Sexual Relationships 
Sexual Health 
This take has been a long time coming. I promised myself that I wouldn't do another take for quite some time after my last one, but recent trends have pulled me back into the myTake writing arena. I was hoping that someone else would step up to the plate and write about this, but I haven’t noticed any commentary on it so I guess I’ll have to do it. So where should I begin? I've been on GaG for quite a number of years now, and I must say that there has been no point in my time here on GaG where I've seen so many "who's the hottest GaG'er" questions. During the days of the old version of GaG, i don't even remember these kind of questions being asked once a month. We've slowly moved from these questions being asked once a month, to once a week, to once a day, to multiple times a day. My fear is that we've long since passed the rubicon on this trend, and have no way of turning back the clock. So why do I say that GaG has become a narcissist? I don't blame any one individual for this trend, but rather the community acceptance of this "new normal." GaG itself as a community has become very narcissistic....looking inward perpetually, looking outward occasionally.
Lets first analyze what these questions look like typically. Well, the asker tends to be anonymous 90% of the time, which is a convenient way to keep themselves protected from moderation removing their question for being a duplicate. It’s asked so often by so many, we really don’t know how many times anyone has asked it individually. Also from my experience, the asker is usually female, but that's not important at the moment. I just want to discuss what actually happens in these questions. This won't really be news to most regular users, but what usually happens in these questions is that you’ll get the same 6 - 7 or so people mentioned by at least half of the responders, then you’ll get a few common secondary selections, followed by a couple outliers that no one has seen before. Now some have referred to this as a "circle jerk", which I partially agree and partially disagree with. Every now and then, I’ll see a weak argument (usually from an anonymous female) along the lines of,
They'll tag someone who is popular to the site and who isn't very attractive at all basically.
Why do I think this is weak? As i said, i only half agree with people who say the whole thing is a circle jerk. A good number of the people who get mentioned the most in these attractiveness contests are people I and many others personally find to be objectively attractive, so when they are mentioned, it woudn't come to much surprise to me, even if they weren’t already popular. Basically, im saying that at least half the reason why these people are tagged so often in these questions is because they are actually objectively attractive. So when i see some anonymous female (or male, talking about other men) throwing out commentary like this, my immediate assumption is that it came from a place of jealousy, and not of genuine frustration of the frequency these questions are being asked. They hate these questions because attention is not on them, but would flip their position on a dime if they were the ones in the spotlight. If you truly have a problem with these questions being asked so often, you’ve got to come up with a better argument than this if you hope to convince people of your point of view.
So, with that out of the way, how can we divide up the blame for all this. Well both the guys and girls are to blame, and I’ll go into detail how I think each gender plays a role in this.
Why guys are to blame?
Generally, I find that guys are too liberal with the tagging. Now, I’ve been somewhat guilty of this myself, though I’ve been tapering off my participation in these questions as of late, as I find that these questions only exist to serve the egos of women (more on that in a moment). The real fuel that keeps these questions churning is really the guys actively jumping in headfirst to mention their favourite female gager. I won’t go into the reasons why this is the case, as it will be different for every guy, but its an undeniable fact that guys do most of the tagging. While the girls tend to answer the question without tagging a soul, (perhaps to remind the guys that they exist and should not be forgotten in a tag), guys will often run in ready to meet the demand for attention. Again, I don’t pull myself out from this trend, as I’ve participated in these questions several times in the past. But I’m choosing now as the time where I say “enough is enough.” What use to be fun little diversions in the beginning have become increasingly perverse. Everyones reasons for tagging will be different, so i won't begin to speculate on that...but I'm fairly certain that if guys stopped tagging, these questions would largely cease to exist, because girls will never pick up the slack where tagging GaG men is concerned, trust me.
Why girls are to blame?
If guys are to blame for fuelling these questions, girls are to blame for the blank cheque they give guys to keep answering them. For some time, I was honestly under the belief that girls generally hated these questions, but recently my view has flipped. Most of the time, when i see people protesting the frequency of these questions, most of their down votes comes from women. Probably one of the creepiest questions I’ve ever seen on GaG, where some guy created a collage of profile pictures of GaG women, was basically sanctioned by women. Most (not all) of the women willingly allowed him to save their pictures, store them, and make this question:
I couldn’t even be annoyed with him. How could I be annoyed with him when most of the girls enjoyed the attention and gave him their sincere blessing? Here’s the thing with women (generally speaking) on GaG. Much has been said about the creepiness of GaG males (a reputation largely deserved), but little is often said about the self adulation of GaG females. While the guys are busy mentioning people as the question asks for, many girls are usually participating too, but in a different way. They often won't outright mention anyone, but they’ll flirt with the idea of mentioning someone. Throw out the fishing line to the guys who think she may be talking about them. Why dedicate yourself to one or two guys, when you could have half the male user base mention you in perhaps an effort to win that special tag from you? I don’t know, its just a running theory of mine. But make no mistake, this method of “passive-mentioning” isn’t a whole lot better to me than outright tagging. Guys, you should know by now that there’s likely a statistically significant portion of girls on here who will never mention you. For them, it's all about receiving attention, not giving it. Honestly, no one should be surprised if we later came to discover that some of these questions were asked by double accounts of GaG females in an effort to garner artificial attention towards themselves. Just another running theory of mine, but the jury is still out on that one.
Now, what should be the solution? I’ve seen many proposed solutions over the months, but one solution i find depressingly common to endorse, is the one which states that the admins should ban these questions from being asked. Really now? For a website that is super-saturated with libertarians, I find this to be a peculiar proposition. The argument i usually see for this solution is, “well people who aren’t mentioned often have their feelings hurt!!!” Wtf? who gives a shit if their feelings are hurt. As much as i hate the frequency of these questions being asked, people are free to mention who they want…and the fact that people get their feelings hurt over not getting mentioned in a de facto beauty pageant is part of the problem, not the solution. If we started taking everything down because peoples feelings were hurt, i reckon there wouldn't be many questions left.
For me, that's not a good enough reason. For me to be on board with taking something down, it would have to go against the site rules... rules which i generally agree with. Yes, the question is asked daily now which should go against the rules of being a duplicate, but the site rules are very specific on this. A question being asked everyday does not go against the site rules. Every other day it seems, you have people asking something along the lines of "Do (insert race) likes (insert race)". Everyday, some guy asks about how big his penis is. Those questions aren't taken down either. A question asked everyday by the same person would be grounds for a removal yes, as that does indeed go against the site rules. But as I stated earlier, most of these questions are asked anonymously, so we have no idea how often individuals are asking this question (I wasn’t born yesterday though, so I'm well aware that the people who ask these questions often have individually asked this at least a dozen times, most likely) Beyond that though, I'm not in favour of pulling repeated questions down simply because it hurts some peoples feelings. I prefer people have the freedom to post whatever it is they want to post within the confines of the rules outlined by the administrators. It's not really the sites job to deal with peoples insecurities. Everyone is individually responsible for that. A question that particularly bothers me, or bores me, are questions that i simply avoid clicking on. Personal responsibility, and freedom of choice/expression are more important for a website like this in my opinion.
So what can people do? To her credit, @spuitkaas is really the only person who I’ve seen, who not only hasn’t jumped reflexively to this terrible solution of outright banning these questions, but has also provided the most reasonable solution which I find to be most mature and effective. In her words:
I often get tagged in those questions. Today again, tagged 1 or 2 times (I don't really pay attention) and someone asking in private chat if I was okay with him posting my picture in his top 23 ranking. I declined.
I honestly don't like it that people get set in some sort of elite position because of their looks, while this site is all about opinions. I have my real picture up because I think it contributes to the quality of my opinions (as in the person sees what kind of person I am) and it makes my opinions more personal.
So I don't particularly like them, because it contributes to the objectification of female gagers on this site (beauty is apparently more or as important as the quality of their opinions).
You can't really remove the questions because they hurt the feelings of some gagers.
What you can do is make a take or something and make people alert so it becomes 'uncool' to post such questions. Create some sort of social pressure.
Just as an aside, this is also why I appreciate the input of younger users. They aren’t always retarded.
But this is exactly what I believe needs to be done, if you care at all about the direction this site is going. I honestly don’t mind these questions being asked perhaps once a month. That would be a MUCH better situation than the one we have now. If you really want to see these questions come to an end, DON’T ANSWER THEM. Do not answer them in any way, shape or form. When these questions are asked, let them become a ghost town with 0 replies. If someone does answer it, put your down voting ability to good use for a change and just down vote it…not because you really disagree with their post or dislike the person, but as a broad gesture/symbol of your discontent with the recent spread and popularity of these kinds of questions. Don’t be so quick to jump on the “lets ban these questions bandwagon”….because let me you, the questions you enjoy seeing banned by mob rule today, will not be the same questions you enjoy seeing banned tomorrow. So if you are looking for a viable, effortless solution, I personally believe that this right here is the best one. I don’t know about everyone else, but I’m really done with these questions now. If they go back to a frequency of say once a month, I may start answering them again, but for now, I’ve honestly had enough. I bet you in the time i took to wrote this, two more variations of the question were already asked, which in of itself is both comical and sad to me. So going forward, let us all observe what direction GaG goes. Does it continue along the road of looks-based popularity contests to decide who the most valuable GaG’ers are, or does the community roll back the clock to the good old days of narcissism’s infrequency? Let us see.
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