I was the guy who'd start shit in bars with other guys I saw slipping roofies into drinks and then walking them over to girls.

I've never hit a woman, outside of a controlled kumite match in a dojo (where we both obviously consented to the idea of martial combat).

I've never sexually assaulted a woman, I've never even cheated on any of my partners... yeah I'm not an incel.

I've had a number of year+ long relationships, and when not in a committed relationship, I've had a number of flings.

I'm actually a fairly successful flirt whose problem seems to be that I'm better at flirting than I am at recognizing red flags.

But I also find the idea of having a 'roster' of 'situationships'... or in the older vernacular, a number of side-chicks... I find that fundamentally disgusting, have never done it myself, don't associate with guys who do.

(and just to be super clear, i don't de facto despise consensted polyamory / ENM, i just can't do it, im not built that way, its not for me)

I've actually had so many platonic female friends growing up, because I was genuinely a rather meek, restrained and polite kid, who didn't like the competitive machismo of pubescent boys... I had so many female platonic friends that I was frequently bullied as being gay.

I've been in multiple situations in my college years where I would get catcalled by women, where women would try to forcibly make out with me at parties, after I clearly indicated I wasn't interested.

Going even further... ~15 years after getting out of school and college... I've now been physically assaulted (as in, had to call the police, she got taken away in handcuffs, not me), forced into sex I didn't want to have (you know, raped), and seriously gaslit and emotionally abused by a number of former female partners.

While I recognize that my personal, anecdotal experience is a bit anomalous, extreme, compared to the statistical baseline... I don't think that its uncommon at all for most men these days to at least experience some of what I have.

But nobody talks or cares about any of that kind of stuff in anywhere near the the numbers, with anywhere near the frequency or intensity that women's struggles are talked about.

Yes, its more likely that a woman will experience IPV than a man... but its like 5 to 4 ratio or a 4 to 3 ratio... not the 9 to 1 ratio that the prevaling culture would give you the impression of.

When I look at this comic, I see, in addition to seeing women expressing fears that are to a certain extent very real and valid...

... I also see a continued minimization of what men go through. The comparative worries in the two panels are obviously set up, to dramatic effect, to make the man's worries seem insignificant... when a plain, literal reading, and undetstanding of the empirical statistical reality, will tell you that the man has a realistic fear, the woman does not.

I see women unfairly painting with an overly broad brush, that punishes, discriminates against just all men, regardless of their actual opinions or tendencies or past actions as individuals.

I see a situation where there's little point in attempting to go out on a date with a woman, if the generally socially accepted norm is that by default she is convinced you could murder her, and that's the starting point, you now have to somehow perform and signal sufficiently to dissuade that particular unrealistic fear, before an actual relationship can really even begin.

And I can tell you that at this point, simply most men, most men who are not violent murderers or rapists, who are not perma online like almost all of us in this thread... most men have an opinion that is somewhere around there.

So they're just learning to either suffer or be happy by themselves, to pursue other goals and interests outside of dating, because they don't have the energy to prove to every woman they meet that they're not going to kill her.

They're tired of being punished for things they didn't do.

I see that the overall situation, on both sides, is ... basically a self reinforcing doom spiral, where this only ever gets worse and worse, for both parties.

Some kind of actually productive dialogue has to happen, some kind of paradigm shift must occur, in order to halt this doom spiral.

There has to be some kind of way to stop talking past each other and start talking too each other, or this dysfunction is just going to broaden and intensify.

Otherwise, women will broadly continue to be hypervigilant by way of constantly being stressed and worried in any interaction or relationship with a man, and men who have no ill will, but are treated as if they do, will simply remove themselves from the dating scene, from broader social spaces where women are, from relationships.

Part of the feedback loop is that the well intentioned, stable, responsible, safe men... take themselves out of society first... so then... women see and experience proportionally more of the ill intentioned, unstable, careless, dangerous men... which leads to women having more and more intensly negative experiences with the men they do meet.

Its the survivorship bias mechanism, but sort of in reverse, its evil twin, something like that.

It amplifies the perceptual disconnect, between each of the two sides, and between each side and the actual empirical reality.

I woukd genuinely love it if there was some way to actually stop this destructive feedback loop, because it makes things worse for everyone.