sounddesignerjeans:

princess-mint:

alarajrogers:

niambi:

I’m????

Oh my God this actually explains so much.

So there’s a known thing in the study of human psychology/sociology/what-have-you where men are known to, on average, rely entirely on their female romantic partner for emotional support. Bonding with other men is done at a more superficial level involving fun group activities and conversations about general subjects but rarely involves actually leaning on other men or being really honest about emotional problems. Men use alcohol to be able to lower their inhibitions enough to expose themselves emotionally to other men, but if you can’t get emotional support unless you’re drunk, you have a problem.

So men need to have a woman in their lives to have anyone they can share their emotional needs and vulnerabilities with. However, since women are not socialized to fear sharing these things, women’s friendships with other women are heavily based on emotional support. If you can’t lean on her when you’re weak, she’s not your friend. To women, what friendship is is someone who listens to all your problems and keeps you company.

So this disconnect men are suffering from is that they think that only a person who is having sex with you will share their emotions and expect support. That’s what a romantic partner does. But women think that’s what a friend does. So women do it for their romantic partners and their friends and expect a male friend to do it for them the same as a female friend would. This fools the male friend into thinking there must be something romantic there when there is not.

This here is an example of patriarchy hurting everyone. Women have a much healthier approach to emotional support – they don’t die when widowed at nearly the rate that widowers die and they don’t suffer emotionally from divorce nearly as much even though they suffer much more financially, and this is because women don’t put all their emotional needs on one person. Women have a support network of other women. But men are trained to never share their emotions except with their wife or girlfriend, because that isn’t manly. So when she dies or leaves them, they have no one to turn to to help with the grief, causing higher rates of death, depression, alcoholism and general awfulness upon losing a romantic partner.

So men suffer terribly from being trained in this way. But women suffer in that they can’t reach out to male friends for basic friendship. I am not sure any man can comprehend how heartbreaking it is to realize that a guy you thought was your friend was really just trying to get into your pants. Friendship is real. It’s emotional, it’s important to us. We lean on our friends. Knowing that your friend was secretly seething with resentment when you were opening up to him and sharing your problems because he felt like he shouldn’t have to do that kind of emotional work for anyone not having sex with him, and he felt used by you for that reason, is horrible. And the fact that men can’t share emotional needs with other men means that lots of men who can’t get a girlfriend end up turning into horrible misogynistic people who think the world owes them the love of a woman, like it’s a commodity… because no one will die without sex. Masturbation exists. But people will die or suffer deep emotional trauma from having no one they can lean on emotionally. And men who are suffering deep emotional trauma, and have been trained to channel their personal trauma into rage because they can’t share it, become mass shooters, or rapists, or simply horrible misogynists.

The only way to fix this is to teach boys it’s okay to love your friends. It’s okay to share your needs and your problems with your friends. It’s okay to lean on your friends, to hug your friends, to be weak with your friends. Only if this is okay for boys to do with their male friends can this problem be resolved… so men, this one’s on you. Women can’t fix this for you; you don’t listen to us about matters of what it means to be a man. Fix your own shit and teach your brothers and sons and friends that this is okay, or everyone suffers.

The next time a guy says, “What? You don’t want to be my friend?” I’ll text him this and then ask if he really wants to be friends or just have another potential girlfriend.

y’all I am living for these analyses where the new way to fight the patriarchy is to teach men to love each other and themselves

Im a communication student and can confirm the above is absolutely 100% accurate and it’s called agentic vs communal friendship theorized by Steven McCornack

And during this recent interview in Manhattan, [Braugher] dwells on his two passions: his family and his work.

What fuels that love for acting?

“It’s an emotional release,” he explains — an outlet that might otherwise lie beyond his reach. “Men are not usually forthcoming in the expression of their emotions.”

Growing up in a rough Chicago neighborhood, he was blessed with loving and demanding parents. “But I was socialized in a certain way. Even as a kid there’s no real suitable outlet for emotions that don’t fall within a certain small range: anger, lust, ridicule — Army emotions, I call them.”

Then, at Stanford University as an engineering major, he helped out a friend by filling a vacant role in a campus play. He liked it — a lot. He had found a new major, and an unexpected calling.

“As an actor, I’m allowed — encouraged! — to explore emotions that have been basically unacceptable in my life. I have a huge well of emotional stuff, and once I give myself permission as an actor, it all comes to the surface. But I’ll be damned if I can give myself permission to bring it out as a man.“

“As a father,” Braugher goes on, looping back to one passion from the other, “I’ve tried to encourage my children to have a broader and deeper emotional life than I’ve had. I want my sons to be able to express their feelings about things,” he says with feeling he seems fully able to express.

I read this interview over a decade ago now and the concept of “Army emotions” is still key to helping me understand what men deal with in terms of toxic masculinity.

(via mswyrr)

Why any slightest discomfort of woman is a municipal-to-national-level tragedy and requires immediate action, but a death of a man, such as me, will be business as usual, no eye blinked. How is this just and fair. How how how how how.

the-real-seebs:

theunitofcaring:

Everybody matters. You matter. It would matter if you died, and it matters that you’re hurting, and it sounds like right now you’re hurting a lot.

I assume, since you’re on tumblr, which has many deficiencies but not a shortage of different perspectives on gender relations, that you’ve already seen analysis to the effect that our society denies women agency and denies men inherent worth – we treat women like they can’t accomplish anything and are fragile and need protecting and can’t really hurt people and will not produce anything of value, and we treat men like they are only as valuable as the things they produce, and matter only if they earn it through hard work, and earn value by providing it to other people. Both of these things suck.

I am assuming that you have seen posts saying that, because there are lots of them, and that they have not made you feel any better, for the same reason that “some people get too much attention, and some get ignored, and it makes sense for many people to focus on the first problem” is not very reassuring to someone who is desperately lonely, and “some people are drowning, but some don’t have enough access to water, and it makes sense for many people to focus on the second problem” is not very reassuring to drowning people. Sometimes you need someone to care about your problem – not to contextualize it, not to explain how it is the offspring of another problem which lots of people care about, not to describe how the opposite of your problem is also a source of suffering, just to care about your problem and go “holy shit how awful”.

So, yeah. Holy shit, that’s awful. Our world did not tell you “you have likes and dislikes, and they matter. You have feelings, and they matter. You deserve to be happy, and you deserve to be valued, not for the things you accomplish but for the person you are.” Our world did not tell you “people ought to treat you well, whether you have “earned” it by being successful or not.” Our world did not tell you that ‘successful’ is a ugly contrived complicated painful thing that many people cannot reach no matter how they try, and that you are just as valuable if you never reach it. Our world did try to convince you that it was heroic to kill people and heroic to die for people; it did try to convince you that if you were successful then you would be loved; it did try to convince you that the people who were hated for being ‘losers’ deserved it. It did present all kinds of variously fucked up ideals of men who were valuable, and promise that if you contorted yourself into them then you’d be valuable too.

Holy shit. That’s awful.

I’m so sorry, man. I’m so sorry. You deserved better. You deserve better. You matter, and have always mattered, and will always matter, and there is an entire universe that did its best to convince you otherwise and that is awful and I hate it and I wish it hadn’t been that way and I wish that it would stop.

I don’t know what it would have helped you to hear. But if you know – maybe tell it to someone. Maybe find a guy – not just a kid, I don’t think this only hurts boys in their formative stage, I think it hurts men every minute of their lives – and tell him whatever you needed to hear while the universe was yelling the exact opposite – and then it’ll be a little bit better.

TUOC continues to be a pretty excellent example of why I think humanity is actually sorta cool.

jumpingjacktrash:

vaticancameosinspace:

alarajrogers:

niambi:

I’m????

Oh my God this actually explains so much.

So there’s a known thing in the study of human psychology/sociology/what-have-you where men are known to, on average, rely entirely on their female romantic partner for emotional support. Bonding with other men is done at a more superficial level involving fun group activities and conversations about general subjects but rarely involves actually leaning on other men or being really honest about emotional problems. Men use alcohol to be able to lower their inhibitions enough to expose themselves emotionally to other men, but if you can’t get emotional support unless you’re drunk, you have a problem.

So men need to have a woman in their lives to have anyone they can share their emotional needs and vulnerabilities with. However, since women are not socialized to fear sharing these things, women’s friendships with other women are heavily based on emotional support. If you can’t lean on her when you’re weak, she’s not your friend. To women, what friendship is is someone who listens to all your problems and keeps you company.

So this disconnect men are suffering from is that they think that only a person who is having sex with you will share their emotions and expect support. That’s what a romantic partner does. But women think that’s what a friend does. So women do it for their romantic partners and their friends and expect a male friend to do it for them the same as a female friend would. This fools the male friend into thinking there must be something romantic there when there is not.

This here is an example of patriarchy hurting everyone. Women have a much healthier approach to emotional support – they don’t die when widowed at nearly the rate that widowers die and they don’t suffer emotionally from divorce nearly as much even though they suffer much more financially, and this is because women don’t put all their emotional needs on one person. Women have a support network of other women. But men are trained to never share their emotions except with their wife or girlfriend, because that isn’t manly. So when she dies or leaves them, they have no one to turn to to help with the grief, causing higher rates of death, depression, alcoholism and general awfulness upon losing a romantic partner.

So men suffer terribly from being trained in this way. But women suffer in that they can’t reach out to male friends for basic friendship. I am not sure any man can comprehend how heartbreaking it is to realize that a guy you thought was your friend was really just trying to get into your pants. Friendship is real. It’s emotional, it’s important to us. We lean on our friends. Knowing that your friend was secretly seething with resentment when you were opening up to him and sharing your problems because he felt like he shouldn’t have to do that kind of emotional work for anyone not having sex with him, and he felt used by you for that reason, is horrible. And the fact that men can’t share emotional needs with other men means that lots of men who can’t get a girlfriend end up turning into horrible misogynistic people who think the world owes them the love of a woman, like it’s a commodity… because no one will die without sex. Masturbation exists. But people will die or suffer deep emotional trauma from having no one they can lean on emotionally. And men who are suffering deep emotional trauma, and have been trained to channel their personal trauma into rage because they can’t share it, become mass shooters, or rapists, or simply horrible misogynists.

The only way to fix this is to teach boys it’s okay to love your friends. It’s okay to share your needs and your problems with your friends. It’s okay to lean on your friends, to hug your friends, to be weak with your friends. Only if this is okay for boys to do with their male friends can this problem be resolved… so men, this one’s on you. Women can’t fix this for you; you don’t listen to us about matters of what it means to be a man. Fix your own shit and teach your brothers and sons and friends that this is okay, or everyone suffers.

This makes so much sense omg

the first step to fixing it is: knowing that being emotional with your friends may get you mocked or lose their respect, do it anyway. the ones that bail, let them go. they can’t handle the real you, so wave goodbye.

this doesn’t mean you should be a big soppy oversharing weenie. but if you can’t tell your best friend what you’re feeling, it’s not much of a friendship, and you need to gut up and take the step to make it better. start with positive emotions and compliments to get used to how it works – next time you’re having a great time together, just open up your mouth and say, “it’s so great hanging out with you. i really like this.”

is it hard? does it feel freaky and weird? does it feel like you’re hitting on them? that’s the toxic bullshit talking, that’s the monster you’re killing. you should be allowed to fucking tell your best friend you like him, jesus fucking christ. what the hell is the patriarchy DOING to us. like this is not news but here i am typing this advice calmly and suddenly it comes back to me how much it fucking HURT when i was like 6 and andy’s mom told us not to hold hands because andy’s ‘girlfriend’ would be jealous, like holy shit lady did you really say that to someone wearing an oscar the grouch backpack and optimus prime moonboots, no wonder adult men are certified fucking insane D:

LET THE LITTLE BOYS HOLD HANDS

OH MY GOD DON’T TELL THEM THEIR FRIENDSHIP WITH A GIRL IS A ROMANCE

THEY ARE SIX WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU

when i came out as trans

yensidlove:

[ or, toxic masculinity from the perspective of a trans guy ]

when i came out as trans my warm and loving family supported me

but they treated me differently

when i came out as trans my dad asked if he should start slapping me on the back and socking me in the arm instead of hugging me.

when i came out as trans my mom wanted to know if i would still got with her on fun trips to the mall to buy clothes and home decor items.

when i came out as trans my grandfather looked positively startled and overjoyed when i kissed his cheek and told him to drive safe.

when i came out as trans my grandmother asked if it was okay if she hugged me in public or if it would embarrass me.

when i came out as trans my dad told me that he had a lot to teach me— he said this because i told him i thought make up was fun.

when i came out as trans my aunt apologized for kissing me on the forehead.

when i came out as trans my uncle gave me a handshake rather than a hug.

when i came out as trans my cousins hesitated to hug me at the door.

when i came out as trans my family hesitated to show me the casual affection and platonic love they had previously felt free to give.

end toxic masculinity.

show your sons as much affection as you would show your daughters.

let your sons indulge in beauty when they want to and always support them.

do not think for one second that the societal expectation of masculinity is more important than the individual feelings and needs of someone you love.

vaticancameosinspace:

alarajrogers:

niambi:

I’m????

Oh my God this actually explains so much.

So there’s a known thing in the study of human psychology/sociology/what-have-you where men are known to, on average, rely entirely on their female romantic partner for emotional support. Bonding with other men is done at a more superficial level involving fun group activities and conversations about general subjects but rarely involves actually leaning on other men or being really honest about emotional problems. Men use alcohol to be able to lower their inhibitions enough to expose themselves emotionally to other men, but if you can’t get emotional support unless you’re drunk, you have a problem.

So men need to have a woman in their lives to have anyone they can share their emotional needs and vulnerabilities with. However, since women are not socialized to fear sharing these things, women’s friendships with other women are heavily based on emotional support. If you can’t lean on her when you’re weak, she’s not your friend. To women, what friendship is is someone who listens to all your problems and keeps you company.

So this disconnect men are suffering from is that they think that only a person who is having sex with you will share their emotions and expect support. That’s what a romantic partner does. But women think that’s what a friend does. So women do it for their romantic partners and their friends and expect a male friend to do it for them the same as a female friend would. This fools the male friend into thinking there must be something romantic there when there is not.

This here is an example of patriarchy hurting everyone. Women have a much healthier approach to emotional support – they don’t die when widowed at nearly the rate that widowers die and they don’t suffer emotionally from divorce nearly as much even though they suffer much more financially, and this is because women don’t put all their emotional needs on one person. Women have a support network of other women. But men are trained to never share their emotions except with their wife or girlfriend, because that isn’t manly. So when she dies or leaves them, they have no one to turn to to help with the grief, causing higher rates of death, depression, alcoholism and general awfulness upon losing a romantic partner.

So men suffer terribly from being trained in this way. But women suffer in that they can’t reach out to male friends for basic friendship. I am not sure any man can comprehend how heartbreaking it is to realize that a guy you thought was your friend was really just trying to get into your pants. Friendship is real. It’s emotional, it’s important to us. We lean on our friends. Knowing that your friend was secretly seething with resentment when you were opening up to him and sharing your problems because he felt like he shouldn’t have to do that kind of emotional work for anyone not having sex with him, and he felt used by you for that reason, is horrible. And the fact that men can’t share emotional needs with other men means that lots of men who can’t get a girlfriend end up turning into horrible misogynistic people who think the world owes them the love of a woman, like it’s a commodity… because no one will die without sex. Masturbation exists. But people will die or suffer deep emotional trauma from having no one they can lean on emotionally. And men who are suffering deep emotional trauma, and have been trained to channel their personal trauma into rage because they can’t share it, become mass shooters, or rapists, or simply horrible misogynists.

The only way to fix this is to teach boys it’s okay to love your friends. It’s okay to share your needs and your problems with your friends. It’s okay to lean on your friends, to hug your friends, to be weak with your friends. Only if this is okay for boys to do with their male friends can this problem be resolved… so men, this one’s on you. Women can’t fix this for you; you don’t listen to us about matters of what it means to be a man. Fix your own shit and teach your brothers and sons and friends that this is okay, or everyone suffers.

This makes so much sense omg

jumpingjacktrash:

lierdumoa:

benfael:

stars-glow-for-you:

fierceawakening:

ferenofnopewood:

jumpingjacktrash:

moldytony:

was cruisin my tl & this is so fucking important

i think the moment i was disillusioned about life was when i was maybe 7 years old and realized the reason all my friends had become assholes was because boys aren’t allowed to have any physcial contact that isn’t fighting

my parents were hippie feminists so my brother and i could play clapping games and sleep in puppy piles and give each other weird hairdos, but all the ‘normal’ boys just up and stopped knowing how to touch anyone without hitting sometime between kindergarten and first grade

and my little kid mind briefly saw the vastness of life stretching out in front of all of us, and all the hugs everyone would need and not get, and for a moment i was just like

maybe life is not such a good idea after all

I grew up around a Russian ballet school. Let me tell you something about Russian men: They touch each other. Especially dancers, who are in my experience almost always super tactile people. They rough house like Americans, but they also hug each other, and sit on each other’s laps, and share blankets when it’s cold backstage.

So I grew up knowing full well that the whole Men Don’t Touch thing was puritanical bullshit.

What I was absolutely not prepared for, however, is the super intense effect it has on straight men’s romantic relationships.

Because when you are literally the only person it is okay for your boyfriend to touch, Jesus fucking Christ, that changes the game.

I strongly suspect that a lot of Str8 Dude feelings of entitlement to women’s bodies, particularly the bodies of their wives and girlfriends, is a direct result of those women being the only non-violent physical contact they’re allowed to have.

I know for certain that the framing of any and all platonic physical contact as un-manly has been directly responsible for a lot of sexual dysfunction (and then the attendant misery of trying to get that treated at the ripe old age of 22) with at least one of my exes. It’s a mess when you can’t get it up because you’re depressed and want to be held but you’ve been brainwashed into thinking what you actually want is sex because being held is for girls.

Amazing how the erectile dysfunction went completely away when he learned the difference between feeling horny and feeling cuddly. /sarcasm

“I strongly suspect that a lot of Str8 Dude feelings of entitlement to women’s bodies, particularly the bodies of their wives and girlfriends, is a direct result of those women being the only non-violent physical contact they’re allowed to have.”

Omfg

No wonder the worst of them seem crazy… profound isolation does exactly that

When I taught in Japan, the boys were all super comfortable with each other. They’d sit on laps and hug and roughhouse and it wasn’t seen as bad ? Like it surprised me at first, but then you realize the problem is with so many men feeling that they have to prove… something? I dunno. I personally don’t like hugs or touches, but that is my own personal reasons and nothing of how I was brought up.

Thank you all for this. Specifically @ferenofnopewood.

Because when you are literally the only person it is okay for your boyfriend to touch, Jesus fucking Christ, that changes the game.

Things I never thought of…I couldn’t imagine if my husband were the only person I was allowed to touch. As I think on it, that extends to the kids, too. The dudes aren’t allowed to really even cuddle their own damned children or nieces and nephews.

Wow.

Also explains why western media romanticizes co-dependency in romantic relationships to such an insane degree.

LET BOYS GET HUGS

roachpatrol:

jumpingjacktrash:

mikalhvi:

jumpingjacktrash:

the-real-seebs:

amakthel:

thesocialjusticecourier:

thej-key:

arjan-de-lumens:

argumate:

corpus-vak:

vessel-haver:

thefutureoneandall:

argumate:

marcusseldon:

(note: I have no romantic or sexualized experience myself, so I admit *some* of these points rely entirely on secondhand stuff and media)

One thing I think is not talked about very much is that straight men live pretty much desexualized lives if we’re not actually having sex at that moment, and then there’s not much room to be the object rather than subject.

As I’ve said before, we men don’t have clothing options for “dressing sexy” in masculine clothing (there is cross dressing but that is different). There’s no male equivalent to the short skirt or low cut top. There’s no male lingerie that isn’t seen as a joke.

Further, we just don’t get validation for our sexuality outside of a sexual partner. We are almost never complimented for our looks or sexiness from platonic friends like women are, especially same sex friends.

There really aren’t many straight male role models for raw aesthetic sexiness in mainstream culture (besides unnaturally muscled men). In fiction, male characters are almost never attractive for embodying sexiness but rather for doing things (saving the world, being extremely witty, being a genius, winning the tournament, etc.). Their sexiness is non-aesthetic and sometimes is in spite of their aesthetics.

Anecdotally, it seems like a lot of men aren’t even called physically hot and sexy by their own sexual partners, who themselves focus on personality. There’s not much room to fulfill the role of passive sexism object for you partner for many/most men.

I think it is telling that a lot of porn for men ignores the man’s personality and has a woman just throwing themselves at the man, overcome with lust.

Also there the fact that women seem to rarely approach men and some seem to often expect the man to do most of the sexual escalation, especially in the early stages.

We talk about women of color or women who are disabled being sexualized, but we don’t talk about how all straight men are desexualized and denied the ability to be sexualized object.

oh my god… that’s why they send dick pics

“witness me!”

There are occasional reddit threads about things like this: “guys who send unsolicited dick pics, why do you do it?”

The answer always seems to be some combination of slot machine mentality (“maybe this one will like it, and make the other 50 worthwhile”) and a desire for witness. Surprising numbers of people admit that it’s validation even if the reaction is negative, simply because they’re still being viewed in a totally sexual context.

At the very least that has obvious consequences for people trying to reduce dick pic sending. There’s some core of people who can’t possibly be reached with “it’s not attractive to women” because that was never their expectation.

More broadly, I think efforts to get (Western?) men to emphasize with objectification wildly underestimate the challenge they’re facing. It’s not just a sympathy shortage, it’s a totally unfamiliar feeling. Making things even harder, it’s a feeling a lot of men say they wish they could have.

The usual narrative on not (politely) complimenting the appearance of unknown women is “sure, it’s nice if it happens once, but think about how annoyed you’d be if it happened all the time”. Fine in general terms, but I think a lot of men don’t have any way to intuit the emotional difference between too-frequent compliments and being pestered with too much of something totally innocuous like requests for the date.

The comments on those articles are frequently from men saying they’ve literally never received a single compliment from a stranger on their appearance, and can’t imagine what it would be like. The ones who have are often talking about a single, years-old compliment they still cherish. That’s not a framework that supports more than a purely theoretical understanding of what’s it’s like to be valued for your appearance too heavily – or at all.

Obviously that’s not universal, any more than all women are catcalled, but it seems like a really serious communication failure to appeal to a sense of objectification that much of your audience has literally never felt, and desperately wants.

Reblogged because thefutureoneandall describes exactly why I have trouble empathizing with feminism columnists.

Can confirm, I’d take literally any compliment on anything at this point, and would cherish it.

one day we gotta get all the men and all the women to sit down together and hash this stuff out between them, how hard can it be.

This discussion kind of reminds me of a story that made the rounds about a year ago, where
a woman, after having gotten a bit tired with dick pics, decided to try to get her “revenge” of sorts, by sending unsolicited vagina pics to 40 random men:

https://www.thrillist.com/sex-dating/los-angeles/we-sent-a-preemptive-v-pic-before-dudes-could-send-dick-pics-heres-what-happened

Let’s be honest: while I enjoy penises, I don’t necessarily want
unexpected visual boners intruding on my day. I wondered, “What would
guys do if I turned the tables and sent them an unexpected vagina pic?”
And so, in my own twist on revenge porn, I sent 40 unexpected vagina
pics to men on Bumble.

This … didn’t work out the way she apparently expected it to:

Overall, I was surprised that I didn’t get my, “Gotcha!” moment. I’d
initially hoped the guys would see how invasive it is to receive such
intimate photos from a stranger. When I’m excited to get to know a guy,
his penis isn’t the first part of him that I want to know. But given
that men like to send dick pics, I suppose their enthusiasm for v-pics
makes sense.

So, basically, women experience dick picks as a net negative, as an intimacy violation, while men experience v-pics as a huge positive, as validation and an indicator of interest.

This seems consistent with the above discussion, where it’s a pretty common male experience to basically never receive any sexual attention ever and thus respond really strongly positively to whatever scraps come their way (or to start trolling for attention – with the point of some of these dick pics apparently being to get any attention at all, no matter how hostile), while a common female experience seems to be more like being flooded with unwanted sexual attention and wanting a way to make it stop –

resulting in an absolutely massive inferential gap – with the result that if you’re on one side of the gap and try to describe your feelings and experiences to the people on the other side, whatever words you have will just fall on deaf ears because the feeling and experiences you describe are … not just unfamiliar, but outright alien, to the ones on the other side.

This alienness is … mutual.

For men, it feels like no men are sexy to women.

For women, it feels like all women are sexy to men.

It’s like one person dying of dehydration watching another one drown.

“It’s like one person dying of dehydration watching another one drown.”

the conversation has gotten longer, so i’m reblogging

… This is so cool. It actually makes sense.

but of course women are wary of just giving men compliments, because attention-starved men are likely to take it as a come-on. what a dilemma.

So what I’m getting from this…
Is that my idea of taking popular types of fiction and essentially ‘flipping the script’ so that there are sexy male characters as ‘damsel in distress’ types would actually be very good and help a lot of people become comfortable with their sexuality?

it could well! i’m not the guy to answer this really, i’m queer and also i’ve always been pretty comfortable with being the one giving the compliments (and just asking for validation when i need it). but i do think there’s a place in the world for fiction where The Sexy One is male.

consider chris hemsworth in ghostbusters. that one’s a bit mean-spirited, with him being hilariously clueless, but you’ve got that dynamic where what he contributes is, he’s hot. that’s it. and i found it kind of a breath of fresh air, not because it was a fuck-you to sexist tropes, but because it’s never, ever enough for a guy to be attractive, but here it was, and that was fun to see.

i once thoughtlessly complimented a guy on his jacket, because he and his friend rounded the corner and suddenly i was confronted with an extremely handsome young man in a very fashionable black leather jacket, and i blurted out ‘whoah, nice jacket, you’re looking good!’ and the look on his face was just this explosion of surprise and delight– he actually kind of missed a step. the next minute i was like shit shit SHIT what if things get weird JEEZ but he and his friend were already walking past, and his friend just started laughing. kind of this ‘whoah, cool, what the hell’ laugh, and when i glanced back they’d both kind of lit up and were elbowing each other as they walked away. i was extremely relieved to have like dodged a bullet of ‘if you let a man know you are attracted to them at close range GOD KNOWS WHAT’S GONNA HAPPEN BUT IT’S GONNA BE OBNOXIOUS PROBABLY’ and then also pleased that i’d made that guy’s day. but also like. i guess now i’m realizing i probably made that guy’s decade…

i wish it was more common to compliment people– especially guys– in a casual way. but when you live as a woman you can spend a lot more time dodging men’s attention rather than soliciting it…

maybe male poledancing is like, the next big fad to cash in on? guys can enjoy getting hit on and girls can enjoy there being a specific space for that, that they, the girls, can leave afterwards.