Unsure what this has to do with my comment which was in reply to your statement about not knowing what the statement in the original post likely meant by "relaxing". I never stated the friends must be women.
DrivebyHaiku
joined 10 months ago
Trans guy here - in part what I think might be meant is the pressure of expected romance. Like it is certainly a thing when younger AFAB people are trying to find regular old cis male companionship that there's often this sort of pressure where you can tell when someone is crushing on you and it's a matter of if and when they make their move. That time can be dreaded because a lot of the time once someone makes their move if the romantic advance isn't accepted the friendship disappears and the feeling left behind is that you were never a friend at all. That you were tricked into valuing a friendship that wasn't real because it was a down payment on an expected return of sexual or romantic affection.
And yes, I am aware it's awkward and hard to stay around someone who rejected you romantically. It's also hard to lose a friend because of something you had literally no control over and to mourn that. Sticking around and remaining a friend and getting past your romantic flop is a service to all sides involved if what you actually feel is cut off from friendship. Otherwise it really makes the assertion that this isn't about sex ring very hollow.
In my 20's an asexual closeted trans person who counted men as my tribe and wanted nothing but friends that felt normal and lasted - at one point I got so desperate I agreed to a sexless "romantic" relationship by way of fear of losing my best friend. Even though my "boyfriend" was a perfect gentleman during the time we were "together" I ended up in a two year long situationship that in the end felt skeezy and colors that time of my life in a sense of wrongness. I never developed romantic feelings and that whole set up ended up being sickening and oppressive. After it ended that friendship became remote and I lost what I valued somewhere along the line anyway.
It doesn't surprise me that so many women aren't all that empathetic to the male loneliness epidemic even though in this post it is being expressed in a really shit way. It doesn't take many guys dumping you on your ass simply because they got attracted to you and decided not to stick around afterwards before you start feeling like their lonely heart is not your problem to solve. It feels just like if you had a friend who was using you for your money or some sort of service you were providing. Feeling used and discarded is traumatic. People who get hurt this way start getting very suspicious of new friendships and maintain distance because they are guarding from getting hurt again.
In summary - It's really hard to relax around someone who is coming at you with an expectation you might not be able to meet. The more obvious it is the more you can potentially save yourself the trouble of not getting invested early.
If you are unhappy here I assure you there are others to choose from. However I have no particular desire to delve on someone else's behalf particularly since when so many say "freedom of speech" the term so often boils down to just wanting to say slurs or phobic commentary. Either this place is good enough to use with the design of etiquette the people who came before you set or it's worth accepting the inconvenience of moving on and finding something better on your own.
I wish you luck in your hunt.
See I don't think the "tribe" is the trouble when one is given the option and space to choose or abandon their tribes freely with no cost. If this particular culture isn't your jam there's plenty of others that do similar that might be to your taste.
Applying the trauma of racism, religious persecution and so on to a digital place that is one of many... Doesn't feel genuine. I have a lot of feelings about places becoming toxic through allowing racist/phobic stuff to thrive but it's not like the people booted from spaces who hold those views are shut out in the absolute cold. There are spaces where their veiws and comfort is centered it just doesn't nessisarily overlap with where I am.
Saying we must accept absolutely everything because "tribes are bad" seems to apply some axiomatic principle to the lowest of low stakes social clubs. The Internet is a string of endless bars next to each other, if you don't like what one place is serving there's another one down the road.
On the topic of echo chambers - At what point did we decide that a bunch of people over a wide geographical area with similar interests and a common code of standards/preferences of civility... Is a bad thing?
It's kind of how social clubs exist irl.
Eh, I have seen enough of what happens to places that favour so called "freedom of speech" or no moderation over valuing comfort of vulnerable users. There's plenty of places that exist that have "freedom of speech". Rather than making this place just like those places why not just go to a pre-existing one or start your own?
Not saying Israel is complex. Dealing with the victims of the propaganda is complex.
Compassion isn't just good praxis, people who fall back on feeling victimized double down on whatever their base investment is. If you want people to accept facts and actually change their minds you have to engage the person's feelings first.
It's a complex issue Bernie is alluding to. There are a lot of Jewish people who think of Israel of sort of "Their place" in the world where they are centered and the controlling stake of culture. People who are raised to think this way feel critism towards the place as an attack on their Jewishness. Those feelings can override and get in the way of treating Isreal as a country, with a political agenda and make it feel as though it were a criticism of Jewish people.
You know that whole "facts don't care about your feelings" thing the right gets on about? It's actually backwards. Feelings do not care about facts and if you don't adequately explain your purpose you can make people feel victimized even when they aren't. Jewish people who feel victimized by critism of Israel are responding to a mix of cultural programming because the idea of Israel is their security blanket. Problem is the security blanket isn't actually securing them from anything, it was just a tool to soothe anxieties about having a place to retreat to free of persecution... and now that the security blanket has been proven to be woven out of asbestos and warcrimes the trauma of prying peoples attachment from it is causing damage amongst a historically persecuted group. This is Bernie's reminder - to be sensitive to the process of individual trauma while detangling them from the genocidal regime it's emotionally fuzed to.
"Being born in the wrong body" is a phrase used to simplify a fairly complex situation in a way that also makes it seem like to trans people it's a metaphysical belief about the nature of the the soul. This is by and large incorrect. What trans people experience isn't delusion. Delusion relies on a belief that contradicts reality or relies on the very shaky ground of the insubstantiated supernatural. What trans people experience is an uncontrolled mental reaction to physical replicatable stimuli to their own bodies. All the cultural stuff is in service to this.
For example - When you call a trans man a woman - what that person is reacting to is your perception of their body making them ground in that physical discomfort. It is like if you had a physical feature you despised, say a physical deformation with a traumatic memory attached, and people kept remarking on it in conversation. While you might be able to walk the world happily temporarily forgetting it exists someone remarking on it is like shoving a mirror in your face. This is why misgendering doesn't have to be intentional to be hurtful.
Our culture has a lot of cultural protections built in for people who have deformaties through birth or accident because we understand universally the effect those things have on the psyche. It's impolite to stare, to mention or exclude people with those features. Gender however is harmless for about 98% of the population. It's remarked upon in the form of pronouns in every conversation where three or more people participate. This is ultimately why that saying "trans women are woman (etc.) " exists. It's not them saying that trans people have any misunderstandings or delusions about the history of their bodies or how they differ from cis women. They have no delusions, they are painfully aware, at all times, exactly how they differ. What that saying is trying to convey is that a trans person should not be treated or categorized by society any differently than cis people of that gender or should be accommodated for being treated as neither gender.
This is also why surgeries are often employed. It's in part to gain unwitting compliance from a population who reacts to physical sex characteristics and pairs that with gender. It's mending how people react to themselves in the mirror as much as it is removing the mirror from the hands of other people. What the removal of the disorder portion of the DSM was about was an acknowledgement that this problem is cultural. It is as much a problem with society's constructions and beliefs around sex and gender as it is a singular person's problem. Just as being gay is only a problem if society responds to it as an undesirable characteristic the issues with being trans are exacerbated by cultural sorting of gender into exclusive categories and people's personal ick about people's surgical and hormonal personal autonomy around their bodies.
The reason trans people have to frame their fight primarily as medically nessisary intervention is largely because of cis people's squeamishness causing them issues of lack of personal freedom to choose how to personally navigate a society not built to manage their specific personal struggles around their physical sex. The problem with society isn't going anywhere most places yet so the individual is assuming the burdens of that and it's well proven that those experiencing this issue are tackling that issue in thoughtful, logic based ways with proven ability to accurately judge risk and reward of their choices on that front.
As a gay trans guy who grew up in the 90's trying to sort out the toxic masculinity/internalized misogyny while fully closeted and being unaware that other trans men exist is a trip. Like doing all that "I have no emotions and refuse anything remotely girl-coded" song and dance kind of made me into what looked from the outside like a "pick-me" for years and I was relentlessly pursued romantically by people I just wanted to hang out and drink beer with. It was isolating and fucked up even if the behaviour soothed the dysphoria.
Had to address the internalized misogyny thing first, realize that was not motivating the trans portion of the issue and then had to work on getting off the toxic sauce that felt so darkly affirming and actually spend time with cis men who had properly deconstructed their own masculinity. Now I'm generally way better off and have a bunch of folk whom I brunch with who gas each other up over cocktails.
I am glad to have been of help!
With the trans community being under so much pressure from outside it really has negative impacts inside the community crushing down the narratives into only the most defensible to cis people. We repeat them so often it's likely we'll internalize that framework and that's not great for us I think. We defend things so often in terms of nessesity and harm prevention and medicalization of the trans experience that trans joy and the nature of creatures to chase the conditions they instinctually know are the most conducive to happiness get lost.
If the cis folk understood the first thing about being trans, really understood, they wouldn't try and stop us from doing what we want. It's only because they get the ick about body modifications that we are forced to be beggars and question ourselves if we are adequately poorly off enough for rescue by a system that really only cares about survival, not quality of life. We shouldn't have to be dying to be worth care or the grace to be ourselves. We don't have to follow any specific playbook or treatment plan. We are not sick. It's hard to resist but don't let them get in your head and make you start looking at yourself as a paitent and not a deserving seeker of comfort and joy. You don't need to find joy perfect and whole to make it worthy of the risk or the cost.
So... Sorry, third party butting in, but this seems to be what you're implying and clarification would be appreciated - You're saying you believe that men's primary romantic allure to women is to be large, muscled, have chiseled square features and that their personality is largely irrelevant? Like the man being featured in the cartoon?
Kind of a thing I've noticed about folks who feel targeted by these things is they assume a way more objective framework than others. A subjective framework, which is slightly more common amongst minority groups, looks at what the man in the picture is doing and sorts by behaviour. In this framework, if you do not believe or assert the conceit of the character in the comic, it does not apply to you. An objective framework, on the other hand, usually looks at what the represented character is and seeks to expand that to whole groups - in this case they see the character is a straight man (because that is mentioned as the vector by the comic text) and expands the brush to be a commentary on all straight men.
This often causes groups to have friction because objective frameworks demand something is more universally true whereas a subjective one allows for focus on groups inside other groups based on individual action allowing something to be situationally true.
When someone with an objective framework meets a subjective one the point subjective person finds relevant about a satire is entirely different and the calls of it being a broad attack against a large group nonsensical. Your emotional reactions to something are going to be - no one controls that but you - but in a subjective framework satire, if you are aligning yourself with the strict veiws of the target of the comic then upsetting you is intentional because it is a behaviour the writer of the comic hopes to change. Assume an objective framework your call to align yourself with the character because you are a also a straight man on the internet becomes a request to never discuss the behaviour of all straight men on the Internet or to strictly label what specific sub group the text applies to remove your personal self identitfiers from being applied in the text. A call to put in the text of the comic "leftists" or "right wingers" or "alpha chuds" ignores the fact that those are groups and the category sort implied by the comic is behaviour. Behaviours that can be exhibited by some men regardless of their grouping by political alignment.
Subjective framework speaking it's a all squares are rectangles but not all rectangles are squares situation. Text gives you the minimum you need to know - The character featured is not attracted to men and is trying to assert what people who are should be attracted to. That is the only reason why the label "straight man" is important. Because otherwise the behaviour being dumb would make no sense.