So, it’s time I talk about my manosphere days. I am sad that it happened at all, but I am glad to be out and to be able to talk about a time in my life that definitely did happen. It was a time when I was really struggling more with my identity; I still am, but have made significant progress in being comfortable within my own body. You can see evidence of this struggle practically everywhere in this blog.

I was inspired by this video that was brought to my attention by a friend recently:

Going back to my first perhaps halfway coming out post back in 2022 titled Teenage Troubles, it is quite cringe and past me was right in some things — I am definitely cringing — but I doubt that consuming that kind of content was “necessary” good for me in any way (unless you count consuming poison to become more atuned to knowing what poison tastes like / build a tolerance). I was right in that I needed this general phase though — the phase of exploring and trying to find help on what kind of man I should be. I am also wrong in all the degradations that I do upon myself. Humans are complex and very multi-faceted in their ideas and desires. I can see now that I was pigeonholing myself into my own comfort zone of “a world of binary decisions” — which in hindsight is boring af. If you cannot allow yourself to step into things that are more complicated than a 1 or 0, what kind of life is that anyway. There is so much to do and to experience; life is an adventure with many ups and downs, and I want to experience a lot of it (hopefully net positive). I was wrong.

It’s hard to think critically and analytically about what has happened and is happening to me in terms of mental, and psychological development. I was going down the rabbit hole, and if it were not for external forces, I can’t imagine where I’d be, mentally, right now. The external forces were basically common sense from people not in the rabbit hole. First, it was from strangers online, prompting me to write that 2022 post. Then, it was my real-life friends. They didn’t explicitly tell me that I was being stupid and starting to hold wrong, harmful beliefs at first; looking back, they hinted at it and I think I was able to pick up some of it — enough to slowly detach myself away from toxic masculinity and the manosphere a little bit. However, I cannot make it clear enough, that I would not have been able to do this alone. I would’ve been screwed. I owe my current sense of identity in great part to the influence of my friends, peers, and strangers with wisdom.

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I will now touch upon my own profile, which will basically explain why I was susceptible. My profile explains itself because it is one of many; I am not a unique case, I am a data point exhibiting the phenomena of regression to the mean of men in the manosphere.

I was a lonely, socially isolated, deeply insecure, previous victim of bullying, straight cisgender man. Maybe one thing that doesn’t complete the profile, being in America, is that I am not white (or black) though — I am Chinese. That aside, a lot of the other boxes are checked. I struggled with my own sense of masculinity due to toxic masculinity views inside of me that I left unexamined. I could go on and on, complaining about the circumstances of my youth that caused me to be like this, but I will not because I have done enough of that in my own mind. I’m tired of it, and instead, I want to focus on building a life that I look forward to experiencing and one worth living.

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Some videos on the manosphere that helped me see things better: