Instead of an infinitely long list of “yes it is OK to do activity X1, and X2, and X3, and X4, …etc that are associated with girls and women and it doesn’t make you gay”, I am saying “It is OK to be 101% like one of the girls in each and every conceivable way that you can think of, to the point that you’re more like one of the girls and have more in common with the girls than you do with the other guys and even then it doesn’t relegate you to being gay”.
Since you recognize the problem we’re really just talking tactical differences here…
… but you see me as saying THIS:
“If it so happens that you like Activities X1, X2, etc, hey that makes you a male girl”
… and I don’t think I’ve ever said anything of the sort.
too-late attempted ETA: Also, the little boys aren’t so much worried that it will “make them gay”, so much as they are worried that they will be picked on for “being gay”, or for being sissified / girl-like etc. So why not give them an example-person who says “Damn right I’m a sissy boy, a girlish male, and I like being this way and hey just for the record I happen to be attracted to girls as well as being a lot like them, and I’m tired of your shit, you butch assholes” ?
In your OP, you said that flirting was a female things, and that no one talks about men flirting “All I can say is, if all guys learn this and do this, there sure is an odd dearth of anyone talking about it!”. I found half a dozen articles in popular media discussing men flirting and how men should flirt without expending any real effort. That’s a good example both of you projecting your internalized view of something being inflexibly gendered onto the world, and of you ignoring evidence to the contrary.
There’s several textbots around that can generate limitless content-free text using overly convoluted language and saying nothing of import. It’s trivial to a web page and grab 10 paragraphs of stuff like the material quoted below without any real effort, being verbose without saying anything doesn’t even require a human anymore, a machine can do the job better and quicker than you can.
Because kids don’t think like adults? They DON’T want to call themselves “sissies”. And perhaps those “butch assholes” will realize, “hey, it’s also okay to do things that are girl-like, and it doesn’t make you gay/a sissy”, etc.
THAT is my point. You’re thinking like an adult – I’m looking at it from the point of view of a kid, who generally wants to be able to like what they like, but NOT have to take on a new label they might not identify with. (Whether it’s gay, sissy, male-girl, etc)
Bloody hell, I managed to completely miss this earlier.
Excellent editing catch. And I understand that you’re using this as a representative example and saying I do it often.
Honestly, I dash off the blog posts with maybe twice the attention I pay to a general run-of-the-mill SDMB post. I’m sloppy. I love to write (the easy part, the dashing it off part) but once having done so I have a hard time editing my own nonfiction theory because since I know what I mean I don’t see where I am not being clear about what I mean, you know what I mean?
With the book manuscript, I’ve used beta readers who did what you did, and I’ve had editors and proofreader volunteers go at it for clarity, but it also benefits from being narrative, like a fiction story, and the sentence structure thereof is a bit less rococo.
I didn’t mean to ignore you on this post. This was thoughtful and helpful and I thank you for it.
Well, I came to my own realizations at the ripe old age of 21, and I myself had grown up coterminously with women’s lib and the social notion that sauce for the goose was sauce for the gander, that it was sexist to judge someone of one sex for doing something that would be appropriate for the other sex. And trust me, the latter was most definitely not sufficient. The surrounding world, most relevantly the dating world, was causing it to Make A Difference.
It’s ultimately more political than anything else. It’s not about “I’m a special snowflake, look at what oddly different patterns I have”; it’s about “I am redefining what you, the world, have made of my difference. I don’t fucking care for your take on it, here’s how I want that difference to be thought of”.
You seem completely oblivious to the fact that your writing promulgates gender expectations. What do you think you’re pushing against?! Everything that I’ve read from you indicates you believe that certain characteristics are what makes men men and women women.
What I DON’T see you saying is that gender is a social construct, that historically gendered behaviors are now shared among men and women, and that there is no need to view boys who like the color pink and sparkly things as acting outside their gender because there’s nothing abnormal about a boy liking pink and sparkly things. These are ideas that would actually challenge antiquated notions about gender. But these aren’t your positions.
Boys, in your view, who like “girly things” are not really boys. They are rare, aberrant creatures, and they should consider themselves girls.
Read what I bolded. Can you honestly not see that by treating girls as a fungible block, you reinforce the idea that girls not only act the same way but they act distinctly unlike boys? Like, instead of talking about the two genders as if there is significant overlap in traits (which is the case), you’re talking about them as if they are two separate species with a canyon of difference between them.
Being “101% like one of the girls” is gibberish. Which girls? And why would these girls typify girlness any more than any other set? And how likely is it that anyone (make or female) would be 100% like this imagined subset of girls and have absolutely nothing in common with other boys?
What you’re saying only makes sense if you subscribe to boxing people by their gender.
Yep. And it’s not just girly things, it was (at least in some previous threads) basically being a decent human being. “Boys are nasty. Girls are nice. I’m nice, so I’m a girl.”
You have no right to control of what people think of you or your worldview. You certainly have the right to request how people treat you. If you could come up with some concrete ways people should treat you that are different then I think the conversation would be useful. But I see no reason to extrapolate those responses to an ill-defined, arbitrary, and contradictory class of people, even if you you identify those responses.
You’re providing evidence for a point that doesn’t need supporting. I mean, I just wrote that certain expectations are still tied to gender! What ever makes you think I’m begging for proof that water is wet?
What I’m asking you to show is an example of a “behavioral code or rule” that men are never allowed to deviate from. You frequently allude to these rules in your writings, but I never see you talk specifics. I’m asking you to do this.
There’s this annoying creature called “I’m not like other girls.” They aren’t necessarily overtly “tom boys”, yet they often talk about how they are a “guy trapped in a woman’s body”. They use every opportunity to talk about how they aren’t like other girls.
“Other girls” only like chick flicks and romcoms. They don’t read anything but romance and horrible mystery novels. They cry all the time and play emotional games. They are neurotic and superficial. If they even have a hobby, it’s something vapid like shopping or watching reality TV shows. “Other girls” get traumatized by mere catcalling. They don’t know how to tell someone to “fuck off”; they only know how to cry and play the victim. “Other girls” aren’t cool. They get offended easily. They can’t take a joke. They can’t laugh at themselves. They don’t do fun things. All they do is nag and sulk and roll their eyes and cry.
“Other girls” always manage to fulfill every crappy female stereotype out there.
But the “not like other girls” are none of these things. They are special! And they always want you to know it. Maybe they make a big deal out of their identity because they are visibly indistinguishable from “other girls”. They don’t want to face the discrimination that “other girls” deserved get. They want to be treated as individuals, not like the “other girls”.
And they will assert their differentness even in the company of women who are no more like the “other girl” stereotype than they are. Yet these women don’t find the need to bash “other girls” because they know it’s a concept that doesn’t exist.
I’m going to say something controversial. I think many women go through a phase in their 20s when we feel it necessary to distinguish ourselves from the “other girls”. But after a certain age, we outgrow that habit because we realize how annoying the “not like other girls” creature is. She doesn’t just make a big deal about how special she is–which is annoying all by itself. No, she also denigrates and tears down other women, and in doing so, she perpetuates the shit that all women have to deal with.
And it really, really, really, really, really shows. That’s what we have been telling you all along. You are writing the blog as an attempt to build an audience that will want to buy your book. Which means that you want to put your best work forward, not sloppy ramblings that you pull out of your ass on the spur of the moment, which is what you have just admitted to. And you have continued to dash off sloppy posts for years, and continued to get almost no traffic, and you continue to do the same quarter-assed job! That is truly delusional.
I’m late to the party re: engaging Millenials/young folk, but throwing this in.
Overall, my undergrads have sophisticated and progressive attitudes about gender/sexual fluidity. I skip the first few chapters in my gender studies textbook because students already have an in-depth understanding about socially-constructed gender roles. I don’t think your work would engage these readers, it’s old hat.
AH3, I do really like some of your work. The stuff I can’t trudge through is very Judith Butler (I’m certain you are well versed in her work). Many folks worship her work, I find it obfuscatory and complex just to be complex. For the uninitiated, this passage from Diacritics won a bad writing award:
“The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.”
I am not unaware that some people on this board think so. You’ve said so. Guinastasia has said so. Etc.
I’ll say the same thing to you that I said to her: I’ve replied to this assertion many times at this point and I’d like to know if you can repeat back to me what my stance has been. Because I’m curious to know whether you understand and disagree, or simply do not realize that I’ve replied, or can’t make heads or tails of what my reply meant.
We’ve already established that there is a culturally shared notion that girls and boys are different, whether you as an individual or I as an individual believe that notion is correct or not.
We’ve discussed the probabiliy that as a generalization some of these attributed differences between the sexes may in fact exist, as opposed to being nothing but a sexist myth. That doesn’t negate the existence of exceptions to the rule but neither do the exceptions to the rule make a generalization, as a generalization, a political evil or a factually wrong statement.
Quit stating that every fucking time I reference that I am “boxing people by their gender”. I am not.
I am reminded of some WASP people at a 1950s country club who said that Jewish people making so much sturm and drang about anti-semitism were themselves emphasizing a difference that we should be ignoring in the name of fairness, because the goal was to be appropriately oblivious to such private differences. They had Jewish club members, they didn’t discriminate, and Jewish people were allowed to go to colleges and so if anyone was being bigoted it was obviously the people making statements about anti-semitism — they were the ones bringing it up!
Define “never allowed” in such a way that it diverges appreciably and discernably from “is perceived to violate expectations”.
And link to a couple of places where I have said that male people are NEVER ALLOWED to do something. I don’t recall ever having said anything of the sort. I have said things like “male bodied people have to operate against the backdrop of an expectation …” or “the male person who behaves this way is likely to to have that behavior interpreted as…” and things like that — a hell of a lot more nuanced than anything remotely akin to the rigidity and absoluteness of “NEVER ALLOWED”.
There’s an essential difference between the situation you’re describing and my situation (and rhetoric). If you look at women as a whole (and generalize about them yet again) women in general have risen up against the imposed blanket of sexist beliefs and assumptions about how they are, or how they are supposed to be.
For all that it is true that a good portion of femininity-conformity is imposed upon female people by other female people, ranging from who performs the clitoridectomies in the places where they are practiced to who it is who makes disparaging catty remarks about an athletic Tonya Harding who doesn’t skate with the feminine grace of a Nancy Kerrigan, it is still not true that female people who don’t match / don’t wish to match the feminine description predominantly experience the pressure to conform to it from members of their own sex. Generalizing always oversimplified but in general women have rejected those stricture and favored more freedom for each other, and have found their progress impeded far more often by men.
But for male people not matching / not wishing to match the masculine description, it is our experience that it is being imposed by men. And that there’s no contrasting male group voice of anything rebellious against that, pushing back, that men in general can be said to have engaged in and embraced. “Male feminists” are perceived as taking their stance for the benefit of women (for social justice and fairness reasons) not for their own sake. “Men’s libbers” are perceived as anti-feminist men’s rights people.
Women as individuals who feel oppressed (or just seriously annoyed and irritated) by the “femininity” thing have less reason and less excuse for self-defining as “not one of those typical girls” precisely because women in the aggregate have said (if not precisely in a unified voice) that the “femininity” thing is a load of unfair bullshit.
Men collectively are not having “manhood” imposed on us from the outside such that we’re all in this boat together as people defined and pushed into it. Males, individually, yes, but the people doing the imposing and the pushing are MEN, overwhelmingly so.
I would blow the bugle and call male people to rise up for our own sake against it if I judged that that was the best way to package the concept, to attain the communication. I don’t think it is. Instead, it’s “sissy lib”. We need to push back against the plurality called “men” who have, in the aggregate, attempted to impose the “masculine” thing on us, and who still represent the most violent and insistent reaction to our sissy existence.
I like the way that you adopt a deliberately convoluted, confusing writing style, then get irate if people don’t read and remember every high word-count, low content post that you’ve made over the course of years. It’s like some kind of performance art.