What is Masculinty

[*Nately120*]

(05-15-2023, 07:11 PM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote: You raise some interesting points, and thank you for the extreme honesty.  I've been hit on by gay men numerous times, it's never bothered me.  

I didn't really take it personally, but so much of my life as a kid and teen was spent playing pretend, in the sense where I was attempting to use TV and movies as a means to drive how I was supposed to act and feel about things.  As a kid you'd be told to stay out of trouble and be good, but then you'd hear stories from your fun uncles and/or watch sitcoms where the characters were always getting into trouble and having fun and I'd feel like I was missing out on living my life because I was "being too good."  There were girls in my high school that actually liked me, but TV and movies told me that the girls you went for were the ones who didn't like you, said no, and/or had boyfriends and you needed to win them over or convince them that you are the one they want (I won't break into song here, but I'm not deleting that accidental reference).  

I'm more in tune with how not too normal I am now, so I can adjust but back then I was in the societal deep end.  I can sympathize with gay and trans people in the sense that I know how much of a pain it was to live in Steeler country and avoid "shoving it down anyone's throat" that I dared to like a different team than the norm.  If that was a pain, I can only imagine how much dealing with serious issues affects folks.  At least no one thought that preferring Boomer Esiason to Mark Malone was going to damn my eternal soul to hell and needed to be illegal.

The whole "dealing with gays" was another area where I was just trying to follow the lead of society.  As a straight male I may not have cared about people being gay, but I also felt a bit of a requirement to demonstrate that gay guys shoving it down my throat, so to speak would be met with protest and derision. I never went too overboard with it, because I didn't care outside of knowing how eager people were to jump on any reaction anyone had to anything.  

I much prefer being an adult, where I can just deal with or not deal with things as I see fit.  In my internet dating days I got to the point where I was getting pretty lazy and skimming profiles and I ended up on a coffee date and realizing off the bat that my date was trans.  I was polite and it just ended up being a typical boring date we both noped out of after about 20 minutes of small talk, but I was thinking the whole time that I was probably being rude and clearly needed to look over profiles and what not.  But nope, I looked over the profile afterwards and there was nothing in plain english on it about the trans aspect.  I still feel like I must have missed something, because not mentioning that seems unwise, so maybe it was on me.  It was neither funny nor traumatic.  My gf prior to that had short hair and used to joke she could put on a baseball cap and lure in sex offenders with Chris Hansen.

Anyways, I'm shoving my sexual misadventures down your throat now.


tl;dr - I'm a man, I'm 40!