Why straight men rationally dislike gay men

[Inspired by a conversation I just overheard in the campus dining hall between a flaming gay and his homely but slutty chick friend, who was sharing quite loudly the details of her waking up next to a guy whose name she didn't know but had gotten banged by earlier. Only a freshman in college, she is well on her way to becoming this middle-aged whore that Roissy observed at the end of her trainwreck.]

A common response to the question, "Why do straight guys have such disgust for gays?" is that they shouldn't -- after all, less competition! But because only around 3% of men are homosexual, that's not exactly weeding out a lot of potential competition. Factor in how desirable these guys would be if straight, and you're left with even fewer -- maybe 1% or less of all males weeded out.

Of course there are all sorts of visceral reactions that straights have toward gays, the most obvious being the thought -- or heaven forbid, the mental image -- of two guys doing it. And as enlightened human beings, we're supposed to put aside such "yuck test" results and provide clearer reasons.

So here's a perfectly rational motivation that straight men have to make homosexuals knock off their gayness: their interactions with (straight) women represent a form of pollution. Gay men are always there to convince a woman that she doesn't need to lose any weight, that any guy would be lucky to get with her, that she still has plenty of time before she has to settle down, and that she shouldn't feel guilty about being a slut --

I mean, god gave you that nasty thing down there for a reason girlfriend, you should own it! Psh, don't let anybody else tell you how to live your life!

The result is a woman with an inflated ego, less shame, and more venereal diseases. Some poor schlub will end up dating or (perish the thought) marrying this skag, and it won't be the gay himself who bears the costs of dating a polluted woman but the boyfriend or husband. Think of how much better the relationship would be if she were more humble, not so shameless, and free of syphilis. Indeed, it is inconceivable that the gay enabler will date or marry any such polluted woman. When pollution costs them nothing, they will churn it out like a tidal wave, with the costs being borne by straight men.

It is no surprise, then, that straights have an impulse to get the gays to keep quiet -- to do what they want behind closed doors, but to not ruin the dating and mating pool that we straights have to drink from.

Just to show that this is not irrational prejudice against gays per se, let's ask if there's a sub-group of straight men who also play the ego-inflating, shame-scrubbing role. Indeed there is -- we call them "white knights," "captain save-a-ho," and so on. These are loser straight guys whose only hail-mary hope of getting laid is to find a fairly homely and slutty woman and tell her that she's too beautiful for those other men out there, that she shouldn't be ashamed of being repeatedly used and tossed aside, etc.

Both he and the gay bff have selfish reasons for propping her up -- the former to hopefully sleep with her, the latter to have another close friend -- and just like the gay friend, his servile worship is tantamount to pollution. After all, once her mind's been ruined, he'll either have gotten some or not, and some other guy will have to pay the cost of dating an artificially delusional woman. And just as we saw before, most straight guys get disgusted when they see this kind of behavior:

Dude, you're pathetic -- grow some balls and stop kissing her ass.

Still, if gay men are only 3% of the male population, why make such a big fuss? Simple: each gay guy can and does spoil the brains of multiple females. Where they are in highish concentration, it might be around 10% of all females who they manage to pollute. That percentage would be frighteningly high -- as though there were one on each block.

The Nobel laureate economist Ronald Coase is famous for showing that, among other things, government regulation isn't necessary to solve problems like pollution of drinking water. The people who drink the water can negotiate with the polluters, and if the costs of these transactions are low, they'll settle their differences on their own. For example, the people might simply pay the polluters not to pollute if their harm was greater than the polluters' benefit. (Alternatively, the polluters might pay the people to put up with the filth if the pollution benefited the polluters more than it harmed the people.)

Before the openly gay era, the costs of straights negotiating with gays to keep their offensive behavior out of the public sphere were pretty low -- basically just a social stigma against homosexuality. When the stigmatized group members contemplate "coming out" in general, they see how difficult it will be, so they don't bother haggling at all. All the stigmatizers would have to do is shoot them a look like, "hey, remember what your place is," and that would have been the sum of the transaction costs.

In the post-disco era, though, the stigmatized group feels emboldened to bargain and fight back, so that the costs of negotiating between straights and gays has skyrocketed. Any straight guy who now says -- just as he would to a fellow straight "white knight" -- "C'mon, knock it off, you're ruining the women we have to date," will find himself on the wrong end of a hate speech lawsuit.

I mean, like, omigod, so -- what -- I can't make my best friend feel better about her open sexuality just because I'm gay? You don't know who you're messing with, mister -- I mean, we didn't struggle at Stonewall for nothing, and bitch we aren't going back!

Obviously the government isn't going to step in to deal with this market failure either. So really the only option that straight men have is to move somewhere else where the dating pool is not only free of homosexual pollution but has been purified by the tacit collective agreement among men to keep women's self-destructive tendencies from growing out of control.