Children are just cruel in general. I have a giant scar on my stomach from an appendectomy gone very wrong and I used to get made fun of for it in the locker room. They called it my C section scar.

If I’m willing to cold bloodedly kill people for the “greater good”, then I’ve definitely already accepted I’m shredding my soul.

Although when someone tells you how terrible they are, listen.

I don’t see how you can read through this thread and come to the conclusion that all the people sharing stories of how they’ve been hurt are incels. This comment section in general has been the most calm, respectful discussion of gender relations I’ve seen yet.

🫂

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_or_bear

Basically women expressing they’d be more comfortable in the woods knowing that there’s a bear roaming around than knowing there’s a random man roaming around

It taught me to stop feeling as a defense mechanism and I never really started again. Hooray for depression 🎉

Super socially awkward and anxious in middle school and high school and was also bullied a ton. Girls would ask me out as a joke, and there’s no good response. If you say yes you’re a dumbass for thinking they’re actually interested in you, if you say no you’re gay and should kill yourself. Combined with being an impressionable teen with incredibly negative self esteem on reddit at a time where something along the lines of all men are rapists was a common sentiment, it really honestly fucked me up. I still am not comfortable with romance and intimacy with women to be honest.

Like, I get it, it’s upsetting to be judged a predator based off of your gender alone. That’s something I struggle with being trans, seeing how seemingly half the country thinks trans people are just perverts and child predators. But with the whole bear situation, men need to realize that it’s not a reflection of them as individuals but a reflection of society. Being upset about it is normal and rational, but you should be upset at the society that allows women to be treated in such a way that women have to be suspicious and fearful, instead of being upset at the women making them confront this ugly truth.

Discussing gender relations like this should be done carefully with empathy, telling a bunch of male teens and young men that they’re all predators can be quite damaging in and of itself, both to the men directly and to the greater discussion and understanding of the problems we face as a society. God knows being on reddit as a teenager and hearing that really hurt me and contributed to mental issues I haven’t and probably will never fully resolve.

If I’ve met any/interacted with any/they’ve run across my profile on dating/hookup apps and they’ve been interested in me, they haven’t expressed it. Certainly not saying people who might be interested in me don’t exist, just that I haven’t come across any who are. Lol I know bi and pan people exist, I’m one of them

I just wanted to let you know how you phrased your first sentence says the opposite of what you mean, I believe

…are you doing anything next weekend?

Seeing Lemmy’s reaction to the bear made me want to crawl under a rock to be honest, so many people demonstrating that they’re exactly the reason why women don’t feel safe. A lot more than 10% of men on the internet are weird assholes, they just mask it well until they feel insulted. I’ve had a cis woman friend have to change her screen name because she’d occasionally get clocked and harassed, and a trans friend is really split on the progress she’s making with her voice, because now she’s also getting harassed when using voice chat in games.

Sorry mostly unrelated tangent, it just feels like gender relations have been backsliding

🫂

There’s a few factors working together to cause it. There’s really two main ones: pressure to have sex and romantic connection, and an inability to be able to make those connections.

There’s tons and tons of pressure out there about being in a relationship and having sex. In modern day, a good example is Andrew Tate and the like, directly linking your self worth to having sex. Back when I was a male teenager during the days of rage comics and advice animals, it was memes about the friend zone. The core idea is the same, being alone is something to be ashamed and upset about. Being rejected is something that reflects badly upon you as a person. Young men are constantly being bombarded with messaging about how being a man revolves around sex and romance, and lacking these things makes you less of a man. In addition, so much media portrays sex both as this amazing thing on a pedestal and as something that’s not just commonplace but as something that everyone’s expected to be doing.

So young men are believing that everyone except them are all in relationships and/or fucking all the time, and believing that them not doing those things makes worth less as a human being.

The other problem is actually making romantic or otherwise meaningful connections. So much more socializing is online these days, and there are a lot fewer women on the internet than men. It’s difficult to make organic connections with single women online, as random social media is by far mostly male and more direct closer friend groups tend to be made of single men and people in relationships (this is very arbitrary and circumstancial, it’s just what I’ve noticed). So, your odds of finding a single and compatible friend of a friend of a friend online aren’t great, and dating apps are complete trash for pretty much anything other than gay hookups. So, there’s not really a way for many young men to find romantic partners. Straight up hookups are easier, especially if your standards aren’t too high, but it’s an area a lot of young men aren’t socially comfortable with because it’s not something they’ve done a lot of, which makes everything much harder.

In the end, if there wasn’t so much pressure to be dating and having sex, then the difficulty of doing so in the modern day wouldn’t matter so much.

Personally, I’ve basically only had sex with men, because it’s so much more straightforward and the dating pool isn’t crazy lopsided. Though that’s at an end now too, because I’ve transitioned too much to be appealing to gay men anymore and haven’t transitioned nearly enough to be appealing to straight men or gay women.

Cochlear implants do exist, you know

👀

Lmao mood, like if you’re going to put something on for background noise it better be something neither of us care about. Being on the giving end sounds amazing, marathon dick sucking to go with marathon lotr watching, amazing.

Hahahaha I’m the other way around, I can’t imagine having enough energy and attention for more than one person

I really like the nothing is changeable and travel is possible and anything you do while traveling has already happened / was already going to happen concept