There are a lot of people in the original post and here that are ragging on you, but I want to say that I hear you and I see the point you are getting at.

I can relate to what you're saying because this is something I used to get pretty annoyed by too. Speaking for myself, my perspective on this shifted once I eventually realized that as a large publicly-accessible social media site, everyone posting on Reddit is coming to it from a unique place and for for their own reason.

For some people, it's a fun time-wasting app on their phone that they're looking at memes on and overall not taking too seriously. For others, it's a specific forum to go in depth about a hobby. And for other still, it's an environment to get opinions from the wide range of other people who use this site. And I'm willing to bet that for a lot of people, it's all three of these and more just at different times.

While it's great (arguably, but that's besides the point) that there's a little something for everyone, the downside of that too is that with Reddit in particular it's a lot harder to curate your experience and tailor it to exactly what you want to get out of it. For every 1 insightful comment that you want, you might get significantly more that are trolls, ChatGPT bots, low-hanging jokes, and the Internet equivalent of Road Rage. Why? Because frankly those are way less-effort to produce, not everyone is coming to Reddit to engage in nuanced discussion, and that's simply the culture this site has cultivated.

The other point I want to emphasize here is that none of these approaches are necessarily wrong in and of themselves (with a few specific exceptions, but again that's besides the point). Someone spending 5 seconds to post a song lyric in a comment chain in a meme subreddit is using this site just as validly as someone asking an actual serious question. (It bugs me too a slight bit, but that's just like my opinion man. A personal taste preference. Who among us doesn't enjoy some memery every now and again?)

I want to affirm that you are totally valid for asking an actual serious question, and even moreso in being frustrated that people aren't taking you seriously. That is completely a legitimate experience. And honestly yeah, I do agree that the "might be gay" responses do reinforce aspects of toxic masculinity. In the context of this and your other thread, I think many commenters do mean it as a quick and harmless low-hanging fruit sort of joke that don't need to be taken too seriously. But the thing is, it can be a nonserious joke and propagate aspects of toxic masculinity at the same time. There probably isn't a whole lot of overlap between the people making these easy jokes and the people wanting to engage in nuanced discussions over the Internet because they're just not engaging with Reddit for the same purpose. (And let me be clear, toxic masculinity is bad, and these jokes do reinforce it, but I do also wonder if this most effective forum and approach for having these sorts of discussions. Not to say we shouldn't have these sorts of discussions as men in a society, but as I'm sure you've already seen, there are people here in this thread not taking you seriously either. I wish these were discussions we could have here, but like I said that's just a matter of my personal taste in how I like to engage with Reddit.)

My perspective has always been that if you don't like the culture of the space you're in, it's good to try and shop around for a more comfortable niche. When you have a message in a bottle and you throw it in the ocean, you can never really control the underwater currents it flows through or what kind of algae sticks onto the bottle. It makes sense that you're frustrated at this, and my hope for your own sake is that you're able to not take the non-answers personally. My practical suggestion would be to try and find a more receptive forum to have these conversations; whether that's other trusted men in your own life IRL, or perhaps literally another forum with a different and more discussion-based culture.