Emerald

The "being used for money/status" is probably the closest that men can feel to the type of objectification that women are subjected to. And I'm sure that can bring up lots of negative feelings and resentments around being used. But when it's your body/identity that's being objectified, there's a more all-encompassing disempowerment and de-subjectification. And you don't have the money, status, and power to mitigate this disempowerment. But there is a lot of tension in the desire to be beautiful and be seen as powerful through the lens of beauty... and trying to avoid objectification. Like, I've been on both ends of that tension... where sometimes the desire to be beautiful and centered in my Feminine power has won out. But it attracts a lot of unwanted attention that can be quite disempowering. And there's always a lot of resistance even when I do step into that. And I remember, at age 13, when I had spent my whole childhood wanting to feel beautiful... I finally started to match the beauty standard and getting male attention. And it was immediately a really negative feeling. And I would eat a lot of food when I was a teenager. My metabolism was good at the time, so I was still just on the higher end of normal, weight-wise. But I would have had to lose about 15 lbs to fit the beauty standard... which would have been easy if I just ate normally. It's only in retrospect that I can recognize that my dietary habits back then were what they were, because I was trying to avoid all that negative attention where I get treated as an interchangeable sex doll. There was also a lot of negative attention from jealous girls in my classes. I also had a really strong judgment towards the people who I knew who were obsessed with dieting. And I think that judgment towards them was also a way to avoid being proximal to the beauty standard. I'd also dress in ways that weren't universally appealing... but that I felt beautiful in. Like I made my own goth inspired style out of stuff that I'd buy at thrift stores and do all sorts of stuff with my make-up. Now that I'm in my mid-thirties, I find now that looking very ordinary helps me feel safer and hidden away. But there's still the tension of wanting to step into my full power and allowing myself to fully embody what feels like me aesthetically. And I'm in a less vulnerable state now than I was before. But there's still an aversion to beautifying myself... but a desire as well.

Yeah, it's just one of those things that the guys have shame about... and they externalize that sense of shame onto OF models (or sometimes women in general).

That's where you're wrong. I'm 100% sure that men would hate being objectified en masse because you would cease to be the main character of your own sexual experience and your own story. You'd be reduced to being seen as a disposable and interchangeable dildo for women of all ages and levels of attractiveness. There's a chance that men would even hate being objectified even more than women do because men feel a more pressing need for sex and don't have all the sorting mechanisms that women do. So, you'd be feeling disempowered and objectified by more societally powerful women that are behaving vampirically towards you... and also lacking the natural aversion to sex that women have and giving in to all the sexual opportunities and feeling like you're in an addictive cycle of subjecting yourself to constant disempowerment and objectification from all sorts of women. And then society would start seeing you as a degenerate and weak loser of a man because you kept giving in to the sexual advances because "how dare you use sexuality for your own pleasure! Don't you know that your sexuality is for your future wife!". And you'd lose a bunch of opportunities because no one would take you seriously because you were a man of ill repute. And eventually, you'd have to choose between being a loser man of the streets or get married to an older woman who keeps you in a very tight lease because she must govern you because your sexuality is out of control. You'd probably start thinking of yourself that way too because you'd be having lots of sexual experiences that solidify your value as an object for women who are seen as inherently more important than you. And you'd feel competitive to other men where you want to see yourself as a better object for your older wife. You see... men like the idea of being objectified now because they get to imagine that sexual attention empowers them and adds more agency and value to them. But if men were truly sexually objectified, it would negatively impact them in every area of life and narrow their agency... including their level of sexual agency. So, sexual objectification is inherently disempowering because you just become an interchangeable chunk of flesh for ravenous dogs. Now, it may not be as physically unsafe for men as it is for women... but the physical unsafely is just a very small part of what's negative about objectification. I've never had a man commit physical violence against me. But I have experienced a lot of sexual trauma, just around being objectified and oriented to that way. It's really about being treated as mere vehicle for someone else's pleasure... and your sexuality becomes stained with that kind of disempowerment.

It's not about being bombarded with sex or sexual choices. That's the thing that men might assume it to be like. And men would like having lots of sexual choices... though would probably find it annoying that most of that attention is coming from women they're not attracted to... including much much older women. But it's more along the lines of your value and humanity being reduced to the status of object... and having a lot of people trying to use you as an object. And having people and society at large constantly projecting that onto you. This is why men can't really relate or empathize. They've been conditioned to see sexual attention as empowering and that they're the main character of that attention. But if men were actually sexually objectified en masse, it would cast you as the interchangeable side character in someone else's story where you just exist for the main character's gratification. To be oriented to constantly as a sexual object is a very disempowering and painful experience... like you're conditioned to feel like your body and your sexuality aren't your own... and that your sexuality is a source of disempowerment that has no where to exist outside of someone else's fantasies. And it takes a lot to break down that conditioning to even feel like your body is your own. When men imagine what it would be like if the shoe was on the other foot, they just think about the sexual opportunities and the empowerment it would bring. But in this opposite world, if the shoe were truly on the other foot, it would be a disempowering experience because the world only sees you as the masturbatory fodder of some old woman's sexual fantasies.

There is probably that jealousy too. I honestly wish that men could experience a reality where they're constantly being sexually objectified from the age of 13 onward with all sorts of women of all ages trying to get with them every time they went into public from age 13 to early 30s. It's a really horrifying experience, tbh. And I don't think men can get a clear sense of what that's like. It's something you have to experience first-hand to empathize with, I think. It's like being a drug and a significant portion of the population are out-and-proud desperate junkies that want to use you for their next fix. So when women are upset at being objectified, it probably feels like a brag from the male perspective. It's like if a person who never knew when their next meal was going to be was jealous of someone who was constantly being tied down and force-fed a bunch of food they don't want to eat. (and food represents sexual attention in this metaphor)

Someone who does OF is sexually objectifying themselves in exchange for money. That is part of the job description. But I have no judgments towards anyone who chooses that because financial circumstances are difficult. There will always be a demand for sex and sexual content, and it makes sense why so many people turn to it. And I certainly don't blame OF models or any other kind of sex worker for the disconnection and transactional devolution of relationships in society. That comes from other sources that are much deeper seated. But perhaps we could say that the tendency to seek out a sex worker (including OF models) could be symptomatic of a deeper feeling of loneliness and disconnection. But it would be a mistake to mischaracterize a single symptom as the root cause. That could lead to scapegoating sex workers, when those issues are not their fault. With all that said, I would imagine that most people who work in the sex industry probably have (at least) mixed feelings about the work. And the average person working in the sex industry probably feels quite negatively about it because you're getting to see a side of people where a lot of negative/predatory/objectifying tendencies arise from. Like I said, when I was in my early 20s and I was proximal to the beauty standard, I would get frequently approached, harassed, and objectified. It was like everyone and their father was always trying to extract sexual value from me... via pleasure or status. And of course, 80%+ of that attention was coming from exploitative people who just saw me as a means to their own ends. And it really jaded me during that time because I was on the receiving end of those kinds of interactions really often, as I was often in the pedestrian area near my college. And having had those experiences, I can only imagine that 10x that amount of contempt and negative feeling I felt back then would be stirred up in a person who makes money through being seen as a sex object. While they may consciously decide to do it and consciously want to do it, it doesn't mean that all of themselves is on board with being objectified that way. And part of them may feel quite resentful for being oriented to as a sexual object. So, I'm sure it could exacerbate feelings of resent and contempt towards their patrons.

I honestly think the OP and many of the guys on this thread are projecting their own (unconscious and semi-unconscious) tendencies towards sexual objectification and exploitative value extraction onto the OF models. And that's why it touches such a deeply negative chord for them that feels disturbing to them... and why their criticism towards these models seems so biting and unnecessarily personal. They just see their own objectifying tendencies mirrored back to them in their projection onto these women... with an extreme aversion to being on the chopping block of their own tendencies towards objectification and transactional value extraction. And they judge the OF models for their own disowned tendencies, whilst succumbing to a victim's mentality narrative where they see themselves as the exploited ones. Edit... Here's a song about this phenomenon...

A bit biased there, aren't you? Both are extracting value from the other without having emotions for the party they're extracting from. And at least the OF model is providing the desired outcome to the person they're extracting from... as that person has gone looking on OnlyFans and knows what they want and what they're getting exactly when they put in their card info. You just might not want to see that you're under the chopping block of your own judgment.

This seems to have touched a nerve for you that is more personalized than it is. To me, it seems pretty evident that someone who's on OnlyFans wouldn't really care too much about their audience. When you're an attractive woman who gets a lot of sexual attention from men, you experience many men trying to use you for status and pleasure. I experienced this frequently just existing when I was in my early 20s and was proximal to the beauty standard. And it did create a kind of contempt at that sort of treatment because so many people behaved vampirically towards me. And I can only imagine that someone who's a popular OnlyFans model (or sex worker in general) would probably feel very negatively towards the audience... because the audience is being objectifying, and she probably experiences objectification pretty often just being a young attractive woman. So, it's not surprising to me that OF models would feel some contempt towards her patrons as they're only valuing her as a source of sexual gratification. So, she probably feels equally okay with using the people who see her as a source of sexual gratification as purely a digit in her bank account. In my mind, that's fair enough given the transactional nature of that industry. People get back what they give out.

Yes, sorry for the late reply. It does seem like the pattern that you mentioned could be coming from that pattern of not being attuned to or paid attention to. When we have a chronically unmet need like there, there tends to be a part of ourselves that is CONSTANTLY trying to get that need met... even if we are objectively getting that need met in the present tense. And that's because we build protection strategies to keep ourselves from being fully aware of the pain/vulnerability associated with that unmet need. So, it blocks us from truly receiving that need. So, it could present itself as an insatiable need for validation and attention that can take many different forms (especially if we block off more direct forms of attention seeking or validation seeking). For example, I had a lot of judgments as a teenager towards attention seekers. But when I was 20, in my second medicine journey, it hit me like a ton of bricks that I was always seeking attention because of unmet needs for it... and feelings of insignificance and lack of importance. But I hadn't realized that I was seeking attention because I was doing so with hard work and acheivement... and qualities that people generally smile upon. But I would judge people who would act out and show emotions as weak, annoying, etc. for seeking attention. And I had a deep secret contempt for that kind of behavior. But when I realized that I was always seeking attention, I decided to be more direct with that needs and later found better ways to communicate it and to feel significant just because I exist... and not because I achieved something. So, my recommendation is to fully embrace the attention seeking part of yourself and seeking to love and understand it at the deepest level you can without any kind of judgment. Recognize the wisdom inherent in your attention seeking and what it's communicating to you about your traumas, needs, and subjective experience.

The political dynamics happening right now are rooted in very deep collective emotional and psychological dynamics. This has all grown out of collective traumas and the subsequent disconnection with the Earth, other people, and the universe at large. So, it is not a surprise that these feelings might be creeping in... as they've been rising in the collective consciousness for nearly a decade. And now it's just the dawning of this awareness for you... a little late to avert a Trump presidency though. And you're now feeling that dark heavy feeling that many of us have been feeling since 2015. But because you did not become aware of it before, it may feel new and have guilt associated with it because of the actions you took before this awareness bloomed for you. You may have thought it to be no big deal and that you wouldn't be impacted by it. Really Trump and all the people around him and the entire dynamic going on is laying bare a collective Shadow that more and more people are waking up to. And I believe that this dynamic couldn't be helped because it's just that time. It will be a bitter medicine. My recommendation is to tune very deeply into those feelings that you're feeling right now, because it is not just your feeling.

Did you ever feel like you had to stand out in some way to get your parents' approval or attention? One possible reason is that there's a part of you that's still operating off of a belief that you must differentiate yourself and "niche market" yourself to others to get them to notice. Does this resonate with you or not so much?

I hope the guardrails of our institutions hold because they are being stress-tested right now. But I see it as a nonzero chance of an authoritarian takeover from these tech billionaires... which even if it's a 1% chance, it's too much. And my most recent medicine journey makes me concerned that it will come to fruition. It was showing me the macrocosmic service that dictatorship/authoritarianism serves in the collective evolution of humanity. And I really understood it in that experience that, despite its problems, dictatorship and authoritarianism was imposing limits on people that they unconsciously desire. It's like a child that wants total freedom... but desperately needs a parent to come in and impose limits. And my experience was about choosing and desiring limitation despite a strong curiosity drive to seek unlimited knowing that has been present for me since I was a small child. I had to keep affirming over and over "I'm choosing to be limited!" to create a barrier between my finite human consciousness and the consciousness of God. It was like having to cut my consciousness away from the infinite, and it was a really painful labor-like process. So now, I'm concerned that my journey is a reflection of a collective desire (including my individual desire) for limitation... and that the call is being answered by these top-down authoritarian dynamics. And now that there are these tech people who aspire towards authoritarian power taking big steps towards that end, I can't help but wonder if my journey was showing me a premonition of what is to come and insights to help me understand and accept why dictatorship is necessary for humanity at this time. That is my fear. And I know I won't accept the limitation I asked for if it comes in that form.

What's important to understand is that coming into alignment with unconditional love means accepting, loving, and holding space for all pairs of opposites. When it comes to Truth... it includes both truth and illusion, which are the Yang and Yin of Truth. And so, if we reject illusion, it actually takes us further away from Truth because we're being dualistic and rejecting the wholeness of these two sides of the coin. And it keeps us down in the lower expressions of both poles. I find that people who polarize into truth-seeking and attempting to transcend the human smallness often just repress these parts of themselves... creating a sharp split within themselves. And their Shadow leads them into lower expressions of the illusion like hedonism, pettiness, smallness, and other negative expressions of the illusion. So, it's counter-intuitive... but if you want to come into alignment with Truth... embrace the illusion fully.

It's not paranoia. Though I understand that it might be a more comforting notion that I'm just being paranoid. I've been correct about the rise in Fascism since 2015... and I'm correct about the situation with these tech billionaires now. Do you not know that Elon Musk and a sizable percentage of tech billionaires are trying to actively undermine democracy? My recommendation is to look into Curtis Yarvin, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and others in the tech space that want to upend the current social order and replace it with corporate fiefdoms. It's pretty clear that that's what they're attempting... and they've said as much. So, it's not paranoia to point out something that's (at the very least) being openly attempted by Elon Musk. I don't know if they will succeed, but my medicine journey from last March makes me think that they will. And if I didn't see a direct correlation to the current situation with Elon Musk, I wouldn't be making that connection with my medicine journey. At first, I thought it might be reflective of someone like Putin that it would be more reflective of... since the figure looked more like Putin than like Musk. 10 months ago when I had that journey, I just thought it was making a point about limitation and the general function of dictatorship in the collective... and why dictatorship happens. It was just another insight in my journey. But as more and more dictatorial dynamics are arising from tech billionaires, it makes me ponder if the medicine journey was showing me a sign of something to come in order to help me understand why these collective dynamics arise.