r/redscarepod

For example, a travel nurse I worked with went to Miami Music Week, came back and told me how she “got to fuck” redacted (major house DJ). She told me how he wanted to do anal, that she didn’t really want to, but that she thought “fuck it I’m not going to say ‘no’ to redacted”.

And to anyone who asks “why do you care so much?”, I would ask why are we so comfortable letting women get hurt and not telling them that they don’t have to be with or do things for porn rotted goon brained fuckbois?

And they will complain about it on reddit every single year as if they didn’t know it was coming

On my end, as a straight guy: bartenders, waitresses, barbers, dispensary worker, farmer, influencer, strippers, OF girl, retail

Basically if you have a college degree and don’t get paid by the hour, you’re in

I just spent three months in Portland Oregon on contract and left in April. As soon as Mount Hood was no longer visible in my rear view mirror, I sighed a mild relief and said "that was weird" and damn near forgot the place existed until the Portland hate thread was posted the other day. Just started reflecting on observations I wrote down.

I’m traveling as a nurse from a tight-knit New England Catholic community, both of these cities feel extremely alien. I have hopped on 3-month contracts in the Northwest, interior northwest, and the northeast. It’s a way to scratch the restless wanderer itch I’ve had since I was a wee sensitive young man reading Kerouac, make money, learn about different people and regional healthcare delivery styles, do frivolous bullshit, etc. Probably have it made. Emotionally detached from it.

I spent three months in Montana and have nothing negative to say about the folks there. Montana has its own set of geographic and socioeconomic challenges that the lifestyle magazines and streaming slop shows are not in the business of educating people on. I ’m not saying which city I lived in but people in that state generally just want to hunt, fish, hike, smoke weed, and be left alone. They generally support their LGBT neighbors and are pro choice. Hardly anybody gives a shit who their neighbors voted for.

The other side of the Bitterroot Mountains is heavily inundated with identity politics. Southeastern Idaho has some weird creepy Mormon stuff going on. A lot of Ned Flanders-looking people with a sinister edge to them. I remember walking into a Five Guys in Pocatello and having 10 people turn around to stare at me all at once, as if they’ve communicated via chemical signals that an imposter was among them. The Northern Panhandle of Idaho has a history of racial extremism that the state museum in Boise has some honest and informative displays on. My ex gf and I went garnet mining up there but didn’t really talk to anybody. Gas station clerks just want you to grab your coffee and your sandwich and get the hell out. Some weird looking flags that I could only assume were related to far right groups were on display outside people’s homes.

Boise city proper is red by plurality, where the rest of southwestern Idaho is red by majority. These people aren’t extremists like up north, or uncanny mormons like in the East, but rather your typical angry indignant conservative whose entire inner world is grievance politics. You know, your uncle who always wants to bait an argument at thanksgiving about the trains. Your obnoxious coworker who plays Charlie Kirk Owning The Libs reels too loud at work and yells at his phone. This genre of conservative dominates in this region. Boise is the only place I’ve ever walked into a patient’s room and got immediately grilled about who I voted for in the last election. “Oh you’re from Boston? Has it been burnt to the ground by the ILLEGALS yet?” People in the ED waiting room throwing hissy fits because the television is playing CNN.

White grievance politics bleeds into every conversation in the Treasure Valley. I was spotting a guy at the gym my first week there and introduced myself. Less than a Planck time after telling him my name, he launches full force into a rant about the “transgender Mexicans from California who are ruining our state.” “Go Back To California” is a mantra chanted quite often (in a mcdonalds accent usually), but never said directly to someone from California. Boise has a lot of transplants from The Bay Area/Sacramento who have been priced out of the housing market down there. Most of these transplants vote red and desperately want to prove that they’re “not like those other Californians.” The bumper stickers and yard signs are very confrontational in nature with an uncouthness to them. “Joe and the hoe gotta go” was a phrase I would read quite often on people’s front lawns on my way to work. Or on the back of bumpers on my way to the grocery store where I would have to get on the highway and was immediately greeted by barely legal street tanks driving 85mph in a 55 zone. This was summer of 2023. There was controversy about an upzoning initiative in the city during this time.

In Portland, the political identity signaling is a lot less confrontational. It takes the form of an ambient pressure to conform and have the correct opinions. Typical RS takes about sex work, polyamory, and mass immigration are takes one should keep to themselves if they want to play the social game. I was there January to March of this year. I remember doing trivia at a book bar. The trivia topic and conversation was pretty innocuously about geology. While i was trying to remember the difference between a stalagmite and stalagtite, the hostess blurts out “Oh and by the way, FUCK ICE!” Everybody and started cheering and clapping. I was caught off guard and didn’t cheer and clap with them and ended up getting the cold shoulder from the other patrons for the rest of the night. It’s a strange method of exclusion. For the record, I agree, Fuck ICE. But you’re preaching to the choir. Can we chill out?

This next example is just as weird and maybe somebody here with better language skills who’s spent time in PDX can articulate this phenomenon. In normal polite conversation, people will make vague off-handed politically charged statements just to see how you will react. These statements are calculated and the policing of your reaction is very covert. They’re attuned to your micro-expressions. If they don’t like your reaction, they won’t tell you. You’ll just be silently demoted in their brain and discarded. Categorized as unworthy. I’m quite attuned to this kind of shit testing. I’d almost rather them just yell in my face like Idahoans do.

Yard and business signage in Portland is less aggressive than Boise. It’s the typical “in this house, we believe” bullshit. Not as interesting. The nursing culture is bizarre in Portland. Though identity politics don’t permeate the barrier as hard in my profession as other (no land acknowledgements before morning unit huddle), many of the social bizarrities of Portland are still present in hospitals. I had made a comment about this on the other thread.

it’s been fascinating to immerse in two places in the same geographic region where people who get super attached to their opposite political leanings express their neuroticisms in far different ways.

Portland is overall a much better place than Boise if you were wondering. I just wish the people there could be normal. Go and see the rose garden and the food trucks and the cherry blossoms and the giga book store. It’s worth it.

tl;dr Both bizarre. One hostile and one passive-aggressive.

I’d met Victoria before, I was certain of that – briefly, at some after-show drinks years earlier. I could tell she hadn’t remembered. This meeting was different, though. Last time, I hadn’t fallen in love with her.

This was a very posh party. It was a film premiere party – the reward for having been to a film premiere (which, I’d just discovered, is quite a distracting way to watch a film). It was 2007 and I was starting to get invited to this sort of thing but usually I was filming or doing a panel show or my back hurt too much. But my back was on the mend, thanks to all the walking, and I’d been personally invited to this, rather than just getting an e-mail through my agent, so here I was. I was immensely glad.

There were lots of famous people there, some of whom had introduced themselves to me and said nice things. They thought I was famous too, it seemed, so there was a sort of implied acquaintanceship between us. I liked this, but it also made me queasy.

Then she’d been introduced to me – and I’d said we’d once met, just out of pedantry really, and she had neither denied nor remembered it. She was all chatty and sparky and gossipy and interesting and it seems ridiculous that I can’t remember a single thing she said, though I can still see her face looking up at me when I close my eyes.

After a while, the little chatting group developed and widened. She was a couple of yards away from me now and I was talking to a middle-aged woman who had some theory about comedy. I wasn’t interested but I still considered parties like this to be basically hostile environments so I was also grateful to the middle-aged woman for paying me the attention. But then she was back, in my eyeline again, interrupting the woman.

‘Do you smoke?’ She was gesturing towards the door.

I’m a moron. ‘No,’ I said. I was just answering the question. I hadn’t had a cigarette for about six months so I felt like I didn’t really smoke. I only ever have a bit. I didn’t want to lie to her. Amused irritation flashed noticeably across her face. Irritation, though, not disappointment. I suspect she already knew.

She went off for a cigarette – she kind of had to now – but was back quite soon, if not quite soon enough. She wasn’t trying to mingle. I was pretty sure she was flirting but was unwilling to believe my instincts as that seemed too good to be true.

We talked for a long time. I think the main topic of conversation was how awkward parties like this were and how some people seemed so adult and adept about working their way round them, but how we found that difficult and didn’t know how you were supposed to break into other conversations. We. I hoped she didn’t really want to break into another conversation because I certainly didn’t. I wanted to stay in this one forever. The pessimist in me said that she was just what she said she was – a bad mingler, someone shy at parties who didn’t know how to break away from someone else shy at parties.

Eventually she did: ‘I really should go and say hello to …’ I can’t remember who she said, I was suddenly too depressed to care. ‘Maybe see you in a bit?’ She walked away and I got the first wave of a sensation that would become familiar to me: missing her.

I date the current phase of my life from that party. I changed then. Everything that happened to me after that moment, even incidental things, are in a different context, a new world where different things matter.

We went on a few dates – I clumsily managed to organise that, self-consciously booking a restaurant for a time and a place and then feeling amazed, touched and flattered when she actually turned up – this beautiful, exciting woman, just to see me, wearing clothes that she’d picked out while thinking of me.

But it didn’t work out. She e-mailed me and explained, carefully, lovingly really, why it wasn’t a good time for her and how she felt something, in fact had strong feelings for me, but didn’t think it could work at the moment. But can’t one always get over that? Timing can’t be crucial – not outside the context of a joke? And she said she’d met someone else as well. Ah. She didn’t know what would come of that and who knows, maybe in six months or so …? But it was a bad time. A very bad time. Her father had just died. Everything was wrong.

It may sound strange but I treasured that e-mail. It was such a reluctant brush-off – I felt it was almost a sign of achievement for me. Part of me was amazed, overjoyed even, that I’d got so close so quickly to someone I’d fallen for. Because I knew I could only be with someone I’d fallen for and I wasn’t falling for people very often any more. And it had never been quite like this.

‘Close but no cigar,’ as Ellis says. Well that’s all right, I thought. Give it another 34 years and you’ll meet someone else nice.

I did not think that.

I didn’t blame her – she’d been clear, honest and fair and I loved her – but I didn’t really know how to cope. Being single had never made me lonely before – now the feeling was crippling. There were couples everywhere, it seemed. Everyone had someone. I wanted someone more than I’d ever done before at precisely the same moment that I realised that only one person would do.

Never was I more bitterly aware that I didn’t have three wishes. But what if I’d already had a wish? What if I’d used it up? I’d wanted my career success so much and for so long. Had I wasted my luck, my wish on that, something that seemed so trivial now? My career, acting, comedy which, at the time of every other crush, had been a consolation and a distraction, this time felt like a rebuke. That’s the cold, selfish glittery object of my desire that I get. Instead of her. Try and console yourself with that, sneers the genie.

Shepherd’s Bush Green is not a nice place to walk, I think to myself as I cross it diagonally northwestwards, weaving between bench-focused gatherings of chatting tramps. It’s noisy and ugly, but I’m used to walking in drab, boring, featureless places. For years, from the end of 2007, it didn’t matter where I walked. I wasn’t looking at the view. I started walking for my back, I kept going because of her. It made thinking about her more bearable. If I got more miserable, I could just speed up.

Drinking helped too. I’d always liked getting drunk in the pub or at parties – now I had a real use for it. At the end of a miserable day you could use it to speed up time – almost like cutting to the next morning’s hangover. So I did that a lot.

A few times, when drunk, I’d get off with someone. The booze allowed me to tell myself that it might make me feel better. Maybe I’ll manage to fall in love with this person instead, I always wondered. It seems that it can happen very quickly. And surely I should be doing something to shake myself out of my obsession with a woman who’s going out with someone else.

One of those pissed late-night snogs was captured by a paparazzo and printed in Heat magazine. That felt pretty humiliating. What a fool I’d been, I thought. I had no personal life to speak of, not even much experience of how to meet women and form relationships, and yet I’d already become famous. If I was ever to work any of this out, relationships, women, life, as I probably should have done as a teenager, I’d have to do it sneaking around because the press might be interested. I was snogging a girl outside a bar, for God’s sake – that is a normal thing to do, something I should have done more often, and now thousands of people will have seen. No one, I thought bitterly, can have had a higher percentage of their life’s snogs appear in the papers than me. I wasn’t ashamed of what I’d done but I was embarrassed for it to be shown to the world – as if someone had taken a picture of me washing my balls or having a shit.

It dawned on me gradually that quite a lot of people who I didn’t know were interested in my private life, or my apparent lack of one. My profile had grown slowly – initially Peep Show had barely been noticed but, as more series aired, more people became aware of it. Then some became aware of the sketch show. Others started to see me crop up on panel shows. Gradually the likelihood of a stranger knowing who I was had grown.

And, as it grew, I was interviewed more often by newspapers, and the nature of the questions I was asked in those interviews changed. They were fishing for details of my private life. I suppose that’s natural – people are always interested in that sort of thing, and my character in Peep Show has his private life very much to the fore. They wanted to know how mine compared. And I’d certainly implied in panel shows, as a way of getting a laugh and developing a persona that people could get a handle on, that I was a lonely, dysfunctional, OCD loser.

For years, I was very happy with this image. People found it funny, and when I wasn’t that well known they didn’t want to dig any deeper. The language of lonely self-loathing gets a lot of laughs when bluntly used in a comic context – it’s like doing a sketch about the Samaritans. But, in an interview, the context becomes more serious. They weren’t letting me paint a stereotypical, broad-brush picture of an isolated wanker – they wanted details. And, because I was broken-hearted, it was a joke that was getting a bit too edgy for me anyway. It made me sad to describe myself as so sad.

‘Is that what you’re really like?’ interviewers wanted to know. ‘Lots of women find you attractive, you know – just look at the internet.’

It was absolutely true that, by googling my name, I could find lots of examples of people saying that they fancied me, usually (they added) to their surprise. But then some people will fancy anyone who’s on telly. That just turns them on. As, sometimes, does being funny. As does being unattainable. As does not being there ‘in real life’, all wrong/normal/unglamorous/unhilarious/hairy/human like people are when you actually know them. I get it a lot on Twitter – people saying they fancy me or asking their friends if it’s ‘wrong’ that they fancy me, which is definitely a backhanded compliment, or possibly a backhanded insult. It’s all a bit of an ego boost, I suppose. But I think that moment of saying they fancied me would always be the high point of the relationship, so there’s no need to take it any further. Even in my memories of my racy encounter with the girl at Cambridge who was keen to bed a Footlights president, it’s only the initial realisation that’s an exciting memory – after that it fades to drunkenness and guilt.

I suppose, if you do decide to shag groupies – and I’m not saying those who do are necessarily wrong as I’m sure it can be done in a fun and mutually satisfying way – you have to deal, as soon as it becomes clear that you’re up for it, with your sudden lowering in the groupie’s estimation. It’s like what I get when someone realises I’m not the novelist. Suddenly you’ve become attainable to the groupie – the excitement of fancying a star from afar evaporates and they have to deal with the reality of a stranger’s body – usually an older man’s.

There were lots of things about my life that seemed to baffle interviewers. Why did I still live in an ex-council flat in Kilburn? was a very common question. Why did I show no interest in some of the trappings of fame: expensive cars or clothes or giant TVs? Perhaps I came across as some sort of weird ascetic or the kind of person who ‘keeps himself to himself’ and is later discovered to be dwelling on a pit of human bones.

I think people thought I had something to hide. Maybe he’s gay and can’t admit it, they may have thought. Or spends all his money on morphine. Or, as the Heat photo might have suggested, he’s as promiscuous as Russell Brand but is somehow managing to do it on the quiet. What is his secret? was the implied question I feared. So I tried to be honest, when I went on Desert Island Discs at least, about the bare facts of my life and how I felt – that I was single and unhappy.

I resented the interest. I didn’t think – I don’t think – that the specifics of my private life were anyone’s business. I was just a purveyor of comedy. If people liked it, they could keep watching. If not, they should stop. I didn’t want to encourage people to buy in too much to ‘what I was really like’. They couldn’t know me personally and I didn’t want to be trapped into creating the illusion that they could – an illusion that might subsequently be shattered if I was caught on film strangling a cat.

But mainly I resented it because I was hiding something. I couldn’t stop thinking about Victoria. I was hopelessly in love in a way that wouldn’t go away. That’s why I had no private life to speak of – because I didn’t want one, couldn’t face one without her. I told no one about it. Never mind interviewers, I didn’t tell my closest friends or my parents of the enormous sadness that over-shadowed my life. I didn’t tell them because I was ashamed and I knew what they’d say. ‘Stop indulging yourself in these hopeless feelings. Snap out of it. She doesn’t want to go out with you – she said so. She’s going out with someone else. It’s not the end of the world – it happens to people all the time. It’s happened to you before. Deal with it.’

They would probably have put it more gently than that. But I’m sure that’s what they’d have said I should do. So, if I already knew that, what was the point in telling them? It was stupid to have such an all-consuming crush at my age. So I couldn’t talk about it – and without doing so, I couldn’t adequately explain my life.

I didn’t want to move from Kilburn, partly because my friends lived there but mainly because it would be a sign of my life moving on without her. I didn’t want to change any major aspect of my existence on my own – I wanted to do it as part of my future with her. I couldn’t let go of that hope even when I told myself that I should.

And my career just went from strength to strength, as if taking the piss. I had a successful sitcom and sketch show on the go at once, I was a sought-after guest for panel shows, I was a praised columnist in a fine newspaper, everyone wanted to make a programme with me, everyone seemed to be saying I was the next Stephen Fry. And, because of the walking coupled with the appetite-suppressant effect of a broken heart, I’d lost some weight. I was looking healthier and more attractive. Every wish had come true except the one that mattered.

The ‘six months or so’ came and went. I’d occasionally see her at panel show recordings. If there was a Peep Show screening party, I’d invite her. She’d come and we’d chat and it would be lovely but I was never left in any doubt about her status: she had a boyfriend. That was that.

I waited for three years. Isn’t that weird? Aren’t I odd? I can’t explain it other than to say that I couldn’t do anything else. She’s not only too wonderful, she’s too right for me. Any sane straight man would find her attractive but she’s funny, bright, sexy, nervous and confident in ways that could have been meant for me. I suppose that’s why I waited. I couldn’t shake the cheesy thought that it was ‘meant to be’.

Three years after we met at that party (met for the second time I bloody-mindedly can’t not say) she became single again. And we went on some dates again. It was different this time. We started gradually – secretly really. But each week, we spent more time together than the last.

I switched over from feeling cursed, as if the world had been constructed to spite me, to feeling so much luckier than I believed I could ever deserve. If only I’d known I just had to wait three years, I kept thinking. That was nothing – I would have gladly suffered ten times as much, as long as I’d known it would work out and we’d have our chance. We.

It’s so much easier to talk about what makes you unhappy than what makes you happy, I’m now discovering. And I am happy now, I can’t deny it. And I am happy because of Victoria. All my priorities are different now, and better.

In March I asked her to marry me and she said yes. In fact, to my unsurpassable delight, she said ‘Of course.’ Of course we’re getting married. It’s obvious. Perhaps I should have asked her at that party.

There’s a down side to all this – and I don’t mean not being able to drink beer in the bath or scratch my balls during dinner, because she insists on both. Neither do I mean the fact that we won’t be living in Kilburn, although I’ll miss it. But Harlesden it has to be – she insists.

The down side is the fear. The fear of something happening to her, the pressure of there being two bodies in the world that I want to keep from harm and only being able to watchfully inhabit one of them. I wonder if you know what I mean. I hope you do, for your sake.

It’s a worry I’ll have to learn to live with because I’m definitely out of wishes. And whatever happens from now on, I want to concentrate on being grateful. I thought I was too old to change – someone once told me that anything you haven’t done by the age of 28, you’ll probably never do. And by my mid-thirties I’d never formed a long-term relationship, never moved in with anyone, hardly ever got off with the same woman twice. Now I’ve met someone who I can’t live without – and I don’t have to.

So I’m inexpressibly grateful, to her and to fate, for this change, this miracle. It would have been an incomplete life, one not properly lived, if I’d never fully loved or had the amazing feeling of it being reciprocated.

When you meet each other again the following morning you start looking at them in a different way, considering things from scratch. Am I guilty about what I dreamt of? But wasn't it a nice feeling when we were together? Do I really just never bring it up? It eats away at you for a while until you ultimately decide dreams are nonsense. But wow, she really is kind of beautiful and I never thought too much about it before. It wouldn't work out.

Well. I've had much weirder wet dreams than that. But not many of them have made me think for so long. The perks of being a virile young man❤️

Tried doing the medieval Irish silverside/cabbage pottage recipe tonight as we had one laying around in the fridge and didn't have much else ideas for what to cook. Except I didn't have leeks, great start I know. I fucked up the pottage by putting too much stock in because I was worried it would end up burning due to not having enough moisture, but instead it ended up soggy, I'm guessing it's meant to be just enough to steam them instead.

But the flavour was good, and the silverside ended up really nice and tender despite only being cooked for about two hours. Definitely much faster than the more 'traditional' method of slow cooking it that seems to be popular in the Commonwealth countries today.

I want to give the ancient Roman ones a shot at some point, because they're usually pretty simplistic in preparation but stuff like defrutum is just completely absent from the standard meals of most cuisines today (outside of the Turks apparently), so it should be up to my horrendously novice skill level and provide a decent amount of novelty.

What I'm having trouble understanding is that I've definitely read or heard about things said by philosophers that made me go "that was something I was spitballing in my head when I was a kid", and I'm not a woman. I was under the impression that this isn't a particularly unique or exclusively female experience. Anyone who has taken an interest in philosophy ought to have come across this phenomenon multiple times. The response to the women who say this is often "no you didn't, you're a liar", which is bewildering to me because "so did I, but I can accurately and succinctly verbalize these concepts now that I am a fully developed adult" is right there, readily available for anyone to say. Its not disparaging, but still manages to contest the notion that you're somehow justified in being condescending just because you weren't uncurious in your formative years.

It should also be noted that we often take for granted that many of these concepts have existed long before we were born and were already interwoven into the ideological zeitgeist, so it would make sense that these are things that you would already be thinking about at a young age. For example, if as an adult you read about a guy named isaac newton who came up with gravitational theory, it would come off as conceited to proudly declare that you already thought of that when you were a child, because of course you did. That's sort of the basic cable of our understanding of reality in the 21st century, so having a hypothesis of it before you ever read about it wouldn't exactly make you precocious. I'm only posting this here because I suspect that my mentation has a blind spot. I'd like to know if there's something I'm missing.

Yeah never. They were always so arrogant, so immediately ready to impose their unbending, unreflective worldview on you, while also having nearly no broader understanding of what they're talking about. In addition, they loooove claiming their superiority over Americans, which is just bizarre to fathom considering we've occupied their country for 80 years, with 40,000 American soldiers in their country as this claim drools from their mouths. Despite their wanton insulting demeanor, to suggest German ways of do things is incorrect is akin to heresy in serious personal insult. Every conversation I've had with a German turns into them broadly criticizing the USA (from what they see on the internet) and meanwhile I'm practicing the expected diplomacy of not saying anything bad about their country.

Couple other things:

1. Food kinda sucks, smashing meat with a hammer and frying it isn't special
2. They have this extraordinary habit of intense staring at strangers in public, very rude.
3. Total hall monitor rule follower culture, total bureaucracy, to a degree that is unfathomable outside of Germany.
4. They will actively let someone bleed out and die if it's against an arbitrary rule to help them. I have seen this first hand.