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.
I just flat-out treat all men like shit and decenter them wherever possible. Reserving all of my kindness for women and nonbinary people is the only way to ensure my safety. Not my fault that men continue to materially benefit from and uphold patriarchy.
Edit: Reading through the “patriarchy is actually not benefitting men at all” replies once more shows me that i am fully justified in this. You incel mfers can’t be trusted around women.
It makes me think of a quote a black radical said about white people: “They’re like snakes, plenty of snakes won’t bite you but I don’t go around picking them up to find out.”
I think snakes are a lot less harmful than men or white people. No snake ever owned slaves or bombed the middle east or ended up in the Epstein files or said that Israel has a right to defend itself or that misandry is real.
I think treating people poorly because of their immutable characteristics is reactionary and counter revolutionary
First of all, “man” is by definition a privileged category, just as being white, cis, heterosexual, able-bodied, neurotypical etc. It is generally assumed in non-reactionary circles today that these are not protected classes, that they cannot be structurally discriminated against and that it is an alarmingly chuddy thing to believe in concepts such as anti-white racism. If somebody tells you about white genocide, you would be correct in assuming that they are a fascist harping on about a conspiratorial piece of disinfo. The same goes for treating cis as a slur, believing in heterophobia etc.
“Misandry”, the belief that there is a systemic opression of men, falls into the same category. It is a thought-terminating cliché used by anti-feminist hate groups to silence women and defend male privilege. The belief that “patriarchy harms everybody equally” is the laundered, more palatable version of this, what men decided to take away when we made the grave error of letting them read bell hooks because we mistakenly thought it would better them. Unlike “white genocide”, claiming that “feminism is for everybody” and meaning “feminism is for nobody, but if it was for anybody it should first and foremost be for men because men are so emotionally scarred from being violently abusive to people” is still commonly accepted in liberal and even leftist circles, including the very liberal lemmy instance hexbear. That acceptance needs to be ended. I am here to help with that.
Secondly, it’s a bit of a contentious issue how “immutable” being a man is, so let me clarify that i am referring to manhood as the ruling gender class position under patriarchy, which can be argued to be highly mutable - for example, i have lost the privileges associated with that position during my lifetime simply by not trying to perform masculinity any longer, and my ability to utilize these privileges was always highly precarious because given that i am not and have never been a man, i was never good at performing the materially important rotes associated with it, such as being socially dominant, integrating into men’s networks in school or work settings, making a show out of performative misogyny and homophobia, policing adherence to toxic masculinity etc. Nevertheless, i did lose a good amount of privilege simply by transitioning, i am confronted with that almost every day. For example, people now constantly jump down my throat on social media while i could argue in a much more aggressive way and get away with it when i still went by he / him pronouns and called myself Mr. Marxism the Communism Dude at heaxbear dot net.
Some people, especially terfs, would obviously argue otherwise and say that being a man is immutably linked to XY chromosomes or the potential ability to ever have produced large gametes or some other arbitrary nonsense like that, and i also do not believe it to be linked to very mutable characteristics like genitals, hormones, phenotype etc., but let’s not go down that road, this is not a position i am assuming of anybody here, not even the many lowkey misogynist people. It is particularly not a position i have ever seen among any feminists on this site, maybe because most of these are trans women and other transmisogyny affected people who have zero reason to do bioessentialism. So no, i do not think that “man” is a category that can be reduced to anything immutable short of something like gender identity, which means that “man” as i use it here is by definition a constructed social caste people can and do transition into or out of.
In short, hating men is cool and good. Men who are not loathsome should understand that, just as i as a white woman understand it when comrades of color do not trust white people and call us things like cracker or no purpose flour or paper impersonator. These terms are terms i can laugh about, because they attack my privilege, not my vulnerabilities, and i have no problem with my relative privileges being questioned. I cannot laugh that way about the many, many actual slurs i get called for being a trans woman. Shouldn’t be hard to wrap your head around this.
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You very obviouly have no idea how many men have given me a reason for doing this.
you do you but i cannot fathom how doing this in a group setting would not create a really divisive and hostile atmosphere thus hindering organizing. i think someone was doing this in my union caucus but they left, membership is about 30% men
It creates a really inclusive and safe atmosphere for women and transfem nonbinary people, which i tend to value a lot more than men’s feelings in lesbian spaces, given that men have absolutely zero business being there in the first place. Shocking, i know.
Couldn’t do that in a union, obviously, but even in wider societal contexts you cannot constantly babysit men and tiptoe around their incredible fragility, you need to show them boundaries because they are encouraged every day to ignore these.
Based based based based based!
Masculinity is the whiteness of gender. There is no place for it in a just society. I hope that, once the proletariat seize state power, masculinity/men will disappear as a category.
Edit: I originally deleted this post because I thought it was too unhinged, but I don’t fucking care anymore. DEATH TO MEN!
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They said no such thing tho.
Not literally, word for word, but they clearly meant it. I will not unblock them, go over their post with a fine comb and then point out to you what part of it is doing the usual “your response is irrational and overly emotional in a way that makes me uncomfortable and i think you are in a social position where you have to act more submissive towards me” spiel, you can do that yourself if it bothers you that much when a woman points this out.
Or, instead of doing that, you can ask yourself what it says about site culture when a thread where a woman is venting about her experiences with men inevitably becomes a thread where men whine about how hard they have it under patriarchy.
FWIW I think both of you handled this poorly tbh, you both escalated the argument and assumed bad faith for absolutely no reason, I think people should give more benefit of a doubt with each other here, you’re not talking to some random chud on the street here.
I agree with the “assume the most charitable interpretation possible” stuff from rule 8 for a lot of issues, but the rule was originally written against sectarianism, not with situations like this in mind, and it shows. It’s outright violent towards marginalized comrades when we constantly have to pretend that nobody in leftist spaces could ever be misogynist, racist, transphobic, ableist etc. Hexbear has a problem with all of that, it’s not uncharitable to point that out and we can’t be demanded to constantly compartmentalize ourselves for your convenience when we do that. You guys seriously need to learn what fragile masculinity means because you are fucking prime examples of that. The fact that this thread blew up in such a way 1000% proves my point. You dudes always react with dogpiling women whenever we speak up, it’s always the same shit where you want to talk about nothing but how much patriarchy harms men and i’m sick of that.
Looks like more of gender neutral fuck off
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Lol look at this misogynist loser who thinks misandry is real.