So, to you and to the community I’d like to take some time that may save me and dozens of people some time in the future. This is in response to your childish tantrum and insulting nature in our chat message that went awry when you immediately assumed a habit of mine was a disrespect towards you.
The fact is I’m an extremely strong introvert. For those of you not in the know, an introvert is a person who thrives on being alone. They tend to be wholly independent and don’t see being alone as a punishment. Introverts really can’t stand small talk and would rather talk about genuine things that mean something to them. Introverts are usually deeply caring people. They are driven by a strong moral compass. Though the only people who get to see that are the few people with who an introvert has established a connection. There is no formula for how an introvert connects to another person. It happens with development over the course of time. Being a man who is an introvert has not made being a gay man easy nor has it made navigating the niche leather community easy.
The homosexual community is very vapid and it’s extremely daunting to me as an introvert. Because I post a few good pictures I’m besieged by desperate perverts with private messages that lack any genuine content and to me this is noise I don’t want to hear. I’m not impressed by cock shots or ass shots; I roll my eyes when men on other continents tell me they want to serve me and become my slave; I find it exhausting that desperate perverts treat me like I’m a free sexting bot that dispenses pictures. Example: “You’re so hot, SIR. Tell me what you’re going to do to me, SIR. SIR, I know you have dozens of pictures on here and I don’t have any here and the one I sent you is maybe just my ass/cock and my face is cut out or heavily obscured but can you send me one more photo of yourself, SIR?” Or men endlessly sexting me fantasy scenarios that will never come to be. That’s not fun for me. It’s rather shallow and superficial. It attempts to use me as a tool to get off. In short, it demeans me in ways I wouldn’t demean others. I would actually consider walking up to a guy in a dark room, popping inside him, and dumping my load to be a bit more respectful. That at least isn’t wasting hours of his time with lies and lead ons like so many of these messages.
Because these private messages can best be described as “noise” to me, I delete them. If a guy isn’t showing a genuine interest in me or lets a lot of time pass without responding to me, I delete the message. This isn’t an introverted trait per se but it is in fact just my love of cleanliness and orderliness. With around 50+ message that I receive in a week from my social media platforms, I have a NEED to delete these messages before they overwhelm me.
I came into this world with a mentality of “Love and trust few and do your best to do harm to none.” I can’t tell anyone why exactly I am an introvert. I can’t say if it’s my brain chemistry that I was dealt in the genetic lottery or if it’s how I came to be due to the world around me, or if it is a combination of both. And being a part of the gay community, which can be unnecessarily cruel, it has only reinforced that mentality of “Love and trust few and do your best to do harm to none.” Mainly because members of my own community have treated me EXTREMELY poorly both intentionally and unintentionally in ways I wouldn’t imagine doing to them. I don’t wish to be an asshole like them.
So, this may seem very not-like a SIR but I am polite. Most people think being a SIR excuses you from being bound to protocols. No, we’re bound to rules, manners, and formalities within the leather community AND in the real world. I am an extremely polite person and in-so-much I can consider it a fault. I maintain civility and politeness long into a conversation where I am not receiving the same kindness from my chat partners. I also continue to remain polite when a desperate pervert is sexting Me and I am just not into being used like a tool to get him off. I maintain civility when he is failing to pick up the social cues of “I’m not into you.” Now, this may make me seem like a total jerk but I’ve come to a point where I don’t directly say to guys, “I’m not into you,” because gay men have a proven track record of breaking into childish temper tantrums when rejected and I have only a 3 gallon bucket and no mop to clean up this 5 gallons of childish insanity. In my humble opinion, when a guy breaks down into a fit of cruel words, screaming, insults, and projecting their own issues onto the person who rejected them, it can be a great indicator that all his sweet and kind words were a front and his love is conditional and when he’s in the midst of a tantrum we are seeing his true self. That angry brat is the real him. The bitter old queen. And this behavior is foreign to me. When I’ve been rejected in the past I simply move on and if given the opportunity, I shake the hand of the man who turned me down and thank him for his honesty or his time.
I have a strong moral code based on the morality I developed from every person I’ve met in my life. I truly believe in honesty and integrity and brotherhood. I believed in those values long before I knew about Leather and the Leather community. The fact that those words are used often as the motto for the leather community made a young me think the Leather Community would be a paradise for people like me. Sadly, I found it wasn’t. I find it extremely aggravating how so many men lack this honesty, integrity, and sense of brotherhood and the hypocrisy found within them when they boast how important it is to them. They state so in their in their profiles, speeches, and reference it when convenient, and yet easily abandon it when it’s convenient to do so. This causes me great dissonance because I don’t think it’s hard to act like a decent person and yet I see so many of my fellow leather men choose to act like like the same selfish and nasty queens they admonish. I see them act and behave in ways towards their fellow men that are appalling to me. I don’t know if it’s based in selfishness or vanity but to me I can’t help but write it off as unnecessary cruelty.
When I do try and talk to someone, I’m searching for genuine connections. I am looking for men who are into leather as a fetish (wearing gear), kink (deviant sex) and leather lifestyle (Master/slave or Dad/boy). I’m looking for all three of those in my people. The gear is important to me, the deviant sex is important to me, and so is the leather lifestyle. Capitalizing my personal pronouns and using lowercase for the pronouns of my chat partners and how they respond to me is a great indicator of whether or not this guy is on my wave length. And because I’m an introvert I’d rather be alone than be with someone who doesn’t do it for me or someone who doesn’t get me. I’d certainly rather be alone than be with someone who would take a value of mine and of many people in the leather community and use it in a low blow attempt to insult.
I thank you, dear enraged tumblr user. You finally were the straw that broke the camel’s back. You allowed me to vomit up thoughts I’ve had for months. You’re the perfect example of why I stay so distant from my fellow leather men. The sad part is you and I just failed to connect. For whatever reason you didn’t resonate with me or you never gave me cues that you were a person I wanted to get to know and bring past my personal guard.
So, now to be absolutely cut throat. I find it hysterical all that you derived from my habit of deleting private messages of conversations that have gone stale. I actually smiled and chortled to myself reading your response. I showed to you honesty and manners (I said: “Sorry”) when I apologized for deleting the message but it was you who degenerated into instant and blatant rudeness because I didn’t save a message from a faceless profile that only reblogs other people’s content. It’s amusing that you’d call ME ‘pretentious’ when YOU didn’t bother to chat with me for a time (or the content of our previous exchange lacked anything genuine) so that the message fell into the delete category and then you expected me to remember your faceless profile that shows nothing to identify you. The rather generic fetish profile handle didn’t help your cause either. Neither of those helped differentiate you from the other 50 private messages I deleted. Isn’t that rather pretentious of you to think you’re so important that you’re extremely memorable without any identifying features?
But one thing I did learn from this was what you truly are. I’m glad you showed your true colors to me now rather than later before I wasted any of my time on you. I don’t need someone who immediately assumes the worst in people because I’m already pessimistic enough. I don’t need a friend or chat mate who goes into attack mode over the slightest offense (which was really just your assumption). I don’t need someone who displayed the exact traits he accused me of having. Nor do I need someone who quickly resorts to laughable insults. You seem pretty toxic to me.
It’s people like you who make me glad that the universe gifted me with an introverted brain. That I can happily stay at home and not feel lonely. That I have the strength to to look at someone like you and realize I’d be better off alone than suffer someone like you for the sake of companionship or sex. That I have the moral character to not insult other people’s value systems because I was slightly rubbed the wrong way. And that I have the grace and manners to not resort to ‘Spit Acidic Venom’ mode because my feelings were hurt. I am very thankful to be a lone wolf introvert rather than deal with people like you, or worse yet, become someone like you.
And I thank you in your cowardice. You instantly blocked me with an ADORABLE handwritten emoji. Instead of trying to work it out like a decent human being. You threw mud and then ran before I could throw any back. Yeah, you’re a real decent man. To be honest with you if the method of communication was still available I might have tried to actually speak to you and resolve the situation. But blocking me sealed the deal and gave me the strength to finally put down some things I’ve felt for a long time now. You, the true churl, gave me the inspiration to begin to write on major problems we face as gay men, leather men, and a leather community in an age where people are losing their own humanity and dehumanizing others without any repercussions because they can hide in the vastness of the internet. Thank you for that strength.
I really am not great at closing words while being an asshole since I work hard not to be an asshole so I’ll just let my introverted brain do the talking:
No, Bozo, my introverted brain says to myself “This Tumblr guy isn’t your loss. You just dodged a bullet.”
yousharknotpass
turnnoffyourmind
janainaart
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origamiaround
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dededos
