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Benjamin Pond's avatar

I grew up with a feminist mother and learned to hate myself as a boy. I can't remember a time in my childhood where I felt like being a boy was a good thing or something that my mother wanted. From my earliest memories it felt like something to be ashamed of.

My feelings are easily traceable to the way feminists regularly talk about men. They often range from dismissive to outright hateful. Any pleas that they be more kind or empathize with the experience of hearing their words is rejected with a sneer. Even a simple feel-good measure that could blunt or heal some of the pain like International Men's Day is met with waves of derision. "You don't need it!" I needed it.

It's not some wacky theory that this resulted in my devastated self-worth. It's just straightforward cause and effect. An easily believable story, if you empathize with an emotionally vulnerable child for just a second.

A close friend of mine just *yesterday* talked about how her and her gay male friend both have "a shared hatred for straight men". Come on. That's not a freak coincidence, it's just a fairly common thing for progressive people to say or think. I haven't had the heart to say anything to her about it.

It's true that feeling worthless as a boy/man isn't the only problem I've had with dating. But it was a big one. A huge one. I was one of those guys who was terrified of showing attraction or asking a girl out. And the #1 reason was that I felt worthless for who I was. I felt like I was asking someone better than me to put up with someone who could only bring her misery, because I was male. And I felt like being male made me worthless.

I feel a lot better about being male now. But part of my healing process has been accepting my truth, my lived experience. Instead of letting people like you gaslight me out of my own childhood memories.

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Ben Millwood's avatar

When you say "asking people out is just scary [for normal social-anxiety reasons]", I'm definitely on board with "asking people out is scary [for those reasons]", but not the "just". In particular:

> But at some point I start to ask myself, is it the case that society has, by complete coincidence, managed to uniquely fuck up every single category of person in a way that means that they don’t ask people out?

Yeah I mean there's only like, three categories you mentioned, and there's a myriad of ways people are fucked up about sex and dating. Seems unsurprising that every category would end up with a few each.

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Separately, I'm annoyed at people who tell the "feminism gave me dating anxiety" story that you described. I don't think feminism gave me dating anxiety, but instead that feminism and my dating anxiety come from a common cause, which is me hearing a bunch of stories about men being shitty to women, and then other men (their friends, or acquaintances, or random Internet strangers) closing ranks and protecting them from consequences without displaying *any* curiosity (to my eyes) about whether or what harm was done. I heard these stories from my friends, heard their pain, saw them under pressure not to feel angry or protect themselves. I heard them from internet communities I was involved in or peripheral to. Just a lot of my early exposure to stories of heterosexuality was stories of it going wrong. After that, pursuing romance myself felt like listening to someone talk about how they'd been mauled by a dog as a child and still had nightmares about it, and I'm there like "oh no that sounds horrible I'm sorry, also I really want to show you my dog". It just felt really selfish, slimy and unappealing.

I mean, in the years since then I've had a fair handful of happy and successful relationships, so I wasn't exactly ruined by this. But I do stand by the claim that it's made me more timid, quicker to drop interest when I'm not sure it's welcome, put a bunch of labour into seeming as unscary as possible, and put a higher bar on feeling like expressing my interest in someone is going to be worth it for them. It's relatively recently that I've been able to be comfortable with the idea that by default, the fact that I like someone is often *good news* for them, even if they're not interested in me.

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