Gaywallet (they/it) @ Gaywallet @beehaw.org

I'm gay

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I used to think that SEO only affected people trying to sell products directly. It's sad how badly it's polluted the ability to find any content at all on the internet, as it's cheap enough and easy enough to do at this point that they're just trying to sell on ad revenue/clicks.

I mean that was Tate's whole deal, was it not? Not surprising it's expanding

Both happen! It's just work on phage therapy had to reinvent itself in the last decade or so and modern techniques are only just reaching maturity. We're gonna see a lot more development in this space over the next decade.

I would say that's their story to tell

There's so much to unpack in this really short article it's hard to know where to start. At the very top we should probably start with male and female socialization and focus and how it leads to very different media consumption patterns. In broad strokes men are socialized to pay attention to action and resolution. Problems are to be solved. Objects are to be built. Efficiency is to be analyzed. The focus is often on the non human elements in life or the measurable and tangible things. Women, on the other hand, are socialized to pay more attention to the human element. It's no surprise, given their historical role as caretakers of the home, the family, and the community. Problems aren't just to be solved, there's a need to manage the emotional needs of the parties as well. It's less about the objects you build but more about how and who you build them with. Efficiency isn't very important if everyone is unhappy as a result of changing the process.

This difference in socialization is likely behind the differences in media consumption. Men tend to consume more media that is action oriented and women tend to consume more media that is about human interactions. Romance novels, for example, are much more heavily consumed by women than men and the reverse is true for something much less focused on the human such as books on business. There is something special about the topic of romance, however, as gender disparity among readers of romance novels is highest, and while I couldn't find any statistics on relationships blogs and advice media, I suspect strong disparity among gender in this space as well.

Starting from this space it's easy to see how a straight male blog on relationships is just generally speaking not a very likely thing to exist in the first place. However, this begs the question of why the author is curious why it doesn't exist in the first place. The author is not a straight male and it's fairly clear there most likely isn't a very large straight male audience for this sort of thing, so why ask about it's existence? There's a few main trails of thought here that I think are relevant.

The first is that the author enjoys this kind of content and is curious why men aren't interested in the same content. I think this is adequately answered by the above, at least in broad strokes. Another thought in the same vein is that they're transferring what they get out of relationship blogs to the needs of men - that whatever they get out of the writings from women on sex and dating is something that they believe men need or can see how some of them might desire the same thing. To an extent, I think this can also be explained by the reasons above. A cisgender heterosexual romantic/sexual relationship consists of both a man and a woman. If, in general, men are more concerned about outcome (acquiring a relationship, being successful in a relationship, etc.) than they are about the human element (how a relationship makes you feel, the moments that make a relationship special, etc.) then a man might be able to get just as much if not more information from reading a blog about sex and dating written from the perspective they are missing. If they are trying to understand the needs of potential partners, there's no better place to find them then in the thoughts of people who resemble them. A male's perspective wouldn't have a particularly high utility to them, except perhaps when its dressed as a set of action items such as how to pick up women which almost always veers into the territory that the author and many other individuals rightfully consider as toxic (such as pickup artists).

Another potential trail of thought is that the author sees straight men in need of education based on her experiences interacting with them and has decided that it's good to have both male and female role models and is struggling to find the male ones. This would be a transference of an observed educational need. I think it's important to note that this need may be one sided in that it's implied that men would also desire this education. It's also important to note that there's a level of broad strokes thinking here which I think one can rightfully deduce as well as specific strokes which apply more to the individuals likes, wants, and desires and is subject to their own personality. A good example of this is how courtship should play out. Some people feel strongly that the heterosexual male needs to initiate courtship and others might be perfectly fine with the woman initiating. The relative importance of say tips on how to initiate that courtship, where it's appropriate to initiate it, how long one might need/want to know someone before initiating, what words to use when initiating and so on and so forth vary on a personal basis. Seeing a need on one or more aspects of this could represent a broader general need among men as a whole, or simply reflect the social circumstances of where the person exists, how attractive they are, their persuasion towards this kind of behavior and just pure happenstance. I suspect there's a fair chunk of this trail of thought by the author given that they mention a 'so-called crisis in male emotional communication.'

Of course none of these thoughts even begin to touch on a lot of the technical difficulties with respect to writing on this subject as a straight male. I think the author does a good job of bringing up the most salient points of power dynamics and an online audience and how that is likely to amplify its effect to a straight male writer more than a female one, but I don't think they do a good job of mentioning how badly some of these gender dynamics already affect women who do write on this subject. She mentions that women are allowed to denigrate men in print, but fails to mention how articles like that often draw in a lot of negative male criticism even when the author does so in good faith and is sure to couch their words in a way to make it very clear they are speaking in broad strokes and not about men as a whole. The same would be exponentially worse for men writing about toxic women, requiring an even higher emotional burden before sharing their experience which also would undoubtedly be met by some irate individuals on the internet claiming that the author must be sexist and a womanizer. If men are in a crisis of emotional communication, why should the author expect that they have the desire to expend what little emotional energy they have left on the burden of attempting to write about sex and dating in a way which draws more positive attention than negative?

Ultimately these trails of thoughts are different enough that I'm not sure they're all served by simply having more straight men write about sex and dating. While I do think the inclusion of more media of this nature is good for the world in general, the educational need would probably not be particularly well served by this given that straight male consumerism of relationship focused media is fairly low. Scientific and educational books are more likely to meet the eyes of straight male readers, and may do a lot more for teaching them how to have better a sex and dating life than a blog ever would. If we're focused on disparities among consumption habits by gender, de-gendering the socialization of children might result in less disparity. Some of these may not even be problems at all, but simply a reflection of human diversity as it loosely correlates with genetic expression.

David Bronner, one of the grandsons of Dr. Bronner, is a fantastically interesting person with a lot of really charming eccentricities I think you were trying to capture when you said 'crazy talk'. I've met him a few times at medical psychedelics conferences, he was introduced to psychedelics at burning man and has bought fully into how it's expanded their mind and has helped them heal.

I think a good model for a dating community would be the /r/daddit subreddit. Here’s men communicating emotions in a male-oriented space, getting helpful support and feedback from a welcoming community.

I think this is a very salient point. Most of the positive male content on social media are people in long term committed relationships with their partner, and are focused on how they uplift and adore their partner. Or conversely, it's men helping other men to do things like lift heavy things and put them back down again. Helping others at the expense of yourself, your time, your emotional energy, etc. is what is often celebrated in men's spaces. Women are allowed to celebrate themselves, their strength and their struggles in a way that is rarely afforded to men, likely because of power imbalances laid out by the author.

The criticism tends to mostly occur in spaces where masculinity is equated with some form of sexism or bigotry or flaunting of power. The sexism part and the imbalance of power with regards to gender is what makes writing about dating and romantic feelings so tricky. Some topics would become off limits for fear of being associated with toxic behavior - a woman writing about sexual promiscuity might be celebrated for embracing feminism, sex worker rights, and so on, whereas a straight man writing about sexual promiscuity would likely be labeled a womanizer. Similarly, complaining about the toxic behavior of men is often allowed (although it sure garners a lot of highly engaged male responses) or even celebrated when it's done tactfully enough, whereas criticism of toxic behavior of women in dating by a straight man would be much more widely criticized and quickly labeled as incel behavior.

It leaves a really small needle to thread, or an exceptionally verbose and emotionally intelligent individual to thread it. Whereas a woman might get away with more generalizations about toxic male behavior and have it generally understood to not be a statement which is intended to represent all male behavior, a man decrying a similar pattern would likely have to spend a few paragraphs talking about imbalances of power in gender dynamics and make it clear that pointing out this behavior is not meant to represent an opinion which applies to all women they encounter. It's a lot of emotional bandwidth and labor to need to perform in order to share relationship woes and stories which seems like a rather high cost of entry to me.

The journal article is free on pub med https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6248753/

They've happened here in the open in the communities mentioned but also extensively on our discord and matrix

I will be honest with you, I do not think that it would be a good use of your time. This has been unfolding for a long time and its clear that there are both coding and ideological issues with lemmy as a platform (there's plenty of discussions of this which have unfolded in the chat and beehaw support communities which I would suggest reading up on). However, if you are committed to making lemmy as a whole a better place, here's a truncated list of some of the still existing issues:

• There are not enough federation options to deal effectively with current problems, at minimum:
  1. One-way federation to protect our site culture
  2. Exemption from all feed & media reject to handle pornography
• Purging posts and comments does not purge associated images
• Reports are not sent to the right places (example: we don't get reports about our users' off-instance activity and reports are not sent to moderators which are off-instance)
• The modlog does not work in a chronological fashion and does not allow to filter actions by instance or per community
• Moderators are exposed to graphic images because a banned user's description is still visible
• If you are a mod of a community, and you get banned from that community you mod, you can still take mod actions
• If you get site-banned from an instance and you are from another instance, you can still post on the community and people from your instance can see and interact with your posts

Thanks for elaborating. It's tough to decide where is 'too far' and when someone is behaving in a way that if left unchecked results in a slow decline into a space where nice people no longer want to participate. We tend to err on the side of caution because we've seen how evaporative cooling can ruin a nice place, but with strong checks/balances to try and reduce/minimize inappropriately stepping in, as well as inappropriate deletions and bans. We're human though, we make mistakes, and ultimately it's important to us that we create a space we haven't been able to find elsewhere and sometimes there just aren't enough people with enough emotional bandwidth to do the messy work of differentiating between someone who's just stubborn and misinformed, and someone who's being malicious (let alone issues that crop up with neurodivergence and not understanding what nice behavior is).

I truly do wish we had enough bandwidth to provide more cordiality and grace to everyone. Speaking of which, if you or anyone else who does have emotional bandwidth, extra time, and passion for seeing places like this exist on the internet and wishes to step in and help us stick to our principles, we'd love the help 💜

These are among the platforms we are testing

I actually don’t think Beehaw is great at this currently, with the strong caveat that I also believe it is much, much better and more earnest in its endeavor to do so than any other alternative I’m aware of. But I fear further seclusion would be a move in the wrong direction.

I'm curious in what ways you think we could improve? Would you care to expand upon this?

We simply need a lot more moderation tools than the current set of lemmy devs are willing to create, and many of them see some of the requests as frivolous or not in line with their personal beliefs on how the website mechanics should work. There's also a metric ton of bugs, potential legal issues with how the platform deals with federation and malicious and abhorrent material, and the issue of the code of choice this website runs on not being a particularly popular or easy to pick up coding language meaning less access to talent to fix or work on new things. We've been talking about potentially moving platforms for some time now and with time there are just more discoveries of new issues.

Just stopping in to say this is a really well thought out response and you've more or less nailed all the salient points. We greatly appreciate thoughtful feedback like this, thank you for being a part of our community 💜

Any company that makes a pledge with no funding, no metrics, or otherwise no way of ensuring or tracking progress is pretty much always doing it performatively

I get that you're trying to look out for OP but you probably shouldn't liken non Western spiritual processes to 'another cult thing' in case there are people for whom magic is an important part of their life.

It never changes no matter what I say, so I gave up asking it.

Apologies for being unclear. I meant within reason. How can another tolerant and nice stranger misinterpret what you have said. What information might they be lacking, as the entire context that they have of you may be the very post you are making.

Nice people usually aren’t kind. Nice people are usually white neurotypicals who can dance the dance of social norms and portray themselves as “the good guys” no matter what they’re doing, which is a power that allows them to commit all manner of evils unnoticed.

It sounds like you're getting at the concept of civility, often used arbitrarily to exclude others. This also dips a bit into white fragility and policing the voices of minority folks. In our philosophy posts which can be found in our documents, we try our best to outline what kind of behavior is considered nice. The guise of civility, that is to say, using really nice words means nothing if the intent is malicious. You can use really nice words to say really heinous messages, and we don't allow that on Beehaw. Intolerance is not tolerated. You're welcome to say all the mean and nasty shit you want in response to someone spouting Nazi rhetoric (although please report them too so we can ban them).

However, the way you word it, in specific this part

People who will swear at me to my face and defend my rights with the same ferocity

is a bit more difficult to give a definitive answer on. We want people to be both nice and kind, but we also recognize, as I have stated, that we are all human and we get emotional and we are imperfect and we want to allow space for all kinds of people here. However, being online you are going to run across a lot of people who know nothing about you. All they can see is your words, and to them it doesn't matter whether you would defend their rights with the same ferocity as you are swearing at them, they can only see the swearing. You can't just say that you'll defend their rights either, because you have no way to prove it and someone could easily say the same to justify their shitty, intolerant words. This is why we use interpretable language and our rules are very simple. You need to recognize that you are posting in a community, with other individuals, and a certain level of peace is necessary for that to work. There are times where you will have to be the bigger person, or simply not bring certain discussions to the community because it is simply not the right place for them.