Yeah, BLM is keeping a very low profile now that they're being investigated for missing funds :) Apparently part of the hard work of antiracism includes living in a nice house with a studio to create your mix tapes or whatever :)
"I think you're painting men with an extremely broad brush there. Yes, men like porn. I don't think there's mu…
Yeah, BLM is keeping a very low profile now that they're being investigated for missing funds :) Apparently part of the hard work of antiracism includes living in a nice house with a studio to create your mix tapes or whatever :)
"I think you're painting men with an extremely broad brush there. Yes, men like porn. I don't think there's much room for argument on that. But I think that's a long way from being an endorsement of sex trafficking, no?"
It's not that they endorse sex trafficking, it's that they discover they may be inadvertantly supporting it if what I say about it is true. As to the pervasiveness of porn and men, I was surprised to learn last year just how pervasive it is, even before the pandemic, but it shot up way after that. I got into the research because the guy I was seeing last year got very defensive when I happened to mention sex trafficking & porn and he got all pissy about it - that was how I realized he watched porn (which we talked about) and then it got me curious as to its effect on men and relationships (not good, and when a man asks "Do you do anal?" he almost certainly got that idea from porn).
Medium's younger female writers have written a lot about the availability of porn and how it's making young men more violent, and sex less good for women.
"There are lots of women working in the sex industry and making very good livings from it entirely of their own free will. That said though, I am interested in learning more, so if you have any resources, I'd be very interested to read them."
That's exactly what other men say to me! :) I'll tell you what I tell them: Type sex trafficking youporn pornhub into Google and the first ten results will give you plenty of reliable information right there. Those are the top two porn sites and they're famously into sex trafficked videos - not that they actively seek them, they just don't work hard to remove them. Or genuine rape videos or clearly underage girls.
As for women who 'enjoy' sex work, I imagine there are some who do like it but I've read others argue very few women really like doing it no matter what they say, and that calling it 'sex work' dresses it up and makes it sound more voluntary than it is. There's a high degree of sex trafficking in prostitution as well as porn and sometimes a woman sucks dick for money because it's the only skill she has. So, it's not 'trafficking' but it's not truly voluntary either, and it's the sort of thing men don't like to talk or think about.
I didn't say they *enjoyed* it. From what I've heard, sex work is pretty unfulfilling for men and women. I said that lots of women do it of their own free will, drawing the line between sex work and sex trafficking.
But there's no such thing as a woman whose only skill is sucking dick for money. That's a pretty awful thing to say!😅 If they're not being forced to do it, that means they're doing it because it's easier/pays better than the alternatives. Which, minus the penises, is the position most people find themselves in. Very few people work "truly voluntarily."
But yeah, after replying I thought you'd probably tell me to go look it up myself. 😁 I will. I genuinely hadn't heard that sex trafficking was an issue within the porn industry.
p.s. the idea that men only like anal or other sexual activities because of porn is one of those easy stereotypes that some feminists like to assert about men. But it's really not true. Anal sex predates porn you know! For what it's worth, my first time doing it was at 16 with a girl who wanted to try it.
One of the great tragedies of male/female dynamics is that women spend too much time learning about men from other women. And men spend too much time learning about women from other men. And in both cases, the "teachers" don't usually think very highly of the opposite sex.
"But there's no such thing as a woman whose only skill is sucking dick for money. That's a pretty awful thing to say!😅"
They might well have no other alternative if they're young. If they're runaways and have never had a job, and can't get one waitressing (which might not pay enough). They often fall in with pimps & traffickers because they're vulnerable and scared and have no idea how they're going to find/buy their next meal.
As for anal, yeah, it's been around forever but I can tell you I NEVER had men ask for anal until maybe the last several years. Apparently anal (esp rough, violent anal) is quite popular on porn sites. Porn is also responsible for the high level of violence in sex young women are reporting - I learned that from Medium's female writers who were asking what was up with the sudden choking, hitting, and near-rape that came from out of the blue.
"One of the great tragedies of male/female dynamics is that women spend too much time learning about men from other women." Actually, I'll bet far more women try to learn about and understand men more than men ever. do. Where are all the self-help books for men on how to have better relationships? The only ones I've ever seen are how to get laid better - like The Game (actually a very good book, and written with a sympathetic eye toward women). There are tons of self-books for women on how to understand men better but almost nothing in the reverse. I can tell you after twenty years of trying to find a partner that men are still ridiculously clueless about women. I used to ask on dating sites when men complained they couldn't get women to pay attention to them. "Have you ever Googled on what women want? On how to write a good profile? Post a good profile picture? What they're looking for on dating sites?" No. No. No. No. I wrote a whole series about this for Medium called Adventures In Mid-Life Dating. About how men made, said, and did the stupidest things while drowning in an *ocean* of information about women, what women want, and how to talk to women.
I've written books by men, and read articles by men, hung around the Ask Men website for awhile, followed The Good Men Project, and had my fave male writers on Medium who wrote sympathetically about men from a male perspective, and non-hostile to women. I learned a lot from them.
While not all women do this - Medium is rife with misandrists and feminazis - I feel pretty comfortable in stating that overall, I think women attempt to understand men more than men ever do women.
" If they're runaways and have never had a job, and can't get one waitressing (which might not pay enough)."
Yeah, but you're describing a pretty tiny, extreme group of people here, no? And then there's the question of what paying "enough" is. There are young male runaways too, more of them in fact, who don't have the option of sucking dick for money.
I'm not trying to trivialise what these people go through, obviously nobody makes those kinds of decision lightly, but I don't really buy into the "she had no choice but to be a sex worker" narrative in any case where the woman isn't being directly coerced.
As for the effort made to understand the other sex, I think part of the problem is that people, and yes, I guess it might be more often women who do this, believe that it's possible to "understand" the opposite sex. This idea, whether it's men or women who have it, is immediately reductive.
A group that comprises half the planet is obviously not a monolith. So what works for one man or woman is not necessarily going to work for the next. Some women love anal, some don't. Some men do, some don't. Some men love it when women stomp on their balls! Sex is weird.
I'm not denying that porn is warping some men's notion of sex. It definitely is. I'm saying that the idea that porn is responsible for kinkiness amongst men *and women* in general is probably simplistic. And I guess that unless you want men who only have sex in the missionary position, I'm not sure what they should do but ask. If they don't take no for an answer, that's a completely different issue.
What I see missing from both sides is an effort to truly just see the opposite sex as people. To give each other the benefit of the doubt, to have the same degree of empathy as they do for their own sex, to refuse to let the worst members of that sex, or their worst dating experiences, tarnish the entire group.
How do you think it would go down if I wrote a dating series about how women did and said the stupidest things? Or that women should just do the things I imagine men want (which would really just be the things *I* want) if they want more dating success? Do you think men and women would have similar experiences on dating sites when it comes to the effort made to get matches or start/maintain interactions if men just used better profile pictures?
Both men and women extend too little charity to the opposite sex. And make the mistake of thinking that because they see the worst of men/women in their dating lives, men/women are the worst. Women are awful too sometimes. I promise you.😅
Actually, sucking dick IS a viable 'option' for the male runaway - the world is full of men who will pay for a blowjob and it doesn't always matter if it's from a man as long as no one knows. IOW, male hustlers aren't only for gay men - but straight men on the 'down low' or who just don't care who sucks their dick.
I'm not arguing women who 'choose' sex work are trafficked or coerced - just that sometimes it's the only real option for them. I'd love to see an end to sex work, or perhaps legally permitted but highly regulated. With options for people to get training in other skills so they don't have to do this shit. Interestingly, Obama tried to do something like this - with no attention, AFAIK, to sex work - one of his first attempted actions in office was to pass something that would have made it easier for people in poverty circumstances to go to community college. Guess what collection of Congressfucks shot it down?
As for anal, I've never met a woman yet that said she likes it (not that I've taken a scientific poll!), well maybe one that I can think of, and she'd be too freaky even for Rick James, LOL. Most want nothing to do with it. According to the book on dating apps I read last year, a lot of the violence and freakiness young people are engaging in they get from watching porn as sex ed (because parents STILL aren't talking to their kids about this!) A guy the author was involved with argued that the women in the porn videos he watched *liked* rough, physically hurtful sex and the author argued it didn't. "Women WANT this!" he said. "They ask for it on dating apps!" And he proved it by scrolling through profiles in which the women said they wanted rough sex, they like being raped, etc. The author noted that they'll say what they think guys will hear to get them to like them (which I can totally buy as a woman, and as a human being who knows men do the same thing). Then she pulled up a porn video of a woman being choked and pointed out, "She's not enjoying it. Look at her face. Look at the *tears in her eyes*. She's not enjoying this!"
The research is still in the process of studying the influence of porn on other aspects of culture, but what I've been finding myself after getting interested in the porn influence last year is bolstered by the stories of women younger than I on Medium who told insane stories about dating life that I didn't experience in the pre-Internet days. They complained that porn was responsible for the rise in misogyny overall, and that too has been validated by my own research so far.
Sometimes we don't know why we like what we like. My ex last year liked a particular type of sex that I didn't find abhorrent or degrading, just not very interesting. But he loved it, and he had another related fetish, that I'm pretty sure came from porn. Let's remember what normalized oral sex for 'nice' couples: Deepthroat.
My 'freaky' friend was bisexual and admitted once she wasn't sure if she really was, or if she had been induced into it in college when she had college counselors and class speakers keep emphasizing over and over again, "It's okay if you're gay or bisexual! It's okay! It's okay! It's okay!" She said after awhile she sort of started thinking that it was maybe what she was *supposed* to be...she said this in what I consider to be a very candid, honest moment.
If you wrote a dating series about dumb shit women say and do, I agree, it would not go down well, but I would totally read it! I used to watch for articles like that on Medium, and I knew which male writers were non-misogynist. I wanted to know what women did and said that men didn't understand or like, and why. What mistakes might *we* be making? When I was in my forties and undergoing my Angry Drunken Bitch years there were dynamics going on at the time that I didn't know about, some that were women-blameworthy, some men-blameworthy, and others blameless - like finding out many years later how different men's and women's headspaces are in the late thirties (when my ex and I split up) and the forties, and how we don't come together again until the fifties (which I can see, but, unfortunately, men are still doing and saying some remarkably dumb shit, and I ding them for this because the truth isn't just Out There, it's right in front of their faces, but they never bother to Google anything.
They would never go into a business meeting, especially a competitive one, not having researched their opponents, or just be educated on what they'd need to know to accomplish their objectives, yet they bumble around on dating sites making the same mistakes with everyone and wondering why they get ignored so much (because you get tired of them expecting you to ask the same basic questions over and over because they're too lazy to fill out a profile). If women are doing as seriously dumb shit as men are doing - and I'm sympathetic to legitimate male grievance - please, let me know where I may learn more! Since I'm still persona non grata there, and I understand the new guy Tony thus far doesn't seem inclined to deal with the social justice extremists. I hope he can do better than Evvie did.
We'll never learn to get along until we understand each other. It'll take balls for men to write honestly and sympathetically to women about what they're doing wrong. It's what I do when I criticize feminism - I have to be willing to take some shit for what I write, and I think I've lost a few friends over my personal responsibilty, power feminist mindset. Just as you piss off victim antiracists who can't stand you suggesting that white people aren't devils and that antiracists are sometimes part of the problem.
"Actually, sucking dick IS a viable 'option' for the male runaway"
😅Okay, we're talking about a *reeeeally* small group of people now. If this is what you're basing the idea that some women can't do anything but suck dick on, we'll probably just have to agree to disagree. I don't think we can pretend this is the path that most runaways go down. Male or female. But especially male.
And while I think prostitution (and particularly the men who use prostitues), is truly gross, I don't see any clear argument to end sex work. A lot more should be done to make sure the people engaging in it are safe and doing of their own free will. But as long as those conditions are met, my feelings are irrelevant. We can't inflict our morality on other people. That ends badly pretty much every time.
Again, I'm not arguing that porn doesn't have an impact on culture or on the sexual behaviour of men *and women.* I'm saying that porn is far from the only explanation for a particular fetish. Do you think, for example, men have foot fetishes because of porn? Or do they watch foot fetish porn because they have foot fetishes?
I've met lots of women who were into anal. Who requested it even though I'm broadly indifferent to it. And quite a few who were into *really* rough sex. Some, so rough it would shock you. This last category certainly wasn't a majority, but not a trivial number. All we have are our anecdotes, but I'm pretty sure I've slept with more women that you have.😄
As for my series on the mistakes women make, I've mentioned quite a few of them here. It's a mistake for women to pathologise men's sexuality or to assume that we're all porn addicts. It's a mistake to assume that because you don't like something sexually, "women" don't like it. It's a mistake to treat men as if we're a monolith (this is a really big one that I see in various forms all the time). It's a mistake to forget that men are just people and treat them with the same compassion and offer them the same benefit of the doubt that you do other women. It's a mistake to allow your worst dating experiences to colour your perception of all men.
Men make exactly these mistakes with women, of course. But I think one mistake that is often made by women is failing to really consider how different dating is for men. I hear "advice" from women all the time that men should follow. But many women don't have any real understanding of what it's like to date as a man if you're not in the top ~10% of attractiveness. They assume that the experience is somewhat similar and it's really not. In all kinds of ways. If you have fifteen minutes to spare, I'd highly recommend this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZTIbHIsIYw).
Not sure how really small the male runaway professional dick-suckers are, guys need money too, but I don't have the stats on that. I'd suspect it's somewhere north of 'reaaaaally small' but I don't know how much.
I don't see a good argument for ending sex work either, I've read books by women who seemed to really enjoy it and the Happy Hooker claimed she loved being paid to have sex. Hey, we get paid for use of our brains or hands or feet or whatever, why not our sex organs? I just want it to be a viable, at least somewhat more respectable profession, *regulated*, with protections for the women and the potential for arrest for any johns who get out of hand. I also want to see it taxed.
And I want to see better options for helping people to learn job skills that don't involve sex if that's not what floats their boat. I.e., desperate.
For the women you knew who liked really rough sex, anal, etc., I wonder (to myself, you don't have to answer this, it's personal) how old they were and whether they grew up with porn and had their tastes as shaped by what they thought sex was supposed to be. In the Dating Inferno book I read, the author pointed out the profiles claiming they like it rough et al may be because they say what it takes to get guys to like them. I think I mentioned that before but I can't remember. MADBS (Middle-Aged Dumb Blonde Syndrome ;) You may not even know that answer yourself.
I'm just going to reply to the video for now, the rest of it later when I have more time (I don't disagree with you much). WOW! That was an awesome, eye-opening video! I just bookmarked it so I can go back and read the comments to better understand the men's perspective. I was on Tinder for about a half a day when it first launched and I uninstalled it because it was a HUGE energy suck on my mobile. Before I did I checked to see who had swiped on me and it was like fucking EVERYBODY. And I was a 49-year-old woman, perhaps the oldest on the site. And I was getting all these young guys. Now, I *can* get younger men, and I'm not averse to that, but not guys under 30. Like guys in their mid-to-late twenties had wiped I don't know, whichever way was a match. And I was like, seriously? Are you fucking kidding me? And I realized they were just swiping right, I think it was, on everyone. I figured they were just maximizing their opps to get laid and I'm not sure I wasn't wrong; Tinder has notoriously been a hookup app, and I think that was the one Nancy Jo Sales used in her book on dating apps I read (turned it into a great Medium article that got some claps and comments). She is a year younger than I and like me, still pretty decent-looking for her age.
Now I'm beginning to understand the 'throwing spaghetti at the wall' thing you always seem to get from guys. I wonder - maybe someone else can answer this? - how much you really can put on your profile. Good photos are always helpful, but when I've been on dating apps (I never went back to Tinder because of its rep) I've always been aggravated by the lack of anything else - just the basic questions answered about looks - hair colour, eye colour, height, weight - and nothing about who they are, what they like, what they're looking for. It's a bummer because I *do* want to know that stuff. And I know guys don't read profiles because many have said they don't, esp when I said, "You'd know the answer to that if you'd read my profile." "I don't read profiles." I tried making my profiles really funny to encourage them to read, and that helped a bit, also it showed my sass and personality, but I also would stick something really weird but non-threatening in it that they would surely comment on ("Do you really have a pet gila monster?" "No, I just wanted to see who actually read that far!")
I wonder if more niche-oriented sites are better for men who aren't Ryan Reynolds (who frankly I think is nice-looking but I honestly don't think I'd swipe right on him if I saw someone like him on an app, he's not all that and a bag of chips). I've considered it myself, to try and eliminate a lot of the dross. Lately I've been wondering if there are guys who are minimalist I could meet as I'm nearing retirement and won't have tons of money to retire on but I don't need tons, I lead a simple life and aren't much materialistic and have already done a lot of my traveling - which is a lot more expensive now.
This really is worth delving into more. I'm off for the next two days as I do sales work and all my campaigns are US-based and I'm looking forward to the four-day weekend, having done Thanksgiving this past weekend with my bro and his fam. Tomorrow morning the comments of that video will be my breakfast reading, just as the video was this morning. Thanks for this fantastic look into what it's like for men. Wow. Just Wow!
Hey! I'm glad you found it interesting. Yeah, this is just the tip of the iceberg really. The comments on that video are quite funny, and go into more detail about how common those experiences (and worse) are. But yeah, as I said, male/female dating/romantic experiences are so different. And both men and women make the mistake of judging the other's behaviour by their experiences.
When I look at an account like tinder nightmares, for example, I'm as horrified/bewildered as anybody else by the grossness and idiocy I see there. But I can also understand how the frustration and depression that the girl in the video talks about (bear in mind this was only her pretend life for five days) drives some guys to just think "f**k it" because they assume they'll be rejected in the end anyway.
It's one of the many reasons I've never gone anywhere near dating apps. I try as hard as possible to keep my faith in humanity intact.😄
I didn't know what Tinder Nightmares was; I Googled it & found it's a book, a YouTube series and an Instagram account. I'll look for it on Insta but did you read the book? Was it any good?
I met my wife 19 years ago online. Since then, the apps have become even more vicious with simple swipes and low quality interactions that do not lead to investment in another person. The basic way to find good interactions has not changed. Do not out-pace others in your willingness to communicate. Those who are looking for more than an easy lay will put little effort into it. Those seeking a conversation must be immediately willing to read your profile. Even as a male, I would recognize females with lots of questions about me but revealing only a few superficial things about themselves. They were looking for a stranger to entertain them, and they had not intent of making any investment. I too soon gave them no time and stopped answering their questions. You can easily filter those willing to mutually invest from the many that are not. Good luck!
Yeah, BLM is keeping a very low profile now that they're being investigated for missing funds :) Apparently part of the hard work of antiracism includes living in a nice house with a studio to create your mix tapes or whatever :)
"I think you're painting men with an extremely broad brush there. Yes, men like porn. I don't think there's much room for argument on that. But I think that's a long way from being an endorsement of sex trafficking, no?"
It's not that they endorse sex trafficking, it's that they discover they may be inadvertantly supporting it if what I say about it is true. As to the pervasiveness of porn and men, I was surprised to learn last year just how pervasive it is, even before the pandemic, but it shot up way after that. I got into the research because the guy I was seeing last year got very defensive when I happened to mention sex trafficking & porn and he got all pissy about it - that was how I realized he watched porn (which we talked about) and then it got me curious as to its effect on men and relationships (not good, and when a man asks "Do you do anal?" he almost certainly got that idea from porn).
Medium's younger female writers have written a lot about the availability of porn and how it's making young men more violent, and sex less good for women.
"There are lots of women working in the sex industry and making very good livings from it entirely of their own free will. That said though, I am interested in learning more, so if you have any resources, I'd be very interested to read them."
That's exactly what other men say to me! :) I'll tell you what I tell them: Type sex trafficking youporn pornhub into Google and the first ten results will give you plenty of reliable information right there. Those are the top two porn sites and they're famously into sex trafficked videos - not that they actively seek them, they just don't work hard to remove them. Or genuine rape videos or clearly underage girls.
As for women who 'enjoy' sex work, I imagine there are some who do like it but I've read others argue very few women really like doing it no matter what they say, and that calling it 'sex work' dresses it up and makes it sound more voluntary than it is. There's a high degree of sex trafficking in prostitution as well as porn and sometimes a woman sucks dick for money because it's the only skill she has. So, it's not 'trafficking' but it's not truly voluntary either, and it's the sort of thing men don't like to talk or think about.
"As for women who 'enjoy' sex work"
I didn't say they *enjoyed* it. From what I've heard, sex work is pretty unfulfilling for men and women. I said that lots of women do it of their own free will, drawing the line between sex work and sex trafficking.
But there's no such thing as a woman whose only skill is sucking dick for money. That's a pretty awful thing to say!😅 If they're not being forced to do it, that means they're doing it because it's easier/pays better than the alternatives. Which, minus the penises, is the position most people find themselves in. Very few people work "truly voluntarily."
But yeah, after replying I thought you'd probably tell me to go look it up myself. 😁 I will. I genuinely hadn't heard that sex trafficking was an issue within the porn industry.
p.s. the idea that men only like anal or other sexual activities because of porn is one of those easy stereotypes that some feminists like to assert about men. But it's really not true. Anal sex predates porn you know! For what it's worth, my first time doing it was at 16 with a girl who wanted to try it.
One of the great tragedies of male/female dynamics is that women spend too much time learning about men from other women. And men spend too much time learning about women from other men. And in both cases, the "teachers" don't usually think very highly of the opposite sex.
"But there's no such thing as a woman whose only skill is sucking dick for money. That's a pretty awful thing to say!😅"
They might well have no other alternative if they're young. If they're runaways and have never had a job, and can't get one waitressing (which might not pay enough). They often fall in with pimps & traffickers because they're vulnerable and scared and have no idea how they're going to find/buy their next meal.
As for anal, yeah, it's been around forever but I can tell you I NEVER had men ask for anal until maybe the last several years. Apparently anal (esp rough, violent anal) is quite popular on porn sites. Porn is also responsible for the high level of violence in sex young women are reporting - I learned that from Medium's female writers who were asking what was up with the sudden choking, hitting, and near-rape that came from out of the blue.
"One of the great tragedies of male/female dynamics is that women spend too much time learning about men from other women." Actually, I'll bet far more women try to learn about and understand men more than men ever. do. Where are all the self-help books for men on how to have better relationships? The only ones I've ever seen are how to get laid better - like The Game (actually a very good book, and written with a sympathetic eye toward women). There are tons of self-books for women on how to understand men better but almost nothing in the reverse. I can tell you after twenty years of trying to find a partner that men are still ridiculously clueless about women. I used to ask on dating sites when men complained they couldn't get women to pay attention to them. "Have you ever Googled on what women want? On how to write a good profile? Post a good profile picture? What they're looking for on dating sites?" No. No. No. No. I wrote a whole series about this for Medium called Adventures In Mid-Life Dating. About how men made, said, and did the stupidest things while drowning in an *ocean* of information about women, what women want, and how to talk to women.
I've written books by men, and read articles by men, hung around the Ask Men website for awhile, followed The Good Men Project, and had my fave male writers on Medium who wrote sympathetically about men from a male perspective, and non-hostile to women. I learned a lot from them.
While not all women do this - Medium is rife with misandrists and feminazis - I feel pretty comfortable in stating that overall, I think women attempt to understand men more than men ever do women.
" If they're runaways and have never had a job, and can't get one waitressing (which might not pay enough)."
Yeah, but you're describing a pretty tiny, extreme group of people here, no? And then there's the question of what paying "enough" is. There are young male runaways too, more of them in fact, who don't have the option of sucking dick for money.
I'm not trying to trivialise what these people go through, obviously nobody makes those kinds of decision lightly, but I don't really buy into the "she had no choice but to be a sex worker" narrative in any case where the woman isn't being directly coerced.
As for the effort made to understand the other sex, I think part of the problem is that people, and yes, I guess it might be more often women who do this, believe that it's possible to "understand" the opposite sex. This idea, whether it's men or women who have it, is immediately reductive.
A group that comprises half the planet is obviously not a monolith. So what works for one man or woman is not necessarily going to work for the next. Some women love anal, some don't. Some men do, some don't. Some men love it when women stomp on their balls! Sex is weird.
I'm not denying that porn is warping some men's notion of sex. It definitely is. I'm saying that the idea that porn is responsible for kinkiness amongst men *and women* in general is probably simplistic. And I guess that unless you want men who only have sex in the missionary position, I'm not sure what they should do but ask. If they don't take no for an answer, that's a completely different issue.
What I see missing from both sides is an effort to truly just see the opposite sex as people. To give each other the benefit of the doubt, to have the same degree of empathy as they do for their own sex, to refuse to let the worst members of that sex, or their worst dating experiences, tarnish the entire group.
How do you think it would go down if I wrote a dating series about how women did and said the stupidest things? Or that women should just do the things I imagine men want (which would really just be the things *I* want) if they want more dating success? Do you think men and women would have similar experiences on dating sites when it comes to the effort made to get matches or start/maintain interactions if men just used better profile pictures?
Both men and women extend too little charity to the opposite sex. And make the mistake of thinking that because they see the worst of men/women in their dating lives, men/women are the worst. Women are awful too sometimes. I promise you.😅
Actually, sucking dick IS a viable 'option' for the male runaway - the world is full of men who will pay for a blowjob and it doesn't always matter if it's from a man as long as no one knows. IOW, male hustlers aren't only for gay men - but straight men on the 'down low' or who just don't care who sucks their dick.
I'm not arguing women who 'choose' sex work are trafficked or coerced - just that sometimes it's the only real option for them. I'd love to see an end to sex work, or perhaps legally permitted but highly regulated. With options for people to get training in other skills so they don't have to do this shit. Interestingly, Obama tried to do something like this - with no attention, AFAIK, to sex work - one of his first attempted actions in office was to pass something that would have made it easier for people in poverty circumstances to go to community college. Guess what collection of Congressfucks shot it down?
As for anal, I've never met a woman yet that said she likes it (not that I've taken a scientific poll!), well maybe one that I can think of, and she'd be too freaky even for Rick James, LOL. Most want nothing to do with it. According to the book on dating apps I read last year, a lot of the violence and freakiness young people are engaging in they get from watching porn as sex ed (because parents STILL aren't talking to their kids about this!) A guy the author was involved with argued that the women in the porn videos he watched *liked* rough, physically hurtful sex and the author argued it didn't. "Women WANT this!" he said. "They ask for it on dating apps!" And he proved it by scrolling through profiles in which the women said they wanted rough sex, they like being raped, etc. The author noted that they'll say what they think guys will hear to get them to like them (which I can totally buy as a woman, and as a human being who knows men do the same thing). Then she pulled up a porn video of a woman being choked and pointed out, "She's not enjoying it. Look at her face. Look at the *tears in her eyes*. She's not enjoying this!"
The research is still in the process of studying the influence of porn on other aspects of culture, but what I've been finding myself after getting interested in the porn influence last year is bolstered by the stories of women younger than I on Medium who told insane stories about dating life that I didn't experience in the pre-Internet days. They complained that porn was responsible for the rise in misogyny overall, and that too has been validated by my own research so far.
Sometimes we don't know why we like what we like. My ex last year liked a particular type of sex that I didn't find abhorrent or degrading, just not very interesting. But he loved it, and he had another related fetish, that I'm pretty sure came from porn. Let's remember what normalized oral sex for 'nice' couples: Deepthroat.
My 'freaky' friend was bisexual and admitted once she wasn't sure if she really was, or if she had been induced into it in college when she had college counselors and class speakers keep emphasizing over and over again, "It's okay if you're gay or bisexual! It's okay! It's okay! It's okay!" She said after awhile she sort of started thinking that it was maybe what she was *supposed* to be...she said this in what I consider to be a very candid, honest moment.
If you wrote a dating series about dumb shit women say and do, I agree, it would not go down well, but I would totally read it! I used to watch for articles like that on Medium, and I knew which male writers were non-misogynist. I wanted to know what women did and said that men didn't understand or like, and why. What mistakes might *we* be making? When I was in my forties and undergoing my Angry Drunken Bitch years there were dynamics going on at the time that I didn't know about, some that were women-blameworthy, some men-blameworthy, and others blameless - like finding out many years later how different men's and women's headspaces are in the late thirties (when my ex and I split up) and the forties, and how we don't come together again until the fifties (which I can see, but, unfortunately, men are still doing and saying some remarkably dumb shit, and I ding them for this because the truth isn't just Out There, it's right in front of their faces, but they never bother to Google anything.
They would never go into a business meeting, especially a competitive one, not having researched their opponents, or just be educated on what they'd need to know to accomplish their objectives, yet they bumble around on dating sites making the same mistakes with everyone and wondering why they get ignored so much (because you get tired of them expecting you to ask the same basic questions over and over because they're too lazy to fill out a profile). If women are doing as seriously dumb shit as men are doing - and I'm sympathetic to legitimate male grievance - please, let me know where I may learn more! Since I'm still persona non grata there, and I understand the new guy Tony thus far doesn't seem inclined to deal with the social justice extremists. I hope he can do better than Evvie did.
We'll never learn to get along until we understand each other. It'll take balls for men to write honestly and sympathetically to women about what they're doing wrong. It's what I do when I criticize feminism - I have to be willing to take some shit for what I write, and I think I've lost a few friends over my personal responsibilty, power feminist mindset. Just as you piss off victim antiracists who can't stand you suggesting that white people aren't devils and that antiracists are sometimes part of the problem.
"Actually, sucking dick IS a viable 'option' for the male runaway"
😅Okay, we're talking about a *reeeeally* small group of people now. If this is what you're basing the idea that some women can't do anything but suck dick on, we'll probably just have to agree to disagree. I don't think we can pretend this is the path that most runaways go down. Male or female. But especially male.
And while I think prostitution (and particularly the men who use prostitues), is truly gross, I don't see any clear argument to end sex work. A lot more should be done to make sure the people engaging in it are safe and doing of their own free will. But as long as those conditions are met, my feelings are irrelevant. We can't inflict our morality on other people. That ends badly pretty much every time.
Again, I'm not arguing that porn doesn't have an impact on culture or on the sexual behaviour of men *and women.* I'm saying that porn is far from the only explanation for a particular fetish. Do you think, for example, men have foot fetishes because of porn? Or do they watch foot fetish porn because they have foot fetishes?
I've met lots of women who were into anal. Who requested it even though I'm broadly indifferent to it. And quite a few who were into *really* rough sex. Some, so rough it would shock you. This last category certainly wasn't a majority, but not a trivial number. All we have are our anecdotes, but I'm pretty sure I've slept with more women that you have.😄
As for my series on the mistakes women make, I've mentioned quite a few of them here. It's a mistake for women to pathologise men's sexuality or to assume that we're all porn addicts. It's a mistake to assume that because you don't like something sexually, "women" don't like it. It's a mistake to treat men as if we're a monolith (this is a really big one that I see in various forms all the time). It's a mistake to forget that men are just people and treat them with the same compassion and offer them the same benefit of the doubt that you do other women. It's a mistake to allow your worst dating experiences to colour your perception of all men.
Men make exactly these mistakes with women, of course. But I think one mistake that is often made by women is failing to really consider how different dating is for men. I hear "advice" from women all the time that men should follow. But many women don't have any real understanding of what it's like to date as a man if you're not in the top ~10% of attractiveness. They assume that the experience is somewhat similar and it's really not. In all kinds of ways. If you have fifteen minutes to spare, I'd highly recommend this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZTIbHIsIYw).
Not sure how really small the male runaway professional dick-suckers are, guys need money too, but I don't have the stats on that. I'd suspect it's somewhere north of 'reaaaaally small' but I don't know how much.
I don't see a good argument for ending sex work either, I've read books by women who seemed to really enjoy it and the Happy Hooker claimed she loved being paid to have sex. Hey, we get paid for use of our brains or hands or feet or whatever, why not our sex organs? I just want it to be a viable, at least somewhat more respectable profession, *regulated*, with protections for the women and the potential for arrest for any johns who get out of hand. I also want to see it taxed.
And I want to see better options for helping people to learn job skills that don't involve sex if that's not what floats their boat. I.e., desperate.
For the women you knew who liked really rough sex, anal, etc., I wonder (to myself, you don't have to answer this, it's personal) how old they were and whether they grew up with porn and had their tastes as shaped by what they thought sex was supposed to be. In the Dating Inferno book I read, the author pointed out the profiles claiming they like it rough et al may be because they say what it takes to get guys to like them. I think I mentioned that before but I can't remember. MADBS (Middle-Aged Dumb Blonde Syndrome ;) You may not even know that answer yourself.
I'm just going to reply to the video for now, the rest of it later when I have more time (I don't disagree with you much). WOW! That was an awesome, eye-opening video! I just bookmarked it so I can go back and read the comments to better understand the men's perspective. I was on Tinder for about a half a day when it first launched and I uninstalled it because it was a HUGE energy suck on my mobile. Before I did I checked to see who had swiped on me and it was like fucking EVERYBODY. And I was a 49-year-old woman, perhaps the oldest on the site. And I was getting all these young guys. Now, I *can* get younger men, and I'm not averse to that, but not guys under 30. Like guys in their mid-to-late twenties had wiped I don't know, whichever way was a match. And I was like, seriously? Are you fucking kidding me? And I realized they were just swiping right, I think it was, on everyone. I figured they were just maximizing their opps to get laid and I'm not sure I wasn't wrong; Tinder has notoriously been a hookup app, and I think that was the one Nancy Jo Sales used in her book on dating apps I read (turned it into a great Medium article that got some claps and comments). She is a year younger than I and like me, still pretty decent-looking for her age.
Now I'm beginning to understand the 'throwing spaghetti at the wall' thing you always seem to get from guys. I wonder - maybe someone else can answer this? - how much you really can put on your profile. Good photos are always helpful, but when I've been on dating apps (I never went back to Tinder because of its rep) I've always been aggravated by the lack of anything else - just the basic questions answered about looks - hair colour, eye colour, height, weight - and nothing about who they are, what they like, what they're looking for. It's a bummer because I *do* want to know that stuff. And I know guys don't read profiles because many have said they don't, esp when I said, "You'd know the answer to that if you'd read my profile." "I don't read profiles." I tried making my profiles really funny to encourage them to read, and that helped a bit, also it showed my sass and personality, but I also would stick something really weird but non-threatening in it that they would surely comment on ("Do you really have a pet gila monster?" "No, I just wanted to see who actually read that far!")
I wonder if more niche-oriented sites are better for men who aren't Ryan Reynolds (who frankly I think is nice-looking but I honestly don't think I'd swipe right on him if I saw someone like him on an app, he's not all that and a bag of chips). I've considered it myself, to try and eliminate a lot of the dross. Lately I've been wondering if there are guys who are minimalist I could meet as I'm nearing retirement and won't have tons of money to retire on but I don't need tons, I lead a simple life and aren't much materialistic and have already done a lot of my traveling - which is a lot more expensive now.
This really is worth delving into more. I'm off for the next two days as I do sales work and all my campaigns are US-based and I'm looking forward to the four-day weekend, having done Thanksgiving this past weekend with my bro and his fam. Tomorrow morning the comments of that video will be my breakfast reading, just as the video was this morning. Thanks for this fantastic look into what it's like for men. Wow. Just Wow!
Hey! I'm glad you found it interesting. Yeah, this is just the tip of the iceberg really. The comments on that video are quite funny, and go into more detail about how common those experiences (and worse) are. But yeah, as I said, male/female dating/romantic experiences are so different. And both men and women make the mistake of judging the other's behaviour by their experiences.
When I look at an account like tinder nightmares, for example, I'm as horrified/bewildered as anybody else by the grossness and idiocy I see there. But I can also understand how the frustration and depression that the girl in the video talks about (bear in mind this was only her pretend life for five days) drives some guys to just think "f**k it" because they assume they'll be rejected in the end anyway.
It's one of the many reasons I've never gone anywhere near dating apps. I try as hard as possible to keep my faith in humanity intact.😄
I didn't know what Tinder Nightmares was; I Googled it & found it's a book, a YouTube series and an Instagram account. I'll look for it on Insta but did you read the book? Was it any good?
Oh, I didn't know they had a book. I've just seen the Instagram account. Equal parts hilarious and depressing.
I met my wife 19 years ago online. Since then, the apps have become even more vicious with simple swipes and low quality interactions that do not lead to investment in another person. The basic way to find good interactions has not changed. Do not out-pace others in your willingness to communicate. Those who are looking for more than an easy lay will put little effort into it. Those seeking a conversation must be immediately willing to read your profile. Even as a male, I would recognize females with lots of questions about me but revealing only a few superficial things about themselves. They were looking for a stranger to entertain them, and they had not intent of making any investment. I too soon gave them no time and stopped answering their questions. You can easily filter those willing to mutually invest from the many that are not. Good luck!