coraxxx
Policy Enforcement
This is really well put. It’s this mentality of "counting what’s worth", do they have that job, are they beautiful (different according to each kind of standards), do they have money, this and that… To put it shortly, do they project a very quantitative (and narrow) sense of power (that can be very real, but narrow). Women do engage in this too, I don’t think it’s necessarily a gendered thing. The manifestations are codified as gendered. A woman should be this, a man should be that… Both genders having gendered expectations towards each other, yada yada, all this circus hurts my brain… But the insecurities and aggressive impulses behind aren’t. And actually, when I see a guy making that kind of unpleasant show, it’s often quite evident he’s doing it for a certain image he has for himself… and I feel more awkward to be in the middle of the way of such a confusion rather than irritated. Depending on my mood, I guess. And I can sense how as girls we’re trained to compete between each other instead of just teaming up and f*cking relax, hopefully this seems to ease out with age.However, I have also found that men like that often don't mind being treated as commodities themselves, so at least their attitudes are consistent.
Ah, I don’t find it normal. I find this situation unbearable because it strips people of authenticity. Rehearsed roles, micro assertions of power as check-ins for personal comfort. Don’t know if I’m being clear here, or if I understood your sentence right?Upside if this is "normal" then at least it is irrespective of me.
This made me smile. It grates me but it is genuinely funny at the same time. This ding dong contrast. Seen so many times!The other day it was almost funny I am in a cerebral conversation then suddenly he brutally redirects and I am essentially having to consider the guy's crotch. yeesh.
I think there is. Perhaps not everywhere in the same way. I don’t know if it’s already transformative because I think it will take centuries to undo such ingrained habits, but I can see that they’re having the conversation and girl’s voices come up more and more often, sometimes in this strange mix of self commodification with actual true empowerment, still bothered by the Weak Point: the actual relationship(s) with your partner(s). Because you might say what you want, it’s when the dynamics start to play that the real complications appear. And in this it’s going to take time to change because it belongs to the intimate spheres, that are already difficult to manage in themselves. DV, to take that example, occurs in queer couples and / or young couples as well, perhaps not in the form of what is defined as domestic terror that is what people think about when spoken about DV, because that one is massively gendered, even if there are a significant amount of cases of battered men.Maybe there is hope for the younger set.
But my point here is that I sense that as a society it’s not even gendered relationships that we aren’t seeing right, it’s relationships in general that we aren’t seeing right. So much pressure in reproducing whatever our parents and dominant culture taught us, categories such as friend/lover/boyfriend/husband/ex and all rather codified that cut the complexities and particularisms of specific relationships (I’m not speaking here of unbalanced relationships where one has a certain entitlement but not the other, but just of some places that are actually comfortable and beneficial, yet not well seen by most), and distance people from each other when there was no reason to, but also get people closer to each other than what they would have liked to. I don’t know. I’m sensing I’m being convoluted here.
What is positive in younger generations is that it seems, for what I see at least, that they’re more eager to express their views and learn to feel things and respond to it and consider it as important, not something you keep for yourself.
Yep… I’ve heard similar podcasts. Also that they didn’t realise that what they do once in a while actually happens regularly to women. They don’t measure the effect of the fatigue. Being bluntly hit on by a harmless guy who gracefully admits his plan didn’t work out once can be funny, being hit on with that sense of I’m giving attention to you so you do better do to me otherwise you’re a bitch, bitch, is less, and this happening regularly, profoundly off-putting. Add actual sexual harrassment, previous horror shows with DV or knowledge of it and sexual assault, and you have a society that is clearly hostile to the fact of being a woman. And, in fact, this society is brutally hostile to men too. I don’t see many places as a guy where you can turn to when you’re feeling miserable and wanting to cry. Even some jerky woman with interpret that as weakness and turn away. How we landed in such a lose-lose combination hurts my brain.The men were genuinely surprised at how upsetting it was to women. The sad thing is, a lot of them sad they probably wouldn't change their behavior. They seemed to equate the behavior with manhood and didn't want to lose that.