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random-thought-depository:

brin-bellway:

This is my home! This is my home! How can you sit here within it and tell me that nobody lives here?!

(and say it like it’s obvious, say it with condescension, I am so fucking sick of my lived experience being met with condescension and casual declaration of impossibility, or at best saying that it may well have happened but I should still shut up and just let the first-generations speak, their problems their experiences are more numerous more important the only ones worth public acknowledgement)

(You say you want a world like mine, a world with people like me in it. You say you work to achieve it, to achieve us. Decide now how you will react to us when we come to be, for we are already here. You cannot afford to wait until you deem the tide to be turning in your favour, for the world is vast and contains multitudes and the tide is always in your favour somewhere, even if those places are small. Even if those places are small, they may still be big enough to raise a child.

Decide now. Decide wisely.)

This is kind of how I feel about a lot of SJ/feminist discourse about what men are like.

Context of that: Brin-Bellway was raised in liberal social circles and is talking about how SJ makes her feel, and I’m a man, basically cis though I suspect I’m at least a little gender-weird.

I think my System 1 is sexist, but its sexism is more like misandry. I don’t think I have an intuitive feeling that women are less competent and intelligent than men. I don’t think I have an intuitive feeling that women owe me service, deference, or sex. I do have an intuition that women are nicer and prettier than men and kind of basically are better people and make better companions. I think I empathize with women more easily, see them as more vulnerable and sympathetic, and am more likely to imagine sympathetic motives for them when they do something I consider bad. I think female characters tend to feel more emotionally alive to me. I think I’m more driven to make social connections with women. I think I probably am less deferential to women, but this is a function of me having more fear of men, not less respect for women. Being very unpopular in school made me into a fairly timid, deferential person who tends to try not to take up too much space. I do feel I have an obligation to support women in a “chivalrous” way, and I think the guilt and anxiety I feel about still being supported by my mother is partially a gendered feeling of this kind. SJ/feminist descriptions of the entitlement and confidence men are supposedly raised to feel don’t feel like descriptions of my condition at all, but something in my brain shivers in dark rapture at the “I will stay and be thy husband / though it be the death of me” line in The Maiden and the Selkie. Empathy for women’s arousal and pleasure is a pretty big part of my sexuality, and I think I’m low-key sexually submissive.

I don’t think I have what SJ/feminism thinks is typical male socialization; either I didn’t get it or I didn’t “properly” internalize it because I have a weird brain.

Tags:

#(OP from June 2015; response from December 2017) #conversational aglets #rants #our roads may be golden or broken or lost #(I feel like I don’t deal with nearly as much of this sort of thing as I used to) #(I think I’ve gotten a lot better at avoiding the sort of people who would do it) #((also I dug this one out of a force-safe-moded blog by scrolling down until I found it)) #((fortunately random-thought-depository didn’t post all that often))