It’s all good! I chose Beehaw for a reason, I will always engage in good faith and give you the same benefit of the doubt!

It honestly wasn’t my intention to call anyone out, I just had some concerns based on what I saw. I’m glad we get to continue the conversation 😀

/r/menslib was actively curated to be a safe place for men to discuss men’s issues and allyship without toxicity, and we had a good balance of men, women, and nonbinary posters. Its most active mod was an LGBTQ+ trans individual who was very aggressive about purging trolls and bad actors, and I found it to be a supportive and reasonable place.

Now that I’m looking back, there may have been a /r/mensliberation once upon a time that unfortunately was a copy space of MRA, MGTOW, and Red Pill, but if it did actually exist, I never subbed or participated and it likely would have been quarantined / purged when the others were.

Well, that’ll teach me to read an article and then not engage in the conversation that follows. I’m not a Stoicism stan, as you say, but I have found Practical Stoicism a useful tool in my life, especially when it comes to recognizing and owning my own contributions (positive and negative) to my relationships.

I’ll go back and reply to you in the other thread so we don’t derail this one.

There’s a link in the top 5 posts to a “philosophy” article that cherry picks limited sources in order to misrepresent Stoicism as a philosophy as mere garden variety stoicism in the more modern vernacular, and then uncritically blames it as the source of all toxic masculinity.

Perhaps “misinformation” was a strong accusation, but articles like that are certainly not written in good faith, regardless of the intent in sharing them.

Perhaps I should edit my post to use less inflammatory language. Sorry.

Reddit as a whole was an absolute cesspool, I don’t deny that. But some of us were lucky enough, through lots and lots of searching and trial and error and weeding out of bad eggs, to find a few places where we felt welcomed and accepted without judgment.

I’m sorry that you never did!

Luckily, I think Beehaw and Blahaj are doing an admirable job, and I’m happy to be a part of it!

Oh, thanks for the link. I’m sorry I missed that discussion, but it’s good to know I’m not the only one who’d be interested in a space like this and I’m glad the admins are aware of the need.

This was not at all my experience in the specific community I’m asking about recreating here, which is why I’m asking.

I also don’t agree with the take that extremism of some form or fashion is the only natural course of human discourse. I’m sorry your experience of people has left you with such a negative view of them.

Whether or not you’re ace is only something you can determine. I can only tell you that my own sexuality is…weird.

I personally have issues connecting emotionally with other people. I can feel just fine, but there seems to be an invisible wall between what I feel and how I process my emotions and other human beings. I can show compassion and sympathy and empathy, but it’s purely performative: I don’t feel these things for others.

No amount of therapy has ever been able to fix this. That part of my brain just…doesn’t work that way.

But I still experience attraction. I still want someone to share my life with, romantically. I still like sex, a lot.

Romance, for me, is just finding out what behaviors my partner recognizes as me caring for them and then modeling those behaviors. It can sometimes be a strange cognitive dissonance to have someone who says how loved I make them feel and yet my attachment to them, such as it is, is pure intellectual and sexual, no emotional component at all.

Anyway, sorry for the word vomit, I guess all that was just to say that there’s nothing wrong with not fitting any of the existing labels 100%. Labels are just descriptors, and their only value is in communicating a shared experience to others. If they fit, they fit. If they don’t, no worries. You’re you, and that’s okay.