fracture [he/him]

this take in the article was really funny

My guess at the real reason for all this grave dancing is that it feels like a victory over FOMO. If the new $40 game sucks and no one is playing it, I can safely go back to whatever I was playing before without worrying that anyone’s having fun without me.

i don’t know what most people’s reasons for deriving enjoyment from concord’s failure are, but there’s no way FOMO cracks the top 3 lmao

seeing the trailer, i definitely thought it was a bandwagon hero shooter that might have had some creativity if a bunch of suits didn’t say “make it GotG”, but realistically, it launched with little fanfare, in competition with valve’s first new game (beta) in ages. not that it was fated to fail but it didn’t have a lot going for it

it’s an interesting article, but i think the authors are conflating friction for wanting genuine human interaction; its easier than ever for me to make friends because i can instantly connect with and message back and forth, quickly and in real time, over various platforms e.g. discord, the depth of which is only limited by our interactions and how we treat them. forcing us back to sms/email/paper mail doesn’t make our interactions deeper, even though it adds friction. it means we can easily choose what the depth of connection we want is

that isn’t to say that there aren’t examples where less friction leads to less interaction. dating apps are a great example. but i think the authors are conflating the friction for the interaction. yes, you could add friction that would encourage interaction, but you could also add friction that doesn’t. i think the more salient point would be, encouraging interaction often includes friction, but one shouldn’t shy away from that, as a UI/UX developer

which, granted, isn’t as catchy of a title. but they could have gone into greater detail for that in the article, too

regardless of this critique, i enjoyed reading it and the perspective it offered, even if i don’t strictly agree

can they just please make a lower budget game for the sake of branching out instead of pushing millions into a game expecting it to explode in sales? no? too much to ask? ok…

i think it would be really helpful for you to include which country you’re from. in the US, i would think it’s pretty comparable, but in other countries, there are probably different cultural factors at play that make it difficult to speak to without taking them into account

from the way you write and your dismissal of e.g. candy crush as “not a real game”, i think those cultural factors are probably what’s preventing either 1) women from feeling like they’re allowed to participate or 2) women from revealing, around you, that they play games

fwiw, i wouldn’t assume that women as a whole assume games are silly or childish. some women probably think that, for sure, just like some men do. but their viewpoints are as varied as women themselves are. it’s very possible that they simply view them as a masculine hobby that isn’t “for women”, or just haven’t been exposed to any they’d be interested in, or, similarly to you, wouldn’t consider being interested in mobile games to be “real gaming”

i was househunting for a while recently and i felt the same way about sending out viewing requests. i was wondering how many these people were getting from spam to begin with, and now ai generated. it didn’t help that the messages were nearly identical despite handwriting them all… i really should have just made a template lmao

you’re correct that the term normally used is “drop out”. i think this article may be using “stop out” to specifically refer to people who merely did not enroll in a new semester (vs. people who e.g. failed out, or were otherwise forcibly removed from the school), but i wasn’t able to conclude this 100% from my reading

huh, interesting. i mean that’s awful for you and i’m sorry you have to deal with that, but it is interesting there’s a place where that’s the case

i can understand the second part of your statement, but the first part confuses me. are you saying that you’ll be harassed more in public for being gender conforming vs e.g. wearing a dress? or do you mean something else?

yeah and i posed both questions just to kind of allow for multiple possibilities because, y’know, i wasn’t really sure what was going on in your head

but otherwise, i dunno if you’re this comfortable with your dad, but if you are, maybe you could have a conversation about it. ask him if he knows about sex work and how workers in the porn industry are treated, ask if he’s considered looking for ethical pornography producers, maybe suggest some (?) LOL

i understand this isn’t a conversation everyone is necessarily comfortable having, but i think, if you can overcome the awkwardness, it’s worth it to kind of reaffirm your dad’s relationship with you and his shared values with you. fwiw i think a lot of people (men?) who are like, strongly feminist would be open to reconsidering this stuff and maybe just don’t necessarily have the tools or haven’t really had the idea to explicitly pursue more ethical porn. some of it is just accessibility, you know? like, everyone knows pornhub, but i can’t name an ethical porn studio offhand

that said, this inspired me to google it (i know, what an idea) and i found a couple of article recommendations as a starting point:

https://www.menshealth.com/sex-women/a36465164/ethical-porn/

https://sexualalpha.com/ethical-porn-sites/

and then, just for full disclosure, some of the things that prevented me from doing that before were:

• i didn’t (and still am not sure) that i could just trust a google search about this (it’s still better than nothing and the second article lists some signs that you can look for, at least)
• conflating ethical with soft: sorry if this is too mcuh information LMAO but i’m kind of into people fucking hard (sort of regardless of gender), so it’s hard to feel like i’ll enjoy ethical porn. i think it’s better now, i would have been a lot more concerned ten years ago, but there’s probably something nowadays that is ethical and still caters to me
• there’s also kind of the concern about like, getting my money’s worth, because tbh ethical porn DOES mean paying for it. the money isn’t really a huge concern (altho it could be for others), but it’s hard to want to manage it without the sort of security of a good return. again, it’s not a huge deal, it’s a worthwhile investment to spend a few bucks to find out and i think these studios probably have enough available material to evaluate them
• similarly on the accessibility front, is being able to access it on my phone bc my pc is in the goddamn living room (another situation which has probably improved substantially over the last ten years)
• some of it is just like, it wasn’t that feasible or good of a situation ten years ago and i just haven’t sat down to think about it much since the last time i did until now. and your dad is definitely older than i am, i am not old enough to have a child your age LOL

notably, none of these are really about whether it’s a (morally) good idea or not, it’s a lot about the practicalities, but yknow not necessarily every feminist guy is on this page

i’m not gonna sit here and pretend these are the best reasons or anything, i’m not the best human being to ever live, but i try to do better than the day before, and i listed those reasons out honestly to hopefully help if you decide to have that conversation with… not even just your dad, but anyone

but you know, if you decide not too, obviously that’s totally fine and understandable LOL, i think this was still good to write up and talk about

i had to think on this a little bit, and knowing you’re a woman helped me see where you were coming from, i think

and i think you should reflect on what looking at porn says to you about a person. because there can be a lot of baggage attached and - at least for me, as a guy who likes porn - i’ve already had to come to terms with that stuff. but it’s hard to know if someone else has done that kind of inner reflective work about what most people treat as a throwaway hobby

it’s also kind of like, how comfortable are you with your own sexuality? are you asexual? how did your folks treat sex and sexuality growing up?

i don’t have any answers for you, and you certainly don’t need to answer any of these questions in a public forum on the internet. but hopefully they help you understand and resolve what’s troubling you

fwiw, my dad is super careless about it LMAO i found his porn bookmarks by accident as a kid. and nowadays his steam notifies me when he hops on hentai games 💀💀💀 but yknow what, good for him, hope he’s having a good time

the misandry has become less acceptable over time, probably as more “cis” girls like i was realized we weren’t so cis or girls and made some of those actually cis girls confront the things they’d said and thought during that time

but also we’ve become a lot more aware of how the patriarchy hurts men, and we’ve also become more broadly aware of feminist authors like bell hooks, who have been writing about how men need feminism too all along

yeah as someone on a keto diet and already allergic to soy and coconut… i need this LMAO i’m gonna die if i lose dairy and meat 😭

hate speech (of which nazi speech is a subset of) isn’t political either. it definitely should be banned because it demonstrably causes people to get hurt

insane stance to be advocating that nazis should have free speech in 2024

i had to google this because i am not a tiktok-er, and apparently women (? sample size?) are commonly stating that they would rather encounter a bear than a man if they were alone in the woods

interesting point that men often also chose the bear for the question of if they would rather have their wife / daughter stuck in the woods with a bear or a man, so that says a lot about men, as well, i think

we can derive some other mildly interesting points from this, like viewing sexual violence as potentially worse than non-sexual but fatal violence. or like, that one might have to live with societal judgement of having been sexually assaulted because there’s still a lot of assumptions that you initiated it somehow (rape culture) vs people universally having sympathy for the victim of an animal attack

overall, the unfortunate reality is that women generally view men or people who look like men as dangerous. i’m a transgender man and i’ve observed this phenomenon in a very real way as women have gone from generally friendly or neutral to detached. it sucks, but it’s not personal

however, if this really bothers you, there are actually some things you can do to help women feel more comfortable around you. this is not like… a guarantee. at the end of the day, you’re gonna have to live with jumpscaring some women if you round a corner too quick at them. that’s how life is. but, if you want to give them some signs you are not a violent person, not as a way to trick them into trusting you, but as a genuine attempt to help them feel safe:

if you change your style to be more feminine, even in subtle ways, like wearing a pink shirt or pink shoes. if you have a man purse. you don’t really need to go full femme but if you express yourself in a way that makes you look like someone secure in your masculinity (actual), it will help women understand you’re not really a threat

which i think, generally, reflects that women understand that patriarchy isn’t about men as a whole, but rather that most men haven’t confronted the ideas they were raised with in order to “be a man”, and those are the dangerous ideas they need to avoid to be safe

i think there is also an idea that expressing yourself as a softer or more feminine man will make it harder for you to get laid, and i think this may be true. however, i would suggest that women who only wanna fuck you because you’re traditionally masculine are not really the women you wanna be fucking, because they’re (probably) going to bring their own ideas of toxic masculinity to enforce on you. those are the women who are more concerned with whether or not e.g. you can change the oil on their car, that you are a “real man”, and hopefully it goes without saying that those are the ideas you want to avoid reinforcing / internalizing, even if that means turning down a sexual partner

bell hooks, rest in peace. truly an incredible author, i originally learned of her from the news she had passed away :(

just wanted to post to let people know that she styled her name literally “bell hooks”, as all lowercase

this was a really funny article to me because the author really doesn’t seem that attached to being a man. i want to be clear, that’s fine and valid. but it seems weird to then speak to the want of men in general to have more positive role models of masculinity, and say, well you should just want positive role models

like? yeah, you can have role models of any gender, but isn’t it nice to have role models who look like you? isn’t that the entire point that people make when saying representation is important? that doesn’t stop being true just because we’re talking about men now

he’s missing such a basic and fundamental argument that the entire thing just becomes, at least for me, an externalized argument about how he feels about his own gender, which appears to be disconnected and largely not good

also he picked like, apparently the worst examples of masculinity he could find and said, yeah this is why we don’t need positive masculinity?? like c’mon

i like being a man, it’s cool. there’s a lot (A LOT) of shit i have to reconcile with being a man. but imo that’s part of the duty that comes with it. so yeah, author, it would be pretty cool to see men who had done that, who expressed their masculinity in unique and authentic ways that sometimes conform and sometimes don’t

you know. like people

(i want to take a moment to say that i have several women role models and also people whose gender identities aren’t so easily captured by the binary. but those people, generally speaking, don’t need to reconcile with the long history of people of their gender doing harm to those around them, nor with the present day scars from that harm. it’s a LOT to come to grips with understanding that you scare a lot of people just by existing, and frankly, that’s just an experience that a man is more commonly going to have to experience. exclusively? of course not. obviously, there’s a racial bias here as well. but due to the commonality, having readily available examples of how to handle it well, and even gracefully, would be nice)

@MareOfNights@discuss.tchncs.de hoping you’ll see this as well

kind of feel weird about you both using trans men as demonstrating your argument without either of you actually being trans. there are as many kinds of trans men as there are cis, and you can find examples of those of us who enjoy conforming to stereotypical masculinity and those of us who don’t

it’s also fairly presumptuous to assume every trans person’s goal is to pass, and also to presume the intent behind the goal of passing

honestly even presuming that trans men are asking how to be men, instead of defining it for themselves, is very presumptuous

like, the points you’re making, in general, aren’t bad. but it kind of feels icky to presume a minority’s goal and to also use it as an argument, when that minority’s reasoning is wide and varied. i think most people don’t like being treated like a monolith and i think that applies here, too

trans men were also largely unnecessary for the arguments you were making. a lot of it could be said for people who want to or enjoy (or don’t!) presenting masculine, regardless of sex assigned at birth. the answer to the author’s question, why should we have positive examples of masculinity, really boils down to, because some people like being masculine, but not toxic. trans men aren’t really special in that regard

anyways, keep in mind that i don’t speak for all trans men, but this trans man felt weird about this, like i’m being referenced as a demographic with no regard for what being in the demographic is like. thanks for reading

i am also wondering this, this thread feels like the goddamn twilight zone

if you want to talk about women’s issues, why don’t you go to communities dedicated to that? we’re not taking away from them; we’re also feminist. we’re allied, and it’s important to have a space for men to talk about, from a feminist perspective, how the patriarchy impacts them

i don’t understand why you think space on lemmy is somehow limited?

nor do i see how your second paragraph is relevant at all

it seems like you view this community as a stereotypical MRA/MGTOW kind of place, which it definitely isn’t. and getting rid of it would leave it so men looking to talk about their issues only have those shitty places to go. that would only lead more men down the alt right rabbit hole

there’s enough space on the internet for everyone

you can take the link to the internet archive yourself, but it’s still getting cut off halfway through for “verifying access”. i had this happen with a different article recently too (different site as well, but still blocking access through the internet archive). i wonder if companies are shutting down access to their stuff through the internet archive :/