So, back when I was “still cis tho”, there were a lot of aspects of male gender norms that bothered me deeply and of course I totally understand why now. Even though these days I obviously have a clear reason for feeling that way, I’m still curious if cishet men also have issues with how norms or expectations around gender and sexuality impact them in a negative way.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on how those norms impact you, whether good or bad.
Also, I should mention that since this is a bit of a sensitive subject we’re talking about here, please be thoughtful and sensitive when discussing with others in this thread. Thanks! <3
EDIT: Much thanks for all the great responses here! I know it’s a difficult topic of course, so I appreciate you sharing your thoughts/feelings like this.
Speaking of which… I just looked at /c/menby and some of the posts on the front page there are over 2 years old. I see a lot of the discussion here centered around not being able to share feelings and/or not having the spaces or support to do that in. /c/menby seems like the perfect place for that, just sayin’.
The absolute fucking rancid vibes everybody emitted when I took my kids out alone in public. I even had the cops called on me once, when one of them was throwing a tantrum at the grocery store. I am so grateful that I was paranoid about that exact scenario happening, and carried copies of the kids’ birth certificates at all times. No officer, I’m not a stabber. Just a very tired dad. Kindly stop detaining me, thanks.
It’s well over a decade since any of them have been that small, but the experience is still haunting.
edit: I just realized I still have the laminated birth certificate copies in my bag. I should probably get rid of them. Carrying around another grown-ass-man’s birth certificate is weird for entirely different reasons.
I volunteer with kids on international camps, which means I get given legal guardianship of them for the duration of camp, and a bunch of paperwork to go with it. When travelling, I always keep that paperwork as the closest thing to hand, because I’m a young adult travelling with 4 kids that are obviously not my own so everyone and their aunt wants to make sure I’m not a kidnapper.
Anyway, I brought it up during training one year and found out none of the women have ever had to deal with that. The closest they’d got was one particularly short woman who had trouble convincing airport staff that she was actually the responsible over 21 adult, and not another child.
Now in my particular case I don’t think regarding me with suspicion is unwarranted, but it even more clearly demarks how society treats men and women around children - Men aren’t trusted even with their own children, while women are trusted with absolutely any children, both of which are seriously problematic.
A flipside of this is that when you aren’t around a bunch of breathless nitwits who think a father solo parenting is actually a child trafficker, there are also women who look at you like just for existing positively with children. Expectations are both too damn high and too damn low. It’s so stupid.
there are also women who look at you like just for existing positively with children.
I wouldn’t know. My children were all born girls. Most of them weren’t girls, as it turns out, but that’s another story. And it probably colored my experience a bit differently.
And it probably colored my experience a bit differently.
This is a good point. I have a son and most of the kids involved in the programs I volunteer with are boys (or at least male presenting, they’re young so who knows who they will be in 10 years). You saying this has helped me appreciate how my experience has been colored. When I am a male mentor figure to a boy, his mother sees a positive male role model teaching and supporting her son and dad sees a patriarch training a recruit. There’s the same low level paranoia about pedophilia that permeates any interaction an adult man has with any child, but it’s not the same level of paranoia as when an adult man interacts with a girl child. When I am interacting with girl children, mom is more likely to see a threat and dad is more likely to see a queer, because interacting with children is women’s work. Also, by age 8-10 I’m sure girl children have started internalizing the very real dangers of maleness to them as young women.
I’m thankful that for the most part these are just vague societal undercurrents and systemic forces rather than factors that play a real role in my day to day life doing volunteer work. Really I just want to be a safe person to kids including nd/queer kids and teach them to value and understand the natural world.
Having mental illness and being a man seem like they’re not compatible under the patriarchy. I’ve had my dad tell me straight up to my face I’m just faking it and looking for sympathy with my anxiety, depression, OCD, because according to him my life is good. So there’s that.
Thanks for sharing and I’m sorry you gotta deal with that
I’ve never been good at sharing my feelings for many other reasons on top of it, but not having any kind of emotional support also always hit me pretty hard as well. One of the many great things that’s happened to me since realizing I’m trans is both being able to get rid of that shame/mental block around expressing my real self as well as having positive spaces to do it in (thanks tracha!). Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems to me like even in relatively positive male spaces there’s still a lot of discomfort for men around expressing certain feelings openly in the same way. Not sure what it takes to break that, but it at least seems like a good thing to bring up that stuff more often like you’re doing right now.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems to me like even in relatively positive male spaces there’s still a lot of discomfort for men around expressing certain feelings openly in the same way.
Yeah there’s still a lot of shame involved with being open as a man. Though I have seen a recent change in people’s perceptions of what you can say/do in regards to feeling while being masc so that’s a positive. We just need to de-brainworm more people.
Though I have seen a recent change in people’s perceptions of what you can say/do in regards to feeling while being masc so that’s a positive. We just need to de-brainworm more people.
I found that being in the right situation, being open with one or two other guys about my own fears and distress (this was during covids first days and i just fuggen needed to vent honestly) was usually a catalyst for them to drop the charade as well, talking about their own feelings of helplessness and dread. Once that hurdle was cleared i was the guy they’d come share their worries and the younger ones would bitch to me about the ‘bullshit’ machismo of the older gen. Course it helps a lot that i present as cishet and look and talk like a tradesman, but my experience is even the crustiest looking steelworkers, rather than embodying the chud alpha ideal, were putting on a brave face just like me.
That experience went a long way towards fixing my own fear of guys (tho i am in fact amab im ace and adhd/aut, so was mentally and physically bullied throughout school until i learned how to mask up and act like a “proper” Midwestern male).
I wish this info was useful, i wish just anyone could try that but i understand my position as a somewhat older well-spoken crackerjack was what really helped me break thru their facade.
An assumption built on another assumption, that seeking sympathy from other people is somehow weak and not like
What every social species does
The fundamental axioms that generation takes for granted about people and the world are so heart wrenchingly sad. And then they go and try to inflict it on their kids
Actually I just caught my own assumption, that weak=not serious or worth respecting. I don’t consciously think that, but I did use the word as a stand-in for that. This shit is insidious and multilayered, like an onion with a ghost in it.
In a moment of vulnerability, I expressed my feelings of weakness, frustration, and just general helplessness in regard to mental issues, financial issues, and a few other things that I can’t quite remember because the response was so strange. I was talking to a partner, and I don’t really remember what spurred it, but I kinda broke down a little bit and just expressed how things weren’t really going well for me.
She was quiet for a few seconds and just looked at me, with what looked like a feeling of disgust, and said something along the lines of, “Men aren’t supposed to act like this.” So, since then, I’ve kept a lot of my emotions in check and withdrawn a lot. I don’t do it intentionally, but that wasn’t the response I expected, especially since I had consoled them many times without complaint or judgement because that’s what you’re supposed to do.
Another example is with an ex that accused me of being gay because I didn’t want to have sex 24/7. Sometimes I think I’m maybe aromantic or asexual, or maybe just haven’t found someone I’m really compatible with sexually.
I engage with a lot of “traditional” masculine hobbies like boxing, weightlifting, etc, and even though I still feel comfortable adhering to certain traits or roles considered masculine, I guess this is why I sometimes don’t feel comfortable with the label of cis. Like, I used to have people say “you’re the gayest straight man I’ve ever met.” Which is weird cause I’m a big bald dude with tattoos and a beard but having interests outside of the traditional gender norms is weird for some folks I guess.
She was quiet for a few seconds and just looked at me, with what looked like a feeling of disgust, and said something along the lines of, “Men aren’t supposed to act like this.”
Oh jesus, that’d become an ex immediately right there if it were me; you have my sincerest condolences my guy.
I’m gonna recommend you stop dating cishet women. I’m seeing a lot of heteronormative brainworms in the women you’ve described that are causing you distress. There’s nothing wrong with you. There are plenty of people who don’t just want to fuck all the time. Queer people will not treat you like this.
Yeah, not everyone’s great but my queer dating experiences have been majority positive, even if we don’t end up working out. People are generally much more open and vulnerable than cishets
I was talking to a partner, and I don’t really remember what spurred it, but I kinda broke down a little bit and just expressed how things weren’t really going well for me.
She was quiet for a few seconds and just looked at me, with what looked like a feeling of disgust, and said something along the lines of, “Men aren’t supposed to act like this.”
In my experience, if you allow yourself to be vulnerable (really vulnerable, not the kind of vulnerable where you just shed a single tear while watching Old Yeller) with a woman, it usually marks the end of the relationship. It won’t happen immediately, but she’ll become disgusted that you’re not holding up your end of the gender role bargain, and things start to fall apart.
Obviously not all women are like this, and I don’t want to come across like an incel screeching about females, but I’ve had a couple of relationships fail after a moment of “weakness,” even if I thought my partner was progressive about heteronormativity. I think this is one of the nasty ways that the patriarchy programs women in particular and is yet another example of why it harms us all.
Yeah I had a partner who would complain I never told her anything, and when I did she would complain that there “was no room for her.” She would also make fun of men not sharing their feelings. Or the way they shared them. When I told my best friend I had a depression he made me feel better. We were making jokes about it after 10 minutes. Was it how women would handle it? Probably not. She told me I was bad at talking about that kinda stuff, but whenever I talked to her about my issues, I felt like shit too. I just figured we had different methods of talking about it, her method was probably great for her girlfriends. I didn’t tell her she was terrible at it though, because why would I?
That sucks. I think I might be able to relate. I dated someone who was clinically depressed. Takes a lot to be a partner for that kind of person, a lot of patience a lot of understanding. She could break down over any issue, because that’s what depression does. Makes any issue difficult, so difficult you might just break down. And I was there for it.
My foot is fucked, and that has kept me from doing elite sports. I can’t put a lot of weight on it for a long time. I thought it had finally healed and her and I went out for some bouldering. Then my foot started hurting. I cried. I couldn’t take it anymore - She was having a Good Day, I thought I was healed, we both wanted to go out, we both had the energy and the will to do stuff, we both wanted to be active, we both had an activity we loved. But I couldn’t and the only obstacle was something I had no way of doing anything about and it was just the result of me being born weird. I couldn’t take it so I told her “it just feels so unfair, I just really want to climb” and I cried.
She told me “just get over it.”
Later on, before we broke up she would complain that I never told her anything. Whenever I did, she’d tell me “there was no space for her.”
Well for instance where I come from, men are not allowed to cry and boy did I cry a lot as a kid. Got called a “crying pussy bitch” as a kid a TON. Even by my dad.
Now I have anxiety, keep to myself a lot and I’m afraid of standing up for myself because I’m scared of being physically overpowered. So yeah, “good” stuff.
I was having a panic attack and my mother laughed at me.
