Even worse idk much about codeswitching.
I can tell friends who are girls “I love you” and they take it as friendly. But guys can’t hear this without thinking he’s laid claim to a romantic and/or sexual feelings?
If I reject a girl asking me out with the attitude of a bubbly girl talking to another bubbly girl at a party, and say “I have a bf. But you’re a babe!, You can get another babe!” She’d totally be friendly back about it… But once I said this to a guy who asked me out, and he proceeded to ask me for my number 4 times in less than 10 seconds.
Shit like this puts me in fight or flight mode. I have very little awareness of how or why I have to codeswitch between men and women. My skin is crawling nearly everytime a friend points out to me in retrospect that a guy was actually flirting with me after my only intention was being friends or a friendly neighbor. Yikes. I want to go back in time and yell “Fuck you stop being a creep!” (Ofc, they’d be too creepy to understand why I would say that.)
That said, I love my bf because his fem side makes him chill and understanding if a girl talks to him like he’s another girl. I’m pretty quiet and mostly talk to him, and I have no guy friends. So I’m not learning codeswitching skills by watching him. How do you codeswitch and why do you codeswitch in the exact way(s) you do? I barely go outside, and I’m angry at guys everyday over this over past events I’m creeped out by.
That’s part of it. The other part is that guys think they are entitled to affection, and that women are responsible for men’s emotional well-being. This is something that is ingrained since childhood, both from the way mothers are centered in how our society raises children, how we frame the emotional wants of men and from the way kindness and closeness are discouraged in interactions between boys. I get that people living in a male gender role are frequently alienated, and get shamed for behaviors that would be necessary to form deep emotional connections, and these are real and valid problems. But you can’t stop at that point and say “well, men just need more affection”. Because this centers the man’s demands and wants without looking at who fulfills them and what that entails. So then you have the classic situation where a guy can only be emotionally open with his partner, and then she has to constantly be his entire support system. This is what perpetuates the problem. Because other men are unavailable and because women are supposed to be caretakers, you end up depending on one woman shouldering a man’s entire needs for affection and validation and emotional stabilizing.
Operational terms here being one and woman. When i look at women and nonbinary people in my life, we have our entire friend groups as support networks. When i need to vent or need somebody to show me affection, i can write to several friends if they have the time and energy to do that, or i can go to a server a friend runs and post in a vent channel and see who replies. It’s usually the same people, but it’s more than one person. This is important. Doing emotional support for others and showing them affection is draining, even for somebody like me who absolutely needs to take care of others to feel fulfilled. Also, none of them are partners of mine.
And men need to work on building something like that as well. You can’t rely on women to do that for you. Men need to learn how friendships work, and that is no easy task in a society that does not allow homosocial behavior among men. But it is needed, as more and more women are past the point were they are willing to put up with men as they are right now.
extremely well put.
it’s entitled behavior to make it women’s problem that men aren’t building community with each other. and that’s the issue. i’m not gonna call his mom for him or somehow build safe men’s spaces or set up play dates for adult men to make friends like they are children. we can’t build build any type of communism without community, and some of us are already holding up half of *that *particular sky, thank you very much.
Kinda related side note: Most women do not hold up just half the sky, they hold up a significant extra portion of it during the unpaid second shift.
Damn. This is a great insight and needs to be emphasized:
From this perspective, when a man is turned down by a prospective partner, he is agitated not merely because he is insulted. All of his frustration and unmet desires by society become focused entirely on the one person. That person stands in, not as their personal self, but the abstract embodiment of society. Their rejection or affirmation then becomes that of society. It’s sad yet inexcusable at the same time. But then it is clear how and why incels come about — refusing to participate in the process, but in a confused way which blames women for patriarchy.
Your solution is also spot-on. If the problem is a lack of validation, then men need more validation, not only from partners, but from everyone, particularly but not only other men. The dichotomy between partner and non-partner has to be significantly reduced.