Comment on mindset
Asetru@feddit.org 1 day ago
Why would this apply only to girls?
cause traditionally/stereotypically feminine things are seen as stupid, useless, and cringe while masculine ones are seen as serious, deep, and respectable.
trans people also show that being a man is seen as an “upgrade” while being a woman a “downgrade” (trans men don’t get a fraction of the hate trans women do). same thing with tomboys-femboys.
If you think boys aren’t ridiculed (for literally anything) you’ve never been to school.
So, boys, might as well do what you want.
the experiences of boys and girls in society aren’t comparable.
this post is about girls, going “but what about the boys?” on it is just misogyny.
It’s not misogyny. Maybe the experiences of boys and girls aren’t comparable, but somethings transcend gender, and getting ridiculed is one of them.
This post unnecessarily genders something that isn’t gendered, so it makes total sense that someone would point out that it’s not restricted to one gender.
Guys are used to having their experiences invalidated when it comes to this kind of stuff. “Oh, be a man. Don’t be so sensitive. No one cares about your feelings. Man up, be stronger, stop being weak and then people won’t make fun of you,” the list goes on.
And then there’s the aspect where bringing up issues that impact men always gets hit with “BUT WHAT ABOUT WOMEN?!? MEN HAVE IT SO GOOD, WHAT COULD YOU POSSIBLE HAVE TO COMPLAIN ABOUT?!?”
So when a post directly implies that “girls get ridiculed, to the exclusion of boys,” it makes sense to clarify that “boys get ridiculed too.”
Also, it’s mostly women and girls who judge other women and girls, so trying to make that about misogyny is kind of a stretch. Men and boys get judged by men, women, boys, girls, and everyone else.
Not to mention when a woman or a girl gets made fun of, like thirty people have her back, but when a guy gets made fun of, no one cares.
Just overall, making this a gendered issue from the start was the wrong call, and the people responding by saying this affects other genders too aren’t the ones unnecessarily gendering the issue.
I understand the feedback because there’s no need to distinguish between gender when you are talking about something as generic as personal empowerment. The post is not about girls, it’s about human psychology.
You’re fucking right. Experiences of men and women in society are absolutely not comparable when we’re talking about societal expectations.
You’re also right that women don’t have to center every conversation around men.
I can’t believe someone told you directly this isn’t a female safe space hahaha
Boys already do what they want hahaha
The phrase “boys will be boys” is a thing that exists ffs
This reads like the kind of tumblr 13 year old that thinks boys don’t have self esteem issues or something
so why exclude men who are made fun of for feminine expression?
there are definitely socialized negative biases that specifically women deal with, but being exclusionary doesn’t actually help the cause, it just narrows the audience that is allowed to relate to the cause.
and it applies in gender neutral situations, like drawing literally anything in jr.high/highschool would grant the name ____fucker, no matter the benign nature of the variable being drawn.
it’s a good little rule that doesn’t need to devolve into a cultural battle about which group gets to identify with it more.
i constantly talk about the atheist/mra vs feminist war which just put everyone on the defensive, destroying active efforts in fighting groups like the heritage foundation, who are now doing unimaginable systemic harm to women through destruction of academic spaces and scientific efforts around women’s health largely propped up by religious fundamentalist efforts.
sometimes you have to be like “there’s something specific about this group which we don’t want being lost in the current conversation,” but also sometimes it’s good to be less rigid about which generalized group is allowed to identify with or benefit from progressive ideals.
fem guys already relate to content targeted toward women since their lived experience is closer to that than to the typical man, so no exclusion.
men often do this. post is about something women related -> “but what about the men?”. we don’t have a duty or obligation to include men in every single conversation. men can also create their own content/conversations, and they should. hijacking/inserting themselves just reeks of insecurity and misogyny.
fem guys already relate to content targeted toward women since their lived experience is closer to that than to the typical man, so no exclusion.
Shit like this makes my blood boil… “oh, you’re struggling with acceptance and your identity? Well, people ridicule you for not adhering to what boys should be, but the best we can do is offer you stuff targeted at girls because, you know, you’re essentially a girl anyway”. Fuck that. And then telling me about misogyny. Ridiculous.
we don’t have a duty or obligation to include men in every single conversation.
This isn’t a female safe space. Posting something here that deliberately leaves out half the population and then complaining that people bring up the stupid line you’re drawing between boys and girls where none is necessary is laughable.
“fem guys” are not even the majority of guys with so called feminine interests.
It’s not about a “duty to include” but there is a reasonable expectation not to exclude when there’s no good reason to.
Quite right. I would also say there is definitely a stigma to men who do not present as fem doing the occasional fem thing, and it is more of a stigma than when a woman who generally presents fem doing the occasional male thing.
Way less, in my experience, than ever before, but definitely still there. You get less open mockery and more silent confusion these days.
I didn’t think that making a post about women means you’re excluding men. I feel like excluding should only be defined as an active attempt to prevent people from associating with the post, rather then a failure to include men and enbies and every other gender in existence in the body of the post.
I feel like leftist spaces have gotten a bit too expectant that everything relevant to an individual must be explicitly stated to be as such, rather than encouraging people to simply find relevancy even in things that are not explicitly made for them. I’m a guy, and when I read this I felt a connection with it - I didn’t even think about how it only mentioned women, as if that should mean it can’t apply to me.
I would rather instill a mindset in all people that would allow for situations where, for example, a man can find relevancy in a post about women, rather then try to get all people to only share content that specifically addresses who all is intended to be able to relate to it. A woman saying things are hard for women isn’t making any comments about whether or not it’s hard for men, just like a black guy saying black lives matter isn’t making any comments about whether or not all lives matter.
TLDR: how we bound things matter, most of society is social constructs. biologically relevant bounding (gender binary) is both not absolute (intersex) and individually contextualizable during development and social reification (genderfluid). deciding as law that there are only two genders is a purely social reification move, and not actually representative of reality.
constantly gendering/bounding things for no reason does weird bad things for the social construct people build and make socially real. again, this is a vulnerability for divide and conquer tactics. we don’t want louder general voices to dominate over important signal of groups experiencing systemic problems, but that is a different issue from defending unnecessary and unhelpful framing that continues to be used against us with very real effects.
– “A woman saying things are hard for women isn’t making any comments about whether or not it’s hard for men” what is the role of bounding this statement to half of the population if not to exclude it from the other half? the entire point of gendering is lost if we recognize this. please understand i’m very generally against unnecessary bounding for what i see as important reasons that affect us all.
“black lives matter” is a very american movement, “all lives matter” might make sense to say, a pakistani-american who also experiences systemic problems and would like to join a collective effort for change, but is being excluded. in this context, most are willing to ignore that plight because of the redneck/corpo american using “all lives matter,” as a signal to their white supremacy group is actually enough of a problem that the backlash towards ALM has weight in that setting. personally i think “black lives matter too” would have been a better and more inclusive bounding that isn’t abusable by opportunistic bad actors. but we can’t cooperate for that level of nuance around the words we use i guess, it’s too ‘annoying’ i guess. although comprehending framing is a much more important use of energy than people seem to believe. entirely unnecessary progressive exclusivity is literally harming us all.
my emphasis is on progressives unnecessarily being -weirdly- exclusive about every issue, even very general issues, and then cause a fuss when any of the ‘wrong’ people want to take part in the bandwagon and affect change. “divide and conquer” is THE rule for stopping collective action for change.
why i brought up the feminist/atheist stuff. the fact that progressives aren’t allowed to cooperate is a huge problem. if the post was “men get made fun of for everything, might as well do what you want.” i would have NO issue with women/NBs going “why is this being gendered lol? that’s such a general problem.”
and instead of people going “ha ha yeah i guess that is a pretty general experience.” you get a big ol’ “if you feel excluded, too bad.”
“why does it always need to be about men” is generalizing a lot of vague unrelated contexts to one that we defined very specifically.
there’s a reason i stated “there are definitely socialized negative biases that specifically women deal with” because not all problems do need to be generalized, and sometimes gendering it could be relevant for some actual reasons.
“men are from mars, women are from venus.” kind of thinking is just… classic patriarchy? why are we defending it so hard?
at this point i’d get into social constructs, and how we frame things is incredibly important for things like, stopping progressives from unnecessarily being divided for stupid shit that doesn’t matter while fascist chuds are enabled in enacting systemic violence towards women (axing sciences and women’s health stuff, as stated,) and everyone else. while everyone is spending all of their energy trying to navigate the fucked up framing that divides people unnecessarily and encourages those groups to be antagonistic unnecessarily.
when “this applies generally” could easily consume as little energy as “ha ha yeah this is unnecessarily gendered.” which, in recognizing, allows us to hold a better general idea of the complexity of the world and experience.
again, the inertia of really bad social constructs are still implanted in society. isn’t deconstructing that supposed to be a big part of feminism? that youtube video essay i linked is actually pretty good, on emphasizing around this issue, but as i pointed out with the atheism/feminism thing, this is a very real and tangible problem that i’m trying to address while also noting the context of not deflating some actual specific issue that is being made salient.
that being said, if you build a system for dealing with a problem that mostly affects one gender, being exclusionary is going to cause unnecessary friction, you cause inevitable tension as your group bounding become less reliable at full scale. ignoring the edge cases doesn’t make them disappear, and leads to subgroup antagonism that was entirely preventable.
there’s nothing wrong about making a post about girls, but there’s also nothing wrong with going “that’s a weirdly gendered framing on a very general experience.”
group specific “do what you want,” also causes weird problems, because to some people this message could be easily read as gender specific (else why gendered?) and “do what you want” becomes what it does for the least thoughtful and most aggressive of any group, usually leading to more division and antagonism because we’ve weirdly bounded our interactions to be so strictly group specific that we just aren’t allowed relating to each-other, and we can now define punching down as punching up because context doesn’t matter, only the salient boundings we’ve defined as truth. anecdotally, you get things like a manager telling their employee “you’re lucky you already worked here when i was hired because i don’t hire men,” which is just one of my personal experiences. this doesn’t mean women aren’t systemically disadvantaged in some hiring areas, but i don’t think getting at the pan-demi-autistic barista(ask me about my thoughts on gendered languages,) who grew up in poverty is really “punching up.” it does make fighting for equality more disheartening when this becomes a general experience in progressive areas.
i really REALLY don’t care to be defined and seen as “MAN” whenever people start their assumptions about me, and the less baggage we randomly invent in people’s minds the better. anyone who has been ill-treated purely for group association rather than their actual behaviour knows this feeling. if you feel unnecessary gendered/grouped doesn’t harm you, then maybe you aren’t so familiar with the oppression of systemic framing, and the people actually affected by it. all of whom i think deserve to be free from this really shitty framing tools we seem to be incapable of growing out of as a species.
remember, most of our world is socially constructed. a lot of what is “absolutely just how the world is” falls apart more quickly than the MAGA “two genders” very inaccurately framed argument under any scientific scrutiny. AKA, it’s not that simple, and pretending it is hurts everyone that doesn’t fit your neat low-energy boundings, and failing to properly frame and interact with the complexity of the world leads to systemic failures that harm us all.
i’m just trying my best, and have been while people spent the past two decades fighting rather than stopping the heritage foundation and other such actual problems that are actually affecting us all, which we need to be able to successfully collect and communicate around without devolving into different preferred boundings over-ruling the shared reality that we are all creating and growing into.
Making a post about women doesn’t - and shouldn’t - mean you’re excluding men. I feel like excluding should only be defined as an active attempt to prevent people from associating with the post
Does this apply to making posts about men? Because if so (meaning, the rule applies universally without making exclusions for certain demographics), then I’m inclined to agree.
Experience shows however that posts (or any media) about men usually get attacked for ostensibly excluding women, even without explicitly doing so.
I would rather instill a mindset in all people that would allow for situations where, for example, a man can find relevancy in a post about women, rather then try to get all people to only share content that specifically addresses who all is intended to be able to relate to it.
This is almost hilarious. I mean, on the surface I agree. But again, if we flip the situation then we can see how comical it is. Can women find relevancy in a post about men without commenting by saying it isn’t gendered, or even that it applies to women more than it does to men? The same thing applies to race. Can POCs find relevancy in a post about white people (even just implicitly), without claiming it’s excluding other races?
The fact is if a white guy wants to create any form of media, be it writing a novel or making an indie film or whathaveyou, he has to be very careful to explicitly include other genders and races, because anything less will get nailed as being exclusionary.
But when a post is explicitly exclusive to one gender, as long as if that gender happens to be women, then suddenly “Oh it’s fine, men can just find relevancy in it even if it doesn’t (explicitly or implicitly) include them. It doesn’t have to be gendered even though it’s clearly and deliberately gendered.”
Like, the mental hoops people will jump through to justify double standards as long as men are the ones being disadvantaged by them. That is not egalitarianism.
Because that’s their lived experience. You want to post about guys, go ahead.
Sure, make a post about guys and see how long it takes these same users to comment saying “why is this unnecessarily gendered?!? Women experience this too!” Or even “That’s not an issue men face! It’s clearly a women’s issue.”
Sure. There’s stupid complaining cunts in both genders. I’ll say the same thing to both.
A true egalitarian.
Can you show me an example of this happening?
Literally any community that is mostly women when someone complains about a guy issue
Or the numerous accounts of women finally acknowledging some things men have been complaining about for years once trans men start talking about them (alienation, mental damage from constantly being treated like a predator by default, etc)
Sure, I’ll tag you next time I see it. I’m sure it won’t take long
No one said that it did.
It doesn’t say that it only applies to girls its a screencap of part of conversation from people we have little context about.
And “sir”
Shit like this makes my blood boil… "Trauma-dump”… Posting something here that deliberately leaves out half the population …
This is a shitpost community.
So it’s trauma-dumping when a man does it, but when a woman does it it’s just “a part of a conversation” or “women talking about their experiences”?
I think that double-standard is precisely what this conversation is about.
We talk about how it’s an issue that men aren’t allowed to talk about their problems or their feelings, but that’s clearly just an abstract idea to some people because when men actually do try to talk about those things, it’s always the same reaction.
Not at all…
It just appears rather obvious from that text that Asetru their anger against op came from a very specific personal injustice done to them. Channeling it in such way where you direct anger at a demographic is toxic, regardless of gender.
I do disagree a lot with how op responded, they where over reacting in a similar way, i didn’t call them out because the longer this ordeal went on the more people seemed to prove that they have a real point to be frustrated about it.
You did prove the same thing. My comment isn’t gender specific, i don’t know what Astetru identifies as (thats part why i put the sir is in quotes) any gender can argue in favour of any gender. That is not that unusual.
And yet you perceived it as directed at one gender and came in with a “but what about the other gender”
I really didn’t want to believe that this “always happens” but the evidence here says it either is or this is targeted trolling against op.
Yes, but why are we making fun of a guy for doing what he loves (posting “but what about men?” In a post talking about women)?
(This is a joke btw.)
Would you have the same reaction to a woman posting “but what about women?” In a post talking about men?
Yes. It’s literally the waffles/pancakes meme.
Two women talking do not have to talk about men.
If we don’t make fun of him for litterally everything he does he’ll never realize he has license to do what he wants
Doesn’t that prove the point though?
Girls was meant in a gender neutral way obv
It doesn’t, and they did not say it did.
Akshullee, they didn’t say it did - just that girls get teased over everything. I don’t have the correct parts to validate that, however.
Notyou@sopuli.xyz 6 hours ago
OP: I like waffles.
YOU: oh so you hate pancakes?
OP: No man. WTF are you talking about? Those are 2 different things.
Soulg@ani.social 1 hour ago
That is not the correct use of this meme at all