@Olo said in I found a crumb of M/f in a manga:
When I was feeling ashamed of my shrunken man fantasies, one way I would beat myself up was to tell myself that it was an infantilizing fantasy driven by my reluctance to take responsibility for my life.
This resonates. Did you ever feel like the shame was a result of your fantasy being at odds with your own sense of integrity? The way you’ve worded it, it sounds like there was a belief there that responsibility was synonymous with control.
I ask because I’m one of those people who started out using it as a coping mechanism, a deep desire to hide from the world because the world sucked- the only difference being I never found that part of it shameful. For me, avoiding responsibilities was entirely fine, but the shame was rooted in the prospect of giving myself to someone wholesale. Considering that trust being violated was the entire reason I needed such a cope to begin with, it felt gross and confusing to me why I would find comfort in the same situation.