I never assaulted anyone, nor wanted to, just realized that I wasn't thinking healthily about the opposite sex. Maybe assault is the extreme end of the way I was going? At least that's what I always assumed. I don't know, but I think acting on such thoughts need even less empathy than what I had.
Don't get me wrong, I was being horrible and probably made someone or two uncomfortable.
Good thing about therapy is you don't get judged like the responses I get here.
I don't find it at all hard to believe, especially if the perpetrator is impaired with drink etc. Just as a drunk driver may fail to see a pedestrian that's in front of them, but that's not an excuse.
I think it's rare for people behaving badly to be fully aware that they're behaving badly, and proceeding anyways. Humans are constant rationalizers, and where sexual consent is the issue, there's a lot of ways for people to tell themselves it's okay. I've heard men say horrifying things in all seriousness. "You need to be a little forceful so she can say 'no' and then give in." "I kept going and she stopped saying no." "Women have rape fantasies, so they actually want it to happen"
I did not read it as OP assaulting women, but rather likely objectified most women as objects to fuck rather than people. (Sorry if that sounded blunt)
That's not what I got from his writing. That's normal behavior by both men and women. What OP described is manipulating them for his sexual pleasure, including making them do "non-conventional" things.
Take a look at any dating apps, there are hundreds of millions of people objectifying people. Being good or bad doesn't change the fact it's normalized.
it being normalized doesn't make it normal. the critical point here is that it should not be normal, and the only way to make it not normal is to say so. coming out and repeating that it is normal only helps to normalize it further. in my circles it is not normal. but in part that is because i stay away from people who think it is normal. and it could be that i am in the minority, but i hope not. either way, this needs to be called out and opposed, and my complaint to you is that you are not opposing it.
Well, you might want to revisit your beliefs on how folks' in the US experience their world.
There is certainly no excuse for bad behavior, and it is certainly the case that for many folks they absolutely know what they are doing.
If your point is that people are culpable for their bad behavior regardless of their claims about knowledge, then I agree.
At the same time most of the culture that raised me runs on people denying to themselves what they are doing, ranging from highly individualistic sublimations of the "fundamental attribution error" to renouncing culpability for their direct work at building the torment nexus.
The entirety of the mode of production here relies on ignoring how we exploit the people around us in almost every exchange so it's not at all surprising to me that, looking towards the OP, men in this culture commonly are able to hide their bad behaviors in layers of fantasy so deep that they aren't able to consciously understand how they are treating their lovers.
I don't know your context here, but if that kind of self-deception is news to you you might want to review the behavior of the people you're around (or your own), because either your threshold for bad behavior or your perceptions of peoples' capacity for self-delusion is perhaps a little low.
