urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
No bio...
User ID: 226
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
3d ago
Alright, I'll quit while I'm behind. Best of luck to you.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
3d ago
As someone who’s struggled with “I’m weird and that makes me cool,” I learned the hard way that the best thing you can do for yourself is to develop the ability to bridge your personality and values to normies. Making yourself a permanent outcast just perpetuates feelings of ostracization. I know you feel like an outsider, but I assure you that from your posts, you’re much more relatable and typically human than you think.
Even in your hypothetical rant, you’re attributing to her thoughts and values that she didn’t share. “Whatever happened to the Hellboy quote that I put in the book”, in that context, doesn’t sound like the description of a betrayal — it sounds like you’re upset she isn’t actually what you imagined her to be. You’re accusing her of betraying your perception of her.
That’s why she reacted so harshly to the kissing: you were a fun buddy to her, not a romantic interest. Unfortunately, she seems to have a big problem with actually vocalizing her thoughts and needs, and either accidentally or intentionally flirting as a form of social bonding, which is why you get anger only in texts. It’s genuinely possible that this is the dark side of my anecdote about asexuals not understanding the difference between sexuality and friendship — maybe she honestly doesn’t realize some of actions are clearly flirting, just sees people responding positively and so it’s positively reinforced.
Everything else makes sense and doesn’t seem like BPD or even craziness when I think of it that way: the “friend hug,” the invitation to hang out but aversion to dinner (which would be a date!), and the cold shoulder. I’m not sure she ever thought of you as a potential partner. Maybe she flirted in ways that were honestly ambiguous, but you’re both neurodivergent — are you certain she was acting and you were reading social signals correctly?
I’m still trying to solve the mystery of why I never ended up in a situation like this, and have had generally positive romantic experiences. Probably what I would have done with this girl is awkwardly ask her out in explicit terms, she would awkwardly say no, and even our friendship would fizzle out. I don’t make grand romantic gestures and I only rarely flirt first.
I guess I’m lucky that occasionally women have made their interest known explicitly, and understandably women who’ve liked me enough to go out of their way to make me know it had little trouble with ambiguous interest or attraction. Looking back on your initial thread, I realize I’m basically implementing @gorge’s advice: “It's easier if you go for the girls who are crushing on you, without you having to put in extraordinary effort.” What’s really tough is if you don’t have anyone crushing on you. But women who clearly state their attraction to a man don’t realize how powerful and important they are in the current social context.
I’m sorry if I made you feel judged. My goal was solely to try and relate to your experience and reassure you. I guess I overstepped. But I do think after reflecting that this isn’t a case of “crazy feminism ruins good romantic prospect,” I think it’s that you made a geeky friend and misread her friendship as attraction. I’ve done that many times, and probably would have in this situation, too. It’s very relatable.
It would have saved you both a lot of drama if you’d have clarified your relationship before you kissed her. The current social environment just makes ambiguity too threatening to everyone.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
3d ago
squouse
New furry name for intimate partner just dropped
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
3d ago
I’m sorry about this. From what you’ve said, you didn’t do anything wrong.
Unfortunately, I think the truth is that people who reach their 30s without marrying or being in an LTR on the way to marriage are often that way for a reason. She’s in her 30s, and going back to college for a degree with a tenuous relationship to direct employment — that points to aimlessness. That’s understandable in your early to mid 20s, much less understandable in your 30s.
I’ll counterpoint the cynicism by saying that I’ve never encountered this kind of instability from “geeky neurodivergent asexual” women. Of course, when I found about the asexuality things ended because of the obvious incompatibility. For what it’s worth, your interlocutor does not at all sound to me like their behavior matches the cluster — that cluster of people is usually more shy, reserved, and actually confused by sexuality, not manipulative about it.
It's hard to describe the anecdotes without context, but the asexual people I've met just didn't understand the concept of how a relationship is different from a friendship. I've been asked what is supposed to differentiate them by someone in this category before. I wasn't convinced about the existence of absolute asexuality when I first encountered it, but meeting a few of these people and seeing how absolutely bewildered they are by sexuality led me to the conclusion they they really don't have the sexual feelings that most people do. I've never met the "asexual but romantic" people, which seems to be the identification of your friend here; every asexual person I've met has clearly been as confused by romance as by sexuality, or talked about it analytically and outside the frame of direct experience.
But perhaps what's going on is one of two things -- she has relatively normal sexual feelings, but has general identity instability that makes her uncomfortable with it unless lubricated by alcohol, which seems most likely to me. Or, alternatively, she is asexual, and her confusion about the concept of sexuality manifests as an intense conflict resulting in the craziness you've encountered. Your choice quotes, "I'm so tired of straight guys assuming I'm not asexual, anyways I already have a crush," and "pretty people dont light their own cigarettes" just read as woefully neurotypical and narcissistic in a normie way. This is perhaps a case of a neurotypical person with identity instability latching onto concepts like asexuality and autism and queerness as validation for her weirdness. I'm not a psychiatrist, but this has what is coloquially called "BPD chick energy" all over it.
I run into her again a few weeks later (this is 2024) and she gives me a big ole body hug and invites me to hang out, making me internally panic. There's other people around so I can't really have a frank conversation with her. At the end of the evening, I ask her if she'd like to get dinner sometime, so we can talk in private and I can hash out exactly how she feels about me. She reacts poorly.
Talk about mixed signals! That's exactly the kind of thing that makes me think you're just dealing with garden variety crazy. "Let's hang out, but no I won't go to dinner" shortly after "you ruined my birthday"... especially combined with the "made me feel not okay about you" thing you got a year later, makes it extremely likely that this is a person with serious confusion about her romantic identity and desires, who over time built a positive or neutral situation into a decidedly negative one.
You said in your hypothetical rant that she said something like "all us freaks have is each other." Well, that sounds like someone that has made an identity out of weirdness. And I don't think it's healthy. I've certainly bonded with women in that way -- you know, "we have this in common and we understand each other like other people don't." But there's a time and a place, and calling yourself a "freak" when you do that just makes them sound like they're committed to weirdness not as an obstacle, or as a healthy part of personality, but as an active aversion and identitification with rebellion from the norm for no reason.
I'm sorry that a connection that meant so much to you at the time became so negative. But unfortunately the connection you had was always fictive, time-limited. This is not a person capable of stable bonds. There was no relationship to be had with her. And though she holds the power to destroy aspects of your life in her hands, she also seems much more interested in destroying aspects of her life -- including the connection she made with you, which may well have had the capacity to be incredibly meaningful to her, too. You're collateral damage in the mess she's made of herself. I don't say that beacuse I think you should sympathize with her, but because I think you should remind yourself that her own life is hot garbage, and certainly seems lonely. It's not like she rejected you for bigger and better things; she rejected you for smaller and worse things. She's the one who lost.
While writing wish fulfillment stories about it is a little silly, I do think it's a real phenomenon that women in love start having a halo effect feeling towards their partner's appearance. "I want to have a baby with your deep blue eyes and your cute nose and your bright smile" is a completely realistic thing you might hear from your girlfriend or your wife. Maybe not for a pot belly -- but obviously that's not exactly a genetic trait. It's not so much a statement of "they're so HAWT and SEXXXXXY" as it is a statement of "I want to have children by you in particular," which is just something that women say when they really love you.
I can say that pair-bonding with a woman also gives a halo effect about her appearance, where individual features that might not be the most attractive thing in the world dissolve into the gestalt of someone you love. You start finding her distinguishing features attractive because they're hers. I'd assert this is a symmetrical feature of human pair-bonding.
The unrealistic thing about the comic's depiction of this is that it happens so quickly, which is partly a joke I think.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
4d ago
Married many kids, greatly enjoys child birth.
Excuse me, what?
I'm curious how you'd distinguish this from desire-to-be-masculine.
I'm with Iconochasm here: I've triangulated that I'm at the far high end of male tenderness and romantic shyness, and those examples strike me as painfully unmasculine. The rat character just feels hunched over, passive, depressed. Maybe a desire is there, but if this resonates with the trans masc community than I don't know if they really get what men aim to be like. Although I love my tenderness, I also don't want to be the guy who apologizes for kissing a woman who really wanted me to kiss her. Ask me how I know.
and also is more gynophilic in his partners than I am
I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean -- I'm really not trying to be a jerk here. But, I mean, you are bisexual, and obviously you have a deep connection to gay culture. I'm not sure that being more gynophilic than you means a whole lot, particularly when we're talking about people who are exclusively attracted to women. Do you have a preference for women?
I admit, I didn't even realize you had any interest in the fairer sex until you explicitly said you were bisexual -- my ingrained mental image, which is hard to shake, is that you're twink who likes wearing programmer socks. I guess I've known too many geeky MSM or furries that fit that frame that I slotted you into it. And I genuinely want to know how wrong I am.
are really gay
The "trans men are really gay" thing actually contributes to the point you're refuting: if you're flying from femininity, what is less feminine than being gay? As you've said before, femininity isn't really all that prized in gay culture, stereotypes aside.
a longer-running thread revolves around wanting to be a dad
Well, a parent, at least. There are obviously differences between moms and dads, but I don't know how to meaningfully distinguish "I want to be a parent, but I don't want to get pregnant" (which would actually contribute to the point you're trying to refute!) from "I want to be a dad."
It is also slightly humorous that the rat character throws a party to interview candidates for impregnating his girlfriend, which seems, well, like something a lot of men would find somewhere between uncomfortable and enraging.
EDIT: A few more reflections after downloading the comic PDF. I braved the rat pornography so everyone else wouldn't have to.
But most of the sex doesn't come off to me as gay, or male -- they come off to me as lesbian wish fantasies about doing masculinity better than men. In particular, the initial sex scene in the comic features the rat character pulling a strapon out of his everyday carry bag (as one does) and then insisting on putting a condom on it, because ????. This is a contradiction to the stereotype that men won't wear a rubber.
Then, during the sex scene, he asks the female character, "how do you like to do it?" and she responds by saying, "Nobody's ever asked me that before!" Again, this is a contradiction to the view that men don't give a damn about women's sexual enjoyment, which is puzzlingly common among women. The point is that the trans masc rat is a Better Man (TM) than those dirty cis rat boys who didn't treat her right.
Maybe that is how a lot of men are, I don't know. But the idea that I'd have a sexual encounter and not aim to make it a good one for my partner is like suggesting that I set my pizza sauce-side down. What's the point of getting my rocks off without having a memorable experience that ends in mutual satisfaction?
(Of course, she doesn't know what she likes, and the trans man rat character just substitutes his own judgment for her inability to state her sexual preferences, and those happen to be absolutely exactly what she likes. Another trope in sexual fiction written by women.)
The "single pregnant woman meets Good Man (TM) with dad vibes" is also a common female fantasy -- obviously it's quite adaptive. But it's not necessarily something that I'd say reflects an internalization of maleness so much as a desire to perform proper maleness for women, or in other words to be the butchest lesbian who ever strapped on a dildo.
I did definitely enjoy the transition from "we literally just reunited on the street randomly" to "we are having sex, we can separate physicality from emotions, right?" to "we are now madly in love," which took all of one evening. Can I make a u-haul joke?
Also... it really does seem like the "main character" in the sex scene I read was the female character. It was all about her. I'm not getting "I AM A MAN FANTASIZING ABOUT BEING MASCULINE" vibes, but very much a projection of women's sexual desires onto the trans male character. Particularly in the "you're my princess but you're also my slut" thing, that's textbook girl next door with a naughty side energy. Of course, I think many men would be happy to do that for a woman if she asked (but in the comic she doesn't ask -- he intuits).
The comic's depictions of sex read more to me like something written by a woman than by a man -- might as well have been written by women I've dated, it's so painfully familiar. (ngl, didn't hate it.) He's a woman's ideal man, not a man's ideal man. That's not an insult, but it is important. I don't think this proves what you think it does.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
4d ago
Another group transitions, and either the desire to reify their masculinity by becoming culturally gay or perhaps the influence of testosterone, leads them to become hypersexual. 2rafa's description from a few years ago of someone she "knew as a girl and she was a blue hair, tumblr type, I suspect into Yaoi. Now he’s a twinkish bottom with a thin beard addicted to Grindr hookups" rings very true to me. I know people like this. There's always the beard.
Sometimes this seems to happen to people who identified themselves as lesbians before transitioning, which means that they jumped the shark from not wanting male attention to really wanting male attention. I once met an FTM transitioner in a marriage with a woman who was looking for men to sleep with. "I like women and she's nice, but I need to be fucked, what she doesn't know won't hurt her" was a real quote. First time I ever encountered the concept of a lesbian sham marriage. I guess in this case the beard was more of a person.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
5d ago
As far as I am aware there are some OF sellers that sell videos and image sets individually, which also happens to be the way that traditional pr0n worked.
My understanding is that it’s most of them, and “all my videos are on my onlyfans!” is a marketing differentiator. You pull the suckers in with a subscription, and then upsell them on individual pieces of content once they’ve built the loyalty of having already given you money. Onlyfans subscribers are a customer base pre-selected and filtered for willingness to give you money to see you naked.
But also the Russians have cornered the market on “free access to archived onlyfans posts from any popular user”, having redistributed the means of reproduction. If you know you know.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
8d ago
Pre-Peter-Jackson, sure, knowing the name "Frodo" marked you as an ubergeek, but today they're still top-100-lifetime-gross movies; when The Return of the King came out it was like top 10.
Yeah, she’s been a fan since the 80s! Tolkien has always had a loyal following among college-educated conservative Christians, and my mom was recommended The Hobbit at a Christian college. She does love the Peter Jackson films, but insists that everyone should watch the extended editions.
You're not mixing up 1 and 4, are you? Everybody thought 1 was dull but loved 4.
Nope! The Motion Picture with V-ger was a movie I really enjoyed. It could be slow but the V-ger accumulations over time and the sequence of them flying in to the center of the mysterious spaceship was so epic that it impressed itself on my memory. I also like 4, and as an adult I like it more than 1 because of the character moments (and Spock swearing) despite thinking that it has a weaker overall concept than 1. “What if the voyager probe gained sentience and RETVRNED to Earth?” is just a more interesting premise than “what if whales seek revenge on humanity?”
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
8d ago
I've never actually watched either Stargate or Battlestar!
My parents are boomers, so they watched Star Trek and The Next Generation when they aired, and especially saw the films when they started coming out. Talking to them about movies is an interesting experience: they remember a time when movie theaters were everywhere, and going to see a movie was almost an everyday occurance. My dad talks about how when Star Wars came out in 1977, he saw it several times before it left theaters.
So I grew up on watching Star Wars films with my parents, we'd pull the lounge chair into the center of the living room and I'd curl up with my dad and watch the OT. When the prequels came out, we watched those too, but my favorite was Empire, obviously. When I was a little older we started watching Star Trek too, I remember liking Star Trek 1 and I was surprised when I got older and found out everyone hates it. But I also was obsessed with the Voyager probes as a child, so I guess it hit the spot for me.
Star Trek and Star Wars have always been the most mainstream of the space franchises, so I grew up with them as normal popcorn movies that my parents liked. Now, if you start talking to my mom about Lord of the Rings, that's where you'll start finding the nerdiness.
So part of this is that I grew up on a bit of an older wave of nostalgia, and I don't know what the Xer and Millennial parents of my cohort raised their kids on.
Kindles? iPads
The Kindle Fires (I don't know if they use the term "Kindle" for these anymore) are the cheapest way to get a kid a tablet and they went crazy coming out with various kid-themed versions and cases.
Edit: for instance, here's a $100 tablet advertised for kids and themed to the Avengers.
The strength of the Star Trek female fan base has always been slightly surprising to me: it’s military science fiction! That said, I can see it: it’s military sci-fi, but the military solves problems through the power of empathy and diplomacy, Kirk and Riker (my phone literally autocorrected his name to “Romeo,” which is hilarious) are… present, and most stories in Trek are soft science fiction, using alien societies or time travel to explore social structures and personal relationships. TNG always stood out to me as having a remarkable number of episodes about character romance, particularly for the female characters.
Trek also stands out to me for how it’s very formalized and society (in Starfleet — who knows what people do on Earth) is regimented, and I think that’s a factor in geek culture more broadly. Geeks seem to really like dreaming of societies with clearly-defined rules and chains of commands and even uniforms. I have a theory that geeks, often autistic or hypo-social, find the improvisational and non-explicit social rules of society hard to navigate or understand, and wish things were more explicit and systematic. I think this is what psychologically unites ren faire people who dream of m’ladying their way into a woman’s affections (or a woman who would like to be treated like a courtesan), and Trek fans who dream of color-coded uniforms.
Star Trek has ranks and command structures (but is highly non-rigid in social organization for a quasi-military organization — it’s how a progressive imagines a military should operate), Harry Potter has Hogwarts houses with found families based on character traits ordained by a magical hat. Both are about social institutions that provide the security of structure without the rigidity of oppression, with many stories revolving around how morality and justice override authority. There’s a fundamental liberalism at the heart of nerd interests, but one that absolutely finds the improvised social structures that actually characterize liberal society hard to fathom.
But also after a long period of miss after miss, even my geeky friends aren’t into Star Trek. I know more fans of The Phantom Menace than The Next Generation. I remember when I took IT classes and the instructor was appalled when I was the only one in the class who copped to liking Trek. Nerd culture has changed.
I don’t think it was Scott Bakula’s show that killed it — I’ll come out as actually liking Enterprise, but also I liked Voyager so I have terrible taste in Trek. Was it Abrams? I always used to joke that Abrams ruined Star Trek as a job interview for ruining Star Wars. No one should have let this man near a franchise. (While I hated The Last Jedi, I also generally like Rian Johnson, just not for a main episode in a long-running franchise focused on nostalgia.)
The only person in my cohort I’ve ever known as a Star Trek fan was an autistic, asexual girl who seemed to have picked it as her special interest, reading the novels, playing STO, and of course writing fan fiction. I would have liked to have known her better but she was a hard person to get to know.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
10d ago
Lol. Those were jokes, not serious statements of analysis. The crocodile penis thing was a riff on a silly joke I myself made -- she works in science, and understands very well that this was not how taxonomy works.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
10d ago
What's strange is I've known many women who are into Star Wars. It's basically a tentpole franchise, at least before Disney bought it. My mom loves Star Wars -- even was on Star Wars fan forums back in the 2000s. I almost dated a girl back in high school who was really into me; I met her in school, and we flirted (to really date myself) at a Star Wars premiere, which she was really excited to go to. I don't think Disney needed any help making Star Wars appealing to women.
I don't know that it's about wanting to make franchises appeal to women over men, even if Kathleen Kennedy liked implying this. I think Disney just has serious cultural problems with telling stories that men like. Too many creative leaders at the company have spent too long telling stories that women like, that they don't have experience telling stories that men do. This applies to their parks as well: long before lightsabers were the hot Disneyland souvenir, Davy Crockett coonskin hats were the big seller in the 1950s. Walt Disney was a man who loved cowboys-and-indians stories and trains: Disney was a children's brand, not a girls' brand. There are plenty of heterosexual male fans of theme parks, but show me a straight man who likes EPCOT and I will show you a man who is incredibly angry at the Disney company. They took a park about science, technology, and cultural awareness -- a "permanent world's fair", as it was described -- and turned it into a place to get drunk and ride rollercoasters.
Once upon a time, Disneyland was a place about exploring the frontier, riding canoes, riding on a train, riding on a space-age train, there was a show where they simulated going to space on a rocket... the Disneyland of the 1950s and 60s was a respectable place for a little boy to be into. But more and more Disney's parks feel like places for little girls to wear dresses, women to go on a "girls' trip", and gay men to be Disney adults. They've lost touch with what boys are into, and have gotten stuck in a rut of being a "girl's place." I genuinely blame the introduction of the Disney princess dress -- which, surprisingly, dates back only to the late 90s -- as the beginning of Disney as a brand being wildly associated with girls and not boys. (Disney Channel basically being "dumb sitcoms for preteen girls" probably didn't help.)
That said, I don't believe girl-power storylines are the problem with Marvel. I also don't think it's "franchise fatigue." I think the problem with Marvel is that the early MCU films had a kind of grounding in the real world: Iron Man had war on terror connections (and got worse over time), Thor was relatively grounded and intimate for a story about a norse god and at least had the real-world mythology connection, Captain America had the historical fiction angle and the connection to fighting pseudo-Nazis (which they later handwaived away as villains because ???). Avengers feels realistic compared to what comes out of Marvel these days.
Guardians of the Galaxy was wildly successful, but I guess I'm in the minority who didn't like the first film and preferred the second, and especially the third. I actually fell asleep at the theater watching the first Guardians, the only time I've ever done that. Marvel seriously overreacted to that success, and took everything in a cosmic, ungrounded, fantastical direction. The early Avengers films earned their cosmic dimensions. The recent films ask viewers to accept a lot of wild and unbelievable stuff without earning it. Time travel! Multiverse! Alligator Loki! Wanda creating an entire fictional town! Apparently Kang (and Loki?) has the ability to CONTROL ALL OF TIME now? Or he did, because Kang is no more.
Really, the problem with Marvel is that they're running into the limits of comic book stories trying to reach general audiences. I don't read a lot of comic books, and generally don't care for superheroes. But I liked Iron Man 1; it didn't feel like a comic book story. It felt grounded and human, and was more like a science fiction film than a comic book movie. The real problem with Marvel is baked in: most of their stories are about fantastical, ungrounded, space events involving mutants and aliens, and this quickly becomes confusing and alienating for general audiences. There's a reason comic books aren't considered hard sci-fi.
There are lots of complaints from comics fans about what they did to MODOK in Ant-Man, but my response is always that MODOK as a concept looks hilarious and stupid, like something a child would design. There was no way to translate this into live-action in a way that general audiences wouldn't find ridiculous. Making it a joke was inevitable.
(And the new Fantastic Four felt genuinely AI-generated to me, all of the effects had a ludicrious quality and the soft, undefined edges I associate with AI video. I don't think they used AI to create it, but dang if they didn't create a great imitation of AI art.)
urquan
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11d ago
I think there is a negative correlation between intelligence and silliness on average.
I disagree, particularly if we’re talking about verbal intelligence. The silliest people I know are highly intelligent, and they love to riff on things in goofy and ridiculous ways, yet surprisingly insightfully. It’s actually not-very-bright people who are most resistant to silly wordplay — they don’t get it!
I remember the first day I went to a gifted education program, which had an IQ cutoff, and the thing that stood out to me was that I finally met people who made silly jokes and found my silly jokes funny.
I think if we sat for IQ tests I would score higher than my girlfriend, but she’s also probably the smartest person I’ve dated and she’s sharp and analytical. Regardless, she’s definitely the silliest. I have a text file where I write down many of the silly things she says because I find them so hilarious. I was going to share these for Friday fun anyway, so here’s some choice selections:
I want to be an RNA so I can just affect you and go with you everywhere. I want to be in your body 100% of the time. It's not enough for me to just be close to you. I need to be enveloped by your cells.
Can you imagine an 18th century taxonomist out in the swamp, trying to measure a crocodile's penis in order to properly classify it?
People need to retain their inalienable right to suck mannequin dick without worrying about it being a dead guy.
(apparently this was a real story)
All children's authors are on the right amount of cocaine. Just the right amount of cocaine to get the right amount of whimsy. Roald Dahl, JK Rowling, CS Lewis are all massive cokeheads. I mean Dr. Seuss just had it dialed in, just the perfect amount.
I found a very interesting documentary for us to watch. It's about fungus.
(It was in fact a good documentary about mycelium.)
urquan
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14d ago
>space elf society starts debating the moral rights of monkes
>the alien women find monke men’s primitive ways irrationally attractive
>space elf company creates human dildos
>alien incels begin claiming that some fraction of space elf women would rather fuck a monke than an ugly space elf
>space elf women start fucking the humans
>space elf males’ sense of unearned status is irrationally compelling to human women
>women start fucking the space elves
>mfw alien interbreeding solves the fertility crisis
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
16d ago
Well, I suppose you and I are more psychologically different than I thought.
I have to confess, though, that I’m not necessarily surprised — the only guy who ever mirrored my orientation in this way was that one guy from high school. Intriguingly I’ve had more “oh that’s how you see it too?” conversations with trans women than men, and actually more than cis women too — nobody crack an egg over my head. I have often found that people on the margins are those who most understand the precious nature of intimate connection.
Romance for a lot of both men and women seems immensely tied up in external status in a way it never was for me; while I absolutely recognize the norms of male performance in my own romantic success, when it’s come, I am also lucky that the performances that were appealing were abundantly personal to me, showing me at my best, being myself. And that the feeling I can, at times, inspire includes both attraction and companionship.
I believe all the things I do about love as transformation not because of things I read in novels, but because of what I have experienced in love. Every time someone has loved me it has changed me for the better. Not in the sense that “I was trained” or whatever people believe about women in relationships. But in the sense that I became more tender, more empathetic, more open to other people, and in fact more spiritual. I actually believe in God in part because of my experiences with romantic love. C.S. Lewis once called Eros “the thing in the world that most begs for idolatry,” (paraphrase) and I believe it.
But our discussion here and the serendipitous chat with my girlfriend prompted a really good chat with her last night — thanks for that. She made the point that what women dream about “in traditional romances, not the werewolf thing,” she added, is a man who cares about them, talks to them when they’re down, is emotionally available, good dad material. I made the point to her that a lot of men dream about the same thing — a woman who cares about them, accepts their vulnerability, believes in their potential, sweet and loving — good mom material. The great male fear is that a woman will love him only for what he can do, and will resent him and hate him if he ever stops giving interest on their principal. This shows up in complaints about nagging, the alpha/beta dichotomy, sexless marriages, if you find a male complaint about women this is what it resolves to. I don’t want a woman who loves me because I slayed the dragon, I want a woman who gives me the strength to slay him. “Behind every great man…”
If “cishet girl lore” can dream about a man who sees a woman for who she is, for her actual personality and soul and love her for this and not for the size of her tits, well, Cishet male lore also dreams about a woman who sees a man’s capabilities even when he’s down and yet believes in him. Loves him. For who he is, for who he can become. What both sexes truly want beneath the recriminations is very similar: love, affection, and commitment based on who we are in our innermost selves, not what we present to the world. This is the meaning of “intimacy.”
It is only because this is preciously rare that anyone settles for less. And men and women both feel its lack with great yearning. And sometimes, contempt.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
16d ago
Ouch, I guess it is just me in the corner then.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
16d ago
Well, I can’t speak for what most men would want. Maybe it’s just me and… maybe @Primaprimaprima and like a guy I know from school in the corner, but no, I’d want romance content as the main enchilada.
Basically, “guy is going about life, meets woman, forms connection with woman, the two understand each other on a deep level, passion ensues.” When you wrote this: “scenes with the girl being cute and sexy and falling in love with him, the two of them having intimate encounters and emotional conversations”, well I guess I like the last bit the most. I find myself bored in some action movies waiting for the emotional character moments to happen.
I like romance stories because I like romance, I like thinking about romance not as a reward for what’s actually important, but as something that itself forms people into who they are and is one of the keys that makes life meaningful. Not “I became the best version of myself to gain you,” but “I became the best version of myself because I met you.” Romance isn’t about reward but about recognition; seeing yourself in the other. Becoming complete through intimate union.
But I am literally the guy who will be at a party and go, “hey, these video games are fun, but what if we sat in a circle and talked about our feelings?” So if you’re looking to me to find out what “men” are into, god help ya.
Also — immediately after I wrote my first message I went to cuddle with my girlfriend, and she was telling me she’s been reading a romance novel, “but not like those romantasy books, I don’t understand the non-human thing.” Well, I don’t either honey.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
16d ago
No, that doesn't leave much for the male reader, but I will say that if you want cute love stories with actual functional couples, there seem to be quite a few that do not feature Chad Thundercock or BDSM.
Well, the main point is that “romance for men” would be about a male protagonist who meets a woman and they have a romance. It’s not just about what the male character is like, but about whose perspective the plot is written from.
Unironically, there’s more romance stories for gay men than there are for straight ones. Presumably this is just a market thing, but I don’t know why it doesn’t even seem to exist. Are there a lot of lesbian romance stories?
I’d probably be a reader of this genre if it actually existed. As it is, occasionally I read fanfiction about male protagonists (probably 80% written by women, but occasionally not bad), and take what I can get from the scraps of media that incidentally have romantic content. Japan has visual novels, but they’re too weird and too Japanese for me, but I liked Katawa Shoujo and some western fan VNs are tolerable.
So you say “men don’t buy romance”, but this is a chicken-egg problem: I can’t buy it if it doesn’t exist.
Once this is rejected, the position of preferring hot and exciting, even if short-term, partnerships to a long-term investment with a lukewarm partner at best, from which the women does not derive any pleasure - seems only obvious.
Well, some fraction of men also would make this choice, and many do. It’s just that fewer have the opportunity.
And really, it feels like the hypothetical is missing the middle ground: the options aren’t “temporary fleshlight” or “permanent sex slave.” That’s already an extreme catastrophization of the options, done presumably for dramatic effect, but also demonstrates a wildly unhealthy view of what relationships with men are like.
The thing that’s missing isn’t women’s desire to be a tradwife, or even traditional family roles. What’s missing from this minority of women is the idea that pair-bonding with men is even possible at all. Most women still love a man, even if they don’t love you or me, personally. The only thing to do with attention-seekers like the X poster is to laugh at their inanity.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
17d ago
That was an interesting link. I often wonder about all the variables that are leading young people to date less — of course, “no woman wants to date me” seems to be a plurality answer from men, and I’m well aware of male friends of mine for whom that’s the entire reason they’re single. I have a friend who’s gone from social and engaged to depressed, suicidal, and medicated as his 20s have flown by without a wink of intimacy. Nicest and most prosocial guy you’d ever meet — maybe that’s the problem.
I do wonder sometimes how I’d feel romantically if I hadn’t had some formative positive experiences with dating as a teenager. It certainly wasn’t all roses, but I can trace my own strong drive for intimacy to a before/after with my high school sweetheart. If I hadn’t fallen into a relationship with her… would I be dating now? Would I feel as strongly about dating as I do now?
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
17d ago
NIH has done a study that shows that any study (like the one above) that assumes kids are even eating the meals is dubious. Some are, some aren't.
Among actual schoolkids, school lunches are considered somewhere between "literally inedible" and "prison food." Occasionally there's a Friday special that the kids consider tasty, but most of the food is significantly lower quality than anything someone would pay for on the open market.
It got worse after Michelle Obama's reforms; suddenly even the white bread that people found edible became nasty whole wheat versions that were much less appetizing. I think if we want to make school lunches more nutritious, the first thing to do would be to stop making them slop and actually make them something a human being would want to eat.
Heartland. I grew up in the Bible Belt, and have never lived in a major city.
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