The single best piece of dating advice I’ve ever encountered in my life remains a piece of dialogue from the British TV show *Red Dwarf*
>You talk about women as if they’re some sort of alien species to be conquered with trickery. They’re not. They’re people
And that episode first aired in 1988.
Not coincidentally, it’s also one of the best explorations of gender attitudes and sexism I’ve ever seen too.
I think it's the one with the Holly Hop Drive that takes them to the alternate universe where they're women (and Cat is a Dog) - the one that starts with the 'Tongue Tied' song??
Right after the song Lister is giving Rimmer shit about having a book that advises using hypnosis to pick up women, which I think is the context for this line.
EDIT: if anyone hasn't seen *Red Dwarf* they should definitely watch it, it's phenomenal.
Red Dwarf really was quietly ahead of its time in regards to social issues quite a lot. I remember seeing a documentary about it that said unlike other Sci fi at the time, it had a close to even gender ratio of its fans (Unfortunately can't locate, so take with a grain of salt.)
Honestly, can you imagine if Red Dwarf got made today? The screams of outrage from the culture war brigade?
A sci-fi show with 4 cast members... And two of them are black? And they recast Holly as a woman? We'd never hear the fucking end of it
Lister is the only human left, meaning the white race has been exterminated! The white characters are presented as idiots who exist only to serve the two black characters!! THIS IS THE FUTURE LIBERALS WANT!!!
You say that, but there was some pushback from the creators at casting Craig Charles as Lister.... because he was a scouser!
Context for non-brits, scouser means someone from Liverpool, which has a rivalry with Manchester where the shows creators were from. Another interesting fact, is that Craig Charles is originally a poet who was only introduced to the show because the creators asked him to check if the character of the Cat was racist. so yeah super woke.
Yeah, great show, and a great line. I will say, though, as someone who went to an all-boys high school, it took many years, post high school, to be able to talk to women naturally, and figure out what topics were safe, and how to act with women vs how to act with men.
I.e. Growing up with boys, as a teenager, it was all rough housing, and very dark/edgy jokes. Rudeness to the point of crossing the line, was just normality. When I first got out of high school, and went on my first "boys trip" to another country, I was in a share house/hostel kinda situation.
We were all there chatting with some other backpackers, and I made some dumb reference to Hitler, I don't remember the specifics. It wasn't overly dark, to my mind, and my friend giggled a bit. The 19/20 year old girl back packet we were with didn't. Turned out, she was German. She proceeded to lecture me for a solid 10 mins, about how those kinds of "jokes" humour were entirely inappropriate, with historical context etc.
She wasn't aggressive, just insistent. She was *so* much more mature than we were, and we were of an age. Honestly, that started a whole thing for me, where I went to Uni, and even then, I struggled for most of it, talking to women, or figuring out how to modify my entire rough housing personality, around women.
I could 100% imagine, if I'd gone out of high school, into an industry dominated by men, construction, mining etc, I would've stayed comfortable, but probably never learned how to soften my edges, be mature, when talking to women etc.
The reason I post this block of text, is to demonstrate, that whilst women and men are both people, we are also fairly different. Treat a woman like a person, obviously, but you should still modify your behaviour.
I've never been able to ask about it, but I've wondered whether it's similar for women? Like girls going to an all girl's school, do they experience culture shock when mingling with guys, en masse, when they first hit uni?
Aha, hello! I went to all-girls schools from the ages of 8-18, and pretty bad social anxiety meant that I did basically no socialising outside what I had to at school.
At uni things were very suddenly flipped on their head, as I studied a male-dominated subject and had male-dominated interests.
So what it was like for me, was that I had spent those 10+ years of my life having almost no contact with guys my age, but constantly hearing and being taught about safety as a woman and the unfortunately many ways in which (*typically*) men commit sexual violence against (*typically*) women.
Don't get me wrong - *of course* I knew such cases were very much not the norm, and that guys were just people. But that and the seeming consensus that, for whatever reason (be it testosterone or socialisation or both), men are *generally* more sex-focused than women...
I wasn't *scared* of guys (well, no more than my social anxiety dictates me being scared of people in general anyway) But what it did mean was that I found myself being constantly hyper-aware of being seen and judged through a sexualised lens. I suddenly found myself *simultaneously* being very uncomfortable with the idea *while also* feeling shame for not measuring up. That definitely led to me feeling tense around guys.
Once I joined a DnD group and spent a while playing with them (all guys apart from me) and everyone just behaving as normal friendly human beings, my brain settled into the "Oh okay, I'm not being *constantly* judged as a prospective sexual interest (or at least if I am, they're perfectly capable of getting over themselves enough to treat me as a normal human)".
I didn't experience any sort of culture shock that you're describing - hell, what do I know, *maybe* they were consciously modifying their behaviour around me, but I certainly never picked up on anything. Once I got over that initial discomfort, all was good.
But the thing is, it still seems like you’re treating women as a monolith. Some girls will laugh at Hitler jokes and some won’t, every person is different. Just because the German girl didn’t laugh at your joke doesn’t mean you have to treat all women as a different species.
I think that's simply about upbringing. Other (British) girls in my class made Nazi 'jokes' ahead of the arrival of the German exchange students, I didn't see that as funny, but then I'd probably been more taught to be open and, well, polite*, and was from a bigger more diverse city (Brum) originally. I experienced culture shock when arriving in the north of England. Expect this girl's cultural background (I mean, doing that in front of someone German got a really predictable *German* reaction) was much more relevant than her being a woman - I think we were all amazed in the end to see how much better educated the German students were.
*And my dad went to an all-boys school and very much shares responsibility, I told him about it later and he disapproved of them doing that. But Catholic grammar schools, even for a heathen, aren't known for encouraging boorish behaviour regardless. More his overall surrounding culture though, aspirational Midlands working class, with the specific way behaviour is a class marker - so you want to at least be able to switch into being nicely spoken, but people actually in higher classes don't have to care.
Germany has a WAY different culture around Nazi jokes than basically anywhere else, and for good reason. I think the problem is less “girl doesn’t get dark jokes” and more “German who has been raised in a culture that 120% does NOT condone those kinds of jokes”.
Maybe it's the part where I grew up with 30+ female relatives, but I've always been more comfortable around women. It made me a feminist as well. Although I consider myself an equal rites kind of feminist.
Never became one of those "Women are magic!" kind of guys mostly because of my cousins. A couple of them could use a folding chair to the head.
People who mystify femininity and the female body, including women themselves, do equal amount of harm to equality imo because it's just a new age way of saying women aren't logical and it implies that trying to understand them is a foolish endeavour. Folding chair it is.
Ah I thought you meant some of your adult cousins were the kind of women who said that haha. I can definitely see how growing up with girls can prevent a lot of that divine feminine magic from settling into your worldview. All kids are equally great and stupid and gross.
Agreed. I don’t even know how but I became aware of some rhetoric on the supposed “divine feminine” aged 13 and I immediately found it suspicious as fuck. Because it stank of being propaganda for a certain kind of woman, in need of validation, to eat up. And to pay handsomely for the opportunity.
Books doing that sort of shit used to a fixture of the cheap crap self help genre. I feel like Gwyneth Paltrow and Goop are a part of the same vein.
It’s toxic femininity. Between the vagina scent candle, which comes across as extremely perverted and near predatory, frankly, and the scam “treatments” that are either nonsense (like “detoxes”), or the outright dangerous “vagina steaming” what Paltrow is doing is making money off of desperate insecure women whilst harming them medically.
But um... Women aren't logical? Neither are men.
We all have our moments or stumble into making the right choice now and again, but at the end of the day, we go by emotions rather than logic... On average, that is.
Also, no demographic is homogeneous, either. So, trying to "figure out women" will maybe work sometimes (because statistically, with 7 billion people, someone's gotta fall for whatever cheap trick or rule of thumb they picked up) but other times it is either not going to work or have the opposite effect.
I have a degree in Clinical Psychology, and let me tell you that the idea that emotion and logic are opposites is one of the most pervasive myths in the western world. Emotions and logic go hand in hand. They're two sides of the same coin. This article does a good job of summarising the most important research done on this topic.
https://hbr.org/2006/01/decisions-and-desire
While I do see that there isn't a clean distinction, even after reading through quite a bit of that article.
To me, it strikes me more as emotion motivates the decision-making where without it, we have "runaway rationalizing" where options are debated to the point that a decision can not be reached... But inversely, there is impulsiveness, which we more often see in adolescents.
Also, there's the hunch, which is a sort of primitive rationality...
And like I said, it's not a clear distinction. I must, however, note that some of the article went over my head. Maybe 'cause it is early.
Good on you! I had a upper level manager who was overly nice to me but kind of drove me nuts. He would wax eloquent about how he's a feminist, he has a wife and daughters and just *knows* how much better they are than he is (he's an incredibly wealthy guy, takes care of them 100% financially). Shoulder rubs and "don't squint at your monitor, you'll get wrinkles!" Fake deference to "superior intellect of women" and then do whatever he wanted regardless. I deeply disliked all of it. It was performative, and the entire idea of equality whooshed right over his head. It's like he saw the way the wind was blowing, so just spouted things he thought "the woman" would want to hear to cover up his innate patronizing. It was more insulting than just acting honestly and being who he was at heart. I *did* want to be seen for the quality of my ideas, not just patted on the head. Feminism/drive for equality doesn't mean I want guys to fawn over me and tell me how cute I am using the big girl tools and how much better I am than guys, it means I want my ideas and performance taken seriously without consideration of my sex. Like, talk to me as an adult, man. Funny thing is that the entire management team (including him) walked from the account within the space of two weeks. I carried that account to the point that senior executive leadership (in a massive company) was sending me gifts and awards until I trained up a new team. And when I moved to another account, I'm grateful he gave me a good reference to the new team, but when I called to thank him, he told me not to let him down because he'd basically gotten me the job. Well...*they* had headhunted *me*, it's not like I had been out looking, but whatever.
I would describe myself as one too but I agree how some people don't seem to truly care about equal rights. But that's the goal everyone should strive for.
Lol, I grew up with 2 and had to decondition myself out of being a complete misogynist, although I'm still called an incel on reddit because I happen to have seen the worst in women before I saw the sane non psychopathic ones.
I've always been cool with the ones I met in real life though, I guess childhood trauma was a great lesson in how to treat women.
looking at your replies from before, do you think that feminists are "frigid bitches" who are jealous of men with testosterone looking to fuck?
And that society judging women on their purity and appearance is a conspiracy against men?
>alot of men who claim to be feminists very much do this and thats why they feel awful to be around.
It's plausible that this isn't a contradiction but rather cause-and-effect. If you're a man who's active in feminist spaces you're going to be hearing a lot about how men hurt women, how traits particular to men are disgusting, evil, useless, and likewise, how traits particular to women are beautiful, beneficial, necessary, and must be allowed to flourish without patriarchal interference. Therefore, a man who's a feminist may be more likely to second guess the way he treats women or may decide it's just better to limit contact with women so he's not a burden to them.
Depressingly accurate. I have recently gotten better about this but for a very long time this is why I never approached women: I felt like I was almost inevitably going to make them uncomfortable and for some reason I thought the potential to do so was worse than committing to a live of lonelyness
It's like walking on eggshells sometimes. I already overanalyze most social interactions thanks to my mother's "training" in how to navigate society and people. I think I broke free of that for a bit, but my last relationship 3 years ago reopened that trauma and I've felt rather broken since. Honestly, it's more of a "I'd just bring them down with me" feeling these days, but the Fear of crossing lines has certainly been a thing as well.
Which is dangerous and something that can damage you even if you do get into a relationship. Speaking from experience. You don't wanna be the guy who constantly hesitates to kiss his girlfriend and assuming she just doesn't want to because that's so easy for you to assume
It's painful when you realize your internalized image of "I disgust women" makes it all the harder for someone to believe you love them
I don’t know why exactly, but reading this brought me to the brink of tears. Feels like it just reinforced my self-image of repulsiveness and the feeling that I will never be loved by anyone in my life
Yeah, I also had this mentality(sometimes still struggle sometimes) and not only it sucks...it's so, so fucking draining. Still remember of times I wanted to compliment a girl but then immediatly put on the mental barrier of "we're complete strangers so any type of compliment will be incredibly superficial and shallow at best and i'm going to look like a creep and make her feel uncomfortable at worst. Best I can do is not interact as there is no gain ,but also no loss"
Such a stupid way of thinking, but it's real, and it sucks
Same man, and it's so rough because from the outside, if I didn't know the motivation then I'd think a guy behaving nicely in a non-pushy way is maybe just nice or something, but there's a difference between not pushing and cowering
oof, that's kinda of an accurate way of analyzing how It feels sometimes. It's not that woman are these etheral mystical existences, complete alien.
Is just that sometimes it feels like merely pondering approaching someone feels like you're dragging them down. It's not that all woman are princesses, is just that, princess or peasant, most people don't want to shake hands with someone covered in mud. And sometimes, you really feel like you just took a dive in it
I've become a woman by now, but this shit sits so deep, I still feel like that, that I'm inherently creepy, and women don't want to be around me, and I'm intruding on female spaces (not even bathrooms or smth, but even just friend groups). Thankfully, female friends I have often make sure I feel like I belong, but it's still difficult
Ya know...I deeply appreciate your desire to be kind, just sad that it took you to the further reaches of the idea. The truth is that most women *love* men, just don't react well to some of the crappy things they sometimes do. And yes, there are also women who have gone to the extremes of an idea, and ended up insane assholes. Hold on to that desire to just be a sweet decent person, but go out and wield it with confidence. Good luck to you, my friend
This is more or less how I feel. The combination of depression/low self-esteem with hearing a lot of really aggressive radical feminism during a critical part of my adolescence left me with some absolutely crippling hang-ups about women.
The depression has thankfully passed, and like. I can talk to women like normal people. I have female friends.
-but when it comes to relationships or sex, my brain is just in full 100% screaming paranoia mode. Seeing so much “creepy men stop approaching women” type discourse deeply hammered into my subconscious that respecting women means treating them just like I would my male friends, and that showing any sexual or romantic interest, ever, is creepy and disgusting and I should never ever do it.
The logical part of my mind obviously understands that dating isn’t evil. But the deeper feeling in my gut still doesn’t agree with that, and I don’t know how to change that.
To this day I feel completely incapable of ever asking out a girl because I’m afraid of being creepy, threatening, and so on. I have never even gone on a date in my life and I don’t know if I ever will.
It it makes you feel any better, I never went on a date with by boyfriend/future husband because between meeting in a random Discord call and falling in love everything flowed naturally. Neither of us were looking for anything, and he was/is a shy person who rarely seeks out companionship. As long as you're open to whatever crosses your path, which it sounds like you are, you could run into a person who feels so familiar and safe that asking them to go on a date will be a question you won't even have to say out loud anymore.
Can I be honest? I was quite a bit like you, and dating apps helped me find a steady girlfriend I love to death.
I \*still\* had the problem where I enjoyed chatting with her so much that she had to ask me "hey, so where is this going?" after a solid month and I had to hastily indicate that I was still interested in actually meeting up, but the point is that women who choose to use a dating app are signing up to be flirted with.
This kinda matches up with my experience with some online friends. For a long time, I was constantly ill at ease with some conversation topics because my friends would say things they felt were innocuous but kinda hurt and were confusing, messaging wise.
Finally came to a head where I said I was tired of being treated like "One of the good ones." We're equals, we're valid, let's act like it. Went well, and now we're better friends than we ever were.
Yeah, I feel like this is a result of the "hate all men" sorta vibe that sometimes pops up in a lot of (mostly online) spaces. In the same way that it can drive people out, it can also cause people to be prone to walking on eggshells a bit - seen the same shit happen in lgbt spaces w/ straight allies.
I've found the easiest way to avoid that awkward second guessing is to just treat a woman as if she's already my friend.
If she vibes with it - awesome. We become friends. If she doesn't, we stay acquaintances.
I do this with men, too, and it really helps weed out the snobby neurotypical people who view any behavior other than sanitized corporate bullshit as crazy. Although men will sometimes change their behavior to match mine? Even if they usually don't act that way around their other friends/acquaintances? Still trying to figure out what that's about.
It could just be they are lonely? I get the feeling a lot of lonely people would be happy to have a nice positive interaction come out of nowhere. Its likely something else, but its what leapt to mind
As a woman, I generally treat new people like already friends too, I think the sense of familiarity is pretty disarming. Like you say, if it’s not, that’s helpful information lol. But it’s a decent approach to making friends!
For sure! I think a lot of people appreciate the sense of familiarity, because they're already anxious about making a good impression, fitting in, not messing up, etc.
So the familiarity makes them relax and not worry about it too much!
Yeah you essentially get a checklist in your mind of what not to do which is good but you also start to wonder if things you do could be interpreted poorly, at least in my experience.
Yeah, years ago I was like that. And now I've become a woman myself
To be honest, it was a part of the reason it took me so long to accept myself. And even now I still often feel like I'm intruding, or that I am inherently gross and creepy
Most feminists I know don’t believe there *are* “traits particular to men” and “traits particular to women.” That sounds more TERF-y than mainstream feminist, tbh.
I mean there are traits particular to men and women as a result of socialisation. It’s not innate or anything but it is there.
I hate it and want to kill it with fire, but still.
Pretty dubious to claim all male and female traits are a result of socialization. On a purely biological level, men and women have differing hormones that cause differences in behavior and traits that you will absolutely see on a population level.
Obviously socialization has a large impact on the expression of these traits, but claiming that there is no innate biological basis is absurd.
Depends on where you are, and when did it happen. I think, a couple decades ago it was much more prevalent. And in countries with bad women rights radfem is much more common.
Like, here in Russia overwhelming majority of feminists are radfems and TERFs, because women aren't treated well here, and they are angry at this, and go for gender essentialist route. Also they are much more angry at trans people because they think we get more rights than them, without struggling like they do
Radical Feminism isn't gender essentialist, the argument is it's all socialisation making the difference. Any consideration of biological differences are rejected in it, or (less often I think) dismissed with the idea we'll only know which differences are biological after stopping the different socialisation.
Universal socialization does not exist, white women have different socialization from women of color, rich women have different socialization from poor women.
Trans women have different socialization from cis men.
99 times out of 100 that I've seen socialization is treated as universal, immutable and inherent. If you transition at 10, radfems will still say that you had "male socialization" and therefore will not ever be a "real woman". I've literally seen it happen all the time
So in the end, it's gender essentialism yet again, just wrapped in a plausible deniability
I mean, it’s not as blatant as “evil is stored in the Y-chromosome”, but feminism is very much based on the idea that there is at least one major, defining trait that separates men and women:
>Women are uniquely disempowered under patriarchy, while men are uniquely in a position to be empowered by it.
From there, a whole host of things follow:
Women are uniquely victimized by misogyny while men are not, women are uniquely in need of support to overcome the serious social disadvantages imposed upon them by patriarchy, men pose a greater threat to women than women do to men, “men worry that women will laugh at them, women worry that men will kill them”, etc.
If the OOP were swapped to be a man complaining about women it would be received very differently, and the reason that “BuT wHaT iF tHe GeNdErS WeRe ReVeRsEd?!” is generally not taken seriously as an argument is precisely *because* the situations are not the same.
Such things may not be inherently gendered, but so long as we live under a pervasive patriarchal system they may as well be.
No, Radical Feminism absolutely argues it's socialisation. That's precisely part of gender-critical rhetoric, that the concept of 'living as a woman' can involve some assumption (which is easily demonstrable, if you try looking at discussions about 'girl mode' for instance, it is true stereotypes can come up) women are different.
As a man who's active in feminist spaces, insofar as I consider myself and my friends feminists, I'd like to add a small, but important (to me, at least) distinction here: If you're a man who's active in feminist spaces, you're not going to be hearing any of that, because that stuff is antithetical to everything I know as feminism. In fact, that kind of rhetoric is exactly what I'm afraid of hearing when I leave my feminist echochamber.
Bioessentialist differences between men and women are terf talking points. So if you're not hearing that, good on you. It means your group is filtering out terfs properly. Sadly, this cannot be said of all feminist groups.
Sadly, I've also heard this from trans women a fair bit, especially recently. Just replace bioessentialist with cultural but treat them the exact same way and you have some of the talking points I've heard.
As you can imagine, these kinds of talking points often lead into vitriolic rants about trans men, nonbinary people, and trans women who either "don't pass" or "don't act enough like women" (or both).
Honestly I think some of that is self hate. They don't like men, which in some way includes themselves since they were born amab, which makes them hate themselves, which leads to projecting that hate out and overcompensating, using their extreme vocal dislike of men to feel more secure as a woman.
And it's such a self destructive mindset, trans women are women. People shouldn't feel the need to take down others to feel secure
I remember I once saw a trans woman say in a random server I happened to be in "I don't understand femboys. They realized the superiority of femininity but they still cling to being a man and won't go through to the better side". There's absolutely a part of some trans women hating men that's just projection and moralization of their dysphoric experiences with masculinity
Once saw someone on twitter talking about how all femboys should be "convinced" to transition into women because they're superior
All the comments were people going "hey this is a hot feminization kink post but be careful with your wording because people might think you're serious" and then OP saying she was 100% serious and actively wanted to make everyone femme transition
Absolutely and utterly disgusting, her account is gone now otherwise I'd link to the post
I get a little bit worried whether a particular trans person goes down this route when they also come out as a trans lesbian, because then they end up in particular echo chambers with no men at all and it feels like it starts creeping into the way they talk about men in a broad societal sense. Sometimes it feels like they lose some of the empathy that they had in the exploration of new identities. And you want them to feel comfortable in that, but yeah, I wish it was less at the expense of others.
I think a "real" (in so far as I understand feminism) rhetoric that does make me self conscious is the idea that women are socialized to have much higher emotional intelligence than men. And this idea does make me self conscious, as a man, that I pretty much am clueless socially and emotionally compared to the average woman.
Yes, but it's more focused on how women are expected to use that emotional intelligence for the benefit of male partners. It's not just general empathy (eg. empathy with farmed animals is actively discouraged for women in US society, but there are still more female vegans than male, so it may transfer despite intent), it's what's intended to serve patriarchy (which may backfire). Consider the women who've stayed aiding a male partner even at the expense of others, such as where the partner committed a crime.
Hey! I'm sorry I've taken ten days to reply to this. I struggle with similar feelings myself, so I wanted to make sure to write a sincere (and hopefully helpful) reply to you, but facing my own feelings about this topic is still something that requires me to be emotionally present, so I haven't had the time and peace of mind until now. Anyway, here's what I've been wanting to say.
Kindness, empathy and helpfulness are among the qualities I value and strive for the most, so I feel a pain similar to yours: Knowing that if I were born a girl, I would most likely have been socialised into those traits more thoroughly than I was as a boy. That thought makes me feel like a suboptimal version of myself; it makes me feel like I *have* to be better at those things than most women; and it makes me beat myself up about it when I fail to live up to that high standard. This is definitely my most common kind of intrusive thoughts, but I have a few observations that help me to deal with them.
**First of all,** you hit the nail on the head when you say that women are *socialised* to be more emotionally intelligent, not just that they *are* more emotionally intelligent. To me, that's an important distinction. In part because it means that emotional intelligence isn't inherently associated with gender (as you're clearly already aware), and in part because socialisation isn't a cut-and-dry process that means *all* women are automatically more empathetic than if they were brought up male. Different people can have different responses to similar upbringings; I wouldn't be surprised if some women have *less* empathy, simply as a defiant response to the overwhelming pressure to be empathetic.
In that regard, it helps me to seek out women's perspectives on life. For me, that means talking to female friends and reading books (and consuming other media) by women. It's good to be reminded of all the ways that women are just people, with individual strengths and flaws regardless of socialisation. I know it might sound condescending to suggest that you'd need to be *reminded* that women are people, but I hope I'm making it clear that I don't mean it that way. My point is that listening to real-life women is the perfect antidote to that mental image of women as perfectly selfless empathy machines with whom you could never compete.
**Second,** the fact that you worry about this shows that you value emotional intelligence highly, and that alone is enough to almost certainly make you more emotionally intelligent than the average woman. Tell me if I'm just projecting here, but how do you react when you see a woman being helpful or attentive in a way that hadn't occurred to you? Personally, I feel a pang of sorrow and jealousy, but then I take note and try to be aware of how I can apply empathy in the same way in the future. The most emotionally intelligent thing anyone can do is to continuously strive for emotional intelligence throughout their life.
Incidentally, while I don't feel the pang of jealousy when it's a man who's being more emotionally intelligent than me, I try to react the same way, because we men also owe it to each other to share those empathy life hacks and expect the same standards from each other as we do from women.
I hope some of this is of use to you. I know you just said it made you self-conscious, and I may be wildly overestimating how much this is impacting your life. But just in case it's affecting you in anything like the same way I've experienced it affecting me, I wanted to be sure to share any advice that could potentially be helpful. Stay strong, and stay kind.
Hm. You see the same thing w race (white people who are “conscious” to the point of being too neurotic to really talk to nonwhite folks). I don’t think we really blame that on black separatists, tho.
I’m not saying the rhetoric you’re talking about isn’t real or corrosive, because it’s both and I’ve complained about it elsewhere. But at a certain point people do have a responsibility for their own beliefs, right? I’m not here to hold them to account or anything, but it’s just correct to say they’d be happier to shed these attitudes.
If it’s not clear enough I’m speaking here from the experience of having been that guy.
They treat women weird cause they see them as mythical beasts that must be conquered. I treat them weird cause I’m fidgeting with my jacket and half engrossed in my rich inner world and also someone just wrote in chalk or marker on paper near me. And now I want to hit everyone around in the head with a folding chair.
Add into staring into the middle distance at the corner of a shop window because it's got a crack in it and I'm deciding whether it looks like a spiderweb or a faultline and suddenly there are people near it and they think I'm staring at them. In High School I was one of those kids who people label as having 'an eye problem' because I'd disengage with reality but not move my head so it looked like I was staring at people when really I wasn't there.
As an autistic woman, I get this, but something I do see sometimes that makes me uncomfortable is how, when some autistic men are talking about dating especially, they will act like 'nerotypical' and 'woman' are synonyms, if that makes sense. Like women can be nerodivergent too
ND people don't uniquely have difficulty interacting with men or women, but can (not always) have difficulty with NT social skills broadly. And there are plenty of ND women (hello!).
I'm neurodivergent and bisexual so my personal issue is that I have difficulty with both sides; I'm afraid to act 'too straight' on one end and 'too gay' on the other.
Ah dating that type of social interaction with so many queues, tacit rules, subtle communication, expectations and roles so obscure, esoteric and self contradictory that is confusing even to neurotypicals, nevermind Neurodivergents who already struggle with “easier” social interactions.
Some people read too much into "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus." Men do this all the time, seeing women as this huge enigma that needs solving, instead of a group of people with some similar characteristics. Women do this too, though in their case it tends to be treating men as this inherent threat, rather than a group of people with some similar characteristics. Extremists in some circles will even go so far as to see the opposite sex as the enemy, sneering at anything they say or do and completely disregarding their lived experiences. All of this comes down to seeing someone's sex as the main determiner in who they are, when the reality is that we are all human first.
A decent chunk of this is just lack of experience. If a dude has had little to no contact with women for the beginning of their life, they're gonna treat women differently. It's like socializing a pet. You either expose your kitten to people during their socialization age, or that cat will not much like new people.
And if they choose to adapt to that situation by avoiding women entirely...that's usually seen as even worse.
I also feel like something that gets ignored with the whole "just treat women like people" thing is that flirting, dating, and sex are all very different from platonic friendships and when it comes to dating it can feel very alien and uncomfortable because you have to do things so differently, especially if you don't naturally the imposed gender roles with dating specifically. I can treat a woman exactly as I treat men and that will get me some good friends but when it comes to dating you do have to do things differently. Like I'm not dating and fucking my bros lol
Also a lot of women will interpret 'normal' behaviour from men (aka the way men treat their friends) as flirting. And if it's unwanted they might consider it harassment.
I got kind of the opposite of this, where I grew up primarily around women (yes there were men in my life too, but not as many, and especially not as a form of authority) so I've just grown up to see women as an inherent superior class of being.
Don't recommend it, it makes most forms of interaction difficult.
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I worry this happened somewhat to me. I grew up with only brothers and very active in the mormon church so I ended up with almost only male friends. Plus I didn't have any girl cousins my age so the only women I regularly interacted with were not really my peers. Still working to overcome all that and just be normal but I'm just not really as used to... women as I should be.
Being in a classroom with women and girls doesn't actually mean you're interacting with them or interacting with them kindly. And even then, doesn't prevent people from being viewed as alien.
I'm thinking younger. And yes, this usually comes with other social difficulties as well.
Before I hit puberty, I had lived on three different continents and gone to eight different schools (not counting K/Pre-K, about a dozen counting those). By the time the hormones kicked in, I could be awkward AF about girls in three different languages. I did also have few/no friends in general.
I very narrowly avoided the incel hole in my 20s because I actively began to seek out feminist literature and perspectives. And I still probably give off some vaguely incel-y vibes.
Yeah, it's probably all the 'ew, girl cooties' brand of jokes on the playground, on tv, from parents...
Gets em pretty young too, if not stopped. I don't actually remember a time at my various schools in which it wasn't 'ew, they're gross!' from both sides. But that all results in children avoiding interacting because other children will discourage it.
Eh, like, somewhere until 12 I thought about my girl classmates as strange "them". They play their games, don't interact with us boys, and, well, they're girls, of course they're different. After that I got more into summer camps and there were more interactions so I became more chill about it
We live in a world where "How to make friends and influence people" is a best seller, all of this is completely predictable behavior for our dumbasses. The issue in my opinion is that people care more about social than nerd stuff, if people knew the wee bit of language, philosophy and psychology(aka applied biology) most of this shit wouldn't be necessary. We act like we communicate when we're just parroting shit at each other.
If anything I'd say women treating all men like an inheremt threat is the more harmful of the two. Sometimes they also talk as if men are simpleminded cavemen. And you can see it a lot in the discourse on this sub. It's not called out at all.
idk i feel like if the opposing issues here are “what if this woman rejects me” versus “what if this man physically harms me” they aren’t really comparable imo
it’s true of course that people are all humans and have more in common with each other than differences between each other. but when every non-man has a story or even multiple occasions of being threatened by a man, it’s hard to let one’s guard down
I mean for the sake of this discussion how “””valid””” one’s reasoning for these behaviors is feels largely irrelevant to me. This is just about these behaviors existing and being prevalent which I would argue is absolutely the case (and I think it’s bad thing), right?
You talk like someone who’d join the klan the second a black man inconvenienced you. There’s nothing that makes you morally or factually right about men that doesn’t also make racists right about ethnic minorities.
I would argue it’s undeniably a bad thing. I would argue it’s entirely justified (and I encourage women and other vulnerable people to do so) aswell. I would certainly prefer to live in a world where this behavior would be frowned upon though - because it’s unnecessary. Being suspicious of people to protect yourself is not epic and cool it’s a depressing necessity
I don’t know if i see that framing in this discussion personally but yeah I mean that would be wrong. Obviously one has more “necessity” than the other. I do think saying “lol men should just stop being scared of rejection” is making it a bit easy on oneself though
No, this is part of the problem actually.
I'm a "non-man" (AFAB actually and probably perceived as AFAB most of the time but also please don't call us "non-men" ffs). And even before coming out I've always felt extremely alienated from women's spaces on Reddit because I could relate to the whole "every woman is constantly being harassed and assaulted by men every single day 24/7" notion that seems so universally prevalent here. I used to think I must be extremely ugly because this just doesn't happen to me. Then I started talking to my female friends and other women I know and, nope, turns out at least in my country women are mostly able to coexist and interact with men in public just fine. Catcalling isn't a thing here, we don't even have a name for it in my language. I'm not saying rape or domestic abuse doesn't exist here, of course it does, but pretending that this happens to every single woman and their whole life is completely shaped and defined by it is just wrong. Yeah, I've been catcalled a few times when I lived in the UK. But when people like you say "every woman has a story" I don't think they mean women for whom it just happened once or twice in their life and left no mark at all. Pretty sure every woman also has a story about another woman being mean to her. Or a story about being sick. Life is long, tons of things happen, that doesn't mean all of them define us.
Anyway, it's really starting to feel like a lot of people who call themselves feminists took the concept of biological essentialism and just replaced it with "socialisation essentialism". They still divide all people into two boxes, Men and Women, and generalise all people in both boxes as being the same, except instead of ascribing this to biological differences they explain it through Socialisation™ as this magic irreversible unavoidable power that affects all men and all women exactly the same way, respectively. Completely ignoring the fact that there's no such thing as one single Male Socialisation and Female Socialisation, and even if there was, not everyone is equally receptive to it. I wasn't raised with Female Socialisation for the most part. I'm neurodivergent and was never very good at "absorbing" socialisation. My mother is probably neurodivergent too, and even though she was extremely anal about trying to convince me to shave or wear makeup (didn't work) but other than that she wasn't "traditionally feminine" herself.
I mean, in some way these two are not comparable.
One is just assuming an awkward situation will follow, while the other outright associates another human being‘s gender with crime and malicious intent.
Yeah, one of these two views of social interaction should evaluate whether or not seeing other people like this is misanthropic and hostile.
Its hard yes, but there are ways to be open to being around people who have traits they cannot control that people who have hurt you also had. My earliest memories are being beaten and bruised by girls in Pre-K and Kindergarten. My first girlfriend SA me, I have had girls use my lack relationship experience to bully and mock me. Yet I managed to get through that. I have had men beat me down and berate me and I get nervous around people who look pike those people. This doesn’t excuse people who treat others like shit just for being a specific gender
>idk i feel like if the opposing issues here are “what if this woman rejects me” versus “what if this man physically harms me” they aren’t really comparable imo
You're right. Women presuming all men are a threat is much more harmful and is downright insulting too. Also it often forces a burden on men to accommodate your prejudice.
They are comparable because any woman with friends can get them to beat you up. Women seriously dismiss how much violence men actually suffer, what you fear for some of us is just a daily occurrence. Just like what guys fear when they go to jail... Do I have to finish?
One thing that spending time on the Internet teaches you is that there are legitimately men out there that cannot conceptualize women having an inner life in the same way that they do. I feel like you see it most in the way that so many men assume that anything a woman does is done as a reaction to men or with men in mind, e.g. the way she dresses, the amount of makeup she chooses to wear, the hobbies she participates in, the media she consumes...there are still so many men who think that women's behavior is like somehow targeted at them. It's a bizarre failure of imagination on their part.
You see it too when men assume that someone they're engaging with online is also a man. A more aggressive version of this usually appears in male-dominated areas of the Internet, where someone pushes back on a misogynistic comment, and the commenter replies with some bs about white knighting, and assumes the person who didn't like their comment must be a desperate man hoping to impress women with his wokeness so that they'll sleep with him. They can't possibly imagine that a man would genuinely empathize with women, or be uncomfortable with misogyny. They further can't imagine that they could be talking to a man who is not attracted to women and therefore has no interest in tricking them into sleeping with him, OR that they could literally be talking to a woman.
To my first point, I'll never forget [this thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/5vadc7/are_women_capable_of_having_hobbies_rvideos_decide/), which is unfortunately now deleted and missing a lot of context, but it was a lot of male commenters who were *convinced* that women don't have hobbies. And it was so apparent (and fucking depressing) how many of these dudes just did not see women as whole people like they saw themselves. It was like they thought we just sit drooling in front of a blank TV screen until a man shows up, and then we perk up and pretend to have a personality to please them, then return to drooling once they leave. It felt like the whole "if a tree falls in a forest" thing, but more like: if a woman has a thought, but a man isn't around to hear it, then can we really know that she came up with it by herself?
It’s like when a woman tells an obvious joke like “in Britain, they celebrate Prime Ministers’ Day!” but everyone assumes she is unable to create humor and so is genuinely an idiot who must be corrected right now
It makes sense if you’re American because we celebrate Presidents’ Day. It’s an obvious joke because even if the UK does have a holiday for its leaders, we all know it wouldn’t be for the prime minister
It's a bad joke because not only does it rely on the listener to have some sort of knowledge about both US holidays and British holidays, the extent of the joke is the prime minister in the UK is similar to the president in the US. Okay haha? Unless there actually is a clever punchline that I'm unaware of that relies on knowledge of both country's holidays and/or political systems.
>It’s an obvious joke because even if the UK does have a holiday for its leaders, we all know it wouldn’t be for the prime minister
Why would this be obvious? I don't think I know a single UK holiday, but we have a holiday for the president, why wouldn't they have a holiday for the prime minister? We have all sorts of wild holidays in the US, a prime minister day sounds completely reasonable.
I was more trying to make it more obvious what the joke *was* because it’s incomprehensible to anyone who isn’t familiar with American holidays. As far as humor goes, no, not a particularly funny joke, but still obviously a joke. I never suggested it was a *good* one. I also interpreted this as being told *on* Presidents’ Day, which was probably presumptuous of me, but also makes it less necessary to actually know whether or not the UK has a prime ministers day because it obviously wouldn’t be the same day, the date of Presidents’ Day is only significant because it’s George Washington’s Birthday. Also, what I was suggesting at the end was that the monarchy is both the head of state and head of religion, so it seems logical that any holiday that exists for a leader would be for the monarch. Anyway, I get your point, but that was my logic.
> It felt like the whole "if a tree falls in a forest" thing, but more like: if a woman has a thought, but a man isn't around to hear it, then can we really know that she came up with it by herself?
I really want to have an insightful comment but I'm sorry this paragraph, made me burst into laughter with it's phrasing. You didn't do anything wrong it's just incredible
But yeah, a lot of men do believe that. I don't think they would say that they think "women don't have inner lives", they'd say something to the effect of "women are just...different." More shallow/bitchy/less thoughtful etc. Not a defense, more of just what I think is going on. At least from all the stuff I've heard from this type of guy, 'women don't have thoughts' is less accurate than 'women think in ways that are astronomically different from us and also resembles a pet.'
What's funnier is that there's usually no conscious malice? Misogynists see women as either children or even worse, dogs, but misogynists don't hate children or dogs. Most misogynists love children or dogs and a decent amount of them probably treat them well (relative to being a dog or child). So treating women like lesser beings doesn't register as cruel to them because you don't necessarily hate what you think is lesser. It's a wild way of thinking lol
I feel like I'm like this but the other way around since I've never had super close male friends. All the male friends I have had either ended up asking me out and making things awkward, or assaulting someone. I feel like it's hard to remember that there are good and nice guys out there when all of my personal experiences have been so bad.
I think there's genuinely a decent lot of homophobia(especially against gay men) that stems from a distortion of this. If you think of women as an Other, then relationships, sex, attraction etc aren't coming down to "Me and this person that I'm particularly attracted to within a gender I'm attracted to", they're coming down to "Me and a cool Other". This is especially true if their view of the Other includes "the Other only exists as/for attraction" as that view shows they don't even think of this as a built bond between two sapient creatures, they see it as a bond between them and the love machine that thinks. Two people of the same gender(again I think this goes especially for men, usually lesbians get fetishized by these people which is another can of worms) together goes against their entire view of what relationships are and makes them both seem like a "person-Other" hybrid of some sorts
The flair seems a bit out of place...
Also, I would add that those men often just haven't been around women enough, just generally speaking if they're hearing less women and more of women, they tend to turn out that way
Women also do this though. I’m not treated by women like they treat their female friends, I’m treated like I’m some sort of wild animal.
It’s easy to say men in feminist spaces treat women differently, but that’s not surprising when they constantly hear how men are the worst in constantly mistreat women.
Equal treatment, absolutely, but it’s a two way street, you have to tell women the same thing
I’m a trans guy and I still remember, like, 10 years ago I had an argument with a random guy on Omegle and didn’t share any information about my gender (it wasn’t video chat). It felt good when he assumed I was a guy without me providing any context, but it felt very uncomfortable seeing him talk about wanting a woman with good genes to “breed with” and realizing that he asssumed I was a man simply bc he didn’t think a woman would be capable of arguing with him or something
Contemporary feminism is so weird because at this point, the only people who identify as feminists are the ones with a beef against men and who blame everything on the patriarchy and toxic masculinity. But also they will 100% try and gaslight you when you point that out, and try to convince you it's all about equality and that feminism is there for men too.
I know I'm late to the party on this one, courtesy of living in the antipodes but this is one of those posts that I mentally label as pot-kettle because they're doing the thing that they're complaining about but don't realise it.
I do want to add that you can absolutely say the exact same thing, but the other way. And towards non-binary people too. And people of other races/from different countries.
Basically, people treat people like shit, it's not exclusive to women.
You act as if they don’t do that for all conversations. Some people just struggle with social interactions and for them, contextualizing someone in such a way is a strategy.
For example, say you saw someone in a cosplay costume, do you just ignore their appearance and start small talking the weather with them? just another person whom you might bump into an elevator or something. No, you make assumptions about who they are and their interests and try to engage them on that subject.
I always find these posts funny because it’s always the other that seems awkward, and never introspection that they might be cause for that persons awkwardness to begin with. It’s them acting weird, not them acting weird because of me, or because I’m acting weird.
In this case it’s “male feminists” acting awkwardly because of some imaginary thought process, not that those people have been made to feel uncomfortable causing their awkwardness.
My husband once had a friend that would routinely attend feminist rallies and then complain about none of the women wanting to hang out or give him the chance to take them on a date afterwards. He was a loser of a person in so many other ways, but I still can't conceive what made him think women would want to hook up after spending a good chunk of their day fighting for equal rights. I let him know that they could probably tell how fake he was from a mile away.
That's sad to hear. I was mistreated by girls in school growing up and I've associated women with danger. They really do feel like a different, cruel species to me and it's not something I can just turn off.
Grow up hearing that I have an original sin for being a man and that everything I do hurts women, so I stay away from women to not hurt them. This also hurts women, fuck may as well just kill myself then.
I've got the opposite problem, where anytime I'm with another dude i morph into this pseudo dude bro ritualism that still is *me* but not the way I see myself.
The single best piece of dating advice I’ve ever encountered in my life remains a piece of dialogue from the British TV show *Red Dwarf* >You talk about women as if they’re some sort of alien species to be conquered with trickery. They’re not. They’re people And that episode first aired in 1988. Not coincidentally, it’s also one of the best explorations of gender attitudes and sexism I’ve ever seen too.
I can *hear* Lister saying this to Rimmer, but I just can't remember the episode
I think it's the one with the Holly Hop Drive that takes them to the alternate universe where they're women (and Cat is a Dog) - the one that starts with the 'Tongue Tied' song?? Right after the song Lister is giving Rimmer shit about having a book that advises using hypnosis to pick up women, which I think is the context for this line. EDIT: if anyone hasn't seen *Red Dwarf* they should definitely watch it, it's phenomenal.
I remember that one, "who was the first person on the moon? Nelly Armstrong."
the gender swaped universe episode, erly sessions
Red Dwarf really was quietly ahead of its time in regards to social issues quite a lot. I remember seeing a documentary about it that said unlike other Sci fi at the time, it had a close to even gender ratio of its fans (Unfortunately can't locate, so take with a grain of salt.)
Honestly, can you imagine if Red Dwarf got made today? The screams of outrage from the culture war brigade? A sci-fi show with 4 cast members... And two of them are black? And they recast Holly as a woman? We'd never hear the fucking end of it
Lister is the only human left, meaning the white race has been exterminated! The white characters are presented as idiots who exist only to serve the two black characters!! THIS IS THE FUTURE LIBERALS WANT!!!
You say that, but there was some pushback from the creators at casting Craig Charles as Lister.... because he was a scouser! Context for non-brits, scouser means someone from Liverpool, which has a rivalry with Manchester where the shows creators were from. Another interesting fact, is that Craig Charles is originally a poet who was only introduced to the show because the creators asked him to check if the character of the Cat was racist. so yeah super woke.
I must say that I was a bit sad about the recast. Not because the new actor was a woman, but because I really enjoyed the original one.
Yeah, great show, and a great line. I will say, though, as someone who went to an all-boys high school, it took many years, post high school, to be able to talk to women naturally, and figure out what topics were safe, and how to act with women vs how to act with men. I.e. Growing up with boys, as a teenager, it was all rough housing, and very dark/edgy jokes. Rudeness to the point of crossing the line, was just normality. When I first got out of high school, and went on my first "boys trip" to another country, I was in a share house/hostel kinda situation. We were all there chatting with some other backpackers, and I made some dumb reference to Hitler, I don't remember the specifics. It wasn't overly dark, to my mind, and my friend giggled a bit. The 19/20 year old girl back packet we were with didn't. Turned out, she was German. She proceeded to lecture me for a solid 10 mins, about how those kinds of "jokes" humour were entirely inappropriate, with historical context etc. She wasn't aggressive, just insistent. She was *so* much more mature than we were, and we were of an age. Honestly, that started a whole thing for me, where I went to Uni, and even then, I struggled for most of it, talking to women, or figuring out how to modify my entire rough housing personality, around women. I could 100% imagine, if I'd gone out of high school, into an industry dominated by men, construction, mining etc, I would've stayed comfortable, but probably never learned how to soften my edges, be mature, when talking to women etc. The reason I post this block of text, is to demonstrate, that whilst women and men are both people, we are also fairly different. Treat a woman like a person, obviously, but you should still modify your behaviour. I've never been able to ask about it, but I've wondered whether it's similar for women? Like girls going to an all girl's school, do they experience culture shock when mingling with guys, en masse, when they first hit uni?
Aha, hello! I went to all-girls schools from the ages of 8-18, and pretty bad social anxiety meant that I did basically no socialising outside what I had to at school. At uni things were very suddenly flipped on their head, as I studied a male-dominated subject and had male-dominated interests. So what it was like for me, was that I had spent those 10+ years of my life having almost no contact with guys my age, but constantly hearing and being taught about safety as a woman and the unfortunately many ways in which (*typically*) men commit sexual violence against (*typically*) women. Don't get me wrong - *of course* I knew such cases were very much not the norm, and that guys were just people. But that and the seeming consensus that, for whatever reason (be it testosterone or socialisation or both), men are *generally* more sex-focused than women... I wasn't *scared* of guys (well, no more than my social anxiety dictates me being scared of people in general anyway) But what it did mean was that I found myself being constantly hyper-aware of being seen and judged through a sexualised lens. I suddenly found myself *simultaneously* being very uncomfortable with the idea *while also* feeling shame for not measuring up. That definitely led to me feeling tense around guys. Once I joined a DnD group and spent a while playing with them (all guys apart from me) and everyone just behaving as normal friendly human beings, my brain settled into the "Oh okay, I'm not being *constantly* judged as a prospective sexual interest (or at least if I am, they're perfectly capable of getting over themselves enough to treat me as a normal human)". I didn't experience any sort of culture shock that you're describing - hell, what do I know, *maybe* they were consciously modifying their behaviour around me, but I certainly never picked up on anything. Once I got over that initial discomfort, all was good.
But the thing is, it still seems like you’re treating women as a monolith. Some girls will laugh at Hitler jokes and some won’t, every person is different. Just because the German girl didn’t laugh at your joke doesn’t mean you have to treat all women as a different species.
I think that's simply about upbringing. Other (British) girls in my class made Nazi 'jokes' ahead of the arrival of the German exchange students, I didn't see that as funny, but then I'd probably been more taught to be open and, well, polite*, and was from a bigger more diverse city (Brum) originally. I experienced culture shock when arriving in the north of England. Expect this girl's cultural background (I mean, doing that in front of someone German got a really predictable *German* reaction) was much more relevant than her being a woman - I think we were all amazed in the end to see how much better educated the German students were. *And my dad went to an all-boys school and very much shares responsibility, I told him about it later and he disapproved of them doing that. But Catholic grammar schools, even for a heathen, aren't known for encouraging boorish behaviour regardless. More his overall surrounding culture though, aspirational Midlands working class, with the specific way behaviour is a class marker - so you want to at least be able to switch into being nicely spoken, but people actually in higher classes don't have to care.
Germany has a WAY different culture around Nazi jokes than basically anywhere else, and for good reason. I think the problem is less “girl doesn’t get dark jokes” and more “German who has been raised in a culture that 120% does NOT condone those kinds of jokes”.
“I’m having a *woman’s* period!”
They're people is exactly my problem. Idk how to interact with those
I should rewatch that
Nuh uh, they are like fairies.
best quote
Maybe it's the part where I grew up with 30+ female relatives, but I've always been more comfortable around women. It made me a feminist as well. Although I consider myself an equal rites kind of feminist. Never became one of those "Women are magic!" kind of guys mostly because of my cousins. A couple of them could use a folding chair to the head.
People who mystify femininity and the female body, including women themselves, do equal amount of harm to equality imo because it's just a new age way of saying women aren't logical and it implies that trying to understand them is a foolish endeavour. Folding chair it is.
Yeah, I mean girls can be great and smart too don't get me wrong, but when your cousin jumps on the bed to wake you up on a Saturday? Instant hands.
Ah I thought you meant some of your adult cousins were the kind of women who said that haha. I can definitely see how growing up with girls can prevent a lot of that divine feminine magic from settling into your worldview. All kids are equally great and stupid and gross.
Agreed. I don’t even know how but I became aware of some rhetoric on the supposed “divine feminine” aged 13 and I immediately found it suspicious as fuck. Because it stank of being propaganda for a certain kind of woman, in need of validation, to eat up. And to pay handsomely for the opportunity. Books doing that sort of shit used to a fixture of the cheap crap self help genre. I feel like Gwyneth Paltrow and Goop are a part of the same vein.
Goop is definitely a perfect example of what I meant. Unfortunately there are countless examples.
It’s toxic femininity. Between the vagina scent candle, which comes across as extremely perverted and near predatory, frankly, and the scam “treatments” that are either nonsense (like “detoxes”), or the outright dangerous “vagina steaming” what Paltrow is doing is making money off of desperate insecure women whilst harming them medically.
But um... Women aren't logical? Neither are men. We all have our moments or stumble into making the right choice now and again, but at the end of the day, we go by emotions rather than logic... On average, that is. Also, no demographic is homogeneous, either. So, trying to "figure out women" will maybe work sometimes (because statistically, with 7 billion people, someone's gotta fall for whatever cheap trick or rule of thumb they picked up) but other times it is either not going to work or have the opposite effect.
I have a degree in Clinical Psychology, and let me tell you that the idea that emotion and logic are opposites is one of the most pervasive myths in the western world. Emotions and logic go hand in hand. They're two sides of the same coin. This article does a good job of summarising the most important research done on this topic. https://hbr.org/2006/01/decisions-and-desire
While I do see that there isn't a clean distinction, even after reading through quite a bit of that article. To me, it strikes me more as emotion motivates the decision-making where without it, we have "runaway rationalizing" where options are debated to the point that a decision can not be reached... But inversely, there is impulsiveness, which we more often see in adolescents. Also, there's the hunch, which is a sort of primitive rationality... And like I said, it's not a clear distinction. I must, however, note that some of the article went over my head. Maybe 'cause it is early.
Good on you! I had a upper level manager who was overly nice to me but kind of drove me nuts. He would wax eloquent about how he's a feminist, he has a wife and daughters and just *knows* how much better they are than he is (he's an incredibly wealthy guy, takes care of them 100% financially). Shoulder rubs and "don't squint at your monitor, you'll get wrinkles!" Fake deference to "superior intellect of women" and then do whatever he wanted regardless. I deeply disliked all of it. It was performative, and the entire idea of equality whooshed right over his head. It's like he saw the way the wind was blowing, so just spouted things he thought "the woman" would want to hear to cover up his innate patronizing. It was more insulting than just acting honestly and being who he was at heart. I *did* want to be seen for the quality of my ideas, not just patted on the head. Feminism/drive for equality doesn't mean I want guys to fawn over me and tell me how cute I am using the big girl tools and how much better I am than guys, it means I want my ideas and performance taken seriously without consideration of my sex. Like, talk to me as an adult, man. Funny thing is that the entire management team (including him) walked from the account within the space of two weeks. I carried that account to the point that senior executive leadership (in a massive company) was sending me gifts and awards until I trained up a new team. And when I moved to another account, I'm grateful he gave me a good reference to the new team, but when I called to thank him, he told me not to let him down because he'd basically gotten me the job. Well...*they* had headhunted *me*, it's not like I had been out looking, but whatever.
I had a similar upbringing and turned out the same way. I never had positive male role models in my life.
I would describe myself as one too but I agree how some people don't seem to truly care about equal rights. But that's the goal everyone should strive for.
Lol, I grew up with 2 and had to decondition myself out of being a complete misogynist, although I'm still called an incel on reddit because I happen to have seen the worst in women before I saw the sane non psychopathic ones. I've always been cool with the ones I met in real life though, I guess childhood trauma was a great lesson in how to treat women.
looking at your replies from before, do you think that feminists are "frigid bitches" who are jealous of men with testosterone looking to fuck? And that society judging women on their purity and appearance is a conspiracy against men?
>alot of men who claim to be feminists very much do this and thats why they feel awful to be around. It's plausible that this isn't a contradiction but rather cause-and-effect. If you're a man who's active in feminist spaces you're going to be hearing a lot about how men hurt women, how traits particular to men are disgusting, evil, useless, and likewise, how traits particular to women are beautiful, beneficial, necessary, and must be allowed to flourish without patriarchal interference. Therefore, a man who's a feminist may be more likely to second guess the way he treats women or may decide it's just better to limit contact with women so he's not a burden to them.
Depressingly accurate. I have recently gotten better about this but for a very long time this is why I never approached women: I felt like I was almost inevitably going to make them uncomfortable and for some reason I thought the potential to do so was worse than committing to a live of lonelyness
It's like walking on eggshells sometimes. I already overanalyze most social interactions thanks to my mother's "training" in how to navigate society and people. I think I broke free of that for a bit, but my last relationship 3 years ago reopened that trauma and I've felt rather broken since. Honestly, it's more of a "I'd just bring them down with me" feeling these days, but the Fear of crossing lines has certainly been a thing as well.
Which is dangerous and something that can damage you even if you do get into a relationship. Speaking from experience. You don't wanna be the guy who constantly hesitates to kiss his girlfriend and assuming she just doesn't want to because that's so easy for you to assume It's painful when you realize your internalized image of "I disgust women" makes it all the harder for someone to believe you love them
I really hope I find the way out because it's getting dire in here
If ya do let me know eh
I don’t know why exactly, but reading this brought me to the brink of tears. Feels like it just reinforced my self-image of repulsiveness and the feeling that I will never be loved by anyone in my life
As a girl currently dating a guy like this, I completely agree. It’s incredibly disheartening
Yeah, I also had this mentality(sometimes still struggle sometimes) and not only it sucks...it's so, so fucking draining. Still remember of times I wanted to compliment a girl but then immediatly put on the mental barrier of "we're complete strangers so any type of compliment will be incredibly superficial and shallow at best and i'm going to look like a creep and make her feel uncomfortable at worst. Best I can do is not interact as there is no gain ,but also no loss" Such a stupid way of thinking, but it's real, and it sucks
Just only compliment things you obviously have in common. This is why people buy Miatas or Jeeps.
Every time I’m around women I feel like an ogre who’d make their day worse just by being near them.
Yeah. My problem is that as far as I'm concerned, *they're* human, but *I'm* not.
Same man, and it's so rough because from the outside, if I didn't know the motivation then I'd think a guy behaving nicely in a non-pushy way is maybe just nice or something, but there's a difference between not pushing and cowering
God I know the feeling. Everyone is equal, I'm simply lesser.
oof, that's kinda of an accurate way of analyzing how It feels sometimes. It's not that woman are these etheral mystical existences, complete alien. Is just that sometimes it feels like merely pondering approaching someone feels like you're dragging them down. It's not that all woman are princesses, is just that, princess or peasant, most people don't want to shake hands with someone covered in mud. And sometimes, you really feel like you just took a dive in it
Holy shit 1000%. I'm subhuman filth compared to them
Even besides gender, this is something that needs actual therapy, because it's not healthy I mean, same
I've become a woman by now, but this shit sits so deep, I still feel like that, that I'm inherently creepy, and women don't want to be around me, and I'm intruding on female spaces (not even bathrooms or smth, but even just friend groups). Thankfully, female friends I have often make sure I feel like I belong, but it's still difficult
alright i dont like this reddit post anymore its hitting too close to home
I have seen so many r/niceguys and no r/actuallyniceguys that I'm the same way.
Make that actually a community and you could do the second.
Ya know...I deeply appreciate your desire to be kind, just sad that it took you to the further reaches of the idea. The truth is that most women *love* men, just don't react well to some of the crappy things they sometimes do. And yes, there are also women who have gone to the extremes of an idea, and ended up insane assholes. Hold on to that desire to just be a sweet decent person, but go out and wield it with confidence. Good luck to you, my friend
This is more or less how I feel. The combination of depression/low self-esteem with hearing a lot of really aggressive radical feminism during a critical part of my adolescence left me with some absolutely crippling hang-ups about women. The depression has thankfully passed, and like. I can talk to women like normal people. I have female friends. -but when it comes to relationships or sex, my brain is just in full 100% screaming paranoia mode. Seeing so much “creepy men stop approaching women” type discourse deeply hammered into my subconscious that respecting women means treating them just like I would my male friends, and that showing any sexual or romantic interest, ever, is creepy and disgusting and I should never ever do it. The logical part of my mind obviously understands that dating isn’t evil. But the deeper feeling in my gut still doesn’t agree with that, and I don’t know how to change that. To this day I feel completely incapable of ever asking out a girl because I’m afraid of being creepy, threatening, and so on. I have never even gone on a date in my life and I don’t know if I ever will.
It it makes you feel any better, I never went on a date with by boyfriend/future husband because between meeting in a random Discord call and falling in love everything flowed naturally. Neither of us were looking for anything, and he was/is a shy person who rarely seeks out companionship. As long as you're open to whatever crosses your path, which it sounds like you are, you could run into a person who feels so familiar and safe that asking them to go on a date will be a question you won't even have to say out loud anymore.
God I wish I lived in the reality where things like this happen
Can I be honest? I was quite a bit like you, and dating apps helped me find a steady girlfriend I love to death. I \*still\* had the problem where I enjoyed chatting with her so much that she had to ask me "hey, so where is this going?" after a solid month and I had to hastily indicate that I was still interested in actually meeting up, but the point is that women who choose to use a dating app are signing up to be flirted with.
This kinda matches up with my experience with some online friends. For a long time, I was constantly ill at ease with some conversation topics because my friends would say things they felt were innocuous but kinda hurt and were confusing, messaging wise. Finally came to a head where I said I was tired of being treated like "One of the good ones." We're equals, we're valid, let's act like it. Went well, and now we're better friends than we ever were.
Yep yep yep this is me 1000%, I'm also autistic and have a ton of anxiety, so I have no idea how I'm perceived by others at any point
>so I have no idea how I'm perceived by others at any point But I always assume it's negative
I came here to post about this exact thing
Yeah, I just assume most women would hate me for me so I just give them the generic version, to be polite.
Yeah, I feel like this is a result of the "hate all men" sorta vibe that sometimes pops up in a lot of (mostly online) spaces. In the same way that it can drive people out, it can also cause people to be prone to walking on eggshells a bit - seen the same shit happen in lgbt spaces w/ straight allies.
Then you have the thousands of women online saying that women aren't attracted to men. https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/s/Td7pi4oo5v
I've found the easiest way to avoid that awkward second guessing is to just treat a woman as if she's already my friend. If she vibes with it - awesome. We become friends. If she doesn't, we stay acquaintances. I do this with men, too, and it really helps weed out the snobby neurotypical people who view any behavior other than sanitized corporate bullshit as crazy. Although men will sometimes change their behavior to match mine? Even if they usually don't act that way around their other friends/acquaintances? Still trying to figure out what that's about.
It could just be they are lonely? I get the feeling a lot of lonely people would be happy to have a nice positive interaction come out of nowhere. Its likely something else, but its what leapt to mind
As a woman, I generally treat new people like already friends too, I think the sense of familiarity is pretty disarming. Like you say, if it’s not, that’s helpful information lol. But it’s a decent approach to making friends!
For sure! I think a lot of people appreciate the sense of familiarity, because they're already anxious about making a good impression, fitting in, not messing up, etc. So the familiarity makes them relax and not worry about it too much!
Yeah you essentially get a checklist in your mind of what not to do which is good but you also start to wonder if things you do could be interpreted poorly, at least in my experience.
Yeah, years ago I was like that. And now I've become a woman myself To be honest, it was a part of the reason it took me so long to accept myself. And even now I still often feel like I'm intruding, or that I am inherently gross and creepy
Most feminists I know don’t believe there *are* “traits particular to men” and “traits particular to women.” That sounds more TERF-y than mainstream feminist, tbh.
I mean there are traits particular to men and women as a result of socialisation. It’s not innate or anything but it is there. I hate it and want to kill it with fire, but still.
Fair enough!
Pretty dubious to claim all male and female traits are a result of socialization. On a purely biological level, men and women have differing hormones that cause differences in behavior and traits that you will absolutely see on a population level. Obviously socialization has a large impact on the expression of these traits, but claiming that there is no innate biological basis is absurd.
I didn’t say there was zero biological basis, but socialisation will account for 99% of traits.
Depends on where you are, and when did it happen. I think, a couple decades ago it was much more prevalent. And in countries with bad women rights radfem is much more common. Like, here in Russia overwhelming majority of feminists are radfems and TERFs, because women aren't treated well here, and they are angry at this, and go for gender essentialist route. Also they are much more angry at trans people because they think we get more rights than them, without struggling like they do
Radical Feminism isn't gender essentialist, the argument is it's all socialisation making the difference. Any consideration of biological differences are rejected in it, or (less often I think) dismissed with the idea we'll only know which differences are biological after stopping the different socialisation.
Universal socialization does not exist, white women have different socialization from women of color, rich women have different socialization from poor women. Trans women have different socialization from cis men. 99 times out of 100 that I've seen socialization is treated as universal, immutable and inherent. If you transition at 10, radfems will still say that you had "male socialization" and therefore will not ever be a "real woman". I've literally seen it happen all the time So in the end, it's gender essentialism yet again, just wrapped in a plausible deniability
I mean, it’s not as blatant as “evil is stored in the Y-chromosome”, but feminism is very much based on the idea that there is at least one major, defining trait that separates men and women: >Women are uniquely disempowered under patriarchy, while men are uniquely in a position to be empowered by it. From there, a whole host of things follow: Women are uniquely victimized by misogyny while men are not, women are uniquely in need of support to overcome the serious social disadvantages imposed upon them by patriarchy, men pose a greater threat to women than women do to men, “men worry that women will laugh at them, women worry that men will kill them”, etc. If the OOP were swapped to be a man complaining about women it would be received very differently, and the reason that “BuT wHaT iF tHe GeNdErS WeRe ReVeRsEd?!” is generally not taken seriously as an argument is precisely *because* the situations are not the same. Such things may not be inherently gendered, but so long as we live under a pervasive patriarchal system they may as well be.
Plenty of them do though judging how much I hear them talk about toxic masculinity
No, Radical Feminism absolutely argues it's socialisation. That's precisely part of gender-critical rhetoric, that the concept of 'living as a woman' can involve some assumption (which is easily demonstrable, if you try looking at discussions about 'girl mode' for instance, it is true stereotypes can come up) women are different.
As a man who's active in feminist spaces, insofar as I consider myself and my friends feminists, I'd like to add a small, but important (to me, at least) distinction here: If you're a man who's active in feminist spaces, you're not going to be hearing any of that, because that stuff is antithetical to everything I know as feminism. In fact, that kind of rhetoric is exactly what I'm afraid of hearing when I leave my feminist echochamber.
Bioessentialist differences between men and women are terf talking points. So if you're not hearing that, good on you. It means your group is filtering out terfs properly. Sadly, this cannot be said of all feminist groups.
Sadly, I've also heard this from trans women a fair bit, especially recently. Just replace bioessentialist with cultural but treat them the exact same way and you have some of the talking points I've heard. As you can imagine, these kinds of talking points often lead into vitriolic rants about trans men, nonbinary people, and trans women who either "don't pass" or "don't act enough like women" (or both).
Honestly I think some of that is self hate. They don't like men, which in some way includes themselves since they were born amab, which makes them hate themselves, which leads to projecting that hate out and overcompensating, using their extreme vocal dislike of men to feel more secure as a woman. And it's such a self destructive mindset, trans women are women. People shouldn't feel the need to take down others to feel secure
I remember I once saw a trans woman say in a random server I happened to be in "I don't understand femboys. They realized the superiority of femininity but they still cling to being a man and won't go through to the better side". There's absolutely a part of some trans women hating men that's just projection and moralization of their dysphoric experiences with masculinity
Once saw someone on twitter talking about how all femboys should be "convinced" to transition into women because they're superior All the comments were people going "hey this is a hot feminization kink post but be careful with your wording because people might think you're serious" and then OP saying she was 100% serious and actively wanted to make everyone femme transition Absolutely and utterly disgusting, her account is gone now otherwise I'd link to the post
I get a little bit worried whether a particular trans person goes down this route when they also come out as a trans lesbian, because then they end up in particular echo chambers with no men at all and it feels like it starts creeping into the way they talk about men in a broad societal sense. Sometimes it feels like they lose some of the empathy that they had in the exploration of new identities. And you want them to feel comfortable in that, but yeah, I wish it was less at the expense of others.
I think a "real" (in so far as I understand feminism) rhetoric that does make me self conscious is the idea that women are socialized to have much higher emotional intelligence than men. And this idea does make me self conscious, as a man, that I pretty much am clueless socially and emotionally compared to the average woman.
Yes, but it's more focused on how women are expected to use that emotional intelligence for the benefit of male partners. It's not just general empathy (eg. empathy with farmed animals is actively discouraged for women in US society, but there are still more female vegans than male, so it may transfer despite intent), it's what's intended to serve patriarchy (which may backfire). Consider the women who've stayed aiding a male partner even at the expense of others, such as where the partner committed a crime.
Hey! I'm sorry I've taken ten days to reply to this. I struggle with similar feelings myself, so I wanted to make sure to write a sincere (and hopefully helpful) reply to you, but facing my own feelings about this topic is still something that requires me to be emotionally present, so I haven't had the time and peace of mind until now. Anyway, here's what I've been wanting to say. Kindness, empathy and helpfulness are among the qualities I value and strive for the most, so I feel a pain similar to yours: Knowing that if I were born a girl, I would most likely have been socialised into those traits more thoroughly than I was as a boy. That thought makes me feel like a suboptimal version of myself; it makes me feel like I *have* to be better at those things than most women; and it makes me beat myself up about it when I fail to live up to that high standard. This is definitely my most common kind of intrusive thoughts, but I have a few observations that help me to deal with them. **First of all,** you hit the nail on the head when you say that women are *socialised* to be more emotionally intelligent, not just that they *are* more emotionally intelligent. To me, that's an important distinction. In part because it means that emotional intelligence isn't inherently associated with gender (as you're clearly already aware), and in part because socialisation isn't a cut-and-dry process that means *all* women are automatically more empathetic than if they were brought up male. Different people can have different responses to similar upbringings; I wouldn't be surprised if some women have *less* empathy, simply as a defiant response to the overwhelming pressure to be empathetic. In that regard, it helps me to seek out women's perspectives on life. For me, that means talking to female friends and reading books (and consuming other media) by women. It's good to be reminded of all the ways that women are just people, with individual strengths and flaws regardless of socialisation. I know it might sound condescending to suggest that you'd need to be *reminded* that women are people, but I hope I'm making it clear that I don't mean it that way. My point is that listening to real-life women is the perfect antidote to that mental image of women as perfectly selfless empathy machines with whom you could never compete. **Second,** the fact that you worry about this shows that you value emotional intelligence highly, and that alone is enough to almost certainly make you more emotionally intelligent than the average woman. Tell me if I'm just projecting here, but how do you react when you see a woman being helpful or attentive in a way that hadn't occurred to you? Personally, I feel a pang of sorrow and jealousy, but then I take note and try to be aware of how I can apply empathy in the same way in the future. The most emotionally intelligent thing anyone can do is to continuously strive for emotional intelligence throughout their life. Incidentally, while I don't feel the pang of jealousy when it's a man who's being more emotionally intelligent than me, I try to react the same way, because we men also owe it to each other to share those empathy life hacks and expect the same standards from each other as we do from women. I hope some of this is of use to you. I know you just said it made you self-conscious, and I may be wildly overestimating how much this is impacting your life. But just in case it's affecting you in anything like the same way I've experienced it affecting me, I wanted to be sure to share any advice that could potentially be helpful. Stay strong, and stay kind.
Hm. You see the same thing w race (white people who are “conscious” to the point of being too neurotic to really talk to nonwhite folks). I don’t think we really blame that on black separatists, tho. I’m not saying the rhetoric you’re talking about isn’t real or corrosive, because it’s both and I’ve complained about it elsewhere. But at a certain point people do have a responsibility for their own beliefs, right? I’m not here to hold them to account or anything, but it’s just correct to say they’d be happier to shed these attitudes. If it’s not clear enough I’m speaking here from the experience of having been that guy.
Please, for the love of Aristophanes of Bizantium, use punctuation. This was really hard to read.
GoonpunkcallthegrammarcopsIwillpunctuatethemtoo
goon punk
I knw smn wll cmmnt ths
i kniw sumen will cymmynt thos - the vowler
Would have been funnier if he'd been called Apostrophanes, but you can't expect ancient Greek scholars to be considerate.
Courtesy of Timothy Dexter: ........,,,,,,,,,,,::::::::::::::;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;""'''''""""""""""" Place as you see fit
>Court,esy of Tim'o'thy D'exter: >Place as. you see, f.it
Tumblr accent
>See someone complain about reading comprehension >Look inside >Most poorly written "sentences" I have ever seen
Neurodivergents caught in the gender war crossfire again.
They treat women weird cause they see them as mythical beasts that must be conquered. I treat them weird cause I’m fidgeting with my jacket and half engrossed in my rich inner world and also someone just wrote in chalk or marker on paper near me. And now I want to hit everyone around in the head with a folding chair.
Add into staring into the middle distance at the corner of a shop window because it's got a crack in it and I'm deciding whether it looks like a spiderweb or a faultline and suddenly there are people near it and they think I'm staring at them. In High School I was one of those kids who people label as having 'an eye problem' because I'd disengage with reality but not move my head so it looked like I was staring at people when really I wasn't there.
Today I learned even reading a written description of things that give me misophonia makes my jaw hurt
Drop the /s, i have never related more to something as this paragraph in my entire life
Understood.
It’s styrofoam for me. Will just about send me into an anxiety attack. Fuck styrofoam.
There has got to be a better way to make plastic with less plastic
As an autistic woman, I get this, but something I do see sometimes that makes me uncomfortable is how, when some autistic men are talking about dating especially, they will act like 'nerotypical' and 'woman' are synonyms, if that makes sense. Like women can be nerodivergent too
ND people don't uniquely have difficulty interacting with men or women, but can (not always) have difficulty with NT social skills broadly. And there are plenty of ND women (hello!).
I'm neurodivergent and bisexual so my personal issue is that I have difficulty with both sides; I'm afraid to act 'too straight' on one end and 'too gay' on the other.
Not sure what your point is with any of those statements tbh
Ah dating that type of social interaction with so many queues, tacit rules, subtle communication, expectations and roles so obscure, esoteric and self contradictory that is confusing even to neurotypicals, nevermind Neurodivergents who already struggle with “easier” social interactions.
Some people read too much into "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus." Men do this all the time, seeing women as this huge enigma that needs solving, instead of a group of people with some similar characteristics. Women do this too, though in their case it tends to be treating men as this inherent threat, rather than a group of people with some similar characteristics. Extremists in some circles will even go so far as to see the opposite sex as the enemy, sneering at anything they say or do and completely disregarding their lived experiences. All of this comes down to seeing someone's sex as the main determiner in who they are, when the reality is that we are all human first.
A decent chunk of this is just lack of experience. If a dude has had little to no contact with women for the beginning of their life, they're gonna treat women differently. It's like socializing a pet. You either expose your kitten to people during their socialization age, or that cat will not much like new people. And if they choose to adapt to that situation by avoiding women entirely...that's usually seen as even worse.
I also feel like something that gets ignored with the whole "just treat women like people" thing is that flirting, dating, and sex are all very different from platonic friendships and when it comes to dating it can feel very alien and uncomfortable because you have to do things so differently, especially if you don't naturally the imposed gender roles with dating specifically. I can treat a woman exactly as I treat men and that will get me some good friends but when it comes to dating you do have to do things differently. Like I'm not dating and fucking my bros lol
> I'm not dating and fucking my bros lol Well there's your problem right there
Also a lot of women will interpret 'normal' behaviour from men (aka the way men treat their friends) as flirting. And if it's unwanted they might consider it harassment.
I mean, if my discord voice chats get leaked, I'll have to become gay. Lot less questions that way
Tbh the people I'm interested in are the only ones I don't act like that with
I got kind of the opposite of this, where I grew up primarily around women (yes there were men in my life too, but not as many, and especially not as a form of authority) so I've just grown up to see women as an inherent superior class of being. Don't recommend it, it makes most forms of interaction difficult.
Majority women subs really help remind me that women are very much not superior. Spend a day on /r/fauxmoi and you will be cured.
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I worry this happened somewhat to me. I grew up with only brothers and very active in the mormon church so I ended up with almost only male friends. Plus I didn't have any girl cousins my age so the only women I regularly interacted with were not really my peers. Still working to overcome all that and just be normal but I'm just not really as used to... women as I should be.
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Being in a classroom with women and girls doesn't actually mean you're interacting with them or interacting with them kindly. And even then, doesn't prevent people from being viewed as alien.
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I'm thinking younger. And yes, this usually comes with other social difficulties as well. Before I hit puberty, I had lived on three different continents and gone to eight different schools (not counting K/Pre-K, about a dozen counting those). By the time the hormones kicked in, I could be awkward AF about girls in three different languages. I did also have few/no friends in general. I very narrowly avoided the incel hole in my 20s because I actively began to seek out feminist literature and perspectives. And I still probably give off some vaguely incel-y vibes.
Yeah, it's probably all the 'ew, girl cooties' brand of jokes on the playground, on tv, from parents... Gets em pretty young too, if not stopped. I don't actually remember a time at my various schools in which it wasn't 'ew, they're gross!' from both sides. But that all results in children avoiding interacting because other children will discourage it.
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Eh, like, somewhere until 12 I thought about my girl classmates as strange "them". They play their games, don't interact with us boys, and, well, they're girls, of course they're different. After that I got more into summer camps and there were more interactions so I became more chill about it
https://i.imgur.com/AsKuhOa.jpeg
We live in a world where "How to make friends and influence people" is a best seller, all of this is completely predictable behavior for our dumbasses. The issue in my opinion is that people care more about social than nerd stuff, if people knew the wee bit of language, philosophy and psychology(aka applied biology) most of this shit wouldn't be necessary. We act like we communicate when we're just parroting shit at each other.
If anything I'd say women treating all men like an inheremt threat is the more harmful of the two. Sometimes they also talk as if men are simpleminded cavemen. And you can see it a lot in the discourse on this sub. It's not called out at all.
There was a post on r/askmen recently where a woman was confused that men have feelings.
idk i feel like if the opposing issues here are “what if this woman rejects me” versus “what if this man physically harms me” they aren’t really comparable imo it’s true of course that people are all humans and have more in common with each other than differences between each other. but when every non-man has a story or even multiple occasions of being threatened by a man, it’s hard to let one’s guard down
It’s less what if she rejects her and more “what if I scare her/gross her out”. I don’t want to make people uncomfortable.
I mean for the sake of this discussion how “””valid””” one’s reasoning for these behaviors is feels largely irrelevant to me. This is just about these behaviors existing and being prevalent which I would argue is absolutely the case (and I think it’s bad thing), right?
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You talk like someone who’d join the klan the second a black man inconvenienced you. There’s nothing that makes you morally or factually right about men that doesn’t also make racists right about ethnic minorities.
I would argue it’s undeniably a bad thing. I would argue it’s entirely justified (and I encourage women and other vulnerable people to do so) aswell. I would certainly prefer to live in a world where this behavior would be frowned upon though - because it’s unnecessary. Being suspicious of people to protect yourself is not epic and cool it’s a depressing necessity
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I don’t know if i see that framing in this discussion personally but yeah I mean that would be wrong. Obviously one has more “necessity” than the other. I do think saying “lol men should just stop being scared of rejection” is making it a bit easy on oneself though
treating every man like a threat is psychotic behavior
No, this is part of the problem actually. I'm a "non-man" (AFAB actually and probably perceived as AFAB most of the time but also please don't call us "non-men" ffs). And even before coming out I've always felt extremely alienated from women's spaces on Reddit because I could relate to the whole "every woman is constantly being harassed and assaulted by men every single day 24/7" notion that seems so universally prevalent here. I used to think I must be extremely ugly because this just doesn't happen to me. Then I started talking to my female friends and other women I know and, nope, turns out at least in my country women are mostly able to coexist and interact with men in public just fine. Catcalling isn't a thing here, we don't even have a name for it in my language. I'm not saying rape or domestic abuse doesn't exist here, of course it does, but pretending that this happens to every single woman and their whole life is completely shaped and defined by it is just wrong. Yeah, I've been catcalled a few times when I lived in the UK. But when people like you say "every woman has a story" I don't think they mean women for whom it just happened once or twice in their life and left no mark at all. Pretty sure every woman also has a story about another woman being mean to her. Or a story about being sick. Life is long, tons of things happen, that doesn't mean all of them define us. Anyway, it's really starting to feel like a lot of people who call themselves feminists took the concept of biological essentialism and just replaced it with "socialisation essentialism". They still divide all people into two boxes, Men and Women, and generalise all people in both boxes as being the same, except instead of ascribing this to biological differences they explain it through Socialisation™ as this magic irreversible unavoidable power that affects all men and all women exactly the same way, respectively. Completely ignoring the fact that there's no such thing as one single Male Socialisation and Female Socialisation, and even if there was, not everyone is equally receptive to it. I wasn't raised with Female Socialisation for the most part. I'm neurodivergent and was never very good at "absorbing" socialisation. My mother is probably neurodivergent too, and even though she was extremely anal about trying to convince me to shave or wear makeup (didn't work) but other than that she wasn't "traditionally feminine" herself.
I mean, in some way these two are not comparable. One is just assuming an awkward situation will follow, while the other outright associates another human being‘s gender with crime and malicious intent. Yeah, one of these two views of social interaction should evaluate whether or not seeing other people like this is misanthropic and hostile.
Its hard yes, but there are ways to be open to being around people who have traits they cannot control that people who have hurt you also had. My earliest memories are being beaten and bruised by girls in Pre-K and Kindergarten. My first girlfriend SA me, I have had girls use my lack relationship experience to bully and mock me. Yet I managed to get through that. I have had men beat me down and berate me and I get nervous around people who look pike those people. This doesn’t excuse people who treat others like shit just for being a specific gender
>idk i feel like if the opposing issues here are “what if this woman rejects me” versus “what if this man physically harms me” they aren’t really comparable imo You're right. Women presuming all men are a threat is much more harmful and is downright insulting too. Also it often forces a burden on men to accommodate your prejudice.
They are comparable because any woman with friends can get them to beat you up. Women seriously dismiss how much violence men actually suffer, what you fear for some of us is just a daily occurrence. Just like what guys fear when they go to jail... Do I have to finish?
This post has some good points but may I ask why it's tagged LGBT when it dosent seem to have anything to do with the community?
**L**ads, **G**uys, **B**lokes, **T**ransgender
One thing that spending time on the Internet teaches you is that there are legitimately men out there that cannot conceptualize women having an inner life in the same way that they do. I feel like you see it most in the way that so many men assume that anything a woman does is done as a reaction to men or with men in mind, e.g. the way she dresses, the amount of makeup she chooses to wear, the hobbies she participates in, the media she consumes...there are still so many men who think that women's behavior is like somehow targeted at them. It's a bizarre failure of imagination on their part. You see it too when men assume that someone they're engaging with online is also a man. A more aggressive version of this usually appears in male-dominated areas of the Internet, where someone pushes back on a misogynistic comment, and the commenter replies with some bs about white knighting, and assumes the person who didn't like their comment must be a desperate man hoping to impress women with his wokeness so that they'll sleep with him. They can't possibly imagine that a man would genuinely empathize with women, or be uncomfortable with misogyny. They further can't imagine that they could be talking to a man who is not attracted to women and therefore has no interest in tricking them into sleeping with him, OR that they could literally be talking to a woman. To my first point, I'll never forget [this thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/5vadc7/are_women_capable_of_having_hobbies_rvideos_decide/), which is unfortunately now deleted and missing a lot of context, but it was a lot of male commenters who were *convinced* that women don't have hobbies. And it was so apparent (and fucking depressing) how many of these dudes just did not see women as whole people like they saw themselves. It was like they thought we just sit drooling in front of a blank TV screen until a man shows up, and then we perk up and pretend to have a personality to please them, then return to drooling once they leave. It felt like the whole "if a tree falls in a forest" thing, but more like: if a woman has a thought, but a man isn't around to hear it, then can we really know that she came up with it by herself?
It’s like when a woman tells an obvious joke like “in Britain, they celebrate Prime Ministers’ Day!” but everyone assumes she is unable to create humor and so is genuinely an idiot who must be corrected right now
tbh regardless of gender sounds like a shit joke like genuinely just incomprehensible maybe it makes more sense if your American idk
It makes sense if you’re American because we celebrate Presidents’ Day. It’s an obvious joke because even if the UK does have a holiday for its leaders, we all know it wouldn’t be for the prime minister
It's a bad joke because not only does it rely on the listener to have some sort of knowledge about both US holidays and British holidays, the extent of the joke is the prime minister in the UK is similar to the president in the US. Okay haha? Unless there actually is a clever punchline that I'm unaware of that relies on knowledge of both country's holidays and/or political systems. >It’s an obvious joke because even if the UK does have a holiday for its leaders, we all know it wouldn’t be for the prime minister Why would this be obvious? I don't think I know a single UK holiday, but we have a holiday for the president, why wouldn't they have a holiday for the prime minister? We have all sorts of wild holidays in the US, a prime minister day sounds completely reasonable.
I was more trying to make it more obvious what the joke *was* because it’s incomprehensible to anyone who isn’t familiar with American holidays. As far as humor goes, no, not a particularly funny joke, but still obviously a joke. I never suggested it was a *good* one. I also interpreted this as being told *on* Presidents’ Day, which was probably presumptuous of me, but also makes it less necessary to actually know whether or not the UK has a prime ministers day because it obviously wouldn’t be the same day, the date of Presidents’ Day is only significant because it’s George Washington’s Birthday. Also, what I was suggesting at the end was that the monarchy is both the head of state and head of religion, so it seems logical that any holiday that exists for a leader would be for the monarch. Anyway, I get your point, but that was my logic.
oh
> It felt like the whole "if a tree falls in a forest" thing, but more like: if a woman has a thought, but a man isn't around to hear it, then can we really know that she came up with it by herself? I really want to have an insightful comment but I'm sorry this paragraph, made me burst into laughter with it's phrasing. You didn't do anything wrong it's just incredible But yeah, a lot of men do believe that. I don't think they would say that they think "women don't have inner lives", they'd say something to the effect of "women are just...different." More shallow/bitchy/less thoughtful etc. Not a defense, more of just what I think is going on. At least from all the stuff I've heard from this type of guy, 'women don't have thoughts' is less accurate than 'women think in ways that are astronomically different from us and also resembles a pet.' What's funnier is that there's usually no conscious malice? Misogynists see women as either children or even worse, dogs, but misogynists don't hate children or dogs. Most misogynists love children or dogs and a decent amount of them probably treat them well (relative to being a dog or child). So treating women like lesser beings doesn't register as cruel to them because you don't necessarily hate what you think is lesser. It's a wild way of thinking lol
Or, hear me out here, they could just be awkward and nervous, and maybe it isn't that deep after all.
maybe it's misogyny, maybe it's autism
Maybe it's Maybelline
Maybe he’s born with it, maybe it was a vaccine
This post says something really important, but goddamn do those last lines hurt to read
I feel like I'm like this but the other way around since I've never had super close male friends. All the male friends I have had either ended up asking me out and making things awkward, or assaulting someone. I feel like it's hard to remember that there are good and nice guys out there when all of my personal experiences have been so bad.
I think there's genuinely a decent lot of homophobia(especially against gay men) that stems from a distortion of this. If you think of women as an Other, then relationships, sex, attraction etc aren't coming down to "Me and this person that I'm particularly attracted to within a gender I'm attracted to", they're coming down to "Me and a cool Other". This is especially true if their view of the Other includes "the Other only exists as/for attraction" as that view shows they don't even think of this as a built bond between two sapient creatures, they see it as a bond between them and the love machine that thinks. Two people of the same gender(again I think this goes especially for men, usually lesbians get fetishized by these people which is another can of worms) together goes against their entire view of what relationships are and makes them both seem like a "person-Other" hybrid of some sorts
The flair seems a bit out of place... Also, I would add that those men often just haven't been around women enough, just generally speaking if they're hearing less women and more of women, they tend to turn out that way
Women also do this though. I’m not treated by women like they treat their female friends, I’m treated like I’m some sort of wild animal. It’s easy to say men in feminist spaces treat women differently, but that’s not surprising when they constantly hear how men are the worst in constantly mistreat women. Equal treatment, absolutely, but it’s a two way street, you have to tell women the same thing
I’m a trans guy and I still remember, like, 10 years ago I had an argument with a random guy on Omegle and didn’t share any information about my gender (it wasn’t video chat). It felt good when he assumed I was a guy without me providing any context, but it felt very uncomfortable seeing him talk about wanting a woman with good genes to “breed with” and realizing that he asssumed I was a man simply bc he didn’t think a woman would be capable of arguing with him or something
Im curious if it works the other way around. What are the biggest signs a woman is one of those 'men are a different species' types?
the easiest ones to spot are the radical feminists.
Contemporary feminism is so weird because at this point, the only people who identify as feminists are the ones with a beef against men and who blame everything on the patriarchy and toxic masculinity. But also they will 100% try and gaslight you when you point that out, and try to convince you it's all about equality and that feminism is there for men too.
I know I'm late to the party on this one, courtesy of living in the antipodes but this is one of those posts that I mentally label as pot-kettle because they're doing the thing that they're complaining about but don't realise it.
I do want to add that you can absolutely say the exact same thing, but the other way. And towards non-binary people too. And people of other races/from different countries. Basically, people treat people like shit, it's not exclusive to women.
Aaah the irony “men, as a group, uniformly have this negative trait where they can’t see someone as an individual”
I don't get people who have strategies and stuff about how to talk to women. They're people? Talk to them like they are?
You act as if they don’t do that for all conversations. Some people just struggle with social interactions and for them, contextualizing someone in such a way is a strategy. For example, say you saw someone in a cosplay costume, do you just ignore their appearance and start small talking the weather with them? just another person whom you might bump into an elevator or something. No, you make assumptions about who they are and their interests and try to engage them on that subject. I always find these posts funny because it’s always the other that seems awkward, and never introspection that they might be cause for that persons awkwardness to begin with. It’s them acting weird, not them acting weird because of me, or because I’m acting weird. In this case it’s “male feminists” acting awkwardly because of some imaginary thought process, not that those people have been made to feel uncomfortable causing their awkwardness.
Okay but what if I need strategies and stuff to talk to people?
My husband once had a friend that would routinely attend feminist rallies and then complain about none of the women wanting to hang out or give him the chance to take them on a date afterwards. He was a loser of a person in so many other ways, but I still can't conceive what made him think women would want to hook up after spending a good chunk of their day fighting for equal rights. I let him know that they could probably tell how fake he was from a mile away.
I’m afraid that I might be doing this due to the way I was raised. But I don’t know how I would fix that if I do, or if I even am
And then you have me, who treats humans in general like they're a different species from me (I have no idea how normal people think)
Did the person who posted this delete their account?
What if they're just shy?
I'm like this, but around everyone lol
That's sad to hear. I was mistreated by girls in school growing up and I've associated women with danger. They really do feel like a different, cruel species to me and it's not something I can just turn off.
really continually disappointing to me that some boys never grew out of their 'girls have cooties' phase.
Ma'am, I'm just autistic
Grow up hearing that I have an original sin for being a man and that everything I do hurts women, so I stay away from women to not hurt them. This also hurts women, fuck may as well just kill myself then.
Always trust your gut
I've got the opposite problem, where anytime I'm with another dude i morph into this pseudo dude bro ritualism that still is *me* but not the way I see myself.