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.
I’m a guy. when I posted gym shirtless dude bro pics, I got way more attention. Often from women who said on their profiles they ‘weren’t into guys who most gym selfies’.
People’s behavior is what matters. People will chase what gets them rewards. In dating the point is to get sexual attention.
Lots of studies show this, but people on reddit/lemmy seem to live in alternative world I guess. I got zero attention when I was a skinny unmuscled guy, once I started workout out and show it off, I got way more attention. Just like when I point out I went to Harvard, women give me way more attention than if I don’t.
Women are people. People are shallow and mostly care about appearances before everything else, and often it’s all they care about.
Agreed thought, it’s going to get way way worse. Women and men are moving towards these gender extremes the past decade, that have been extremely normalized and seem completely weird compared to how people conceived of gender 20 years ago. Social media is the culprit. A lot of folks increasingly are in this desperation spiral of gender performance and seeing the opposite sex as an enemy they must conquer and control through manipulation and ‘value’ displays.
There’s a big distinction between people’s self-image and their behavior. One’s confidence in telling a story doesn’t come from its adherence to reality, but from its internal coherence. It’s why, in user interviews, you stay away from questions like “how do you generally use feature xyz?” but rather ask things like “tell me about the last time that you did xyz”. If you ask the former, they’ll essentially tell you about their self-image, and how they think of themselves, and with the latter they’ll tell you something that actually happened, and they’re much more likely to tell you something real about their behavior. It’s an unavoidable aspect of talking about yourself, and I’m not calling anyone a liar, but it’s something to keep in mind when talking abt stuff like this.
The issue is that most folks internally can’t see the hypocrisy in their behaviors vs their self-reports, especially in dating.
Hence the prototypical problem of ‘why can’t i find a nice person to date’… and yet when you see them chase/get excited it’s only for folks that treat them like crap. Men and women both. I’ve also had plenty of friends over the years get utterly disgusted by someone treating them well, and had that same reaction in dating experience. I’ve also deliberately treated people like crap, and was shocked and horrific how positively they responded to that treatment.
People largely behave emotionally and irrationally. Though in their heads, it’s all very rational and logical and makes total sense.
And in the moment it’s hard to think about things. I had once date where a woman slapped me in the face for being 5 minutes late. I was so shocked it like just didn’t register, and I went on the date anyway. Took her slugging me in the face with a closed fist, on the next date, for me to register that this person was physically abusive. And of course when I walked away and broke up with them… well came to my home and pounded on my door and tried to threaten me into staying with them. And at that point I realized they were not just abusive or angry but just a total psycho.
Yeah in retrospect it easy to see that I should have never gone on that date after the face slap, but in the moment I simply dismissed it. And she passed it off as ‘playful’ too. etc. etc. Our first two dates prior to all that had been more or less boring and normal and they had been very sweet and fun. But in their mind, I hadn’t upset them and until I did there was no reason to hit me. If only had I had not upset them, they would have no hit me! So simple, all I had to do was not upset them!
The fact your date went straight to violence tells a lot about them. It sounds like they were testing your boundaries. Glad you got away early, I can only imagine what would’ve happened if you’d gotten into a steady relationship then tried to break up. You didn’t just dodge a bullet, it sounds like you dodged a nuclear warhead.
What’s more terrifying to me is how many people think she is justified in that violence, due to their rampant sexism. I’ve told that story and had women and men take her side immediately. That any violence against a man means he must deserve it. But of course, it is never appropriate for a man to hit a woman, no matter the circumstance…
yeah because it’s weird and quirky. i knew a guy who slayed because he had a picture of himself laying in a bathtub of milk. he was also a gym bro who agonized about his deadlift and talked about it almost everytime you spoke to him.
it makes you entertaining and people want to be entertained.
now if you had been wearing a clown outfit on said unicycle… you might have had not so great results. because that would freak people out.
statistically men with cats are not desirable. My cat died last year and my matches went way up. Lots of women who would match with me would ask me to get rid of my cat and even when who I met and dated IRL, were very hostile/suspicious that I had a cat.
You may prefer cats… but my dating experience has show me that women overwhelmingly dislike them. I also have a dog… my dog gets nothing but positive responses. Nobody has asked me to get rid of my dog or been weird around my dog when they met her.
You said statistically but provided an anecdote. Is this statistically based on your experience in your specific area or do you have actual stats to back this up?
Because I’ve spoken to lots of women who feel the same way I do. My wonder is whether something else in your profile is attracting women who don’t like cats/prefer dogs (are you extremely active possibly and are looking for somebody super outdoorsy?) perhaps or it could be a fluke, because what I’ve heard/experienced does not align with what you have experienced.
In my experience, the cat pic is a signal that a man understands consent since cat ownership often requires some kind of base understanding of consent lest you get mauled. Could be a regional thing though, maybe that’s not a gauge people use where you are from.
Cats are coded as feminine. Dogs are coded as masculine. That is just how our society, in North America is. You may not agree, but you are in a minority if you don’t.
I’m a straight guy that is comfortable about non-straight people, I’m also in a minority. But I understand that most folks in America are very uncomfortable around non straight people, and they view my familiarity with non-straight people as suspect that I’m not fully straight.
Don’t mistake your personal preferences for those of the broader public. I also ride bike to work, and most folks are very hostile to that… and the people who aren’t hostile to it are also folks who ride their bikes to work. Only 3% of people in my city commute by bike, 97% do not.
I’ve dated women who loved cats and had cats, and they were weirded out by me liking their cats. Because men are not supposed to like cats, women are. That was before I got my own cat, btw. Once I got a cat I got zero interest anymore from cat-owning women, only from dog-owning women and non-pet owners, many of whom made it known my cat was a ‘red flag’ for them.
I will get another cat. But I would rather have a cat than be in a relationship with another person who thinks me liking cats is unacceptable or weird for a man.
I wish I could see more info on the study but I can’t see a link in the article to the actual study.
I’m very curious to see how their sample was chosen, whether this is America-or even Colorado-specific (study was performed by the university of Colorado). I wonder what kind of distribution they have of people from different states, if at all. I mean, it was less than 1000 people so knowing what population they are testing is important, especially to my “it may be regional” suspicion.
I say this because none of this judgement about cat men being rejected because they are viewed as more feminine is familiar to me and I really truly think that this study is quite american-biased because that sounds like a lot of rhetoric that comes out of America that really doesn’t bleed much into Canada.
Perhaps because Canada is a lot more LGBTQ friendly in general, people here have strayed further away from the femininity=bad rhetoric that is so ingrained in America and so women here perhaps don’t see that connection as undesirable. I’m curious to see how the exact same study would play out using a Canadian population.
Could be that my province is generally really left-leaning and so maybe women here prefer feminine men, and it could be a regional thing on my side.
I lived in Canada for 3 years. I did not find it at all to be more LGBT friendly. I think you are talking about the federal governments policy? I don’t think the average Canadian is that much more LGBT+ than the average american. I also met plenty of conservative Canadians and I’m related to them. Plenty of Canadians I met while living there where racist, sexist, and anti-lgbt+, and I was at a liberal university.
Canada has the same rural/urban red/blue divide as does America. The conservative sexists at my uni were all from like rural Alberta, Ontario, and Manitoba. The people from BC/Quebec were all far leftists, etc. My Canadian family is from rural Ontario and is conservative AF.
I’m thinking more provincially. If you lived in ON, I could see it not being more LGBTQ friendly, but I’m in MB which historically is more socially left than other provinces, save for maybe BC.
Everything is so far apart that this kind of thing varies so much across different provinces and cities or rural/metro areas.
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.
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.”
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.
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”.
I’ve had more than one woman in my life tell me how gay I am for having an oatmeal exfoliating facewash and moisturizer in my shower. because apparently i’m suppose to use soap only or something.
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.
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.
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.
gym bros care about what other gym bros care about.
That’s true of any culture. I am a cyclist. I get endless shit from other cyclists about my ‘old’ bikes, not knowing my FTP, wearing ‘cheap’ kit, etc. For a lot of people everything is about bragging rights and showing off they are better than you either based on physical performance or equipment.
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.
I’m a guy. when I posted gym shirtless dude bro pics, I got way more attention. Often from women who said on their profiles they ‘weren’t into guys who most gym selfies’.
People’s behavior is what matters. People will chase what gets them rewards. In dating the point is to get sexual attention.
Lots of studies show this, but people on reddit/lemmy seem to live in alternative world I guess. I got zero attention when I was a skinny unmuscled guy, once I started workout out and show it off, I got way more attention. Just like when I point out I went to Harvard, women give me way more attention than if I don’t.
Women are people. People are shallow and mostly care about appearances before everything else, and often it’s all they care about.
Agreed thought, it’s going to get way way worse. Women and men are moving towards these gender extremes the past decade, that have been extremely normalized and seem completely weird compared to how people conceived of gender 20 years ago. Social media is the culprit. A lot of folks increasingly are in this desperation spiral of gender performance and seeing the opposite sex as an enemy they must conquer and control through manipulation and ‘value’ displays.
There’s a big distinction between people’s self-image and their behavior. One’s confidence in telling a story doesn’t come from its adherence to reality, but from its internal coherence. It’s why, in user interviews, you stay away from questions like “how do you generally use feature xyz?” but rather ask things like “tell me about the last time that you did xyz”. If you ask the former, they’ll essentially tell you about their self-image, and how they think of themselves, and with the latter they’ll tell you something that actually happened, and they’re much more likely to tell you something real about their behavior. It’s an unavoidable aspect of talking about yourself, and I’m not calling anyone a liar, but it’s something to keep in mind when talking abt stuff like this.
Yeah I know.
The issue is that most folks internally can’t see the hypocrisy in their behaviors vs their self-reports, especially in dating.
Hence the prototypical problem of ‘why can’t i find a nice person to date’… and yet when you see them chase/get excited it’s only for folks that treat them like crap. Men and women both. I’ve also had plenty of friends over the years get utterly disgusted by someone treating them well, and had that same reaction in dating experience. I’ve also deliberately treated people like crap, and was shocked and horrific how positively they responded to that treatment.
People largely behave emotionally and irrationally. Though in their heads, it’s all very rational and logical and makes total sense.
And in the moment it’s hard to think about things. I had once date where a woman slapped me in the face for being 5 minutes late. I was so shocked it like just didn’t register, and I went on the date anyway. Took her slugging me in the face with a closed fist, on the next date, for me to register that this person was physically abusive. And of course when I walked away and broke up with them… well came to my home and pounded on my door and tried to threaten me into staying with them. And at that point I realized they were not just abusive or angry but just a total psycho.
Yeah in retrospect it easy to see that I should have never gone on that date after the face slap, but in the moment I simply dismissed it. And she passed it off as ‘playful’ too. etc. etc. Our first two dates prior to all that had been more or less boring and normal and they had been very sweet and fun. But in their mind, I hadn’t upset them and until I did there was no reason to hit me. If only had I had not upset them, they would have no hit me! So simple, all I had to do was not upset them!
The fact your date went straight to violence tells a lot about them. It sounds like they were testing your boundaries. Glad you got away early, I can only imagine what would’ve happened if you’d gotten into a steady relationship then tried to break up. You didn’t just dodge a bullet, it sounds like you dodged a nuclear warhead.
What’s more terrifying to me is how many people think she is justified in that violence, due to their rampant sexism. I’ve told that story and had women and men take her side immediately. That any violence against a man means he must deserve it. But of course, it is never appropriate for a man to hit a woman, no matter the circumstance…
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
yeah because it’s weird and quirky. i knew a guy who slayed because he had a picture of himself laying in a bathtub of milk. he was also a gym bro who agonized about his deadlift and talked about it almost everytime you spoke to him.
it makes you entertaining and people want to be entertained.
now if you had been wearing a clown outfit on said unicycle… you might have had not so great results. because that would freak people out.
Dungeon Crawler Carl montage coming right up…
statistically men with cats are not desirable. My cat died last year and my matches went way up. Lots of women who would match with me would ask me to get rid of my cat and even when who I met and dated IRL, were very hostile/suspicious that I had a cat.
You may prefer cats… but my dating experience has show me that women overwhelmingly dislike them. I also have a dog… my dog gets nothing but positive responses. Nobody has asked me to get rid of my dog or been weird around my dog when they met her.
You said statistically but provided an anecdote. Is this statistically based on your experience in your specific area or do you have actual stats to back this up?
Because I’ve spoken to lots of women who feel the same way I do. My wonder is whether something else in your profile is attracting women who don’t like cats/prefer dogs (are you extremely active possibly and are looking for somebody super outdoorsy?) perhaps or it could be a fluke, because what I’ve heard/experienced does not align with what you have experienced.
In my experience, the cat pic is a signal that a man understands consent since cat ownership often requires some kind of base understanding of consent lest you get mauled. Could be a regional thing though, maybe that’s not a gauge people use where you are from.
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/06/22/world/cat-men-dating-study-scli-intl-scn-wellness
Cats are coded as feminine. Dogs are coded as masculine. That is just how our society, in North America is. You may not agree, but you are in a minority if you don’t.
I’m a straight guy that is comfortable about non-straight people, I’m also in a minority. But I understand that most folks in America are very uncomfortable around non straight people, and they view my familiarity with non-straight people as suspect that I’m not fully straight.
Don’t mistake your personal preferences for those of the broader public. I also ride bike to work, and most folks are very hostile to that… and the people who aren’t hostile to it are also folks who ride their bikes to work. Only 3% of people in my city commute by bike, 97% do not.
I’ve dated women who loved cats and had cats, and they were weirded out by me liking their cats. Because men are not supposed to like cats, women are. That was before I got my own cat, btw. Once I got a cat I got zero interest anymore from cat-owning women, only from dog-owning women and non-pet owners, many of whom made it known my cat was a ‘red flag’ for them.
I will get another cat. But I would rather have a cat than be in a relationship with another person who thinks me liking cats is unacceptable or weird for a man.
I wish I could see more info on the study but I can’t see a link in the article to the actual study.
I’m very curious to see how their sample was chosen, whether this is America-or even Colorado-specific (study was performed by the university of Colorado). I wonder what kind of distribution they have of people from different states, if at all. I mean, it was less than 1000 people so knowing what population they are testing is important, especially to my “it may be regional” suspicion.
I say this because none of this judgement about cat men being rejected because they are viewed as more feminine is familiar to me and I really truly think that this study is quite american-biased because that sounds like a lot of rhetoric that comes out of America that really doesn’t bleed much into Canada.
Perhaps because Canada is a lot more LGBTQ friendly in general, people here have strayed further away from the femininity=bad rhetoric that is so ingrained in America and so women here perhaps don’t see that connection as undesirable. I’m curious to see how the exact same study would play out using a Canadian population.
Could be that my province is generally really left-leaning and so maybe women here prefer feminine men, and it could be a regional thing on my side.
I lived in Canada for 3 years. I did not find it at all to be more LGBT friendly. I think you are talking about the federal governments policy? I don’t think the average Canadian is that much more LGBT+ than the average american. I also met plenty of conservative Canadians and I’m related to them. Plenty of Canadians I met while living there where racist, sexist, and anti-lgbt+, and I was at a liberal university.
Canada has the same rural/urban red/blue divide as does America. The conservative sexists at my uni were all from like rural Alberta, Ontario, and Manitoba. The people from BC/Quebec were all far leftists, etc. My Canadian family is from rural Ontario and is conservative AF.
I’m thinking more provincially. If you lived in ON, I could see it not being more LGBTQ friendly, but I’m in MB which historically is more socially left than other provinces, save for maybe BC.
Everything is so far apart that this kind of thing varies so much across different provinces and cities or rural/metro areas.
I lived in Victoria, BC. But I was meeting people from all over Canada.
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.
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.”
Or it’s what gets you more/better matches.
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.
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”.
I’ve had more than one woman in my life tell me how gay I am for having an oatmeal exfoliating facewash and moisturizer in my shower. because apparently i’m suppose to use soap only or something.
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.
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.
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.
gym bros care about what other gym bros care about.
That’s true of any culture. I am a cyclist. I get endless shit from other cyclists about my ‘old’ bikes, not knowing my FTP, wearing ‘cheap’ kit, etc. For a lot of people everything is about bragging rights and showing off they are better than you either based on physical performance or equipment.