Yes, please, for the love of Christ, sexualize me! God my 20s were fucking miserable, and I was very attractive! I was just dirt poor so I might as well have been invisible.
I like this article but I feel like it's missing a few things. It's missing some details about how normal male sexuality is demonized by the current sex negative culture. This includes simple things such as wanting to look at porn, wanting to masterbate and being attracted to multiple people. These are demonized into saying that men are pigs and this doesn't even fit the kink desires that most men get at puberty. This are completely demonized as some perverted desire especially those unmanly submissive desires. Even the as simple desire to be watched as a sexual being. This sex negative push drives great shame and anger especially towards those who can be viewed as a sex object. This drives a hate towards women and gay men who can dress sexy or slutty while the traditional manly man can't at all.
For myself, I found that simply largely being off social media, or being very careful in curating my content, has helped. I don’t get positive attention, but I also don’t see other people getting positive attention, so I’m less immediately aware of it. In the case of men, since they aren’t usually in danger from the lack of attention, their perception of that attention gap is, itself, the problem.
I think this article totally (but only implicitly) ignores young men and boys being sexualised by other men in ways that are as dangerous as the way young women and girls are sexualised.
Aside from that, I agree with the comment from @Pons_Aelius that it’s about misidentifying sexualisation as positive attention and seeking the latter by ways of the former.
I am not disagreeing with the article but I think the better description would be:
"Young men (12-24 is used by the author) would like more positive attention. They see the attention young women receive via sexualisation as positive but are unaware of the many downsides it brings."
I have been saying essentially this for years using a water analogy. It is difficult for the drowning to explain their problems to people dying of thirst.
As a partially disabled man, unable to run and too weak to fight, I’m on guard a lot. It’s fucking exhausting. Yet it’s still a tiny fraction of what women experience. The entirety of unwanted attention and actions against women is too much to really comprehend for men.
What change can we make as men that will be a rising tide, lifting both men and women?
I’m very much a proponent of 2A rights. But carrying, by itself, is not going to eliminate fear, and may not even moderate it significantly. And someone that’s disabled may not be able to effectively use a firearm, and they certainly won’t be able to use one effectively with training.
Uh, what? I’m Canadian, but isn’t the Second Amendment a negative right? The government isn’t allowed to stop you from carrying a gun. You can agree with that and still think there are reasons an individual might not want to carry a gun.
Explain to me then, how it is that you think that a person with a firearm is going to suddenly not feel any fear. Do soldiers charge into machine gun fire without hesitation because they themselves are armed? How is a person with cerebral palsy reasonably expected to wield a firearm?
I believe you should have the right to own and carry the firearm that works best for you, if you want to. But a gun isn’t a magical talisman that will protect you simply by it’s presence.
In my experience, people who carry firearms are much more afraid than normal, because they have a physical object that reminds them to be afraid every time they step out the front door. And in every situation, from the barber to the grocery, they’ve got this heavy metal thing weighing them down while they wonder if this is the time to use it.
If you don’t mind sharing, where do you live? I’m able bodied but in my 31 years I’ve literally had to run or fight only once, and it was in a neighborhood I knew was bad. Meaning if I wasn’t able bodied I would not have gone there.
Just makes me think you live in the slums of Chicago or some harsh place. I’ve been all over western Canada and there’s maybe two neighborhoods I’d think you’d want to avoid. So it’s hard for me to imagine a person living in constant fear unless they are in or near those neighborhoods.
