I do not understand this “male privilege" bullshit.
What. Fucking. Privileges. Do. Men. Have.???????
Name them. I swear, I challenge you to name these “male privileges" and be able to prove them.
Come on, I fucking dare you.
Name them!
Oh boy. Well, as a man, I’ll tell you my male privilege.
My odds of being hired for a job, when competing against female applicants, are probably skewed in my favor. The more prestigious the job, the larger the odds are skewed.
I can be confident in the fact that my co-workers won’t think that I was hired/promoted because of my sex – despite the fact that it’s probably true.
If I ever am promoted when a woman of my peers is better suited for the job, it is because of my sex.
If i ever fail at my job or career, it won’t be seen as a blacklist against my sex’s capabilities.
I am far less likely to face sexual harassment than my female peers.
If I do the same task as a woman, and if the measurement is at all subjective, chances are people will think I did a better job.
If I am a teen or an adult, and I stay out of prison, my odds of getting raped are relatively low.
On average, I’m taught that walking alone after dark by myself is less than dangerous than it is for my female peers.
If I choose not to have children, my masculinity will not be questioned.
If I do have children but I do not provide primary care for them, my masculinity will not be questioned.
If I have children and I do care for them, I’ll be praised even if my care is only marginally competent.
If I have children and a career, no one will think I’m selfish for not staying at home.
If I seek political office, my relationship with my children or who I deem to take care of them will more often not be scrutinized by the press.
My elected representatives are mostly people of my own sex. The more prestigious the position, the more this is true.
When i seek out “the person in charge", it is likely that they will be someone of my own sex. The higher the position, the more often this is true.
As a child, chances are I am encouraged to be more active and outgoing than my sisters.
As a child, I could choose from an almost infinite variety of children’s media featuring positive, active, non-stereotyped heroes of my own sex. I never had to look for it; male protagonists were (and are) the default.
As a child, chances are I got more teacher attention than girls who raised their hands just as often.
If my day, week or year is going badly, I need not ask of each negative episode or situation whether or not it has sexist overtones. (Nobody’s going to ask if I’m upset because I’m menstruating.)
I can turn on the television or glance at the front page of the newspaper and see people of my own sex widely represented.
If I’m careless with my financial affairs it won’t be attributed to my sex.
If I’m careless with my driving it won’t be attributed to my sex.
I can speak in public to a large group without putting my sex on trial.
Even if I sleep with a lot of women, there is little to no chance that I will be seriously labeled a “slut,” nor is there any male counterpart to “slut-bashing.”
I do not have to worry about the message my wardrobe sends about my sexual availability.
My clothing is typically less expensive and better-constructed than women’s clothing for the same social status. While I have fewer options, my clothes will probably fit better than a woman’s without tailoring.
The grooming regimen expected of me is relatively cheap and consumes little time.
If I buy a new car, chances are I’ll be offered a better price than a woman buying the same car. The same goes for other expensive merchandise.
If I’m not conventionally attractive, the disadvantages are relatively small and easy to ignore.
I can be loud with no fear of being called a shrew. I can be aggressive with no fear of being called a bitch.
I can ask for legal protection from violence that happens mostly to men without being seen as a selfish special interest, since that kind of violence is called “crime” and is a general social concern. (Violence that happens mostly to women is usually called “domestic violence” or “acquaintance rape,” and is seen as a special interest issue.)
I can be confident that the ordinary language of day-to-day existence will always include my sex. “All men are created equal,” mailman, chairman, freshman, he.
My ability to make important decisions and my capability in general will never be questioned depending on what time of the month it is.
I will never be expected to change my name upon marriage or questioned if I don’t change my name.
The decision to hire me will not be based on assumptions about whether or not I might choose to have a family sometime soon.
Every major religion in the world is led primarily by people of my own sex. Even God, in most major religions, is pictured as male.
Most major religions argue that I should be the head of my household, while my wife and children should be subservient to me.
If I have a wife or live-in girlfriend, chances are we’ll divide up household chores so that she does most of the labor, and in particular the most repetitive and unrewarding tasks.
If I have children with my girlfriend or wife, I can expect her to do most of the basic childcare such as changing diapers and feeding.
If I have children with my wife or girlfriend, and it turns out that one of us needs to make career sacrifices to raise the kids, chances are we’ll both assume the career sacrificed should be hers.
Assuming I am heterosexual, magazines, billboards, television, movies, pornography, and virtually all of media is filled with images of scantily-clad women intended to appeal to me sexually. Such images of men exist, but are rarer.
In general, I am under much less pressure to be thin than my female counterparts are. If I am over-weight, I probably suffer fewer social and economic consequences for being fat than over-weight women do.
If I am heterosexual, it’s incredibly unlikely that I’ll ever be beaten up by a spouse or lover.
Complete strangers generally do not walk up to me on the street and tell me to “smile.”
Sexual harassment on the street virtually never happens to me. I do not need to plot my movements through public space in order to avoid being sexually harassed, or to mitigate sexual harassment.
On average, I am not interrupted by women as often as women are interrupted by men.
On average, I will have the privilege of not knowing about my male privilege.
And lastly, I am taken as a more credible feminist than my female peers, despite the fact that the feminist movement is not liberating to my sex.
I will forever support fellow poc girls who have to wax and shave because if they grow it out white girls wouldn’t think of it as feminism but they’ll just say “she’s hairy and dirty” and call her a “monkey”
But when a white girl has like three hairs on her armpit from growing it out for months she’s “brave” and a “role model ”
If you only support “attractive” white chicks with armpit hair while mocking poc women for something they can’t control, as in facial hair, chest hair, leg hair, thick back and neck hair.
You aren’t a feminist.
You’re a racist
a lot of young people say that fanfic made them think abuse was okay, and I think it’s disingenuous to say they’re all lying. but why is this suddenly a problem? this is my theory as to why it’s no longer an understood thing that fandom is about fiction & fantasy.
really good stuff
I’ve said it before– if young people are getting their primary education on consent and sexual relationships from fandom they have already been failed.
And I say this as someone who got my primary education on consent and sexual relationships from fandom, and for whom it worked out pretty well. I mined a ton of good stuff out of fandom and discussions around fandom. But the fact that there was a void of education in my life that I had to fill on my own is not on fandom. That’s on society and rape culture and our puritanical education system.
[First post is screenshots of a twitter thread; here’s the text of it.]
something I think about a lot is how fandom talks to each other.
i suppose that’s obvious, but not just the antagonistic vitriol. the hyper-ramps of joy feedback can produce similarly hyperbolic language.
almost a year ago I got a multi-comment ask from an anti who told me that ‘bad ships’ almost led them into some real life abusive situations in her dating life. I didn’t respond because I wanted to think about it. and while the framework of my feelings was formed 1 month later–
–I’ve been fleshing that out ever since. because she’s not alone in saying this happened – she read smutfic and later felt her impressions were screwed up by them – but why? why is this suddenly a complaint?
and i think it has a lot to do with evolving internet culture interacting poorly with fandom culture and young people looking for easy answers to complicated questions. for instance:
-young women&/or afab people grow up with specific toxic messages targeted at them about sex/purity
a lot of shit mixes together & it’s not weird for afab people to be disgusted by their body &/or come away with dark sex/violence mishmashes brewing in the hindbrain. may or may not be kinks later, but like. USians, think about how sex & violence (towards afab/women) is tied together.
(transphobia adding a WHOLE NEW FUN LEVEL to this, too. trans (&nb) people 10,000% included in this, in case it’s not clear to anyone.) -all the taboo around expressing sexual ideas, esp if you’re not a cis man, makes it hard to express yourself. -then fandom: mostly afab, full of kink
-majority afab and/or women, kink-friendly fandom functions like a release valve for a lot of people. & though it was never explicitly said by anyone I remember, there was always a kind of understanding this was the case: a safe place for women/afab people to be crass and sexual–
–objectifying fictional characters instead of being objectified, exploring sexual fantasies in safe spaces, etc etc. people in fandom would express filthy ideas & wants! it was afab people &/or women being as frank & open about their fantasy lives as cis men could be everywhere else.
but it was also understood that everything in fandom was fictional. like: of course rape is bad, nobody wants rape to happen, but fantasies are fantasies. live it out on a fictional character who can’t be hurt! good way to blow off some steam.
& because this was understood, people talked about kinks – some really taboo, some things that would be very harmful or abusive or illegal irl – without restraint or qualifications. they weren’t needed! fandom was for fiction. say the gross thing, nobody’s judging!
and that was all well and good as long as we were all working off the same context: fandom is for fiction. this is where we put stuff that’s not safe irl. but.
but.
tumblr.
tumblr is a viral sharing platform. every post you make can be boosted independent of its original context. & when you remove all this frank, salacious, unqualified talk about fictional characters from the context of ‘it’s fiction’ and ‘it’s not for rl for good reason’: well.
fandom got visible on tumblr in a new way. tumblr dropped the barriers to entering fandom. and starting in 2012/2013, tumblr entrants had grown up in a world where the internet had been around *their whole lives*. 9/11 happened when they were a /fetus/.
and 2011-2013 fandom tumblr is an unholy, indistinct mix of real life activism, awareness, and …. posts about how sexy Dave Strider is. in exactly the same kinds of tones we used on lj, in fandom-only – fiction-only – spaces.
I can see how baby fans got the wrong idea.
without necessarily knowing it was happening, fandom – in moving to tumblr – went from a delineated safe space for non-cis-male sexual fantasy indulgence to being – for newcomers at least – indistinguishable from the sexual noise they grew up with, except probably more appealing.
losing shared context by being diluted on tumblr means young people could encounter fandom fantasy content independent of the ‘we let it hang out here b/c we’re not allowed to otherwise’ subtext. Mixed well with the much nastier toxic messages of rl & mass media & get a nasty mess.
i don’t want to spoil the punchline, but the reason non-cis-men are more in need of a safe space retreat than cis men is b/c of misogyny. so you’ll never guess what happened when fandom’s version of that space got diluted into pop culture!
(radfems! also misogyny.)
2012/13 tumblr gets a 1-2 punch: structural patriarchy: women who openly like sex are dirty sluts! they raise & teach kids how to be good adults! they’re pure! radfems: women who openly like kinks are feeding into female oppression! women teach women to be good adults! they’re pure!
2012/12 tumblr recognizes the structural punch, kinda, but disguised as Girl Power, they don’t see the second one coming. Bam! fandom – mostly made up of afab people and/or women – is suddenly awful for letting itself be sexually expressive! it abandoned the teaching post!
softened up by structural oppression of non-cis-(straight-white)-male sexuality, young fandom went down like a stone to the idea that women should be teaching other women how to be good women and Good Women Don’t Do Kinks Or Men (add heaping tablespoons of transphobia/racism/etc)
this got out of hand like always, god. but long story short: young fandom didn’t – doesn’t – see how society sets them up for abusive relationships, sexual disasters, and toxic predation. so they look back at fandom – in dialogue with all that grossness – and conclude:
‘the people in fandom failed me.’ – fandom was supposed to teach them how to be safe – society tells them that’s the job of ‘women’. but fandom wasn’t being a mom, and therefore if they weren’t safe it was fandom’s fault.
these people who were abused using fandom as a tool, or feel like they were vulnerable because of fanworks: fanfic didn’t make them that way. it just feels natural to blame it because it’s hard to see the power structure you live in, and it’s hard to admit to being helpless.
the fanworks are easy to point to and blame because they’re fiction. It’s the same reason video games were easy to blame for violence. it feels so clean and straightforward, and it doesn’t require dismantling a whole power system – a whole culture – to get rid of.
but it’s not the fiction.
(here’s the hard part.)
if fandom contributed to the toxic messages about sexuality absorbed by younger members, it’s because of continuing to talk about fictional characters like we were in those old, delineated ‘fantasy only/it’s just fiction’ spaces–
– after the shift to tumblr. and frankly, tumblr is not that kind of delineated space: it’s also an activist space (or was one), and an awareness space.
non-cis-male sexual fantasies about fictional characters & rl social activism/awareness do not mix well, as we’ve seen.
and that contribution was a small, small part, probably: fandom is so queer, so non-cis, so non-straight, so disabled and neurodivergent that our influence on everything but tumblr is really small.
but because we’re not a power structure, we’re easy to point to & tear down.
and we’ve been trained by society to blame our troubles on those we can get at and hurt instead of blaming the very way our cultures are built. hurting other vulnerable people is easy. dismantling the earth under our feet is hard. (why do u think radfems focus on fixing women?)
to wrap up: fandom isn’t perfect by a long shot, and one thing we can do to protect ourselves from harm is assume the best of others and try to put things we see into context.
we can also fuck up white cis male patriarchy instead of each other. (screw the system.) /end
Expert says many more girls have autism than was thought, and failure to diagnose them can lead to misery
So, basically, what this article is saying is they discovered the way that boys present with autism, went “well that covers 100% of the population surely!” and then didn’t bother figuring out how autism presents in girls.
Girls slip through the diagnostic net, said Attwood, because they are so good at camouflaging or masking their symptoms. “Boys tend to externalise their problems, while girls learn that, if they’re good, their differences will not be noticed,” he said. “Boys go into attack mode when frustrated, while girls suffer in silence and become passive-aggressive. Girls learn to appease and apologise. They learn to observe people from a distance and imitate them. It is only if you look closely and ask the right questions, you see the terror in their eyes and see that their reactions are a learnt script.”
WOW.
Tony Attwood, founder of the first diagnostic and treatment clinic for children and adults with Asperger’s, and author of The Complete Guide to Asperger’s Syndrome, agreed with Gould’s estimation of a 2.5:1 ratio of boys to girls. “The bottom line is that we understand far too little about girls with ASDs because we diagnose autism based on a male conceptualisation of the condition. We need a complete paradigm shift,” he said.
WE FIGURED OUT HOW TO DIAGNOSE BOYS AND BECAUSE WE FIGURED THAT WOULD WORK FOR EVERYONE BECAUSE BOYS AND GIRLS ARE SO EXACTLY THE SAME (child psychology would DISAGREE WITH YOU IDIOTS) NOW WE’RE REAL SURPRISED THAT WE FUCKED UP.
This. This is a feminist issue. This is an issue like holy shit there are doctors out there who will deny a female patient who is referred to them because ‘lul girls don’t get austism’. They didn’t think to do any more research because, whatever right? We figured out how to solve the male side of the problem.
This is so wrong on so many levels.
I want to be surprised but I’m not because basically the exact same thing happened with ADHD.
@merindab happens with ADHD and with other conditions too apparently
Yup! Girls tend to be more often Innatentive type ADHD which means we space out and daydream, but don’t cause a fuss, so, we don’t get noticed.
i need feminism because when jesus does a magic trick it’s a goddamn miracle but when a woman does a magic trick she gets burned at the stake
fabulous
i mean they did also kill jesus. that was a pretty significant thing that happened. like i understand where you’re coming from here but they very much did kill jesus.
So. The thing to understand with radfems is that their anti-kink / anti-BDSM stance isn’t anything new. It’s been going on since the 1970s. It’s an offshoot of what are termed the ‘feminist sex wars’, rhetorical clashes between various feminists when it comes to sexuality and the role of sex, BDSM, pornography, sex-work, etc that led to a polarization of the feminist movement as a whole and a clear delimitation between the anti-porn/anti-BDSM/SWERF crowd, who tend to be strong proponents of radical feminism and the camp that describes itself as ‘sex-positive’ and that tends to take a stance that is supportive of sex-workers and non-normative sexual practices, even if individuals or groups might have particular criticism to offer to the porn industry, for example.
In particular, the radfem opposition to BDSM came to existence in the middle of this whole thing, at the end of the 1970s, causing counter-movements to also appear:
The main locus of the sex wars’ debate on sadomasochism and other BDSM practices was San Francisco. Women Against Violence in Pornography and Media was founded there in 1977. Its first political action was to picket a live show at a strip club featuring women performing sadomasochistic acts on each other […] As well as campaigning against pornography, WAVPM were also strongly opposed to BDSM, seeing it as ritualized violence against women and opposed its practice within the lesbian community. In 1978 SAMOIS was formed, an organization for women in the BDSM community who saw their sexual practices as consistent with feminist principles. (source)
One of theseminal works behind anti-BDSM/anti-kink attitudes on the part of radfems is also Against Sadomasochism: A Radical Feminist Analysis, an anthology of essays published in 1982. Something to note is that, two years later, the anthology garnered a negative review from the Journal of Sex Research, with the reviewer saying that while the essays themselves were well, written, the arguments against BDSM in the book were akin to religious arguments against same-sex attraction, saying both only served to cause unnecessary guilt. It’s one of the reasons why I start laughing whenever a teenager on here gets all red in the face and ‘how DAAAARE you draw any comparison between gay people and kinksters!’ Parallels between the treatment of both at the hands of sexual puritans – whether that puritanism is based on religion or on radical feminism that actively denies people’s ability to consent if radfems don’t agree with the sexual practices in question – have been consistently drawn since before many of the discoursers on here were even born, for fuck’s sake!
Radfem ideas haven’t changed much since four decades ago. What has changed has been their approach. As far as they’re concerned, my generation is a lost cause, we’re too entrenched in our views. So they leapfrogged us entirely an went for the youngsters. In this sense, Tumblr has been an absolute goldmine for them – a site with young, inexperienced people who nevertheless want to do good and to be directed as to how they can achieve that, a site where content is meant to go viral and people spread it without checking the source. This is how anti-BDSM posts written by a radfem OP and made to look like general sexual safety PSAs at a quick glance, ended up gathering tens of thousands of positive reblogs on here. It’s all rather brilliant – gather young people to you, drip-feed them things that don’t seem all that extreme and slowly inure them to ideas such as ‘BDSM is inherently patriarchal violence’ and by the end not only will they believe, they’ll be ready to go on a crusade for you! As I said, brilliant piece of work. It really shows that I’m a Scorpio and a Slytherin, when even utterly despising someone’s result, I’ll sit there and grudgingly admire the underhandedness or cunning or ruthlessness of their methods!
The way I figured out that radfems were behind the whole thing was when I’d have fifteen year-olds say to me something along the lines of ‘consent isn’t enough if violence is involved’, that’s word-for-word something you’d read in a radical feminist tract from forty years ago, this idea that people’s consent can be utterly invalidated and tossed to the side if a group of individuals have decided to unilaterally label their sexual activities as being harmful. Add to that the fact that I also clashed two years ago with adult radfems on here when it came to things like consensual non-consent fantasies and it became clear that Tumblr was the perfect ground for them to spread their ideas and bring a new generation into their opposition to BDSM/kink.
So, a few years ago, a series of posts that were making the rounds caught my eye because they were the first really noticeable (for me) examples of radfems politics wrapped up in dogwhistle positivity language.
These posts were criticizing the concept of being “sex positive” because, and I quote “the patriarchy demands we say yes, so there’s nothing radical about feminism that doesn’t focus on a woman’s right to say no”.
They were really well crafted. Most of them said things that, on the surface, were absolutely true! But they said them while specifically, explicitly positioning sex positivity as secret patriarchal indoctrination posing as feminism, and someone if you followed the posts back to their source you always found radfems.
And most people didn’t notice! They reblogged the posts because yeah! A feminism that doesn’t equally prioritize a woman’s right to say no isn’t gonna do anybody much good! But I had grown up in sex-positive circles, reading the literature from a young age, and I knew FOR A FACT that sex positivity had ALWAYS demanded that a woman’s right to say no be prioritized above all else. In fact the foundational tenet of the politic was “there’s no such thing as yes without the right to freely and easily say no”. So these posts blew my fucking mind! Like what the hell were they talking about trying to bash sex positivity for an idea that sex positivity LITERALLY WAS FOUNDED ON?
But then I realized. Little by little, without ever having read an ounce of sex positive feminist writing, people were declaring themselves as, at best, critical of sex positivity and at worst actively against it. They would refuse to read things that openly talked in a positive light about sex positivity because “it’s still too close to patriarchy”. And of course, what lay waiting on the other side of the spectrum? What politic was standing ready with a long standing history of being against sex-positive politics? Radfems.
Little by little, I watched people get indoctrinated. It started with associating key phrases of sex-positive, trans-positive, queer-positive, etc politics with patriarchy, with oppression, with being a traitor to womanhood and a victim of male brainwashing. And once people were taught to veer away from any feminism that might give those ideas room to grow, they started offering up radical feminism as the reasonable alternative to the “failed modern liberal feminism” that “didn’t take it far enough”.
I’d start seeing 15 year olds who could never get access to any respectable kink or sex work community proudly calling themselves “anti-porn, pro-woman” and talking disdainfully about women being brainwashed into giving blow jobs and having kinky sex. I saw people who had never talked to a stripper a day in their lives talking about how strip clubs should all be made illegal because it’s “gateway prostitution”.
It was unbelievable honestly, and I’ve only seen that strategy get used more frequently, more viciously, and across more communities since those posts started circulating.
It kills me that people honestly think I should give people the benefit of the doubt over their intentions when they use the language of radfems rather than demanding it be stamped out then and there.
Because language matters. It really does. More powerfully than you could possibly imagine. And when radfems position marginalized groups of feminists with evil, oppression, and disgust, they know exactly what they’re doing and they’re doing it very well. They have spent decades carefully tarring and feathering community after community of revolutionary feminists who dared to promote a view of feminism that didn’t allow for radfem’s supremacy. And the latest and greatest hits of anti-bi, anti-ace, anti-kink, anti-sex-positivity, and anti-queer are no exception.
I’m literally begging for people to know better this time. I’m literally begging for us not to let radfems skew an entire generation away from yet more critical and ~foundational~ feminist ideologies with their bullshit. Because there isn’t much left of those revolutions at this point, and what is left tends to be fearful and underground, unable to communicate effectively with the greater world through the fucking stranglehold that radfems have on the broader political discussion.
Can we please stop the White Feminist™ idea that naked = empowered?
Because I had to watch the Muslim girl in my history class lucture the class on Islam’s treatment of women and why she wears her hijab to feel closer to god, because some new girl in our class tried to coerce her into taking it off, and then proceeded to try to take it off her.
I made sure she was alright after class and she told me she’s used to it. I. Got. Pissed. Because this sweet girl is used to other people trying to rip her hijab off. I’m not Muslim, but from what I understand, that’s like being used to people trying to rip your shirt off of you.
Also, this idea doesn’t just threaten and offend Muslim women and girls. Because a lot of women and afab people don’t like being naked. It’s not empowering to them, it’s demeaning. For example, I don’t like being naked, because I just don’t feel comfortable with it. But still, my family still forces me to wear bikinis to the beach and thinks I’m self conscious just because I don’t want to wear the least amount of clothes possible.
So, in summary:
Destroy the White Feminist™ idea that Naked = Empowered
Destroy the White Feminist™ idea that Naked = Empowered
Destroy the White Feminist™ idea that Naked = Empowered
Destroy the White Feminist™ idea that Naked = Empowered
Destroy the White Feminist™ idea that Naked = Empowered
Destroy the White Feminist™ idea that Naked = Empowered
Female empowerment is the ability to chose to behave or dress as you wish. Hard stop. If you, personally, feel empowered by walking around in public topless, more power to you. However, if someone else is choosing to be covered from head to toe because that makes them feel empowered, then back the fuck off.
The power is in the choice, not in the result.
I know I’m the OP but I wanted to reblog for this excellent addition.
Saying there’s a sex panic on the grounds that women don’t like having their asses grabbed is the 2017 way of calling women frigid. In the 1950s, the woman who slapped a man’s face for an unwanted grope was mocked for not being sexually open, for being uptight. Now she’s accused of participating in a “sex panic.” But it’s all the same thing across the generations: When women stand up to say “keep your hands off of me” there’s a good chance they’ll be called prudes. Saying there’s a sex panic is a fancy way of saying that women’s bodies don’t completely belong to them the way their cars do. Someone can damage a woman’s car in a very small way, and insurance companies take it seriously and pay for the repair. She owns that car, and has every right to protect it. But if someone grabs her butt without her permission, she needs to lighten up. What is she, a frigid bitch?
I think you’re being a little uncharitable here. I was raised Mormon, and since Mormons are hyperconservative and patriarchial, men used to say things like this a lot. When men say “I didn’t realize how bad things were for women until I had a daughter” (or something along those lines)”, they’re being literal. They (usually) don’t mean “I completely ignored my wife’s struggle but now that I own a small girl-child I must Protec”, they mean “I literally have not seen some of these problems in action before and now I’m seeing them happen to someone I love in gory detail”.
Imagine for a second you live in Zimbabwe and don’t follow American politics much. You hear weird news coming out of the USA every so often, but mostly it’s just background noise. Then Trump gets elected, and suddenly every day there’s some new crazy shit happening in the US. You hear about it and you’re like ‘this can’t be real, can it?’ But of course, it is real, and the more you look into it, the more you see it’s fucked up.
This is kind of like that. Speaking as a trans man who transitioned early in adulthood– there are a lot of things women* just don’t talk about around men, because it’s socially taboo. Things like, say, periods. Or why you need to be buying all that expensive makeup and clothing. Or the ways that girls/women bully other girls/women and how it can fuck you up. Or menopause. Or why you’re afraid of walking home alone at night. Or abuse and/or sexual assault that’s happened to you in the past.
Sometimes it’s because women don’t feel safe talking to their male partners about it. Sometimes they think it’ll hurt their male partner to hear about it. Sometimes, it’s just that it’s Not Done– it’s as socially wrong as taking off your pants in a restaurant.
If you’re lucky, you have a good partner, you’re both willing to step outside the gender role box you’ve been assigned, you feel like you can tell them anything and you’re right, and your partner takes you seriously when you tell them and doesn’t get grossed out or go “bzuh? That’s batshit insane, it can’t be real”. A lot of people– especially people in conservative/patriarchial societies, but even egalitarian people in lefty parts of the country can fall into this mess– do not feel like they have this kind of safety with their partners. They feel like they can’t discuss the problems they’re having with their partner, because their partner is a Man/Woman and you Don’t Talk About These Things, it’s Not Done.
So if you’re a man– even if you are a good man, even if you’re kind and empathetic and care about other people and try to treat other people right– there’s a good chance you’ve never been exposed to the full brunt of the ~female experience~. It’s entirely possible for a man to grow up with no sisters, a mother who doesn’t talk about these things with her son, and no female friends until you start dating in earnest, without hating women or ignoring their problems. It’s then entirely possible that your parther won’t talk about the problems she’s having, because she’s still relating to you as A Man as much as she’s relating to you as Her Partner. Socialization is a hell of a drug.
Speaking as a trans man again… a lot of the problems that women have are not immediately obvious to the naked eye. I’m not saying ‘women don’t have problems’. I’m not saying ‘sexism is over’ or ‘feminism is unnecessary’. But if you never go clubbing**, don’t ask your coworkers about their salary, don’t watch much TV, and don’t talk to women about Taboo Topics… you’re never going to realize just how deep the rabbit hole goes, just as much as our hypothetical Zimbabwean isn’t going to realize just how bad Trump is as a president.
And then you have a daughter. Your daughter has not yet learnt that you don’t talk to men about Taboo Topics, and you’re her dad. She trusts you with everything when she’s tiny, and even as she gets older, she knows you’re one of the people who unconditionally love her, no matter what. You see her getting hit with all the misogynistic messages women get hit with every day and how it changes what she feels safe doing. You see her struggling with misogyny and bullying and ridiculous beauty standards. You see her dealing with the basic biological functions that women usually have under control by the time they’re getting married but are a scary mess when you’re a young teenager, the gross boys and men who treat young girls like shit, the way she gradually absorbs sexist toxicity and stops believing she can do anything she wants. If you’re unlucky, you see the fallout that comes from her being assaulted.
And it’s in your face, in a way it might not be with your wife. The misogyny that happens to young girls is much more blatant and terrible than the misogyny that happens to grown women (grade-schoolers are not known for their subtlety). What’s more, you’re seeing it all happen in real time- you’re seeing a girl who’s cutting herself down to size to fit society, not a woman who’s already done it. So it’s entirely possible that a man won’t realise the full extent of misogyny until he has a daughter, without that man being a shitheap in any way.
…I’m not saying that this is right or good or the way things should be. This is the very definition of ‘male privilege’– you have the ability to ignore bad things in the world that other people don’t get to ignore, just because you’re lucky enough to be a cis man. That is a bad thing. It needs to stop happening. It is a tragedy that men and women are not taught to communicate properly with each other, and it’s not women’s fault that they don’t feel safe talking about dangerous things with men. That is also a bad thing that needs to stop happening.
But at the same time, men saying “I didn’t realise things were bad for women until I had a daughter”… it’s not necessarily “hurr durr I didn’t realize women were people until I had a daughter because I’m a horrible person who ignores what women say :V”. It can mean “wow, I didn’t realise just how much of a problem misogyny/sexism was until I had a daughter, because there are things I didn’t know. Now that I know the full extent of the problem, I’m going to change the way I act about it”.
Stop assuming the worst of people, ffs.
*(Speaking in broad terms here, just assume the tag “cis” usually-but-not-always goes here. Trans people do tend to relate to gender/their partner’s gender a little differently.) **(As An Sperglord, it confuses me just how much feminist discourse is about the club scene and why it’s bad. It seems disproportionate to the amount-of-a-problem-it-is.)
Or why you need to be buying all that expensive makeup and clothing.
Is it ok if I ask why here? Because I still don’t know.
Yeah, of course! It’s not the end of the world not to understand things.
OK, I’m trying not to assume that you work in tech, but… you know That One Tech Guy who wears nothing but free company T-shirts and cargo pants and won’t shave or cut his hair? The guy who’s brilliant and could easily get promoted if he wanted, but no one is willing to promote him because he looks like a hobolo and training him to dress professionally would take too much time when there are equally qualified people who already know how?
If you’re a woman and you don’t wear makeup, or you don’t shave your legs (which is much more of a hassle than shaving your face, for the record), or you don’t have A Wardrobe (rather than, like, 1-3 Outfits and a week’s worth of basics to pad them out, like most men seem to), people are going to treat you like you’re That One Tech Guy, regardless of how you perform or behave. People see women who don’t wear makeup as lazy and sloppy, women who don’t shave their legs or armpits as Making A Statement and being gross in the process, women who don’t dress in a variety of outfits as poor or lazy…
So if you want to get anywhere in life as a woman, whether in your career or your personal life, you have to have many clothing and wear at least some makeup.
There are exceptions to this rule- for example, a lot of blue-collar jobs are just fine with women not wearing makeup, because they expect female workers to be ‘one of the boys’ and hyperfemininity is a detriment there. And of course there are plenty of guys who like women without makeup, and so on. But in general, if you’re a woman who’s not working in an industrial setting, you need to perform some level of femininity to be taken seriously.
(And of course if you perfom too much
femininity, people will think you’re stupid and shallow and vapid, but that’s a whole nother ballgame.)
This is a good explanation which holds in many places, but this is really dependent on local culture. Around me quite a lot of tech guys match your description of That One Tech Guy and don’t have much trouble getting promoted. I’m a woman in a non-tech job in a tech company and I dress however and almost never wear makeup and it’s fine. (Sometimes women in tech complain that there’s actually a pressure on them not to dress too nicely/femininely or wear makeup because it doesn’t fit the culture. Which is also bad, but also demonstrates how impeccable grooming isn’t always the norm.) So it’s not just industrial settings that don’t have super high feminine grooming standards.
for a long time i’ve wanted to object to the sentiment framed by the screenshotted tweet, but never been quite sure how to phrase it, and also it’s generally a bad idea for a man to object to feminist venting. not because i’ll get jumped on (i will, but so what) but because it’s rude and contrarian to jump in all I Am The Fact Police when people are upset, especially if you’re a representative of the group they’re upset at.
at the same time, though, i think promoting the idea that people are worse than they really are creates an oppressive atmosphere and keeps people from being proactive or forming coalitions, and in the end it mostly helps the oppressors.
so i want to chime in with @earlgraytay here and say, yeah, it’s not that decent guys don’t care about women’s problems, it’s that you just do not understand how deep the rabbit hole goes until you see a six year old girl try to go on a diet.
Beltainefaerie's Flights of Fancy 