Thanks!
Fair enough. As a tall-ish woman, I run up against the guy who didn’t want to date someone taller than he is. 
I’ve never totally understood this because, while I am straight, I think tall women are amazingly gorgeous and often envy them. I don’t get why men aren’t blown away in the same way I am.
Yes! Speaking as a strong, confident woman married to an incredibly nice guy, I’m also getting the distinct feeling from this thread that we did something wrong.
I dated a tall as me woman before (I’m 6ft). And when she put her high heels on, she was taller then me. I have to say, it was kind of hot. I loved going out in public with her. 
The thing is… I don’t view most women as weak. So I am having a hard time wrapping my head around what a ‘‘strong’’ woman is. People have called me strong, but I am neither loud, obnoxious, nor particularly assertive, so I have nothing in common with the woman in the OP. What they usually mean when they call me strong is, ‘‘You’re remarkably healthy and well-balanced considering your childhood.’’ I don’t think that’s what the OP means.
I got a fiction critique from an older male friend who said my female character should cry less as the book goes on because ‘‘she should be getting stronger.’’ The tears weren’t about piddly shit; they were in reaction to being in several nearly fatal situations, or confronting her grief at the loss of someone she loved. So apparently my character could murder her own brother to try to stop a genocide, or (stupidly) intervene in a knife fight when she was unarmed, or risk her life to save her closest friend, but tears negated all that; they made her weak. I once cried at an orange juice commercial. Am I weak? I don’t think the answer can be found in the number of tears I’ve spilled.
My husband chose a profession (clinical psychology) that gets more respect than mine (social work), which I admit is vaguely irritating to me. We have basically the same values and the same level of intelligence. I sometimes tire of hearing people rave about how smart he is just because he has a Ph.D. It’s not a huge deal, just a ‘‘rrrgh but I’m smart tooooo’’ adolescent knee-jerk response. Like my best friend often describes him as ‘‘the smartest person I know.’’ She’s known me since fourth grade! What am I, chopped liver?
It has nothing to do with his salary and everything to do with my ego, and it’s also directly contradictory to what ‘‘women’’ apparently want in a mate. I should be apparently thrilled that I married up. But maybe since he’s devalued by his shortness, it all evens out. :rolleyes: Trust me, if we’re going CarMax theory on this relationship, I got the sweetest deal.
So while I hate reducing people to somewhat arbitrary characteristics, the gist of this conversation is true… some people are unaware that they are the problem with their relationships. Some people are obnoxious and like to paper it over with the ‘‘assertive’’ label. Some people are manipulative weasels and call themselves ‘‘nice.’’ Sometimes people do that because their view of what makes one ‘‘strong’’ or ‘‘nice’’ is oversimplified. A woman might think, ‘‘I need to be strong,’’ and in her mind that translate to, ‘‘Loud, rude, pushy, aggressive’’ without considering all the other ways there are to be strong. She doesn’t understand it intrinsically so she just goes through the external motions. See again: my mother, who will fuck your shit up if she gets pissed off, but who can’t function without a man, no matter how terrible, so how strong is she really?
There’s that old ‘‘show, don’t tell’’ concept in writing fiction. You don’t say, ‘‘Mary Sue is a strong, confident woman.’’ You show Mary Sue becoming a medical doctor and fixing her own transmission. The minute the author tells you how to feel about the character, you mentally rebel. You look for evidence it’s not true.
I think it’s works in a similar way for real life.
My wife says that is not a good idea.
Regards,
Shodan
I laughed.
Doesn’t anyone marry for love anymore?
Sent from my SM-G900T using Tapatalk
Of course, but “love” is not some kind of pure, rarefied and elemental substance, extracted and distilled out of the ether.
Every individual composes their own idiosyncratic version of love, which is a compound of many disparate things–some of them pure, and some of them otherwise.
The “nice guy” is the average looking guy who gets friend-zoned by women who then go off and have sex with the better-looking, but maybe not so nice guys. So, in some ways, I think the better analogy on the female side is the “plain Jane”.
The “strong, confident women” doesn’t get friend-zoned by guys. If anything, she gets shied away from completley. She represents what, traditionally, were meant to be attributes of men, not women. I’m not quite sure what would be the male analogy to that, but it would, in some sense, be guys who act in ways more traditionally thought of as characteristically female, but also in such a way that women didn’t want to pal around with them, either.
I think the problem with trying to find these analogies is that men and women don’t have the same strategies and goals when seeking sex partners. It’s sort of like asking what’s the position in golf that most resembles first baseman in baseball. Uh, one’s a team sport and the other isn’t, so there is not a good analogy.
I don’t, either. Most of my female friends are strong, confident women. And most of my male friends are nice, for that matter. There’s some selection bias there, of course. But I’ve had no trouble finding either strong women or nice men to befriend.
All true John. But the OP’s point wasn’t about either your kind of “nice guy” nor your kind of “strong confident” woman. The OP’s point was about the screwed up people who’re toxic but use those faintly praiseworthy terms to describe themselves.
e.g. the guy who says “I’m a nice guy” while inside he’s a seething MRA who uses “incel” a lot in his internet postings. The woman who says “I’m a strong confident woman” but she’s actually somebody with no awareness of anyone’s interests but her own and has no finesse in how she tries to dominate any and everything around her.
These two losers are the “Nice Guy™®” and (per the OP’s contention agreed to by many since) the “Strong Confident Woman™®”.
Well yeah. But that “man is a gentleman”, whose gallant, respectful, courteous and therefore the ladyfolk would do well to marry them since most men are usually loud braggarts is a very old trope; you see it in Shakespeare and also in some Roman literature. The woman who is outgoing, vivacious and well read, and therefore good company; so marry her you, idiot, is another very old trope.
I genuinely don’t understand what this means. Some of us want to get laid, and some of us want to have relationships. Some of us don’t know what the hell we want.
How is that a gendered difference?
I swear to Og these threads make me feel like a space alien.
Another factor is that, with the rise of gender equality, there has been this tendency for society to pretend, or insist, that sexual dimorphism isn’t a thing - that men shouldn’t be masculine and women shouldn’t be feminine, and that men shouldn’t be attracted to feminity or women attracted to masculinity. But that often isn’t how attraction works. Many people *are *attracted to women for being feminine or men for being masculine; sexual dimorphism is hard-wired into our psyches.
My mother is taller than my father (always has been; they’re rapidly shrinking as they age) and I’ve dated men who were shorter than me; so has my sister. It’s an absolute non-issue.
And it sounds like you’ve got yourself a keeper. Who cares how long it takes him to do something? He does it!
I don’t really hear that argument a lot. What I’ve often heard is that a lot of this gender stereotype bullshit is as much socialization as it is biology, and a lot of people who don’t fit into these molds are punished for it, and they shouldn’t be, and people should be able to do what they want to do in terms of gender expression without being treated like shit for being different. I’ve seen mountains of evidence that point to a lot of these ‘‘hard-wired’’ differences being socialized, and I’d put down all kinds of money that one reason masculinity is such a highly valued trait is that femininity is so negatively valued. But in all honesty, I don’t care whether these preferences are hard-wired or not, as long as people who aren’t wired that way are not required to behave as if they are.
And I’ve seen a lot of people claim that we are making your argument when we are in fact making mine.
The difference is that I can espouse my view and still be attracted to plenty of masculine traits, or enjoy displaying plenty of feminine traits. I actually have a lot of feminine traits and find the woman described in the OP completely unrelatable. I am a nurturing person and I prefer men who are sexually dominant. I don’t think there is anything wrong with me. I don’t think there is anything wrong with a woman who dedicates her entire life to childrearing and nurturing her husband and family,* if that’s what she wants.* I have no problem with a guy driving a pickup truck and being a breadwinner and making a shit ton of money,* if that’s what he wants.*
But increasingly, people are beginning to stand up and say, ‘‘No, that’s not actually what I want.’’ More and more women choose to put career before childbirth. More and more men are choosing to prioritize their kids over their careers. This causes some cognitive dissonance in people who believe that everything men or women do is arbitrated by their gender. What I’m doing, what I’m trying to do, is not to say, ‘‘Oh, you’re of X gender, so you probably want this.’’ I’m trying to listen to what they actually have to say, and not my preconceived biases.
It raises my hackles extra because this set of assumptions about women that are bandied about just don’t apply to me. There’s a running joke among women in our family that we have man brains. My mother was a mechanical engineer and wears men’s clothing. My Aunt jokes that she was really meant to be a gay man. I’ve always identified as a woman and felt comfortable there, but I’m not sure I think how most women think. People confuse me for a man on these boards sometimes and I’ve been here ten years. It’s impossible to know if other women are like me, isn’t it? Because all any of us see is what’s externally expressed. This board is as close as it gets to being inside someone’s head without all the preconceived shit to get in the way. You don’t necessarily see race or gender, just thoughts.
So the argument would go, ‘‘Of course there are outliers. You are just an outlier.’’ But I’m not convinced that I am. I suspect that my brain is not really a man or a woman’s brain, just a weird brain, and I only think my brain is a man’s brain because we are socialized to think of women as so weird and mysterious and irrational. Not to harp on the fiction writing thing, but I used to have a hell of a time writing female characters, because I was trying to make them into what I thought women were like, instead of realizing that I am what women are like. I don’t know if that makes sense. The bottom line is I’m very skeptical about gender differences and even more skeptical about claims regarding their cause.
My other point of contention is the idea that if someone dares to step out of that gender box, they will be an undesirable mate. That might have been true in archaic times, but it just isn’t any more, because as people are increasingly more free to make choices about what they do with their lives, what they are seeking has diversified as well. Some men are uber masculine and some are not, and they are all getting laid, but frankly, I don’t give a flying fuck about their ‘‘social value’’ in the eyes of gender conformists. I care about what they bring to the table as people, perhaps as partners if we’re heading that direction. Someone who can express their truest self with confidence is the sexiest thing.
In my experience, planting your flag on the hill of ‘‘sexual dimorphism’’ is an easy way to ignore inequality. In fact, the woman in the OP is buying into a masculine definition of strength, because Og forbid she behave in a feminine manner. Her underlying assumption is that she can’t be feminine because she wants respect, dammit.
That is sad. Think about that for a minute.
[QUOTE=nearwildheaven]
And it sounds like you’ve got yourself a keeper. Who cares how long it takes him to do something? He does it!
[/QUOTE]
There aren’t even words for how much I love that man. He’s not stereotypically anything. Also, consider that there are some things you want to go slowly… It has its benefits.
Another similarity: I think a lot of “Nice Guys” start out as nice guys, but then start getting upset over the inherent unfairness of the world. And so they start becoming resentful and turn into assholes.
Similarly, I think a lot of “Strong, Confident Women” start out as strong, confident women, but get upset when their male peers get better, and so start becoming resentful and act like assholes.
Some of them want to abuse you. Some of them want to be abused.
I was thinking from an anthropological perspective. I’m not so much talking about what we consciously decide to do, but things that drive us subconsciously. Things we do because we evolved to be that kind of being, and some of those things vary depending on the gender of the individual. But, just to be clear, I’m not at all saying those two things (conscious and subconscious) are completely separable and don’t overlap in important ways.
You need to get the podcast from this last Friday’s Fresh Air on NPR. It was an interviewer with the woman (can’t remember her name) who writes for the Amy Schumer show. She coined the term “tom-man”, which is a tomboy who doesn’t grow out of it. She’s a comedy writer (no shock), and she’s hilarious. IIRC, it was a previously recorded interview, not something new they had on.