Yeah this whole " beards are manly? I had no idea!" thing makes me think he’s just messing with us.
Or else he gets his fashion tips from People of Walmart. 
Naaah, beards aren’t manly–beards are “male personly.”
Start with the OP of this thread and consider it to be rather central.
I can tell you that there were other things, prior things, things that I had become aware of as far back as 3rd grade, but the truth is that none of those other things changed my attitude that “it doesn’t matter, so what if I’m a boy who is more like girls in this way (and that way etc) than I resemble other boys, it’s OK for a boy to be more like girls than he is like other boys”.
Dating and sex dynamics made it messy and complicated and made other people’s attitudes and opinions relevant in a way they had not been previously.
It’s probably partly illusory (some evidence suggests a huge part of our “memories” are somewhat illusory) but I seem to be the same me that I was when I was 5. Things have happened since then but the “core me” is still me.
Talk about coincidence.
everyone has told you the OP is tedious, and opaque…
the comportment you present, it seems to me you want to create the role of an instructor for yourself - lecturing - and you are stuck in a vision of the gender stereotypes of your specific youth and in the intellectual frameworks of the 1980s literary theory and the similar and that very sterile and tedious obfuscational form of writing that was - maybe still is in their small circles - preferred. (the term paper writing as someone said a little above)
it is not a discourse or an approach that is going to have a wide audience or a wide success as the threads here keep showing.
The response quoted above, it is the response of a professor to the student.
You are not the professor to any reader here and the professor voice, it is not going to be convincing or seductive…
Unuseful to bother telling you as your ears are closed, but voila, this is the truth as demonstrated in your demarches so far.
That’s not really true. Several people on this board have told me that, true enough, but I had someone tell me something entirely different after reading the same post: that reading it helped make concrete some tings they had been feeling and thinking more vaguely for a long time, and that readint this helped them clarify some thoughts and gave them hope.
No one’s keeping you here. Add/drop privileges have been extended indefinitely.
Dear brainstall:
This question has been asked before, and I forgot you weren’t a participant at the time. In this thread from October 2017, an earlier blog post, people kept after me to post “specifics”. I didn’t want to do that because any individual characteristic that I might mention would yeild some male respondends saying “I have that characteristic, are you saying that I’m not a ‘real man’, are you saying that I, too, need to identify as a ‘male girl’?”, and would invariably also yield some female people replying that “Excuse me but that characteristic doesn’t apply to me, so are you saying I’m not a ‘real woman’?”
And I didn’t want to create a “litmus test” quiz for whether a person is or is not “feminine” because it wasn’t any characteristic or set of characteristics that I had that made me say “Ooh, if I am like that, that ‘makes me feminine’, so I guess I’m a girl”.
People identify for reasons they themselves may not be fully aware of. And they don’t usually do it by making a list like that. It’s both more overall-holistic and less deductive-logic than that. It’s a sense of “these are the people who are like me”. In the transgender community, it is accepted that your gender identity is what you say it is. People aren’t asked for femininity-credentials.
When I did finally yield to the repeated and insistent requests to provide some specifics, in this post, people did exactly what I was afraid they were going to do and interpreted it as meaning that I was saying it was a checklist and that anyone who answered “yes that describes me” was feminine whether they thought of themselves as feminine or not and anyone sho answered “that doesn’t seem to describe me at all” was not feminine even if they were female people who had never questioned their identity as woman or girl.
People said it proved I had an unduly rigid notion of gender, because I obviously thought this checklist of characteristics “made me a girl” and wasnt savvy to the notion that I could be like this and still be a man or boy, and that that was my problem, that I had internalized a really inflexible concept of how you have to be in order to be a man, and that I believed that my “yes” to these checklist items meant I wasn’t a man and was a woman or girl instead.
And, as anticipated, people raised their hands and said “Well I don’t match that description at all and I am a woman. Or I thought I was. Gee, I guess I’m really a man or something, ha ha” and “Well, yeesh, your answers sound a lot like me, why do you think this makes you different and special, I’m male and all this is true for me, but I don’t go around telling people I’m a ‘male girl’.”
When you asked the question in this thread, I directed your attention to the OP of this thread. I said the characteristics described there are more important than most other things because the ones described there “make a difference” — that unlike, say, tending to sit with my legs crossed and being told by other boys that I sit like a girl, which I could reply to by saying “yeah, so?” and dismissing it, the world of courting and flirting and dating specifically means needing something from other people, and being put in a position where not meeting expectations had important negative consequences.
There was nothing concrete in your advice about flirting, though. So it’s a mystery why this person would use that word. As I pointed out earlier, there is not even an attempt to explain how to initiate conversation, which is the biggest hurdle in connecting with someone. And what does the femme guy do if the woman isn’t doing anything that he can “mirror”? Your advice presumes women are all going to be receptive to and sending out the same kind of signals. If she’s special enough to be drawn to a femme man, she’s isn’t going to be easily reducible to feminine stereotypes, but your writing does not indicate a consideration of this.
If the person who gave you that positive feedback is not a very astute or experienced person, they likely lack the frame of reference to critique your ideas. Which is really why you should be careful putting it on equal plane with people (like women) that do have that frame of reference.
He wants to engage in his professor fantasy lecturing…
it is entertaining to read the responses at least. Like entertainment of reading the commentary on the bad movie.
Ah, my favorite internet gambit: the invisible supporter.
Quite frankly, like most of your writing, it was basically a bunch of pseudo-intellectual jargon.
Maybe you’re better off just keeping a diary. I mean, you obviously love to psycho-analyze the shit out of this stuff, but it seems it’s more for your own personal benefit, not for anyone else’s.
And I can’t imagine being the same person as when I was five. I’m not even the same person I was when I was twenty-five. And I don’t WANT to be.
And I don’t think anyone wants to listen to a lecture from someone who is stuck with a five-year-old’s self-concept and perceptions. Especially in the context of gender and sex.
This thread just keeps on giving.