He’s definitely the golden child. There’s an illusion of fairness, but I am viewed far less favorably than he is despite his numerous crimes and transgressions. They are usually spread far enough apart that things “reset” and I seem to be the only one who understands how messed up he is. Nothing sticks to him. He his held in positive regard no matter what he does, and I am held in negative regard no matter what I do.

I am doing online college because it’s cheaper than in-person. I am worried about accruing too much debt because I am anxious about my ability to pay it off in the future.

U.S. Sorry for the late reply.

My original plan was a CS degree and try for a remote job, but with the direction the tech sector has been going, I’m not sure that I like my odds. I’m looking at possible majors I can pivot towards, but I haven’t decided yet. I’ve just started classes, so I don’t have that much of a sunk cost yet.

The big issue is that I have a condition called POTS that gives me brain fog and can cause fainting if I sit or stand up for more than a couple minutes. That makes it difficult to do most in-person jobs. So I have to find something that works with that and will still exist in the U.S. economy once I graduate.

I haven’t. I’m worried that doing that would be taken as an act of aggression and would lead to retaliation.

Also, my brother hasn’t physically attacked me yet, not since we were teenagers. He’s just being threatening and intimidating right now. But I also know that he suffers from fits of uncontrollable rage and has the capacity to kill. In one episode where he killed his girlfriend’s cat, he said that he lost control of himself and started wailing on the poor animal. I haven’t heard of him doing any premeditated violence; it always seems to happen in the moment. But he doesn’t seem to feel remorse for his victims after the fact. There is also no criminal record of the things he has done.

There is something deeply wrong with him and I think that he is a ticking time bomb.

• Fetishizes female submission and powerlessness
• Shows interest in “petite” women almost 2 feet shorter than him
• Values women for how “pretty” they look
• Says the Epstein situation “doesn’t matter”
• Likes to sneak into other people’s private spaces without consent

I gotta hand it to you God, I think you might be onto something

I’d guess they are very sexually repressed.

My dad DOES have a tendency to make an unusual amount of phallic jokes, to the point where one day I responded with “You know, it’s okay to be bi, you can just say it” and boy he did NOT like that

But i wonder why dad was upset op isint gay.

Every day, my dad liked to call me the f-slur and threaten to kill me or kick me out of the house “if he found out” I was gay. Apparently, I wasn’t in on the joke: in his head, he ALREADY KNEW I was gay, and so his words weren’t meant to prevent me from being gay, but rather to make me terrified of him.

It seems like he was angry because he lost a critical control mechanism over me and desperately sought to bring it back. I will never forget how shocked he looked when he saw me actually happy for the first time in years and I playfully deflected his insults instead of engaging with them. He sort of shut down and became depressed for a couple days before he came up with a new way to control me.

It seems that there is nothing that he and my brother hate more than my genuine happiness. Since they believe that they define who I am, how I feel, and what I am capable of, any feelings I am “not supposed” to feel will be violently crushed by them.

I am not supposed to feel happy.

What has therapy been like for you? I’ve never done therapy before, and I’m kind of worried they’ll try to criticize and gaslight me into playing nice with people who I’m 90% sure are narcissists or try to get me to ignore the limitations that my health problems give me. (But then again, I can’t help but notice that I was socially conditioned to expect shame, punishment, and destructive guidance if I ask for help.)

I just thought I had to be seen as “sufficiently masculine” in order to survive. I thought that it was too dangerous to be authentic because people would constantly fight me on it. I used to see that as a universal thing, but now I’m aware that some people are vastly more tolerant than others, so you can just hang out with the ones who accept you.

Funnily enough, in my case, I couldn’t hide my “deviant” traits because they’re written all over my demeanor. Nobody has ever seen or treated me as a manly man. Not one. My gentleness is obvious no matter how much I try to suppress myself. That means that every friend or acquaintance I have ever had liked (or at the very least tolerated) something about me that I thought would be universally shunned. Theory debunked. I just ignored the evidence.

What’s the alternative? Pretend to be someone you aren’t and end up in a situation you hate where you aren’t happy?

I used to think that I had to, because I was afraid that nobody would accept me for who I was. It seems like the beliefs in my post are a last-ditch effort by my fear to hold me back (“You can’t be yourself because everyone will despise you (which also means that nobody can be attracted to you) and a small subset of people will react violently while bystanders watch.”)

My worldview over the past decade, the one that I’m actively trying to dismantle, has been that, despite having the right to free expression on paper (in the U.S.), we unfortunately live in an intolerant authoritarian culture that stifles that free expression through social shaming. Deviations from traditional masculinity, I believed, would lead to one being universally shunned in everyday settings, and may lead to severe social consequences. As you can imagine, it’s hard to change a belief if you’re too scared to challenge it (going outside, talking to people), which is why it stood for as long as it did. But now I understand that I have to challenge it because the downstream consequences are literally ruining my life.

Basically, I grew up in a right-wing echo chamber, so my brain learned to expect everyone to be intolerant of deviations from stereotypes.

I like sweet and dominant women

Have you found some? I probably shouldn’t put too much stock into anecdotes from Internet strangers (that’s part of what got me into this situation in the first place), but I think it would be encouraging to hear if you did!

It has actually helped me a lot, but only because the people here helped me to build enough confidence to talk to real life people about this and realize that I had fooled myself.

I used to think it was literally too dangerous for me to go outside because I didn’t fit a world of hyperpolarized gender norms, which I convinced myself was how reality was. I used labels like “submissive” or “GNC” to mean “likes confident women” and “isn’t a macho alpha male” respectively, not knowing that these were common characteristics that didn’t need special labels. In that stage, the questions I asked were me trying to poke holes in my theory and see if there were exceptions to the hyperpolarized rule I imagined.

As my language became more accurate and I talked to online friends about my feelings, they kept saying that I was completely normal and not weird at all. That gave me the courage to come out about my feelings IRL to some of my conservative family members, and even they said I was normal. The more I probed real people, the more I realized that I had been catastrophically wrong this whole time, and this fascination with gender norms made no sense.

I asked this question to see if there was any shred of legitimacy left in the way I used to think, and I think it’s safe to say that it has been fully discredited at this point. I only thought that way because some assholes in the past convinced me I was unlovable and I developed an elaborate pseudoscience to explain why. Maybe I should have just listened to the nice people who told me to my face how much they love my soft side.

I feel like I’m ready to go outside and make some friends now. And see a therapist if I still find myself struggling. The Internet has served its purpose for me, and I will not miss this era of my life.

Honestly, judging by the responses here, it really seems like my social anxiety selectively absorbed negative information and created a self-defeating worldview based on inflammatory social media posts. I really need to take a hard look at what I’m consuming and ask myself if it’s really worth it.

It’s embarrassing to be this wrong, but I’m grateful that I have this community to help me understand that this is a self-imposed social dysfunction rather than a legitimate worldview. It’s just fear.

So I don’t disagree that this is the best way to do it, and I find your suggestions helpful, but… what about the phones in people’s pockets that could be recording and the security cameras inside buildings?

Doesn’t that data end up in the hands of a corporation that aggregates data about everything you do, or am I being way too paranoid/conspiratorial about this? I assumed that machine learning algorithms would make it trivial to automatically parse and aggregate all of that data for every individual, but maybe I’m overestimating the scope and accuracy of these systems.

Why do you need to stop using discord?

I’m worried about the current U.S. political climate. Discord is an American company with data about what millions of people are talking about, including their political opinions, minority status, and what groups they associate with. It seems like a goldmine for the government to compile a list of targets to go after in future purges. I don’t know how easy it is to tie users with real-world identities (certainly payment info would be one way), but I don’t want to find out.

And, well, I guess I’m a coward. I saw privacy as necessary for survival because it might spare me from ending up on the list, at least temporarily. But now I’m starting to realize that hiding might just be a really crappy solution. I’m not doing anything to prevent these purges from happening, and even if I succeeded at flying under the radar, the vast majority of people who believe the same way I do will be dead, hiding, or rotting in gulags. Is that the world I want to live in?

It seems like this short-sighted instinct to save myself is only isolating me and helping the enemy. I just find it hard to accept that I might not get to live much longer after everything I’ve done. I still have hopes and dreams, and it’s difficult to let them go, especially because everyone around me had so much hope for me. I don’t want to believe that my life could be cut short in what may become the largest genocide in history. But if I don’t come to terms with the truth, I will continue hiding in cold, lonely isolation, foolishly believing that the life I seek can still materialize as long as I stay quiet amidst the encroaching horrors.

But isn’t a bottom purely passive/receptive/compliant though? I also fantasize about assertively directing my partner’s pleasure too and find the idea thrilling. I didn’t talk about it much in the post because that was more expected with traditional gender roles. Wouldn’t the right term for me be “switch” or “versatile”?

The reason I need my partner to be assertive still is because I need the back-and-forth aspect to get excited, like in a “You got me good, now it’s MY TURN!” kind of way.

Yeah, I feel like I was pretty intellectually lazy in that part.

What I really mean is that I don’t like sexual activity that looks mean or degrading or painful or has dark undertones. It hits an uncanny valley for me because my preferred type of intimacy is all lovey-dovey and responsive to a partner’s real-time comfort. I don’t think BDSM is bad, it’s just not my thing.

Although maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’ll change my mind one day and come up with some unique sunshine-and-rainbows twist on it. It just wouldn’t be what immediately comes to mind when people think of BDSM. I mostly added that section to make it clear that I’m not talking about the kind of control that people often associate with BDSM and meant something more nuanced.

Yeah, that’s kind of why I mentioned at the end that this post might sound kind of ridiculous to outsiders lol.

One of the main reasons it sounds like incel talk is because the bedrock of this insecurity is gender essentialism, which is an idea that was hammered into my head constantly and very painfully when I was young. Now, it’s an incumbent idea that I have to viciously fight against, because if I don’t, I default to the established prescriptivist view: that because I deviate from gender roles, the very core of who I am is wrong and incompatible with society, I’m not masculine enough to find love, and my desires aren’t compatible with women. These were not just made-up ideas either; they were socially reinforced by nearly every person I talked to in the conservative communities I lived in. I was a pariah because I was different, even in my own family.

I had to think about this stuff extensively because it was the only counter I had to their speech. If I unquestioningly accepted what everyone said about me, I would be dead right now. But because I am willing to spend the time to seek outside information and deconstruct the toxic ideologies that surround me in the real world, I am able to build self-confidence in the face of universal rejection. There was no mentor figure or safe haven in my life who I could talk to about these issues, so I ultimately faced a long, arduous journey of de-programming myself by seeking outside information through the Internet.

It might be hard to believe from this post, but I feel 100 times better about myself today than I did a decade ago. Today, I wholeheartedly accept who I am and believe that I am capable and worthy of love. I’m just trying to figure out how to make intimacy work with my unique attraction patterns, and I’m making good progress on that, too!

Okay, okay, you’re not gonna believe this…

I don’t have any.

I never tried to date anyone precisely because I saw the kind of intimacy I wanted as impossible. I always just assumed that anyone I dated would flop over like a dead fish in bed, and that’s just not sexy to me. Up until this point, I believed that my own sexual drives were incompatible with everyone else’s and could only be satisfied through fantasy. Only now am I questioning if this is actually the case.