This assertion surprises me.
Rule in the sense of “general rule” is what people normally mean when they use the phrase “exception to the rule”. At least that’s my experience as a native speaker of the language. It is, at any rate, what I intended.
Yes. Some of them would be exceptions to the general rule. That’s what you get when you make a generalization: there are exceptions to it.
: shrug : either you’re speaking from experience here as a person who developed an antipathy towards the general rules and stereotypes and gendered expectations such as you with the face referenced, or else you’re not. If that was not your experience, then it was not your experience (another trite truism that I offer for your consumption).
To piggy-back on this, your writing isn’t very youth-oriented. You are a 58-year-old guy trying to speak to young people, with no attempt to actually speak the language of young people. You don’t sound old, but you don’t sound like you’re very “with it” either.
Young people are very much into pop cultural references and memes. Their flirt games happen on social media, not face-to-face. Instead of quoting feminist scholars that almost no one has heard of, I believe you’d do better providing examples set in the world we’re living in now and referencing models that are recognizable to those immersed in today’s culture.
Someone mentioned Prince earlier. Have you ever watched “Purple Rain”? Granted the film is more than 30 years old, but it provides great contrast between feminine and masculine male swagger. There are even more recent models of non-conventional gender expressions that you could be referencing, but this would require exposing yourself to TV, movies, and music that young people are consuming.
It’s stronger than a lack of pop culture and memes - there’s a whole new vocabulary about sexual attraction and identity that AHunter3 doesn’t seem aware of. For example, “demisexual” is the term that someone under 30 would likely use for the “only into sex with someone who you’re in a relationship with or otherwise have strong feelings for”, and would probably find someone talking about sexual identity without using the term to be very off-putting. A lot like if someone was trying to talk about same sex-attraction and described themselves as attracted to more than one gender without saying “bisexual” or “pansexual”, and seemingly unaware that those terms exist. “You’re trying to talk to me about my sexual identity, but you don’t even know that you’re a demisexual or what the Ace spectrum is?” Also the strong acceptance and reinforcement of traditional gender roles, like calling someone who wants sex in a relationship a ‘femmy boy’ instead of ‘demisexual man’, is likely extremely off-putting to anyone used to rejecting those traditional roles.
It is also possible that he is taking too much Viagra.
This is it, exactly. More precisely, he is 58-year-old guy trying to speak to young people in Radical Feminist Theory. (Link from here.)
Oh **Darren Garrison **you made me spit coffee on my monitor, first thing Sunday morning.
Let me illustrate what I mean about group-level gender differences in flirting, since the thread has shifted into a debate about this point.
Setting: a mixed crowd attending a large-sized party. Not everyone knows each other, but there are lots of friends of friends and distant acquaintances.
There is a single guy on one side of the room. A single woman on the other side. Eventually they both notice each other, and soon after they notice each other noticing each other.
Gender difference #1: Guy is more likely to be obvious about noticing her than the other way around. He will hold a gaze longer. In my experience, men are less inhibited when checking out someone than women are. Either because their visual orientation means they are trying to suck up more information through their eyes or because they are simply less shy about looking.
Gender difference #2: Guy is more likely to approach and initiate conversation. This is changing as gender expectations lighten up, but it’s still the case that men make the first move more often.
Gender difference #3: Once the conversation moves past small talk, the guy is more likely to offer physical compliments (“I was just thinking to myself, what’s up with this gorgeous girl standing there all alone? I have to investigate this”) while the woman is more likely to flatter the guy in other ways. Like laughing expressively at his jokes (as monstro’s coworker does).
Gender difference 4#: Guy is more likely to “take care” of the woman. Get her a drink, throw away her plate, find a place for her sit down, etc. In contrast, a woman is more likely to flirt by being receptive to these overtures and enthusiastically grateful (“wow, you’re such a gentleman, aren’t you? So sweet!”)
All of these are signals of interest that are very common in certain social settings, like bars and parties. My point is not that men and women conform to a script when flirting. Outside of the differences sketched out above, flirting is pretty similar across teams. I’m just saying on a aggregate level, you’ll see such differences emerge. Or to put it another way, if I were to blank out all gender references in the scenario above, most people reading could fill them back in correctly.
Let’s now imagine the same setting, with the same guy and woman. This time, let’s say a femme guy purposely chooses to “act like a woman acts”. Which, for the purposes of this exercise, means not necessarily doing what comes natural to him, but instead mirroring the object of his desire.
In all probability, what this gets us is two people noticing each other across the room. The woman may decide to approach and initiate conversation. But eh, maybe not if she doesn’t think the mysterious stranger from across the room is all that into her, or even actually a straight guy. I mean, he very well might be the straightest motherfucker in the piece, but…is it smart to assume a guy wearing a skirt and wearing makeup is hetero and not something else? He’s petting his hair and batting his eyelashes now…hmmm. Her math tells her no, if she’s going to make the first move, it needs to be on a surer target. So she looks about elsewhere. And what do you know, here’s some other guy and look, he’s walking up to her with a smile and she’s all prepared to laugh at the first jokes he makes…
This is where AHunter3’s advice seems less than sound to me. How conversation is initiated and by whom is completely overlooked, even though that’s probably the most important hurdle! Especially when we’re talking about a man whose manner and appearance might puts his sexual orientation into question.
If you have been in at least six major relationships in the 30 years between 1980 and 2010, I’m puzzled why you claim meeting girls is an agonising challenge for you: most guys would say you’ve been pretty successful. Or is all this just a stealth brag?
All I know is that I have found in my experience way more variation between women than between women as a group and men as a group. Among my family, peers, friends etc women I know approach social situations (including dating and flirting) with a huge amount of variability than you seem willing to acknowledge.
And I stand by my stereotype vs rules comment- I know the idiom. I just do not think it applies in this case. In my experience more women do not adhere to the “rules” (ie stereotypes) than do. I do not see the gendered flirting generalizations others have described. I know many women who make the first move, are complimentary first, initiate intimate (physical or emotional) contact.
That doesn’t mean my friends or I have an antipathy towards stereotypical conventions, but that women as a rule are not monolithic in how things are done. It’s doesn’t make them exceptions to the rule, but evidence, perhaps, that these rules don’t exist as much as you think they do.
Anyway, shrug, I’ve said my bit and don’t think it’ll change your POV much anyway.
I like having a word for that, though I’m not in love with that word itself (and would not, therefore, fuck it).
I came out in 1980, with the new understandings of my newly minted gender identity. It had an effect on outcomes for me. Which is why I bother to share my story and stuff.
Before 1980, I definitely felt stranded on the sidelines and was worried something was wrong with me.
This has been my experience as well. I people watch quite a lot as I hang out and work at clubs, and the women at straight clubs act very different in flirting than at gay clubs, wild clubs, goth clubs, jazz and blues clubs, etc. Of course the world is not nightclubs and bars, but that seems to be where a lot of flirting and hook-ups occur. But yeah, we gals seem to have much more variety in types of flirting.
The boys seem to have very similar styles at all of the places, but the type of flirting seems to differ more by whether they are cis-get/gay/trans, rather than the venue. The goth boys act basically like the cis-het boys at Applebees. Except with more leather and spikes.
All you’re telling us is that you’re human, though. The experience is pretty much the same for a large number of men - and, I would guess, for women too - feeling baffled and left out by this whole pairing off and hooking up thing, assuming that every other guy has been handed a manual for stuff you don’t get, but getting better with age and practice at reading cues and responding appropriately. Hell, when I was 24 we had a house guest for a month whom I was hugely attracted to, we spent every day hanging out together and every night going out, but after a week of this she had to signal her attraction to me by marching into my room and dropping her dress to the floor. Bloody clueless, I was.
A teenager/young adult that felt like something was wrong with them and that they didn’t really “get it” the way others seemed to?
Wow.
Since I’m still struggling with how you express yourself, I’ve taken a couple of sentences from Post 74 and tried to edit them for concision:
“Although I’m interested in sex with her, instead of being deliberately flirtatious I prefer to acknowledge my own shyness and act in a way natural to me”.
Great for you, but not exactly ground-breaking, “watcher-of-the-skies-when-a-new-planet-swims-into-his ken” stuff.
Oh fuck, I am struggling to parse this, even in the context of your first sentence.
“If on top of that…” On top of what?
“… it has mostly to do with…” What has mostly to do with?
“…that those same thoughts” Which strange thoughts?
“…that she expressed that”. Gah! That what?
The best punt I can take at a interpreting your sentence is "From experience I find it best to assume that she’s doing the same’', which would give us:
Your writing is muddled and confused; it reads more like a transcript of speech than writing which has been composed to be read. Are you dictating?
For quite some time now I’ve had the strong conviction that AHunter3’s sexual identity issues would be best addressed by a good editor.
*** selects the changes that editor Penfeather made **
*** puts it back the way it was ***
*** goes off to read Penfeather’s book instead ***