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

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

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

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

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

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

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

🫂

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cochlear implants do exist, you know

Sorry, your comment really came off as “because you live in a country where terrible people have elected a terrible person, you’re not allowed to criticize imperialism”. Which really seems like “because a horrible American wants to do it, it’s ok when any other country does it” in disguise.

I just want to say that that gave me a lot of happiness, watching the reddit simulator aquarium. Thanks for doing it

We hate imperialism, whoever does it, and justify none of it

Coconut oil is what I recommend for an oil for lube. Both solid and liquid work well, the solid formwlts easily with body heat. It smells nice and is also good for your skin!

If it really really came down to it I could probably fit something with a 9" circumference, though it would take me a couple hours of warm up and relaxation. I have a toy that’s 8.5" circumference that I can take, but not easily. That’s what, an eggplant? A rolling pin? A standard single serving soda bottle? Somewhere around there

I’m at every two to three days now cause I just can’t be fucked to eat much of anything

Removed comment: “ML moment”, with the top comment being about their comment being removed. ML moment lol

Just don’t use TPU for your actual bunghole, it’s not body safe and will give you ass cancer

Fucking mood, I grew up in a new England state. Yeah we learned about the fucking horrible things done as a result of “manifest destiny” and imperialism and slavery, and the military industrial complex, and while it was a couple decades ago I really don’t recall the US or capitalism being put on a pedestal in historical terms. (The fucking pledge of allegiance, on the other hand…)The only thing I can think of that was egregious was how we learned about trickle down economics and weren’t taught about how much of an abject failure it was. We learned about different economic systems, and how countries more or less fall somewhere in a triangle with corners of socialism, capitalism, and communism. I don’t know how accurate that really is but it got the point across, that countries and their economic systems are separate, and that systems as implemented aren’t really strictly one thing or another, but on a spectrum (Which helped me understand gender a lot later on in life tbh).

I forget that I’m lucky to have grown up in a state with good education, and that a lot of people’s experiences differ from mine in that regard. But yeah what really gets me is people who can’t separate governments from their economic systems, and feel the need to defend the things done by horrible people because their government used a system that was at least in name a system they support. You can display the evils of capitalism and the benefits of communism without having to worship stalin and erase the terrible things he did.

? We learned about that shit in school lol. You don’t have to preach about how evil capitalism and imperialism are to me. My point is, in the meme, you could completely leave the holodomr out of it, and it would say the exact same thing about capitalism without downplaying a genocide.

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Usually after a while of being able to see the routes I walk in my apartment visibly, it manages to stress me to the point where I can do something about it and I’ll spend a solid 10 hours cleaning and tidying

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