Gay+
Welcome to Errattic! We encourage you to customize the type of information you see here by clicking the Preferences link on the top of this page.
You’re Just Not His Tribe: Rejection and the queer community
Getting older and wiser doesn’t mean you’ll face less rejection. In fact I think most of us would agree that you’ll encounter it more.
Take dating, which is primarily a social dance of rejection and attraction amongst the billions of people who’ve inhabited our planet. Technology has had an immeasurable effect on meeting and courting and coupling. At no other time in history has mankind had the ability to browse an infinite pool of potential partners each day, filtered for you by location, hobbies, fetishes, degrees, etc. I could, potentially, use Grindr’s Explore feature to place myself in Tokyo, meet a guy on the app, and be sipping warm saki with him in a week’s time. Were you to tell someone about this ten years ago, they’d side-eye you before looking back at their Blackberry.
On the flip side, dating has never brought about the sheer volume of rejection we currently face. One hundred guys can reject you on Grindr in a day—more, if you’re tenacious. Mythology suggests that the Greek poet Sappho threw herself off of a cliff due to her unrequited love for a ferryman named Phaon. Imagine if she’d been rejected one hundred times in a day? There aren’t enough cliffs in the world.
You’re Just Not His Tribe: Rejection and the queer community
'How you know you're getting old!' Dad reveals kids now use a different hand signal to show they're on the phone, after abandoning the pinky-and-thumb action used by older generations
Phones have evolved quite a bit over the years, with today's smartphones completely different from early cell phones and landlines.
So with the look and shape of phones changing so dramatically, it seems it was only a matter of time before the universal gesture for talking on the phone — pinky and thumb up, three middle fingers down, hand held up to the face — became unrecognizable to younger generations
Daily Mail
You Can Finally Stop Netflix From Autoplaying Videos. Here's How
Using Netflix, until today, had always been an exercise in timing, especially when looking for something to watch. That’s because, without fail, hovering on a particular title for too long would activate the streaming service’s dreaded preview autoplay feature, presenting you with a trailer you never asked for and forcing you to track the seconds before moving from one title to the next in an effort to avoid just muting your television out of exasperation.
It’s a more benign example of what’s referred to as a “dark pattern,” an engagement tactic used by software companies to persuade users to browse, read, watch, or otherwise interact with an app or service, encouraging addictive behavioral patterns. But Netflix has finally given users a choice when it comes to previewing titles, and now offers an option to disable the feature entirely.
Time
Sexual Abuse Against Gay and Bi Men Brings Unique Stigma and Harm
At least 1 in 6 boys are sexually abused before their 18th birthday. This number rises to 1 in 4 men across their lifespan.
The rates of sexual abuse and assault are even higher in boys and men from sexual minority populations.
Sexual violation in gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex individuals often complicates their sense of self, and how they fit, or don’t fit, into LGBTQ+ culture and communities. Such abuse may even impact their reaching out for help or reporting traumatic events as they fear stigmatization or victim-blaming.
Towleroad
Gay dating apps Grindr and Romeo can expose user locations, leaving men vunerable to hate crimes
Several of the most popular gay dating apps have flaws that allow their users’ exact locations to be determined, the BBC reports. Researchers from the cyber-security company Pen Test Partners found the flaws in the Grindr, Recon, and Romeo apps.
All of those apps allow users to share their general location by displaying their distance from each other. But while that location information only reveals distance from another user’s current location and not direction, the researchers found anyone with basic computing skills could use that information to determine another user’s exact location using a method known as trilateration. Here’s how the BBC describes the method:
Fast Company
MADONNA SAYS GIVING PHONES TO OLDER CHILDREN ‘ENDED HER RELATIONSHIP WITH THEM’
Madonna has said giving phones to her two eldest children had a hugely negative impact on her relationship with them.
Despite having given 22-year-old Lourdes and 18-year-old Rocco phones when they were in their early teens, Madonna does not plan on doing the same for her 13-year-old son David.
"I'm going to stick that one out for as long as possible, because I made a mistake when I gave my older children phones when they were 13," the Madame X star told Vogue.
"It ended my relationship with them, really."
Independent
WHO's Screen Time Guidelines For Babies & Kids Under 5 May Be A Game-Changer For Parents
Why do so many gay men feel lonely? A life coach gives the unfiltered truth
The gay men I work with range from their 20s to 50s. The guys in their 20s are often more attuned to coaching. They’re proactive about their growth and preempt problems by making informed choices. They can be savvy about the need for personal investment.
For older guys, certain issues come up regularly. They include learning to thrive as a gay man as they get older, finding meaningful work and creating authentic connections.
Gay Star News
Sex robot brothel to open in Japan as more men seek bisexual threesomes
A brothel where clients can have sex with impressively realistic robots is set to open its doors in Japan.
The LumiDolls hotel in Nagoya, in the country’s Aichi Prefecture, follows three other venues in Barcelona, Turin and Moscow.
LumiDolls will launch the sex house initially offering four different types of models.
The company’s boss Sergi Prieto says it will give people the chance to carry out their ‘wildest fantasies’.
An hour with a sex robot at the Nagoya’s brothel costs ¥13000, the equivalent of $116,50. A sex robot costs approximately $1,500, depending on the model.
Gay Star News
This little boy's Star Destroyer Halloween costume is out of this world
This little boy's Star Wars-inspired Star Destroyer will make everyone in the galaxy extremely jealous.
Mashable
Parents Who Had Severe Trauma, Stresses In Childhood More Likely To Have Kids With Behavioral Health Problems
A new study finds that severe childhood trauma and stresses early in parents' lives are linked to higher rates of behavioral health problems in their own children.
The types of childhood hardships included divorce or separation of parents, death of or estrangement from a parent, emotional, physical or sexual abuse, witnessing violence in the home, exposure to substance abuse in the household or parental mental illness.
"Previous research has looked at childhood trauma as a risk factor for later physical and mental health problems in adulthood, but this is the first research to show that the long-term behavioral health harms of childhood adversity extend across generations from parent to child," said the study's lead author, Dr. Adam Schickedanz. He is a pediatrician and health services researcher and assistant professor in the department of pediatrics at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.
The study showed that the children of parents who themselves had four or more adverse childhood experiences were at double the risk of having attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and were four time more likely to have mental health problems.
Science Magazine
Luke And Leia ‘Fly’ A ‘Star Wars’ Speeder Bike In NYC For Halloween
May the trick-or-treating be with you.
YouTuber Jesse Wellens has conjured another viral winner for Halloween, zipping through New York City with Carmella Rose a la Luke and Leia on a “Star Wars” speeder bike. The customized contraption gives the illusion of flying at times, just like the one in the movies.
Damn, this is fun.
And it isn’t long before a stormtrooper gives chase.
Huffington Post
New Study Says If You’re a Man With This Face Shape, You’re More Likely to Cheat
Canadian-led face shape study recently published in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior concluded that men with shorter, wider faces “tend to be more sexually motivated … have a stronger sex drive … are more easy-going when it comes to casual sex and would consider being unfaithful to their partners,” compared to those with faces of other dimensions.
How the face shape study worked
The study, led by Steven Arnocky — a professor who specializes in evolutionary psychology, sexual conflict and behavioral ecology at Nipissing University in Canada — happened in two parts.
In the first part, Arnocky’s team asked 145 university undergraduates currently involved in romantic relationships questions about their sex drive and interpersonal behavior. In the second part, his team issued asked 314 students the same questions and additional ones about their sexual orientation, their openness to infidelity and their comfort with casual sex not involving love or commitment.
Hornet
Computers can tell if you're gay or not just by looking at your face
And they get it right 91% of the time
New artificial intelligence can tell whether people are gay or straight based on a picture of their face.
New advances in AI research means machines have up to a 91% accuracy when deducing someones sexuality.
The study was done by Stanford University. The machine intelligence tested in the research was based on a sample of more then 35,000 pictures of men and women’s faces.
The computer algorithm could correctly distinguish between gay and straight men 81% of the time, and 74% of the time for gay and straight women.
That is from looking at a single image.
When given five images per person, the accuracy rate goes up to 91% of the time for men and 83% for women.
Human judges performed much worse with only a 61% accuracy with pictures of men, and 54% of women.
Gay Star News
Texas girl electrocuted while using cellphone in bathtub
A 14-year-old girl from Lubbock, Texas, died Sunday after being electrocuted in a bathtub while using her cell phone, according to local reports.
Madison Coe was electrocuted after she either grabbed her phone that was plugged in or plugged in her phone, her grandmother Donna O'Guinn told KCBD-TV. The teen was visiting her father in New Mexico when the incident occurred.
“There was a burn mark on her hand, the hand that would have grabbed the phone. And that was just very obvious that that’s what had happened," O'Guinn told the news station.
USA Today
Google Knows Which Husbands Are Secretly Gay
There are a lot of gay men in the closet in certain parts of the U.S., and women are concerned that their husbands are among them, according to the new book Everybody Lies, which uses the Google Trends tool to peek under the hood of America's psyche.
"Google is a digital truth serum," author Seth Stephens-Davidowitz told Vox. After earning a Ph.D. in economics at Harvard University and spending five years combing through Google Trends, he's sure that "people tell Google things that they don't tell to possibly anybody else, things they might not tell to family members, friends, anonymous surveys, or doctors.”
Especially when it comes to sex, he said. People don't lie to their computers about what they're looking for sexually, even in regions where it is unsafe to voice their desires aloud.
"It’s clear that a lot of gay men remain in the closet," Stephens-Davidowitz said. "In places where it's hard to be gay, such as Mississippi, far fewer men say that they are gay than in places where it's easy to be gay, such as New York. But gay porn searches are about the same everywhere."
Advocate