the more honest you tend to be, I've seen more people express their insecurities and feel bolstered by the replies in the last few days alone than I ever did on the 15+ years I used twitter.

As I said above the question of how to balance emotional attraction and sexual attraction isn't something unique to Bluesky either, this is something I've struggled with offline too - it's easier to give someone your hole than to give them your heart.