The ladder, and why it comes back to you

In May 2025 I went back to the same gay resort in Torremolinos for a second time, and it felt nothing like the first. I made a TikTok about it, and Pink Ticket Travel quoted it a few months later. It's still the plainest way I know to say what was wrong:

When everyone is a sexual object, and they're just judged on how they look, how big they are, basically that just comes back to you in the end. I just look at myself like that. It's all the ranking, it's all the ladder, and I think it's deeply unhealthy.

The bit people skip over is the middle sentence. I just look at myself like that. The ladder isn't only something you put other people on. You're on it too.

So too are we

When I wrote about that trip later, I put it like this: where other people are objects to admire, use, discard… so too are we… even those most in demand.

I said something similar on Flex Your Feelings. As we treat people disposably, so too we are treating ourselves. If that's the standard, if everyone's just a bit of toilet paper in the end, then what does it matter? And yet how are we ever meant to be special, or unique, or mean something to anyone, if we are just a tool for sexual gratification or for validation?

On Friend of Dorothy I called it a switch. If people are objects, then you're an object as well.

Rejection as a full-time job

There's a bar in Madrid with a cruising basement downstairs. What I noticed there is that in spaces like that, gay guys have to make more of an effort to actively reject people than in normal life. A look signifies interest, and therefore you really have to not look at people. You go to a place to feel connection of some sort, and it invites rejection. What is the point of that?

You can see it outside the cruising bars too. You talk to someone for a long time on an evening, you invest the time, you think there's a connection, friends, maybe more. Then you're out clubbing, they see someone hot, and they're gone. What that tells you is that the entire time you were talking was just a buffer zone while they found someone hotter.

That's the ladder. Everyone is always looking up it. And there's always someone more out there.

The top of the ladder isn't a nice place either

Hot people come on our weekends, and I feel like they get a lot out of it, because people talk to them as people. And people don't just talk to them. They talk to everyone else as well, so nobody is swirling around the hot person all weekend.

If you only look at people on Instagram and never talk to hot people, you'll only ever think of them as unattainable, desirable, out of reach. But when you talk to hot people, they're people. As I said on Flex Your Feelings: "You can talk to a hot person, okay? And you'll just find out that they're normal. You might find out that they're boring. You might find out that they have really amazing interests."

Getting off it for a weekend

No Sex Gay Weekend doesn't fix the ladder. It just takes everyone off it for a weekend. I said this to Better Gay Dating:

It's no sex gay weekend, but actually the not having sex part is pretty minor. It's opening yourself up to people, putting yourself out there. We get rid of the fear of rejection, and we get rid of the having to reject people as well.

It's much easier to talk to anyone when you know that everyone will want to talk to you. If I'm getting to know you and then you go off and talk to someone else, I don't have to worry that you're going to make out with them in the bathroom. I don't have to worry about jealousy. We can just get to know each other.

By the end of the weekend, not everyone is everyone's best friend. But everyone's given everyone a chance, and they've given themselves a chance. You've given yourself time to get to know other people, and given them time to get to know you. That's what people come away with.

How the weekends work is on weekends.