I wasn’t intending to say we only like muscles as an indicator of lifestyle. I was saying they’re also an indicator of lifestyle, so even if we are attracted to them we may still pass because it doesn’t match the kind of personality we prefer, and personality is generally a lot more important to us than appearance (generally, but not always.)
For instance, I find muscles attractive. I like that they show somebody’s interested in staying healthy, but I don’t generally date muscular men simply because I’m not into the fit lifestyle. I much prefer a guy who’s more likely to join me playing my favorite games or watching my favorite movies, because I’m a nerd and those are the things I like, and a guy who’s a little chubbier tends to be exactly that kind of guy.

I can’t speak for every woman, but I can speak for my own experiences and report based on the things women I know have said. For me and those I’ve spoken to, we may like muscles, but the things you need to do to get those muscles often aren’t as attractive and cancel it out. Like, if you’re getting muscles by going to the gym every day, that’s only gonna attract women who are enthusiastic about the gym. If you get them from farm work, you’ll attract women enthusiastic about farm life.
That’s why a lot of us like dad bods so much. It’s not that it’s inherently more attractive, it’s that it’s a body type achievable by living the kind of life style people who’re into that enjoy.
In other words, yes, muscles can be attractive, but not nearly as attractive as shared hobbies and interests, and it just happens quite often muscles can be a quick indicator that you probably don’t share many.

Simultaneously power mommy and disaster bisexual. Except the disaster part only applies around women and the power mommy part only applies around men. I don’t understand this phenomenon but I enjoy it.
I think it’s best demonstrated in the difference between how I confessed to my 2 latest crushes, one man and one woman. The dude, I was like “Yo, I like you. You in?” with zero hesitation.
The woman? Stuttered for 10 minutes straight until she figured out what I was trying to do and helped me through it.
They both said no, but they’re both very good friends of mine now, so it worked out.

I have a similar issue as somebody with a case of dysphagia worsened by certain foods, which happen to be 90% of what you’re supposed to eat to be healthy (suspected to be a combination of eosinophilic esophagitis and another unknown condition.)
The amount of times on various social media platforms I’ve been told to “suck it up and just eat them anyway” as if my condition isn’t real and that won’t cause me to choke to death is absurd.

I’m beginning to wonder what romance is as well, after gaining close friends, especially one very close friend, who considers everything I once considered romantic to be just friendly interaction. That was kinda the catalyst for me to start wondering what it is a relationship can even offer me if I can have friends like this anyway.

Ah, don’t worry, I wasn’t trying to defend myself. More trying to understand my own feelings via comparison. Because I know that for some reason I do still want and enjoy romantic relationships, but I don’t know why, since I get so much from my friends. It makes it difficult to know when somebody would be a good romantic partner for me because I don’t know what I want from them in the first place, as evidence by the fact that all my exs have ended up making better friends for me than partners.

I think it’s a bit of both in my case. I have a lot of popular friends, and that happens to turn a lot of heads my way and make some people insecure around me, but I also act unintentionally rude quite often, which I’ve been making an effort to fix, and I’ve been told by some people that it does make me look stuck up until people get to know me and realize I’m not rude, just very autistic.

I do have that resting bitch face (if you can see my profile picture, that’s evidence enough.) I also have a habit of being unintentionally rude on account of autism. It causes most people who interact with me to really quickly turn away because I give off the vibe that I don’t wanna be around them, even when I am enjoying their company. I end up being unintentionally popular anyway though because most of my friends are very popular, on account of them being so social even my unintentional rudeness couldn’t turn them away. And naturally having a lot of popular friends turns heads in my direction as well.

As far as sexual reasons go, I don’t really need that myself. I’m not exactly asexual, I’m sexually attracted to people, I just find it’s easy enough to take care of that need without a partner.

Losing friends to relationships though, I haven’t ever had that happen. I just become friends with their partner too and absorb them into my friend group.

Although I found out that way through some of them that apparently I give off a really intimidating aura. Apparently I give off the vibes of “the popular girl who refuses to associate herself with the peasants” as somebody said. They tend to be pretty shocked I had any interest in being friends with them at all.

I can see that perspective, and maybe subconsciously it is that stability I’m looking for, especially because I’ve gone through 2 separate traumatic events that resulted in me losing every friend I had, the second, the only person who stayed with me was my ex, who I was dating at the time.

I guess though I kinda feel like I have achieved some level of stability even without a relationship. That ex I just mentioned is still a good friend, and he and his girlfriend talk constantly about trying to move closer to me, because at this point they both consider me more of family than just a friend.

And it’s like that for most of my close friends. I’ve got some that come and go, but my tightknit inner circle seems here to stay at least, at least for a very long time. I can see the appeal of wanting somebody to be there for my entire life though. Granted, the only people I can think of that I want that out of are the friends I already have, but on account of the fact that my friend group is practically composed purely of exs and people who’ve rejected me romantically already, it seems I’ll have to look elsewhere. Although that’s kind of a sad prospect to me, that I don’t get to choose any of them to stay by my side forever.

Men being hurt by women is not an excuse for men to hurt women in return. It is possible for both groups to acknowledge they’ve been hurt by each other and work toward a solution. Pushing “they hurt me so they deserve to be hurt” helps nobody, especially when both groups are doing it.
That’s what I’m complaining about. This mindset that being hurt by men/women completely absolves you of the responsibility to allow them to feel safe. Any space dominated by women will be filled with “Well men are responsible for the majority of violence and sexual assault so actually you deserve to feel like shit.” every time a man speaks up. Any space dominated by men will be filled with “Well it makes me feel bad when you discuss the repercussions of your trauma so shut the fuck up.” every time a woman speaks up.
We can have a place where both genders can talk freely about the way these things effect them and the changes we need to make to fix them. The issue is people are only pretending to want such a space. What they really want is the other gender to sit down, shut up, and agree with them uncritically. Because in their head they’re definitely in the right and they’d rather not be confronted with alternate viewpoints from people who have lived experiences they’ll never have.

Worse, as a trans woman, you’d think people would be more willing to accept our viewpoints because trans people are some of few people who can have both lived experiences. But no, our experiences are only valid if they 100% allign with the men or women we share them with. Otherwise we’re brushed off like somehow our experience doesn’t count because we had the wrong experience to reaffirm their biases.
On Lemmy, dominated by men, when I say I fear women due to my lived childhood experience as a boy, being taken advantage of while I was still too young to fight back, I’m met with outpourings of support. People talk about why “this is why trans people’s life experience matters.” When I mention later in the same conversation that I also fear men due to my lived experience as a woman and not being able to fight back due the the hormonal muscle loss, suddenly, my experiences don’t count anymore. People think they get to pick and choose which of my experiences were valid and valuable and which aren’t based on whatever reaffirms what they already believe. And of course you can bet the exact same thing happens the other way around when I tell the same story to women.

But what’s going on here isn’t something within the control of most people. When you’re abused by somebody you don’t choose to fear those people, you fear them because that’s what your brain is wired to do to avoid repeated trauma. Like I said, therapy is the solution, but only part of the solution. The other part is fixing the issue causing the trauma in the first place. Men aren’t being victimized by the women who fear them, they’re being victimized by the other men who caused that fear.
And I want to be clear, because I’ve realized at this point that this isn’t obvious anymore in today’s world, fear is not an excuse for misandry. At the same time, fear of men is not misandry. Somebody saying they’d rather pick the bear should be met with “oh, we should fix the issue causing them to fear men more than bears,” not “oh, they should fear bears more.”
I also want to be clear that this isn’t even a gendered issue despite the fact that it’s been made into one. A man who’s been abused by women and would rather pick the bear should also be met with compassion and “how can we reduce the number of female abusers?” I’ve actually been abused by women too. In fact, more often than I have men. I want to be clear that even though this discussion has been about men specifically, I feel the exact same way about women. That we still need to be compassionate to their victims and accept that the people who traumatized them are the problem, not their trauma.
Fearing somebody is not an action you perform, it’s a state you’re in.

I hope this doesn’t sound aggressive, but unless you’re a man, you never had to venture very far on Lemmy to experience misogyny. If you ever mentioned you were a woman in any of the major instances and communities in any context except “I’m a woman and here’s what I don’t like about other women,” you were gonna get misogynistic replies and a shocking amount of downvotes. It’s just what happens when any internet community is dominated by a single gender I guess.
Lemmy’s always been great about almost every other social issue, except sometimes trans issues and neurodivergence if you stepped out of the communities for it, but women’s issues have always been an absolute train wreck around here.

I realized this a long time ago when I made a simple complaint that I thought women’s issues were downplayed a lot here, and in response I was downvoted, ridiculed, people demanded sources for my claims then claimed my sources were invalid for whatever reason they could pull out of their ass, and one person even, and trigger warning on this, told me I should die giving birth to a rapists baby.
I’ve even picked up a downvote stalker during the course of this whole bear thing. Same time every day somebody goes through and downvotes every single new thing on my profile.

So yeah, Lemmy’s never been a great place for women. I only continue to participate because I’m disabled and have so few connections to the outside world that I’ll take anything now.

How about you miss the entire point and get aggressive for no reason?
Seriously, what kind of response to “I’ve been traumatized by men” is “you should traumatized by bears too?”

IRL, sure, but on Lemmy that’s not what’s happening. If you talk about trauma at the hands of women on Lemmy, you get outpourings of support and people sharing their experiences as well. Which is good. That should be happening everywhere.
The problem is you can’t do the same thing on Lemmy if you were traumatized by men. Instead, you get down voted to hell, get statistics quoted at you as if that’ll magically fix it, and when surprise, still traumatized after the stats, now you must be a misandrist so your trauma is invalid anyway.

I was just hoping one place would exist on the internet where men’s and women’s issues could get equal screen time and be respected just as much, but no, the genders have to be treated like sports teams and if you support one apparently you have to hate the other. I just don’t get why people are like this.

You’re free to disagree, but for me and many others, I’ve been through both, and I’m definitely waaaay more scared of being sexually assaulted again than being beaten half to death again. They have very different effects on your psyche. Physical violence I react far more with anger than fear, even if I was terrified in the moment. When it looks like it’s happening again, my brain says “Fight back.” When I’m afraid of sexual trauma being relived, my brain says “Escape, now. Can’t escape? Submit. Maybe that way they won’t kill you too at least.”

I agree. I never said it was a good mindset. Therapy is definitely something we need to learn to deal with this and think logically. The issue is so absurdly many women have been traumatized by men that the mental health support systems would be so overloaded that it’s just a fact that only a miniscule fraction of women would ever be able to receive help, even if we had absolutely perfect support systems.

So the only solution is to prevent them from getting traumatized in the first place. But the entirety of Lemmy seems really resistant to that conversation. Would rather quote statistics about “oh the average man isn’t likely to assault you” than to accept that the ones who do are dealing enough damage that the problem needs to be dealt with regardless of what the average man is doing.

There’s a serious difference in the level of trauma between these examples, and the level of exposure to the dangers of the counter. Sexual trauma is a hell of a lot more scarring on your psyche than simply being beaten. In addition, at least in the US we’re exposed to gun violence every day as opposed to basically never for bear attacks. Even in other countries with better gun control, you’re dramatically more likely to hear about somebody being shot than you are to hear about somebody being mauled by a bear. Not only that, but it’s really easy to process “get shot, you’re dead.” It’s not as easy to make yourself believe you’re definitely gonna be killed by an animal that has whole guides written on how to survive them.
Those two things combined make your example far from comparable. In addition, I’m not saying in any way that the fear is justified nor that no attempt should be made to fix it, what I’m trying to point out us that people don’t realize how intense a fear it really is when they get offended at people making this choice.

Obviously, therapy is important to learning how to handle that fear and think more logically, but if every woman who needs it sought therapy for this, there just aren’t enough therapists in the entire world to handle the load. Not even close. So a bigger part of the solution is, y’know, making sure women aren’t getting traumatized in the first place. But everybody here wants to skip that part for some reason.

I’ve never been downvoted anywhere for expressing that opinion. Lemmy especially there’s a huge disparity where saying you’d rather be with a bear than a man is unacceptable, but saying you’d rather be with a bear than a woman? A-okay. Source? I’ve said both. Only one was I not attacked for. Guess which?
Seriously, I’ve expressed my trauma regarding men countless times and every time been attacked for it. I’ve expressed my trauma at the hands of women and not a single downvote or attack or disparaging remark any time. Lemmy has a very clear bias.
I wouldn’t have a single problem with men getting upset about this bear thing if they got equally upset when somebody says something similar or worse about women, but they don’t.