The extremely well-thought-out piece whence I found this.
I'm calling bullshit. There's no possibility that 93% of straight men have cuddled with another man. Not that there's anything wrong with it, but that number seems ridiculous. Any of you out there done this? I'd like an informal Hubski survey, because I can't believe I'm in that extreme of a minority....98 percent of the heterosexual men interviewed had shared a bed with another man, while 93 percent had cuddled or spooned with one.
The study itself is behind a paywall but /r/skeptic opened up pieces of it. Choice tidbits from the abstract: n=40 self-reported college age British athletes From the article itself: "We define cuddling here as gentle physical contact for a prolonged period of time." Having not read the article, it appears that for the study, anyway, a "bro hug" counts as "cuddling."
Ah. That makes sense. They're defining cuddling as something far different that anything any rational person has ever understood it to mean, then letting people self report. That's the great thing about language: When evidence isn't on your side, but you still really want to make a point, all you have to do is redefine terms and hope no one notices. See Frank Luntz, for example.
I was trying to figure out if those numbers could possibly be real. I have sort of done this, when me, some guy friends and some girl friends are trying to watch a movie in limited space, or go on a long road trip, etc, we all end up in a big mishmash. That counts, probably. Although I would call it neither spooning nor cuddling, but convenience, so maybe it doesn't.
Eh. "Bros are a homophobic reaction to the rise of the acceptance of homosexuality." Except bros are the same as mooks are the same as chavs are the same as boors. They're simply talking about unconstrained hypermasculinity which has been a social "problem" since Heroditus.
Oh, absolutely.Frontline did a great episode years and years ago about the direct link between homophobia and repressed homosexuality. I really wish they'd put it online. It was superlative.
I find the argument to be pretty fair and agreeable. Every social group has a spectrum of participants. Whatever forces drive media consumption, and thus dialogue, in America, seem to feed off displaying the negative extremes over the median. It's something that's always bothered me. How can civil conversation happen when it's framed for conflict instead of commonality?