Just a Blog about Me.

So there’s a known thing in the study of human psychology/sociology/what-have-you where men are known to, on average, rely entirely on their female romantic partner for emotional support. Bonding with other men is done at a more superficial level involving fun group activities and conversations about general subjects but rarely involves actually leaning on other men or being really honest about emotional problems. Men use alcohol to be able to lower their inhibitions enough to expose themselves emotionally to other men, but if you can’t get emotional support unless you’re drunk, you have a problem.

So men need to have a woman in their lives to have anyone they can share their emotional needs and vulnerabilities with. However, since women are not socialized to fear sharing these things, women’s friendships with other women are heavily based on emotional support. If you can’t lean on her when you’re weak, she’s not your friend. To women, what friendship is is someone who listens to all your problems and keeps you company.

So this disconnect men are suffering from is that they think that only a person who is having sex with you will share their emotions and expect support. That’s what a romantic partner does. But women think that’s what a friend does. So women do it for their romantic partners and their friends and expect a male friend to do it for them the same as a female friend would. This fools the male friend into thinking there must be something romantic there when there is not.

This here is an example of patriarchy hurting everyone. Women have a much healthier approach to emotional support – they don’t die when widowed at nearly the rate that widowers die and they don’t suffer emotionally from divorce nearly as much even though they suffer much more financially, and this is because women don’t put all their emotional needs on one person. Women have a support network of other women. But men are trained to never share their emotions except with their wife or girlfriend, because that isn’t manly. So when she dies or leaves them, they have no one to turn to to help with the grief, causing higher rates of death, depression, alcoholism and general awfulness upon losing a romantic partner. 

So men suffer terribly from being trained in this way. But women suffer in that they can’t reach out to male friends for basic friendship. I am not sure any man can comprehend how heartbreaking it is to realize that a guy you thought was your friend was really just trying to get into your pants. Friendship is real. It’s emotional, it’s important to us. We lean on our friends. Knowing that your friend was secretly seething with resentment when you were opening up to him and sharing your problems because he felt like he shouldn’t have to do that kind of emotional work for anyone not having sex with him, and he felt used by you for that reason, is horrible. And the fact that men can’t share emotional needs with other men means that lots of men who can’t get a girlfriend end up turning into horrible misogynistic people who think the world owes them the love of a woman, like it’s a commodity… because no one will die without sex. Masturbation exists. But people will die or suffer deep emotional trauma from having no one they can lean on emotionally. And men who are suffering deep emotional trauma, and have been trained to channel their personal trauma into rage because they can’t share it, become mass shooters, or rapists, or simply horrible misogynists.

okay but things that are tragically funny in High School Musical 2:

Troy Bolton being weird and passive-aggressive because he thinks his gay classmate, Ryan, is trying to steal his girlfriend 

The original tweet summarizes it pretty well. Fanfic tends to be popular among certain types of neurodivergent people (aka people most likely to read excessively as a child, and have burnout as an adult) for the same reasons that we tend to hyperfixate–neurochemical signaling (I hope I’m using that phrase correctly). What I mean is, for people who are really dependent on changes in dopamine/serotonin/neurotransmitter levels, who have low levels or wonky neural reward systems (perhaps the most common types of neurodivergence)…people like us rely on dependable external sources of those neurochemicals. In order to function, we spend a lot of our free time trying to level out our brain chemistry using things that can reliably bring us a steady stream of joyful moments (rewards) without costing too much of the mental effort that is already in short supply. 

significantly: the investment of reading has to be balanced with a steady “return on investment”–and this return has to start fairly quickly. because again, we don’t have a lot of attention/energy to invest on tiring things. we have perpetual “low batteries” in that regard.

that doesn’t mean these stories are “simple,” or that they lack complexity or value–only that the reward has to come in short regular intervals, and it has to have a low “upfront cost.” which is why fanfic stories are so perfectly formulated for neurodivergent readers–they are often beautifully written, but skip a lot of the upfront costs (of introducing new characters, of world-building, of getting the audience emotionally connected to the story elements).

the nature of fanfiction is that the reader has a pre-existing relationship with this world and these characters. that–combined with the shorter average length of fics–means that fan fics very quickly start “rewarding” the reader in a way that traditional fiction struggles to. that’s not a bad thing! and maybe it’s something more traditionally published writers should be paying attention to.

Guard: We caught her trying to climb over the wall

Zuko: Is the Avatar with her?

Guard: No sign of him, sir

Zuko: Search the island. He’s probably hiding under a rock.

(Aang flies by. He dings.)

Little squeak