Emerald

Thank you!

If you just feel like you lack skills and there's no strong emotions attached to it, then it's probably just a need to learn more skills. It takes some introspection and attunement to the emotions. What I would ask is... do you tend to feel insecure/shameful about things and thinking/feeling like you're not enough as you are? And do you fear rejection and shame? This could indicate that there's more to your motivation than just a desire to learn skills. But yes, if you're in survival mode (worrying about physical safety and stability), that's a different kind of insecurity that isn't necessarily shame based. But what I mean about operating as though you're a child who doesn't want to miss Disney World is to take productive actions from that place. Like, with your goals, think about the kind of motivation that a child has when their parents say "If you keep your room clean and get good grades in school, we can go to Disney at the end of the month. But if you don't clean your room and get good grades, we won't be going to Disney." You just recognize that you have to take certain actions to enrich your life... and if you do, you get the enriching experiences you want... and if you don't, you miss Disney World. And the good thing about this motivation is that it's very practical and self-loving... and not based in shame. Like, when I was in my teens and early 20s, the lion's share of my drives towards achievement were about getting away from shame and self-hatred. I really believed "If I don't achieve and outdo others in my fields of excellence, I don't deserve to exist." I was really hard on myself. Now, at the age of 35, I've gone through a lot of healing with shame. And I literally feel like I could literally lay around and do nothing forever and not feel very much shame about it. And my goal is to get it to where I don't need to do anything at all to accept myself. But now, my motivations are much more experience-based.... and more sustainable as a result. For example, with my business... I don't have many conscious drivers to avoid shame through having a successful business. My concerns are more practical... when it comes to negatives I'm trying to avert. Instead, most of my motivation comes from a desire to enrich my life and the life of my family... and to be able to have the experience of helping other people. I'm like a kid that needs to do their chores or they won't be able to go to Disney World. And that's my main motivator towards my success now. I do what I do because I love myself, I want what's best for myself, and I don't want to miss Disney World because I was slacking on my chores.

Men and women can both have shame individually for a variety of reasons depending on the details in their own lives. But I'd say men's collective wound is more shame-based, while the current state of women's collective wound is more about disempowerment than shame. But women do tend to deal with different types of collective shame patterns... like shame with body image, age, sexuality, Femininity, being seen as weak, incapable, inferior, looney, etc.. So, there definitely is female collective shame patterns as well. But there's been a lot of shifts over the past century or so (and especially in the past 10 years) that have created some genuine progress with those collective shame patterns that are based in the collective rejection of Femininity... and seeing Femininity as lesser than Masculinity over the course of millennia. So, there's still a lot of collective shame for women but the attitudes over the past several generations that have arisen are slowly shifting things. For example, when I was growing up, all the ads depicted perfect-looking women and slut-shaming and fat-shaming were off the charts. And it was just common for women to hate each other as a default and to internalize all these standards. But over the past decade there's more sensitivity to that kind of thing and a rejection of those beliefs and arbitrary standards that have been the cause of a lot of collective female shame. But the shame dynamic with men is one that men haven't quite collectively woken up to as of right now. And it has to do with unrealistic and prescriptive expectations of strength, responsibility, Masculinity, etc. Like, if you tell the average women that they're not Feminine enough and that they need to be more Feminine and to match societal expectations of Feminine gender roles, they'll get up in your face and bless you out. Go try it on the internet and you'll see. But if you tell the average man that they're not Masculine enough and that they need to be more Masculine and to match societal expectations of Masculinine gender roles, many men will feel genuinely beholden to that expectation and feel shame if they feel like they don't match up. The main difference here is that there aren't any really attractive boons to shoving one's self in the box of the traditional female expectations that you can't also get more and better of by sloughing off those expectations. So, women recognize that these "be more Feminine" shaming are basically just saying... "Take one for the team and get back in the box because it makes me feel more comfortable." So, it's easier to wake up to and shake off the majority of these expectations... as long as you're not caught down in a social system that requires you to conform or be ostracized. But with men, following Masculine gender roles dangles a kind of idealistic carrot of "If you conform to this expectation, you'll be the man!" And there's a lot of peer pressure from other men to conform to these expectations as well. So, there's all these sentiments that echo "You're not man enough" everywhere... from dads, to guy friends, to immature women with unrealistic expectations, to grifters on the internet who want to make a buck off of that insecurity. And it's hard to reject the box that limits you and causes insecurities when you feel like the box is necessary to get respect, power, connection, women, friendship, etc. The box is like golden handcuffs that aren't actually made of real gold. But the expectations still loom heavily. And to the degree that a man internalizes those expectations and tries to mold himself to match them, is the degree to which he rejects himself. And the degree to which he rejects himself is the degree to which he will feel shame. And then this shame around these expectations will play itself out in interactions with women. And there can often be jealousy and resentment towards women because they are not beholden to the same expectations.

Thank you! I'm not sure if everyone would be naturally flirtatious per say, as personalities differ. But I'm certain that it would be a lot easier to interact socially and to open up.

The issue with shame is that you can't improve yourself or fix yourself to get rid of it. The only antidote to shame is unconditional self-love and unconditional acceptance on the level of being. And that does reliably resolve the shame... even though it can be a difficult and drawn out process. So, pickup will never be a solution to shame. And any type of self-improvement will always be 100% ineffective at addressing shame. Any kind of action towards self-improvement that's taken from the attempt to relieve one's self of shame, will only exacerbate the shame issue. And the higher the standards you place upon yourself to accept yourself, the more intense your shame will become. So, there is a reliable way to resolve shame. That's to find ways to accept yourself no matter what... and to never use pick-up or any other form of self-improvement for the sake of getting away from shame... as that will only exacerbate it. Instead, try to switch to a more experiential process-based motivation for the actions you take. So, instead of thinking about pick-up or any other form of self-improvement from a desire to improve or fix yourself or become better to get validation... think about it more as things you're doing to enhance your own amusement and enjoyment of the process of life. See yourself as already valid and valuable... and make decisions from a place of self-love and a desire to give yourself the best experience possible. Take action from a place of being like a kid who doesn't want to miss out on Disney World. So, if you wanted to do pick-up, think about it from a place of already being whole, valid, and valuable as you are. And interact with women from a place of self-enjoyment because you love yourself. And don't approach pick-up from a place of "I need to change myself and fix myself because I'm not enough as I am to get female validation via sex and sexual interest. And I need female validation because attractive women are the arbiters who have the power to judge me as sufficiently or insufficiently Masculine... and therefore worthy or unworthy of being. And who I am isn't enough to be notarized as valid by these attractive women, so I need to learn all these techniques and improve myself to become enough (or pretend to be enough in the case of men who lack self-efficacy in conjunction with their shame struggles.) I rarely see guys on this forum who are interested in pick-up from a place of self-amusement, fun, and pleasure. Probably 90% of the time, it's guys who don't feel enough trying to use pick-up to improve themselves to try to make themselves enough. And even if a guy gets good at pick-up, this will never resolve that shame. He'll just transfer it onto the women that sleep with him. And he'll devalue them because "If they like me, they must not be worthy". Like Mark Twain said "I wouldn't belong to a club that would have me."

I do think it's a little bit like 'take care of the shame' and other things fall into place. And that's because shame keeps us rigid, performing, and disconnected from others and our sense of belonging in the universe. And it injects really high stakes into dating and relationships. In analogy to approaching women... having no shame issue versus having shame issues is the difference between walking on a balance beam that's a few inches off the ground compared to walking on a balance beam that's 200 feet in the air. It's the same action, but the stakes feel so much higher. And it's the sense of unworthiness and shame that makes approaching feel monumentally difficult because rejection is like lemon juice on those pre-existing shame wounds. So, I see pick-up and other ideas/narratives that surround it (even Red Pill, MGTOW, and Incel narratives) as a workaround for shame. And without shame, these workarounds wouldn't be necessary. And a lot of pick-up advice is like Dumbo's magic feather. Like Dumbo believed he could only fly with the magic feather. But then he lost his magic feather... and thought he lost the ability. But he later discovered that he could always fly and that the magic feather was just a placebo effect. Also, when you feel secure in yourself, then your natural personality shines through and playfulness becomes more effortless. There may be a few things to learn. But I think men forget that heterosexual women are biologically wired up to be attracted to them. I think a lot of men can get caught up in shame narratives that make them feel like they have to be a 6'11" Chad who's perfectly strong and Masculine all the time and has a totally different personality than their natural personality to be attractive to women. And that sense of "I'm not enough as I am" creates reclusive tendencies and all sorts of attempts to "fix" one's self. To focus on pick-up as a way to resolve shame is like focusing on the symptom instead of the roots cause. It's like having Malaria, and instead of seeking the cure to Malaria... it's like trying to find a solution only to suppress the fever while ignoring the deeper cause of the fever.

100% It's really evident to me that the main problems facing men in dating have mostly to do with feelings of shame and unworthiness. And women get saddled with the projection of being arbiters of male worth and society enforces that archetypal narrative. So, it creates all these stakes and tension around dating that aren't actually there. And men end up isolating themselves because they feel unworthy. Or they end up relating to women in powerless or combative ways because they see women as holding so much power to validate or invalidate them. And pick-up often gets used as a bandaid coping strategy to either make one's self more worthy of the woman OR to make one's self appear worthy to the woman by tricking her (as the appearance of worthiness is the only thing that feels possible from that standpoint of shame). Of course, some can just learn some of the seduction techniques and be successful if they don't have self-worth issues. But that seems to be the exception and not the rule. But it seems like, 95 times out of 100, men seek to learn about pickup as a means to either try to become worthy of female validation through 'becoming more Masculine' because they can't fathom of having a woman who wants them for them... or as a means of tricking women into validating them if they can't fathom of having a woman who wants them for them to the point where the woman could only love the false mask. And pickup turns into a game of seeking external validation as a temporary salve for the underlying shame. It's that thing of trying to fix a symptom rather than addressing the real root cause. And it seems to be making men lonelier and lonelier... especially the ones who end up successfully sleeping with lots of women. That's the issue when you successfully cut off the head of the hydra without cauterizing the stump.

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.