# Some People See Me as THE STRAIGHT DOPE **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [October 23, 2017, 12:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/some-people-see-me-as-the-straight-dope/799626 "2017-10-23T12:53:51Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![AHunter3](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ahunter3/32/368_2.png) [@AHunter3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AHunter3)\ **Post date:** [October 24, 2017, 4:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/some-people-see-me-as-the-straight-dope/799626/21 "2017-10-24T16:57:50Z")
> [@Procrustus](#): > > This seems non-remarkable. Does anyone really disagree that generalizations generally apply and that there are exceptions to all generalizations? I see a whole spectrum of male and female behavior, and–apart from the actions of a few assholes–most people seem pretty accepting. It is the cattle who, for whatever reason, _don’t_ tend to trod the expected path who are most aware of the cattle prods. No, my experience does not match your own. ---
**Author:** ![AHunter3](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ahunter3/32/368_2.png) [@AHunter3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AHunter3)\ **Post date:** [October 24, 2017, 5:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/some-people-see-me-as-the-straight-dope/799626/22 "2017-10-24T17:08:16Z")
> [@Darren\_Garrison](#): > > This, exactly. The idea that everybody is as fascinated about every small detail of your life as you are. You keep [accusing](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=20536708&postcount=26) me of doing that: > [@Darren Garrison](#): > > You have to realize that chronicling the smallest details of every aspect of your life is the most fascinating subject in the world for only you I don’t think I’m doing that. I’m pretty narrowly focused on a small handful of details about my life. From my vantage point, I’m no more babbling about every little detall of my life than Patrisse Cullors is. ---
**Author:** ![Darren\_Garrison](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/darren_garrison/32/92_2.png) [@Darren\_Garrison](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Darren_Garrison)\ **Post date:** [October 24, 2017, 5:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/some-people-see-me-as-the-straight-dope/799626/23 "2017-10-24T17:12:04Z")
> [@AHunter3](#): > > You keep [accusing](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=20536708&postcount=26) me of doing that It is because you do. Your philosophy seems to be to never say in 10 words what can be said in 100. Brevity is the soul of wit. (BTW, I won’t give a snarky “who” about Patrisse Cullors when I could just google, but I _did_ have to google to have the slightest idea who the hell she was.) ---
**Author:** ![QuickSilver](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/quicksilver/32/7832_2.png) [@QuickSilver](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/QuickSilver)\ **Post date:** [October 24, 2017, 5:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/some-people-see-me-as-the-straight-dope/799626/24 "2017-10-24T17:12:07Z")
> [@AHunter3](#): > > It is the cattle who, for whatever reason, _don’t_ tend to trod the expected path who are most aware of the cattle prods. > > No, my experience does not match your own. You should tell a compelling story about it. Something that would get the reader interested in knowing more about you as a person, not an anomalous sociological/psychological identity. ---
**Author:** ![AHunter3](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ahunter3/32/368_2.png) [@AHunter3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AHunter3)\ **Post date:** [October 24, 2017, 5:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/some-people-see-me-as-the-straight-dope/799626/25 "2017-10-24T17:12:33Z")
> [@you\_with\_the\_face](#): > > My feedback remains the same. Your posts on this subject are alienating because they presume we care about how you label yourself. As stated in the OP, some people _do_ care how I label myself. Most people do not, but most people, in most contexts that I’ve been in, treat me as someone I am not. I care about that. Labels have their use, in communicating and explaining things, but the purpose is not to achieve consensus about labels but to create mental headspace in people’s awarenesses so they’re less likely to treat me (and others like me) as who we are not, and that they’ll attain a first-level approximation of who we are. ---
**Author:** ![AHunter3](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ahunter3/32/368_2.png) [@AHunter3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AHunter3)\ **Post date:** [October 24, 2017, 5:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/some-people-see-me-as-the-straight-dope/799626/26 "2017-10-24T17:14:37Z")
> [@QuickSilver](#): > > You should tell a compelling story about it. Something that would get the reader interested in knowing more about you as a person, not an anomalous sociological/psychological identity. I think I did 🙂 And one of these days I’ll get the damn thing into print and you can read it! ---
**Author:** ![AHunter3](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ahunter3/32/368_2.png) [@AHunter3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AHunter3)\ **Post date:** [October 24, 2017, 5:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/some-people-see-me-as-the-straight-dope/799626/27 "2017-10-24T17:16:28Z")
> [@Darren\_Garrison](#): > > It is because you do. Your philosophy seems to be to never say in 10 words what can be said in 100. Brevity is the soul of wit. Well, I’ve managed to keep you tuning in and reading, despite your grumbling about my verbose tendencies 😉 ---
**Author:** ![QuickSilver](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/quicksilver/32/7832_2.png) [@QuickSilver](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/QuickSilver)\ **Post date:** [October 24, 2017, 5:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/some-people-see-me-as-the-straight-dope/799626/28 "2017-10-24T17:21:04Z")
> [@AHunter3](#): > > From my vantage point, I’m no more babbling about every little detall of my life than Patrisse Cullors is. Patrisse Cullors “also identifies as a Queer Activist”. Not exclusively. Not primarily. But, “also”. What else defines you besides your struggle with gender identity? I’m not saying there is nothing else to you. That would seem unlikely. But I don’t really know anything else about you, and you’ve been a contributor here a year longer than I. Or maybe I haven’t been paying enough attention. ---
**Author:** ![QuickSilver](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/quicksilver/32/7832_2.png) [@QuickSilver](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/QuickSilver)\ **Post date:** [October 24, 2017, 5:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/some-people-see-me-as-the-straight-dope/799626/29 "2017-10-24T17:23:47Z")
> [@AHunter3](#): > > I think I did 🙂 > > And one of these days I’ll get the damn thing into print and you can read it! I’m in no position to give anyone advice about writing or publishing. But it seems to me that most authors start with a short story or three instead of a blog treatise. ---
**Author:** ![VinylTurnip](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/b2d939/32.png) [@VinylTurnip](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/VinylTurnip)\ **Post date:** [October 24, 2017, 5:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/some-people-see-me-as-the-straight-dope/799626/30 "2017-10-24T17:24:11Z")
I’ve read— or at least skimmed— a dozen or so of your little essays at this point, and I still don’t understand what the fuck it is that you want from people, exactly. ---
**Author:** ![Eyebrows\_0f\_Doom](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/eyebrows_0f_doom/32/3119_2.png) [@Eyebrows\_0f\_Doom](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Eyebrows_0f_Doom)\ **Post date:** [October 24, 2017, 6:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/some-people-see-me-as-the-straight-dope/799626/31 "2017-10-24T18:01:16Z")
> [@AHunter3](#): > > To state it starkly, a person in my position is either saying “there are differences between the boys and the girls, but I’m different, I need to be seen as one of the girls” or else “the attributed differences between the boys and the girls is an illusion, a lie, and I’m not an exception because we’re all pretty much the same under the hood”. > > But if I go the first route, I’m perpetuating the “boys are like this and girls are like that” attitudes and expectations that I’m complaining about when they’re directed at me. I’m leaving the fence intact while demanding to be allowed to hop the fence to the other side in some sense. You \*are \*doing that though. You are perpetuating the idea that men cannot be feminine, men must act a certain way and if you don’t fit within those strict norms you must not be a man but a “male girl.” ---
**Author:** ![Telemark](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/telemark/32/372_2.png) [@Telemark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Telemark)\ **Post date:** [October 24, 2017, 6:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/some-people-see-me-as-the-straight-dope/799626/32 "2017-10-24T18:02:17Z")
> [@VinylTurnip](#): > > I’ve read— or at least skimmed— a dozen or so of your little essays at this point, and I still don’t understand what the fuck it is that you want from people, exactly. I’m in the same boat. At this point I skip right over the OP and see if anyone has pulled out anything that appeals to me in their comments. ---
**Author:** ![Darren\_Garrison](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/darren_garrison/32/92_2.png) [@Darren\_Garrison](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Darren_Garrison)\ **Post date:** [October 24, 2017, 6:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/some-people-see-me-as-the-straight-dope/799626/33 "2017-10-24T18:02:44Z")
> [@QuickSilver](#): > > I’m in no position to give anyone advice about writing or publishing. But it seems to me that most authors start with a short story or three instead of a blog treatise. On a science related mailing list I used to subscribe to, there was a guy who had spent literally years of his free time staring at Viking orbiter photos of Mars looking for signs of past Martian civilizations. And of course he found hundreds of “buildings” and structures in the photos. So he wrote a book about Martians who were living in secret tunnels under the Earth’s surface, kidnapped a woman, and took her to Mars. Somewhere in the middle of the book, the Martians hooked the woman up to a machine and implanted the locations of all their ruins in her mind. The book then gave an infodump list of several hundred sites and their longitude/latitude on Mars along with the author’s description. So the Martians on Mars were calling their own cities things like “three squiggly lines”, as if _they_ were seeing them as smudges on an old orbital photograph instead of knowing them as real places. The whole point of this (horribly written, there were once samples on-line but I don’t think they are available any more) book was to get that infodump list of “cities” into the public. All of the plot, characters, etc. were just a vehicle to deliver that list. (The guy then self-published, selling paper copies for $19.99 each from his personal website, and thought that a literal government conspiracy directing traffic away from his site was the reason that people weren’t buying hundreds and hundreds of copies of his book.) My (yes, long) point is that AHunter 3 isn’t going to be writing short stories to get his name known _because the “novel” is just wrapping paper for his message_. ---
**Author:** ![Slash1972](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/slash1972/32/6461_2.png) [@Slash1972](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Slash1972)\ **Post date:** [October 24, 2017, 6:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/some-people-see-me-as-the-straight-dope/799626/34 "2017-10-24T18:05:39Z")
> [@Eyebrows\_0f\_Doom](#): > > You \*are \*doing that though. You are perpetuating the idea that men cannot be feminine, men must act a certain way and if you don’t fit within those strict norms you must not be a man but a “male girl.” Yes. This is what I get out of all the blog posts as well. ---
**Author:** ![you\_with\_the\_face](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/y/ecccb3/32.png) [@you\_with\_the\_face](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/you_with_the_face)\ **Post date:** [October 24, 2017, 7:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/some-people-see-me-as-the-straight-dope/799626/35 "2017-10-24T19:04:43Z")
> [@AHunter3](#): > > As stated in the OP, some people _do_ care how I label myself. Are these people who have a relationship to you in meat space? Or are they strangers on the internet? > [@](#): > > Most people do not, but most people, in most contexts that I’ve been in, treat me as someone I am not. I care about that. How would you like to be treated? And if your answer “as a girly man”, I’m going then ask “what does being treating as a “girly man” look like in practice?” > [@](#): > > Labels have their use, in communicating and explaining things, but the purpose is not to achieve consensus about labels but to create mental headspace in people’s awarenesses so they’re less likely to treat me (and others like me) as who we are not, and that they’ll attain a first-level approximation of who we are. But how should we treat “who you are”? What does this look like in practice? You seem to assume that this requires no explanation but if in fact this is your primary concern, this is where your emphasis belongs. Not on creating mental headspace for taxonomic classifications. ---
**Author:** ![AHunter3](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ahunter3/32/368_2.png) [@AHunter3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AHunter3)\ **Post date:** [October 24, 2017, 7:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/some-people-see-me-as-the-straight-dope/799626/36 "2017-10-24T19:26:33Z")
> [@VinylTurnip](#): > > I’ve read— or at least skimmed— a dozen or so of your little essays at this point, and I still don’t understand what the fuck it is that you want from people, exactly. > [@you\_with\_the\_face](#): > > How would you like to be treated? And if your answer “as a girly man”, I’m going then ask “what does being treating as a “girly man” look like in practice?” > > …how should we treat “who you are”? What does this look like in practice? You seem to assume that this requires no explanation Point taken. I have (several times) expressed this in the abstract but you’re entirely right — I haven’t given examples and particulars. Stay tuned. ---
**Author:** ![you\_with\_the\_face](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/y/ecccb3/32.png) [@you\_with\_the\_face](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/you_with_the_face)\ **Post date:** [October 24, 2017, 7:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/some-people-see-me-as-the-straight-dope/799626/37 "2017-10-24T19:50:11Z")
> [@you\_with\_the\_face](#): > > How would you like to be treated? And if your answer “as a girly man”, I’m going then ask “what does being treating as a “girly man” look like in practice?” And if “male girl” is the preferred term, not “girly man”, please go with that instead. My intent here is not at all to be dismissive of what you consider yourself; it’s to try to better understand what you want us (your audience) to ultimately do with your ideas. The people I come in contact with at work and in life are diverse enough that I’m careful about assuming I know anyone’s gender or sexual identity in the absence of their own disclosure. That said, at the end of the day, people’s identities aren’t a conscious factor in how I treat them. Their personalities, demeanors, communication styles, interests, mutual acquaintances, backgrounds, etc., all have a lot more to do with how I relate to them than who they sleep with or how they classify their genders. This is a long-winded way of saying that I see no reason to treat a “male girl” differently than anyone else, when it gets down to it. ---
**Author:** ![Penfeather](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/penfeather/32/384_2.png) [@Penfeather](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Penfeather)\ **Post date:** [October 24, 2017, 7:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/some-people-see-me-as-the-straight-dope/799626/38 "2017-10-24T19:59:48Z")
> [@VinylTurnip](#): > > I’ve read— or at least skimmed— a dozen or so of your little essays at this point, and I still don’t understand what the fuck it is that you want from people, exactly. Confirmation that he is somehow different and interesting. ---
**Author:** ![Procrustus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/procrustus/32/2994_2.png) [@Procrustus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Procrustus)\ **Post date:** [October 24, 2017, 8:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/some-people-see-me-as-the-straight-dope/799626/39 "2017-10-24T20:19:36Z")
> [@Penfeather](#): > > Confirmation that he is somehow different and interesting. I think it’s interesting that he thinks he’s different. I’ll admit to not having read _everything_ he’s posted, but whatever he think is “different” about his situation is lost on me. Nevertheless, I like the guy. He’s smart and kind, and is trying to make the world a better place. ---
**Author:** ![Penfeather](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/penfeather/32/384_2.png) [@Penfeather](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Penfeather)\ **Post date:** [October 24, 2017, 8:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/some-people-see-me-as-the-straight-dope/799626/40 "2017-10-24T20:33:27Z")
> [@AHunter3](#): > > I could try explaining my issues as a cisgender straight male who is at odds with sexist expectations of males, and with the male gender role. I’ve done that, I did that for years. It was a different way of packaging my stuff, but I still had stuff I wanted to talk about, see? The same stuff, really. Just packaged differently. I was a women’s studies major in college. Back then I was tagging along after the feminists. Waving my little hands in the air and saying “me too, me too”. Look. Mate. I’m a strapping bearded 6 foot straight guy who can split logs like a motherfucker and is looking forward to donning my old leathers this Friday to drink cheap beer and leap about at a punk club. I also plant lavender in the garden to attract the bees, love going recycle shopping for clothes, and go gooey at babies in the supermarket. I may also have done a 19th Century Women’s Literature paper or two at university, although I’m less proud of that. 1993 was a different time. Does all of those those things make me interesting? Sure, to me and my wife. Does that make me some bizarre and fascinating chimaera who needs to constantly publish manifestos defining himself? No, it makes me _me_, just a bloke who likes bits of some things and bits of others, and that, I suspect, make me pretty similar to most other men and women. Like you, for instance. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/some-people-see-me-as-the-straight-dope/799626.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/some-people-see-me-as-the-straight-dope/799626.md?page=3)