Eugine_Nier comments on Transsexuals and otherkin - Less Wrong
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You might be right that there are important differences between the attraction that a typical gay man feels for a man and the attraction that a typical straight man feels for a woman. Certainly there are important cultural differences. But the claim, from a man, "I feel about men the way most men feel about women" is far more innocuous than your contrary idea that he feels about men the way some men feel about feet, or rubber.
Most gay men after all report feelings of romantic love for other men. A fetishist who claims his object or activity of erotic focus is something more than an entertaining sex fantasy is much more rare, or so I think. Also note that there is something obviously culturally contingent about many famous fetishes, while men who take men to bed have existed in thousands of cultural contexts across thousands of years.
The scientific understanding of fetishism is even poorer than the scientific understanding of sexual orientation. By positing a "continuum of fetishism" you're already on dubious ground, whether or not we would go on to accept that homosexuality falls on that continuum.
Eric Raymond has a good discussion here of just how culturally contingent models of homosexuality are. He analyses four "types" of homosexual behavior:
He goes on to say that for male homosexuality acceptance of the "romantic homosexuality" type is the exception, and by exception he means that
"Models" of heterosexuality are also culturally contingent.
The essay is interesting but not altogether convincing. Socrates would not recognize pederasty as a category distinct from romantic homosexuality, as the author does.
Not in the sense that Eric uses the term. In particular, he wouldn't consider consensual homosexual relations between people of comparable ages in any way normal.
Your wording was ambiguous.