My last crushpost got a little weird. They usually don’t get much attention, and what little there is I think is usually men. So this thread should be a good opportunity for women and enbies to bring up what you find problematic.
Update:
Thanks everyone for responding. I have read all the replies and am giving them serious consideration. I will stop crushposting, I deleted all the posts, and deleted the meat of this post as well. Weird or not, however obfuscated, it’s still an obsession and a privacy concern.
I'm going to be honest with you hoss, I'm not actually interested in this drama but I'm bored and the topic is inane and everyone needs to actually humble themselves here. The golden rule, that we aaaaall learned, is treat others how you want to be treated. How do you want your crush to navigate this situation? Would you want your crush posting about you online? Get out of your fucking head and be honest with this person. It's literally two questions, easy flowchart:
- I am interested in you, do you want to go out?
- (if yes) Where and when? (if no) That's cool, can we still be friends?
Hard truth: you need to grow up. Everyone attacking you needs to grow up too, because first thing anyone should have said is that you're going to look back on this and cringe in a few years.
honestly i just think you need to get some resolution to the situation. it's not healthy to keep a diary of the women you want to date without doing anything to act on those feelings. as a woman it does give me pause to think about having what i perceive to be innocent interactions with someone and them posting about it to an audience of potentially tens of people, not to mention the wider group of people on lemmy. like there is a line at which crush posts are not just harmless fun anymore, and it is typically at the point when it becomes a normal part of your routine
I haven't heard of "crush posting" until this stuff but I feel the main issue is just posting this online. I'm pretty sure people think about people they like a lot more than we want to admit, it's just when it becomes a publicly viewed thing it starts giving weird vibes. Probably because it's publicly accessible and approaches a breach of said target of affection's privacy.
tbh the privacy concerns are the big thing that's giving me pause (as a resident big time crush/romance poster). it might be something to put to bed purely on these grounds sadly. because yeah like...people like to talk about people they like, it's a pretty cute and innocent and a natural thing across gender lines. and chapochat feels like an actual community where we do like to get to know each other beyond usernames. but when you're bringing a third party into it who isn't aware, idk, even if you try to fudge details it can create an ethically murky area.
It's something that's generally ok with friends I think. But yeah, if I can give advice, stop posting about it online without their permission and ask about their sexuality directly and stuff (not in a creepy way but a blunt way).
If I can give further advice, I wouldn't bother trying to date people only attracted to one gender if you're questioning your identity. Both cis straight people and cis gay people can be transphobic (and enbyphobic) as fuck and it's not worth touching it. Even trans cis and trans gay people can be painful to date sometimes, it's just usually less intentionally painful. Bi and pan people is where the good dating is at if you're genderqueer in any way that isn't the default "born this way" narrative IMO.
If she does turn out to only like women, it's ALWAYS better to just let it go and just be friends. Not only is it weird to continue to pursue her past that point, but you have to realize you deserve better than people who aren't attracted to you.
I don’t know the full details of your relationship with these two women.
I don’t know the full details of your relationship to your gender.
The only things I know is the stuff you have been presenting in your crushposts.As you say they don’t get a lot of attention (at least not from misogyny-affected individuals), but I can attest that people do read them (even if they don’t comment), and several women have felt uncomfortable about it.
Which I imagine the girl it’s about would as well, if she knew, but that’s another story.Like I said I can’t talk to the truth of the matter, but I can tell you from what you present how it comes off and it comes off as like a creepy dude obsessing over women.
My advice is to just get some closure on this whole matter, stop pining from afar and letting this fester.
I’m not even saying you need confess, but at the very least get some confirmation on her sexuality from her own mouth.
You are friends, it doesn’t have to be creepy, you could start by talking about your own sexuality and have it develop from there.I want to stress that the part people were taking offense with wasn’t you talking about your dick (although that does add to the visceralness of it all) it’s that you pretty much went into the night with the expectation of sex from a girl who is your friend and basically a lesbian.
Now maybe one or both of those things aren’t true, MAYBE she is actually into some men (or penised individuals) and you happen to fall into that category.
MAYBE she does see you as more than a friend and has been throwing signals.
But you are getting way too ahead of yourself, you are taking any sliver of hope you can get that there is a chance she likes you and jumping straight to sex.I can never know the full story, but based on experience with men, I think a lot of women can read that post and your other posts with the take away that maybe you aren’t a totally reliable narrator and are being kind of desperate and deluding yourself about how into you this girl really is.
I can never know, I am purely speaking to the vibes as I read them as a trans woman, but I suggest you get to the bottom of whatever this truly is for both of your sakes.
Like I said I can’t talk to the truth of the matter, but I can tell you from what you present how it comes off and it comes off as like a creepy dude obsessing over women.
I'm not trying to tone police, I have no ball in this game other than hoping that people feel safe on here. I think it would be best to not phrase it this way due to OP mentioning basically being gender as "not a man". I'm not a fan of "not all men" type arguments so don't read this as a defense of their behavior in that line but with a queer twist, I just don't want fellow non-binary people to get hit in this as crossfire, because I know how often being non-binary can be basically a constant state of worrying about being misgendered for doing something too creepy or weird. And frankly creepy shit is creepy shit, I know gender has quite a lot to do with how creepy people can come across but in this very specific case where he has specifically mentioned not wanting to be a man I wouldn't take this direction and would rather we just focus on the fact it's creepy
Edit:
I want to stress that the part people were taking offense with wasn’t you talking about your dick (although that does add to the visceralness of it all) it’s that you pretty much went into the night with the expectation of sex from a girl who is your friend and basically a lesbian. Now maybe one or both of those things aren’t true, MAYBE she is actually into some men (or penised individuals) and you happen to fall into that category.
"penised individuals" is a weird distinction for who a lesbian would or wouldn't fuck and I hope this is unintentional or just an unintentionally botched way to try to accommodate OP's gender
The penised individuals was a reference to a descriptor blight used last night, I was just trying to put it in the terms he used as an example.
ah ok. It's definitely a weird term to use regardless but in that case it isn't your fault it entered the conversation, sorry
Yeah, maybe I should have thought harder before repeating it, my assumption is that she is potentially into cissexual amab non-binary people…or something idk how else to phrase it.
I understand where you are coming from and if blight has a problem with it I’ll try to adjust the wording, but he was point blank asked last night if he identified as enby and basically dodged the question and said he didn’t care.
I’m not trying to get into a whole conversation about gender identity, my main point is about how it comes across to post some of these things especially from someone using he/him pronouns.
I see your point, but frankly think it’s besides the matter as the discussion revolves around misogyny and misogyny effected vs unaffected individuals which the latter blight would fall under.
from my megathread contribution:
i maintain you were unfairly dogpiled by a poster or two who seemed to have a preconceived bone to pick with you, using one admitted overshare that the post could have done without as a pretext. the fact that i was reprimanded by a mod for "reading heavily into unsaid things of a stranger's personal life that's being overshared" when you and I have had an online rapport for months while the whole thread opened with someone taunting you about "the crush in a relationship or the one who doesn't like men?" (implying months of following these posts) w/o comment just furthers the bad taste this whole exchange left in my mouth.
what was or wasn't rescinded re: being a creep i can't speak to if that happened in private. i just thought the whole exchange fucking sucked, from what i saw on the public part of this forum. if it were in the interest of good faith self crit it wouldn't have been such a drawn out, mocking affair - more along the lines of "yo comrade, the bit about what we've all agreed is an overshare might make people feel some type of way, and there are some other aspects of this series of posts that have given me pause. maybe lets talk about that" not posting stupid fucking jim carry gifs mocking you while making big, damning assumptions about the situation in question.
whole thing read as bullying to me, if im bein real! not everyone on here is a comrade, barrier to making an account is real, real low, and someone who (IME) seems if anything ultra-sensitive to potential ways boundaries might be disrespected can make for an easy target for someone looking to vent their shit in a cruel way. dunno about anyone's motives, i'm just reading behavior from the outside.
and im enby if that means anything at all. though a subset of it that still benefits from a large amount of cishet privilege if anyone wants to harp on or gatekeep around that.
EDIT: 1-2 days later, hella cringe that i weaponized my own queerness here like that to paper over ways in which im privileged. i was on one yesterday, we all could have handled things better in various ways but i just want to own the ways in which i fucked up in a transparent manner
The easiest way to find out about her orientation without being super direct is just to start off with something really silly like asking about celebrity or fictional crushes, so that it can transition into a more serious conversation about sexuality and/or relationships. It keeps the conversation lighthearted and can give make the transition to asking her about her sexuality a bit easier than just straight up asking what her sexuality is.I kinda get where you're coming from in so far as not being quite comfortable asking about sexuality and/or relationships. I usually just stumble upon the answer through regular conversation and it seems like you two are at least close enough where you could just do that also.
But since it seems it hasn't definitely just try something like I mentioned before.If she's comfortable enough to have wanted to hang out with just you despite the plan originally being that it was going to be a bit of a group get together, then I'd think she'd at least be comfortable enough to talk to you about such things.Edit: Just taking what @AcidSmiley@hexbear.net said into consideration and I can see how my suggestion could be problematic. In the end its just best to get to know the person in question and use the familiarity you have with her to know how to approach the conversation.
Can someone explain to me why directly asking is bad? I feel like directly asking if someone's a lesbian and then respecting the answer is a lot less creepy than trying to deduce it.
not saying this is right, but if you ask outright it can seem like you're sniffing around the Human Relationship solely to sus out romantic compatibility? that said idt it's wrong if like, the subject of yalls dating life came up anyway, u know some kind of organic segue comes up. and there's also nothing "wrong" with the direct ask either it just might be frowned upon in neurotypical land.
I mean generally if you stay friends with them and aren't creepy even if they say no then there's no issue I can think of that makes sense. Most of the issues probably come from people who ask about romantic compatibility and just drop people after getting a no which probably hurts a lot if the person being asked wanted to be friends
Yeah mostly agreed, but unspoken social rules can be devious little punks sometimes
Most of the issues probably come from people who ask about romantic compatibility and just drop people after getting a no which probably hurts a lot if the person being asked wanted to be friends
yeah my understanding is this is kind of pervasive within opposite gender friendships and sucks majorly, definitely a dudes being raised to be Not Normal or Decent about womxn type of thing :(
Hmm... TBH, I don't really know how to explain it. Like I said I know the feeling. Maybe its like a social anxiety thing or being ND.
And I'm not suggesting that he try and deduce it. It was more of a suggestion of how to make it a bit more comfortable way to bring it up and eventually ask.
I get social anxiety but I honestly feel that's the conditioning that's been beaten into us as neurodivergent people to get us to not do what comes naturally. Because we've all been blunt and direct and had people shit on us for it. But the truth is that it's better 99% of the time to be blunt and direct anyways and that neurotypical people suck at communicating.
Yeah. In my life I've definitely had people kind of beat the whole "think before you speak" type stuff into me. Conditioning is definitely a large part of it.
I think the 1% of the time thinking before you speak is necessary is probably when people are in mourning and that's about it. Oh and ensuring you aren't using slurs
A man asking a women if they're a lesbian is usually not going to be a fun conversation for the woman
For me that's mostly because of the men who react to "i'm a lesbian" with "rly tho?"
Yeah this is the impression I got from how this kind of thing usually goes. At least for me I'd rather have someone ask directly and then not be weird about it then circle around trying to Sherlock Holmes my sexuality.
I don't think this is about making sure the women are comfortable tbh. it seems more like it's about the posters in question not having to risk making it obvious that they're interested romantically in someone who might not be interested in them.
asking about celebrity or fictional crushes
BTW that's easily in the top 5 of most awkward smalltalk topics for me because i do not have celebrity or fictional crushes, the entire idea of crushing on somebody i only know from a tv show or who doesn't even exist seems totally alien to me and i hate explaining that to people who do not get this.
I don’t know if I should copy-paste the now-deleted post in question here (within cw spoilers) or just leave it.
