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’m Asian and there was this guy who was obsessed with the videogame Resident Evil. He frequently quoted the character Leon, and would ocassionally call me Ada when I wore the color red. (Ada is a character in a traditional floor-length red dress, with a leg slit all the way up to her hip, catering to people with an Asian fetish.) I was passive to it because I thought he was just pretending to be action figure and trying to involve me in that. “W/e,” I thought, even if it made me unconformable in a way I couldn’t place.
One day I identify that I feel uncomfortable because Ada is an Chinese fetish character in a basterdized version of a traditional dress. All for people in the West to drool over. So I tell my bf that that guy made me uncomfortable because of this racist aspect of that Asian fetish character. My bf said this weirdo might of been of been flirting. The weirdo had ask me out me years before that so this makes sense.