Even worse idk much about codeswitching.
I can tell friends who are girls “I love you” and they take it as friendly. But guys can’t hear this without thinking he’s laid claim to a romantic and/or sexual feelings?
If I reject a girl asking me out with the attitude of a bubbly girl talking to another bubbly girl at a party, and say “I have a bf. But you’re a babe!, You can get another babe!” She’d totally be friendly back about it… But once I said this to a guy who asked me out, and he proceeded to ask me for my number 4 times in less than 10 seconds.
Shit like this puts me in fight or flight mode. I have very little awareness of how or why I have to codeswitch between men and women. My skin is crawling nearly everytime a friend points out to me in retrospect that a guy was actually flirting with me after my only intention was being friends or a friendly neighbor. Yikes. I want to go back in time and yell “Fuck you stop being a creep!” (Ofc, they’d be too creepy to understand why I would say that.)
That said, I love my bf because his fem side makes him chill and understanding if a girl talks to him like he’s another girl. I’m pretty quiet and mostly talk to him, and I have no guy friends. So I’m not learning codeswitching skills by watching him. How do you codeswitch and why do you codeswitch in the exact way(s) you do? I barely go outside, and I’m angry at guys everyday over this over past events I’m creeped out by.
That’s p much it. Most guys are desperate for affection. Married or single often makes no difference. We are are often deeply alienated by society as a population
That’s part of it. The other part is that guys think they are entitled to affection, and that women are responsible for men’s emotional well-being. This is something that is ingrained since childhood, both from the way mothers are centered in how our society raises children, how we frame the emotional wants of men and from the way kindness and closeness are discouraged in interactions between boys. I get that people living in a male gender role are frequently alienated, and get shamed for behaviors that would be necessary to form deep emotional connections, and these are real and valid problems. But you can’t stop at that point and say “well, men just need more affection”. Because this centers the man’s demands and wants without looking at who fulfills them and what that entails. So then you have the classic situation where a guy can only be emotionally open with his partner, and then she has to constantly be his entire support system. This is what perpetuates the problem. Because other men are unavailable and because women are supposed to be caretakers, you end up depending on one woman shouldering a man’s entire needs for affection and validation and emotional stabilizing.
Operational terms here being one and woman. When i look at women and nonbinary people in my life, we have our entire friend groups as support networks. When i need to vent or need somebody to show me affection, i can write to several friends if they have the time and energy to do that, or i can go to a server a friend runs and post in a vent channel and see who replies. It’s usually the same people, but it’s more than one person. This is important. Doing emotional support for others and showing them affection is draining, even for somebody like me who absolutely needs to take care of others to feel fulfilled. Also, none of them are partners of mine.
And men need to work on building something like that as well. You can’t rely on women to do that for you. Men need to learn how friendships work, and that is no easy task in a society that does not allow homosocial behavior among men. But it is needed, as more and more women are past the point were they are willing to put up with men as they are right now.
extremely well put.
it’s entitled behavior to make it women’s problem that men aren’t building community with each other. and that’s the issue. i’m not gonna call his mom for him or somehow build safe men’s spaces or set up play dates for adult men to make friends like they are children. we can’t build build any type of communism without community, and some of us are already holding up half of *that *particular sky, thank you very much.
Kinda related side note: Most women do not hold up just half the sky, they hold up a significant extra portion of it during the unpaid second shift.
Damn. This is a great insight and needs to be emphasized:
From this perspective, when a man is turned down by a prospective partner, he is agitated not merely because he is insulted. All of his frustration and unmet desires by society become focused entirely on the one person. That person stands in, not as their personal self, but the abstract embodiment of society. Their rejection or affirmation then becomes that of society. It’s sad yet inexcusable at the same time. But then it is clear how and why incels come about — refusing to participate in the process, but in a confused way which blames women for patriarchy.
Your solution is also spot-on. If the problem is a lack of validation, then men need more validation, not only from partners, but from everyone, particularly but not only other men. The dichotomy between partner and non-partner has to be significantly reduced.
How so lol? Men run the patriarchy, we’re given everything we want and get excuses made for our bad behaviours. The only alienation that occurs is because of capitalism, and of our own making.
men running the patriarchy isn’t a blanket benefit to men and masc presenting people. Who the fuck is we? what a white cishet thing to say.
They might mean to say something more like alienated from human interaction/their own emotions. Which is done by men to themselves and other men but it’s still done.
Yeah, but even stuff like never eating vegetables is patriarchy. So, we don’t know how to mend our clothes our wash our ass. Getting out of doing luandry is not worth it.
i thought that was white people cooking and sensory issues
I dunno, most dudes I met in South America were the same. Big on meat.
And also women, to be fair. We are all products of our social conditioning. Men, women, queer folks, all uphold patriarchy to the extent they are raised by/in it, until they do the work to unlearn in.
We are bound by patriarchy. The number of men that actually enjoy any benefits from it is small. Sure, most men get some benefits from it. However we mostly don’t enjoy them. So the way most men experience patriarchy is by being cut off from out own emotions and then being cut off from any kind of meaninfully bonding with others. Then stuff like being alienated from household chores is actually bad for our emotional development. We’d be better of without it.
The patriarchy runs itself and benefits and hurts all genders.
It is a system of oppression tied to capitalism in order to extract value beyond the walls of the workplace. It also exists without capitalism, but in modern society it has been subsumed by it.
Just like how patriarchy lessens womens freedom (I forgot the word for ‘ability to do stuff/allowance to act’) and forces them into roles as “homemakers” and mothers, it also forces men into specific roles.
When I say it benefits all genders, what do I mean?
Women aren’t taken seriously and are reduced to sexual objects. This also means that women cannot be perpetrators, a perspective we frequently see when a female pedophile gets caught - typically resulting in lower punishments than men.
Likewise due to their designated roles as breeder and child-raisers, women are typically awarded the majority or totality of maternity leave.
For some, I assume, the gig of staying at home was nice, just like some men masochistically enjoy being the breadwinner.
Additionally, since women aren’t taken seriously, they are awarded a much wider range of emotions by society than men are.
Women aren’t expected to be proactive in the romantic sense, they are to be courted. This seems like something of an enviable position according to the guys I know.
Looking at this one could say “Wow BanMeFromPosting is an incel chud who thinks women have it good under patriarchy, they’re an MRA-stupidpol user who has infiltrated hexbear!” If one wanted to be a hostile shithead who assumed the worst of people. Because that is very clearly not what is going on. These “benefits” aren’t really all that good and they are all contingent on further enforcing gender norms. They also lock women into roles of being glorified incubation tubes. But look at how patriarchy “benefits” men and you’ll notice the same issues.
Sorry, that last point was a dumb digression. What I’m trying to say here is that patriarchy is also incredibly hurtful to men. Its not all sunshine and roses. Think back to your own upbringing and think about how society would try to shape you. Think about the gender norms enforced on you.
Once again: That’s not to say that men aren’t perpetrators or beneficiaries of patriarchy, they clearly are. They’re made into a privileged class that gets to do all sorts of stuff that women don’t. Like have bank accounts or walk down the street at night without fear of being SA’ed.
But that’s also not to say that women aren’t participators in patriarchy. They aren’t some divine perfect feminine, they’re people like everyone else, and so exist within and enforce society. Try reading any cooking book from before the '70s. That shit be written by a lady, but it is the most misogynistic shit you’ll read in a good while[1].
Sorry for turning this response into a vent.
Edit: And don’t get me started on the treatment of trans people or enbies.
Now, of course, some dipshit will read this to mean that my best and only example is “very old cookbooks”, rather than take it for the beat anekdote it is, and I will once again get disappointed ↩︎
I appreciate the response.
Thank you