The eye roll isn’t to the concept. It is to the fact that it and feeling sorry for men today are the two quickest spots to fill on a bingo card of what will be said in any thread you are in! You’ve made your thoughts on these subjects very very very clear by now.
More so than men, yeah. Stereotypes aren’t universal; you can’t and shouldn’t assume they apply to every individual, but they are mostly based on some kind of truth.
I think empathy is more admired in women, another gender role thing: showing off how nurturing you are. Women are more concerned about not looking mean, hence the preference for passive aggression, excluding rather than attacking directly, etc. A fair number of men just don’t care about being (seen as) an asshole.
You work in social justicey circles, how many (cishet etc) men are involved compared to women?
Personal, probably off-topic stuff
I often find it easier to get on with men; it feels like women have higher expectations of mind reading ability and higher standards for social skills in general. Though I think this is partly because of the assumption that a friendship between two people of opposite sexes won’t be as close, so the bar to meet is lower.
AFAIK this is a common experience for autistic women, and it often seems women with autism have more trouble with friendships than dating, whereas for autistic men it’s the reverse.
Yikes. I kind of assumed stories like this were made up for media articles. Hopefully it’s not common.
Yes, I know. But complaining about Trump, Maga, and Republicans or conservatives are the quickest spots to fill for many other posters in dozens of threads all over this board. I don’t see you mocking them for constantly bringing it up.
And considering you immediately leapt to a wrong conclusion, I don’t think you have been listening to me. It’s hard to always come up with new examples, and these are the ones that are most relevant anyway. They aren’t just my hobby horses, they are things the right in general talks about a lot.
For most of my life I thought it was easier to get along with men. I hung out with mostly boys. It turned out to be a lot of internalized misogyny issues I needed to unpack, in part instilled by my mother, who this week I am increasingly coming to realize is probably autistic. She was very gender non-conforming and had a disdain for things that were stereotypically female.
I also am cursed with the ability to write male characters better than female characters. The upshot of this is I have many male friends who are fans of my romance novels and they don’t know how to handle it. The problem part is you need a woman to carry a romance story, and my women don’t behave like…I don’t know, however women are supposed to behave in these books, so I’m increasingly running across the “likability” issue. I have been told I am very blunt in my personal demeanor and so my female characters tend to be as well. The MC of my WIP is literally trying to stop a genocide, and some reactions are like, “I don’t understand why I should care about her.” Then the very next scene is my male MC getting blackout drunk with a sex worker and they’re like, “Can’t he be the main character?”
Cursed.
(I’ve done enough work at this point, enough people are vibing with my female protagonist that I mostly ignore the ones who aren’t, because I’m tired of like contorting my characters to fit other people’s ideas of how women should be. My books are challenging on a lot of levels, they aren’t written for a mainstream audience, and if people can’t be challenged about what a woman is, they can go read something else.)
All of the women in my family have this sort of directness which is generally considered unfeminine. We’re also all very smart and take no pains to hide it in the interest of attracting a potential mate. But there are other women out there like us, and more than I thought based on how I was raised to think about women.
I had some female friends in high school and college, but given my druthers, I’d have picked the pack of men. Becoming a social worker put me in a context with a lot of women, and it changed everything. It forced me confront my stereotypes about women.
I can’t speak to what it’s like to work with mostly men. I have always worked with mostly women. The cishet straight men in social work that I’ve worked with have invariably been people with a good amount of executive power: CEOs, CFOs and program directors. I’ve loved them all. I guess they erred on the touchy-feely side as men go, but many other men in my life have, so I suspect that men ostensibly not being emotional is just another stereotype.
One of my problems with, I don’t know, the internet brand of feminism that drove me off social media, was the relentless attack on men, which really bothers me. Psychologically I feel safe around men. I know that seems counterintuitive with my history, it’s not like I haven’t known bad men - but I’ve also been protected by good men, and the number of good men in my life outweighs the bad by several orders of magnitude, and I feel genuinely pissed when I think about them getting shit all over. I even have some male friends who have mildly sexist attitudes who I would go to bat for any day of the week. Because they are the kind of people who, when they say something stupid, you can get in their shit about it and they will listen. When you can say to someone, “I know you probably don’t mean it this way, but this is what I’m getting from you” they are much more likely to listen to what you have to say than if you go at it in some weird generalist way.
Sadly, I have heard this all too often lately, especially from Gen Z folks: “I’ve been traumatized, I’m a victim, I need therapy, you need therapy, I’m oppressed, nothing is my fault, check your privilege, I’ve been traumatized, you’re a narcissist, I’m a victim, I need therapy, you need therapy, I’m oppressed, nothing is my fault, check your privilege, you’re a narcissist…” ad nauseam. Two of our three children, each of whom had normal upbringings by any definition, currently seem to be under this spell. I’m hoping they grow out of it.
Unfortunately this has been really embraced in therapeutic circles. Everything is trauma. I realize I literally just posted a thread about my own trauma and was, in fact, raised by two deeply narcissistic people.
The thing is, some people really are victimized.
Oppression really happens.
Some people are narcissists.
Some people really are privileged and don’t see it.
The problem is when any of these things subsumes your identity and it’s the only way you perceive the world. I had a problem with this for a while working in domestic violence and sexual assault. You begin to see everything in these combative terms. Like, are we not fighting a fight? Must we not stand up for the oppressed?
Yes, we must.
But the person I trusted most on this topic - and I brought it to him - is an advocate in these spaces. And he doesn’t make progress in prevention education by alienating people. He does it by building common ground. The people who actually get paid to help the oppressed are all the time building partnerships, relationships, trust, with people who think very differently than they do. That’s how social change happens.
I think, especially in personal relationships, you have to be willing to show up flawed. In my writers group I think some of the guys have some sexist beliefs. It doesn’t disqualify them from friendship. I get to go be imperfect in my own way. I’m a little socially weird. I’m a little emotional. I can be a little socially weird, a little emotional, they can be a little sexist, hell, maybe I can be a little too hard on men sometimes, sometimes we butt heads, we talk it through, we drink, we laugh, we go home, maybe we’re all in a better mood the next week. That’s how real relationships work. The undercurrent of all this oppression talk is that we all have to be morally perfect all the time, and when we’re not perfect it needs to be this prolonged process of atonement, and that’s not how fulfilling, perspective-changing relationships actually work. It’s actually fine - better, even – to just meet people where they are.
Um.
Of course it’s totally possible for inexperienced young people to develop exaggerated and self-dramatizing views, happens all the time.
But that doesn’t mean it isn’t a bit nervous-making to hear of a parent’s responding to their child’s explicit assertions of “I’ve been traumatized” and “I need therapy” just with a dismissive “I’m hoping they grow out of it.”
Maybe what you mean is that it’s obvious that your kids are saying such things merely as a superficial form of fashionable slang, and they’re actually perfectly happy. (Or maybe you mean that you’re more supportive and sympathetic to their expressed unhappiness in person, and just privately venting a bit of frustration with it here on the Dope.)
But the random internet strangers with whom you voluntarily chose to share this information have no way of knowing that.
My last word before butting out (and high time, too): Remember that adolescent and young adult children can be genuinely and sincerely distressed about aspects of their past or present lives without having had unloving parents or abnormal or unhealthy upbringings. Taking a child’s expression of unhappiness seriously is not an admission of guilt or wrongdoing on a parent’s part.
My kids used to say the same things to me. I then did some serious self reflection and went to therapy and realized I actually did indeed hurt them. Why are your kids calling you a narcissist? This doesn’t happen out of the blue. Are their concerns and pain valid?
Thank you for doing honest self-assessment. That takes a lot of courage.
In her new paradigm, someone healthy wouldn’t just not find that funny, it would never naturally cross their mind. That crude humor would be considered “normal” for a young teen is a result of straight male dominated culture imposing itself upon the child. That if he were duly enlightened he would realize he has been damaged and needs to recover.
I mean, I’m an adult woman and I still think crude humor is often funny.
I think this scene in Silicon Valley, for example, is hilarious. (Extremely NSFW language, YouTube, broken link.)
https://www.youtube.com /watch?v=P-hUV9yhqgY
Though when I watched that hilarious show, I did note it was something of a sausage fest.
What concerned me the most though was just, completely invalidating the boy’s feelings.
It was so hard and difficult to be vulnerable and actually look inwards at myself, but I am glad I did it and have no regrets. I can have a closer and deeper relationship with my children and be a better person. It seems like @Crafter_Man is in denial about his hurtful actions towards his children. IMO if your kids are calling you a narcissist and telling you their issues with your behavior and you dismiss it as “it’s just a phase and I hope they grow out of it,” it tells me you didn’t actually listen and understand where they were coming from. The emotional intelligence just isn’t there.
I can see myself in no other light than as a flawed, self-beguiled personality who’s committed actions that cannot be undone. Perversely, I’ve found in that humility my only viable source of dignity. I have no claim to pride and so can withstand any missile aimed at false pride.
That said, I have come to understand that the essential human element is the individual. And that individual’s primary obligation is to be as honest as possible with him or her or itself. Only after that obligation is met can that person conduct themself virtuously. Even behavior full of charity and courtesy is more a rote act of vanity than a genuine expression of empathy without it. Just following the custom of the culture, which can shift to savagery on a dime. We’ve seen it.
If I might reach across boundaries to connect with others, I don’t see much hope for that if it’s based on mutual victim hood, because I still extend an unmet had to our mutual oppressor on the same basis. I wasted my rebellious youth appealing to everyone on our shared struggle against our own version of an unaccommodating reality, and the people who’ve actually done well by serving the status quo never quite caught my drift. Like with a coterie of happy young dingbats hogging the sidewalk, I’ve learned to just step out of their way and let them be right. I can afford the loss in order to be an instrument of peace.
Isn’t it a contradiction that oppression will somehow culminate in victory? Or a logical fallacy that being on the losing side due to economics or geography or biology or whatever is a measure of virtue? Isn’t it rather the quest to realize the possibilities of human kindness and invention, rather than counting the number of chicks who’ve had their skulls pecked in in the quest to be the one with a turn atop the shit pile?
There’s a lot of bastards out there. A lot of them go after you because you’re just different. But a lot of them look just like you. Sadly, the first place we have to and the last place we want to go against them is inside our own skin.
You are a beautiful writer. Has some shades of Buddhism - and Freire. He said something about how there is an oppressor and an oppressed inside every one of us.
Can’t remember the podcast I was listening to once but it was about the courage to look inside yourself and see Hitler.
It takes some of the punch out of other people’s wrong opinions.
I guess I assumed he was talking about their culture more than accusing him of something.
There’s been a lot of press lately about parental estrangement, with a fair amount presenting it as a tragedy and particularly the suffering of the parent. I’m sure my mother is absorbing such content now. I’ve read articles that nearly had me writing letters that essentially said, you can do a great job as a parent and your kid can disown you for any reason.
But AIUI that the two most common reasons are abuse and betrayal (for girls, failure to protect with sexual abuse is a common reason.) I’m guessing politics is a close third, because Trump politics have significantly changed the personality and character of some people and it is deeply upsetting for those they are close to.
What I want to say to these article writers is: do you know how painful it is to live without your parents? We wouldn’t be doing it unless the alternative was even more painful than that.
Yeah, absolutely. I look on it like divorce. If someone wants a divorce, there’s no demanding that they give a reason that’s good enough before the divorce is granted. It’s what they want, it’s what they get.
I try to live my life such that my wife wants to stay married to me, and so that my kids want to stay connected to me. If they’re ever remaining connected to me out of obligation rather than out of the joy they get from my company, I’ve fucked up beyond all measure.
I’ve read some articles over the last few years about the phenomenon of cutting family members off due to political disagreements. We’re not talking about abusive relationships where cutting off contact would be a good thing, just people who grew part due to political difference. The common consensus in these articles is it hurts both the parents and the children. I can relate, my relationship with my mother has become estranged over the years as she falls ever deeper into the MAGAsphere.
My Mom starting to Trumpetize was the last straw for me. She would call me up and just start ranting about politics with no context.
Like when that Colorado politician Lauren Boebert was being asked to resign my Mom called me and announced, “You might see me on the evening news. Nobody is going to take away MY vote. If she did something illegal let it be addressed in a court of law…”
She didn’t actually use names or explain any of it. She just rambled angrily for a half hour. At some point she got on the subject of Kamala Harris and how she doesn’t approve of Kamala’s stance on legalizing sex work… What?
Finally looked it up and learned the politician in question WAS Boebert and the legal question was her tweeting Nancy Pelosi’s location on January 6th, which - that’s a super bad thing to do.
My mother used to be a moderate. And had reasonable political opinions. After the lifetime of abuse and conflict I had to ask myself: is there anything here worth saving? I can no longer relate to this person at all. She rejects basic medical consensus, is obsessed with gun rights, still thinks she met Jesus during a near death experience, we have literally nothing in common, so there’s nothing left to salvage.
I imagine when kids separate from their parents for political reasons it’s often like that. Like politics wasn’t the chief cause there, but the thing that made it not worth trying anymore.
This is absolutely true. Call it culture, call it genetics (I personally think there are elements of both) but I’ve observed this as early as elementary school in my kids’ classrooms. It doesn’t apply to every kid at all (and in fact I personally have the empathic quiet boy and the blunt girl who can come across as a jerk) but the general classroom dynamics are exactly this, the girls trying not to do anything overtly mean so conflict coming out as passive aggression, the boys being overt and direct jerks to each other when there’s conflict.
My high schooler is taking an Ethnic Studies class (required by her high school) and we’ve had a lot of talks about how a lot of the vocabulary tends to divide the world into victims and oppressors, and because it feels bad to be an oppressor people will try to figure out ways to cast themselves as victims. But at the same time, I believe it’s important for her to know that privilege, oppression, discrimination exist and I’m glad she’s taking the class (we have talked about some of these things at home, but don’t use those terms). I try to stress that as a society it’s important to be able to understand these concepts, but as an individual she should concentrate less on her on personal identity as a victim or an oppressor and more on being responsible for her own actions and trying to be kind to everyone.
Empathy is certainly more admired/assumed in women, it’s stereotypically feminine.
As I understand it however, it would be more accurate to say that women care more about the emotions of others, which isn’t the same thing. A hostile woman will try to hurt other people emotionally rather than physically. The extreme example would be a man who wants to hurt somebody murdering them, and a woman instead murdering a friend or family member while leaving the actual target alive. Example:
In 1991, after Holloway’s daughter Shanna narrowly missed out on a spot on her junior high school squad two consecutive years, Holloway’s ex-brother-in-law, Terry Harper, reported to police that Holloway asked him to hire a hitman to kill Verna Heath, mother of the 14-year-old girl who had beaten Shanna onto the squad. Holloway allegedly believed that Heath’s daughter would be so devastated by her mother’s death that she would drop out of the cheerleading team, thereby giving the spot to Shanna.
Now obviously most women don’t go nearly that far, but it demonstrates the mindset; someone who thinks in terms affecting of other’s emotions with hostile intent. The intended murder was merely a tool for emotional harm, not the actual goal.
The lesson being that a person “caring about other people’s feelings” is only nice if they like the person they care about. Empathy is more “feel what other people feel” which isn’t the same thing.
I wasn’t like that. I was pretty gender conforming as a child: I only wore dresses (because I found trousers uncomfortable), I played with dolls, Sylvanian families and other stereotypical girls’ toys. I probably would have enjoyed playing with Lego and other construction toys, but I didn’t have any brothers, and this was the era when Lego was only advertised to boys. I was mostly friends with girls, and identified with female characters on TV. But as I grew up I felt like I had less and less in common with other girls and then young women. I couldn’t fit in no matter how I tried, and in the end I gave up trying.
I had some interests that are more stereotypically masculine, so more and more I found myself in male dominated environments. At first I felt uncomfortable, but I got over it. And there weren’t good female role models, so I started to identify more with men. Not being able to fit in with and feel connected to other women, it was easier to dismiss their interests as superficial; I did go through something of a phase of distain for stereotypically female things, but I don’t feel like that now. Having a baby actually made me feel closer to other women, and it gives me an easy topic to talk about with other mothers, which is nice.
I was afraid you were going to get angry at me for believing in stereotypes, so thanks for not responding that way. But saying something is a stereotype doesn’t make it untrue. I can see them for myself, and there’s research showing sex differences in support for things like disinviting speakers and not hiring people with ‘offensive’ views. This is another thing where I unwillingly find myself more on the typically male side: I’d rather hear a range of opinions, even the offensive ones. I think it’s more import to know the truth than to protect people’s feelings.
You don’t seem unusually direct to me. It might be normal for the message board. 
I tried to hide my intelligence at school in order to be more popular, which was a failure on both counts. But in dating, it was an asset, once I got to the right environment.
I work with mostly men. And since Covid I’ve worked remotely, and most of my coworkers are 5 time zones away on another continent. I’ve never met my manager in person. Not the ideal environment for getting to know people.
But your answer was what I expected. Social work is about helping people, and appeals far more to women. The cishet men are mostly in leadership positions, because being a leader does appeal to men. I think the social justice movement is similar; its about helping the unfortunate, and would mostly appeal to women for the same reasons as social work, even if it didn’t cast men as an unsympathetic oppressor class. Telling men they can’t aspire to any kind of leadership position is just the final nail in the coffin.
And the thing is, if you have an environment or philosophy that enables some kind of bad behaviour, it will attract people who want to engage in that bad behaviour. That’s as true of social justice cancellation mobs as of Maga. So no, not all women engage in these things, but the ones who do are more likely to be found in such environments.
That’s quite funny. It’s very possibly the same issue I was talking about; that both men and women acting outside expected gender roles get less sympathy.
That explains why readers should care about her mission, but not about her as a person. And I’ve read books where the big important mission just wasn’t as interesting to read about as the side quests. The stakes don’t really matter when it’s all fictional. But I daresay you know all this already.
Thanks. Yeah, I think its both. Hormones directly make a difference, too.