This is hitting the generalization issue that runs through Ahunter3’s writing a lot; there are a ton of distinct subcultures of ‘straight men’ and ‘straight women’, and they all differ from each other in varying degrees. Do you really think there’s no difference in straight people trying to date/hook up at a church picnic vs casual hangout vs singles bar vs swingers club, or neighborhood bar vs college bar vs country bar vs dance club vs fetish club, or setup by parents vs setup by friends vs match.com vs tinder vs craigslist, or high school vs college vs blue collar workers vs white collar workers vs trust funders? You can find groups of straight people that differ from what AHunter3 is pointing to as the norm by more than Ahunter3 differs from it himself!
Well, that’s good. That’s a pretty clear and worthwhile purpose. I’m glad other people have found it helpful.
My next question would be, what is your purpose for the OP? Is it to solicit feedback? Is it to generate conversation? I notice the responses tend to be all over the place but I’m not really sure what you’re looking for.
Attention. 
Yes, publishers want to publish biographies/memoirs from people who already have a social media presence and a rapt following. They want the people with the millions of Instagram and Youtube and Facebook and Twitter followers. And you can’t really blame them–sadly, people are going to by vastly more copies of a tome of the deep thoughts of a Khloé Kardashian than they will a book about somebody that cured a disease or designed a microchip or got teased in middle-school. Therefore, the blog posts and the reposts here–so that the publishers will say “well, I’ve never heard of the guy, but there are a couple of dozen people critiquing his writing style on a message board, and the comments on his blog are pouring in by the ones and twos, let’s cut a three-book deal!”
The OP is one weekly blog post in a long line of blog posts. It probably doesn’t a whole lot of sense to ponder its purpose standalone (and for that reason it is admittedly an awkward fit as an OP on the Straight Dope. More about that in a moment).
Previous blog posts over the past months have often elicited comments and questions along the lines of “Hey AHunter3, can you give us some specifics about how your life or situation or experience is different, aside from the internal-mental fact that you think of yourself in this different way?” And along with that were quite a few questions and comments to the effect of “I don’t see why a male femme or whatever-you-wanna-call-yourself needs anything from the rest of the world in order to be feminine. You want to speak in a treble register or wear a tutu, go ahead, what do you need from the world, attention and applause or something?”
Well, the “ground zero” of where the difference makes a difference (as I said in the OP itself) is here, in the land of flirting and expressing sexual interest, because on the one hand it’s an area where male and female behaviors are pretty polarized and because on the other hand it’s not something that just about you, the individual, doing whatever you want, it’s about you, the individual, wanting and needing something from other people.
So it’s political, the flirting thing. It’s something where we, (the admittedly ill defined “we” that I have in mind as discussed above) need a socially shared expectation and would benefit from having it established. Young sissy-femme boykids would benefit from seeing it portrayed in movies and in books and on TV and whatnot; dating-age sissy-femme males would benefit from having a dating scene in which it is not so completely unexpected that some male people do flirt this way, and do so in hopes of meeting the unusual female people who like and respond and are potentially interested in them. Not that it can’t work without that preliminary “advertising” (it does; it did for me over the years) but the flirting-etc game depends so much on expectations and let’s face it, very few people are expecting the behavior I’ve described, so that it works at all is actually a little bit amazing.
This blog post fits in against the overall backdrop of the blog posts I’ve been doing all along — they’re all either about me and my book or social issues pertaining to gender and being genderqueer and specifically being a male gender invert and all that.
Now, about its presence on the Straight Dope as an OP: most of my readers are either on Facebook or the Straight Dope. Facebook is designed to let a person paste in a link and it parses the link and vóila, there’s an “ad” for the blog post that people can click through to read (or not, and skip it). Facebook has a bunch of “groups” that I am a member of: LGBTQIA and Supporters; GenderQueer Support & Talk; Genderqueers+; Nonbinary Femmes; Gender Outlaws; Transgender Support; LGBTS Allied; LGBTQ Writers; Gender Nonconformist; Non-Binary Gender Pride; etc; so my blog posts are akin to a weekly newspaper column in a student newspaper or something.
The Straight Dope doesn’t facilitate parsing links and its culture doesn’t support someone just pasting a link. So I asked the moderators around March of last year about the okayness of me echoing my blog posts as OPs here, and was told it was OK as long as they weren’t going to just be sales pitches for my book.
The Dope is obviously a much more general-purpose posting environment and I suspect it’s become annoying to some to have me recurrently posting on the same general topic (although that’s what the plan was all along). I don’t have a separate “purpose” in posting my blog posts here as opposed to referencing them elsewhere, other than the fact that more people engage and confront me here so it’s a good check against “preaching to the choir” which is a risk when posting such things to Nonbinary Femmes and so on.
How true
Well, one does what one can. The blog hasn’t transformed me into a media presence, that’s for damn sure, but I’ve enjoyed writing them and a few people read them at any rate, which is more than would be exposed to my ideas and thinking than if I hadn’t done a blog.
Interesting.
I haven’t found that to be true, and I’ve been to a pretty wide range of venues over the decades. In describing things it’s virtually impossible not to generalize, and in generalizing I leave out a lot of variation, but the overall patterns I’ve described are widespread norms even if the particulars of their expression may differ.
You haven’t noticed any difference in flirting depending on venue?
Interesting.
My experience has been that successful flirting differs strongly by venue because of the type of people at the venue.
I’m rather good at flirting in a few different types of scene. Dangerously good in some cases. But other scenes, not so much, or I’m completely ignored.
One thing that’s really not clear at all from your OP is how successful you are at flirting, regardless of how you developed any technique. If you go out to your favorite spot, can you reliably get someone to show you interest, or part of the time, or rarely? The OP almost reads as if you’re a non-human observer trying to categorize how humans go through flirting awareness and certain techniques. And I will say that a couple of the items you list are the secret to my flirting success, especially the eye contact.
But for all that people in here are accusing you of writing “me me me me me me…”, I don’t see that - instead I’m getting a sense of you being an outside observer in this case.
Oh, I have. But it’s like cerulean over here and morning-glory there and navy hither and teal over yonder and meanwhile in that other context it was aqua but I remember seeing some deep sapphire somewhere or other… and yet it’s all blue blue blue blue blue.
I’ve made some generalizations. Individual specific situations can appear to give the lie to the generalization, but if you look closely it’s mostly only to a marginal extent and doesn’t really contradict the generalization as generalization.
There are certainly exceptions at the individual level — the more individual the level the more exceptions you’ll see —but as is the case with all generalizations it’s a forest versus trees thing.
Heh! One factor that may be affecting how I come across is that I’m at this point a nearly 60 year old person who is in stable ongoing relationships. And I’m really writing about flirting as an endeavor being tried out by people when they’re first entering the fray, which means I’m describing a scene I’m 40 years removed from. Not that I never flirt any more, mind you.
It was very difficult to get any traction in my 20s. I got pretty good at it by my 30s though. Some of it was getting a better sense of who are these women who are most likely to find a guy like me fascinating? Intellectual feminists? Extremely butch women who present like stevedores? Tough minded businesswomen with sharky minds? Self-labeled wanton sluts and dommy women from the BDSM scene with whips in hand? All and none of that, strong women who were spectacularly self-defined, quirky, loner women, women who for one reason or another were looking outside the boxes and didn’t play by anyone else’s rules.
Sylv replied to my 1980 personal ad in the Albuquerque Journal, which started me on the personal-ad circuit long before the internet — and I’m not sure if personal ads are cheating as far as flirting-success or not —but she responded to how I was in person and found me cute. She was my first ongoing sexually-active adult-type relationship and it lasted 4 years with some interruptions.
I met Joy after a bit of a dry spell in 1985, just making friends with my friend’s date in college. They were poly and hence nonexclusive. This was probably my first real success with nonverbal connecting, we were having an entire conversation under the radar while drinking beer and playing cards and talking, without ignoring the other people in the room. And as we left she asked if she could talk to me in private. No passes were made but we verified a really special connection. Our first kiss wasn’t until a few weeks later and that’s all it was, a kiss, but it confirmed YESS!! I wasn’t imagining things… things went on from there and she was my most passionate in-love involvement to date.
Jean was more frontal in a gender-inverty way. We’d been in classes together and she started a conversation, invited me to dinner, then took me to her apartment. I wasn’t sure about the speed with which things were progressing and she laughed, “Are you worried that I won’t respect you in the morning?” and we got to talking about the gender stuff and all the expectations and restrictions and stuff. We stayed together for about four years.
Marian had been a self-identified lesbian and I met her at an art show where her work was featured and we talked a mile a minute and then made arrangements to go to a different exhibit elsewhere a week later. She was 17 years older (and a lesbian) and so I wasn’t thinking of the relationship in those terms but they kind of drifted that way anyhow. She liked how I was and said being a lesbian for her had never been about not finding male bodied attractive. She liked how I was. I was with her for about three years I guess.
My longest relationship was with Dee, the career businesswoman who had never really let anyone get close. She said I was the first person she trusted. We had a very passionate beginning. Oddly, I think the ways in which I was different from guys she had experienced before worked in my favor at first and then against me later. It was a twelve year relationship and anything of that duration is too complicated to thumbnail effectively.
allthegood and I met in 2010. We dated several times over the course of about six weeks with only gradual and slow sexual experimentation. Turned out she’d been advised repeatedly and emphatically by her own friends and advisors to not rush into sex, and was giving that a try, so neither of us was accelerating the process much. But she let me know she found me hot and appealing. I actually started dating her under the misconception that she didn’t feel free to pursue a sexual relationship with anyone at this time so I thought of the connection as a platonic friendship (didn’t keep me from flirting a bit). Later, she was the person who listened to my longwinded story and summarized the essential point back to me: “I get it. You’re a girl! It makes sense when I think of you that way”.
You are the only one who continues to tie your experiences to gender. Really, you are a normal guy who feels things more than your perception of other men. Are you sure that your experience is so different than others? To me, it seems that you idealize man and woman interactions and feel that you don’t fit the ideal. Welcome to the club, most of us feel this way. We can’t all be beautiful people, but we can have meaningful lives.
When people are faced with a phenomenon they want an explanation for, they theorize. The good theory has to account for the available data and ideally it makes predictions about things that aren’t already known, so we can see whether it describes and makes sense of the phenomenon above and beyond stitching together what we already knew.
There’s a difference between a theory and a research hypothesis. An hypothesis is an individual prediction that can be directly tested, whereas a theory is more of an attempt to interpret the whole phenomenon in a way that gives it meaning, and may contain some assertions less easily tested than others.
Yes, I think it is possible that normal guys are basically like me, but they aren’t talking about it. I’ve certainly thought and taught that the whole male sex role and the bundle of things associated with it, personalty and behavior and so on, is not good for anyone. But if that’s true, then I end up asserting that I’ve got a handle on it while the vast armies of normal guys are so damaged by it that they don’t realize what’s being done to them and aren’t doing anything about it. Or something of that ilk, anyway. That I’m more OK in the head than all the other guys. Even I am leery of a theory that depends so centrally on such an egocentric axiom.
My primary theory is that I’m different. Not uniquely so, but that I’m one of the outlyers, the exceptions to the rule. Here’s a theory that doesn’t demand an explanation for why the average guy isn’t strongly motivated to push back against these expectations and get quite angry about it. It says the average guy is having a different experience with all this than I am, not one without some overlap but somehow less of an everyday contradiction of who they are, more of an ongoing affirmation of who they are, instead.
Gender could be a red herring; it could be some other difference. But gender fits. From the first time I looked at it that way, it had that explaining power for me, it made sense of my life and had a good facility for making predictions that were borne out by subsequent experience. That doesn’t make it Truth. It could turn out that gender is a single factor among many. (I certainly have an attitude towards centralized authority and authoritarianism, and towards money and capitalism and the distribution of resources, and although I see connections between how we’ve got gender socially structured, it might make more sense to describe those things from within other theories when I talk to people about them). But if it isn’t Truth, it has, for me, earned a place as the Operant Theory, the thing I use as my model of reality even as I continue to test it for its explanatory powers.
What beautiful people? 
** rereads ** Oh, no, you’ve got that backwards. I never wanted to be them, I went to a fair amount of effort to not resemble them lest people categorize me as one of them, and it was always important to be seen as beautiful and hence NOT like them. I’ve outgrown the sense of being oh so superior to conventional masculine males —they’re people too, different from me but not inferior, and meanwhile I have my own foibles and weaknesses and character issues — but I never wanted to emulate them, and it’s hard not to feel insulted even now when people say “oh you’re just like any other ordinary guy”. More on that in my next blog post.
You are the exception to what rule?
The couplet rule. ex. 88 Lines About 44 Women.
General rules about personality and behavior that attribute them as gender.
That kind of stuff, IvoryTowerDenizen, in particular.
Those are stereotypes rather than rules. Plus, I don’t agree that flirting falls so firmly along gendered lines. I think there are stereotypes about how girls and guys flirt. These are portrayed in movies and magazines, but I don’t see them so strictly played out in real life. I know quiet guys and women who take the lead and everyone in between.
I can’t imagine there are useful guidelines for men who fit one stereotype vs another, since what works with flirting is mostly dependent on the interest of who is receiving the attention. And there are few hard and fast rules about them either. It’s a chemistry thing and that will always be variable.
You must be going to either some REALLY straightlaced swinger clubs or some really wild church picnics if you don’t see any difference in how people interested in the opposite sex interact there. The content of a lot of craigslist ‘looking for’ ads will get you kicked right off of match.com. I’ve seen dudes come to a kink-oriented get together at a bar and manage to get themselves banned by doing stuff that’s fine in their usual hangouts.
I think part of why your writing falls flat for so many people is that your experiences are fairly limited and viewed through a strong filter for conventional gender roles. You’re eagerly presenting what you see as this utterly unique thing applicable specifically to a femmy boy in an overwrought, confusing writing style, but when someone puts in the effort to dig through the deliberately unclear writing it turns out that you’re describing an experience that’s true for so many non-fem guys that it’s a common trope, and the takeaway advice is also pretty bland and ordinary.
The reminds me of the scene in total recall where Quaid is describing his preference for the girl in his fake vacation and thinks he’s describing something incredibly unique but it’s actually the first choice on the list the doctor pulls up: https://youtu.be/hJXx9HE2Rm4?t=97
If you’re seeing everything as blue, it’s possible that everything you’re looking at is blue. But it’s also possible that you’re wearing lenses that filter everything to ‘blue’ when you’re not looking at yourself, and I think that’s what’s actually happening here.