Eccentric

Cambrian Chronicles. Obscure Welsh history documentaries with occasional whiplashes of dry humour. Not a super old channel but a marked increase in quality over time. Medieval Laws for Your Medieval Cat is a personal favourite.

Fun fact: linguists don't actually know what defines a "word"

sh.itjust.works cos I was hoping it would just work

Your assumption that all women are looking for a relationship that aligns with traditional gender roles is antithetical to your view of women as equals. I'm not trying to be inflammatory, I'm just nudging you towards the conclusion that people that talk about traditional expectations in a relationship don't really speak for everyone. It also seems like a lot of your evidence comes from male voices, which I don't think is an accurate reflection of what women want in a relationship. It sounds to me like these are the conclusions of the circles that you hang around in (or the culture that you live in/grew up in) rather than a fact of life. Most of the women I know are either in the types of relationships you are describing or vocally advocate for finding that type of relationship. There are both women and men that haven't evaluated the impact of patriarchal male expectations, and so there are both men and women out there that knowingly and unknowingly perpetuate the stereotype of men as unfeeling and uncaring. But to say that all men and all women think this way is probably inaccurate.

It sounds like you know what you want in a relationship and what activities make you happy regardless of whether they traditionally fit with a certain traditional gender expression, so do those things. I know it's demoralising to feel like the odd one out, but even if you live in a particularly conservative country there will always be like-minded people /somewhere/ out there.

Big gripe of mine is the distinction of "soft" and "hard" science. I'm a linguist and it surprises people that I had to take advanced statistics, set theory, know the basics of acoustics, and have an understanding of calculus. But just because a field requires nuance and observational data doesn't mean it's automatically less rigorous than a field that deals exclusively with numbers. Can't exclusively rely on statistical models to draw conclusions about economic trends or linguistic phenomena because the economy and language don't exist outside of human society

Everything will be okay and I'm proud of you.

Someone else pointed out I was really uncharitable with reading your post, just wanted to apologise. I'll leave my crappy response up for some good ol public shaming

I think that's part of it but less and less so nowadays and especially the younger generation. I think the aversion to physical or emotional closeness is more cultural memory at this point than homophobia, but it might still play a part. Like someone else pointed out, I think a big part of it is just wanting to feel a bit special but just not having existing avenues for support

Oh yeah you're right. I thought they were being sarcastic at points where I see they weren't. Sorry about that

The question I posited was: if all signs point to men and women having equal amounts of sex, why is there no "female loneliness epidemic" but there is a "male loneliness epidemic"? I posit that the reason we think of sex as a benefit for male loneliness therefore can't be quantity of sex but men must be getting something from sex that women either don't need or are getting elsewhere. Since scientific evidence points toward gender differences being social and not innate, there must be something women are doing different socially that leads us to think of men as a population as in need of sex or intimate relationships but not women. I'm presenting a neutral logical argument here by way of discarding illogical conclusions, not accusing anyone of anything or implying that the comment above me was accusing women of being too promiscuous. I just wanted to ask the question of why are straight men lonely but straight women not lonely even though logically the two populations must be dating and having sex at approximately equal rates

Assuming a roughly equal number of straight men and women, either a large amount of women are consistently sleeping with a small number of men or the same number of women are not having sex as men. The former is a pretty common incel assumption that would require women to be a hive mind, so imo the latter should be more true. In my experience as someone present in both male and female social circles, women tend to feel a lot more emotionally supported in platonic relationships while men tend to expect more emotional support from a romantic partner than a platonic friend. I think as a result, men tend to associate physical intimacy with emotional intimacy because they aren't really getting either from their non-romantic relationships. You can see this in the way platonic men are so much less likely to hug each other or hold hands or cuddle than platonic women. So to me, OP is actually onto something with their original assumption. Not getting laid isn't as much of a problem for women because they don't expect as much emotionally from sex and romantic relationships since their emotional needs are fulfilled elsewhere. Imo, male loneliness isn't so much a problem with modern dating or with women as a problem with the fact that social expectations placed on men are preventing men from feeling fulfilled outside of romantic relationships and sex. In conclusion, hug your bros and tell them everything will be okay and you're proud of them.

Yeah, I think this article is way too far into the weeds. A lot of the comments in this thread are starting to sound a little too much like the right wing conspiracies we saw coming out of the 2020 election. And I get it, we're all looking for ways to prevent this from happening again.

I don't think there was any fraud--bar the usual voter suppression and sleazy tactics the Republicans engage in. Voter turnout went way down for the 2024 election compared to 2020. Had there been wide scale vote tampering, I doubt they would've let the total number of votes for Trump go down. Besides, the 2020 post-election bullshit lawsuits showed that our voting system is relatively secure and it's quite difficult to fabricate votes. The unfortunate reality is that Trump voters really are just that dogmatic and close minded to keep voting for him