this has been on my mind a lot. I follow some lesbian meme shitposting groups and there's tons of memes that are just like "This girl looked at me and I died and then she smiled at me and I came back to life" and I just cannot think of any cishet men's spaces that bring that have that level of absolutely dorky dysfunctional love for women. And, like, cishet men, their whole thing is supposed to be being in to women, and that just strikes me as really weird that there's not an equivalent. Like the closest I can think of is wife guy memes but that's just one wife, usually.
Do any spaces like that exist? Is it even possible given the way gender works in society?
The fact that I didn’t know if you were going to dunk on the men for saying something like that or not answers your question perfectly.
Even half this site would take a cynical approach to a dude being that way
Yeah. Like a man expressing, idk, affection? Awe? Fascination? With women in ways that aren't grotesquely sexual or objectifying doesn't really seem to be a thing. Which, again, what?
This is one of those blowback cases of patriarchy hurting men. Because the dominant social structure has men objectifying and harassing women constantly, it can be difficult to openly admit to finding a woman attractive as a man because people, very understandably, are going to assume that he means that in an objectifying way or is going to go harass her in public trying to get a date out of her and respond accordingly.
It obviously doesn't compare to the consequences faced by femme presenting people, but I'll have a moment every now and again where my bi femme partner and I will notice someone in a cute outfit and I have that moment of knowing that she could walk up to them and compliment them on it without issue, but if I tried to do the same they're likely to be defensive and assume I'm about to ask them for their number.