Could be worse, my older brother had his fiance dump him and he went from feminist democrat to manosphere MAGA.
So after he lost he committed to losing? What would you call someone like that?
an Incel. The manosphere lures them in by making all the problems belong to the woman.
They prey on insecurity. I would have been easy prey for those assholes if I was just a bit dumber.
Yeah, same. i'd have gone down the pipeline shouldn't have I watched contra points video on incels
We all make mistakes.
My brother is pretty dumb but very persuasive so he can pass as an "intellectual". His gateway drug to the manosphere was Jordan Peterson.
Yup, or a bit younger. I'm 40, so I was 28 when gamergate kicked off this whole online misogynist grifter ecosystem (which fed into and became a component of what we'd call the alt-right a few years later.)
By that point I'd already had my first few bad breakups and rejections and had grown up, and had made some good platonic friendships with women, so I wasn't vulnerable to it. But if it'd happened when I was like 23 or 24 and I hadn't had those chances to grow and mature yet? It might've been a lot different.
It's much easier to blame bad luck and personal failings on others. Growth and maturity takes work.
vulnerable, insecure
I know we all know what an incel is, but these words are a better descriptor I think If you want folks to come back, and not scare them further down the hole
Depending on how far out he's gone, be kinder to him. I have had a few friends who went into the manosphere after their breakups. And, some of them came back. During our chats, one of the things that kept coming back was how easy the manosphere makes it to channel their anger.
For someone in an emotionally vulnerable state, it can get hard to figure out when they moved from, "Fuck her, I want to focus on myself" to "its all women's fault".
Tbf, couple of them really kept going deeper into that cesspool and now I have no contact with them 😅, so ymmv.
I'm in a weird state with him currently. See I was going in the opposite trajectory, I used to be one of those atheism-is-my-personality skeptics and a "rational" centrist in high school. Around the same time my brother was going down the pipeline I discovered I was trans and reconnecting with my emotions opened my eyes on a lot of subjects.
He didn't have an explosive reaction but he insisted I postpone HRT until we "know for sure". I said he's welcome to help me explore the topic but I was still doing HRT until I'm convinced otherwise. He never got back to me which just tells me he would've dragged his feet and put my transition on pause.
Shortly after that incident I moved to another state for unrelated reasons and he has not once called me. After 2 years I visited my hometown for a week around Christmas and he didn't even stop by to see me.
To be honest I don't know if he's even still manosphere MAGA, I know next to nothing about him since we last spoke. I could make an effort to contact him myself but after not even saying hi during Christmas when he knew I was visiting I don't know if I even care anymore.
After 2 years I visited my hometown for a week around Christmas and he didn’t even stop by to see me.
For my sanity, I am going to assume you tried reaching out to him during your visit and he didn't reply. Communication is a two way street.
Everything about the trip was discussed at length in the family group chat he was a part of, and the entire rest of the family showed up for Christmas.
I know I could reach out directly but if he's still the same type of guy I last spoke to I don't know if I want to reconnect.
Jesus, he really wanted to prove the Joker right I guess
one bad day?
My condolences.
Thinking of my partner is terrible motivation when I’m mid-set. It just makes me want to leave and go hang out. The transactional view of relationships feels pretty gross. Which is the point, but verbalizing it helps me see where it gets weird
The kid may still come around some day, but it's probably going to get worse before it gets better.
I have no idea what it feels like to be a horny teenage boy roiding up to get muscles, but I can say for a fact that messaging girls and having nothing to show but a muscled-up body and roid-induced anger isn't going to work the way he seems to think it will. When I used dating sites, seeing a guy's shirtless, muscled profile pic was always a turn off, if not a red flag in itself. Include the picture if you want, but put it amongst all the other normal pics you might have, because seeing it as a default pic smells of desperation. If that's what you want to put out, don't be surprised when your only responses are from shallow people (if you're lucky) and (if you're unlucky) catfishers that can sense your need for validation from a mile away.
This isn't hating on muscle bros. I'm sure there are plenty of good guys that just like exercise, or who get caught up in the idea that big muscles are what women want to see. But when they get burned by shallow women and/or scammers that just want to use them, it often reinforces misogynist beliefs, making the cycle of manosphere nonsense harder to escape from.
When I used dating sites, seeing a guy's shirtless, muscled profile pic was always a turn off, if not a red flag in itself.
I always felt this way too. Not only did I assume they would nit pick my body, because they seem to want perfection, I couldnt help but imagine they would at some point scare me if they ever got upset with me.
A friend of mine had a 17 year old son who just got broken up with for the first time. My son, was only 5 at the time, but the teen said to me, "make sure you teach him how to handle a breakup, I wasnt expecting any of this". He shortly after tried to tell me the earth is flat, with split screen tiktoks as his reference. So, we know what road he was on. The kid was angry, confused, and hurt. It made me very sad. Ive now opened the conversation with my 13 year old about dating and break ups just recently. Im do my best to prepare him.
The chances you meet your life partner in the first shot is SO low. Everyone gets broken up with at some point, best to be prepared for it.
The gym bros would do a lot better if they focused on full body, rather than gains on certain muscle groups. No girl really wants a guy whose pecs are bigger than her breasts.
No one cares how much you can bench other than other gym bros, it's such a weird exercise to focus on. Why not curl or squat weight? At least some women are into big legs or biceps.
I like the implication that women with big breasts are more willing to date gymbros because they still have bigger breasts than the pec, and that women with small breasts are relegated to dating only scrawny guys. Hilarious mental picture.
Ha! Yes, my husband works out heavy, I am small of bust, and yep he is more stacked than I am.
We think it's funny though and small boobs is his preference, nice for me.
He does say though that if he could go back in time he would tell his younger middle aged self not to bulk, just focus on strength. Having put on the weight, he cannot seem to lose it and now wants to be leaner as he gets older. It's not practical to maintain that much muscle mass, and if you try to ramp down you usually end up fat not smaller.
One of my best friends in college told me basically verbatim what I wrote in my comment. She said that she was glad she was a D cup and on the shorter side because it meant she could date guys who go to the gym and her pool of options was big because of her height.
So I think it might happen more often than you think. Probably not as big of a thing as height differential, but seems to be a thing from my personal experience.
Because that's seen as less manly.
Which is kinda the opposite of ironic, because obviously, manly things are things men like.
Imagine a man's reaction to a breakup would be to get into things women like, like exfoliating, trimming your eyebrows, etc. People would probably be like "He's so much better without her".
When I used dating sites, seeing a guy's shirtless, muscled profile pic was always a turn off, if not a red flag in itself.
So bizarre that people would do that. When I was single and on social media and on dating websites (before smartphones), I did want to show off a bit that I worked out, but I had the discretion to, like, wear a T-shirt or a polo in the right lighting to show that I had strong looking forearms and a hint that there's something pretty solid under that shirt. Actually taking my shirt off would have felt way too desperate, and besides, just isn't something that I'd naturally have a picture of myself in.
Just seems to be a mix of validation-seeking insecurity and confidence in one's own muscles. Seems like a lot to unpack, and that combination probably doesn't really send a message that "becoming intimate with me is going to be a rewarding and fulfilling time."
Pics with a pet cat were always green flags, and pics doing an activity
The most attention I ever got from a pic on an online dating profile was when my main pic was me on a unicycle.
Activities, yes! Shows you have interests/a personality
Better get some better lighting in my basement so I can get good pictures of the empty beer cans at my computer desk.
Dungeon Crawler Carl montage coming right up.....
Is Omegle still a thing?
No, It's likely the greentext is a few years old
Most likely, but there are also other sites that do the same thing. Last time I tried it seemed a shadow of what it used to be. There were always bots but far more than there used to be.
It was shut down a while ago, but apparently the domain and trademarks were sold at auction and the new owner is planning a relaunch of some sort
Anon's brother be like:
Guys need to learn how to deal with their emotions. Repressing them does not make them go away.
Go to therapy. It saves and improves lifes.
It's really easy to say "go to therapy," but that ignores the realities of accessing it.
It's not cheap. There's long waits involved. It's very likely your first therapist or even first few therapists won't be a good fit and you'll need to shop around. Sometimes you get lucky and you find a good fit on the first try. And sometimes you find a hundred bucks in a gutter, too.
I view "get therapy" as a mid-term goal. It's something that you should be working on but it's not something that fixes things right now.
Off topic, but what do I do when my kids go through their first break up? I never asked my parents for romantic advice—which I think is quite common in Asian families such as mine—so I would have no idea what to say if one day one of my boys came to me crying about some stupid little girl that broke their hearts. Any Lemmy dads with sound advice?
Anon forgot about the posting of random incel-coded anime "motivation" clips on their social media.
This is a place to share greentexts and witness the confounding life of Anon. If you're new to the Greentext community, think of it as a sort of zoo with Anon as the main attraction.
Be warned:
If you find yourself getting angry (or god forbid, agreeing) with something Anon has said, you might be doing it wrong.
