Hey!
First of all I want to see that I am not a man but rather a young woman who has recently taken interest in men issues.
So, during the last year I have been playing a vampire guy for some kind of fantasy life simulator. My idea was to make a good-natured, fun male character to go along with a romance plot with another character. That evolved into him developing relationships with three different women in his lifetime. It was a really intense emotional rollercoaster. But guys... I got so, so distraught from it that it wasn't until I found this reddit that I started to read stuff that really validated my guy's experiences.
Is it really how you feel in real life? Inadequate, always put aside, like you are guilty unless you prove your innocence? Not playing a lot of hypermasculine dating cards for fear of being criminalized for stuff you didn't say or do, but being begged to do so all the same? We are a 70%-female community with mostly female characters and I thought that by making a good guy I would get treated better, havr more plots, but all I got has been women trying to pin on my guy like some dream-like prince, seeping in that love when they liked it and growing ballistic whenever he showed signs of being human. They wouldn't allow him to be weak or express insecurities; or worse, they would immediately lash at him whenever those insecurities developed into downright anxious disorders. They would call him dishonest, insensitive, overdramatic, flippant, and would always stopped to think about the harm he was causing instead on the harm done to him. In short, he hrew into a repressed people-pleased and got abused into a lot of ways: emotional, pychological, physical and even sexual. He got so hypersexualized, diminished and interiorized so much hate, that in the end I had to ask a DM to have the Eldritch-horror of the game kill him cause I didn't want to roleplay his suicide.
Worst is, I can't even talk about it to some of the roleplayers that I care the most. They act so dismissive towards his problems! Yes, I know that I can get passionate about these kind of things and that may give off a dramatic vibe, but I wish I could talk to them openly about this kind of stuff. I also think that the fact that I was able to write a male character that made me sympathize so well with many of the situations in this reddit means that I am actually able to write rich characters that touch the core of human experience. We are all human. We all have the potential for right and wrong. Why can't we leave this gender war aside and exercise more compassion for each other?
Anyway, excuse me for the long post. I have been reading you all for a while and needed somewhere to rant. Thanks for letting me this space for voicing this out!
