This was in my high school and early college years, later on in life I was able develop romantic relationships with them and healthy platonic relationships. I’ll be upfront and say a lot of the times if a straight dude hates women vehemently, it’s probably because he’s not getting laid or able to form any semblance of a romance with a woman.

  • sailorfish [she/her]
    ·
    4 years ago

    To be completely honest, I stopped meeting that many new men 😂 At the moment I mostly interact with men from my uni department, who are luckily all great, and established friends and family, who are also either great or at the very least I can challenge any casual sexism and they'll take me seriously. Because of that my default expectation slowly shifted to that of being treated like a human being by men, and sexism became a (small) shock and not an expectation, so my feelings could also change. I'm sorry this is kind of a downer of an answer :')

      • sailorfish [she/her]
        ·
        edit-2
        4 years ago

        Sorry this ended up as a bit of a rant, but:

        I really hope it for you too! Actually some of my closest guy friends rn are nerdy tech dudes who are into sci-fi/fantasy. It sounds like such a stereotypical bad combo lol but they're really great and sincerely pro-feminism. So you never know!

        Tbf there's also something to be said for.. having no positive expectations. Like when I say I hated, I mean I was genuinely seething about it a lot. Combo of a whole string of bad experiences with harassment one after another + living below an AirBnB which was rented out for huge parties (esp stag parties) every week and sometimes more often. When we tried to run around and complain and get it shut down we

        CW

        got told we have nothing to complain about because in another flat of girls living below an AirBnB a couple of them got raped, and we hadn't been raped yet so what're we even so upset about. When we went to our uni for advice we got given rape whistles because they had no idea what else to do lmao. Also some other fun victim blamey stuff.

        Anyway it (and some other stuff) culminated in me being really depressed, seeking counselling, the guy counselor being kinda disturbed about me not wanting to wear high heels anymore because I felt unsafe in them so I ended up kinda comforting him that I'll work on wearing high heels again lol... Anyway all that to say was that that was a really extreme time in my life, and since then for a while after it was more like you - "assuming they don't see me as a full person" is a good way to put it. For me the end goal there was to not feel too much emotion about it, I guess. Not like ignore it (because it is wrong and it is infuriating) but just not allow it to eat up my actual mental energy. The fact that my emotions are more positive than that as a whole now is kind of just luck.