Paraphrasing some parts of this video for what I think may be key takeaways, or a sort of too long; didn’t watch:
Understand or recognize what’s desirable about your masculinity or yourself through the lens of those you’re interested in being with, so if you’re straight, listen to & pay attention to what straight women are drawn to in straight men. Don’t listen as much to straight men about what they view as appealing about being men or masculinity and what they think straight women are into, they’re not straight women, their understanding is limited at best.
Learn how to feel comfortable with yourself, and seek to improve yourself through regular means through hobbies and learning skills that you’re passionate about & can relate to others with, maybe even meeting others in the process that you later find yourself in a relationship with.
I think that last sentence is pretty reasonable. I haven’t watched the video but of your summary, I have a few things I take issue with that would probably deter me from watching.
“Understand or recognize what’s desirable about your masculinity or yourself through the lens of those you’re interested in being with, so if you’re straight, listen to & pay attention to what straight women are drawn to in straight men.”. The first part of this sentence seems reasonable, however, if you were to say the reverse and a straight woman should pay attention to what a straight man wants, that would be perceived as hyper offensive. Woman’s behaviour should not be defined by men, and men’s behaviour should not be defined by women. While partners are a key stakeholder, they shouldn’t define behaviour.
Integrity is important, and doing what you feel is the right thing, regardless of whether the partner values it. Self-respect is everything. It brings out confidence and that is attractive. This kind of ties into the second paragraph which is good and correct imho. I think it’s important to understand yourself, what makes you who you are. Sometimes female partners can display a negative reaction to a guy who is distressed or wants to cry. Not crying isn’t helpful. Sometimes you feel sad and distressed and you want to understand how you feel about it. Sometimes women enforce negative male stereotypes. In the past, I’ve found relationships turn south when I’ve been vulnerable and opened up. They then ask when men don’t talk. They don’t talk because they frequently receive negative reactions from both men and women when they do. In many ways, we are all human, and fragile, and we can also draw strength from our respective energies. This doesn’t really take a gendered view. Some guys have plenty of feminine energy, and some women have plenty of masculine energy. You’ll naturally end up miserable if you don’t live true to yourself and try to understand yourself and your feelings.
Ah, yeah, so that’s mainly an issue with my paraphrase not adequately capturing the context.
The context of that point was in relation to the video’s highlighting of how it can be both a little weird and detrimental to listen only to other men about how to be appealing to women, and to think that they know better than women about what women themselves may want. A lot of the video is referencing and trying to push back against the whole pick-up artist, be a manly man, how to woo the ladies kind of advice and incel venting floating around some online spaces. In trying to paraphrase that I dropped that context and phrased it more firmly than the video did, so that was my bad, as it wasn’t saying only behave as your partner might want, but to try to recognize what it is they do like about you as you are and appreciate that, even if you may not understand it. E.g. liking when you’re being silly despite that going against some views of what men are “supposed” to be like, i.e. “stoic & serious”.
This is why I also had the second point paraphrased as that’s a big part of the balance to the first. You definitely don’t want to bend over backwards and go against who you are to whoever you’re trying to attract, and that’s emphasized in the video, especially towards the end where I paraphrased the second part from. The video’s conclusion is basically, “Don’t fall for people telling you they have the absolute answers to how to get with other people, and ultimately, just be yourself. If you have a negative view of yourself, focus on picking up hobbies or learning some skills and improving yourself so that you can learn more about yourself, like yourself more, & feel better about being you.”
In other words, a variation of the old advice of, people won’t like you if you don’t like you, or something like that.
Fair points, and thanks for the clarification. It’s a very long video so I appreciate the TLDR.
