Types of gay aesthetics

There’s a silent danger looming among gay men: the pressure surrounding beauty standards, body image, and consequences that follow.

What Is Body Image?

Body image relates to the relationship you have with your physical appearance. It captures the beliefs, feelings, and actions you have surrounding your body. 

We often hold a positive or neutral body image. Societal pressure could negatively shift our image. A negative body image takes dominion of our lives by impacting socialization, habits, and self-talk. In turn, these changes can possess downstream mental and physical health consequences.

People of all ethnicities, genders, sexual orientations, and socioeconomic standings are vulnerable to body image issues – each layer of intersectional identity impacts body image differently. This article examines unique body image pressures impacting gay men. 

Body Image Pressures Outside The Gay Community

Our external world sets the rules for beauty. We witness beauty norms and measure it against ourselves; we may internalize these. 

Minority Stress

The term describe

Aesthetic attraction is a form of physical attraction to an individual's appearance. It is defined as an attraction to the way someone looks, or how they present themselves. It is typically based on a desire to observe someone because one finds them aesthetically pleasing. It is often described as a similar feeling to looking at a nice painting or landscape. One way of experiencing aesthetic attraction is a stronger desire to admire or gaze at an individual; their physical features, their curves and shape, their bearing, how they move, how they dress, etc.

Among allosexuals and/or alloromantics, aesthetic attraction most of the time is felt alongside sexual and/or romantic attraction, and is sometimes considered a necessary element of the experience. However, aesthetic attraction can sometimes be felt separately from other forms of attraction. In the a-spec community, it is typically useful to distinguish aesthetic attraction from sexual and romantic attraction. You can essentially find someone aesthetically pleasing or attractive while feeling something separate that do

I’ve been looking for queer typography. Is anyone else out there? Who else is searching? I wonder if this is even a valid question. Looking for queer anything often feels lonely. The word queer resists definition, sometimes aligned with ideas about rejection, refusal, deviating from the expected, away from the normative. It’s certainly a political word, one that’s taken on expansive qualities throughout its history, qualities that aren’t necessarily confined to gender and sexuality.



As early as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwickwrote: “A lot of the most exciting recent work around ‘queer’ spins the term outward along dimensions that can’t be subsumed under gender and sexuality at all: the ways that race, ethnicity, postcolonial nationality criss-cross with these and other identity-constituting, identity-fracturing discourses, for example. Intellectuals and artists of color whose sexual self-definition includes ‘queer’ . . . are using the leverage of ‘queer’ to execute a new kind of justice to the fractal intricacies of lan

Emily Clarke

What Are the Different Types of Lesbian Aesthetics?


If you're new to the lesbian dating scene, you have a lot to learn! There are many different lesbian aesthetic types you'll likely come across as you start dating around. You've probably already considered this, but it's a good idea to absorb the common terms that lesbians often use to define themselves or one another. That way, you can more easily navigate the ins and outs of lesbian culture and define your own identity as a lesbian too.

Common Lesbian Aesthetic Types

  • Butches: A butch lesbian is someone who has more of a masculine energy and vibe. There are different types of butches (soft butch, studs, short-haired butches, long-haired butches, etc.), but generally speaking, they are the contrary of femme lesbians.
  • Studs: A stud is a butch gal or nonbinary person who is Black or Latinx. The term has largely been appropriated by white dykes on TikTok, but it is a racially specific term. Studs are typically influenced by hip hop and urban cultures.
  • Futches: A futch lesbian is a queer woman or