urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
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User ID: 226
Ah, interesting. When I was writing my post about the meaning of the term "Evangelical" in Lutheran circles, I actually hypothesized that the split between the ELCA and the confessional churches had something to do with the German vs Scandinavian split, but it's interesting that I was actually on to something.
My great-great grandmother had a copy of Walther's hymnal, in the German of course, which is now in my possession. My mother often tells me the family story about her praying in German. The other family story about her German ancestry consists of her fastidiously sweeping the floor while her husband, a full-blood Scots-Irish good old boy, spat tobacco on the porch. But Lutheranism in my family was wiped out a few generations ago in favor of generic American evangelicalism, or Holiness Pentecostalism.
urquan
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1d ago
I'd argue a majority of megachurches are actually affiliated with a denomination technically speaking, but a defining feature of the megachurch is that it downplays the denominational affiliation if it has one, and focuses on the pastor and brand energy™ to solidify the church's identity. Denominations, like the SBC, or some historically charismatic/Pentecostal denominations that have megachurches affiliated with them often have a tense relationship with the megachurches because they're renegades. But they also are huge, attract large crowds that put money in the plate, and therefore wield large influence in the denomination.
That said, old-school Baptists/Pentecostals are immensely critical of them, particularly among the Pentecostals. Megachurches generally downplay or outright eliminate the 'holy roller' elements associated with classical Pentecostalism, the dancing, the speaking in tongues, and the snakes, because those are generally highly off-putting to lapsed Christians who want a church that entertains them without challenging them. Pentecostals without those elements are essentially Baptists, so except for the minority of genuinely charismatic megachurches, you'd be hard pressed to tell a megachurch affiliated with a historically Pentecostal denomination from an SBC megachurch from a non-denominational one.
urquan
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1d ago
The theology is de facto based around the "born-again" experience and the personal relationship between individual believers and Jesus (if you are being polite) or about being gay for Jesus (if you are being rude from a male perspective) or about Jesus wanting to be your perfect romance-novel boyfriend (if you are being rude from a female perspective).
This is simply evangelical Christianity, as practiced since the great awakenings. There are plenty of small, very non-megachurch churches where the theology on this point is indistinguishable.
urquan
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1d ago
Genuinely "smoke machine as in theater." I would also count it as a yes if any of his churches have ever conducted a men's conference featuring monster trucks.
urquan
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1d ago
Have any of your churches ever utilized a smoke machine during a worship service?
urquan
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1d ago
If N. Ireland and Scotland ever end up leaving, will you revert to St. George's cross or just keep the Union Jack? And if you keep Wales, can you make the flag depict St. George and the Dragon? I presume that would coax them to leave too, but I would also like to present the historical missed opportunity of a victorious Britain in the American War for Independence stepping on snek.
In Lutheran circles, "evangelical" means "believes in the gospel according to Luther's understanding of the gospel," or in other words believe in salvation by faith alone. Luther originally wanted his followers to be called "evangelicals" becaue he believed that his understanding of the gospel, evangelion, was the most important element of his theology. By this definition virtually all protestants are "evangelicals," roughly speaking, and it has that meaning in some of the northern European countries where Lutheranism became the normative version of Protestantism.
The term has come to mean different things in the British and US context because of the history of great revivals with the goal of convincing mass numbers of people to have an emotional experience of surrender to the divine, which was central to their understanding of the gospel in a way that Lutherans/Calvinists/Catholics generally connected to sacraments rather than conversion experiences. Evangelicals (in that sense) also strongly defined themselves as popular preachers who wanted to make large numbers of people have a conversion experience, and felt that naming themselves after the evangelion was worthwhile because that was their message. You could make the argument that Anglo-American evangelicals were also evangelicals in the sense Luther would have meant it, but they just shouted it really, really loudly.
In that sense, Methodism, Pentecostalism, and most forms of the Baptists had major evangelical influences, and you can still find some Anglicans in the UK (a few) and the US (a few more) who would identify with the evangelical movement.
The "Lutheran" term came about because the common Catholic custom was to call a heresy by the name of its inventor, as in Arianism, Hussitism, Calvinism, and also the old-fashioned Christian term for Islam that hydro likes to use, Mohammedanism.
I guess the lesson is that the terms people call themselves rarely denote something concrete. "Democrat" and "Republican?" Their dispute isn't really over whether the US should be a democracy or a republic, though some particularly confused and pedantic Republicans like to claim "the us isn't a democracy, it's a republic!" like those aren't compatible, and the US is of course a Federal Democratic Republic and those terms lent their names to the first American party system (Federalists vs Democratic-Republicans) and to the current party system, while "Democratic Republic" on its own means communist, and "The Democratic Republic of America" is basically the "Man in the High Castle" of conservative fear fantasies. We live in a confusing world, and whales are fish.
urquan
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1d ago
Aw, that’s sweet.
urquan
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1d ago
Presumably it means, “Lutheran, with conservative theology,” or in other words a Lutheran who believes in the real presence as a literal metaphysical belief and takes the Augsburg confession as a literal statement of truth about reality.
Though I’m not sure it’s true we don’t have any. I know we have some confessional Protestants who have positive views of Lutheran scholasticism. Presumably at least one of those is a Lutheran.
urquan
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1d ago
I love my country, but I’m a strong critic of our constitutional structure.
I believe the assumption was that Congress would be jealous of its own power, in the way that the House of Commons was jealous of its own power in comparison to the King and the Lords, but the issue is that the elected Presidency created a countervailing center of political legitimacy, and blame, that’s independent of and largely unaccountable to Congress. The framers thought impeachment would be a sufficient counterweight, but failed to take account of the fact that removing a President would be a traumatic and partisan exercise, more akin to revolution against a king than the removal of a minister.
After centuries of experience with elected assemblies, it’s now clearer that the means of survival for democratic parties is ensuring that blame for anything that goes wrong rests on the opposition, not in delivering results. As a result, all blame and accountability for anything that happens politically rests on the President, who is quite impotent to accomplish reform, while little to no power actually rests in individual Congressmen.
So people who want to wield power don’t go into Congress, and Presidents are eager to expand their power by any means necessary. The checks and balances fail. I suspect the American system is designed almost for an inverted Whig revolution, where the executive has every reason to accumulate power by taking it from the legislature.
urquan
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1d ago
You know, sometimes I wonder where my t levels are at. How’d you find out you had an issue with it and what symptoms did it cause for you?
However, there are at least two reasons to question whether there is something inherent in political ideology that produces genuine differences in people’s mental health. First, it may be that factors correlated with ideology are actually responsible for the mental health gap rather than ideology itself being the culprit. Conservatism is positively correlated with a number of traits that are traditionally associated with better mental health and well-being, such as religious faith, patriotism, marriage, higher incomes, and old age [1, 4, 9, 18, 20, 23–26]. To provide one example, religion can provide a source of social support, a purpose in life, positive life choices, a coping mechanism for when things go wrong [23, 26]. It is also true that conservatives in the United States are more likely to be religious than liberals. Thus, at least some portion of the ideological mental health gap may actually be caused by religiosity.
Under this view, conservatives are happier than liberals because conservatism is associated with numerous factors that complement a more positive psyche. In addition to being more religious, conservative Americans are also more likely to get (and stay) married, more likely to be financially secure, and tend to be older. Each of these factors also tends to be associated with positive mental health. Likewise, liberal Americans are younger, less likely to be religious, more likely to be members of socially ostracized groups, and less likely to marry. Liberals are also more engaged in politics, participate more, and more likely to find meaning in political activism, but involvement in politics appears to have a negative impact on well-being [27, 28]. Among less advantaged groups, such as those with a lower socioeconomic status, conservatism has not been linked to improved mental health. Instead, individuals see their lower status as a personal failure, heightening negative perceptions of self [3].
If the ideological mental health gap is at least partially explained by factors associated with ideology rather than by ideology itself, then a more accurate estimate of the size of this gap requires controlling for such factors.
I see their point and I agree with a nuanced take on the gap, but I'd also argue that this specific part of their argument isn't a clear cut case as "it's explained by factors associated with ideology, not with ideology," when those factors are things like marriage, patriotism, focus on income increases, and especially religiosity, which are essentially the entire point of conservative ideology. The "ideology" is that those things are good and you should pursue them.
On the contrary, I don't think you can separate "finding meaning in political activism, focusing on inequality as a social problem, and being less likely to marry and more likely to divorce" from the ideology of liberalism, which says those focuses or decisions are a good thing.
It's possible that conservatism improves mental health for people who benefit from the things they say are important. What's fascinating is that, among liberals, focusing on the things that they say are important, particularly political action and activism in the face of inequality, actually lowers mental health. That's in the paper, and they cite research to support it.
They present this version of the research consensus:
Conservatives’ greater levels of justifications for and acceptance of the current state of the world (e.g. inequality) serve as a pacifying factor for their own mental state. If the conservative ideology allows for this system justification – an acceptance of the status quo – while the liberal ideology does not, then it might help explain why conservatives have better mental health. And this pattern may be cyclical as conservatism may prompt healthy, positive responses to adversity, while liberalism may lead individuals to respond to hardship in ways which are detrimental to their well-being.
But their arguments in this part of the paper don't actually attack this point for me; they seem to separate "ideology" from "things associated with the ideology" because they've carved out that conservatism is specifically and only "a system-justifying ideology that seeks to rationalize the existing political, economic, and social order," and things like religiosity and marriage aren't actually a part of it. In other words they extracted the most negative possible element of conservatism and are evaluating the ideology based on that, while excluding any positive elements of it as "factors associated." IMO, that to me is question-begging of the silliest kind that could only come from academia.
The authors wouldn't say this, but it's possible that system-justification and aligning yourself with "the existing political, economic, and social order" is actually the adaptive or correct response to the world. In other words, it may be that even their negative minimized version of conservatism is right, and my concern is that a huge portion of their argument assumes it must be wrong. That question has to actually be asked.
I did like the part of their argument where questions about mood remove the gap -- I don't doubt that's true. But I also don't think that focusing on daily mood is the best way to maximize mental health. Even psychotherapy doesn't necessarily think that's a good thing! Perhaps finding a comforting, meaning-generating, peace-infuzing ideology in the midst of,
the whips and scorns of time,
Th'oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of dispriz'd love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th'unworthy takes
is actually the way people experience positive mental health, and staring too deeply down the barrel of those things leads to imagining bodkins.
But this is of course the central axis on which political debate has hinged since, unironically, Marx. But the thought cannot be rejected out of hand that the opiates of the masses are medicines.
urquan
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2d ago
"🇺🇸 (American)"
I spontaneously burst into cheers of "USA! USA! USA!" and my favorite foods are Hamburgers, Freedom Fries, and Fried Chicken.
I get the irony of me posting a discourse on the war to someone who was upset about the discourse about the war, but my point was that I actually agree with phailyoor that the thread is a shitshow and I wanted to provide a meta-discussion on what exactly made it so frustrating to read. If phailyoor is unhappy with this I'm happy to re-post it somewhere else.
Edit: I notice that phailyoor got angrier after posting his comment and is now banned. I'm sorry if my comment did something to contribute to the frustration, my goal was to commiserate and not to add to the fire. I found the Iran thread frustrating as well, and hard to read.
urquan
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2d ago
You can definitely tell the Iran war has really hit some identity-buttons, because most of the thread is about what the war (or the causes of the war) means for national identity, political identity, and of course, as always, the Jews.
I have very strong views of opposition to the Iran war as I think it will not work and puts Americans in harms way for an impossible objective, but psychologically it's very hard to try to argue measuredly against accusations from foreigners that my country is evil, even if I agree with them on the object level. The fact that things like the Iran war harms American prestige abroad factors into my feelings about it, but it's one thing to evaluate American desire for regime change and dislike of non-aligned regimes in the Middle East from the inside, and another to feel like I have to justify my country in the midst of our worst impulses.
I think some element of the "I voted for this, bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran," energy is a kind of reaction formation to feeling like the country as an entity is being criticized from the outside based on actions that almost everyone in the country is either opposed to or bewildered by. Everyone I've talked to on the ground is completely confused by what's going on, no one is going John McCain "Iran deserves it."
Americans have a lot of that -- feeling like we're powerful enough that the world inevitably views us as wildly suspicious, yet without much international glory and prestige to show for it. We theoretically have the power to level cities, yet our government could not protect us from a Saudi rich boy living in an Afghan cave flying fully-fueled jetliners into skyscrapers, and the headquarters of our military. Inevitably some level of response is "maybe we gonna level they god-damn cities."
I think the American psychology is a sense of being burdened with the criticism, responsibility, and threat that being a great power inevitably generates, but without any of the respect, from within or without, that such power might engender. Some element of our worst impulses, and even the Trumpian "America First" political movement, is about examining the Machiavellian dilemma, observing that with the US's power it is unlikely to ever be loved, and therefore choosing whatever means might make us feared.
Unfortunately, war is always a complete shitshow. But especially so when identity, fear, pride, ego, and power get involved. In other words, always.
urquan
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2d ago
I’ve also struggled with the same thing, a condition worsened by the fact that many friends of mine have been chronic social procrastinators and highly unreliable in planning things to do. You talk about not being able to get people on the phone, but often even when I try, I can’t even get people to text me back within three days. You can’t build a social life on that.
Hell, I met a guy in a college class that I got along with rather well, despite his off-colour humor. I asked him if he’d want to do something outside of class and he looked at me like I’d suggested he should dance naked in the college fountain, saying “no, I don’t go out after I get home from class.” He seemed to like me a great deal, but apparently socialization was beyond the pale.
Not being jovial friar, I wouldn’t say that I’ve built emotional rapport with many lovers, but the strongest connections in my life have generally been women I’ve dated. If they like you, they’ll actually text you back.
Zoomers are cooked.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
2d ago
Ah, the joke being about her and the age gap makes this more intelligible.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
3d ago
"Obviously I'm going. He's hot," she huffed, and flounced away.
This is pretty funny, but I might compare it to the oft-ignored advice to not "stick your dick in crazy." It seems to me both sexes are bad at putting down and holding to firm and sane boundaries if the individual in question is hot enough.
I know I've put up, in brief courtships, with some pretty noncommittal/confusing/game-playing behavior because I found the individual in question very attractive. There was certainly some stewing in those situations, but in my heart of hearts I have to admit that if they'd resolved their confusion and stated what they wanted clearly, I'd probably have gone along with it. But my response to that kind of behavior, absent the stewing, is basically to shut down and move on, in annoyance, so these kinds of things never advanced. I'm willing to trade a lot of attractiveness for stability and common sense.
urquan
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3d ago
A certain part of female sexuality is wanting to be the proverbial dog barking behind a fence who doesn't do anything when let out, but some of the instant 180s I've seen as a third party are jaw dropping.
I can understand changing your opinion on your coworker because he makes an off-color joke, but what I find genuinely hard to understand is the having of a months-long intense sexual crush on your boss and telling your friends you want to do BDSM with him. That's wild.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
3d ago
How do men meet women in your culture, and what are romantic relationships between men and women like?
urquan
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8d ago
Have you ever had feelings of affection or warmth for a woman? Not just “she’s hot,” but “her smile makes me feel warm.” Ever? Even in school?
urquan
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10d ago
Oh god, please don't start the master morality vs slave morality debate again...
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
10d ago
My experiences with alcohol are that it makes me a sad, weeping drunk about half the time and an utterly silly, horny drunk the other half. That roulette wheel can be fun with an intimate partner you already want to have sex with, but I don't think it would be sensible with a stranger.
Alcohol does not, however, make me more social, except with people I'm already likely to be social with. So I might be more talkative to a friend, but I wouldn't be more likely to be socially gregarious to a third party or a date I barely know. And at the point where I'd consumed enough alcohol to get to that point, I would already be so impaired that I came off as uncoordinated and slurring even to myself, which probably means other people would perceive me as mad drunk.
I also tried phenibut once, before the FDA cracked down on it, and as best I could tell it had exactly 0 effect.
Hey Rae, I took my time with this response because I wanted to get it right. February, like @OliveTapenade said, was gender month on the motte, and it seems like February won't be much different.
A Portrait of Urquan
I wouldn't say that I struggled to integrate male sexuality with my self identity, but more that I struggled to reconcile my personal sexuality and experience of the world, which I've always experienced as male or as cis-by-default, with what was expected of me by society. I've never experienced gender dysphoria, or felt that my penis and the various things which one might endeavor to do with the penis, were strange or foreign to me.
Now, I do have some personality traits that are commonly considered more 'feminine', and have created tension for me in male friendships. I don't enjoy competitive hobbies, like team sports or multiplayer video games. I'm not socially dominant, I don't enjoy teasing-as-bonding, and I tend to be more of a listener in a conversation. It's frequent that after hanging out with someone or going on a date, the other person will say, "Wow, I really talked your ears off, didn't I? I'm sorry I monopolized the conversation."
I enjoy feelings-talk as much as ideas-talk, and my preferred mode of social bonding is to be with one person, or a small group, and listen to how they tell the story of their life, what moves them, what kind of dreams they have, what they care about, what the meaning of life is to them. I enjoy deep chats about life and meaning.
It's a frequent occurrence that any time I try to hang out with male friends, they will proceed to play some kind of competitive local multiplayer video game like Mario Party, Super Smash Bros, in the old days Halo, etc. I will often be sitting off to the sidelines because I don't enjoy that kind of experience, and it's been a real tension in male friendship groups I've been a part of that I'm the odd one out, people try to include me, I reassure them that I'm enjoying watching... it's kind of like when you invite your girlfriend to a hangout with the guys and she ends up playing with the dog. That's me, but I'm one of the guys.
When I play video games, I prefer to immerse myself in the story, build a character that I give a backstory to, and use creative tools in the game to express my character's position and identity in the world. Stardew Valley (which a friend once described as "such a girl game") is one of my favorite games of all time. I see video games as interactive stories and creative expression tools, not mechanics in which to demonstrate mastery. I play games on story mode.
Basically the only social experiences that leave me with a feeling of satisfaction are one-on-one, deep chats. I enjoy laughing and having fun with people, but I just am a very intense, and very private, person, and I enjoy bringing other people into my world, and seeing what their world looks like to them.
Love According to Urquan
As I've shared before on the motte, my model of intimacy and relationships is deep and passionate. I see romance as a means of seeing oneself in the other. It's not principally about resources or even sex-qua-sex, but about being close to someone in the special way that romance brings you close. I don't know how to describe it or break it down. There's a je ne sais quoi to romantic intimacy that I can't describe to people who've never experienced it. It's not lust, it's the desire for union of the soul, where someone else becomes an extension of yourself. It's butterflies and it's the feeling that you've entered the kairos -- the special time, the appointed time, when even going to work and doing boring work things feels buoyant. Where the world feels enchanted and beautiful again, the way it always felt when I was young.
When I was a teenager I wrote this:
I believe in love. Not the altruistic compassion of the teachers and philosophers, nor the euphemistically-concealed erotic passion of sexual intercourse, but the kind of love that erupts with joy and strains the sinews of the heart — the sort of love that is held with such conviction that it disables the other functions of the mind, that is so pure and so powerful that you cannot but think about the object of the love, that makes all you do worth the struggle of life because they live, and that colors the world beautiful because they are beautiful.
Oh - and I'm also into classic poetry. Can't you tell?
The main tensions with the male social role I've had have been that I struggle to "slot in" seamlessly to male social groups, as I've suggested, and that I've struggled to find the kind of intimacy that's meaningful to me. A lot of flirting includes the very kind of social engagement that I find unintuitive or unnatural: playful teasing, inexplicit boundary testing, displays of bravado and confidence, sexual confidence. But if it's supremely creepy to begin a conversation with a woman by saying you want to sleep with her, it's massively more insane to begin a conversation by saying, "I'm looking for the kind of love that makes the world beautiful and I want to merge our souls together." But that's what I've always looked for: someone to whom I can expose the reality of my capacity for passion, someone whose eyes I can stare deeply into, someone whose vulnerability and pain I can absorb and comfort.
Because I see love as a means of intimate union and mutual vulnerability, I come into tension both with the expectations of men and of women. In general, men find that kind of thing to be 'girl-talk,' suitable for 'chick-lit,' the kind of thing you invent to reassure your girlfriend, not a mode of thought you inhabit for yourself. Women find it, in men, somewhere between "impossible to find" and "impossible to exist," and there exists few to no kinds of reliable signals that can communicate to a woman that's what you're looking for. Because establishing a relationship where those concepts make sense requires early-stage flirting and dating, I've often felt like I have to suppress the very motivation that drives me to seek intimacy in order to engage in meaningless banter and playful teasing. That doesn't feel like me.
There's also the sexual shame element, I personally am low in sociosexuality, and I find the idea of having sex with someone I don't know well to be deeply uncomfortable. I've done it, but always with regret and a feeling of emptiness and being used that made me want to scrub my body with such an immensity of soap that my skin would burn. So I feel like I've often swam massively against the current, having to compete with hookup bros in a market for lemons, and facing skepticism from women who expect from me a kind of sexual bravado and indifference to social convention that feels totally foreign to me.
I don't see any of my traits as incompatible with being a man. I just see them as incompatible with the carrots and the sticks that surround the socially-constructed model of what a man is. That kind of model is obviously based in reality -- men really do prefer playing multiplayer games together instead of talking about their feelings, as my own experiences would attest -- but what men reward in other men, and especially what women reward in men, operate according to a certain pattern which isn't necessarily my own.
Queer Theory-ing Urquan
There's a stereotype of gay men among normies that they're sensitive, moody, artistic, poetic, romantic boys who just need a well. Accordingly, I was sometimes bullied as a kid for being 'gay' in that sense. This stereotype shows up all over popular culture; one of the more absurd examples is "The Battle of Schrute Farms" from The American Office, where this purported Civil War battle is actually a gay commune, described thus:
But the Battle at Schrute Farms was no battle at all. It was a code used by pacifists from both North and South who turned the Pennsylvania farmhouse into an artistic community and a refuge from the war. You have to understand. Poets, artists, dancers – these kind of men preferred peace to war. These delicate lovely men found a place of refuge among the Schrutes at Schrute Farms. Amidst the macho brutality of war this was a place where dandies and dreamers could put on plays and sing tender ballads and dance in the moonlight. I like to think of Schrute Farms as the Underground Railroad for the sensitive... and well... fabulous.
In other words, if you're a pacifist, if you're artistic, if you like poetry, if you're not socially dominant, it logically follows that you really must want to suck cock. Seems we have some professors of logic down at the university of science who put a lot of thought into that one.
Our scripts of masculinity have taken everything found "unmanly," bundled them into an archetype, and slapped the label 'queer' on them. The Romantic poets of the past who wrote elegies about their romances with women would be labeled as the queerest queers who ever queered by our modern views of gender, even among progressives. Maybe especially among progressives, for dumb reasons.
Supposedly I'm doing "queer theory" right now, but if you actually sit in a university classroom where undergraduates try to use queer theory as an interpretive lens for historical literature, it's basically the least queer-theory interpretation possible because it consists of viewing any friendly or intimate connection between men as homoerotic. Postmodernism consists of incredulity toward metanarratives, except of course the metanarratives where everybody's fucking gay.
(I will give them the theater kids, though, the majority of the theater kids at my high school were gay or lesbian. I will also give the bisexuals Shakespeare if they wish to have him.)
Maybe such feminine traits are more common among gay men than straight men -- I don't know -- but I do suspect that whatever such traits exist are themselves ground down by the cock and the whip the carrot and the stick that gay men have to face, where intimacy is damnable heteronormativity and hookups are liberatory. You will suck the cock after five minutes of chatting and you will like it.
I'm principally attracted to women, though with a limited ability to find very femme men attractive (stereotype fulfillment?). My youthful explorations of the gay social scene gave me the impression that, there, I'd find it much harder to locate the kind of intimacy I actually find valuable. It was like looking for love in a world filled only "with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls." What I think Ginsberg missed is that the ecstatic sexual world is as much a part of Moloch as any number of demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses!, or indeed granite cocks!, to those who do not fit its rigid vision of freedom.
Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!
I can understand why someone with a personality such as you've described about yourself would find gender transition appealing. The default for an AMAB individual with an attraction to men is the gay social scene, which amplifies most of the very things I find discomforting about the male sexual role into almost a comedic parody. I note with almost existential irony the fact that the ultimate immoral mistake for a man to make when flirting with a woman is to send her an unrequested dick pic, while gay men treat dick pics almost as the equivalent of a hello. I'd be interested if @gattsuru has a more nuanced take -- my own experiences of the gay social world were basically college activists and horny college twinks, and they... have their own peculiar way of things.
I don't know what sensitive men like me are supposed to do, or what the world expects of us. We are strange to men, and invisible to women.
(Edited to add: Exhibit A. See what I mean about carrots and sticks?)
The Masked Urquan
Now, let me answer your direct question:
What happens if you don’t put on the mask and just stay who you are when interacting romantically or in the bedroom?
I feel like you’d be missing out on so much if you can’t be authentically yourself with your partner. Sex when you’re just acting out a persona in order to please your partner… that just means you’re both getting cheated out of real human connection, no? What’s the point then?
Well, the honest answer is, "nothing happens," and there is no "bedroom" in which sex would happen, regardless. At least in early stage flirting, I have to go outside my comfort zone to get to the point where I could be more like myself.
But as for the second part, I guess it's partway related to the fact that I've dated some more... kinky women. My imagined model of a sexual encounter is very personal, very intimate, low and slow, "I love you so much," kissing, holding each other while going at it -- that sort of thing. I've had that, and I value it a lot. That's typically the "porn for women" script, and it's what stereotypes tend to assume women want from sex.
But stereotypes often also assume that women just... don't want sex that much at all, which isn't true. In the post-Fifty-Shades era, it's pretty clear that a decent chunk of women like dirty, kinky, dom/sub, rough, dirty talking behavior in the bedroom. That's the element that felt more foreign to me when I first encountered it. I never had as much trouble as the "Yeah...you like that, you fucking retard?" guy, but it definitely was hard to adapt to it.
But I feel you, sex is for me about 'real human connection,' just like you said. I guess I've tolerated that stuff because, well, it really turned them on, and women are hard enough to please sexually that if something just does it for them, I'm happy for the opportunity to give it. In the post-orgasm-gap-discussion world, the assumption that vaginal intercourse to completion on male terms constitutes the sex act has collapsed, and you're pretty much obligated as a man to do something that isn't necessarily your #1 thing in order to please your partner sexually.
I hope that answers your question. Obviously I'm exposing some vulnerable things on the forum here, but you've been open with me and I felt compelled to return the favor. If anything stands out to you, I'm happy to elaborate to an extent.
Uh oh, I may have to diagnose you with megachurch American.
I can’t judge though - I was baptized in a megachurch, which didn’t even do me the favor of keeping any baptismal records. This became a slight issue when I needed documentation of baptism. Fortunately I had videographic evidence.
In a lot of ways the broader evangelical orbit has become megachurch-y, even if most of the clearly negative elements like pastoral financial enrichment are absent. I’m well aware of the social movement in evangelical circles towards imitation of whatever gets people to keep coming.
That said, there’s also a clear movement away from the Jesus rock/stage entertainment model of evangelical services, and I know of evangelicals converting to conservative Anglicanism and Presbyterianism, as well as some unusual Baptists who believe Baptists should have liturgical prayer. Lutheranism and Catholicism are less porous, perhaps for sacramentalist reasons, although as a rather high church fellow I insist on baptismal regeneration.
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