osberend:

tchtchtchtchtch:

earlgraytay:

humanfist:

earlgraytay:

I think you’re being a little uncharitable here. I was raised Mormon, and since Mormons are hyperconservative and patriarchial, men used to say things like this a lot. When men say “I didn’t realize how bad things were for women until I had a daughter” (or something along those lines)”, they’re being literal. They (usually) don’t mean “I completely ignored my wife’s struggle but now that I own a small girl-child I must Protec”, they mean “I literally have not seen some of these problems in action before and now I’m seeing them happen to someone I love in gory detail”.  

Imagine for a second you live in Zimbabwe and don’t follow American politics much. You hear weird news coming out of the USA every so often, but mostly it’s just background noise. Then Trump gets elected, and suddenly every day there’s some new crazy shit happening in the US. You hear about it and you’re like ‘this can’t be real, can it?’ But of course, it is real, and the more you look into it, the more you see it’s fucked up. 

This is kind of like that. Speaking as a trans man who transitioned early in adulthood– there are a lot of things women* just don’t talk about around men, because it’s socially taboo. Things like, say, periods.  Or why you need to be buying all that expensive makeup and clothing. Or the ways that girls/women bully other girls/women and how it can fuck you up. Or menopause. Or why you’re afraid of walking home alone at night. Or abuse and/or sexual assault that’s happened to you in the past.

Sometimes it’s because women don’t feel safe talking to their male partners about it. Sometimes they think it’ll hurt their male partner to hear about it. Sometimes, it’s just that it’s Not Done– it’s as socially wrong as taking off your pants in a restaurant. 

If you’re lucky, you have a good partner, you’re both willing to step outside the gender role box you’ve been assigned, you feel like you can tell them anything and you’re right, and your partner takes you seriously when you tell them and doesn’t get grossed out or go “bzuh? That’s batshit insane, it can’t be real”. A lot of people– especially people in conservative/patriarchial societies, but even egalitarian people in lefty parts of the country can fall into this mess– do not feel like they have this kind of safety with their partners. They feel like they can’t discuss the problems they’re having with their partner, because their partner is a Man/Woman and you Don’t Talk About These Things, it’s Not Done. 

So if you’re a man– even if you are a good man, even if you’re kind and empathetic and care about other people and try to treat other people right– there’s a good chance you’ve never been exposed to the full brunt of the ~female experience~. It’s entirely possible for a man to grow up with no sisters, a mother who doesn’t talk about these things with her son, and no female friends until you start dating in earnest, without hating women or ignoring their problems. It’s then entirely possible that your parther won’t talk about the problems she’s having, because she’s still relating to you as A Man as much as she’s relating to you as Her Partner. Socialization is a hell of a drug.  

Speaking as a trans man again… a lot of the problems that women have are not immediately obvious to the naked eye. I’m not saying ‘women don’t have problems’. I’m not saying ‘sexism is over’ or ‘feminism is unnecessary’. But if you never go clubbing**, don’t ask your coworkers about their salary, don’t watch much TV, and don’t talk to women about Taboo Topics… you’re never going to realize just how deep the rabbit hole goes, just as much as our hypothetical Zimbabwean isn’t going to realize just how bad Trump is as a president.

And then you have a daughter. Your daughter has not yet learnt that you don’t talk to men about Taboo Topics, and you’re her dad. She trusts you with everything when she’s tiny, and even as she gets older, she knows you’re one of the people who unconditionally love her, no matter what. You see her getting hit with all the misogynistic messages women get hit with every day and how it changes what she feels safe doing. You see her struggling with misogyny and bullying and ridiculous beauty standards. You see her dealing with the basic biological functions that women usually have under control by the time they’re getting married but are a scary mess when you’re a young teenager, the gross boys and men who treat young girls like shit, the way she gradually absorbs sexist toxicity and stops believing she can do anything she wants. If you’re  unlucky, you see the fallout that comes from her being assaulted. 

And it’s in your face, in a way it might not be with your wife. The misogyny that happens to young girls is much more blatant and terrible than the misogyny that happens to grown women (grade-schoolers are not known for their subtlety). What’s more, you’re seeing it all happen in real time- you’re seeing a girl who’s cutting herself down to size to fit society, not a woman who’s already done it. So it’s entirely possible that a man won’t realise the full extent of misogyny until he has a daughter, without that man being a shitheap in any way. 

…I’m not saying that this is right or good or the way things should be. This is the very definition of ‘male privilege’– you have the ability to ignore bad things in the world that other people don’t get to ignore, just because you’re lucky enough to be a cis man. That is a bad thing. It needs to stop happening. It is a tragedy that men and women are not taught to communicate properly with each other, and it’s not women’s fault that they don’t feel safe talking about dangerous things with men. That is also a bad thing that needs to stop happening.

But at the same time, men saying “I didn’t realise things were bad for women until I had a daughter”… it’s not necessarily “hurr durr I didn’t realize women were people until I had a daughter because I’m a horrible person who ignores what women say :V”. It can mean “wow, I didn’t realise just how much of a problem misogyny/sexism was until I had a daughter, because there are things I didn’t know. Now that I know the full extent of the problem, I’m going to change the way I act about it”. 

Stop assuming the worst of people, ffs.   

*(Speaking in broad terms here, just assume the tag “cis” usually-but-not-always goes here. Trans people do tend to relate to gender/their partner’s gender a little differently.)
**(As An Sperglord, it confuses me just how much feminist discourse is about the club scene and why it’s bad. It seems disproportionate to the amount-of-a-problem-it-is.) 

Or why you need to be buying all that expensive makeup and clothing.

Is it ok if I ask why here? Because I still don’t know.

Yeah, of course! It’s not the end of the world not to understand things.

OK, I’m trying not to assume that you work in tech, but… you know That One Tech Guy who wears nothing but free company T-shirts and cargo pants and won’t shave or cut his hair? The guy who’s brilliant and could easily get promoted if he wanted, but no one is willing to promote him because he looks like a hobolo and training him to dress professionally would take too much time when there are equally qualified people who already know how?

If you’re a woman and you don’t wear makeup, or you don’t shave your legs (which is much more of a hassle than shaving your face, for the record), or you don’t have A Wardrobe (rather than, like, 1-3 Outfits and a week’s worth of basics to pad them out, like most men seem to), people are going to treat you like you’re That One Tech Guy, regardless of how you perform or behave. People see women who don’t wear makeup as lazy and sloppy, women who don’t shave their legs or armpits as Making A Statement and being gross in the process, women who don’t dress in a variety of outfits as poor or lazy… 

So if you want to get anywhere in life as a woman, whether in your career or your personal life, you have to have many clothing and wear at least some makeup. 

There are exceptions to this rule- for example, a lot of blue-collar jobs are just fine with women not wearing makeup, because they expect female workers to be ‘one of the boys’ and hyperfemininity is a detriment there. And of course there are plenty of guys who like women without makeup, and so on. But in general, if you’re a woman who’s not working in an industrial setting, you need to perform some level of femininity to be taken seriously. 

(And of course if you perfom too much

femininity, people will think you’re stupid and shallow and vapid, but that’s a whole nother ballgame.)     

This is a good explanation which holds in many places, but this is really dependent on local culture. Around me quite a lot of tech guys match your description of That One Tech Guy and don’t have much trouble getting promoted. I’m a woman in a non-tech job in a tech company and I dress however and almost never wear makeup and it’s fine. (Sometimes women in tech complain that there’s actually a pressure on them not to dress too nicely/femininely or wear makeup because it doesn’t fit the culture. Which is also bad, but also demonstrates how impeccable grooming isn’t always the norm.) So it’s not just industrial settings that don’t have super high feminine grooming standards.

I don’t agree with everything @earlgraytay​ is saying here, but I agree with a lot of it (especially in the first post, but also in a more limited way in the second one — and I am so very in favor of the second one’s “yes, let’s actually answer that” ethos). And I am so hardcore in favor of the basic rebuke to OP that the first post contains.

I’d also like to add another couple quick points:

1. You’ll notice more threats if you’re actively looking for them than if you’re just not ignoring them. And you should be actively looking for threats to your child to a greater degree than you have to for your spouse.
2. More things are threats to kids than to adults. Say your 20 year old (let alone substantially older) wife has dreams of being able to make a living as an author, and she has an opportunity to show some of her writing to a writer she looks up to, and who’s old enough to be her father … and he praises it and turns on the charm, all in an effort to get into her pants. That’s a douchey thing to do, but that’s all it is. Now imagine the same scenario with your 12 year old daughter. Suddenly, things look a whole lot different, because they are a whole lot different.
3. It’s not just that your daughter’s classmates are going to be less subtle than your wife’s co-workers, they’re also generally going to be less homogeneous, meaning that the odds that there’s going to be some asshole who will make her life miserable are going to be higher, especially if she’s in a class where making how people treat her a major factor in choosing her workplace is a real option.
4. Also, they’re going to in general have less reason to all pull together. Someone, I think ESR, noted that social status games get a whole lot crueler and more pointless when a bunch of people are thrown together by forces beyond their control sufficiently often than social hierarchies will develop, but without having a common goal for position in the hierarchy to at least partially depend on contributions to. American public schools. The court of Louis XIV at Versailles. Ladies Who Lunch.
5. As @tchtchtchtchtch noted about the second post, local culture varies. So does personal experience, even conditional on local culture. Your wife may simply catch and have caught less shit than your daughter, for no inherent structural reason, just by luck. And vice versa.
6. A lot of common gendered (and non-gendered) awfulness has to do in one fashion or another with the partnering process: Trying to figure out what you need to do to attract a partner. Despairing over your inability to find a partner, and wondering what it says about you. Approaching potential partners and having them reject you, sometimes in intentionally humiliating ways. Having a potential partner approach you, and then humiliate you when you say yes. Finding a partner, and having them abuse you in any number of ways. Finding a partner, and having them suck (whether in a way that’s actually abusive or not), and repeating the experience, and wondering if this is what you have to settle for if you don’t want to be alone. Having potential partners’ other potential partners seek to humiliate you or otherwise harm you, in order to eliminate the competition. On, and on, and on. Your wife is already partnered, by definition. If your marriage is monogamous, there’s a whole lot of shit that simply no longer applies to her.
7. It’s not just that you’re only seeing your wife after she has already “cut herself down to size to fit society,” even if that describes her experiences well. It’s also that you’re (in all likelihood) only seeing her after she has put on new growth where she’s figured out that society is more comfortable with it. If your wife used to really be into woodworking, or some other “masculine” craft, but gave it up long ago because of how people treated her … in the intervening time, she may have found and taken up quilting, or knitting, or something else that’s more “feminine” than her old hobby but still involves making things with her hands that are both useful and beautiful. Maybe it even makes her happier than woodworking used to. And maybe not. But either way, even after setting aside that the pain of loss isn’t nearly as fresh, she’s probably also a lot more fulfilled in that area than she was between when she gave up her old hobby and when she first found a new one that at least did for her some part of what the other had done.

Regarding @earlgraytay​’s second post: A lot of this strikes me as somewhat true, but overstated (in varying degrees). Some of that’s no doubt the varying local culture thing. Especially regarding anything where the disfavored option is “hippieish” or “nature girl,” since my hometown is the sort of place that people people have been known claim “never left the sixties.” It’s not entirely true. But it’s not entirely false either.

And some of it’s no doubt my own autistic obliviousness. But I really don’t think that’s all of it. I think it’s more that a lot of the ways that “people see women who do X” are ways that a reasonable fraction of the population[1] are at least somewhat biased toward seeing a woman who does X, a smaller (often much smaller) number emphatically sees women who do X, and a reasonable fraction of the population does not, in fact, see women who do X … and that people are much more likely to spontaneously speak up about in the affirmative than in the negative.

Like, if a woman wears three outfits 90% of the time, and this doesn’t strike you as being in any way objectionable, how likely are you to say something, unless it’s directly in response to someone else saying the reverse? Not very likely at all, I would think!

[1] Maybe a majority, maybe not, and almost certainly varying wildly by the specific non-comforming practice — my intuition (such as it is) puts the fraction at a lot higher for not shaving one’s legs than for not wearing a variety of outfits, at least for how men are likely to view women for each. (If others have contrasting experiences or intuitions (or statistics!), I’d love to hear them.)