Slut Shame, Gay Shame, Same Game: Why Straight Men Still Get to Set the Rules

And Why I’m Not Playing by Their Rules Anymore

The first time I saw someone get slut-shamed, I was probably still trying to convince myself I was straight. She had lip gloss, a hot arse, and the kind of confidence that made other girls jealous and teenage boys confused. The whispers followed her through the hallways like perfume no one could name. “Slut.” “Attention-seeker.” “Probably fakes her orgasms.” Meanwhile, I was in the corner pretending to be fascinated by cleavage while secretly wondering if my thoughts alone could get me crucified. Not metaphorically. I actually pictured myself nailed to a cross in the school courtyard, in shame, rainbow flag burning in the background, Jesus shaking his head like, “Bro. Really?”

That’s the early training. Straight women get shamed out loud for wanting sex. Gay men get shamed quietly for even wanting it. One gets judged for what she does. The other judges himself for what he is. That’s the starting line for most of us who didn’t land in life with a penis and a cultural permission slip to use it freely.

Straight men get to fuck and be legends. The rest of us fuck and become cautionary tales.

We grew up learning that desire should be filtered, censored, and ideally accompanied by long-term emotional damage. Straight guys could spray their validation across three cities and still get married in a church. But God forbid I flirt at a party without being accused of needing therapy and a salt cleanse.

And when I discovered a glory hole long before the internet even existed? Let’s just say it wasn’t spiritual, but it sure as hell was transformative. Shame didn’t stand a chance.

Slut If You Do, Broken If You Don’t

There’s a little cultural performance happening every time a straight woman expresses desire. It goes something like: want sex, but not too much. Be sexy, but not too available. Be open, but don’t act like you’ve done this before. And for gay men? That whole theatre set is flipped. We don’t get applause or slut-whispers. We get silence, loaded glances, and an endless stream of Grindr profiles pretending to be monasteries. You want sex? Good luck navigating the labyrinth of masc4masc, internalised phobia, and shame wrapped in gym towels.

The difference is volume. Straight women get slut-shamed publicly. Gay men are expected to slut-shame themselves before anyone else gets the chance.

It’s like we’re handed the gavel and told, “Judge your own filthiness, please, and do it with a smile.”

And we do. Because we’ve been raised not to recognise sex as pleasure, or intimacy, or even self-expression. It’s danger, exposure and that little voice in your head that says, “You’re disgusting,” while you’re in someone else’s bed, fully naked, pretending you’re cool with being treated like a human fleshlight because admitting you want more feels somehow worse.

That’s the psychological horror of it. You crave sex but you loathe yourself for craving it. You want closeness but you filter it through performance. And then when you finally act on it, you spiral, perform the shame scene and cleanse your browser history like it’s a sacred ritual. And you ask yourself, “Why do I keep doing this?”

The answer? Because the rules were written without you. And yet, here you are, trying to follow them anyway.

The Gay Shame Starter Pack

If slut-shaming is what straight women get for being visible, then gay shame is what we get for being seen at all. It’s not handed to us, because it’s installed at birth, like a firmware update you didn’t request. Mine came bundled with Catholic guilt, a fear of being too much, and the belief that liking sex somehow disqualifies you from being taken seriously.

It starts with the basics. Don’t be too flamboyant and don’t look like you enjoy yourself.

And for the love of God, don’t bottom on the first date unless you want to be mentally filed under “Only Good For That.” We’re not taught how to explore desire. We’re taught how to apologise for it in advance.

Gay shame is clever like that. It doesn’t stop you from hooking up. It just makes sure you feel gross after. The moment after the moment. That is where it blooms. The delete-the-chat, pretend-it-didn’t-happen, maybe-I-should-work-on-myself energy. The internal dialogue is so savage it could host a reality show. “Was that validation or desperation?” “Do I even like sex or do I just hate being alone?” “Is this what pride feels like or have I just disassociated again?”

The Community of Shame

And let’s not pretend the community itself doesn’t pitch in. Shaming comes in the form of “preferences.” Which is code for: racism, femphobia, fatphobia, and a moral compass shaped entirely by porn categories. If you’re too slutty, you’re a stereotype. If you’re not slutty enough, you’re repressed. The goalposts move every five seconds and no one tells you where the field is.

So you keep running while while trying to prove you’re enough. Hot enough, masculine enough, chill enough or even monogamous enough. But also sexually open enough, but definitely not so open that anyone starts counting. And all the while you’re wondering, who the hell decided this? Why am I following rules I didn’t write in a game that doesn’t even want me to win?

Meanwhile, Straight Men Are Out Here Collecting Loyalty Points for Ejaculating

While the rest of us are busy auditing our sex lives for signs of rot, straight men are out here racking up orgasm miles like they’re going to trade them in for a boat. They can sleep with five women in a week and society throws them a parade. A gay man or a straight woman sleeps with five men in a week and suddenly they’re the punchline at brunch. Or worse… the “cautionary tale” on someone’s therapist’s whiteboard.

Let’s be clear. Straight men didn’t just dodge the shame bullet. They built the fucking gun, handed it to everyone else, then walked off to get a blowjob and a protein shake. Do they get slut-shamed? No. They get celebrated.

Their “body count” is a badge, their mess is romanticised and their lack of emotional regulation is just… manhood.

And when emotional intimacy gets confused with romantic tension? We call it bromance and move on like no one’s hard.

A straight man doesn’t wonder if he’s addicted to validation when he’s on his third Tinder hookup of the week. He wonders if he can Uber her out before the football starts.

And yet somehow, these are the standards we hold ourselves to. These are the templates we’re subconsciously comparing our own desires against. Every time I wonder if I’ve crossed some invisible line, it’s worth asking: what line? Who drew it? And why are we pretending it wasn’t sketched in crayon by a dude who once said “no homo” after crying during sex?

We are all trying to align ourselves with a system that was never meant for us. A straight man doesn’t feel shame for wanting sex. He feels shame when he doesn’t want it. That’s the cultural default. And the rest of us are left fumbling through the dark, trying to figure out where we went wrong.

Spoiler alert: we didn’t.

Sex as Validation, and Why That’s Not a Dirty Thing

Let’s get something straight. Wanting to feel wanted isn’t some tragic flaw. It’s not a weakness, a trauma response, or a personality defect that needs to be patched in the next update. It is just… being alive. It’s biology and psychology. Maybe a little bit of daddy issues sprinkled on top if we’re being honest, but still normal.

So yes, sometimes we fuck to feel desired. Sometimes we sleep with people who don’t remember our name because we need to believe someone finds us hot, even for a few sweaty, slightly disappointing minutes. And you know what? That’s fine. It’s not the validation that’s the problem. It’s the shame we’ve been taught to attach to it.

We act like wanting attention is some hideous secret, like we’re all supposed to wander the world as self-contained, sexually serene monks who only fuck when it’s spiritually aligned and astrologically approved. Meanwhile, Karen down the hall is judging you for having three guys over this week while her husband secretly jerks off to your OnlyFans in the garage.

Most of the shame we feel isn’t even ours. It’s inherited. Dragged down through generations by religious fanatics who were terrified of nipples and thought masturbation caused blindness. These people were burning witches while literally dying of syphilis. And somehow we’re still letting their rules shape how we feel about our own bodies?

Long before dating apps and digital shame spirals, I found a glory hole that made me feel more validated than most relationships ever did.

The Shame Hangover After a Good Old-Fashioned Orgy

My friend went cruising for sex yesterday. Five guys in one day. I congratulated him. The man had the stamina of a 2004 porn star and the location awareness of a hunting dog. And then, after all that, he said the words that stopped me cold: “Dude. I feel bad.”

Bad? For what? For successfully navigating the wilderness of modern manhood and returning home with five fresh pelts? You didn’t commit a crime, you just tapped into an instinct older than monogamy and better than therapy and you went out hunting through the woods and found hot cock.

You should be proud, you should be carrying a fucking spear and wearing a loincloth made from a jockstrap. You did what you set out to do. Why is that wrong?

The answer, of course, is shame. That soft, sticky shame hangover that sneaks in like a toxic ex after you’ve cum and cleaned up. Or like my friend did recently, when she bleached everything, including door handles after he left. Was she sanitising the apartment or was she sanitising herself?

You wanted sex and got it, so you should feel fine. But instead, your brain goes full Catholic and tells you you’ve sinned. You start wondering if maybe it wasn’t about sex. Maybe it was about validation. Or attention. Or some primal need to be chosen by someone who isn’t your Uber Eats driver.

We are mammals. Horny, social, approval-seeking mammals. Sometimes we fuck for fun and at other times, for comfort. Sometimes for control and at other times just to feel like we matter for an hour. The shame comes not from the act, but from the stupid, outdated cultural script that says you’re only allowed to want sex in very specific, government-approved ways.

If my friend felt bad after an orgy, it’s not because of the sex. It’s because he’s been trained to believe that pleasure without apology is a red flag. And that’s the real sickness.

Breaking Rules We Didn’t Make

It’s twenty fucking twenty five. There are AI boyfriends, sex toys smarter than your last date, and people identifying as houseplants. And yet here we are, still asking if it’s okay to want sex. Still calling ourselves sluts in a whisper. Still trying to fit inside moral outlines scribbled by men who were scared of women and even more scared of themselves.

If I sleep with five guys in a day, that might say something about my need for validation. But it says a hell of a lot more about the world that taught me to feel disgusting for it.

There’s a special kind of insanity in judging yourself by rules you didn’t write. It’s like being graded on a pop quiz in a language you don’t speak. And the worst part is that you still try to pass, and still study while still feeling bad when you fail. That’s how deep shame burrows. It doesn’t need to make sense. It just needs to be repeated often enough until you forget that you ever had the right to say no.

We weren’t born ashamed, because we were taught it by religions that couldn’t handle pleasure. By parents who were still carrying their own bruises and media that only showed one kind of sex and called everything else deviant. By algorithms that reward perfection and punish reality. Shame is systemic. It’s socially reinforced. And it’s incredibly profitable. Whole industries exist to convince you that your natural desires are flaws that need fixing.

The Truth About Shame

But the truth is simpler and so much more boring. Wanting sex is not the problem. Having a lot of it is not the problem. Doing it with strangers, in bathrooms, on Sundays, is not the problem. The problem is that we’re still trying to behave like good little boys and girls in a culture that only ever gave out gold stars to straight men and moral panic to everyone else.

I didn’t agree to this script nor did I get a vote on what counted as too much. I was born into a world that had already decided that sex was sacred for some and shameful for others.

And I spent years trying to contort myself into shapes that wouldn’t trigger judgement, like some kind of queer origami trick. But I’m done folding.

If there’s one rebellious act left to claim in this exhausted world, it’s this. I want what I want, and I won’t be embarrassed about it. Nor will I shrink for people who are terrified of their own urges. I will not ask for permission from a moral system that would have had me burned at the stake for liking cock and moisturiser.

So if I’m breaking the rules, fine, because they weren’t mine. I never signed the contract. And frankly, I look better in sin.

I’m writing a memoir, chapter by chapter. Check out Good Luck Getting Rid of Me. There’s no shame in it.