“Gay son or thot daughter?” is usually treated as a vulgar preference-revelation exercise. This undersells it. The question is interesting because it forces the respondent to compare two very different kinds of variance in descendant outcomes while operating under severe informational compression.
The first mistake is to treat the two options as symmetrical.
“Gay son” specifies a relatively narrow trait: a male child whose primary romantic and sexual attraction is toward men.
“Thot daughter” is not comparably precise. It ordinarily implies some bundle of high sociosexuality, conspicuous sexual self-presentation, multiple partners, weak conformity to conventional sexual norms, and possibly monetization of attention. Different speakers attach different weights to these components.
This asymmetry matters.
One option changes approximately one dimension of the child. The other potentially changes several.
U = W + R + G + S − C − V
W = child welfare
R = quality of the parent-child relationship
G = expected grandchild value
S = family social and reputational stability
C = expected crisis-management cost
V = variance penalty
The question is not whether homosexuality or promiscuity is “good” in the abstract. The question is which bundle produces the higher expected value conditional on everything else being held approximately constant.
The Gay Son Case
The strongest argument for Gay Son is variance reduction.
Conditional on having a gay son, a large amount of his future life remains unspecified. He may be prudent or reckless, ambitious or lazy, monogamous or promiscuous, rich or poor, pleasant or irritating.
His homosexuality alone does relatively little work in the model.
This is important because people routinely smuggle unrelated traits into the gay-son branch. They imagine a specific personality, social milieu, or aesthetic presentation and then respond to that composite.
That is analytically invalid.
If the intervention is simply:
Your son is gay.
then the information content is modest.
The largest conventional negative term is probably G, insofar as some respondents assign positive value to straightforward biological reproduction. A gay son has, on average, a less frictionless path to producing biological grandchildren with a partner than a heterosexual son.
But this is a reduction in probability, not elimination.
Gay men can and do become fathers. More importantly, the grandchild term should not be treated as infinite. A parent who places enormous weight on descendant count should state that preference explicitly rather than laundering it through generalized discomfort with homosexuality.
There may also be social costs in environments where homosexuality is stigmatized, but these are environmental penalties imposed on the child rather than obvious intrinsic disutilities of the trait itself.
From a decision-theoretic standpoint, Gay Son is therefore unusually clean.
It gives you one piece of information.
Most of the distribution remains intact.
The Thot Daughter Case
Thot Daughter is more complicated because the variable is poorly specified.
Suppose, for practical purposes, we define the condition as:
An adult daughter with unusually high sociosexuality, conspicuous sexual self-presentation, and a strong revealed preference for short-term mating opportunities.
The first thing to notice is that people systematically overestimate the reproductive upside.
A daughter having more sexual partners does not imply proportionately more grandchildren.
Modern contraception largely breaks this relationship.
Indeed, if high sociosexuality correlates with delayed family formation, unstable partnerships, or deliberate avoidance of pregnancy, the intuitive “at least she’ll give me grandkids” argument may be substantially weaker than advertised.
The more important difference is variance.
A high-sociosexuality lifestyle potentially exposes the daughter to a broader distribution of outcomes involving partner quality, interpersonal conflict, unwanted pregnancy, sexual-health risk, reputational volatility, coercive relationships, and economically consequential decisions.
None of these outcomes is guaranteed.
The point is that the distribution is wider.
This creates a parental risk-management problem.
The relevant question is not:
Do I approve of my daughter having sex?
That is too coarse.
The relevant question is:
Does the specified behavioral profile increase the frequency of high-cost tail events enough to offset whatever benefits she derives from autonomy, pleasure, attention, relationships, and optionality?
I think the answer is probably yes under the ordinary meaning of “thot.”
This is not because female sexuality is intrinsically costly.
It is because “thot” is doing far more semantic work than “gay.”
Reputation Is Real Even When It Shouldn’t Be
People are often reluctant to include S, reputational effects, because this sounds morally unserious.
That is a mistake.
Social reputation has material consequences whether or not those consequences are fair.
If a behavior predictably alters employment opportunities, relationship markets, family conflict, social trust, or exposure to harassment, those consequences belong in the model.
Saying “people should not judge her” does not make judgment disappear.
Similarly, saying “people should not discriminate against my gay son” does not make homophobia disappear.
Both branches therefore contain externally imposed social costs.
The relevant comparison is empirical.
My expectation is that in most contemporary Western professional environments, the expected reputational penalty attached to being gay is now considerably narrower than the penalty associated with highly conspicuous sexual behavior.
This varies enormously by subculture.
A gay son in rural Mississippi and a thot daughter in Brooklyn do not inhabit the same social environment as a gay son in Brooklyn and a thot daughter in rural Mississippi.
The question is underspecified unless location and class are fixed.
The Grandchildren Error
I think a large fraction of male respondents are covertly solving:
max P(grandchildren)
rather than:
max U(child’s life)
This explains several otherwise strange answers.
If the daughter’s heterosexual activity is treated as direct evidence of reproductive potential, some respondents will tolerate enormous variance elsewhere in the model.
This is probably a mistake.
A grandchild has positive utility to many parents, but it is not obvious that one additional expected grandchild dominates large changes in the adult child’s welfare, stability, or relationship quality.
There is also a hidden asymmetry.
People often imagine the gay son remaining permanently childless while imagining the thot daughter eventually settling down and producing a conventional family.
This inserts mean reversion into one branch but not the other.
If you allow the thot daughter to become a monogamous 34-year-old mother of two, you should also allow the gay son to become a married 34-year-old father of two.
Otherwise the comparison is rigged.
Parent-Child Relationship Effects
There is one term that respondents tend to underweight because it is difficult to quantify:
R
The child eventually learns what kind of parent you are.
If your preference between these two outcomes is strong enough to affect how you treat the child, that response itself creates utility consequences.
A father who selects Gay Son but spends twenty years punishing his daughter for sexual behavior may have chosen the wrong branch in a way the original hypothetical does not capture.
Likewise, a father who selects Thot Daughter but would make a gay son feel fundamentally defective has created a large negative term unrelated to the underlying trait.
This means the chooser’s own psychology should be considered endogenous.
You are not choosing between two children in a vacuum.
You are choosing between two children who will be raised by the person making the choice.
Conclusion
Under ordinary interpretations, I choose Gay Son.
The reason is not that homosexuality is intrinsically preferable to female promiscuity.
The reason is that the Gay Son intervention is narrower, lower-variance, and less behaviorally predictive.
“Gay” tells me who my son is attracted to.
“Thot” tells me something about what my daughter repeatedly does.
Behavioral variables generally carry more downstream information than orientation variables.
If the hypothetical were instead:
Gay son or heterosexual daughter who has many consensual sexual partners, uses contraception reliably, avoids coercive relationships, is psychologically healthy, and experiences no meaningful negative consequences from her sex life?
then much of the difference disappears.
But that is not the conventional question.
The conventional question contains its answer partly in the amount of information packed into each label.
Gay Son is one variable.
Thot Daughter is a latent-factor model disguised as slang.