Ask Lemmy

Cut bits of a girl baby's genitals: jail.

Cut bits off a boy baby's genitals: An occasion for a fucking party.

As a guy who's trying dating again, there's something that keeps coming up that kinda bugs me: talking to women who just put in the bare minimum of effort, expect me to carry the conversation and make all the first moves.

I don't give two shits about traditional gender roles and I'm all about subverting them. However, I think if you're in the same boat but still wanna call yourself a "passenger princess" and expect the guy to do everything, you're kind of a hypocrite.

In favor of men: when we get angry, people listen. When women get angry, people stop listening.

Against men: men being around children is seen as suspect. Women being around children is seen as healthy.

One of the two presidential candidates has five children with three different partners. The coverage of that fact would be very different it it were the female.

Men are often expected to swallow their emotions and just "function", while women are allowed and even encouraged to display them openly

Well, for one, the ability to freely talk about issues specific to their gender without judgement by ~20% of the population

One that constantly comes up between me and my partner is fashion related. She is very liberal but when it comes to our relationship is the exact opposite. She buys everything from lacy thongs and g-strings to boy shorts underwear. She hates that I as a man wear thong and bikini underwear, too. I’m athletic, lift and workout 5 days a week, and get hot very easily. I like the support and minimalism of thongs for that, but she always buys me boxers which are uncomfortable and bunch up and all the extra fabric and cotton makes me hot and sweaty and chafe. When I bring up she wears thongs just do she doesn’t have panty lines and I wear them for comfort and support she doesn’t understand. She also mentioned she thinks guys wearing thongs is weird but then says it’s so “brave” when gay guys do it during pride. I once called her out and homophobic for assuming it’s a fetishized gay guys only thing and she got mad, but am I wrong?

Domestic violence against men is usually ignored or blamed on the victim.

Here's another thing that I was just reminded of in this very thread, lmfao:

Men are expected to accept unsolicited advice at face value when they want to vent, because we're supposed to be the ones with all the answers, and if a man is complaining about a problem, then he's obviously just missing the answer.

This actually blew up my last relationship, right at the beginning of the pandemic, when my girlfriend at the time was stressed from being laid off and we weren't able to see each other due to the isolation orders.

She would try to vent to me about her problems, looking for support in a time of emotional vulnerability, and I, an inexperienced idiot just trying to be helpful, would suggest solutions that I thought she hadn't considered. If you can't guess exactly how that went, you've almost certainly never been in a serious relationship.

What made it worse is she would then say to stop mansplaining, which made me defensive because I thought she was tacitly accusing me of being intentionally misogynistic when I was honestly just trying to be helpful. At the time, I figured I just needed to adjust my approach a little bit, not completely change course. Unsurprisingly, that didn't work.

It was only in hindsight, some time after she had dumped my dumb ass, and I had blocked and deleted her number, that I was complaining to my friends and getting the exact same kind of thing back that I realized, "oh wow, I get it now, that is actually really fucking annoying and invalidating."

It was also around this time, while discussing my experiences with friends who have been diagnosed, that I realized that I might have ADHD. So that definitely hadn't helped.

In the extremely unlikely event you're reading this, K, I'm sorry. I figured out what I did wrong, just a little too late.

No one calls a woman a babysitter or says she's "giving dad a break" when she's somewhere with her own children.

doing oppositely gendered activities.

my girlfriend can change the oil in her car and lifts weights?

cool. healthy.

i can sew my own clothes and bake?

Weird. Creepy.

Clothes in general, I could borrow my husband's shirt and nobody would bat an eye but I'd he borrowed mine (he can't because I'm smaller, but assuming we were the same size-ish) would look strange.

I don't think groping is gonna be ignored in any workplace, in any direction.

In dating or marriage: If a female partner criticizes on her male’s choice of outfit, it’s totally normal. If a male criticizes the choice of outfit of his female partner… a fight is imminent.

Being held culpable for the brutality some powerful men wield against women because of the "patriarchy". But also being at fault when women with power exploit or abuse men.

This comes from my own observations, and might not be a popular take, but men are often encouraged or celebrated for having multiple partners and not using protection.

This attitude puts men(especially young men) at risk for STI's, some of which can affect fertility even if a course of antibiotics will take care of it. Others don't have cures yet, or are not as easy to treat like herpes, the different hepatitis strains, HIV, genital warts ect.

This attitude towards sex for men puts their health at risk and their partners.

The amount of times I've seen dudes encourage each other to not use condoms is kinda distressing. I don't think guys are being educated on how a condom should fit and how to find the right size. They shouldn't be uncomfortable. If they are try a different kind.

Women often have to try different birth control pills until they find one with minimal side effects. Try different condoms until you find the right ones for you. It's to protect your dick from diseases, not just to stop pregnancy.

Take care of yourselves guys. Your health is important.

Everyone says to talk about your problems but the second you do, you're told that women either have it worse or how they have some worse problem. I've largely stopped talking about my problems because I'm never heard, just talked past or worse, made out to be the problem. The older I get the more reinforced my silence is because evey time I open up it's used against me and this is just normal.

Meanwhile I'm expected to play therapist when someone else talks about their problems and I have to stop my autistic ass from telling them I really don't want to hear about you. I can't even get the silence I give returned to me.

"For example workplace harassment by women towards males like touching or groping being ignored"

This is absolutely not a double standard in society in most workplaces. I've never encountered an HR department that wouldn't take this extremely seriously. I'm not saying those HR depts don't exist, but they're certainly not the norm

If you're a dude and your older female boss forces you to have sex with her under threat of losing your job, everyone just says "that's awesome what's the problem?".

Some good examples:

• Fat acceptance and body positivity. Obesity is glorified (even fetishized) when it's a woman, whereas obese men are shunned. Have you noticed that nobody in the fat acceptance movement is vouching for the 300lb basement dwellers?

• Older ladies who date younger guys are called cougars, whereas if you flip the gender roles, an older man dating a younger lady half his age is going to be labelled a pedophile, even if she's of-age. Just look at at the anger surrounding Tobey Maguire (48 years old) dating a 20 year old actress. There are people who legitimately think men like him should be hunted for sport.

• The amount of effort you have to put into your dating profile. Women have the opposite problem of being inundated with matches even with minimal effort.