There was an article on TheBody.com the other day that tried to explain why gay men bareback...
http://www.thebody.com/content/art56400.html
The writer says some of the explanations are:
But he says he doesn't really think any of those are the real reason. He thinks...
- "Sex without a condom just feels better."
- "Gay men bareback out of a need for transgression, from a desire to flout societal norms and rules. Historically, gay men were seen as sexual outlaws, and part of our identity revolved around our outsider status, a status that even conferred a certain 'cool.' Today, with gay marriage making its halting march to legality and gay couples adopting children, being gay may seem kind of ordinary, and some men may need to find ways to hang on to our old outlaw status."
- "Gay men bareback out of a sense of fatalism or exhaustion. Perhaps they feel it's more or less inevitable they'll eventually become infected, so they might as well just get it over with."
Yeah, right... I mean there's a difference between guys who bareback (say in a committed relationship) and "barebackers". What he's saying might be true for the lovey dovey romantic types, but I wouldn't say it's true of the bareback community. As the poll in the other thread clearly shows - barebackers aren't looking for intimate/connected sex - we like our sex pretty much anonymous. So all his rhetoric about intimacy is pretty much pure bullshit.... barebacking is an attempt to escape from the awful sense of isolation that we all experience as human beings. That isolation is perhaps an inevitable consequence of our separate existence as individuals. But it's particularly acute for us gay men, who have grown up in a society hostile to our identity. Having spent so much of our lives on the outside, alienated from members of the majority (straight) culture, we gay men have an intense need to feel truly connected to others like ourselves.
To me, the urge that I think motivates barebacking is perfectly understandable. It is, after all, just a deeply felt desire for the most profound form of intimacy, a desire that goes beyond merely wanting to be close to someone else and crosses over into a need for union -- for the "blissful merger" that Irvin Yalom describes.
That said, I think he might be right about how some guys get into barebacking. I know I started with a boyfriend and there was a great connection blowing my loads up his hole (and his willingness to let me do it pretty early in our relationship - in 1995, before protease inhibitors, when barebacking was still incredibly risky).
But the connection thing doesn't explain why we continue to bareback. Barebacking really is pretty addictive and once you feel the rush of blowing a load up a guy's ass in a dark room in a bathhouse (or taking that load not knowing who in the hell it was who just came in your ass)... That's not about intimacy at all... That's the primitive instinct to BREED...
So why do you think barebackers bareback? Who's full of shit - me or the guy who wrote the article on The Body?



Reply With Quote



Bookmarks