i think more women tend to have insecurity about their gender than men as a girl, like a young girl, maybe you get the impression that boys are cool in a way girls aren't. people praise and laugh at boys for doing high risk things. boys do all the good thinking and flying planes and action movies. and they put women in action movies too but it doesn't reflect life around you - the women you know are moms and shy and weak. you can feel the weakness emanating off of them. they do have passive endurance, of lifestyle martyrdom, of quietly putting up with so much. that’s a type of strength, they say.
It’s very strange to hear the perspective of what a teen girl thinks being a boy is like. I suspect that the only thing so similarly and deeply incorrect is the perspective a teen boy has about what being a girl is like.
I think it probably depends on the boy. It rang pretty true to me. She's envying the boys who are *good* at being boys. She probably never even noticed the ones who aren't.
Even the 'average' or 'below average' boy would be humiliated if a girl beat him at a 'boy thing'. While there are exceptions in real life (there always are) at least in the media it's often portrayed that way e.g. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/IWasBeatenByAGirl
Oh, absolutely. I once saw a very small weak man lose an arm wrestle to a very large strong woman. If I remember that thirty years later I'm sure he does.
But I'm not sure that little Aella was longing to be the sort of boy that gets beaten up routinely at school.
That's the thing though, there are always counterexamples to stereotypes - women who are stronger than men, men who are sensitive and intuitive. But these narratives get ignored, and those who contradict them get punished. Just as the guy was emasculated, I'll bet the woman was also seen as something of a freak.
I guess it depends where you live. Round here anyone claiming that men are stronger than women gets piled on. As far as I can tell most people think stereotypes are both evil and untrue by definition.
Even reading Aella's article I was constantly thinking "You can't say that! (even though it's true)". If even a nasty old patriarchal dinosaur like me has that level of automatic censorship built in, Christ knows what's going on in the kids' heads.
> I'll bet the woman was also seen as something of a freak.
Freakishly strong, certainly. She was! But we were a boat club. Freakishly strong gets respect.
There's an interesting trend nowdays where actually the younger generation (of men at least) are less progressive than the older generations on gender issues.
It could be the influence of social media, which tends to exacerbate the social anxieties of young people who then try to prove their masculinity by expressing more chauvinistic views.
I'm glad to hear that she got the respect! But that's my point - reality is complex and doesn't fit into stereotypes, but a lot of people's views are more and more influenced by social media, the news, movies, tv shows, video games, books... and these offer a distorted picture of reality that has to fit certain accepted narratives (which are constantly shifting). If you make a film that doesn't fit with that people can pile onto it as being unrealistic, but you can't argue with something that you see with your own eyes.
I'm inclined to agree: one thing I wondered about is how insecure boys and men must be. While I only compare myself to the best woman, you have to compare yourself to the best men who seem to have achieved far more.
I can only speak for myself but as a teenager I was less secure than a three legged dog in the back of a pickup truck driving down a road made entirely of potholes.
I would say it was less about the comparison and more about a desperate powerless wanting. I didn’t want to be the tallest. I just wanted to be taller. I didn’t want to be the coolest. I just wanted to be liked. And most prominently, I didn’t want that guy’s girlfriend. I just wanted a girl that I liked to see the slightest glimmer of worth in me and I wanted that very nearly as much as I desperately never wanted any girl to ever know that I felt that way.
Like a one legged man in an ass kicking contest held on the head of a giant weeble-wobble.
Women are so beautiful and get so much love, and all they have to do is turn up and look good. It sounds so easy. They smell AMAZING. The pressure to be useful as a boy is just so high.
“Why did his wife leave him and take the kids?”
“Oh, he lost his job.”
And the movies. Superman gets strength and X-ray vision and he literally saves the world and flies back in time to save Lois Lane’s life, and I know that if that was me, I’d have Superwanked myself into a Supercoma. This is why I’m getting a D in algebra.
Mechanical things aren’t cool to do - literally every man can do them. My Dad just fixes cars by putting his hands on them.
“Feel that, son? No, put your hand right here. The flutter valve on that carb is sticking just a little. Keep your hands here. GIVE IT SOME JUICE, GENE! Feel how it loosens right up? We’re going to take that valve out and clean it.” His hands are already twisting the wing nut on the top of the Henley, on a running engine. This is the baseline you must reach to be average: disassemble and reassemble a car engine while it is running, fixing parts as you go.
And the weird thing is how, yes, you can feel it, and you know exactly what he means, but have no clue how on earth he figured that out until later, when you’re looking at your own son a lifetime later showing him how to scrape the side of a tomato stem and put the CAS-9 altered tomato cell slurry on it just so, and you can see the flicker where he realises what type of cuts will bud and which ones won’t.
“All cells in tomatoes are epistemic.” You say, and he had the exact look that tells you he’s confused in the same way you were. Same when you’re cleaning the plugs on the Kubota. One is fouled again, second time this month, probably a cracked cylinder head. You hear him later tell a totally fascinated girl that the Kubota probably has a cracked cylinder head, maybe a leaky gasket, and she’s SO INTO HIM and he has no idea at all. He’s just trying to show that he’s useful so she won’t take the kids and leave him, later.
Of course, I don’t have a son, or any kids at all. Men don’t get a say in whether they have kids.
I’m 51 and cry into my pillow when the wife is away, bitter sobs of wracking grief for a wasted life. Then I take the keyboard out of her MacBook, bridge the cold solder joint that’s been making the space key sometimes not fire, put it back together and just don’t tell her, because if I start talking to her about anything, I’ll just tell her she’s ruined my life by promising me kids, later, until we couldn’t, and then I’m going to put a gun in my mouth.i
I'm not good at writing with sympathy, but: you want kids. You're 51. It's not too late. My father was about that age when he had me.
You have one life. Go after what you want. I assume you say it's too late because your wife is to old to hear children? You still have options. Adopt. Foster. Pay a surrogate. If she doesn't want kids, by my lights you may divorce her, since you married under a misapprehension.
If this part of life matters to you enough that without it you consider your life wasted, do something. Your goal in life is to have children? Then don't let other things stand in the way. Try the classic "think for 5 minutes (really 5 minutes by the timer) about how to solve this extremely important problem."
You can overcome whatever stands in the way. You can. If your life is wasted without children, you must consider giving up everything that you value less than having children, else you waste your life by your standards.
You yourself are not too old. Please please please take this seriously.
Divide and conquer. This is what modern identity politics is achieving. Who benefits from this? I don’t know, but this “What need is there for you to vote? It’s enough for me to vote” issue is bound to be resolved when there’s nothing to vote on any more.
> you have to compare yourself to the best men who seem to have achieved far more.
I think maybe it's not even about achievement. There are always boys and then men local to us who are so much better at "being men"... who manage somehow to be affable and self-contained, who can make the right joking insult at the right time... who immediately get taken seriously by women and don't have to say much to do it. The rest of us can do these things, but it takes effort, and it never comes naturally.
That's the thing. It's all an illusion. You project an aura of 'toughness' by putting down or dominating those weaker than you. And the worst thing of all is to be weaker than a girl. An ex of mine played on the boys hockey team in school until she had to quit because in every game the boys would gang up on her.
Because it's often just an act or a display. Of course, if you do something enough it eventually becomes real and natural. Fake it 'til you make it. Other people believe it and start treating you accordingly. But a lot of the time, at least in terms of 'banter' it is all about bravado and confidence and it only takes a witty retort to puncture it.
Sorry, thought you meant physically. Told you I was a dinosaur. Once upon a time people who went round acting like that without being able to back it up got brought down to earth fairly quickly, and the witty retort was delivered after the point had been made.
Oh come now. Elizabeth I? Lady Lovelace? Taylor Swift? Even on the male scale their achievements are awesome.
But if I was a woman, I wouldn't aspire to be any of those three. The happiest women seem to be the ones with a husband who loves them and happy children. There must be some skill in that. I would have no idea how to go about it.
The scale on which you measure yourself is doing a lot of work here.
The misogyny with which you were compelled to be so invalidating is doing a lot of work here. Throughout this thread.. Slinging your patriarchal poor excuse of a "perspective" all over the comments. Just because a few women in history managed to step up to the plate and only because of birthright/privilege doesn't negate the struggle of millions of women who only got to have checking accounts 50 years ago.. Or any of the other power structures in place to make sure women "know their place". Your comments throughout this thread really speak to what you really feel about women and our "roles". And in light of our human rights are being attacked and our ability to thrive is being threatened, your trivializing voice only comes off as tone deaf.
The Equal Credit Opportunity Act passed in 1974. Women were finally granted the right to open a bank account without their spouse/or single. Women could before, but banks were not obligated or they refused to do so without their husbands present. You're grown, you could have answered your own question. White men never had barriers like that. ECO Act guaranteed that right for everyone else.
Oh, *that's* an argument you're not going to win. People like Sophie Germain and Emmy Noether did extraordinary things in spite of really crippling barriers to them doing them. Lovelace as well. There were probably countless equally brilliant women who just gave up, or didn't have the resources to just do it anyway.
I didn't come to debate. What I said is true. You're tokenizing women in order to bolster your opinion, in order to deflect from the real lived experience of girls and women. History and our collective lived experience trumps your opinion. No debate can be had.
I can assure you as a teen, I never once thought what it must feel like to be a girl. I was mostly interested in video games and tech, and then in having girls like me, but I never much thought about their experience.
I think it's accurate - from a teen viewpoint. She sees the highlights of life as a boy/man, the ones who make it to the top, and misses all the boys also wishing they were prominent, or at least liked.
The sense of power she seemed to ascribe boys as feeling isn’t true to my experience. In fact, I’d say that being a teenage boy is characterized by a deep understanding of all the ways you are and always will be powerless.
I also don’t think it’s true to how boys see girls. Bear in mind I can only speak to my experience and while I’m sure I’m not unique, I don’t know how many would feel the way I did.
Girls in many ways seemed to hold all the power in the world. A person who can make you feel like you’d do anything just to get a second glance from them is very powerful. It’s not just girls you like or are attracted to. All of them seem to understand a lot more than you ever will. There’s also the mystery aspect. Girls are completely mysterious to most boys. You don’t understand them and they completely understand everything about you, especially anything you don’t want them to.
I don’t think that fully captures it but it’s a piece of it.
While the sense of power isn't there (many guys feel insecure about their status, it's what drives most of the worst kinds of gendered violence), the perception of power is there and guys are constantly trying to display it - putting each other down, fighting, competing to be the best at x y z, showing off their physicality/strength/wealth in various ways.
There's also the fact that many guys 'know' that they could use their physicality to dominate a woman, even though she may have the upper hand socially (like when Dennis talks about 'the implication' in Always Sunny)
As for how boys see girls, my own experience was that it was just an idealised projection of my own unmet needs/desires, rather than seeing them as fully-formed three-dimensional beings with their own experiences and needs.
Men are, actually, necessary for the survival of species. And everyone thinks someone else is stronger. Even though there is much sexism in the world - as a teen girl, I experience it daily - boys have some of the same challenges. It’s not about respect. It’s about doing what’s right. And what you love.
I don’t think male physical confidence is primarily the result of actual physical ability. An adult male is about as vulnerable to a speeding bus or a rabid dog as an adult female. I’m smaller physically than most American women but I would say I still take more physical risks and am more likely to be physically confrontational than a woman who’s bigger than be. I don’t think this difference is so much the result of male physical advantage as intrinsically greater risk tolerance, and of course ‘machismo.’ Men will often refuse to back down from a fight even against someone much stronger who could easily beat them. Men tend to just have weaker self-preservation instincts.
Why do so many people focus on the _sense_ or the _perception_ of power, rather than the actual power?
> There's also the fact that many guys 'know' that they could use their physicality to dominate a woman, even though she may have the upper hand socially
Even a socially dim nerd like me has known since before puberty (when there were plenty of girls stronger than me) not to ever dream of using my physicality against a woman in any way, shape or form, or else. An unspecified, but very dangerous _else_, backed up unanimously by everyone.
Then again, I was sheltered, so it was easy for me to believe grown-ups never fought physically anyway and there was little point in treating violence against women as a special case. Only as an adult did I realize that other people had never stupidly eradicated violence from their minds, like I had, and that one of the reasons women kept their distance was that they were not entirely convinced I was not the kind of idiot who would assault them despite knowing that someone would soon beat me to a pulp or stab me to death.
> As for how boys see girls, my own experience was that it was just an idealised projection of my own unmet needs/desires, rather than seeing them as fully-formed three-dimensional beings with their own experiences and needs.
I was so isolated I just believed what I was told: that they were basically like us, except for the obvious physical differences, which didn’t seem to matter much. I just noticed, at some point, that there were very few girls I did not find attractive. Blissfully status-blind, I lacked the motivation to scrutinize them for tiny defects to find out which one was the fairest of ’em all. Besides, it was not like I was going to do anything with any of them beyond admiring her from afar and thinking, “Wouldn’t it be nice to get to know her or something, you know, in a parallel universe?”.
Then, as an adult, I eventually figured out that women are the gatekeepers to sex and, to a somewhat lesser extent, to any kind of heterosexual relationship surrounding it, and that the average man is by no means remotely as attractive to the average woman as she is to him. Since thinking of violence still did not come naturally to me, I couldn’t help seeing them as vastly superior beings: “See this female peer of yours over here? Well, no matter how much you apply yourself, anything you can do, she can, too, and she’s still desirable, and you’d do anything to get close to her, but you’re still a piece of shit”.
> Why do so many people focus on the _sense_ or the _perception_ of power, rather than the actual power?
Because there is no functional difference between the two. If people perceive you as powerful, you are able to exert influence over them. In many situations it's actually quite rare for people to have to 'prove' their competence or strength, especially if other people around them accept it or don't challenge it.
> Only as an adult did I realize that other people had never stupidly eradicated violence from their minds, like I had, and that one of the reasons women kept their distance was that they were not entirely convinced I was not the kind of idiot who would assault them despite knowing that someone would soon beat me to a pulp or stab me to death.
Many instances of violence and assault are committed by people who don't see themsleves as violent, sometimes they instantly feel regret for what they've done. Othertimes they can snap and suddenly plan terrible violence against their partners and their family. They can be overwhelmed by emotions or lose their inhibitions in other ways (e.g. the influence of drugs or due to mental illness). Just because humans are capable of high-level reasoning and logic doesn't mean they are incapable of this. Even for myself, I have never been violent, and even when faced with violence I have responded with weakness, yet I know that I have the capability to hurt others, especially those physically weaker than me, and I have a responsibility to be aware of my strengths, thoughts, and emotions.
> the average man is by no means remotely as attractive to the average woman as she is to him.
I think there is a large difference between what guys perceive woman as being attracted to and what the reality is for many women. Another thing is that the 'average woman' does not exist, just as there is no such thing as an 'average man' - everyone is unique and has their own set of interests, qualities, values, experiences, strengths, weaknesses, etc which influence their desires. There are women who are attracted to guys who many would look at and think "really, him?". Most guys would look at Steve Buscemi and think "boy what a weird and awkward looking man. Who would want to be with him? I'm so glad I don't look like that". Well, my ex thought Steve Buscemi was an incredibly sexy man. The movie "Cool World" is a great movie about a teenager who falls in love with a middle-aged misanthropic loner Steve Buscemi who collects and sells old records. Finally there's a concept of paradoxical attraction to things which are the 'opposite' of aesthetic. I think a lot of guys struggle to accept this because we constantly make fun of guys who like things that aren't considered 'ideal', like a woman who is excessively tall, overweight, muscular, masculine etc. 'bro your girlfriend looks like a man' 'whoa did you see the girl he went home with? she was huge!' etc. Some women are attracted to guys that are gross, hairy, overweight, have a 'dad bod', are bald etc. Most people would consider my sister to be attractive, and she has been happily marred for over a decade to an incredibly short, fat and ugly man. I recently showed a photo of him to my cousins (who hadn't seen him before) and they actually laughed when they saw what he looked like. It's also about contrasts and perception. Like on family guy, Lois looks more petite and feminine next to her tall and overweight husband.
It's easy to not realise these things because a lot of this stuff is not talked about, especially across gender lines, so we perpetuate these false narratives around 'what women want'.
> “See this female peer of yours over here? Well, no matter how much you apply yourself, anything you can do, she can, too, and she’s still desirable, and you’d do anything to get close to her, but you’re still a piece of shit”.
One of the most consistent things I've heard women say about what they find attractive is confidence. We should be mindful of the thoughts we have about ourselves. We can't change how we feel, but we can control our thoughts, and they do affect how we feel. Thinking these sorts of things about ourselves does affect our emotions and sap our confidence and we should try to replace them with more positive statements like. I would reframe this thought as:
"This female peer can achieve the same things as me, but is also faced with other expectations around her appearance and behaviour that I'm not. She's desirable, but she also experiences a lot of unwanted attention and judgement that I don't. Maybe she questions how much of her success is the product of her achievements rather than her looks, and whether she will still get the same attention when she is older and less youthful in apperance. I would love to get close to her, even if she seems 'out of my league'. Maybe we'll have some shared interests or experiences, maybe she's really into that obscure 90's anime that she's embarassed to admit, or perhaps she'll like my sense of humour."
Another thing about beautiful women is - they have to work hard. Very hard. They spend hours of time getting ready every morning just to go outside. And it has to be maintained every single day. As guys, we can sleep in, walk around in shirts that haven't been ironed, go for days or weeks without shaving, wear the same shirts, let our hair grow out etc and no one will care. The quote "Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, except backwards and in high heels" sums it up. Women have a much harder time keeping up with men because they have all these additional expectations and requirements of them.
On the topic of gatekeeping sex - this idea that men want to have sex and women don't. Women *want* to have sex. But they are also punished socially if they do so, while men are celebrated. They are taught from an early age that they need to withhold their bodies and if they don't they are a slut with no value. Sex is a collaborative act, rather than a goal to be achieved, and for women it is also a much more riskier undertaking than men, both physically and socially. If sex is the goal I think a much healthier outlook is to look at all the things that need to be achieved in order for both individuals to feel both safety and enjoyment, and then work back from there.
"Girls seemed to hold all the power in the world" = "I hit on a bunch of girls and couldn't get laid"
Wanting to stick yourself into something doesn't mean that it has power. Males from all over the world travel to impoverished countries like Vietnam and Cambodia to rape children--it's underage sex slavery, a market of billions of dollars. Do those children have power because men pay money to rape them?
Males think that because they can't get away with treating females like shit all the time, which they want to do, particularly sexually, that means females have power. Check the rates of female participation in politics and finance. That's real power.
Idiotic nonsense like this could only come from a male. Get back to your video games.
"you watch a movie where a woman everyone describes as ‘strong’ demonstrates her strength by refusing to take shit, threatening to tear a man’s tongue out of his head if he speaks to her like that again. but this is roleplay - how can everyone not see this is roleplay? she obviously could not tear his tongue out. if they fought, he would win. in the movie, everyone draws back like she’s being scary, and you see it as everyone indulging her in her pretend feeling of having some sort of power."
As a preteen growing up in mainstream feminist culture, I think I used to experience these scenes in movies the opposite way. I only knew physical conflict through movies like this. When conflict was on the news it was discussed, not shown. So you didn't get to see what gender the soldiers were. And my education emphasised that girls were just as good at everything as boys. In my brain, the notion that women can't fight and thus aren't dangerous was in the same category as treating disease with leeches. Silly superstitious stuff people used to believe in the past. My parents did tell me that boys got stronger on average than girls after puberty, but I'd somehow understood this to be a slight marginal difference that didn't matter much outside aggregate statistics. And anyway, the martial arts movies said skill and having a weapon mattered more than strength.
So when the women in movies threatened to rip people's tongues out for disrespecting them, I took that just as seriously as a male character doing it.
As a result, I often greatly disliked the women characters in these movies. They were supposed to be sympathetic and on the side of good, but they threatened people with physical violence at the slightest provocation! The male characters who were supposed to be sympathetic didn't do that. Or if they did, it was a Big Deal and they got a talking to about not falling to the dark side. But the women somehow got to do it with no criticism whatsoever.
Looking back, this is obviously because the womens' threats weren't really considered serious. The actors might try to pretend that they're serious, but the audience doesn't really believe it, and the writers don't either. Their attitudes leak into the story. But kid me thought it was serious. And so these scenes kind of angered and worried me. Was this a weird genre convention, or did it perhaps reflect real world attitudes? Could women in real life put me in the hospital for 'disrespecting them', like insecure thugs, and just get away with it?
EDIT June 12: On reflection, I no longer endorse this post-hoc story about what I thought when I was younger. The supporting memories are too vague and indirect. There's a vibe of something sort of like this, but little in the way of concrete memories of concrete thoughts kid me had about movies to back it up. The evidence does not seem to single out the detailed story I wrote above.
For what it's worth, skill and having a weapon actually does matter more than strength. No amount of muscle will make you a tenth as deadly as someone with a gun and the training to use it.
> Could women in real life put me in the hospital for 'disrespecting them', like insecure thugs, and just get away with it?
Sink enough in status and they will. And they’ll think and feel they are bravely defending themselves from a vile abuser. And so will everyone else, and they’ll punish you accordingly.
Thanks for capturing this feeling so well, especially the insecurity that comes with knowing that the world rewards (and that there seem to be genuine rewards, even removed from social validation) for being good at male-stuff. One thing I've noticed that really works to be respected while reconciling the facts of your nature, is to use masculine-domain stuff for feminine pursuits or feminine-domain stuff for masculine pursuits. And I think you do so much of that! The way you do rigorous quantitative (male) analysis to answer social (female) questions, for example. In my own pursuits, I also brought a coherent but niche feminine perspective into a male dominated space and noticed how it made me feel not just respected but also so much more comfortable with my female identity: and believe that it does bring value. Although I don't align with all the mainstream progressive/liberal ideals, one thing I do believe is that there is value in the representation of multiple perspectives and interdisciplinary pursuits.
Appreciated your perspective. Your writing is excellent.
For my two cents as a man who used to be a teenage girl, and lived in liberal areas most of my life, I didn't experience this. Actually, when I was young I thought gender didn't matter at all, and I didn’t understand why people kept bringing it up. When you grow up in a liberal, secular area, you get blasted by messaging assuring you that girls were smart and cool and good at coding, which comes off as an obnoxious campaign by overpaid bureaucrats telling kids what we already know. Of course girls can do STEM, what is this, the 1950s?
I remember winning a team math competition in elementary. The lady running the award ceremony looked at the four of us and exclaimed, "Wow, all girls!" I rolled my eyes at the absurd idiosyncrasies of adults: who cared if we were girls or not? What did that have to do with math? Give me my medal.
This culture also meant I never agonized about my initial gender non-conformity. Around the age of twelve, I cut my hair short and started wearing masculine clothes, and I never went back. It felt natural to me. After all, what was wrong with wanting to look like a boy? I fought with my parents over it all the time, but I fought with them often, and while I loved them I thought their opinions were out-of-touch. I’m grateful to my background and my social obliviousness that I was able to figure out my preferences with minimal external pressure.
I’ve talked to people who grew up in religious environment like yours. Broadly speaking, they end up with a lot more baggage around their gender, and it’s not hard to see why.
This whole experience is alien to me. My experience of growing up as a teen girl was literally nothing like this. I didn't see the adult women in my life as weak or incapable. My mom flew gliders and rode a motorcycle when she was young. My aunt worked as a welder. My teachers valued my intelligence and encouraged my artistic streak. In my teens I had trouble fitting in with the cool kids, but that wasn't a gendered experience at all, and I certainly never felt I couldn't do things because of my sex. In fact, I never felt more accepted or encouraged in school than when I took a couple of different shop classes. So I just don't think you can generalize about what a teen girl thinks it's like to be a boy.
Yes, this is definitely just one perspective. There are also quite a few assumptions in the essay about what things men/women are predisposed towards enjoying or being skilled at, which are not going to be true for everyone.
Well, this makes me sad for girls who grew up in this type of religious and ultra conservative culture. I must have grown up in the Twilight zone, because I can't relate to any of it, and never received or saw any of these messages in actual life or media, nor had any of these thoughts. The life of everyone around me and in my home was exactly like what was shown on TV on the Cosby Show (upscale version) or Roseanne (working class version)...men and women who were equally as powerful, equally as smart and sarcastic and likely to assert themselves, and with similar earning power and prestige in their jobs, who both took care of the kids, both cooked, etc. That really was all I knew my whole life, til I went off to college and was astonished to learn that there were people who still had moms that didn't work, or who did all the cooking and laundry, or who had ideas about gender roles or girls being sluts for the same behavior as boys. It really shocked me. I had thought all that ended in the 60s.
It never occurred to me that boys were better at anything than girls, other than sports and who cares about sports. The capacity for violence or physical domination was totally irrelevant, since violence is illegal and would just get the hitter or the fight starter put in jail. If anything, it seemed to me that women held the upper hand on violence since men couldn't hit a woman, but we could hit them (at least that seemed to be the accepted standard in the 90s...I never really saw anyone hit anyone).
It wasn't til I was an adult that I was exposed to and lived in conservative places, and the gulf in gender roles and expectations was enormous.
FWIW, guys and girls also sure seemed to get along and just like each other a lot more, as friends and people, where I grew up. Though that was back in the 90s before everyone got extreme with their gender politics. It was only in conservative places where they'd carved out separate social spheres for each gender that they seemed to have a weird sense of mutual hostility or confusion about the other, yet also a sense of duty and obligation to bind together with the enemy within a family. Very strange.
Similar. I grew up in a fairly conservative culture, where women went to college for their "Mrs." degree, but this was constantly contrasted with the "girls can do ANYTHING" mainstream culture at school. So I got to college with a strange fusion of these beliefs. It seems to me that women are trapped between multiple worlds; home, work, social, with people ready to tell her she's "wrong" no matter what.
It's called being raised as an evangelical homeschooled kid. I'm the same age as Aella and fortunately had supportive parents who were never abusive, but the following lines are straight out of evangelical/fundy pop theology/culture:
-"Maybe women shouldn't have been allowed to vote"
-"women should be loved, but men should be respected"
-"you’re told it’s probably not a good idea for women to be leaders because they’re too emotional"
-"You aren't an adventurer, you aren't meant to do cool things. you don't have the capacity. you're supposed to be cherished, and you're supposed to be happy with that."
I took the route of a computational physics career in academia, and I do love numbers, but I'd lying if some of the impetus wasn't that sweet, sweet respect I get effortlessly now as a woman doing unemotional things that are viewed as "hard"...mainly from my childhood community. All of the sudden they don't care if a woman is "breaking gender roles" if it makes them look good to have "one of them" doing fancy things. I get to be known as a person who does things.
I do have a fond memory of being at a house party with a bunch of secular normie nerd friends after many drinks as a college student and yelling "they say women crave love and men crave respect...but guess what? I CRAVE RESPECT! :D" And all the drunk normies cheered about the woman talking about respect because that sounds good right? They had no idea where I was actually coming from lol.
I wish we could have that “Twilight Zone” culture back. These days, everyone seems certain that it just cannot work.
> or girls being sluts for the same behavior as boys
That particular piece of traditional gender rôles never quite went away where I grew up, along with the condemnation of sex work. But, from my pathetic point of view, it didn’t matter: sex, if it was to occur at all in my life, belonged in the distant, inscrutable future, so why bother to think about it?
> It never occurred to me that boys were better at anything than girls, other than sports and who cares about sports.
I noticed girls tended to do a bit better in school, but nobody seemed to care about that. Then, around a decade later, I realized there were a considerable number of people out there claiming that modern, progressive schools repress masculinity and what we really need is old-style gender-segregated schools. In my case, such a system would have guaranteed I essentially never saw a girl—would I even know they exist?—and, in their absence, the other boys would probably have bullied me with much less restraint, but hey, who am I to say I didn’t deserve it for not being strong and masculine enough? I felt guilty for benefitting from an unfair system that hurts actually respectable boys so much.
> The capacity for violence or physical domination was totally irrelevant, since violence is illegal
I was raised with those ideas, too, but now I think they’re very dangerous. They led me to speak my mind to everyone, expecting only words in return, but this is definitely not how people roll, nor has it ever been. I wasn’t being brave when I told people things that could—should?—have gotten me beaten up or worse; I was just stupid and ignorant.
This reality dawned on me slowly, when people on the Internet again and again won arguments against me by challenging me to meet up and say the same things to their face, showing everyone what a foul coward I was, and I saw that everyone will issue similar challenges when pressed enough and will sympathize with the challenger.
> and would just get the hitter or the fight starter put in jail.
Only if the judge, or whoever makes the decision, gets enough evidence about who started the fight, and is not incentivized to disregard it. Unsurprisingly, troublemakers are often good at troublemaking and getting away with it.
> If anything, it seemed to me that women held the upper hand on violence since men couldn't hit a woman, but we could hit them (at least that seemed to be the accepted standard in the 90s...I never really saw anyone hit anyone).
That was my impression as well. In fact, I wondered why they didn’t take advantage more often of the taboo against hitting them. Now I think that in my case, if they’d known how powerless I felt in front of them, they would have.
> FWIW, guys and girls also sure seemed to get along and just like each other a lot more, as friends and people, where I grew up.
Yeah I can't understand how people think that further segregation, alienation, and polarization of the sexes would lead to a good result...it would not. It makes everyone confused and scared and/or hostile or just deluded about the other sex. I was in mixed sex and mixed age daycare pretty much my whole life and I really think it was the best possible thing for naturalized socialization and being comfortable around everyone.
On the violence thing, I can absolutely understand that as a male, it would seem to be (and is) a much bigger and more realistic threat. In fact the only times in my life I've ever been truly afraid of violence were two occasions where girls threatened to beat me up and I was scared shitless in both cases. But a guy really cannot get away with hitting or harming a woman unless he either kills her or she for some reason doesn't go to the police...otherwise, he's toast. But I hope you know that that's actually the case for you too...keyboard warriors making challenges etc. The vast majority of threats or challenges to violence are just that...empty threats...much like dogs growling or gorillas thumping...intended to make someone back down, not actually do anything. And if someone else attacks you or hits first (especially after TYPING a direct threat to do so), you can absolutely ruin their life. Get them put in jail, get have their wages garnished for the next 20 years, etc.
Anyway I agree, things were better (at least for me)back in the day. I feel bad for young people with gender relations nowadays.
> and, in their absence, the other boys would probably have bullied me with much less restraint
Wrong. It's the inverse - bullying occurs because of intrasexual competition. If there are no girls around, that's better (regarding bullying specifically).
Re. "you are desperate to feel a little of that magic 'respect' that men get for their manliness": There's an asymmetry here. Most women can get respect for their womanliness. Most women are desired by some man. It is just the opposite with men: In any social group, only a small number of men get respect for their manliness. Most men aren't desired by any woman. Men aren't insecure about being male; they're conscious of failing at being male, because, owing to the biology of sperm and egg, most men will always be considered failures as men.
Men have it simple: win respect or fail. Women have it far more complicated; no matter what, they'll be valued, but actually getting respect as a woman is FAR more difficult.
If that's so, I think it means that you're speaking of forms of respect that are gendered, and that you feel most of the forms of respect you want most are gendered male. Does that sound accurate?
Is it possible that part of the reason you want those male-gendered forms of respect so much is that the past 40 years of "empowering" women have tried to do so mostly by telling women they should be less like women and more like men? E.g., Xena, warrior princess, and all the other hyper-masculine women paraded across our screens as "strong women".
I live in a rural area, where most older women have grown ambivalent about women's lib, and there is a type of strong woman here that I don't see much in suburban upper-middle-class America, that maybe is a way of being strong that is being forgotten. I don't really understand it. But the strongest women are often the ones who make the most strategic use of gender stereotypes. It seems to me that traditional gender stereotypes grant men more power than women, but also that women are more-adept at wielding these stereotypes to stake their claims to areas of authority. The loss of these stereotypes admits more women into certain competitive arenas, but the price of admission is stripping them of their "strange" powers.
I think people are confused, too. Men's lives still have the same arc, but now the rewards (good job, house, wife, kids) are increasingly hard to get, both in logistical and social terms. And inequality means there's more of us at the bottom. Men only get marked/noticed if they do something notable. women are always marked/noticed, but not necessarily for what they want to be. Women, on the other hand, are stuck between housewife and girlboss. And so many people ready to judge her for falling short on either.
I think we have lost ideas of feminine strength; no idea how to get them back. I don't blame women for mostly deciding that "traditional" womanhood was a crock; problem is, who does the childcare? And "strong female characters" are all conveniently fictional.
There are strong female characters who are technically fictional, but realistic and feminine: From the ancient Greeks, Penelope, Antigone, & Lysistrata. From the 19th century, Elizabeth Bennet, Jane Eyre, arguably Catherine from /Wuthering Heights/. Mrs. Ramsay from /To the Lighthouse/. Anne of Green Gables, and her adoptive mother Marilla. Most of the women Zora Neale Hurston wrote about, including herself. Though I'm having a hard time thinking of any such contemporary characters who aren't from /My Little Pony/.
Though admittedly the realistic strong female woman in fiction is often a tragic victim (Medea, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Nora Helmer, Mother Courage), and/or a monster (Medea, Laura Adolph in notorious misogynist Strindberg's /The Father/, Hedda Gabler).
> women are always marked/noticed, but not necessarily for what they want to be.
I’m still confused about that. Why do women specifically not want to be noticed for their physical attractiveness? It’s not like you can’t both be attractive and do notable things. This has always seemed a weirdly subtle and philosophical thing to me, but people are never so consistently subtle and philosophical about anything else, so there must be an elephant in the room I’m not seeing.
It probably has something to do with violence, my favorite elephant in the room, and with people losing respect for women who rely too much, or too overtly, on their attractiveness to achieve their goals, but this accounts for maybe the hairs on the tip of the elephant’s tail. I guess there’s no way of learning much about this without getting to know at least a woman intimately and earning her trust.
> problem is, who does the childcare?
Why not whoever it is most practical in each case? Why must all childcare duties fall on the same person, and why must that person always be the same gender? Why are people so certain we can’t raise any more children the way plenty of us were raised a generation or two ago?
> Why do women specifically not want to be noticed for their physical attractiveness?
I can't speak for women as a whole, but perhaps it's because physical attractiveness is precarious. Looking attractive comes from a combination of:
* biology, i.e., being dealt a good genetic hand
* style, i.e., staying aware of what's considered attractive in your specific cultural context
* investment, i.e., putting in substantial effort to maintain the traits above and maximize their benefit
Problem is, those things either fade with time, or they impose such a cost that they aren't sustainable throughout adulthood and/or they take away from your ability to do other notable things. As evidence, look at all the content out there telling women what to eat, how to exercise, and what skincare products to use to maintain their youthful beauty; all the publications and blogs about fashion and makeup and hair, and the variety (and cost) of services offered at spas and salons; the amount of time women spend getting ready to go places, how long it takes a woman to get her hair done vs. a man, and the sheer amount of clothing and other products women buy or even carry around with them to maintain their appearance.
Someone who relies *too much* on being noticed for her physical attractiveness risks being left with nothing if it ever fades, and odds are it eventually will.
The male equivalent might be something like taking a physically demanding job, or in the extreme case, being a professional athlete. Why don't most men want to be valued primarily for their physical strength? Because it's exhausting, and because they won't be able to make a lifelong career out of it.
Showed this to my partner who grew up in England and she said it could not be further from her own experience growing up. She never felt the constraints expectation weighing on her in this way, and the boys were certainly not the "cool" ones - it was the popular girls who were dating older guys that had a hold of the mindshare there. I should add that she is very capable and someone I highly respect.
Just putting this out there as this post is written in second person, instead of the personal experience that I feel it really is. This isn't a necessarily representative view of the female experience.
What was it that changed so you no longer feel this way I wonder? Maturity? Using your body in other ways to control men? I've been pondering lately exactly when and how I started seeing men as people, not just walking sacks of sperm that get in the way of more meaningful and fun relationships. Not quite sure yet.
i think getting out of the very religious culture i was raised in helped a lot. just exposure to people who liked women for women's sake. also exposure to women who really liked feminine things and were proud about it. Also time, a lot of the gender stuff is driven by the insecurity of youth where you're trying so hard to find a way to feel valuable to others
Glad to hear that. Yay for women and feminine things! Gonna age myself now, but watching Sex and the City as a teen/early 20 was pretty formative when it came to enjoying female culture for its own merits. Actually, I think your stuff could be filling a similar space in the cultural landscape today.
It's a pity so many traditional beliefs are patriarchal and narrowly defined. Some kind of social practices to help kids through adolescence to adulthood would be nice, and I don't think high school does the job. College is a poor substitute.
Go talk to the men directly, and tell them to stop destroying everything, including by growing out their hair and destroying women's sports.
Why did you title this "how to be respected as a teen girl"? Why do teen girls need to be taught how to be respected? Who is the source of disrespect?
Write an article entitled "how to be a male and not be trash." Stop preaching at women and blaming us for every problem that clearly flows from male stupidity.
Did you even read beyond the title? It's a personal account of Aella's experience with insecurity over her gender, not preaching at other women. Write the article yourself if you want it so bad.
By the way, what do you have against men growing their hair out and what does that have to do with women's sports? That makes no sense.
Okay, honestly? I didn’t love this article but this comment is very sexist towards men - and it’s not like I’m a man talking about this! I’m a woman! Genders don’t define you. Some men, yes, are very cruel toward women and have shaped the sexist world we live in today - but I bet they thought of women in nearly the exact same way you think about men. And how are men ruining things by GROWING OUT THEIR HAIR? This comment makes no sense and is certainly NOT a viewpoint that will continue development and inclusion in the modern world.
I'm also very curious about what brought about this change. My assumption was that it was because of her own achievements, the recognition she's received, and her increased status. I could be entirely wrong though.
Maybe also that girls stuff is actually cool too? Doesn't have to be shoes and makeup. Music, reading and writing, art, other people. Even a lot of stem is now female dominated...
Very insightful. Thank you for sharing this. I will say that, although they do of course, it's unrealistic for a young girl to compare herself to the "alpha" boys, and not realize how tough it is to be the boy who's the loser at the accepted "boy things".
Just as an observation, I've known many women who were very feminine, but capable of getting respect from males and putting them in their place if they needed it. For a fictional archetype, I'd refer you to the TV series Veronica Mars. Totally feminine, yet tough as nails, and capable of putting obnoxious men in their place with her words and deeds though not in physical confrontations.
I think boys often have higher highs and lower lows than women. In the majority of fields, it'll be very rare for the greatest woman to be better than the greatest man. In a number of important fields like math and war and engineering, often the number of men who can contribute anything at all outnumber the women who can contribute anything at all 4:1. But also, the majority of people who contribute absolutely nothing or are a detriment to society are men. The majority of people who get no sympathy from society and are totally left to rot on their own are men. Men can have more opportunity for greatness, but they need to seize it for themselves, much less will be handed to them, they don't have a safety net of sympathy like women. And men often do fail at their opportunity for greatness. And while great women are rarer, they're hardly nonexistent-Ada Lovelace, Marie Curie, the USSR's Night Witches, Rosalin Franklin, yourself Aella imo, to name a few.
Also there's a great deal of violence committed by men. The vast majority of violent criminals are men. Women are often victimized despite doing nothing wrong. That's why I still consider myself a feminist, albeit of a different stripe than today's mainstream feminism. We need to enable women's potential and freedom to choose what they want to do, while acknowledging many may not hunger for greatness like most men, but absolutely not stand in their way if they do want it. And we also need to give men a path to achieve greatness if they're willing to work for it too, while clamping down on male violence.
Men have a bimodal distribution. This leads to confusion. Women see the men with status and wish they had that...meanwhile all the no-status men are also wishing. Also, why "male privilege" talks go awry; for all the no-status men, being told they're somehow in the same category as the guys they wish they were result in them not understanding.
This was incredibly interesting. Thanks for publishing. Rick Fox (in the top comment right now) is correct that this isn't how boys experience life (he also has a really well written example of how they do). But obviously that isn't the point - your piece is about how girls see things.
What strikes me, though, is how your narrator is pulling incomplete lessons from men's activities. It reminds me of something my sister once told me: she was never told when she was growing up that she could be President.
That blew me away. That concept is a constant for boys. It never occurred to me that girls didn't hear it. It definitely wasn't our parents being chauvinistic - for better or worse my sister and I were expected to have the same college/career life trajectory - so it must just be background radiation of the culture.
But then I watched her raise her girls. She was determined that they be given the same message as boys: you can be president. You can be an astronaut. You can do anything.
Which is fine. The problem, though, is that this kind of message is only culturally dominant for boys until we're ten. After that you're (gently!) introduced to the concept of "nobody cares. Shut up and do your job". To make it clear this is NOT cruel or nasty and it isn't supposed to grind boys down or anything. It's just straightforward, it's reality, and it's required for society to function; moreover it's genuinely helpful to understand and internalize as you make your way through life.
"Shut up and do your job" grows and expands and gets more complicated and nuanced until by the time you're 18 and it's like 90% of the message, with "you can be President" occupying a happy 10% of optimistic potential.
My nieces aren't getting that. I mean they're great - this isn’t necessarily a big deal - but the message they're marinating isn't the same, even though that was my sister's goal, and it's probably inferior.
I think maybe there's a lot of this going on as the culture changes for women. This might be the source of a lot of what men are bemused by and what we complain about as well as why women are discovering that things aren't working out the way they were promised. I think I'm on to something here.
Very thoughtful piece, thank you for writing this. It sucks that you were made to feel this way by the social environment you grew up in. I do think though that "more women tend to have insecurity about their gender than men" is straightforwardly false in most liberal/secular cultures (though I absolutely don't doubt that it's true in most conservative/religious ones like the one you've mentioned growing up in). A lot of what you describe experiencing actually feels similar to what I experienced as a boy growing up in a more liberal/secular culture.
A succinctly representative example of the sort of thing I experienced many many examples of is this poster my 6th grade science teacher had on her classroom wall, which started with something like "both genders have incredible gifts that set them apart from the other", then had a really long paragraph waxing poetic about women's emotional strength, empathy, kindness, refinement, social grace, etc., and finally ended with "men are good at lifting heavy stuff and killing spiders". Obviously, it's meant as a joke, but it very much feels like the same sort of "joke" as when you describe people "joking" about it having been a mistake to give women the right to vote.
It's interesting that the culture you experienced and the one I experienced seem to largely agree about which things are male-coded and which things are female-coded, but differ in that I experienced the male-coded things as being more likely to be viewed with a dismissive attitude and the female-coded things as being more likely to be viewed as What Actually Matters, while it sounds like you experienced the reverse.
Things are further complicated by the fact that many men are envious of women for how much sexual attention they receive, while many women are envious of men for how little sexual attention they receive. I don't necessarily claim that men *generally* have it worse in this regard, but, in the culture I experienced, men *absolutely* have it worse - said culture is very sympathetic to women's desire for less sexual attention from men and very unsympathetic to men's desire for more sexual attention from women. Though of course it's not hard to imagine a culture where the opposite is true, and presumably such cultures do also exist.
Re. "they don't make movies about raising kids. a woman will never earn the respect and gratitude of her fellow countryman for reading bedtime stories really well." -- They used to make movies about raising kids. Think of Mary Poppins or The Sound of Music. They don't make them anymore because these movies are now called paternalistic attempts to brainwash women into wanting to be mothers and raise kids.
Key difference: my parents made the conscious decision to avoid raising their daughters to be girly girls, and when I was in elementary school I was suddenly very good at math - for which I was praised to the moon and told variants of "you can be a mathematician or computer scientist, even though those are male-dominated fields" all the time. For this I am incredibly lucky.
But society still had (and has) expectations based on gender - that females will act like females and males will act like males. Meanwhile, my aspie self admired men and thought I would earn love and respect by being like them. Examples:
- I got it in my head that sleeping with many people was high status. Oh my, I was wrong (one reason I appreciate you is for starting to shift that Overton Window, though it is fascinating and appalling to see how some people just can't fathom how you can be your sexually voracious self and also an intellectual).
- I learned to debate aggressively, to go toe-to-toe with opinionated dudes. While this rapid-fire arguing can be legitimately annoying, I think I get penalized heavily for it due to my gender.
- I consider my self-worth largely contingent upon my intellectual abilities and contributions.
When I was in high school, it was LGB and not LGBTQ. Had trans identity been as common then as it is now, I might have started identifying as a man (or maybe just nonbinary). It isn't because I feel wrong in my body - I love having a woman's body - but because there has long been social/professional friction around my gender versus my interests and behavior. This friction is painful and costly, and I suspect it wouldn't exist if I were male - as in, some of my barely tolerated traits would suddenly become desirable. I could just waltz into some situations implicitly male-only (<- of which there are plenty even in my liberal community, amongst Millennial peers). And I could do all this *without* using sex appeal / girly charm / flirtatiousness to grease the wheels (because that does ease the friction, but has real costs and limitations).
---
I wonder, Aella, how accepted you feel amongst rationalists. Since you have high status in that community, I assume the answer is yes? If so, how did you feel when your status was lower? It seems like gender expectation friction would be a non-issue in that community, but then again I'll never forget some of the dumb comments posted on your Frame Control article on LW.
Had you actually transitioned, you would have realized most of this was in your head.
Maybe not all of it, I can't tell you that. What I can tell you is while I did not originally consider misogyny to be a serious problem in the progressive areas I grew up, being early into my transition (and recently exposed to hyperbolic online activism) made me paranoid about how I was treated. In those early months, I'd often encounter someone being condescending towards me, or men apparently excluding me from masculine activities, and convince myself that this happened because they saw me as a woman. Only to find out later that everyone involved thought I was a cisgender man the entire time.
In one funny incident, I was wrestling with a college friend, and got it in my head that he must be going easy on me. "He's not treating me as a real opponent," I thought, "he's humoring me because he sees me as a girl." Months later I had to explain to him why I couldn't donate sperm.
From these experiences I updated back to my original belief that in liberal communities, gender rarely affects daily interactions. I expect that women growing up in similar political environments, in which messaging about the pervasiveness of misogyny is more common than misogyny itself, are likely to see discrimination where it doesn't really exist. And unlike me, they never get male social experiences to compare to. Ironically, this paranoia does a number on their confidence.
For similar reasons, I am highly skeptical of the idea that kids assigned female are identifying as trans to escape misogyny. Of those living in progressive areas or exposed online to progressive ideas, they might be taught that misogyny is everywhere and it's very bad, but they're also taught that transphobia is everywhere and it's even worse. Kids living in conservative areas don't need to be taught transphobia is everywhere, they will encounter it every time they step out of line. No kid consciously believes that transitioning will make their life easier.
Nor do I believe subconscious "internalized misogyny" is common among trans kids, much less a motivator for transition. These kids don't believe being a boy is cooler than being a girl. If anything, the exact opposite is a serious problem. Because trans youth spaces, online and offline, are infected with the same hyperbolic, nuance-free feminism we all know and hate, many young trans men struggle with guilt over their identities. Men are entitled and unempathetic and stupid and dangerous, men are the oppressors, you don't want to be a real man, do you? You can be a trans man, but you must disavow masculinity, make it clear you're not like the other men. I understand that cis men in progressive spaces often feel similar guilt, though without the added burden of betraying womanhood.
It's easy for older women to look back and say they fantasized about being boys as a kid, so they would have identified as trans if it had been an option. But this ignores the ground realities of the culture trans boys are exposed to.
It’s very strange to hear the perspective of what a teen girl thinks being a boy is like. I suspect that the only thing so similarly and deeply incorrect is the perspective a teen boy has about what being a girl is like.
I think it probably depends on the boy. It rang pretty true to me. She's envying the boys who are *good* at being boys. She probably never even noticed the ones who aren't.
Even the 'average' or 'below average' boy would be humiliated if a girl beat him at a 'boy thing'. While there are exceptions in real life (there always are) at least in the media it's often portrayed that way e.g. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/IWasBeatenByAGirl
Oh, absolutely. I once saw a very small weak man lose an arm wrestle to a very large strong woman. If I remember that thirty years later I'm sure he does.
But I'm not sure that little Aella was longing to be the sort of boy that gets beaten up routinely at school.
That's the thing though, there are always counterexamples to stereotypes - women who are stronger than men, men who are sensitive and intuitive. But these narratives get ignored, and those who contradict them get punished. Just as the guy was emasculated, I'll bet the woman was also seen as something of a freak.
I guess it depends where you live. Round here anyone claiming that men are stronger than women gets piled on. As far as I can tell most people think stereotypes are both evil and untrue by definition.
Even reading Aella's article I was constantly thinking "You can't say that! (even though it's true)". If even a nasty old patriarchal dinosaur like me has that level of automatic censorship built in, Christ knows what's going on in the kids' heads.
> I'll bet the woman was also seen as something of a freak.
Freakishly strong, certainly. She was! But we were a boat club. Freakishly strong gets respect.
There's an interesting trend nowdays where actually the younger generation (of men at least) are less progressive than the older generations on gender issues.
https://www.ipsos.com/en/millennials-and-gen-z-less-favour-gender-equality-older-generations
It could be the influence of social media, which tends to exacerbate the social anxieties of young people who then try to prove their masculinity by expressing more chauvinistic views.
I'm glad to hear that she got the respect! But that's my point - reality is complex and doesn't fit into stereotypes, but a lot of people's views are more and more influenced by social media, the news, movies, tv shows, video games, books... and these offer a distorted picture of reality that has to fit certain accepted narratives (which are constantly shifting). If you make a film that doesn't fit with that people can pile onto it as being unrealistic, but you can't argue with something that you see with your own eyes.
I'm inclined to agree: one thing I wondered about is how insecure boys and men must be. While I only compare myself to the best woman, you have to compare yourself to the best men who seem to have achieved far more.
I can only speak for myself but as a teenager I was less secure than a three legged dog in the back of a pickup truck driving down a road made entirely of potholes.
I would say it was less about the comparison and more about a desperate powerless wanting. I didn’t want to be the tallest. I just wanted to be taller. I didn’t want to be the coolest. I just wanted to be liked. And most prominently, I didn’t want that guy’s girlfriend. I just wanted a girl that I liked to see the slightest glimmer of worth in me and I wanted that very nearly as much as I desperately never wanted any girl to ever know that I felt that way.
I’m so glad I’m not a teenage boy any more. 😅
Like a one legged man in an ass kicking contest held on the head of a giant weeble-wobble.
Women are so beautiful and get so much love, and all they have to do is turn up and look good. It sounds so easy. They smell AMAZING. The pressure to be useful as a boy is just so high.
“Why did his wife leave him and take the kids?”
“Oh, he lost his job.”
And the movies. Superman gets strength and X-ray vision and he literally saves the world and flies back in time to save Lois Lane’s life, and I know that if that was me, I’d have Superwanked myself into a Supercoma. This is why I’m getting a D in algebra.
Mechanical things aren’t cool to do - literally every man can do them. My Dad just fixes cars by putting his hands on them.
“Feel that, son? No, put your hand right here. The flutter valve on that carb is sticking just a little. Keep your hands here. GIVE IT SOME JUICE, GENE! Feel how it loosens right up? We’re going to take that valve out and clean it.” His hands are already twisting the wing nut on the top of the Henley, on a running engine. This is the baseline you must reach to be average: disassemble and reassemble a car engine while it is running, fixing parts as you go.
And the weird thing is how, yes, you can feel it, and you know exactly what he means, but have no clue how on earth he figured that out until later, when you’re looking at your own son a lifetime later showing him how to scrape the side of a tomato stem and put the CAS-9 altered tomato cell slurry on it just so, and you can see the flicker where he realises what type of cuts will bud and which ones won’t.
“All cells in tomatoes are epistemic.” You say, and he had the exact look that tells you he’s confused in the same way you were. Same when you’re cleaning the plugs on the Kubota. One is fouled again, second time this month, probably a cracked cylinder head. You hear him later tell a totally fascinated girl that the Kubota probably has a cracked cylinder head, maybe a leaky gasket, and she’s SO INTO HIM and he has no idea at all. He’s just trying to show that he’s useful so she won’t take the kids and leave him, later.
Of course, I don’t have a son, or any kids at all. Men don’t get a say in whether they have kids.
I’m 51 and cry into my pillow when the wife is away, bitter sobs of wracking grief for a wasted life. Then I take the keyboard out of her MacBook, bridge the cold solder joint that’s been making the space key sometimes not fire, put it back together and just don’t tell her, because if I start talking to her about anything, I’ll just tell her she’s ruined my life by promising me kids, later, until we couldn’t, and then I’m going to put a gun in my mouth.i
I think you have covered everything. Brilliant.
This was fucking brilliant man. Good work. You nailed it.
Brilliant?
This is meaningless drivel. Men are crazy. Wtf are any of you even smoking?
I'm not good at writing with sympathy, but: you want kids. You're 51. It's not too late. My father was about that age when he had me.
You have one life. Go after what you want. I assume you say it's too late because your wife is to old to hear children? You still have options. Adopt. Foster. Pay a surrogate. If she doesn't want kids, by my lights you may divorce her, since you married under a misapprehension.
If this part of life matters to you enough that without it you consider your life wasted, do something. Your goal in life is to have children? Then don't let other things stand in the way. Try the classic "think for 5 minutes (really 5 minutes by the timer) about how to solve this extremely important problem."
You can overcome whatever stands in the way. You can. If your life is wasted without children, you must consider giving up everything that you value less than having children, else you waste your life by your standards.
You yourself are not too old. Please please please take this seriously.
Beautifully written and so bleak.
Men shouldn't be allowed to vote
Divide and conquer. This is what modern identity politics is achieving. Who benefits from this? I don’t know, but this “What need is there for you to vote? It’s enough for me to vote” issue is bound to be resolved when there’s nothing to vote on any more.
She's a troll, ignore her.
What? That makes absolutely no sense. Everyone of every gender should be allowed to vote.
> you have to compare yourself to the best men who seem to have achieved far more.
I think maybe it's not even about achievement. There are always boys and then men local to us who are so much better at "being men"... who manage somehow to be affable and self-contained, who can make the right joking insult at the right time... who immediately get taken seriously by women and don't have to say much to do it. The rest of us can do these things, but it takes effort, and it never comes naturally.
That's the thing. It's all an illusion. You project an aura of 'toughness' by putting down or dominating those weaker than you. And the worst thing of all is to be weaker than a girl. An ex of mine played on the boys hockey team in school until she had to quit because in every game the boys would gang up on her.
> It's all an illusion. You project an aura of 'toughness' by putting down or dominating those weaker than you.
If you're putting down and dominating those weaker than you, how is your 'toughness' an illusion?
Because it's often just an act or a display. Of course, if you do something enough it eventually becomes real and natural. Fake it 'til you make it. Other people believe it and start treating you accordingly. But a lot of the time, at least in terms of 'banter' it is all about bravado and confidence and it only takes a witty retort to puncture it.
Sorry, thought you meant physically. Told you I was a dinosaur. Once upon a time people who went round acting like that without being able to back it up got brought down to earth fairly quickly, and the witty retort was delivered after the point had been made.
Oh come now. Elizabeth I? Lady Lovelace? Taylor Swift? Even on the male scale their achievements are awesome.
But if I was a woman, I wouldn't aspire to be any of those three. The happiest women seem to be the ones with a husband who loves them and happy children. There must be some skill in that. I would have no idea how to go about it.
The scale on which you measure yourself is doing a lot of work here.
The misogyny with which you were compelled to be so invalidating is doing a lot of work here. Throughout this thread.. Slinging your patriarchal poor excuse of a "perspective" all over the comments. Just because a few women in history managed to step up to the plate and only because of birthright/privilege doesn't negate the struggle of millions of women who only got to have checking accounts 50 years ago.. Or any of the other power structures in place to make sure women "know their place". Your comments throughout this thread really speak to what you really feel about women and our "roles". And in light of our human rights are being attacked and our ability to thrive is being threatened, your trivializing voice only comes off as tone deaf.
When did men get checking accounts?
The Equal Credit Opportunity Act passed in 1974. Women were finally granted the right to open a bank account without their spouse/or single. Women could before, but banks were not obligated or they refused to do so without their husbands present. You're grown, you could have answered your own question. White men never had barriers like that. ECO Act guaranteed that right for everyone else.
Oh, *that's* an argument you're not going to win. People like Sophie Germain and Emmy Noether did extraordinary things in spite of really crippling barriers to them doing them. Lovelace as well. There were probably countless equally brilliant women who just gave up, or didn't have the resources to just do it anyway.
I didn't come to debate. What I said is true. You're tokenizing women in order to bolster your opinion, in order to deflect from the real lived experience of girls and women. History and our collective lived experience trumps your opinion. No debate can be had.
I can assure you as a teen, I never once thought what it must feel like to be a girl. I was mostly interested in video games and tech, and then in having girls like me, but I never much thought about their experience.
I think it's accurate - from a teen viewpoint. She sees the highlights of life as a boy/man, the ones who make it to the top, and misses all the boys also wishing they were prominent, or at least liked.
how is it incorrect?
The sense of power she seemed to ascribe boys as feeling isn’t true to my experience. In fact, I’d say that being a teenage boy is characterized by a deep understanding of all the ways you are and always will be powerless.
I also don’t think it’s true to how boys see girls. Bear in mind I can only speak to my experience and while I’m sure I’m not unique, I don’t know how many would feel the way I did.
Girls in many ways seemed to hold all the power in the world. A person who can make you feel like you’d do anything just to get a second glance from them is very powerful. It’s not just girls you like or are attracted to. All of them seem to understand a lot more than you ever will. There’s also the mystery aspect. Girls are completely mysterious to most boys. You don’t understand them and they completely understand everything about you, especially anything you don’t want them to.
I don’t think that fully captures it but it’s a piece of it.
While the sense of power isn't there (many guys feel insecure about their status, it's what drives most of the worst kinds of gendered violence), the perception of power is there and guys are constantly trying to display it - putting each other down, fighting, competing to be the best at x y z, showing off their physicality/strength/wealth in various ways.
There's also the fact that many guys 'know' that they could use their physicality to dominate a woman, even though she may have the upper hand socially (like when Dennis talks about 'the implication' in Always Sunny)
As for how boys see girls, my own experience was that it was just an idealised projection of my own unmet needs/desires, rather than seeing them as fully-formed three-dimensional beings with their own experiences and needs.
Almost nobody who sits at some apex of power seems to feel any of it flowing through them.
The politician thinks the civil servant has all the power
The emperor thinks his generals have all the power
The teenage boy thinks the teenage girl has all the power
The politician is right because he can be voted out of office but you can never get rid of a civil servant.
The emperor is right because the generals can kill the emperor.
The teenage boy is also right. It's universal and biological. Women are necessary for the survival of the species, men are not.
Men are, actually, necessary for the survival of species. And everyone thinks someone else is stronger. Even though there is much sexism in the world - as a teen girl, I experience it daily - boys have some of the same challenges. It’s not about respect. It’s about doing what’s right. And what you love.
I don’t think male physical confidence is primarily the result of actual physical ability. An adult male is about as vulnerable to a speeding bus or a rabid dog as an adult female. I’m smaller physically than most American women but I would say I still take more physical risks and am more likely to be physically confrontational than a woman who’s bigger than be. I don’t think this difference is so much the result of male physical advantage as intrinsically greater risk tolerance, and of course ‘machismo.’ Men will often refuse to back down from a fight even against someone much stronger who could easily beat them. Men tend to just have weaker self-preservation instincts.
> While the sense of power isn't there
[...]
> the perception of power is there
Why do so many people focus on the _sense_ or the _perception_ of power, rather than the actual power?
> There's also the fact that many guys 'know' that they could use their physicality to dominate a woman, even though she may have the upper hand socially
Even a socially dim nerd like me has known since before puberty (when there were plenty of girls stronger than me) not to ever dream of using my physicality against a woman in any way, shape or form, or else. An unspecified, but very dangerous _else_, backed up unanimously by everyone.
Then again, I was sheltered, so it was easy for me to believe grown-ups never fought physically anyway and there was little point in treating violence against women as a special case. Only as an adult did I realize that other people had never stupidly eradicated violence from their minds, like I had, and that one of the reasons women kept their distance was that they were not entirely convinced I was not the kind of idiot who would assault them despite knowing that someone would soon beat me to a pulp or stab me to death.
> As for how boys see girls, my own experience was that it was just an idealised projection of my own unmet needs/desires, rather than seeing them as fully-formed three-dimensional beings with their own experiences and needs.
I was so isolated I just believed what I was told: that they were basically like us, except for the obvious physical differences, which didn’t seem to matter much. I just noticed, at some point, that there were very few girls I did not find attractive. Blissfully status-blind, I lacked the motivation to scrutinize them for tiny defects to find out which one was the fairest of ’em all. Besides, it was not like I was going to do anything with any of them beyond admiring her from afar and thinking, “Wouldn’t it be nice to get to know her or something, you know, in a parallel universe?”.
Then, as an adult, I eventually figured out that women are the gatekeepers to sex and, to a somewhat lesser extent, to any kind of heterosexual relationship surrounding it, and that the average man is by no means remotely as attractive to the average woman as she is to him. Since thinking of violence still did not come naturally to me, I couldn’t help seeing them as vastly superior beings: “See this female peer of yours over here? Well, no matter how much you apply yourself, anything you can do, she can, too, and she’s still desirable, and you’d do anything to get close to her, but you’re still a piece of shit”.
> Why do so many people focus on the _sense_ or the _perception_ of power, rather than the actual power?
Because there is no functional difference between the two. If people perceive you as powerful, you are able to exert influence over them. In many situations it's actually quite rare for people to have to 'prove' their competence or strength, especially if other people around them accept it or don't challenge it.
> Only as an adult did I realize that other people had never stupidly eradicated violence from their minds, like I had, and that one of the reasons women kept their distance was that they were not entirely convinced I was not the kind of idiot who would assault them despite knowing that someone would soon beat me to a pulp or stab me to death.
Many instances of violence and assault are committed by people who don't see themsleves as violent, sometimes they instantly feel regret for what they've done. Othertimes they can snap and suddenly plan terrible violence against their partners and their family. They can be overwhelmed by emotions or lose their inhibitions in other ways (e.g. the influence of drugs or due to mental illness). Just because humans are capable of high-level reasoning and logic doesn't mean they are incapable of this. Even for myself, I have never been violent, and even when faced with violence I have responded with weakness, yet I know that I have the capability to hurt others, especially those physically weaker than me, and I have a responsibility to be aware of my strengths, thoughts, and emotions.
> the average man is by no means remotely as attractive to the average woman as she is to him.
I think there is a large difference between what guys perceive woman as being attracted to and what the reality is for many women. Another thing is that the 'average woman' does not exist, just as there is no such thing as an 'average man' - everyone is unique and has their own set of interests, qualities, values, experiences, strengths, weaknesses, etc which influence their desires. There are women who are attracted to guys who many would look at and think "really, him?". Most guys would look at Steve Buscemi and think "boy what a weird and awkward looking man. Who would want to be with him? I'm so glad I don't look like that". Well, my ex thought Steve Buscemi was an incredibly sexy man. The movie "Cool World" is a great movie about a teenager who falls in love with a middle-aged misanthropic loner Steve Buscemi who collects and sells old records. Finally there's a concept of paradoxical attraction to things which are the 'opposite' of aesthetic. I think a lot of guys struggle to accept this because we constantly make fun of guys who like things that aren't considered 'ideal', like a woman who is excessively tall, overweight, muscular, masculine etc. 'bro your girlfriend looks like a man' 'whoa did you see the girl he went home with? she was huge!' etc. Some women are attracted to guys that are gross, hairy, overweight, have a 'dad bod', are bald etc. Most people would consider my sister to be attractive, and she has been happily marred for over a decade to an incredibly short, fat and ugly man. I recently showed a photo of him to my cousins (who hadn't seen him before) and they actually laughed when they saw what he looked like. It's also about contrasts and perception. Like on family guy, Lois looks more petite and feminine next to her tall and overweight husband.
It's easy to not realise these things because a lot of this stuff is not talked about, especially across gender lines, so we perpetuate these false narratives around 'what women want'.
> “See this female peer of yours over here? Well, no matter how much you apply yourself, anything you can do, she can, too, and she’s still desirable, and you’d do anything to get close to her, but you’re still a piece of shit”.
One of the most consistent things I've heard women say about what they find attractive is confidence. We should be mindful of the thoughts we have about ourselves. We can't change how we feel, but we can control our thoughts, and they do affect how we feel. Thinking these sorts of things about ourselves does affect our emotions and sap our confidence and we should try to replace them with more positive statements like. I would reframe this thought as:
"This female peer can achieve the same things as me, but is also faced with other expectations around her appearance and behaviour that I'm not. She's desirable, but she also experiences a lot of unwanted attention and judgement that I don't. Maybe she questions how much of her success is the product of her achievements rather than her looks, and whether she will still get the same attention when she is older and less youthful in apperance. I would love to get close to her, even if she seems 'out of my league'. Maybe we'll have some shared interests or experiences, maybe she's really into that obscure 90's anime that she's embarassed to admit, or perhaps she'll like my sense of humour."
Another thing about beautiful women is - they have to work hard. Very hard. They spend hours of time getting ready every morning just to go outside. And it has to be maintained every single day. As guys, we can sleep in, walk around in shirts that haven't been ironed, go for days or weeks without shaving, wear the same shirts, let our hair grow out etc and no one will care. The quote "Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, except backwards and in high heels" sums it up. Women have a much harder time keeping up with men because they have all these additional expectations and requirements of them.
On the topic of gatekeeping sex - this idea that men want to have sex and women don't. Women *want* to have sex. But they are also punished socially if they do so, while men are celebrated. They are taught from an early age that they need to withhold their bodies and if they don't they are a slut with no value. Sex is a collaborative act, rather than a goal to be achieved, and for women it is also a much more riskier undertaking than men, both physically and socially. If sex is the goal I think a much healthier outlook is to look at all the things that need to be achieved in order for both individuals to feel both safety and enjoyment, and then work back from there.
LOL
"Girls seemed to hold all the power in the world" = "I hit on a bunch of girls and couldn't get laid"
Wanting to stick yourself into something doesn't mean that it has power. Males from all over the world travel to impoverished countries like Vietnam and Cambodia to rape children--it's underage sex slavery, a market of billions of dollars. Do those children have power because men pay money to rape them?
Males think that because they can't get away with treating females like shit all the time, which they want to do, particularly sexually, that means females have power. Check the rates of female participation in politics and finance. That's real power.
Idiotic nonsense like this could only come from a male. Get back to your video games.
Either get therapy or some original insults.
Yawn
"you watch a movie where a woman everyone describes as ‘strong’ demonstrates her strength by refusing to take shit, threatening to tear a man’s tongue out of his head if he speaks to her like that again. but this is roleplay - how can everyone not see this is roleplay? she obviously could not tear his tongue out. if they fought, he would win. in the movie, everyone draws back like she’s being scary, and you see it as everyone indulging her in her pretend feeling of having some sort of power."
As a preteen growing up in mainstream feminist culture, I think I used to experience these scenes in movies the opposite way. I only knew physical conflict through movies like this. When conflict was on the news it was discussed, not shown. So you didn't get to see what gender the soldiers were. And my education emphasised that girls were just as good at everything as boys. In my brain, the notion that women can't fight and thus aren't dangerous was in the same category as treating disease with leeches. Silly superstitious stuff people used to believe in the past. My parents did tell me that boys got stronger on average than girls after puberty, but I'd somehow understood this to be a slight marginal difference that didn't matter much outside aggregate statistics. And anyway, the martial arts movies said skill and having a weapon mattered more than strength.
So when the women in movies threatened to rip people's tongues out for disrespecting them, I took that just as seriously as a male character doing it.
As a result, I often greatly disliked the women characters in these movies. They were supposed to be sympathetic and on the side of good, but they threatened people with physical violence at the slightest provocation! The male characters who were supposed to be sympathetic didn't do that. Or if they did, it was a Big Deal and they got a talking to about not falling to the dark side. But the women somehow got to do it with no criticism whatsoever.
Looking back, this is obviously because the womens' threats weren't really considered serious. The actors might try to pretend that they're serious, but the audience doesn't really believe it, and the writers don't either. Their attitudes leak into the story. But kid me thought it was serious. And so these scenes kind of angered and worried me. Was this a weird genre convention, or did it perhaps reflect real world attitudes? Could women in real life put me in the hospital for 'disrespecting them', like insecure thugs, and just get away with it?
EDIT June 12: On reflection, I no longer endorse this post-hoc story about what I thought when I was younger. The supporting memories are too vague and indirect. There's a vibe of something sort of like this, but little in the way of concrete memories of concrete thoughts kid me had about movies to back it up. The evidence does not seem to single out the detailed story I wrote above.
For what it's worth, skill and having a weapon actually does matter more than strength. No amount of muscle will make you a tenth as deadly as someone with a gun and the training to use it.
> Could women in real life put me in the hospital for 'disrespecting them', like insecure thugs, and just get away with it?
Sink enough in status and they will. And they’ll think and feel they are bravely defending themselves from a vile abuser. And so will everyone else, and they’ll punish you accordingly.
Thanks for capturing this feeling so well, especially the insecurity that comes with knowing that the world rewards (and that there seem to be genuine rewards, even removed from social validation) for being good at male-stuff. One thing I've noticed that really works to be respected while reconciling the facts of your nature, is to use masculine-domain stuff for feminine pursuits or feminine-domain stuff for masculine pursuits. And I think you do so much of that! The way you do rigorous quantitative (male) analysis to answer social (female) questions, for example. In my own pursuits, I also brought a coherent but niche feminine perspective into a male dominated space and noticed how it made me feel not just respected but also so much more comfortable with my female identity: and believe that it does bring value. Although I don't align with all the mainstream progressive/liberal ideals, one thing I do believe is that there is value in the representation of multiple perspectives and interdisciplinary pursuits.
Raw, insightful, vulnerable, introspective, honest… This is an amazing article. Thank you
Seconded. It threads in between different pictures of femininity to compare them with the male "default" experience.
Appreciated your perspective. Your writing is excellent.
For my two cents as a man who used to be a teenage girl, and lived in liberal areas most of my life, I didn't experience this. Actually, when I was young I thought gender didn't matter at all, and I didn’t understand why people kept bringing it up. When you grow up in a liberal, secular area, you get blasted by messaging assuring you that girls were smart and cool and good at coding, which comes off as an obnoxious campaign by overpaid bureaucrats telling kids what we already know. Of course girls can do STEM, what is this, the 1950s?
I remember winning a team math competition in elementary. The lady running the award ceremony looked at the four of us and exclaimed, "Wow, all girls!" I rolled my eyes at the absurd idiosyncrasies of adults: who cared if we were girls or not? What did that have to do with math? Give me my medal.
This culture also meant I never agonized about my initial gender non-conformity. Around the age of twelve, I cut my hair short and started wearing masculine clothes, and I never went back. It felt natural to me. After all, what was wrong with wanting to look like a boy? I fought with my parents over it all the time, but I fought with them often, and while I loved them I thought their opinions were out-of-touch. I’m grateful to my background and my social obliviousness that I was able to figure out my preferences with minimal external pressure.
I’ve talked to people who grew up in religious environment like yours. Broadly speaking, they end up with a lot more baggage around their gender, and it’s not hard to see why.
This whole experience is alien to me. My experience of growing up as a teen girl was literally nothing like this. I didn't see the adult women in my life as weak or incapable. My mom flew gliders and rode a motorcycle when she was young. My aunt worked as a welder. My teachers valued my intelligence and encouraged my artistic streak. In my teens I had trouble fitting in with the cool kids, but that wasn't a gendered experience at all, and I certainly never felt I couldn't do things because of my sex. In fact, I never felt more accepted or encouraged in school than when I took a couple of different shop classes. So I just don't think you can generalize about what a teen girl thinks it's like to be a boy.
Yes, this is definitely just one perspective. There are also quite a few assumptions in the essay about what things men/women are predisposed towards enjoying or being skilled at, which are not going to be true for everyone.
Well, this makes me sad for girls who grew up in this type of religious and ultra conservative culture. I must have grown up in the Twilight zone, because I can't relate to any of it, and never received or saw any of these messages in actual life or media, nor had any of these thoughts. The life of everyone around me and in my home was exactly like what was shown on TV on the Cosby Show (upscale version) or Roseanne (working class version)...men and women who were equally as powerful, equally as smart and sarcastic and likely to assert themselves, and with similar earning power and prestige in their jobs, who both took care of the kids, both cooked, etc. That really was all I knew my whole life, til I went off to college and was astonished to learn that there were people who still had moms that didn't work, or who did all the cooking and laundry, or who had ideas about gender roles or girls being sluts for the same behavior as boys. It really shocked me. I had thought all that ended in the 60s.
It never occurred to me that boys were better at anything than girls, other than sports and who cares about sports. The capacity for violence or physical domination was totally irrelevant, since violence is illegal and would just get the hitter or the fight starter put in jail. If anything, it seemed to me that women held the upper hand on violence since men couldn't hit a woman, but we could hit them (at least that seemed to be the accepted standard in the 90s...I never really saw anyone hit anyone).
It wasn't til I was an adult that I was exposed to and lived in conservative places, and the gulf in gender roles and expectations was enormous.
FWIW, guys and girls also sure seemed to get along and just like each other a lot more, as friends and people, where I grew up. Though that was back in the 90s before everyone got extreme with their gender politics. It was only in conservative places where they'd carved out separate social spheres for each gender that they seemed to have a weird sense of mutual hostility or confusion about the other, yet also a sense of duty and obligation to bind together with the enemy within a family. Very strange.
Similar. I grew up in a fairly conservative culture, where women went to college for their "Mrs." degree, but this was constantly contrasted with the "girls can do ANYTHING" mainstream culture at school. So I got to college with a strange fusion of these beliefs. It seems to me that women are trapped between multiple worlds; home, work, social, with people ready to tell her she's "wrong" no matter what.
I (female) grew up in the 80s and I also don’t really relate to this. This makes me so sad to read. What happened? Have we gone backwards?
It's called being raised as an evangelical homeschooled kid. I'm the same age as Aella and fortunately had supportive parents who were never abusive, but the following lines are straight out of evangelical/fundy pop theology/culture:
-"Maybe women shouldn't have been allowed to vote"
-"women should be loved, but men should be respected"
-"you’re told it’s probably not a good idea for women to be leaders because they’re too emotional"
-"You aren't an adventurer, you aren't meant to do cool things. you don't have the capacity. you're supposed to be cherished, and you're supposed to be happy with that."
I took the route of a computational physics career in academia, and I do love numbers, but I'd lying if some of the impetus wasn't that sweet, sweet respect I get effortlessly now as a woman doing unemotional things that are viewed as "hard"...mainly from my childhood community. All of the sudden they don't care if a woman is "breaking gender roles" if it makes them look good to have "one of them" doing fancy things. I get to be known as a person who does things.
I do have a fond memory of being at a house party with a bunch of secular normie nerd friends after many drinks as a college student and yelling "they say women crave love and men crave respect...but guess what? I CRAVE RESPECT! :D" And all the drunk normies cheered about the woman talking about respect because that sounds good right? They had no idea where I was actually coming from lol.
I wish we could have that “Twilight Zone” culture back. These days, everyone seems certain that it just cannot work.
> or girls being sluts for the same behavior as boys
That particular piece of traditional gender rôles never quite went away where I grew up, along with the condemnation of sex work. But, from my pathetic point of view, it didn’t matter: sex, if it was to occur at all in my life, belonged in the distant, inscrutable future, so why bother to think about it?
> It never occurred to me that boys were better at anything than girls, other than sports and who cares about sports.
I noticed girls tended to do a bit better in school, but nobody seemed to care about that. Then, around a decade later, I realized there were a considerable number of people out there claiming that modern, progressive schools repress masculinity and what we really need is old-style gender-segregated schools. In my case, such a system would have guaranteed I essentially never saw a girl—would I even know they exist?—and, in their absence, the other boys would probably have bullied me with much less restraint, but hey, who am I to say I didn’t deserve it for not being strong and masculine enough? I felt guilty for benefitting from an unfair system that hurts actually respectable boys so much.
> The capacity for violence or physical domination was totally irrelevant, since violence is illegal
I was raised with those ideas, too, but now I think they’re very dangerous. They led me to speak my mind to everyone, expecting only words in return, but this is definitely not how people roll, nor has it ever been. I wasn’t being brave when I told people things that could—should?—have gotten me beaten up or worse; I was just stupid and ignorant.
This reality dawned on me slowly, when people on the Internet again and again won arguments against me by challenging me to meet up and say the same things to their face, showing everyone what a foul coward I was, and I saw that everyone will issue similar challenges when pressed enough and will sympathize with the challenger.
> and would just get the hitter or the fight starter put in jail.
Only if the judge, or whoever makes the decision, gets enough evidence about who started the fight, and is not incentivized to disregard it. Unsurprisingly, troublemakers are often good at troublemaking and getting away with it.
> If anything, it seemed to me that women held the upper hand on violence since men couldn't hit a woman, but we could hit them (at least that seemed to be the accepted standard in the 90s...I never really saw anyone hit anyone).
That was my impression as well. In fact, I wondered why they didn’t take advantage more often of the taboo against hitting them. Now I think that in my case, if they’d known how powerless I felt in front of them, they would have.
> FWIW, guys and girls also sure seemed to get along and just like each other a lot more, as friends and people, where I grew up.
I wish we could have that back, too.
Yeah I can't understand how people think that further segregation, alienation, and polarization of the sexes would lead to a good result...it would not. It makes everyone confused and scared and/or hostile or just deluded about the other sex. I was in mixed sex and mixed age daycare pretty much my whole life and I really think it was the best possible thing for naturalized socialization and being comfortable around everyone.
On the violence thing, I can absolutely understand that as a male, it would seem to be (and is) a much bigger and more realistic threat. In fact the only times in my life I've ever been truly afraid of violence were two occasions where girls threatened to beat me up and I was scared shitless in both cases. But a guy really cannot get away with hitting or harming a woman unless he either kills her or she for some reason doesn't go to the police...otherwise, he's toast. But I hope you know that that's actually the case for you too...keyboard warriors making challenges etc. The vast majority of threats or challenges to violence are just that...empty threats...much like dogs growling or gorillas thumping...intended to make someone back down, not actually do anything. And if someone else attacks you or hits first (especially after TYPING a direct threat to do so), you can absolutely ruin their life. Get them put in jail, get have their wages garnished for the next 20 years, etc.
Anyway I agree, things were better (at least for me)back in the day. I feel bad for young people with gender relations nowadays.
> and, in their absence, the other boys would probably have bullied me with much less restraint
Wrong. It's the inverse - bullying occurs because of intrasexual competition. If there are no girls around, that's better (regarding bullying specifically).
> bullying occurs because of intrasexual competition
Come on now. That's *a* reason, but it's not *the* reason.
For some bullying is is THE reason, but for bullying in general it is just a reason.
Re. "you are desperate to feel a little of that magic 'respect' that men get for their manliness": There's an asymmetry here. Most women can get respect for their womanliness. Most women are desired by some man. It is just the opposite with men: In any social group, only a small number of men get respect for their manliness. Most men aren't desired by any woman. Men aren't insecure about being male; they're conscious of failing at being male, because, owing to the biology of sperm and egg, most men will always be considered failures as men.
Men have it simple: win respect or fail. Women have it far more complicated; no matter what, they'll be valued, but actually getting respect as a woman is FAR more difficult.
If that's so, I think it means that you're speaking of forms of respect that are gendered, and that you feel most of the forms of respect you want most are gendered male. Does that sound accurate?
Is it possible that part of the reason you want those male-gendered forms of respect so much is that the past 40 years of "empowering" women have tried to do so mostly by telling women they should be less like women and more like men? E.g., Xena, warrior princess, and all the other hyper-masculine women paraded across our screens as "strong women".
I live in a rural area, where most older women have grown ambivalent about women's lib, and there is a type of strong woman here that I don't see much in suburban upper-middle-class America, that maybe is a way of being strong that is being forgotten. I don't really understand it. But the strongest women are often the ones who make the most strategic use of gender stereotypes. It seems to me that traditional gender stereotypes grant men more power than women, but also that women are more-adept at wielding these stereotypes to stake their claims to areas of authority. The loss of these stereotypes admits more women into certain competitive arenas, but the price of admission is stripping them of their "strange" powers.
I think people are confused, too. Men's lives still have the same arc, but now the rewards (good job, house, wife, kids) are increasingly hard to get, both in logistical and social terms. And inequality means there's more of us at the bottom. Men only get marked/noticed if they do something notable. women are always marked/noticed, but not necessarily for what they want to be. Women, on the other hand, are stuck between housewife and girlboss. And so many people ready to judge her for falling short on either.
I think we have lost ideas of feminine strength; no idea how to get them back. I don't blame women for mostly deciding that "traditional" womanhood was a crock; problem is, who does the childcare? And "strong female characters" are all conveniently fictional.
There are strong female characters who are technically fictional, but realistic and feminine: From the ancient Greeks, Penelope, Antigone, & Lysistrata. From the 19th century, Elizabeth Bennet, Jane Eyre, arguably Catherine from /Wuthering Heights/. Mrs. Ramsay from /To the Lighthouse/. Anne of Green Gables, and her adoptive mother Marilla. Most of the women Zora Neale Hurston wrote about, including herself. Though I'm having a hard time thinking of any such contemporary characters who aren't from /My Little Pony/.
Though admittedly the realistic strong female woman in fiction is often a tragic victim (Medea, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Nora Helmer, Mother Courage), and/or a monster (Medea, Laura Adolph in notorious misogynist Strindberg's /The Father/, Hedda Gabler).
> women are always marked/noticed, but not necessarily for what they want to be.
I’m still confused about that. Why do women specifically not want to be noticed for their physical attractiveness? It’s not like you can’t both be attractive and do notable things. This has always seemed a weirdly subtle and philosophical thing to me, but people are never so consistently subtle and philosophical about anything else, so there must be an elephant in the room I’m not seeing.
It probably has something to do with violence, my favorite elephant in the room, and with people losing respect for women who rely too much, or too overtly, on their attractiveness to achieve their goals, but this accounts for maybe the hairs on the tip of the elephant’s tail. I guess there’s no way of learning much about this without getting to know at least a woman intimately and earning her trust.
> problem is, who does the childcare?
Why not whoever it is most practical in each case? Why must all childcare duties fall on the same person, and why must that person always be the same gender? Why are people so certain we can’t raise any more children the way plenty of us were raised a generation or two ago?
> Why do women specifically not want to be noticed for their physical attractiveness?
I can't speak for women as a whole, but perhaps it's because physical attractiveness is precarious. Looking attractive comes from a combination of:
* biology, i.e., being dealt a good genetic hand
* style, i.e., staying aware of what's considered attractive in your specific cultural context
* investment, i.e., putting in substantial effort to maintain the traits above and maximize their benefit
Problem is, those things either fade with time, or they impose such a cost that they aren't sustainable throughout adulthood and/or they take away from your ability to do other notable things. As evidence, look at all the content out there telling women what to eat, how to exercise, and what skincare products to use to maintain their youthful beauty; all the publications and blogs about fashion and makeup and hair, and the variety (and cost) of services offered at spas and salons; the amount of time women spend getting ready to go places, how long it takes a woman to get her hair done vs. a man, and the sheer amount of clothing and other products women buy or even carry around with them to maintain their appearance.
Someone who relies *too much* on being noticed for her physical attractiveness risks being left with nothing if it ever fades, and odds are it eventually will.
The male equivalent might be something like taking a physically demanding job, or in the extreme case, being a professional athlete. Why don't most men want to be valued primarily for their physical strength? Because it's exhausting, and because they won't be able to make a lifelong career out of it.
Showed this to my partner who grew up in England and she said it could not be further from her own experience growing up. She never felt the constraints expectation weighing on her in this way, and the boys were certainly not the "cool" ones - it was the popular girls who were dating older guys that had a hold of the mindshare there. I should add that she is very capable and someone I highly respect.
Just putting this out there as this post is written in second person, instead of the personal experience that I feel it really is. This isn't a necessarily representative view of the female experience.
What was it that changed so you no longer feel this way I wonder? Maturity? Using your body in other ways to control men? I've been pondering lately exactly when and how I started seeing men as people, not just walking sacks of sperm that get in the way of more meaningful and fun relationships. Not quite sure yet.
i think getting out of the very religious culture i was raised in helped a lot. just exposure to people who liked women for women's sake. also exposure to women who really liked feminine things and were proud about it. Also time, a lot of the gender stuff is driven by the insecurity of youth where you're trying so hard to find a way to feel valuable to others
Glad to hear that. Yay for women and feminine things! Gonna age myself now, but watching Sex and the City as a teen/early 20 was pretty formative when it came to enjoying female culture for its own merits. Actually, I think your stuff could be filling a similar space in the cultural landscape today.
It's a pity so many traditional beliefs are patriarchal and narrowly defined. Some kind of social practices to help kids through adolescence to adulthood would be nice, and I don't think high school does the job. College is a poor substitute.
Go talk to the men directly, and tell them to stop destroying everything, including by growing out their hair and destroying women's sports.
Why did you title this "how to be respected as a teen girl"? Why do teen girls need to be taught how to be respected? Who is the source of disrespect?
Write an article entitled "how to be a male and not be trash." Stop preaching at women and blaming us for every problem that clearly flows from male stupidity.
Men are the problem.
Did you even read beyond the title? It's a personal account of Aella's experience with insecurity over her gender, not preaching at other women. Write the article yourself if you want it so bad.
By the way, what do you have against men growing their hair out and what does that have to do with women's sports? That makes no sense.
I’m talking about trannies
Oh, I see. You're here with an agenda, and that's why you're demanding others tailor their personal reflections to fit your political interests.
Okay, honestly? I didn’t love this article but this comment is very sexist towards men - and it’s not like I’m a man talking about this! I’m a woman! Genders don’t define you. Some men, yes, are very cruel toward women and have shaped the sexist world we live in today - but I bet they thought of women in nearly the exact same way you think about men. And how are men ruining things by GROWING OUT THEIR HAIR? This comment makes no sense and is certainly NOT a viewpoint that will continue development and inclusion in the modern world.
I'm also very curious about what brought about this change. My assumption was that it was because of her own achievements, the recognition she's received, and her increased status. I could be entirely wrong though.
Maybe also that girls stuff is actually cool too? Doesn't have to be shoes and makeup. Music, reading and writing, art, other people. Even a lot of stem is now female dominated...
We prefer the term "dangerous sacks of sperm". What are these "relationships" of which you speak?
Very insightful. Thank you for sharing this. I will say that, although they do of course, it's unrealistic for a young girl to compare herself to the "alpha" boys, and not realize how tough it is to be the boy who's the loser at the accepted "boy things".
Just as an observation, I've known many women who were very feminine, but capable of getting respect from males and putting them in their place if they needed it. For a fictional archetype, I'd refer you to the TV series Veronica Mars. Totally feminine, yet tough as nails, and capable of putting obnoxious men in their place with her words and deeds though not in physical confrontations.
I think boys often have higher highs and lower lows than women. In the majority of fields, it'll be very rare for the greatest woman to be better than the greatest man. In a number of important fields like math and war and engineering, often the number of men who can contribute anything at all outnumber the women who can contribute anything at all 4:1. But also, the majority of people who contribute absolutely nothing or are a detriment to society are men. The majority of people who get no sympathy from society and are totally left to rot on their own are men. Men can have more opportunity for greatness, but they need to seize it for themselves, much less will be handed to them, they don't have a safety net of sympathy like women. And men often do fail at their opportunity for greatness. And while great women are rarer, they're hardly nonexistent-Ada Lovelace, Marie Curie, the USSR's Night Witches, Rosalin Franklin, yourself Aella imo, to name a few.
Also there's a great deal of violence committed by men. The vast majority of violent criminals are men. Women are often victimized despite doing nothing wrong. That's why I still consider myself a feminist, albeit of a different stripe than today's mainstream feminism. We need to enable women's potential and freedom to choose what they want to do, while acknowledging many may not hunger for greatness like most men, but absolutely not stand in their way if they do want it. And we also need to give men a path to achieve greatness if they're willing to work for it too, while clamping down on male violence.
Men have a bimodal distribution. This leads to confusion. Women see the men with status and wish they had that...meanwhile all the no-status men are also wishing. Also, why "male privilege" talks go awry; for all the no-status men, being told they're somehow in the same category as the guys they wish they were result in them not understanding.
I just have to disagree with the “higher highs and lower lows” comment. Emotion fluctuation occurs based on person not gender.
This was incredibly interesting. Thanks for publishing. Rick Fox (in the top comment right now) is correct that this isn't how boys experience life (he also has a really well written example of how they do). But obviously that isn't the point - your piece is about how girls see things.
What strikes me, though, is how your narrator is pulling incomplete lessons from men's activities. It reminds me of something my sister once told me: she was never told when she was growing up that she could be President.
That blew me away. That concept is a constant for boys. It never occurred to me that girls didn't hear it. It definitely wasn't our parents being chauvinistic - for better or worse my sister and I were expected to have the same college/career life trajectory - so it must just be background radiation of the culture.
But then I watched her raise her girls. She was determined that they be given the same message as boys: you can be president. You can be an astronaut. You can do anything.
Which is fine. The problem, though, is that this kind of message is only culturally dominant for boys until we're ten. After that you're (gently!) introduced to the concept of "nobody cares. Shut up and do your job". To make it clear this is NOT cruel or nasty and it isn't supposed to grind boys down or anything. It's just straightforward, it's reality, and it's required for society to function; moreover it's genuinely helpful to understand and internalize as you make your way through life.
"Shut up and do your job" grows and expands and gets more complicated and nuanced until by the time you're 18 and it's like 90% of the message, with "you can be President" occupying a happy 10% of optimistic potential.
My nieces aren't getting that. I mean they're great - this isn’t necessarily a big deal - but the message they're marinating isn't the same, even though that was my sister's goal, and it's probably inferior.
I think maybe there's a lot of this going on as the culture changes for women. This might be the source of a lot of what men are bemused by and what we complain about as well as why women are discovering that things aren't working out the way they were promised. I think I'm on to something here.
Very thoughtful piece, thank you for writing this. It sucks that you were made to feel this way by the social environment you grew up in. I do think though that "more women tend to have insecurity about their gender than men" is straightforwardly false in most liberal/secular cultures (though I absolutely don't doubt that it's true in most conservative/religious ones like the one you've mentioned growing up in). A lot of what you describe experiencing actually feels similar to what I experienced as a boy growing up in a more liberal/secular culture.
A succinctly representative example of the sort of thing I experienced many many examples of is this poster my 6th grade science teacher had on her classroom wall, which started with something like "both genders have incredible gifts that set them apart from the other", then had a really long paragraph waxing poetic about women's emotional strength, empathy, kindness, refinement, social grace, etc., and finally ended with "men are good at lifting heavy stuff and killing spiders". Obviously, it's meant as a joke, but it very much feels like the same sort of "joke" as when you describe people "joking" about it having been a mistake to give women the right to vote.
It's interesting that the culture you experienced and the one I experienced seem to largely agree about which things are male-coded and which things are female-coded, but differ in that I experienced the male-coded things as being more likely to be viewed with a dismissive attitude and the female-coded things as being more likely to be viewed as What Actually Matters, while it sounds like you experienced the reverse.
Things are further complicated by the fact that many men are envious of women for how much sexual attention they receive, while many women are envious of men for how little sexual attention they receive. I don't necessarily claim that men *generally* have it worse in this regard, but, in the culture I experienced, men *absolutely* have it worse - said culture is very sympathetic to women's desire for less sexual attention from men and very unsympathetic to men's desire for more sexual attention from women. Though of course it's not hard to imagine a culture where the opposite is true, and presumably such cultures do also exist.
Excellently expressed
Re. "they don't make movies about raising kids. a woman will never earn the respect and gratitude of her fellow countryman for reading bedtime stories really well." -- They used to make movies about raising kids. Think of Mary Poppins or The Sound of Music. They don't make them anymore because these movies are now called paternalistic attempts to brainwash women into wanting to be mothers and raise kids.
I had/have some similar but different feelings.
Key difference: my parents made the conscious decision to avoid raising their daughters to be girly girls, and when I was in elementary school I was suddenly very good at math - for which I was praised to the moon and told variants of "you can be a mathematician or computer scientist, even though those are male-dominated fields" all the time. For this I am incredibly lucky.
But society still had (and has) expectations based on gender - that females will act like females and males will act like males. Meanwhile, my aspie self admired men and thought I would earn love and respect by being like them. Examples:
- I got it in my head that sleeping with many people was high status. Oh my, I was wrong (one reason I appreciate you is for starting to shift that Overton Window, though it is fascinating and appalling to see how some people just can't fathom how you can be your sexually voracious self and also an intellectual).
- I learned to debate aggressively, to go toe-to-toe with opinionated dudes. While this rapid-fire arguing can be legitimately annoying, I think I get penalized heavily for it due to my gender.
- I consider my self-worth largely contingent upon my intellectual abilities and contributions.
When I was in high school, it was LGB and not LGBTQ. Had trans identity been as common then as it is now, I might have started identifying as a man (or maybe just nonbinary). It isn't because I feel wrong in my body - I love having a woman's body - but because there has long been social/professional friction around my gender versus my interests and behavior. This friction is painful and costly, and I suspect it wouldn't exist if I were male - as in, some of my barely tolerated traits would suddenly become desirable. I could just waltz into some situations implicitly male-only (<- of which there are plenty even in my liberal community, amongst Millennial peers). And I could do all this *without* using sex appeal / girly charm / flirtatiousness to grease the wheels (because that does ease the friction, but has real costs and limitations).
---
I wonder, Aella, how accepted you feel amongst rationalists. Since you have high status in that community, I assume the answer is yes? If so, how did you feel when your status was lower? It seems like gender expectation friction would be a non-issue in that community, but then again I'll never forget some of the dumb comments posted on your Frame Control article on LW.
Had you actually transitioned, you would have realized most of this was in your head.
Maybe not all of it, I can't tell you that. What I can tell you is while I did not originally consider misogyny to be a serious problem in the progressive areas I grew up, being early into my transition (and recently exposed to hyperbolic online activism) made me paranoid about how I was treated. In those early months, I'd often encounter someone being condescending towards me, or men apparently excluding me from masculine activities, and convince myself that this happened because they saw me as a woman. Only to find out later that everyone involved thought I was a cisgender man the entire time.
In one funny incident, I was wrestling with a college friend, and got it in my head that he must be going easy on me. "He's not treating me as a real opponent," I thought, "he's humoring me because he sees me as a girl." Months later I had to explain to him why I couldn't donate sperm.
From these experiences I updated back to my original belief that in liberal communities, gender rarely affects daily interactions. I expect that women growing up in similar political environments, in which messaging about the pervasiveness of misogyny is more common than misogyny itself, are likely to see discrimination where it doesn't really exist. And unlike me, they never get male social experiences to compare to. Ironically, this paranoia does a number on their confidence.
For similar reasons, I am highly skeptical of the idea that kids assigned female are identifying as trans to escape misogyny. Of those living in progressive areas or exposed online to progressive ideas, they might be taught that misogyny is everywhere and it's very bad, but they're also taught that transphobia is everywhere and it's even worse. Kids living in conservative areas don't need to be taught transphobia is everywhere, they will encounter it every time they step out of line. No kid consciously believes that transitioning will make their life easier.
Nor do I believe subconscious "internalized misogyny" is common among trans kids, much less a motivator for transition. These kids don't believe being a boy is cooler than being a girl. If anything, the exact opposite is a serious problem. Because trans youth spaces, online and offline, are infected with the same hyperbolic, nuance-free feminism we all know and hate, many young trans men struggle with guilt over their identities. Men are entitled and unempathetic and stupid and dangerous, men are the oppressors, you don't want to be a real man, do you? You can be a trans man, but you must disavow masculinity, make it clear you're not like the other men. I understand that cis men in progressive spaces often feel similar guilt, though without the added burden of betraying womanhood.
It's easy for older women to look back and say they fantasized about being boys as a kid, so they would have identified as trans if it had been an option. But this ignores the ground realities of the culture trans boys are exposed to.