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What is the hardest thing about being a man?

Poki

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Having to deal with a "man" stereotype. People dont realize that while we "are" wired similiar to other men...we are pretty much all just people with minor differences between men and women in the big picture. If you take the differences between men and women and stacked them against similarities the differences would be almost non existant. I dont see eye to eye with alot of men :shrug: i tend to see eye to eye with people who look at reality itself as opposed to some tiny set of self-defense rules that they live life by.

Pressure doesnt phase me as i have never felt the pressure to "be a man", people have tried to make me feel the pressure. Maybe its just the fact that i am a man...i cant really "not" be a man. So if i do cry ..then its simply a man ..one of millions can cry for XYZ.
 

Doctor Cringelord

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As much as I see some people complain that men might feel they can't show a full range of emotions without being judged (which is silly really, when all humans are judging creatures who are going to make assessments and judgments on others based on their behavior and temperaments and then react accordingly based on our own temperaments and degrees of indifference or compassion), one of the harder things for me has been the opposite, being accused of not being expressive enough in my emotions, being accused of being to stoic and reserved in my emotional expression. However I'm hesitant to really bring this up here because I don't think it's particularly specific to either gender or sex.
 

Cellmold

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I was thinking about this question a lot recently & I found it very difficult to describe any particular, gender based, hardships without reducing it to a mere comparison with some abstraction of male & female. And also reducing it to my own heuristics, although that's going to be unavoidable in a question that, to some extent, appeals to anecdotal experience like this one does.

For example I could point out male specific diseases and conditions, but that can't really exist on an indeterminate spectrum of it being hard to be a man since women have their own gender specific conditions and diseases. Perhaps it's a numbers game? Who has/had more of them throughout history up to the modern era & how many died or had miserable lives because of them. But that becomes a question of infinite complexity with regards to human individual variation.

So I ruled that out as a useful example pretty much straight away.

Another angle is socially, which is generally what these threads are aiming towards, but that is a bit of complicated mess as well & also tends to fall into a historical examination of who had it worse. For example men being almost exclusively the ones conscripted to war & women exclusively the ones suffering through pregnancy based problems and death (although this one also comes under the heading of conditions and diseases as well).

It's become a very sisyphean task, where every time I thought I had something I realised it was too arbitrary to be applied as an exclusive.

And so I realised I could only talk with any degree of authority and insight from a very specific position of personal experiences. "Well duh" chimes the invisible strawman crowd, but the question does deal in individual experiences as part of a collective identity, so it was difficult for me to come up with examples in my own life that I could conclusively say were in the domain of 'being a man'.

Ok so...waffle out of the way.

The caveat here is that what I'm about to describe as examples, are just things that have happened to me personally & I don't generally assume that they are rules that apply at all times, or are to be assumed as true without question. Nevertheless, they did happen and I think it is important to remember that.

I'll start with being around 4-5 years of age at infant school where Rhianna Hall and her friend were going around pulling down the trousers of the boys and when they did so to mine I went and told one of the teachers who was governing the playground at the time. They followed me once they saw what I was attempting to do and told her that I was also doing it to them with their skirts, which was patently not true. The consequence was that they were told off, whereas I was hauled off the ground and made to sit out my play time and then strongly lectured. I'm not that old so this would have been around the early to mid 90's.

That was just one of many such incidences involving what can only be described as a false accusation, followed by an unjust punishment. But while women certainly aren't the only ones who make things up to get another in trouble, they did seem to be disproportionately believed, or at least so it seemed from my very individual experience. So I'd say it's hard when you are assumed to be the villain of a situation, seemingly because of your own gender.

In my small, run down mining town, people don't have much to do. So what they tend towards are fleeting distractions to pass the time, most notably casual sex and drinking. The culture where I grew up was that if you hadn't had sex by around 13-14 there was something wrong with you. Now this is an extremely unusual localised assumption (which I didn't realise at the time) and so being a sensitive and nervous person with a proclivity to overreact, I wasn't exactly a prize catch and I became very isolated.
Any time I started to become intimate or close with a girl around this age, eventually she would elicit (and it only happened a few times, though it still hurts) the information of my virginity and then use that as a weapon of ridicule, with the only motivation I could perceive was that this was just for kicks. Now it's fair to say that without context and coming from only myself that this is a biased sample, nevertheless I can only insist on it's veracity and whether or not I was a gullible fool might depend on your view of the average boy going through puberty from the ages of 13 - 16.

Without going into lurid detail, I experienced it as cruel and it wasn't just verbal abuse. Interestingly enough, the other boys my age weren't so bothered.

When I was older and working, a girl I worked with invited me out for a coffee after work. As we were walking on our way to the shop she said she needed to pop into a chemist's we were passing to get some cash, which I thought was odd. After a while she came out with an intense looking guy who didn't say a word to me (even when I said hello) and who immediately started walking with us, staring at me all the while in this very unsettling manner. We get to the shop and, while in the queue, I receive a text off my brother. By this point I had figured out what was going on and made an excuse to leave.

And what I had figured out was that this was her boyfriend, even though she had bare-faced lied to me when asked if she already had a boyfriend. And I believe she was using me to make him jealous and potentially manipulate us into conflict.

In any case, that doesn't really say much about the hardships of being 'a man'. But surprisingly it also didn't colour my perceptions of women as I took all these as incidents of individuals more than anything.

For a more...nebulous description I suppose it would probably be some of the stuff I've seen in day to day life, particularly certain expectations of character and behaviour (although I am against a lot of social deconstructionist reasoning) the judgements of character based on poorly defined traits, which are something which affects everyone, were quite harsh at times.

At work the more physical and tiring tasks tend to fall to the men over the women, with only a small productive minority of the women willing (and capable) of keeping up. This means that in my current job in a small retail outlet that has a large amount of female staff compared with male staff, that the work is often unequally shared between us, so that I might spend 4 hours on a till and 4 hours doing delivery, whereas some of my female co-workers might spend 4 hours on a till and 4 hours barely touching delivery while gossiping in the back. I notice this by observing how often a cage of delivery is actually brought out, how many there were on delivery when it first came in to how many are still there when I start working them (and the reverse if I am working them first) & the fact that there are cameras in the warehouse and you can rewind them to see. Although I generally don't go out of my way to rewind them for that purpose, usually I'm looking to see if a suspicious person has been shoplifting and then I notice them drinking coffee and standing around for 40 odd minute intervals.

Once again I recognise that this is a biased sample & I don't think this is necessarily normal, although the lack of physical ability is an issue I've run into many times in different jobs....they (female staff) usually attempt to make up for it (successfully or not).

What I found most difficult is that as a man it seems more difficult to take advantage of what is implicit in nature. At times the concept of actions speaking louder than words seems not to matter so much in the court of public appeal & especially so in the minutiae of the day to day. The women I am working with are currently able to say one thing, do something completely different and yet have what they said they did be accepted as what actually happened.

In all of these frustrations I cannot tell if this can be construed as the hardships of being a man, and I don't really see it as the fault of women as a collective. My most difficult trials are actually outside these current work-based ills and more so to do with being an emotionally sensitive person, who resents that sensitivity as it only keeps blocking him from moving forward.

After all, the best mantra I discovered for coping with the situations I find myself in is that "In all things one should only expect a thankless task, or else wither from yearning for an impossible praise". People usually meet you for a brief window of interaction and neither you nor they have much information on the other and so, with the average person lacking the imagination necessary to conceive of another's position, the standard position is one of casual cruelty.

And that's how I view both men and women, or rather humans in general: as agents of casual cruelty.

To me, that's a hardship & life appears to carry a lot pain with it. To expect otherwise seems dangerously naive.
 

Coriolis

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Having to deal with a "man" stereotype. People dont realize that while we "are" wired similiar to other men...we are pretty much all just people with minor differences between men and women in the big picture. If you take the differences between men and women and stacked them against similarities the differences would be almost non existant. I dont see eye to eye with alot of men :shrug: i tend to see eye to eye with people who look at reality itself as opposed to some tiny set of self-defense rules that they live life by.

Pressure doesnt phase me as i have never felt the pressure to "be a man", people have tried to make me feel the pressure. Maybe its just the fact that i am a man...i cant really "not" be a man. So if i do cry ..then its simply a man ..one of millions can cry for XYZ.
Exactly. Many of the issues described in this thread fall under the expectations associated with those stereotypes. Both sexes experience such expectations, but if anything I think women have made more progress in freeing themselves from them. This is one area where men need to catch up. Everyone will be better off for it.

As much as I see some people complain that men might feel they can't show a full range of emotions without being judged (which is silly really, when all humans are judging creatures who are going to make assessments and judgments on others based on their behavior and temperaments and then react accordingly based on our own temperaments and degrees of indifference or compassion), one of the harder things for me has been the opposite, being accused of not being expressive enough in my emotions, being accused of being to stoic and reserved in my emotional expression. However I'm hesitant to really bring this up here because I don't think it's particularly specific to either gender or sex.
I suspect women are accused of this more than men, but you are right that both sexes experience it. Just another way some people hold others to their own expectations, regardless of who they are as individuals.
 

anticlimatic

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There's a few things I thought of that are hard in the difficult or challenging sense, not so much in the morale department.

1) Bonding with other men in comfortable environments that are focused on bonding. I went to a dinner party with a friend of mine to her sister's, and got to know her husband a bit. Though everything about it felt awkward and uncomfortable. Arms were folded. Talk was small. We both kept fidgeting like we didn't really know what to do with ourselves, or like we should be doing something. I think the deepest thing I learned about him was where he worked. Later that week I got stuck in a dusty cluttered under construction bathroom with a guy laying tile while I plumbed in the shower valve. Without even pausing in our work, we naturally got to talking and ended up having some deep heart to hearts about family and romance while complaining about the contractor and debating the merits of the cleaning crew ladies.

2) Hitting the bowl while urinating with an erection, which for me always requires the smooth criminal tilt lean and a firm grip on a towel bar.

3) Bringing a woman I care about to climax without also climaxing. Or any of the other variations of gaming the rigged orgasm system in which men get to climax much sooner while also being able to only do it once. When you're really tuned into your partner, completely in sync and sharing pleasure, and they suddenly get the snowballing rush of an impending O- that shit is not lost on us- and since our climax is half the snowball's distance as yours, it can be a problem. The best solution I've got is just to halt your horses before they burst out of the gate, which of course halts her horses too- but at least you both have a chance to ride again after a moment. It's doable with the right degree of separation, but it's damn hard.
 

Crabs

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My chances of getting eaten by a dinosaur are significantly higher than if I were female.
 

Coriolis

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My chances of getting eaten by a dinosaur are significantly higher than if I were female.
You should know by now that the ladies taste better. Of course perhaps that means the dinosaurs just save us for dessert.

 

Doctor Cringelord

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I was thinking about this question a lot recently & I found it very difficult to describe any particular, gender based, hardships without reducing it to a mere comparison with some abstraction of male & female. And also reducing it to my own heuristics, although that's going to be unavoidable in a question that, to some extent, appeals to anecdotal experience like this one does.

For example I could point out male specific diseases and conditions, but that can't really exist on an indeterminate spectrum of it being hard to be a man since women have their own gender specific conditions and diseases. Perhaps it's a numbers game? Who has/had more of them throughout history up to the modern era & how many died or had miserable lives because of them. But that becomes a question of infinite complexity with regards to human individual variation.

So I ruled that out as a useful example pretty much straight away.

Another angle is socially, which is generally what these threads are aiming towards, but that is a bit of complicated mess as well & also tends to fall into a historical examination of who had it worse. For example men being almost exclusively the ones conscripted to war & women exclusively the ones suffering through pregnancy based problems and death (although this one also comes under the heading of conditions and diseases as well).

It's become a very sisyphean task, where every time I thought I had something I realised it was too arbitrary to be applied as an exclusive.

And so I realised I could only talk with any degree of authority and insight from a very specific position of personal experiences. "Well duh" chimes the invisible strawman crowd, but the question does deal in individual experiences as part of a collective identity, so it was difficult for me to come up with examples in my own life that I could conclusively say were in the domain of 'being a man'.

Ok so...waffle out of the way.

The caveat here is that what I'm about to describe as examples, are just things that have happened to me personally & I don't generally assume that they are rules that apply at all times, or are to be assumed as true without question. Nevertheless, they did happen and I think it is important to remember that.

I'll start with being around 4-5 years of age at infant school where Rhianna Hall and her friend were going around pulling down the trousers of the boys and when they did so to mine I went and told one of the teachers who was governing the playground at the time. They followed me once they saw what I was attempting to do and told her that I was also doing it to them with their skirts, which was patently not true. The consequence was that they were told off, whereas I was hauled off the ground and made to sit out my play time and then strongly lectured. I'm not that old so this would have been around the early to mid 90's.

That was just one of many such incidences involving what can only be described as a false accusation, followed by an unjust punishment. But while women certainly aren't the only ones who make things up to get another in trouble, they did seem to be disproportionately believed, or at least so it seemed from my very individual experience. So I'd say it's hard when you are assumed to be the villain of a situation, seemingly because of your own gender.

In my small, run down mining town, people don't have much to do. So what they tend towards are fleeting distractions to pass the time, most notably casual sex and drinking. The culture where I grew up was that if you hadn't had sex by around 13-14 there was something wrong with you. Now this is an extremely unusual localised assumption (which I didn't realise at the time) and so being a sensitive and nervous person with a proclivity to overreact, I wasn't exactly a prize catch and I became very isolated.
Any time I started to become intimate or close with a girl around this age, eventually she would elicit (and it only happened a few times, though it still hurts) the information of my virginity and then use that as a weapon of ridicule, with the only motivation I could perceive was that this was just for kicks. Now it's fair to say that without context and coming from only myself that this is a biased sample, nevertheless I can only insist on it's veracity and whether or not I was a gullible fool might depend on your view of the average boy going through puberty from the ages of 13 - 16.

Without going into lurid detail, I experienced it as cruel and it wasn't just verbal abuse. Interestingly enough, the other boys my age weren't so bothered.

When I was older and working, a girl I worked with invited me out for a coffee after work. As we were walking on our way to the shop she said she needed to pop into a chemist's we were passing to get some cash, which I thought was odd. After a while she came out with an intense looking guy who didn't say a word to me (even when I said hello) and who immediately started walking with us, staring at me all the while in this very unsettling manner. We get to the shop and, while in the queue, I receive a text off my brother. By this point I had figured out what was going on and made an excuse to leave.

And what I had figured out was that this was her boyfriend, even though she had bare-faced lied to me when asked if she already had a boyfriend. And I believe she was using me to make him jealous and potentially manipulate us into conflict.

In any case, that doesn't really say much about the hardships of being 'a man'. But surprisingly it also didn't colour my perceptions of women as I took all these as incidents of individuals more than anything.

For a more...nebulous description I suppose it would probably be some of the stuff I've seen in day to day life, particularly certain expectations of character and behaviour (although I am against a lot of social deconstructionist reasoning) the judgements of character based on poorly defined traits, which are something which affects everyone, were quite harsh at times.

At work the more physical and tiring tasks tend to fall to the men over the women, with only a small productive minority of the women willing (and capable) of keeping up. This means that in my current job in a small retail outlet that has a large amount of female staff compared with male staff, that the work is often unequally shared between us, so that I might spend 4 hours on a till and 4 hours doing delivery, whereas some of my female co-workers might spend 4 hours on a till and 4 hours barely touching delivery while gossiping in the back. I notice this by observing how often a cage of delivery is actually brought out, how many there were on delivery when it first came in to how many are still there when I start working them (and the reverse if I am working them first) & the fact that there are cameras in the warehouse and you can rewind them to see. Although I generally don't go out of my way to rewind them for that purpose, usually I'm looking to see if a suspicious person has been shoplifting and then I notice them drinking coffee and standing around for 40 odd minute intervals.

Once again I recognise that this is a biased sample & I don't think this is necessarily normal, although the lack of physical ability is an issue I've run into many times in different jobs....they (female staff) usually attempt to make up for it (successfully or not).

What I found most difficult is that as a man it seems more difficult to take advantage of what is implicit in nature. At times the concept of actions speaking louder than words seems not to matter so much in the court of public appeal & especially so in the minutiae of the day to day. The women I am working with are currently able to say one thing, do something completely different and yet have what they said they did be accepted as what actually happened.

In all of these frustrations I cannot tell if this can be construed as the hardships of being a man, and I don't really see it as the fault of women as a collective. My most difficult trials are actually outside these current work-based ills and more so to do with being an emotionally sensitive person, who resents that sensitivity as it only keeps blocking him from moving forward.

After all, the best mantra I discovered for coping with the situations I find myself in is that "In all things one should only expect a thankless task, or else wither from yearning for an impossible praise". People usually meet you for a brief window of interaction and neither you nor they have much information on the other and so, with the average person lacking the imagination necessary to conceive of another's position, the standard position is one of casual cruelty.

And that's how I view both men and women, or rather humans in general: as agents of casual cruelty.

To me, that's a hardship & life appears to carry a lot pain with it. To expect otherwise seems dangerously naive.

You know, I think that (the bolded) is really the crux of it. It's not women or men who are intrinsically bad because of their gender, although I've found that the shittiest people tend to act in ways that are more specific to their sex, which I think makes it really easy for someone on the receiving end of that to think one sex is the problem. I don't claim to share or know your exact experiences although I've had similar experiences at the hands of both malicious men and malicious women, so I really tend more toward a general misanthropy than a specific misogyny or self-loathing misandry. It's important to be an equal opportunity hater, I'm glad you seem to get that.
 

Forever

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Living in a more... you could say conservative part of where I live, growing up being in a male body and only wanting to socialize with women made it pretty difficult. I wasn’t gay so I couldn’t have lived the lifestyle of all women friends and finding the right guy eventually.

It started off that people only saw me as someone who’d only want deep relationships with people aka only there to get a girlfriend and nothing else. Which I guess later on, because of the lack of meaningful friendships of either sex, I did only want a relationship.

Elementary school talk: “oh this is girl talk. Please leave.”
Internal me: “but I’m not a boy...”

Middle school girls projected that all guys were just perverts.

High school I was alone because my male friends didn’t interest themselves in pop music. I guess before it was cool to do so anyway. My childhood severely lacked the SJW mindset that today we’re so engrossed in. The millennials I grew up with were so ... uninterested in the minorities you could say.

So really making any friends, I was just lonely and sad and anyone who gave me a chance, I was like a little child finally seeing my savior. And probably in their eyes they’re like: “the fuck is this weakling?”

That was the point where I just felt so alone. Maybe I got sparkly eyes and guys/gals didn’t want to tolerate someone who was so ... idk feeling oriented.. that wasn’t romantic.

Idk if a true love exists anymore for me. I feel like I was sent here to go beyond this whole social letter we have as a society. But then I guess people point their metaphorical fingers at me like wow how dare you have such high standards looking for someone outside of you. Well to be very frank, the average everyday person hasn’t ever given me a chance. Be it woman or man. It’s always something I have to benefit them.

Girls who will accept me for my “queer” status still don’t get, I don’t want to be the dominant person in the relationship. In fact the only time they liked me is when all I was, was just tough and independent. And when I finally open up to them, they’re like uh....... (though they will never say it but their behavior certainly says so) “I liked it better when you were taking more of a male role. And they’ll get upset and frustrated with me if I don’t assume my male role. They’ll just lose interest.

It seems like I have to go to some fucking kink society to find a woman who likes some person for just being themselves. Which is ironic because kink societies are not really that way either.

I remember a girl asked me in high school: “why do you wear tight pants in school?”

“... because it makes me feel secure.”

*disgusted and walked away even though she was the fucking leader of a club in hs who was all about supporting the needy*

I do get more socially comfortable now that I hardly share any emotion with others to this day. But it’s sad as soon as I show the vulnerable side of me. I’m just now not their business anymore. This isn’t just from man to man who establish male norms but often women to men as well.

“Why aren’t you a male?” It seems like I’m even poked by people who swing left on the political spectrum.
 

Cellmold

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You know, I think that (the bolded) is really the crux of it. It's not women or men who are intrinsically bad because of their gender, although I've found that the shittiest people tend to act in ways that are more specific to their sex, which I think makes it really easy for someone on the receiving end of that to think one sex is the problem. I don't claim to share or know your exact experiences although I've had similar experiences at the hands of both malicious men and malicious women, so I really tend more toward a general misanthropy than a specific misogyny or self-loathing misandry. It's important to be an equal opportunity hater, I'm glad you seem to get that.

Yeah.

I mean, frankly I'm not even so cynical all the time, at least not as much as my final statements implied. It's just I am so often reminded of those little moments in the day to day when people, somewhat unconsciously I think, pass on their stresses and strains to others in the form of petty inclinations. It's the easy way out and people will nearly always take the easy way if it's offered, particularly if they are (or feel to be) beaten down and drained by life.

I'm not any different really, even if I strive to be.

Although, every so often, I come across those rare few people who, at first glance, seem to demonstrate in what appear to be really quite small and seemingly insignificant ways (and there is a lesson in there about the importance of small but powerful gestures), that you can be capable of shouldering a burden and owning up to your portion of responsibility for the creation of the problems you experience. And those people can be disarmingly unassuming & they aren't necessarily the most intelligent amongst us.

It reminds me of what Oliver Sacks wrote in his book "The man who mistook his wife for a hat" with regards to a patient called Rebecca:

"When I first saw her - clumsy, uncouth, all-of-a-fumble - I saw her merely, or wholly, as a causality, a broken creature, whose neurological impairments I could pick out and dissect with precision: a multitude of apraxias and agnosias, a mass of sensorimotor impairments and breakdowns, limitations of intellectual schemata and concepts similar (by Piaget's criteria) to those of a child of eight. 'A poor thing', I said to myself, with perhaps a 'splinter skill', a freak gift, of speech; a mere mosaic of higher cortical functions, Piagetian schemata - most impaired.

The next time I saw her, it was all very different. I didn't have her in a test situation, 'evaluating' her in a clinic. I wandered outside, it was a lovely spring day, with a few minutes in hand before the clinic started, and there I saw Rebecca sitting on a bench, gazing at the April foliage quietly, with obvious delight. Her posture had none of the clumsiness which had so impressed me before. Sitting there, in a light dress, her face calm and slightly smiling, she suddenly brought to mind one of Chekov's young women - Irene, Anya, Sonya, Nina - seen against the backdrop of a Chekovian cherry orchard. She could have been any young woman enjoying a beautiful spring day. This was my human, as opposed to my neurological vision."


He later spoke to her after hearing the news of her grandmother passing, someone who had cared deeply for her and been there her entire life:

'I called on her as soon as I heard the news, and she received me, in her small room in the now empty house. "Why did she have to go?" she cried; and added, "I'm crying for me, not for her". Then, after an interval, "Grannie's all right. She's gone to her Long Home."

"I'm so cold", she cried, huddling into herself. "Cold as death, she was a part of me; part of me died with her".

She was complete in her mourning - tragic and complete - there was absolutely no sense of her being then a 'mental defective'. After half an hour, she unfroze, regained some of her warmth and animation, said "It is winter. I feel dead. But I know the spring will come again".'


This is someone so neurologically impaired that she would score below 60 on IQ tests administered to her & spend over 5 hours struggling to work out how to open a door. Yet I find the expression and recognition of grief, the possessiveness and sadness of being the one left behind to mourn the one who has died and the realisation that at some point, this pain will, if not go completely, then at least become less so, to be fascinating.

Sentimental or not, I think Sacks was struck by it the same way it struck me, that this wisdom about grief, nature, death & so on, is something that I think is very necessary in order to remind us & expose our ungrateful day to day cruelties. Such people can be stupid or clever, outgoing or withdrawn, it's a phenomena that doesn't seem bound by any strict pattern of nature, other than it is a characteristic in itself.

And I always know when I've met people like that, particularly when I am in the grip of some force of arrogant self-pity & lashing out, when they say something that completely disarms that mood without intending or gloating about it.

And then I have to remind myself of the importance of that moment & why it stopped me so suddenly in my cruel tracks.
 

Crabs

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You should know by now that the ladies taste better.

1508.gif
 

Luigi

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Do ladies really taste better? idk :shrug:
 

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sx/sp
In my small, run down mining town, people don't have much to do. So what they tend towards are fleeting distractions to pass the time, most notably casual sex and drinking. The culture where I grew up was that if you hadn't had sex by around 13-14 there was something wrong with you. Now this is an extremely unusual localised assumption (which I didn't realise at the time) and so being a sensitive and nervous person with a proclivity to overreact, I wasn't exactly a prize catch and I became very isolated.
Any time I started to become intimate or close with a girl around this age, eventually she would elicit (and it only happened a few times, though it still hurts) the information of my virginity and then use that as a weapon of ridicule, with the only motivation I could perceive was that this was just for kicks. Now it's fair to say that without context and coming from only myself that this is a biased sample, nevertheless I can only insist on it's veracity and whether or not I was a gullible fool might depend on your view of the average boy going through puberty from the ages of 13 - 16

I'm sure it's a localized assumption, but I don't know how unusual it really is. I recall being 10 or 11 on the playground, witnessing some other kids insult each other. One called the other a virgin. I didn't know what the word meant, and asked my parents. I had no idea it had anything to do with sex, and when they told me what it meant, I was embarrassed that it did have to do with sex and flabbergasted that someone would use it as an insult. I think that by the time people are late teens, at least when I was one, there's cultural shame in being a virgin, whether you're male or female.
 
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