Men are pigs...and gay men are piggy too

Joy Behar has been taking some lumps around the blogosphere today for comments she made this morning on "The View." She stumbled upon a topic that I have been thinking about recently. Watch this clip and then read my comments afterward.



Though she did not make her point as articulately as she could have and though she seems to generalize a lot, clearly Joy has a point.

Both straight and gay couples have open relationships. But most people would agree that gay male couples are more likely to have an open relationship. I've always thought of this concept simply as "men are pigs."

Men think about sex all the time and want sex all the time. For any number of reasons, men are more physical overall and definitely more expressive sexually. When two men come together, as in gay relationships, you have that dynamic times two. But when straight couples are involved, there is only one male involved in the dynamic. To Joy's point, women temper what would otherwise be an uber-sexual dynamic. As with anything else, this is how it works usually; it's not to say that all straight relationships work that way.

I believe that gay men are even more sexual than straight men. It's how we are wired. And we open up our relationships for any number of reasons...we don't believe in monogamy; he like threesomes; we like having new and exciting partners; boredom...the list goes on and on. But for every open gay relationship, there is a closed gay relationship that is rich and intimate.

It was wrong of Joy to leap to such grand assertions that our relationships are not as valuable as straight ones because we tend to be more open sexually. But her underlying point is well-taken, and most gay men know that's true.