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This is terrifying but I am glad people like this are self aware enough to get help. Kudos.. I think?

Women had to be interested in me so that I could feel validated

i don't quite get the meaning of this in the context of accepting agency of others. because it works both ways. either it means you assume that they are interested in you to validate yourself, or it means you need see/experience them actively showing interest in order to validate your approach.

likewise with agency, i can assume someone has agency, which is actually bad because it leads to thinking: if they didn't want this they would have used their agency to stop it. or i can ask myself whether there might be something that could prevent this person from using their agency.

a problem is also that when approaching someone you know what you want, and what you want could be something harmless. but the approached person doesn't know that if they don't know you well enough already.

i forgot to add that i am just talking about general definitions and my own feelings, not your personal specifics. feel free to respond as you feel comfortable

Thanks for sharing. And well done admitting you need help and getting it.

are we talking about weird fantasies / bdsm or just "having a partner" here

It doesn't matter. It really doesn't, but I'm only equipped to deal with my own stuff, I can't explain the "why" to others even if I wanted to.

WTF, I find it hard to believe that during a sexual assault, the perpetrator doesn't know what they are doing. WTF is this?

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.

> Good thing about therapy is you don't get judged like the responses I get here.

That's why it's a paid service. ChatGPT is also not judgemental. It doesn't mean people assuming shitty behavior deserve comforting.

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.

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 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.

That's normal behavior by both men and women

no, it isn't. if you think it is then you should look for other friends.

you are reading an awful lot into the comment.

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.

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"