@tiny-ivy
A lot of that, and I say this literally, just goes back to society as a whole. A person, right now more than ever it seems, but probably throughout all of modern history, is seen by the eyes of society as only being worth what they’re worth. If you’re not making money, if you don’t have money, if there’s nothing influential like that about you, to the human race as a whole you’re almost worthless.
And for a lot of people, to face the brutal reality of human indifference is a struggle, but with friends and hobbies and interests it’s manageable, to a degree. But, when you’re not allowed self worth, or really a ‘self’, as a man or a woman, you turn to societal worth instead to have a reason to live. For men, that is ‘succeeding’, making the bank, along with the other ‘masculine’ concepts that you’re supposed to follow like being athletic, or tough, or getting chicks or whatever. I think it honestly explains the stereotypical jock: because they succeed at their role, they double down on it and keep going with it for the praise they’re receiving for it, and with all the time they spend being ‘men’ they don’t get as much chance to develop their self like someone who isn’t as lockstep with a stereotype. So they keep doubling down, keep acting out in the same way society tells them they should act (brutally honest here: the reason there’s so many ‘boys will be boys’ moments is we keep telling boys that that’s how boys act) until they reach a point where they built their lives around that role they’ve been acting, and it’s all that they have: the jock, the tough guy, the businessman.
To bring this (ha) temporarily back to the topic of fetishes for a moment, I think that the ‘shirt’ metaphor is why so much giantess stories are kind of dumpster fires. So many go off two main concepts: men losing their rights, or a normal woman who gains power and instantly, and for no apparent reason, just starts killing everything and everyone just because she can now, in whatever ways the author finds sexy. I think… for a lot of guys, that being ‘forcefully’ depowered like that is like getting that shirt taken off, and it’s the only relief from the roles they can find, and allow themselves to find.
(Personally, it makes my skin crawl; in theory I could like GTS content. In practice I find it largely abohorant, even if the pics themselves can be great in isolation (those legs! Those heels! And oh, do I envy the raw power they have in those pictures, that ability to just step on a city, I really do (and there’s so many good ones because they have so many more artists making them, sigh)) which is ironic since when I was a whelp still figuring out the fetish, I mixed them both, but the reality of it, how so much of it seems to focus on what is probably self-hatred of men, much less losing what remains of our agency in a rapidly evolving society that seems to loath people having any real control over their own lives in the first place, has driven me off it almost completely. Seriously, I have enough problems without getting into that. These days I mostly trawl through GTS stuff looking for more SW content that isn’t actually under an SW label.)
It’s interesting you say that, though, because looking at a female from the male perspective, while you’re allowed to be more a person than we are, even if we’re collared robots it seems like we can do more with what limited personhood we have. If we men are wearing collars, and slowly killing ourselves with them, it seems like women are have their ankles chained.
@kisupure said in Sex Objects:
it was actually really surprising and kind of scary how much subconscious social male programming I’d absorbed
Yeah. A lot of the reasons people act like they act, men and women alike, is because that’s how they’re told to act, and that comes from both directions. Moms will tell their sons they have to be tough, that their sisters are too weak to do something physically demanding, just as much as fathers do. A girl can attack a boy and that’s almost amusing, but a boy can’t realiate without being a brute, because they’re strong and girls are weak and they must be protected, even from the consequences of their own actions. It’s frustrating and amusing, almost, that there are so many women who tell boys to be sexist, or distant as a child, and then are startled and horrified that boys grow up to be distant sexists.
