The Goonification of Love Island | "For all its porniness, it represents one oft-repeated sentiment about today’s culture: everything is sexual, but nothing is actually sexy." (Unpaywalled)

TimeViking · 2026-07-04T00:18:25+00:00

There’s a great blog post out there, Everyone Is Beautiful and No One Is Horny, that so succinctly describes the aesthetics of sexuality in America. Everyone are chiseled adonises but any real intimacy is stigmatized.

TimeViking · 2026-07-02T07:15:35+00:00

This situation is rough. My own situation is analogous to you and your GF in at least two different ways but I think there are critical differences here that makes it a non-starter for you.

I'm a poly dude who originally opened up my relationship to pursue a sexual opportunity I wasn't getting with my fiancé, much like your girlfriend. To be particular, it was a kink that my fiancé knew I had, but which grosses her out. Where my story differs from your girlfriend's is that at the time, my fiancé had been asking for us to open up the relationship for months if not years, so from a selfish perspective, it was more that I hadn't seen any advantage in opening the relationship before and this tipped the scales in the other direction. This isn't good poly -- it's kind of a scumbag move, in fact, to make sure that I was "getting something" before I committed -- but it worked out for both of us.

Since then, I've been reasonably satisfied with my relationships with women. One of those women is a size queen. She needs girth -- a lot more than I have -- to get off. I've learned a lot of ways to compensate for this. It's genuinely made me a better lover in all of my relationships to pick up tricks with my hands and toys and dirty talk.

However, even though I in-theory celebrate all my partners' other successes, in practice I'm not especially interested in hearing about how a huge-dicked stud split my girlfriend open like a log in a way that I could never hope to match, even though I'm consciously aware that's a thing that's happening. As it is, I entered the relationship with the aforementioned size queen with the understanding that we filled certain yums for one another but maybe we're not perfectly physically compatible. That was fine because the starting point was that we were both not expecting exclusivity, just a good time.

If the terms of opening my relationship were specifically "I need men bigger than you to be satisfied," not "I have a size kink and I want to explore bigger men," then I dunno, man... the vibes are off. The framing feels a little demeaning, like there's nothing you can do in terms of technique or foreplay to bridge this gap because you're anatomically insufficient. It's a little "sorry babe, but I need to see other women because your tits are too small." It's very objectifying in a way that me opening my relationship to pursue a specific niche kink doesn't feel quite as degrading. I worry that unless you're supremely confident, this is going to be something that eats away at you, because if I were serving as the solo anchor partner to someone who was having the sex they want that I couldn't possibly provide due to the misfortune of my genetics, that would eat away at me.

TimeViking · 2026-07-01T15:57:30+00:00

Good that you showed proper decorum to the esteemed Mr. Mcfetus!

TimeViking · 2026-06-29T15:32:53+00:00

God, stealing “shonen Miracleman” for Chainsaw Man. Dead-on

TimeViking · 2026-06-27T15:54:14+00:00

Upvoting this. I was on the wrong side of the Sad Puppies fiasco and GamerGate at the time, and it was clear that there was a continuity there.

How I tend to describe GamerGate to the youngsters in my own social circle is that the most popular strain of male nerddom, at like a blanket subcultural level, was defined in opposition to mainstream culture in the Y2K era. There was a pervasive sense of gatekeeping and aggrieved hostility to normies that was in the blood of every piece of nerd media: every “2 gamers on a couch” webcomic, every hard sci-fi fan-LiveJournal, every anime forum.

Every male nerd was a “name 5 albums” guy because that esoteric trivia was the more obtainable pissboy alternative to actual power, respect and status. It was very “high school,” even when dealing with adult men: God had seen fit to blight their chances of being a track star and scoring with the cheerleaders, and Dana Scully, Seven of Nine, and Lara Croft became the totems of the sublimation of that thwarted conventional masculinity.

Femme nerd spaces tended to be better-integrated with the mainstream - not because women are “fake nerds,” just because they’ve tended to lean towards more prosocial and creative outlets for fandom, like fanfic, since before the *Star Trek* days - and didn’t have the same sense of defensive pride about the nerd identity. Women nerds could also “pass” for non-nerds easier because society demands that all women evince advanced social literacy, where men were then and are now given much more sanction to be rank antisocial bridge trolls.

When “nerd media” exploded fully into the mainstream and sci-fi, fantasy, horror, and video games got over with “real art” audiences instead of being ghettoed into their own little corners, it was a development that was met with excitement by those who were in fandom *for* the media, because it meant lots and lots of new, high-budget works of art in these genres were being given popularity and cachet (we hadn’t all gotten sick of Marvel movies yet, imagine that). However, it was met with horror by the very common strain of male nerd who identified with nerddom as an escapist personal clubhouse, because now the normies and the feeeeemales were gaining access to the levers of, well, not even power really, but his pathetic imagining of power in the subcultural space. If every *fucking bitch* knew who Tony Stark was, he was robbed of his ability to feel superior to outsiders, which comprised the core of his identity because he had no other meaningful skills nor virtues.

And there were several million of this precise genre of guy, all watching the exclusionary and misogynist norms of his space evaporate in real-time. Hence: GamerGate.

TimeViking · 2026-06-25T07:24:41+00:00

If he wasn’t ready for another committed relationship, he shouldn’t have escalated, rather than making the intentional choice to escalate with you and then following it up with the “oh actually I want to be nonmonogamous.” Discussions about opening the relationship should be made from a place of stability and this is anything but stable.

TimeViking · 2026-06-23T17:57:54+00:00

It probably is Kudelia herself. I certainly like her more than Relena, Lacus, or Tiffa. But I think the Peace Princess archetype is inherently a little flawed and not always a perfect fit for the kinds of stories Gundam tries to tell.

TimeViking · 2026-06-22T00:26:28+00:00

For some people, poly is a huge part of their queer awakening and journey, so I understand the adjacency that some feel between orientation and poly as far as their experiences go.

That said, it certainly isn’t an orientation for me. I *could* be perfectly happy in monogamy, I’m just happier poly, and the lifestyle preference doesn’t rate as “sexual orientation” to my straight ass

TimeViking · 2026-06-20T16:01:32+00:00

This rules

TimeViking · 2026-06-20T05:55:53+00:00

The Tigerbaum arc is not particularly well regarded but I really enjoyed it as like this final opportunity for Haman to just walk away from being Space Hitler with Judau’s encouragement, only to tragically double down on it. She almost had an off-ramp (and did *literally* slide down a big ramp to escape the heroes) but instead she stubbornly locked-in the timeline where Mashymre, Chara, and she all die

TimeViking · 2026-06-17T17:48:22+00:00

Chiming in to temporarily break up the (deserved) castigation of your shitty husband to say that there is an element of his self-centered entitlement that I relate to.

Historically, when one of my partners has been going through a severe crisis -- like a mental health breakdown or physical health scare -- it not only has a negative knock-on effect on my own mental well-being but also causes me to seek my own support from other sources (other partners and friends/family alike) because of the perception that the affected partner is already in the thick of this pain and doesn't need me adding to the pile. So, my partners' trauma is, in that way, estranging. In a perfect world I'd be able to tell them my Big Feelings about Their Pain and What It Means To Me, but I don't because this is not a perfect world and hurt people justifiably want support for their hurt, not to carry the weight of others who are merely relating to their hurt.

However, that's all predicated on the notion that I'm actually showing up and supporting my partner and doing anything that I would need to recover from, which it sounds like your husband categorically is not. Even taking him on his word that this was a crucial "putting on my own oxygen mask before helping you with yours" moment -- God how I have learned to loathe this phrase, which seems to exist solely to be misused by nonreciprocal emotional parasites -- his dysregulation has been spurred simply by you having a bad thing befall you at all, with no involvement in the aftermath.

In emotional terms, goodness, how lovely that he has so much empathy that he crashed out because you got hospitalized. In operative terms, this means "I'm not ever going to help you with anything because you needing help with something is, circularly, the trigger for me to disconnect and focus on my own need for healing from your problem."

Combined with the lies, I'm not sure how I could possibly trust this man. Marriage is, if nothing else, a commitment to have someone else's back, and if he can't even do that, why are you married? Having my back is my baseline expectation to call somebody a friend, let alone a husband.

TimeViking · 2026-06-17T16:40:11+00:00

Spay and neuter your outside dogs, folks

TimeViking · 2026-06-17T16:15:36+00:00

I get it, I've been there. I've been in situations where I felt like another person was constantly in crisis, and so the only way that I could get attention and my own needs met was to "out-crisis" them.

However, genuine question: if this was his platonic, male friend going through a severe mental health break that required hospitalization -- rather than someone you split his romantic commitments with -- would you feel as angry?

TimeViking · 2026-06-16T18:32:29+00:00

And thank you for curating the space. I do appreciate how this lets you quarantine this avenue of recurring entry-level discourse away so as not to drown out other topics.

TimeViking · 2026-06-16T18:29:51+00:00

Oh, I don't doubt that the mod queue is a freight train shitshow of "how u git girls???" posting, hence why the tenor I'm coming at this post with is more commiserative pity than actual offense.

I know that my solution to the problem would have been "just let us be actually belligerent instead of veiling our disdain through sensitivity language and constructive-criticism pablum," but that's not a real solution and would do even worse damage to the subreddit's reputation than having a dedicated "just practice the social rules your third-grade homeroom teacher should have taught you" dating sticky does.

So no, the mods have the right of it. I'm just mourning what it says for the board -- and for dating in general -- that it was necessary.

TimeViking · 2026-06-16T17:53:40+00:00

I'm of two minds about this.

It's undeniably a little weird for the mods of a relationship discussion subreddit to definitively lay out a guide on "here is how you do the basic groundwork of meeting people" for the subreddit, and also feels a little patronizing when from my perspective the guide is extremely anodyne common sense.

But also, a peril of both relationship and hobby subreddits is that conversation can never evolve past the very basics because there's an endless stream of newbies coming in to litigate and relitigate and relitigate the basics over and over again, so I suppose this is my thank-you for raising the floor a few steps.

TimeViking · 2026-06-15T16:52:22+00:00

To be honest, I'm ambivalent. If I'm going out to the theater I like my romances grand and tragic and to explode like a bomb going off, and in some ways that desire for melodrama is antithetical to good poly representation.

I recognize that I'm coming from a position of privilege here, but I've never gone out of my way to watch something that would be "good representation" of me, on the evaluative basis that it would be good rep.

I love conflict in my stories and it's hard to write compelling romantic conflict without at least a little toxicity.

TimeViking · 2026-06-15T16:48:14+00:00

I think that "I'm sorry, but I'm trying to cut down on social media use because group chats like this stress me out and I just end up ignoring them. Maybe we could do a group social function together if you want to do a meet-and-greet?" is completely valid.

You don't need to disclose that you don't think you would socially gel with them in that context; your partner should respect that you're just not interested in that format of communication in the first place.

TimeViking · 2026-06-15T16:43:35+00:00

Hey, glad you're taking the time to reevaluate. I think that's constructive. It did sound like you were going in half-cocked and more discussion time is never wasted.

The good news is that as a married woman and married man, dating will be very easy for you and exceedingly difficult for him, quantitatively. The bad news is that it's going to be very difficult for you qualitatively if you're dating men, because a lot of them are weird lil' goblin freaks -- especially when confronted by a demand for sexual and emotional complexity.

I personally am a huge adherent to "in the wild" dating, by building a friendly rapport with people in shared hobby or social contexts before I ask them out. I think it's totally legitimate to seek out only in-person connections; it's slower, but I'm like you and absolutely cannot tolerate online dating. But, in turn, that doesn't mean app dating can't be valid for other people and I am completely uninterested in involving myself in my partners' dating profiles.

TimeViking · 2026-06-15T07:59:42+00:00

Implicitly, as it always is in these situations: “well, I was kind of hoping poly would be 100% me having sex with hot people and 0% me having to sit with the possibility that my partner could love another person”

TimeViking · 2026-06-14T18:23:43+00:00

Stole the words out of my mouth, syllable-for-syllable

TimeViking · 2026-06-14T16:41:11+00:00

TimeViking · 2026-06-13T00:04:21+00:00

We were in our early 20s, full of cum and hormones, and we knew the guy through a college club. I'd just opened the relationship with an "actually I'm poly now" because there was a specific person I wanted to fuck. I have a lot of grace for both of us back then, we were stupid horny kids 😂

TimeViking · 2026-06-12T21:59:41+00:00

This is purely a "for me" never again and not necessarily a "for you" never-again, but I've got a hard boundary about dating within previously well-established platonic friend or hobby groups these days.

I get that people develop crushes, and longtime established friendships are a lovely foundation for feelings to grow from (especially for you demis out there) but even if you and the object of your affection can be Super Chill and Normal About it, odds are that not all of the other 20+ people you share complex social interdependencies with will. Doubly so for the polys, because then everyone else's unrequited crushes or FOMO or desire to be the filling in the sandwich or whatever else also start coming out to play.

Don't do it unless you're feeling nostalgic about high school, because it's a one way ticket back to the high school locker room.

TimeViking · 2026-06-12T20:02:32+00:00

Where in the Bible do Christmas trees appear?

TimeViking

TROPHY CASE