I just thought I had to be seen as “sufficiently masculine” in order to survive. I thought that it was too dangerous to be authentic because people would constantly fight me on it. I used to see that as a universal thing, but now I’m aware that some people are vastly more tolerant than others, so you can just hang out with the ones who accept you.

Funnily enough, in my case, I couldn’t hide my “deviant” traits because they’re written all over my demeanor. Nobody has ever seen or treated me as a manly man. Not one. My gentleness is obvious no matter how much I try to suppress myself. That means that every friend or acquaintance I have ever had liked (or at the very least tolerated) something about me that I thought would be universally shunned. Theory debunked. I just ignored the evidence.

What’s the alternative? Pretend to be someone you aren’t and end up in a situation you hate where you aren’t happy?

I used to think that I had to, because I was afraid that nobody would accept me for who I was. It seems like the beliefs in my post are a last-ditch effort by my fear to hold me back (“You can’t be yourself because everyone will despise you (which also means that nobody can be attracted to you) and a small subset of people will react violently while bystanders watch.”)

My worldview over the past decade, the one that I’m actively trying to dismantle, has been that, despite having the right to free expression on paper (in the U.S.), we unfortunately live in an intolerant authoritarian culture that stifles that free expression through social shaming. Deviations from traditional masculinity, I believed, would lead to one being universally shunned in everyday settings, and may lead to severe social consequences. As you can imagine, it’s hard to change a belief if you’re too scared to challenge it (going outside, talking to people), which is why it stood for as long as it did. But now I understand that I have to challenge it because the downstream consequences are literally ruining my life.

Basically, I grew up in a right-wing echo chamber, so my brain learned to expect everyone to be intolerant of deviations from stereotypes.

I like sweet and dominant women

Have you found some? I probably shouldn’t put too much stock into anecdotes from Internet strangers (that’s part of what got me into this situation in the first place), but I think it would be encouraging to hear if you did!

It has actually helped me a lot, but only because the people here helped me to build enough confidence to talk to real life people about this and realize that I had fooled myself.

I used to think it was literally too dangerous for me to go outside because I didn’t fit a world of hyperpolarized gender norms, which I convinced myself was how reality was. I used labels like “submissive” or “GNC” to mean “likes confident women” and “isn’t a macho alpha male” respectively, not knowing that these were common characteristics that didn’t need special labels. In that stage, the questions I asked were me trying to poke holes in my theory and see if there were exceptions to the hyperpolarized rule I imagined.

As my language became more accurate and I talked to online friends about my feelings, they kept saying that I was completely normal and not weird at all. That gave me the courage to come out about my feelings IRL to some of my conservative family members, and even they said I was normal. The more I probed real people, the more I realized that I had been catastrophically wrong this whole time, and this fascination with gender norms made no sense.

I asked this question to see if there was any shred of legitimacy left in the way I used to think, and I think it’s safe to say that it has been fully discredited at this point. I only thought that way because some assholes in the past convinced me I was unlovable and I developed an elaborate pseudoscience to explain why. Maybe I should have just listened to the nice people who told me to my face how much they love my soft side.

I feel like I’m ready to go outside and make some friends now. And see a therapist if I still find myself struggling. The Internet has served its purpose for me, and I will not miss this era of my life.

Honestly, judging by the responses here, it really seems like my social anxiety selectively absorbed negative information and created a self-defeating worldview based on inflammatory social media posts. I really need to take a hard look at what I’m consuming and ask myself if it’s really worth it.

It’s embarrassing to be this wrong, but I’m grateful that I have this community to help me understand that this is a self-imposed social dysfunction rather than a legitimate worldview. It’s just fear.