I recently watched an essay by " Moon Channel ", about how K-On encourages immaturity and an inability to grow in young men, and the line " [These young men] are perpetually 12 " stuck with me. I disagreed with the premise of the thesis (slice-of-life and incessantly cute media preys on young men by offering an endless hamster wheel of escapist fantasy), but that line intrigued me.
In Australia at least, there's no "innocence". As someone who was an apparently naive child, looking back on it, it amazes me the sheer number of references to masturbation, dick jokes, and sex that I was seemingly supposed to engage with and partake in. I don't think being 12 years old would change anything.
Fundamentally, I think that if you don't latch on to societal archetypes as a male (at least in Australia), you're kind of screwed from day one. At least the United States of America, LATAM, and, to some small extent, Scandinavia, have a less innate culture of perversion and an othering of females (probably because they're large enough landmasses with enough people on them that gendered culture homogenizes a bit), but Australia has such a deeply performative culture of " ruggedness " and " dominance " baked into it that there's no room for any sort of goodness or purity.
Another side effect of this is that any sort of yearning, not even for femininity, but for, like, B-tier normalcy in the face of that culture, is automatically championed as being "counter-cultural" and "progressive". While I don't really resent either of those causes, outside of them being kind of annoying, it makes it so that you can't really exist at all without either conforming to the mainstream or being put on a pedestal.
I still remember the time my retarded mother berated me for shaving my legs, as though I had somehow " failed her " or I was conforming to the great marketing powers that be (which wouldn't even target my demographic). Obviously total bullshit. What a nearsighted bitch.
I'm schizophrenia hello
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