Maybe both? It seems these two things mean the same to my eye.
Your OP wasn’t an invitation for a conversation. So you’re relieved we’re having one now?
I don’t think anyone disagrees that straight men and straight women, as groups, have different ways of attracting and communicating interest in and to the opposite sex. It’s how we’ve been socialized, yes, but in a rational sense, its about appealing to the orientation of the person you’re trying to attract. So if a woman is going to a bar, she knows her legs get her attention from guys, and so she’s going to wear something that shows them off. What she’s NOT going to do is wear a muscle shirt because “that’s what guys do and I’m speaking their language.”
It’s your generalities that are problematic, not the notion that flirting is a gendered behavior. Let’s go back to long hair. If I were to write a guide to flirting for female women, would it occur to me to make the unqualified statement that men like long-haired women? No it would not. For one, where does that leave female women without long hair? Are they now going to have to put on wigs just flirt? For two, while the majority of straight men may be attracted to long hair, plenty are flexible in their preferences. Being confident in your look matters more than hair length.
The existence of rigid definitions is in your head. Really it is.
I don’t understand why your guide to flirting is so lengthy when the actual guidance part could be reduced to “be yourself”. I mean, think about it. All you’re telling femme guys to do is to go at it like women do. But if femme men are naturally inclined towards the feminine anyway, there is no need for them to mimic women to flirt. They could just be their natural selves and let the cards fall where they may. Eventually they will land on a woman that is attracted to them.
Where in your blog did you make this clear? I only see unqualified statements about women, not a special subset.
Right, and we’re trying to tell you that your writing style is not conducive to this goal. But you don’t believe us.
The problem with generalities is they fall apart at the individual. Perhaps women generally act like this and men generally act like that, but that is useless in a guide geared for individual humans, who may only share a subset (if any) of these stereotypical qualities.
I’m part of a family of three daughters and the four of us share some traits, naturally, and yet we have dramatic differences in our stereotypical female qualities despite being all girls and all raised in the same family. Generalizations tend to fall apart too quickly at the individual to be useful in guiding individual behavior.
I hate to be all militant black girl, but the statement that “women love long-haired men” guys sounds so…white. Where does this notion leave women who love black men? Where does that leave femmy guys who don’t do the long-haired thing?
So I’m wondering how much of your generalizations apply only to a subset of white folks, AHunter3. How much of your feminism is intersectional?
The statement that “women love long-haired men” was reflective of the kind of things that might run through my own head if I were pondering being flirtatious. It’s obviously not true of all women and wouldn’t be of much relevance to guys who don’t have long hair. A fair extrapolation would be “be aware of your best features, the ones that have attracted attention in the past, and feel confident about those and draw some attention to them”.
A butch / masculine woman who is totally repelled by the orthodox female ways of flirting has options that aren’t entirely mirror-image so let’s take this back to the case at hand.
If a man is going to a bar, he’s far more likely to get success doing things that the women at the bar understand to be male ways of flirting. But if he’s so totally not into the “man thing” that he’s repelled by the orthodox male ways of flirting (for reasons I’ve blathered on at great length already), he’s not going to do that. It would be bad advice to a guy in general to flirt using the modalities that women do (as I myself said in the OP) but for this particular guy it has the benefit of being something that’s only likely to elicit a response from women who are specifically into feminine guys.
There’s more than a modicum of truth to that. It is mostly about “be yourself”.
So is dancing, especially the free-form kind that doesn’t involve memorizing a bunch of moves and steps. It still helps, for someone who is standing on the sidelines protesting “but I dont know how to dance”, to explain a bit about loosening up, tuning in to the music and moving with it; it helps to provide examples and encouragement.
A couple of years back there was bad flooding from a hurricane remnant in Columbia, SC, and I helped with loading/transporting/unloading a U-Haul full of bottled water down there. The distribution center directed us to take the load to a shopping center parking lot where we met up with a group of black volunteers stationed there to leave the water with them. I noticed that every one of the young black men in the group had long dreadlocks. I’m not sure what was up with that–a religious thing? If it is a general fad, it hasn’t reached Upstate SC, because I never see black men (or, for that matter, men or women of any color) with dreadlocks up here.
So, a guy with long hair is likely to attract women who like long hair. A guy who acts typically “masculine” is likely to attact women who like masculine men, and a “femmy” guy who acts feminine is more likely to attract women who are into feminine men.
I feel like we’re really breaking new ground here. Weird, wild stuff.
Do you see why this kind of self-centered thinking can undermine your credibility as a writer?
Hey this is a great advice, and the cool thing about it is that it’s applicable regardless of gender!
Can you describe these orthodox male ways of flirting? I don’t know what you really mean, and it’s mainly because your “blather” is essentially a chain of circumlocutions.
Not if your advice has them doing things that come unnatural to them, all in the attempt to mirror what women do.
I don’t know what it is, but this doesn’t feel like feminism to me.
Not saying I doubt that AHunter3 is a feminist. What I doubt is that this particular line of thinking is really feminist… Or feminist as I personally would define it, anyway, as targeted toward gender equality. The fact that gender is part of the discussion is insufficient for it to qualify.
It’s more like PUA for people who aren’t assholes.
I’m fairly certain what we’re seeing is not ethno-centrism as much as AHunter3-centrism. He has a very difficult time separating his subjective experience from the experience of others.
So with the hair thing, because he’s experienced women admiring his hair, this means women love long hair. All the hordes of women not all that enthralled with long hair fall outside his awareness because they don’t advertise their preferences. End result is these women don’t factor into his generalities.
All in the attempt to mirror what they perceive women to be doing. If someone is consciously modeling their behavior after someone else, then I wonder what keeps them from becoming laughable caricatures of that model.
I had a coworker a few years back. She was not the girliest girl in the world, but I would categorize her as a feminine person. And boy, was she a big ole flirt. She flirted with everyone–male and female–because she craved attention and wanted to be liked. She would actually cry when she thought she wasn’t liked (which drove me up the wall, but whatever). And she was largely successful in being liked. But her flirt game would have been a horrible role model for someone like me. Like, I love to laugh, but I’m not going to laugh at every little thing someone does just to get them to like me. I don’t do the fake-laugh very well. And a big part of her flirt game was laughing and saying “Oh, (insert guy’s name), you are sooo FUNNY!” Often said with a playful slap on the arm.
If I had to generalize, I would say the ability to gush in a sincere-sounding way is a hallmark feature of the feminine flirt game. That’s not to say that AHunter3’s other features aren’t a part of it, but those aren’t the things that come to my mind when I think of a flirtatious woman.
And yet, I would never tell someone (femmy guy or femmy woman) that they should do the big laughing “you are soooo funny!” thing to signal their romantic interest. Because it seems to me that if you have be consciously taught something like this, then that means it’s not a natural thing for you. Which means it’s not “you”.
At any rate, there are so many ways to be a feminine flirt. Some of them overtly feminine and others much more subtle (which I suspect would probably be more suitable to the average femmy guy anyway). The OP doesn’t indicate any awareness of this diversity. Notice how the “femmy boy” gets his own gendered box, but “women” are treated as a homogenous group.
Here’s a major problem with your writing: the original blog entry doesn’t actually say that anywhere, and pretty much the only way that someone is going to extrapolate that message from what you wrote is if they already know it. Also, while the extrapolated bit it true and somewhat useful, it’s not really that deep of advice - there really should be more meat behind as many words as you wrote than a short relatively generic piece of advice that also doesn’t have anything in particular to do with being a ‘Femmy’ boy in the first place.
Yep. A homogeneous group that he ascribes characteristics to that he has or wants to have, so then he says he’s a girl because he has or wants to have those characteristics.
So is the purpose of the blog to help other people like you? Is it that you’re positioning yourself as someone who has overcome these struggles and has advice to hand down?
If that’s the case, what do you think is unique about your advice? Do you think this is something non-gender conforming people routinely struggle with? Do you perceive that they struggle with it in the exact way that you have? I have no idea what the answer is, I’m just trying to understand the purpose of the writing.
As opposed to the huge library of other personal testimonials and recommendations by male femininine folks who don’t wish to follow the expectations attached to their biological sex in our society?
Yes, and sort of, in that order.
I’ve spent 38 years trying to connect with “a community of my people” so that I could get advice from them as well as join my voice to theirs. What I discovered instead is a wasteland of no-voices-heard, with some little oases here and there.
There’s the pissy truculent “nice boys” who complain that girls and women say guys should stop being pushy and aggressive about sex but then they get involved with pushy and aggressive guys while ignoring the nice guys. Except guess what, those nice guys aren’t organized or speaking with their own voice. We hear of their perspective second-hand, from women complaining about them! (Not that I’d embrace the overall agenda attributed to them or anything but in a certain sense “they are us”)
There are individual celebrities who present as feminine but who say very little specific on the topic of what it means to be that way. (It has a lot more octane as a mysterious and understated thing that is exhbited but goes unspoken)
Over the years while trying to speak out or raise consciousness and make this stuff an issue, I’ve had guys, individuals or a couple or three from a small audience, etc, come up to me and say they’ve been thinking such things for years but never read or heard any confirmation and therefore didn’t know how to put it into words.
It’s changing. There are a lot of younger males who identify as nonbinary, as genderqueer (like me), or simply as gender nonconformists. With a few old farts like me joining in.