Comment on How to summon a group of gym bros (100% working tutorial 2026)

• blarghly@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  Hard disagree. The main character of the comic is taking an active interest in improving himself through living a healthy lifestyle. In his interactions with others, he behaves in a friendly and genuine way. In the panel you are describing, he is essentially striking a flirtatious - but masculine - pose and attempting to make eye contact… which is the default way that women will typically try to indicate openness to potential suitors. The location appears to be a public park, which is a very normal place to interact with strangers.

  Really, saying it is the wrong place at the wrong time is an interesting thing to say, because what is the right place and time? You say this like there is some sort of set of rules, like those Victorian books of aristocratic manners, about when it is and is not appropriate to interact with someone. If you have such a book for the modern era, I would love to read it… but I have seen neither hide nor hair. Instead, it seems like the “appropriate” time and place is a mythical moving target. Even if you specifically have some sort of idea of places you personally think are appropriate - wait ten minutes and someone will come along to contradict you. Gym? No. Class? No. The park? No. The club? No. Coffee shop? No. Dance class? What you’re not here purely for the sake of learning a beautiful art form? Ew, no. In my view, the only places really “appropriate” for meeting women are:

  1. Explicit “singles” events - where the women present will consist almost entirely of women looking for committed, long term relationships.
  2. Dating apps, which everyone hates.
  3. Completely accidental interactions.

  In all these situations, men are heavily disadvantaged in achiving their goals of finding partners to have sex with, since the first two will always have an extreme disparity between men and women with the same goals, and the latter is, by definition, impossible to make happen or seek out.

  I propose a different idea. Any reasonable, sex positive person will tell you - sex is no big deal. It is just like anything else. Okay, then let’s treat it like anything else. Suppose you like metal music, or playing tennis, or building neat bicycles. When is it appropriate to say hello to someone with this context? Like, suppose you are hanging out in the park, and see someone walking by carrying a tennis racket. It’s reasonable to walk up to them and say “Hey! I see you play tennis! Me to!” And then maybe you can talk some more, and actually both of you are looking for tennis partners, and you have a lot of fun together. Or maybe you are sitting outside a cafe, and someone rolls up on their pennyfarthing. It wouldnt be out of turn for you to say “Wow, that’s a sick pennyfarthing!” We can even see an example of this in the very comic above, where guys come over and talk to our bro-hero in the park about lifting.

  Now, maybe Mr. Pennyfarthing is having a bad day. Maybe he runs the national association of neat bicycles, and your bike is just so under his standard that he is already bored of talking to you. Or maybe he is an alcoholic who lost his job and his pennyfarthing is the only means of transportation that he has and he is so fucking tired of people commenting on it, FUCK! And so maybe when we try to strike up a conversation, he won’t be interested, or might be grumpy, or might even go off on us, saying we are assholes for bringing it up. But that doesn’t make us assholes - after all, we were just trying to strike up a friendly, fun conversation.

  Similarly, if a girl walks over to the cafe rocking a bodacious ass in skintight booty shorts, it is perfectly reasonable to say “wow, you look like you have an interest in being a sexy human - me too!” (in so many words, lol). And maybe she’ll feel anxious, or pissed off. And maybe she’ll run away sobbing, crying “I didn’t ask for this luscious badonk, it’s a curse!!” But much like Mr Pennyfarthing, that is her problem, and none of this means that we are bad people.

  Which kind of brings me to the last point I wanted to make, which is your use of the word “creep”. It seems like your justification for this is that he is staring at women - but there is no indication that he is staring at women at all. In fact, the joke of the comic implies, to me at least, that literally as soon as he shows up at the park he is inundated with guys wanting to talk about lifting.

  But suppose he was staring. Let’s consider his actions and intentions. We see no evidence of ill will towards women - in fact, he has gone to great efforts to make himself more appealing to them. And without some sort of malintent, such staring should be considered, at worst, a social faux pas. After all - we look at things we are interested in, and at people we would like to speak to. But sometimes we don’t initiate because we are shy or anxious. And if bro is not even aware that it is a social faux pas, he can hardly be blamed for doing it.

  But working backward through the line of reasoning in your comment, we see - he seems creepy because he is staring, and because he seems creepy, he must be a creep, and because he is a creep, talking to women can’t possibly help him. To me, this chain of logic seems to be making a lot of logical leaps that aren’t justified, and instead I think it is something of a post-hoc rationalization which essentially boils down to slut shaming.

  Men who want to have sex with women are bad - which is why we know this man is bad, and everything he does is bad. Any effective strategy he might adopt to gain a more enjoyable and fulfilling sex life, like working out to have a hot body, noticing potential sexual partners, or interacting with those potential sexual partners, are therefore also bad. But since polite society is nominally sex positive, calling him a slut would be in bad taste - and so instead he is called a creep, under cover of “protecting women” - ironically, shaming him for doing the very things that most women would find attractive: being hot, being socially confident, taking initiative. And the overall social effect is a net negative: since trying to be an attractive and sexually successful man is liable to get you labelled a creep - a term that implies not a lack of attainable skill, but a fundamental moral failing - the men who are most likely to take effective steps towards being appealing to women are men who don’t care about being good people.

  Thank you for coming to my TED Talk

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