But then again, there is this little question that has to be asked. In order for you to have formed such an opinion, were you trying at the time to be your brother's keeper by intruding into private lives, or perhaps being voyeuristic? OR were you the victim of confirmation bias, in which you see what you expected to see BECAUSE you expected to see it, whereas someone else lacking that bias would not have even raised an eyebrow?
Well, that's a somewhat iffy question to ask, but I'll believe the best that your intentions are not to take a cheap shot or embarass me by trying to force me to "tell your secrets or else you lose this argument", because you do have a little bit of a point in wondering how I got my opinion.
And I suppose I could ask you the same thing.
However, if your opinion in the argument is based exclusively on NON-sordid, then doesn't that bias your conclusion exactly as much as it biases mine, quite probably in the opposite direction?
But, in the interest of as much straightforward exchange as seems reasonable, let's just say that like most people, I've had my dalliances in life. And, perhaps unlike most people but like some, I've had particular difficulties that, while they were not sexual in nature, they definitely had me rubbing shoulders with a lot of wild places and people. I picked up a lot of information during that time based on where I went, what I read, who I had to see. It exposed me to a world of all kinds of vices and underground things. One thing became clear to me fast....the gay community's active networks of sex-only schemes outweigh anything straight people have created, or would probably feel comfortable with. I don't particularly blame them, I think there is a perfectly good explanation for it. Straights and gays probably want about the same contents of life, on the whole. However, straight people cannot engage in sex with major safety concerns - usually the female more concerned with exploitation, deception and assault than the male. However, gays can engage in this without that paradigm, as they are of the same gender and tend to start out from a slightly more equal footing. Thus, nature takes its course. They can take advantage of a paradigm for sex that others just can't do.
I suppose this is kind of like the age-old "massage parlor" dispute.
You had the guy who shot up one of those back-alley asian massage parlors in the news a year or two back, citing some kind of frustration with a sex addiction. You had CNN running articles bemoaning the awful Racism, Sexism, Asian-ism, and any other 'ism they could think of, to think that a white man DARE make such a conclusion about this parlor that he, by all accounts, hadn't been to himself. Trying to convince their readers that such a conclusion made no sense at all, and that, Rare were such parlors, by God! You had a lot of men probably reading that article mumbling...what in the world are they talking about? Clearly they've never participated, or they would know that probably 90% of them actually
are sex workers. Of course these same readers can't exactly muse verbally their opinion at the dinner table, now can they?
I think you get the point.