Fuck off. Seriously. Eat all of my shit.
Come back to me when you’re an afab enby or a trans man, and then you can talk about how it feels to be emasculated.
I’ve been made to feel like a fucking piece of trash for showing any masculinity my entire life, except I never even had a word for it, because for someone born without a dick, emasculation is norm.
You don’t know shit about shit.
For entirely selfish reasons, it’s great when people complain about wokeness and men being emasculated, because it’s a giant red flag and I know to stay the fuck away from you. Angel is commenting below how shit women are who pull this kinda thing, but for me, it’s saved me many many times from pursuing a relationship with a woman who likely had not-so-secret reactionary beliefs.
Sorry to talk about me. Really, OP is correct.
I don’t intend to tell you or anyone else their business but this is exactly why I have personally been on a crusade against dick-size discourse for a long time - because it reinforces the cultural normativity around judging masculinity by the amount of dick a person happens to have/not have.
I would welcome anyone who feels safe enough to join me in this crusade and if it doesn’t feel safe enough then feel free to involve me in it, any time.
(But please go easy on the small-dick kings who have internalised these garbage cultural beliefs; they need to be nurtured out of the internalised bigotry, not berated out of it.)
For whatever it’s worth, there are some butch as hell lesbians in particular who I have known that have outstripped me in the masculinity department by miles and I think that they’re wonderful. There are people in the world who would cherish your masculinity too and I sincerely hope that you believe me when I say this.
If people try to convince you that your masculinity is too much, as far as I’m concerned they can fuck off and find less.
For similar reasons, I’ve convinced several dudes to talk to their wives about using a vibrator. His wife would talk to mine about how bad the sex was and how she often didn’t get off. My wife would ask why they weren’t using toys. And apparently the husband felt insecure about them. So many guys feel like a toy is an external threat to their masculinity, like it’s separate from them. So I bring it up as casually as possible. These were people with whom we’d talked about our sex lives before so it’s not like I’m randomly bringing it up. And I just try to frame it like, if you use a toy to give your wife an orgasm, you gave her that orgasm. This has happened multiple times and at least one of them has had a positive impact. Guys need to get over the idea that their dick has to be the only way their partner can finish. It’s ridiculous.
100%
Also if you’ve got a dick and you see toys as your competitors then that’s the quickest way for you to experience a resounding defeat because you cannot vibrate.
On the other hand, I’ve never come across someone who was in a committed relationship with a vibrator. I’m sure there’s gotta be someone out there who is (and tbh more power to them) but most people aren’t dating someone for their RPMs.
If you treat it like a race, you’re going to finish early.
If you treat it like a competition, you’re going to lose.
If you treat it like a mutual experience then you might just share in some intimacy, pleasure, and maybe even some adventures along the way too.
What’s there to lose?
Body shaming, and any kind of idioms referencing bodies in general (big dick energy) is shit that needs to die out. Maybe there’s an outlier or two, but I can’t think of any
My cold take on this is that any sort of idiom that enforces a normative standard for bodies is inherently ableist and thus based on that fact alone it’s bad (but it’s also bad in other ways too, for example being cisnormative).
Am I going to argue my case for this outside of an essay or a discussion with people who are on the same level? Not a chance. It’d never land.
But my angle is that disabled bodies very often exist outside of the norm for a variety of reasons, whether it’s because of physical reasons like amputation, congenital disorders, muscular dystrophy or like medications that mess with metabolism or things that disrupt the endocrine system or even just being so damn depressed that you either stop eating or you can’t get out of bed so you aren’t burning many calories.
Is ths idiom intentionally perpetuating ableism? Maybe, but not necessarily.
Is it overtly engaging in ableist rhetoric? Possibly, but it’s quite likely not as well.
And this is why I don’t think I could be bothered litigating this with a person who doesn’t get it.
I just don’t have the energy to have someone say “No, but it’s not ableist because it doesn’t say anything about disabled people directly” and to go through loop after loop of dialogue where it’s like:
“Is a driver responsible for driving drunk and killing someone, even if they never set the intention to do so”
“Yes, you have to take responsibility for the consequences of your choices”
“If the consequence of your choice is that you pathologise or denigrate disabled bodies, does it matter what your intention is?”
“No, because it’s still the consequence”
“So therefore this idiom is ableist?”
“Well no, because this doesn’t say anything about disabled bodies”
Or
“Speaking in terms of consequence, is it any different to invite all but one of your friends to dinner and to invite everyone to dinner but knowing that one friend is coeliac and the restaurant doesn’t cater to gluten free dietary requirements?”
“No, it’s still exclusion”
“Does it matter whether you explicitly exclude some people from being considered part of the entire spectrum of normal or whether you only do it implicitly?”
“No, because it still excludes people”
“So using an idiom that excludes some bodies from the entire spectrum of normal is ableist?”
“Yes”
“Then by definition that idiom is ableist, correct?”
“No, but it isn’t explicitly intended to exclude anyone who is disabled so that means it’s not ableist”
So often it doesn’t even matter how gently I approach these discussions or how much I soften the blow by assuring the other person that I’m not going to rake them over the coals with accusations of them being ableist or how often I tell them that I’m only interested in discussing the nature and function of the idiom, it just goes around and around only to end at the same denial.
I can either pursue this stuff or I can maintain a sense of hope for humanity but I don’t get to choose both. (Though I am autistic so it’s not uncommon for me to struggle with getting my tone right for allistic people.)
It’s just frustrating because this stuff poses no threat to that type of person, it causes them no harm, and despite me personally being the one who is on the receiving end of this equation I’m still offering to gently and patiently midwife the whole process so that we can reach a logically consistent conclusion and maybe even agree to acknowledge that the idiom is unintentionally ableist before shaking hands and going out separate ways with the hope that they’ll maybe spend a bit of time reflecting on how their words can affect others at some point. But nah, that would be asking too much from the other person.
I really wish I had more gusto for talking people around on matters like this one.
I fucking hate cishet women who do this shit too.
I knew this younger cis woman who was enraged that men these days are “not masculine enough” and it makes her harder to date because she wants to be a “tradwife”.
It’s especially toxic because she’d start judging men for being feminine when it came to really irrelevant things like drinking coffee with a straw. I wish I were joking.
Also, as far as those cis men go, to them, “emasculating men” literally just means “Don’t be toxic and misogynistic.”. Nobody cares if you’re masc or not as long as you’re not a total dick in the process, but unfortunately, people who express these sentiments are never anything but dicks. Fitting.
Sorry to hear about people disrespecting your transmasculinity. That shit is unbearable. “Well-meaning” cis allies engage in this shit too, and it hurts even worse when it’s behind a mask of performativity.
Wishing you all the best, comrade.
I knew this younger cis woman who was enraged that men these days are “not masculine enough” and it makes her harder to date because she wants to be a “tradwife”.
It’s especially toxic because she’d start judging men for being feminine when it came to really irrelevant things like drinking coffee with a straw. I wish I were joking.
She sounds awful. I once worked with a dude who had long hair, and all the other guys would give him shit for it.
Funny thing was, he looked great with long hair, I dunno what those guys were smoking.
But yeah, gender roles are fucking dumb. I wish people could just be who they want without this pressure.
You know, funny story about being male with long hair.
My grandparents were on a video call with my younger cousin. He’s somewhere in the 11 to 13 age range right now. I can’t quite remember because I haven’t interacted with him in ages.
His hair is longer than my grandmother’s, and they were all going on about how “handsome” he looked and how much they loved his long hair and what not.
When they got off the call with him, they were like, “He needs to get a haircut. That long hair makes him look too much like a girl!”.
Mind you, quite obviously, my grandparents are viscerally transphobic and religious, and I had to cut them out over that, so it adds up.
Boss joked the other day that I wasn’t a real man of I read the manual before trying to use a new device we had received. How did some of these notions become gendered in the first place?! Does not compute.
It’s manly as fuck to look like a complete incompetent dipshit because you refuse to read the instructions about anything instead of striving to better yourself and be a reliable, competent, knowledgeable person, and unless you break something trying to use it or while putting it together you can’t declare yourself the expert because you’re probably a woman actually.
This extends to the weirdness around short men too IMO. I’ve known people who are otherwise pretty chill about masculinity and gender be really fucking weird with rules about never dating men shorter than themselves.
As a pansexual, transfeminine enby who is 5’5", I’m glad I’ve come to find that all women I’ve had some kind of “encounter” with never gave a shit about my height. Some were taller, some were roughly the same height, and some were shorter. I think the kind of women who would be into someone like me don’t seem to care as much.
