At Target this lady told her son he couldn’t have a Wonder Woman doll because “that’s for girls” and then bought her daughter the same one. It got me thinking about how often I see people bar young boys from appreciating girls/women as protagonists and heroes, and my own experience with it as a kid.
When a man starts
explaining a concept you already told him you understand,
instead of saying “I know” over and over until you die, try one of these:
Ok, which aspect is confusing you?
It seems like
you have the basics down; Would you like me to recommend some good articles so you can get a more nuanced understanding?
So did
you have a specific question, or do you just want a more in depth
explanation?
SAVAGE
teacher-zone him
I’ve also had some good results with, “Wait, stop. It sounds like you’re disagreeing with me, but nothing you’ve said has contradicted anything in my initial argument. What, precisely, are you disagreeing with?”
I usually walk everywhere with my headphones on, but I had them in my bag and I was reading a book on my phone instead (I do that when the foot traffic is light). A young Latina was coming down the street as I was coming up the avenue, and when she got to the corner a few paces ahead of me, she turned to walk in the direction I was going. We were traveling at the same speed, but since she was like ten paces ahead and it’s bright outside in the middle of the day, I didn’t feel the need to fall back or slow down to give her more space. At night, I try not to walk too close behind women just so they don’t feel like I’m any sort of threat.
We got to a corner and this dude standing outside of the bodega was like, “Slow down mama where you goin? You don’t have to work today, you can stop and speak.”
She didn’t break her stride. “I’m going to the gym.” The Walk sign was on, so I didn’t break mine either.
A block later, a young guy was coming toward us on the sidewalk riding his bike.
“What’s good shorty?”
She didn’t respond.
“Well you was lookin, you can say something, stuck up bitch.”
We kept walking.
In the middle of the next block, an older man was walking toward us and he put on a friendly smile and said, “Smile young lady, it’s a beautiful day.”
I don’t know if she smiled, but we kept walking. She went into the gym and I kept on toward where I was going thinking about how that was just five minutes of her day. How many other blocks of five minutes are just like that?
Only one of them was truly aggressive. The other two guys seemed nice enough and it felt more like a pleasant compliment. It felt like the kind of thing a guy says who argues with women online about catcalling. “We’re not all bad guys. We can’t even compliment women? We can’t even say something nice?”
No. You really can’t. I was annoyed in that five minutes and I just happened to be walking behind her with no headphones on. Can you imagine those five minutes over and over every day of your life? Nobody wants to be spoken to by strangers day in and day out forever regardless of what they’re saying.
So no. You can’t say anything. The quality of your life has not decreased because you aren’t allowed to say nice things to strange women on the sidewalk, but your silence greatly increases the quality of hers. So just be quiet, and let her go where she’s going.
So no. You can’t say anything. The quality of your life has not decreased because you aren’t allowed to say nice things to strange women on the sidewalk, but your silence greatly increases the quality of hers. So just be quiet, and let her go where she’s going.
So no. You can’t say anything. The quality of your life has not decreased because you aren’t allowed to say nice things to strange women on the sidewalk, but your silence greatly increases the quality of hers. So just be quiet, and let her go where she’s going.
So no. You can’t say anything. The quality of your life has not decreased because you aren’t allowed to say nice things to strange women on the sidewalk, but your silence greatly increases the quality of hers. So just be quiet, and let her go where she’s going.
So no. You can’t say anything. The quality of your life has not decreased because you aren’t allowed to say nice things to strange women on the sidewalk, but your silence greatly increases the quality of hers. So just be quiet, and let her go where she’s going.
So no. You can’t say anything. The quality of your life has not decreased because you aren’t allowed to say nice things to strange women on the sidewalk, but your silence greatly increases the quality of hers. So just be quiet, and let her go where she’s going.
Protip for men: if marriage is a horrifying concept for you and you think it is an evil trap, do not buy a ring and ask a woman to marry you
I’m way over seeing radical feminist bullshit on my dash. This isn’t even social justice or a real issue.
sorry that not marrying someone you dont loathe is radical feminism i guess?
women: don’t propose or get married if u don’t like the thought of marriage
men: what kind of sjw fuckery
the other bit that this implies is:
If you like your wife, act like it. Even around your friends. Be open and honest about liking your wife, liking spending time with her, and not being resentful of the shared work of building a household. Let your buddies know you can’t hang out with them because you’d rather be home with your wife, whom you like, because she is your legit bff, even though you know your buddies are gonna mock you for it.
Stand up to your buddies. Tell them mocking isn’t cool and you don’t want them to do it anymore. Challenge the other men in your life to be better men.
That is what “don’t get married if you think marriage is an evil trap” implies to men who are married. And while it’s all completely reasonable I imagine that it’s scary as fuck when it’s just so much easier to har de har har the little woman’s such a nag, ain’t she, don’t we all hate being married so much? with other men.
In that context, “don’t get married if you think marriage is an evil trap” is kindof a radical statement.
The number of guys I work with who are engaged who started pulling the “uh oh, life over soon, har har” shit that I have completely shut down with a simple “well if you don’t want to get married, then don’t”…*sigh* And they’re just like, hem, haw, welllll if I don’t then she might not stay with meee, which I respond to with “well, sounds like you need to have a pretty serious and honest conversation with your fiancee about your feelings then” and then the *panic!* look…When you remove that easy “hah hah ball-and-chain” narrative, watch the reaction. Some of them (to a female friend) will mumblingly admit that they love their fiancee and are excited to be married. Others…all you get is fear.
That’s the disservice we do men by refusing to teach boys how to explore their emotional needs. It hurts everyone. I watched three male friends walk into marriages I can tell they weren’t ready for and didn’t want, just because it was expected and they had no tools for emotional self-examination. Two of those marriages are (shockingly) in crisis, a couple years later. One has kids involved now. It’s more than a little heartbreaking. The marriages I see that are working? Are the guys with the emotional maturity to talk to their wives and who don’t care if everyone knows they’re in love with them.
SERIOUSLY.
My friend is getting married this summer and when I congratulated her fiance on their engagement he said to me “Yeah well you know, women. This is what they want so you have to bite the bullet.” and my other friend’s husband who was sitting next to him laughed and agreed. If this is how you feel, don’t get married. Don’t propose. Just…. Don’t. Do it. Any of it.
Straight people think that doing things you really don’t want to do – like marriage and having kids – is normal cos they’re still stuck in a fucking 19th century mindset.
It’s why I know my best friend got a good one, he’s open about how much he loves her and he’s excited to be getting married and regularly contributes ideas and has his own input, it’s nice to see
It filters through as well. Even being gay, a lot of my straight friends don’t understand why I spend so much time with my husband. Because I love him? Because I enjoy his company? Because he’s my best friend? I can’t count the amount of straight people that have told me that they think it’s “weird” that my husband and I spend so much quality time together. The only person who understood was my mom, whose response was: “If you love someone and genuinely enjoy their company, why WOULDN’T you want to spend your free time with them?!”
How can anyone look at their impending marriage and think ‘oh no, it’s all over now’ like???? I’ve only felt so close to so many people in my life, but those small few were like?? I’d wake up in the morning excited to be awake just to look forward to SEEING them. I’d catch myself with this stupid idiot grin in broad daylight just THINKING ABOUT BEING AROUND THEM. I’d sleep easy with them in my head, shitty days became perfect once I spoke to them. THAT’s how I imagine feeling again someday. I think about feeling that way for someone again and it’s like the whole future opens up. Marriage is finding your best friend in the whole wide world and wanting to have a sleepover every single day, and to agree to it and then go around groaning like your freedom is being stolen is a HUGE disrespect. If you have the freedom to share your life with anyone you like and you throw it around like baggage you really can’t expect it to grow, can you? You gotta care about yourself a little more than that I think
All of this.
Not to mention this mentality makes it’s way TO THE DAY OF THE WEDDING. How many weddings have we seen with something like this:
Like what kind of toxic mentality do you have to have to say this as the bride is about to walk down the aisle and marry someone who it’s now suggested doesn’t even want to be there?? How is this cute? How is this supposedly charming? This is supposed to be the person you love and want to be with! And not to mention that you send this down the aisle with a small child (the ring bearer or the flower girls)…I have a special loathing for things like this.
Holy shit I didn’t know that was even a thing.
This reminds me of a study I read about years ago with statistics on happiness/stability in relationships of people of various genders/orientations, and straight people were at the very bottom. (And lesbians were at the top! Not a huge surprise, given that women are generally more inclined to communicate and work out emotions and issues.)
Reblogging for the “last chance to run” comment. Honestly it’s so fucking gross.
I can’t even imagine being married to any of these douchebags that think this way. My husband is my best friend and I can’t wait to come home from work to be with him. Every damn day.
And you know what? If you don’t want to get married that’s okay! Just so long as you and your partner are on the same page it’s all good!
Sit down and have a serious conversation and tell them “look, you’re great, I love you, but I don’t ever want to get married so I need you to know that and decide if you are okay with that.”
A good relationship isn’t one where you tick all the boxes of moving in together and getting engaged and buying a house and having two kids.
A good relationship is where two people have the same goals and values. It’s no good if he wants to settle down and have kids and she wants to travel and stay childless. You need to be on the same page. So communicate, and stop acting like not talking and getting pressured into major life choices is romantic.
“Women often internalize that sense of responsibility for men’s needs. Stormy Daniels felt so responsible for coming to a stranger’s hotel room in 2006 that she felt obliged to provide the sex he wanted and she didn’t. She told Anderson Cooper, ‘I had it coming for making a bad decision for going to someone’s room alone and I just heard the voice in my head, “well, you put yourself in a bad situation and bad things happen, so you deserve this.”’ (It’s worth noting that she classified having sex with Donald Trump as ‘bad things happen’ and the sense in that she deserved it was a punitive one.) His desires must be met. Hers didn’t count.”
How do I not remember hearing about that when she did the interview…?
“But the follow-up story to the #MeToo upheaval has too often been: how do the consequences of men hideously mistreating women affect men’s comfort? Are men okay with what’s happening? There have been too many stories about men feeling less comfortable, too few about how women might be feeling more secure in offices where harassing coworkers may have been removed or are at least a bit less sure about their right to grope and harass. Men themselves insist on their comfort as a right.”
Yeah, I’ve been getting some of that from my own advisor, who keeps complaining about how professors can’t have meetings with their students with the office door closed and he’s not allowed to make any remarks about female colleagues’ appearance, even if it’s just that they look professional. One of these days I need to tell him that it’s fine to make a comment on a woman’s appearance if and only if he would make the exact same comment to a man and no one would find it odd or “gay.”
Good men in my grad program had to shield me from a man who does not understand a woman’s signals that she is not interested. I really appreciate the good men.
It makes me kind of sad that some men are so socially incompetent that they think that any woman who is nice to them for a few minutes at a party must want to sleep with them. And part of the reason for that is probably that if they’re sufficiently awkward and weird, people usually aren’t nice to them. But then if they start creepily following around any women who are nice to them, that’s going to discourage women from being nice when they aren’t interested.
And here I am engaging in gratuitous “himpathy.” Typical.
Loki is the Philosopher King 