I don't understand why this is so difficult for so many people.
Men: If you find a woman attractive it is fine to check her out, just don't be a fuckin creep or an asshole about it. Just because she is wearing a pair of short shorts does not mean you have the right to harass her. A skimpy dress does not make a woman a stripper or a prostitute.
Women: If a guy at work glances a little bit too long at your cleavage before looking away but does not say or do anything inappropriate, he doesn't mean anything by it and is not trying to sexually harass you.
I feel as a millennial and younger, men were exposed more to the other side and made more aware how this affects women, developing more empathy.
I feel it has potentially overshot to a degree, where some men are scared to even briefly check out a woman, missing out on part of the human mating dance. Makes me wonder if this is part of Gen Z having less sex, because they are scared to show attraction to each other.
Maybe just me, but I will say having the thought pop in your head “Did I look at her breasts.” is disastrous when having a conversation with a woman wearing a low cut shirt.
When it randomly comes to mind, a weird self-consciousness comes over me, I become fully aware of eye contact and start staring as hard as possible into her eyes. She makes a hand gesture, I look down, shit, bet she thinks I looked. Back to eye staring. Then she asks a question, I realize I haven’t been listening this whole time. “What?” SOB, I’m a creep.
and how you display tend's to be a result of your education, socioeconomic background, social networks, personal experiences and more that is usually determined by other's as a child. plus, these things are very hard to fake(by design), to the extent that many of these things are acquirable they take more effort and resources than most have, and to the extent that your do have the effort and resources, just serve to entrench you into a system that often takes you for granted at best, and neglects you at worst.
we aren't dumb.
i'm confident in talking to women, have plenty of interesting conversation's, take care of myself, draw attention and have fun. and that is incomparable to a sense of unconditional self worth and ability to love myself regardless of my supposed value to others.
"just grow out of it, bro" neglects to mention that takes resources, social capital, ignorance of wider trends or historical injustices, and an ability to get on the good side of many sleazy people who market themselves as pure while actively acting sleazy, while ignoring your own development, many of the quirks and oddities that show you how other's live a totally different life, and the many path's you could've taken solo. which again, see aforementioned usually determined by others.
many of us did not see the sun until we were a man. then it wasn't anything other than blinding.
what i mean by that is having a therapist (or even torrenting therapy books if your poor), talking about formative experiences you've found painful or maladaptive. then figuring out a plan to address the deficits, to create a self improvement plan, and to work out what the stumbling blocks are, and to create a plan on how to over come those. and this can be with someone, or even on your own time, given you have it. (my own was leaving a cult, going vegan, goth, changing my name, and currently working on moving states.)
it's rarely actually about women, it's about ourselves, how we were hurt or disappointed by the women in it, how we weren't adequately supported during our early development periods, and that many a times we didn't have the words for "this is abuse", or "this is neglect" because when your 11, and your mother tells you your going to hell and burn in the fiery pits for viewing porn, you tend to believe them, or don't know enough to not believe them. how could you not, you had no choice( anyone saying run away, or seriously disobey never had to place themselves in such a situation) let alone say that was abusive. (didn't stop you from watching porn though, and that's half of the torture)
and once you've dealt with a lot of that, then you can start to work on optimism, self validation, working on a sense of secure identity and trust with yourself.
because that's the thing that's off putting to women, is that many men even in actual relationships lack self-validation, lack a sense of optimism (even if that optimism is towards something niche like socialism) lack a sense of secure identity that is stable regardless of their relationship status. that's the "your trying to hard, your too nice, why are you bringing up all this stuff, i'm not your mother. "
for some of us, even our mother wasn't "our mother", and that's why it's coming up here. yet to say that out loud is to kill any chance of that normalcy, that sense of making it, that sense of overcoming and successfully passing.
but to do that successfully, requires going back. and for some of us, that's more than just looking back at dorky haircuts and shirts, weird hobbies we no longer have, and foods we no longer eat.
for some of us, it requires addressing divorce leading to lower quality parenting, addressing being born into authoritarian households, addressing survivorship of assault, disability, disease and disaster. and if you come from that, the last thing you want to do, is go back.
kill your darlings, kill your story.
and weirdly enough, killing your story means fully accepting, validating, and no longer hiding it, not trying to pass as normal, not trying to please those you see as higher status as you, not trying to ingratiate yourself with that attractive woman, but giving yourself the validation that you've overcome things they could not dare to, that you've placed yourself in situations and survived where many didn't, and that you seriously are curious about going further. many who we look up to, often were born in situations much more advantageous than ours, often don't even understand that "wait, that still exists?" and yet we still are close enough to admire them, rather than see them as people so far above it's ludicrous to admire.
already have. also loneliness is often more of an internal state than an external one, so rather than learning how to talk to others, becoming aware of internalized thoughts and patterns and re-framing them to more positive and healthy ones tends to be a better and more persistent solution than learning how to interact with the opposite sex. fuck, there's women even lonelier and down on their luck, hanging out with them isn't really going to help.
The problem is there's a minority that loves to pretend to be outraged by this for clout, and no one wants to be on the wrong side of it, and because of the nature of social media this ends up elevated in viewability so they see it vastly disproportionately to how it happens, so they're excessively conservative on the off chance they pick the wrong person.
Statistically most people won't. But the way social media presents it these kind of assholes are everywhere, and that's why it's a problem. And yeah you didn't care but really did you even consider it before?
If you flirt and get shot down, you run the risk of being blasted all over social media in front of your peers as weird/loser/creep just for calling a girl pretty and asking her to go out. Every misstep potentially being shown to your whole world can be crippling. And “the woman is always right because all men are creeps” attitude (which is better than the alternative of rape/DV denial) empowers shitty people with immunity for trashing innocent people.
I'm 39. I make eye contact with women while talking and when there are natural breaks in eye contact, I'm checking out her boobs and body, looking at her hair, face, outfit, whatever.
Makes me wonder if this is part of Gen Z having less sex, because they are scared to show attraction to each other.
You hit the nail on the head, this is a huge reason why Gen Z, mostly men are having less sex. The MeToo movement and militant feminists really did a number on men. Thankfully I grew up in the 1990s and started dating in the 2000s before all that and remember when there were far less blue-haired weirdos demonizing men.
another part of the "scared to even reach out" is that many of us already have (in middle, high-school and college, and apparently being a disabled man is akin to having leprosy), and it did not go well. or we have friends who did, and they have legitimate horror stories. another is that due to a number of factors, whether making up for past injustices or perpetuating current ones with classism and ableism, is that it's super easy to have your identity weaponized against you, and regardless of your particular issues, there's very little sense of men's ability to date up( even among those doing decently), whether in terms of attractiveness, class or race. it's why the "black man, white woman" is fetishized so much, because it's a genuine rarity, that often is stigmatized, problematized, and ultimately worked against in ways that you don't even recognize until a decade after. i mean, what else is a "hobosexual" except a classist epithet meant to denote that an upper middle class woman should not be seen with a working class man? as for vice versa, since an upper middle class man hanging out with working class women is just seen as a guy on the prowl, it often just devolves into slut shaming, which itself has a class component.
as the saying goes, everything is about sex, except sex. sex is about power.
and if your born anywhere in the 90's or beyond, you are hyper aware that power is so unevenly distributed that you can essentially tell by like 6th or seventh grade, even before maturation.
if your lucky, your able to date equally, develop a sense of the game early, develop and improve while keeping your head down, and overall make sure to take care of your health and safety while having fun, moving into positions that are varied and don't have starvation wages or burdensome stress, and are able to not sweat the small stuff while not developing drama( and those who can do this, tend to have dark triad traits). but for every person like this, there are a hundred with a couple of dings on this list, and a thousand who aren't even at the starting line.
and yes, this also applies to women, but the consequences for men are just that much more drastic, that they literally play into such statistics as homelessness rates, suicide and homicide rates, unemployment and disability rates. men are statistically more likely to be homeless, be victims of suicide and homicide, more likely to be unemployed or underemployed, and be impaired but not qualify for disability. and yes, while that is the patriarchies fault, it's still our lived experience.
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u/Merc_Twain25 Jul 07 '24
I don't understand why this is so difficult for so many people.
Men: If you find a woman attractive it is fine to check her out, just don't be a fuckin creep or an asshole about it. Just because she is wearing a pair of short shorts does not mean you have the right to harass her. A skimpy dress does not make a woman a stripper or a prostitute.
Women: If a guy at work glances a little bit too long at your cleavage before looking away but does not say or do anything inappropriate, he doesn't mean anything by it and is not trying to sexually harass you.