Considering all the liberal, conservative, anti-feminist and, err, occasional backsliding feminist angst about the Assange case in Sweeden doesn't it seem like the Minnesota case against Daniel Rick from back in March of this year seem curiously obscure?   It’s not at all 100% parallel to the Assange allegations but it’s similar enough that one wonders why the MRAs and their fellow travelers who’ve been up in arms about Sweden’s “Saudi Arabia” haven’t been all over the Rick case.

For instance, Rick’s victim chose to accompany him to his home after meeting him in a bar.  The victim chose to pass out drunk in Rick’s home and (after all) that’s practically the same thing as consenting to sex.  And when he did have sex with the victim he evidently didn’t use a condom, which triggered extra charges for knowingly putting the victim’s health at risk.  And in that case, too, when one complaint was filed other “me too” victims came forward, revealing a pattern of behavior on Rick’s part!

It's enough to make you think anti-Wikileak forces aren't the only ones exploiting the Assange case for their own political ends!

Once again, not 100% the same as the accusations against Assange (for instance unlike Assange Rick had related prior arrests on his record) but many of the particulars are close enough that it’s weird that the Assange charges seem to have caught MRAs off guard.

Of course the source of this particular "Saudi Arabianism" is Minneapolis, Minnesota and not Sweden, but... well... here's how their local Fox network station put it:

MINNEAPOLIS - Two additional charges of assault have been filed against an HIV-positive Minneapolis man already charged with raping a man.

Daniel James Rick, 28, was arrested Monday after more alleged sexual assault victims came forward. The victims said they had unprotected sex with Rick, who didn't reveal his HIV-positive status.

Rick was charged Wednesday with two counts of third-degree assault by knowingly transferring a communicable disease. Those charges are on top of charges in February of third-degree criminal sexual conduct and third-degree assault for the alleged rape of a man he left a bar with.

According to the original set of charges, Rick and his victim went to The Saloon in downtown Minneapolis and after to Rick's home. The victim passed out drunk and later awoke to Rick sexually assaulting him.

Source: MyFox9.com

Oh... wait!  Whawazat?  Did... did you see that?  Oh wait a minute, Daniel Rick is gay! His victims were all men! Doh!  Cancel the Operation Payback attacks on the Minneapolis Star-Trubune!

No feminist angle on the case for miles and miles. False alarm. Never mind!

For all MRA protestations that “but men can be raped too,” and for all the MRA protestations that accusations of rape are invariably false, it doesn’t count when the victims, or the accused, are gay.

Must be why nobody’s Tweeting about how Sweden’s a “feminist Minnesota.”

Via Em & Lo, dating site OKCupid.com’s OKTrends research blog debunks yet another grievous canard about a “gay agenda” to “convert” straight people.

The subtext to a lot of homophobic thinking is the idea that gays will try to get straight people into bed at the first opportunity, or that gays are looking to “convert” straights. Freud called this concept schwanzangst; the U.S. Army calls it Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. We combed through over 4 million match searches, and found virtually no evidence of it:

only 0.6% of gay men have ever searched for straight matches.
only 0.1% of lesbians have ever searched for straight matches.
only 0.13% of straight people’s profile visitors are gay.

Source: OKTrends

OKCupid has millions of users. They make it not just possible but very easy to search using very specific criteria — for instance “both who like bi guys” “straight girls only,” “bi guys only,” “girls who like guys” and so on. And obviously you also get so specify your own preferences. The general culture of OKCupid is pretty open minded and so if for any reason you were a gay man or lesbian looking for straight matches it would be pretty easy, anonymous, and no particular hard feelings.

And yet… out of 10,000 visitors to straight people’s profiles only 13 will be the same sex they are. So much for Teh Great Gay Menace.

I remember a (straight) friend saying the thought being paranoid about getting cruised by someone of the same sex was a great way to tell if someone would be too unsuitably egotistical to date.

Alex Tabarrok of Marginal Revolution has a nice post about gay promiscuity stereotypes. (Emphasis his.)

OKTrends has another great post, gay sex v. straight sex, analyzing data on millions of customers who use the dating site OKCupid.  Here is one piece of the long post that I found surprising.

Another common myth about gay people is that they sleep around, but the statistical reality is that gay people as a group aren’t any more slutty than straights.

Median Reported Sex Partners

• straight men: 6
• gay men: 6
• straight women: 6
• gay women: 6

...
45% of gay people have had 5 or fewer partners (vs. 44% for straights)
98% of gay people have had 20 or fewer partners (vs. 99% for straights)

It turns out that a tiny fraction of gays have single-handedly two-handedly created the public image of gay sexual recklessness — in fact we found that just 2% of gay people have had 23% of the total reported gay sex, which is pretty crazy.

Source: Alex Tabarrok of Marginal Revolution.

It’s only crazy if you accept a lot of stereotypes not just about gay men but about men in general.

I can’t find the reference at the moment but it wasn’t that long ago that credible researchers mentioned that at least half of all gay men are either in or would prefer to be in stable monogamous relationships. At coarse enough granularity that alone might be enough to bring the numbers into line.

That plus the extravagantly promiscuous “bath house” culture immediately preceding the HIV/AIDS epidemic had its heyday at best only between roughly 1975 and 1981, and even then it involved only on the order of thousands or tens of thousands of men rather than the millions fantasized about and/or demonized in the popular imagination.

Then there’s the whole business of how the most common stereotypes of gay men devolves only on those who are most visibly different represent a relatively small slice of all men who simply like, love, or prefer to have sex with men. (With all due respect to Emily Nagoski, for every Quentin Crisp there are dozens of the ordinary and uneventful “marines, scaffolders, and rugby players” Crisp himself preferred the company of during the years of World War II.

The final conceit is the stereotype of all men as sexually insatiable and romantically insensible beasts who if we but could would “spread our seed” as fast and far and wide. Perhaps an easy extrapolation to make from the starvation of self-imposed sexual scarcity to imagined perpetual feasting… but also a generally false one. Good rule of thumb? When you feel you’re not getting enough of something you think you want a lot. When you feel your actual needs are being met then all you need is enough.

So anyway, there you go: yes, it’s not surprising but it is crazy how we turn tiny outliers in a population into the stereotypical “

• Society and Politics
• gender roles
• homophobia
• sexual stereotypes
• social construction of gender