There have been pathological and fringe-minded people since the beginning of time, even in great times. What’s a huge problem is when they reach a critical mass so that many normal people are effected by them.
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I doubt it, but it’s possible. She has let it be known that she likes older men, which I would grudgingly have to admit includes me.
@marine77
Yes, that filmmaker. Strange man.
Just for the sake of curiosity, and showing my young age, what the hell is a “Latchkey Kid”?
Also, just some random bits I skimmed over catching up:
(You guys must be in opposite time zones, because I miss a lot daily)
- Regardling course language and otherwise offensive terminology… personally, I prefer it. I grew up with the only word i should avoid being “fuck”, and racist terms. The former which was strictly relegated to horrible pain. It sounds southern and hick-ish, but I dont trust people that dont curse freely. It comes off as pretentious and fake to me. This does not mean I think someone’s language should be as bad as mine. Also, as @EmilyQ mentioned, its everywhere in our modern society, comparatively to times past, its bound to become standard dialect. Honestly I’m incredibly vulgar off this site, I just find myself talking with people I barely know/knew, I do believe theres a respect to be had at first.
Foreign Women: @BrickHead you’re right, I definitely see this fairly often. I mean, I believe we all have a bit of foreign taste, but the consensus is definitely that women can be rough in America. But I think this just circles back around to the feminism debate. Entitlement and whatnot. My fiance is pretty mentally strong and independent, and she tends to generally dislike women as well.
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Apologies I missed this reply.
I could take it as disheartening, but at the same time I’ve just come to terms with the fact that there are some people who I’m never going to get on with. That’s ok, no judgement on them or me. I’m confident there are plenty of women who don’t think this way, or who are just using the “sass” as a defence mechanism, that I can just navigate around them.
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Latchkey kids are kids that go home from school to an empty home and are alone for a decent amount of time. The situation isn’t inherently bad but it can be very bad with the wrong social elements at work.
I curse here and there in conversation with people close to me but I avoid it elsewhere and only sparingly do so on here. I’ve cut down. I’ve never heard one of my wife’s uncles curse once, but he’s highly disciplined, well spoken, and religious. My whole family only heard my grandma say shit once.
Yeah, but I believe dropping standards is not a good sign as we’ve dropped standards for a lot. I’m sure some likely think I’m morally posturing but being around ill-mannered people is irritating after some time. Plus the vulgarization of culture at large isn’t good. Have you ever visited any of the five boroughs of NYC outside of well-to-do Manhattan? People screaming into thin air, loudly mumbling or shouting songs they’re listening to with earbuds, passing tough guys or wannabe tough guys blabbering, “I told that muddafugga,” “I’m gonna fug dat guy up!”, or something similar. Several times from nearly a block away I’ve heard women on cell phones shouting, “I told dat bitch…!”
Yes, some or many are. And I think they’ll match submissive men they can boss around.
Yes! A teen in a group I was running years ago said, “I used to get upset when someone didn’t like me, but then I realized that I don’t like everybody, so why would I expect all of them to like me?” I thought it was profound, and helpful as a people-pleasing type. Some people come into my office once and never come back. That’s okay. I’m not everyone’s flavor - and not all of the people who come in are mine. It’s not necessary that I decide who is the problem. Probably no one!
I agree, but I don’t know that swearing conversationally is part of “ill-mannered.” Maybe! My husband used to not swear around me, but I’d hear him doing it in the basement or when with other men. I thought it was sweet. He’s loosened up a bit, and our conversation has in no way become ill-mannered. I had a client say yesterday, in conversation about her pursuing a similar career to mine, “but you’re charming as fuck.” I thought it was a delightful and flattering thing for her to say to me. She’s very appealing, a young-ish mother in love with her child and husband, and there’s just nothing coarse or ill-mannered about her.
But I do know what you’re saying about feeling assaulted by the street scene. I just want to differentiate it from nice people cheerfully asking “what the fuck?” And I will say, in agreement with this:
I don’t know that I need people to be using specific words to make me comfortable - I was fine with my husband’s chivalrous withholding of it, though he’d occasionally let fly a “shit!” - but there’s a type of person…sanctimonious, maybe?..who irritates me. Like, an older person who just doesn’t use the language is fine. You never notice that they’re not swearing. But people who substitute words (“heck fire”) or sound enraged while grinding out “fudge!” bug me.
It used to happen to me, too! I’d see one of his posts and think it was mine at first.
I think you’re fine. It feels like a conversation with you, rather than a repeating loop.
So, I was a latchkey kid. My mom was a nurse, and went back to work when I was in kindergarten, then left altogether the summer before 7th grade to go “find herself,” and of course my father worked. I hated it and wanted to do things differently with my own children. I worked when the eldest was a baby, went part time when #2 came, and stopped altogether during my 3rd pregnancy (four kids in just under five years). I returned to college when the youngest was 6, and did a gradual increase to basically a full time (work and internships) working lifestyle. I chose not to stay home because as the kids got older I felt under-challenged to the point that it seemed not-good for everyone, and I remember a specific moment when I realized it was time to do something. I was talking to the kids’ dad and he was eating pretzels. One fell, and his eyes tracked it landing on the floor, then he looked back up at me and continued talking. When he walked away, he stepped on it. And I wasn’t so much angry (he wasn’t being disrespectful, just not paying attention) as suddenly aware that I needed to become one of the people who were too busy and fulfilled to care about a pretzel on the floor. My house was too clean, my participation in the kids’ schools (PTA, reading to various classes, parent-run environmental science program at one point, art program at another) my only intellectual outlet - and teaching kids an hour-long class that I was taught last week isn’t an adequate intellectual outlet for me. I was reading 3-4 books a week before going back to school.
I may not have done it - I really believed as you do, Brick, that kids need a mom home if at all possible, but I was involved at the time with a forum full of mostly professional women, and there was a conversation about SAHMs that was compelling. Some of them had grown up with moms at home, others of us not, and the response of the women with at-home moms was not necessarily positive. One women put it that “my mother’s entire focus was too much for me.” Suffocating. Some of the women with working moms expressed that they felt good and proud of their mothers, and enjoyed the benefits of the income.
So I really think it’s a “your milage may vary” thing. I have a lot of energy and I can be very intense. I think my kids would say that graduate school was too much. I was commuting almost two hours to school twice a week, then commuting 45 minutes to an internship two days, with Friday the day to write the endless papers and of course try to maintain my household. But we divided chores, I prepped dinners, their dad was fine chipping in, and we managed. But it wasn’t optimal and they weren’t used to it. We were really in good shape with just a little less, though.
The women I know who’ve remained “home” with now-grown kids are very low energy. Sort of plump and contentedly getting manicures. That’s just not me. I siphon off some of my energy first thing in the morning either arguing with you guys or posting to my Estrogen Nation, which is like a shared journal. Then I work out. Then I prep all of my food for the day and go off to work for 10 hours. I’m better busy. Being home with four little kids was a delight, but four kids keeps you busy (if you also gobble books and paint everything in sight). I’d have struggled with just one or two.
But I also think that there’s a quality range for “latchkey.” I came home to what felt like a cold house with a violent brother. My kids came home to a mom who had everything pre-prepped to make homemade chicken soup and who was excited to see them and hear about their days. I made sure I was home every first day of school so I could make our traditional first day cookies, and I was there on the last day. I don’t recall any traditions of that sort from my childhood.
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I should amend my statement and add that this is definitely a regional thing. There are very few people that dont share this belief with me. If I go to a work meeting and dont liberally swear or drink a beer I’m considered an outsider. (Funny enough it’s gotten to the point where I literally dont drink unless I’m at a company event)
But I agree, using overly PG alternatives like “effin” or “heck” definitely warrants a profoundly perplexed look from me.
We actually have a new employee that I was very stand off-ish towards. He was very PG and fairly emotionless, until one day I was giving him shit and he told me to fuck off. Instantly liked him then lol.
Probably takes him a while to warm up to people … I’m the same way when I’m in a new environment.
My initial personality is very milquetoast, then when I find my peeps, I’ll be a lot looser around them (in appropriate situations) but still remain more formal with people I find to be stiff, still.
For instance, I’m very loose around a few of my colleagues I work directly and our work has a lot of cross over mainly because we’ve had to roll up our sleeves and march through the muck together,
Then there are parallel colleagues with whom we’re on the same project but don’t really work directly together. Less loose.
Then there’s the supervisors/directors/etc. More business like than the former.
Then the C-Suite people I have limited interactions with: Most business-like/formal.
This is me, except the first impression is more like proper and outgoing. Sort of “good girl.” When people get to know me, I think they’re generally shocked initially by how improper I can be. There really is nowhere I won’t go conversationally, nothing about which I’m not curious, and pretty much no word I won’t say, although I avoid “cunt” or “bitch” used in the traditional sense because I prefer the broader, gender-neutral “asshole.” I’ll say “bitch” jokingly in its “bitch please” or “guess you’re pretty much my bitch now!” sense.
But I think at the same time that I’m really never coarse. I have very nice manners and only let the wild me out to play with like-minded people.
Right. Milquetoast. I’m appropriately polite and, jovial??, but not very close to how I am when I’m super comfortable with people/“cutting loose”
This is me. I get the “I was totally wrong about” line quite a bit after a while … the “you’re not at all what I expected when I first met you…”
That’s just New England talk, although I think the sentiment I use for “cunt” is akin to how the Brits use it … so, like “asshole”
This sums it up … very milquetoast unless people I’m around can handle my relaxed personality.
louis ck once said something like “boys fuck things up, but girls are fucked up. boys do damage to your house, but girls leave scars in your psyche”. i think it pretty much sums up men and women.
I just thought I should weigh in on this part. It all depends on what sort of person you are and what your motivation is, if you are someone who has problems with the opposite sex (this applies to both men and women) then there is a good chance they will just use you for a visa or green card. This also happens to immigrants who either meet someone here whose visa is going to expire or they go back home to find someone, I know people in that situation. On the other hand, there are some people who are happily married to someone they met on vacation, but they obviously have something going for them or it would have ended badly a long time ago.
It reminded me of this story that was in the in the news a couple years ago:
"When first arriving at the Montreal airport, he made a derogatory comment to her about her appearance in front of her friends who came to greet him, court heard.
While he complained that a problem from a herniated disc in his back made it impossible to get a job or have sex, he managed to go out dancing two or three nights a week, returning in the morning, court heard."
Totally agree! I guess it comes down to, from my perspective, that happy, healthy people draw other healthy, happy people, while people looking to be rescued are probably not going to have success with that, because they draw other people with something missing.
Interesting. Do you really believe that men don’t damage women’s psyches?
One of my best remembered quotes (from Jason Ferruggia, who first brought me to this site) is simply:
“Not everyone is going to like you. You need to be OK with that.”
Not massively insightful or groundbreaking yet its stuck with me when far smarter things haven’t.
from what i’ve seen happening in real life, louie’s line is quite accurate.
This doesn’t answer the her question bud. It’s a cop-out if anything
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Honestly, just entertaining the idea that men don’t damage women’s psyches is a black hole, especially when it’s propped up by another ‘this is what I see’. I’ve told my kids that the thing I’ve asked them to look for and that they can’t find is literally right in front of their face too many times for me to listen to people say ‘all I’ve seen…’ and not laugh. People see what they want to see, which, often times, is not much. Certainly nothing that challenges their firmly-held beliefs. The argument here has largely avoided ‘do women deserve to be equal’ and has been more about ‘has equality already been achieved, and if so, what’s the need for feminism?’.
But you’re always going to have some strange person who comes in here and stands behind the firm belief that men don’t damage women’s psyches, not even with beatings or violent rape. And before this guy comes back with ‘oh no, I didn’t say that’, you can’t say that not-in-a-joke without it implying that. Even if you DO say it in a joke, Louie cornered women and jerked off in front of them, so he’s obviously the authority in what is and isn’t cool with women, right?
Anyhow, it’s always nice to step back into this thread and see who the new BMOC is.
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That’s part of it, but basically you just need to have something going on to keep whoever you are with. And anyone who is looking for a visa or green card is likely to have ulterior motives.
I think that explains why a lot of girls got into all sorts of slutty behaviour in the first place, they had a boyfriend that mistreated them and/or cheated on them so they figure that all men are like that and proceed to do behave in similar ways.
Quoting a guy who is famous for jacking off in potted plants is not a good way to get your message across.
Equal doesn’t mean the same in every way. If a guy acts a certain way then most people might agree that he deserves to get his ass kicked, but you always hear about how no woman deserves to be subjected to violence. If you want full equality then be prepared to get your teeth knocked out for saying the wrong thing or looking at someone funny.
And no I am not in favor of violence against women, lest someone misconstrue my statements.
One of the best, most enlightening books I’ve ever read, which I have recommended ad nauseum on this site, is “Thinking, Fast and Slow”.
One of the topics covered is how we “perceive” our immediate world and a phenomenon dubbed “What you see is all there is” (WYSIATI). If you haven’t read the book, it’s right up your alley.
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