No problem, I will leave that to you.
Male feminists are like tampons, only to be used and discarded after serving their purpose.
If 8 1/2 inches isn’t enough for them then I could just stick my arm in.
There is no way to achieve such a thing, except some sort of leftist dictatorship where the government regulates every aspect of our lives. Hmmm…
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Three times I’ve been new at a job in which a female co-worker while training and/or talking to me, out of nowhere said, “I’m a bitch,” or “I know I’m a bitch.” Imagine obediently and politely talking to someone, receiving information, and completing tasks and someone says this to you?! It’s highly disrespectful and I actually think it’s intended as a low level of intimidation (eg, “watch your step with me”). I’m curious to know what would happen if I as a man while training a female coworker, out of nowhere, said “don’t mess with me,” or “I’m an a—hole/jerk/hard ass/etc.” I never would though.
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Sure, lol, that probably best explains it. It somehow never occurs to me to look for dark motives. My immediate supervisor was female and her boss was male. I’ve assumed unconscious bias on his part (it was displayed in other contexts separate from me as well, though I’d call him a nice guy generally speaking). I assume that she was put in an awkward position when I questioned the decision, then went back to him with my response and he immediately reversed course.
But you’re certainly right, “unconscious bias” seems much less likely than an active dislike of me personally, with a resulting attempt to sabotage a productive, well-qualified, and (I thought) well-liked employee!
haha .. dude that’s happened to me a couple of times. Years and years ago in less professional settings.
I had one young woman say that sentiment in those exact terms (I can be a bitch so…) and another say the “I have a strong personality”…
Cool .. don’t care .. Ima do what needs getting however the getting needs doin’
It might be intended as a way to say one better watch out, but the 2 times I can remember that happening I didn’t feel intimidated and they didn’t last long at the company. Imagine that…I know people who know one of the girls, and she still struggles with holding down a job…kind of feel bad for her tbh (this was the "I can be a bitch girl).
The other girl, haven’t really thought of until now. It is awkward though.
I remember distinctly the first girl, training me on a portion of the ERP system:
“Ok, click there. Mmhmm. That’s right. Now click that…I can be kind of a bitch … ok now scroll down…”
I was like .. well alright. Just shoe horned that in there eh .. I kind of chuckled and just went about the training session.
I’ll be honest, I’ve never once thought about this. I’ve been called an asshole before. I know I can be (and sometimes have to be to get shit done - people can be obstinate for no good reason), but I wouldn’t just present that as a preamble to future interactions. Where’s the fun in that? I’d much rather them be taken by surprise by it .. the reaction is both genuine and hilarious…
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Yet you are quick to accuse men of sexism despite the fact that
Was her office in a broom closet?
I had a few experiences where either they refused to give me a raise after working there for a long time, or instead of giving me a big raise as promised they wanted me to settle for a few extra cents per hour. After I quit they begged me to come back. One place the owner was a woman, am I to assume sexism?
I see a lot of instances where someone is mistreated and due to their race, religion, or being female they are quick to assume it was due to discrimination, but they totally disregard the fact that a lot of people are just straight up assholes. Welcome to planet earth.
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These could be shit tests. I think one of them liked me.
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This, both of us are on the same page with. I absolutely cant stand the “I’m just a bitch” mentality.
A: no, you just dont know how to talk and reason with people
B. You lost the fire to defend yourself against that word.
Bitch is insulting. Its supposed to be insulting. If I call a woman a bitch, I would have already hit her if it was a guy.
If someone calls me an asshole, I typically immediately back pedal and either justify or rethink my actions.
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Right.
I remember one when I was single I came across a dating-site profile in which a woman wrote “I’m such a typical NYC bitch.”
This is thought of as attractive and intimidating. It’s not.
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People seem to believe now that “bitch” is synonymous with “strong minded”. See also: “Sassy”. I was once told by ostensibly a grown adult (in a performance review, no less), that she had “dangerous levels of sass”. I don’t really know what to do with that
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I think I’d be tempted to say “don’t worry about it, I can be a bit rapey, just letting you know, full disclosure etc…”
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True, of course, but I’ve also had to deal with jerks of both genders, and I’m not accusing any of the bosses involved of doing anything in any deliberate or official capacity, just noting what to me was a clear example of thoughtless bias on the part of the (male) higher-up. The female supervisor didn’t dislike me, and in fact reached out after I’d left to have dinner. Neither of them disliked me; I do my work cheerfully and am very much a team player with a sense of mission. I worked with poor and neglected and mentally ill children. I didn’t even leave because I was angry, it just sort of broke my starry-eyed devotion to the place. It was a low paying job in community mental health, and I was at that point overqualified (Tom was not). I left for a job that payed $12K more. Had the office thing not happened I wouldn’t have looked around to see what else was out there, but it did. I suppose people reading about it can either imagine me as angrily looking for insult and jumping at shadows, or they can take into account my history of being comfortable with men and with men/women together and assume if I saw something, there must have been something there to see. It’s fine with me either way, since this has no bearing on my home or work life.
Except I believe that professional women are having to say “hold on, why is xyz happening” regularly, as I had to do. I feel like I could sit here and list example after example (male nurse comes into health center and within six months there’s a new position created to oversee nurses and he’s chosen for it) but none of them are glaring examples of oppression and I don’t have the time or the heart to argue about whether I’m crazy or a man-hater or disliked by the people around me.
But in my opinion, THIS is what has to happen to achieve gender parity. If they encounter bias, women - or men - have to note it and/or challenge it. Politely, professionally. Thank god for the early feminists, who made it so that all I have to do is say “I understand the agency’s position. Now I’ll have to consider what that means for me going forward.”
I’ve heard this before, maybe from you, and never understood it. People have always seemed to be nice or assholes at about the same rate. I’ve worked in female-dominated fields and had great experiences, though there might be one or two women I didn’t like or thought sort of generally toxic. But I’ve encountered miserable men, too.
I think of male feminists as the guys who cook dinner on the nights their wives work later than they do. Again, easy and quiet. No big giant angry fuss.
Yeah, this is weird. I don’t know if it’s meant to be intimidating, I’d almost think it’s insecurity speaking, but who knows. But you’re right, it’s the same as saying “I’m 100% unpleasant. Just so you know.”
I know some women struggle with the sense that if they’re firm and professional they come off as bitchy. I haven’t noticed that in my life, but I work in a very communication-oriented field, and I’m pretty good at it. I also know women through work who work in other fields and have had to push back at men in some regard without having an issue in either direction (“so I was like, Bob, this is 2019, you can’t call me honey, it’s not allowed anymore, even in the south”). So I have no idea whether it’s true in some cases or a false assumption that’s making those women overly aggressive when they could have just stated their cases with professionalism, or what.
Funny, but I think there’s a real advantage to having people be surprised. It suggests that one is typically easy-going, but this is serious, and now as a result so am I. If you’re pleasant 95% of the time and firm or demanding 5% people will view you as taking whatever matter seriously rather than as an asshole. I’m pretty sociable and chatty at work, but if I happen to walk by after my client has left and hear the check-out people calling my client crazy? We’re going to have a talk that is neither pleasant nor chatty. It won’t be bitchy, either, but it will be firm and the target of my talk that covers “no one chooses to be born with mental illness” and “we have been entrusted with our patients’ care and should be worthy of that trust” will nod until I’m done. Then I’ll smooth things a bit by running some variation on “don’t mean to jump down your throat” but then reinforce by saying “it’s just really hard to be that person and I want this to be a safe place.” More nodding, then I’m done. I’ll make sure to further smooth by saying something unrelated to reestablish friendliness, then move along. I’ve never had a problem holding friendly relations.
Actually, I ass-crawled my (goofy, adhd) biller yesterday, not for the first time. She sent a bill to the wrong person, egregiously breaching the confidentiality of my patient. FEDERAL CRIME. But regardless, we’ll still exchange “lol’s” in messages in future that are not about her criminal negligence. Because I’m only a 5% asshole. Maybe I should start announcing that in advance!
Hahaha, picturing your face! I would take that as (really weird and uncomfortable) flirting. Hahaha.
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Oh god. People actually take that word seriously?. I long ago lost count of the amount of times I’ve been called hun, honey, or sweetie, or had my arm or shoulder tapped by female co workers. If anything it made me feel more relaxed around them.
I never use those words or touch anyone though.
It can actually be disheartening to read and hear that. Imagine a single, good guy coming across that and thinking something like, “I’m an alright guy just looking for an alright woman and this is what’s out there.” I thought that, and other then-single (now taken because they’re alright) guys I know complained about the same things. Busy-ness and seemingly-compulsive travel were also complained about.
Speaking of which, @EmilyQ you said many posts ago that in the view of some American men, foreign women are primo dating material. I’ve heard several complaints from even married men about an increasing rudeness and callousness in American women. I don’t think it comes from nowhere. Do you? If such men are perceiving women like that they’ll go abroad, though I don’t think that has high a track record as people make it to have. Different religions, different languages, different gender expectations, resentful native men in the background… Gee, what can go wrong? Lol.
Just the other day my happily-married Asian-American friend of 32 years said to me in a text about the American mothers he comes across while picking his child up from school, “potty-mouthed, loud, rude.”
I forget the exact term for this, but negative interactions have a disproportionately larger impact on our view of an interaction (might be akin to loss aversion). i.e. if I’m pleasant 95% of the time, it’ll more likely go unnoticed than the 5% of the time I’m an asshole which will be remembered more vividly than my pleasantness, even though I’m generally more pleasant and agreeable far more often than not.
I’m actually embroiled in a somewhat unpleasant ongoing interaction at the moment - someone on the West coast prepared a file which has inconsistencies with the master data to which she seems oblivious in the face of overwhelming evidence her file is riddled with errors.
Really not a big deal as we have time to correct it and it’ll take, maybe, an hour on her end to fix these errors. I presented my argument with the evidence from the data holy grail juxtaposed with her file and explicitly stated where the incongruences are and how they ought to be corrected. She doubled down saying “this is how these files HAVE ALWAYS (my emphasis) been prepared”.
Again, not a big deal - I’m not interested in the fact that she’s always prepared these files incorrectly. Now they’re affecting my work, and the workflow of a growing number of people. So, I’ve set up a call with her to explain the situation and why it’s no longer acceptable to provide inaccurate data to a vast number of people. I really don’t expect it to “unpleasant” but I know people don’t like to be criticized, or feel like they’re work is being scrutinized. I could care less, honestly, the quality of her work up to this point, it needs to improve moving forward.
I do that, I cook all the time and it’s my job as well. But I’m not a male feminist.
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That is important but I don’t think with equal opportunity and fairness that there should be an uproar if men simply outdo women in some professions. If the cream of the crop of men are more suitable to take up more CEO positions than the cream of the crop of women, so be it. If the reverse works out for any field, so be it too. If men don’t have innate traits that make them generally suitable for hairdressing (even though some are excellent at it) then it’s neither fair or unfair. And so on.
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Just a few days ago, Jennifer Lopez, was the centerpiece of the Super Bowl halftime show, even in some positions in the performance in which she was genuflected to by other performers. As brickheaded as it can be, why would an observer think there is such pervasive anti-female sentiment now? Women earn advanced degrees, make six figures, some can marry a rich man and not work, talented and pretty ones can earn millions, some untalented and pretty ones can earn hefty sums too by simply existing, administrative positions, school principals, PR/ad and media execs (my cousin being one), huge amounts of admiration on social media, etc.
Am I missing something here? I can’t think of any one pervasive force that can stop a moderately intelligent woman from setting up a satisfying life for herself in most of the West, even excluding men from much of her daily life if she wishes.
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You pretty much summed up the whole argument in one paragraph. There is nothing left to fight for that resembles equality in any way, at this point they are trying to put women’s interest ahead of men’s. The moderate feminists who aren’t into this extreme agenda are relics from a long-gone era.
They talk about how “victims have to be believed” and stuff like that. I know a guy who’s ex-girlfriend hit him several times and hid his wallet and car keys so he couldn’t even leave. He called the cops rather than hitting her back, when they arrived they were sympathetic but said there was nothing they could do because it was his word against hers so they left. If a man did that to a woman do you think that there is any way he would not have been arrested and charged?
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