How do you all deal with being asked for your pronouns in every space?

DangerJelly · 2020-07-18T03:40:19+00:00

None. I don't have a ton of guy friends (only one), and we NEVER talk about this or anything REMOTELY close to it (mostly tea, dancing, mental health, how our lives are going, cooking, funny memes, etc). Heck, I don't even talk about this with my female friends until we're really, really close and have known each other for years and even then it's NEVER in a way this creepy (and like... it's just about general sex stuff with specifics removed, never about porn with porn out on the table). Also this post made me realize my ex was lowkey like this. Everything was fine until we started dating and then he got REALLY sexual, and while he respected my boundaries, sex constantly got brought up with his friends (he lied about us having a safe word when we were NOT having that kind of sex, his friends asked me how big his dick was, his friends were surprised (and KNEW and TALKED TO ME ABOUT IT IN FRONT OF HIM) that we didn't have penetrative sex for almost a year). Wanna know what happened when we broke up? 4 months after this loser was no longer getting my attention he sent me the world's most passive aggressive email (actually lowkey aggressive, I printed and kept it for a while out of fear but nothing ever happened). Guys like this are bad fucking news. I would say to set a boundary (no porn or porn/sex talk while you're over)... but honestly he probably won't listen. Please stop spending time with this guy. He needs to learn that this behavior is not socially appropriate.

DangerJelly · 2020-07-10T02:44:18+00:00

Yeah, cancel culture is something I've had a hard time confronting. I had already made up my mind to be a little more... mindful of when I got involved in political discussions online, as some people can really rile me up and it was NOT good for my mental health, but I think in that time the cancel culture just got THAT much stronger. People fired and unable to have any kind of life over one poorly worded tweet. No way to apologize and move forward. It's tricky because I can almost see the point when it comes to people who are like, blatantly in the KKK, or blatant Nazis (like, white nationalist, fully offensive, loves hitler nazis), but when people ask innocent questions, phrase things badly, or are just plain uneducated, or hold a viewpoint that is considered "evil" by the masses... do they deserve the same level of hatred as when they blatantly promote the killing of others? Idk if any of that makes a lot of sense. But I understand your identity crisis. I'm Canadian and the situation here is both better and worse in so many different ways. I think some of the things I say in private among select friends would already be considered hate speech. I miss so badly the easy days of being in the libfem crowd and feeling like I was blazing a path to a bright new future and was on the right side of everything. It's a lot harder to admit that things are more complicated than that.

DangerJelly · 2020-07-07T16:30:21+00:00

This is SUCH a mood. Please feel free to post a link or start a discussion thread about any of these things! I think you'll find a lot of women here will have something insightful to say.

DangerJelly · 2020-07-06T21:13:00+00:00

I was puzzling over the "I've ignored porn tweeted at children" thing and how people were calling that out, how strange it was, until I realized: The only reason porn is being tweeted at these kids who are making pictures for her story is BECAUSE these people want to shut her up so badly. They're willing to make it look like it's HER fault that some really creepy adults (I'd guess largely men) are abusing her and CHILDREN because she won't kowtow to their whims. Classic abusive mentality: "It's her fault he hits her because she's just so difficult, what else is he supposed to do?" Nope. There is always the choice to... not tweet porn at children? It's not her fault for having views that don't align perfectly with someone's ideology that are clearly still based in intelligence, critical thinking, and respect for others. I can't believe I almost fell for that.

DangerJelly · 2020-07-04T19:58:20+00:00

women only (including TIFs). No sealioning or bad-faith questions. More discussion of radfem issues as well, not just the gender stuff. Keep men out. Permanently. If they want to learn something they can read and discuss it elsewhere on one of the infinite platforms that exist for them.

DangerJelly · 2020-07-04T19:50:27+00:00

At my uni in the new science building they built a new "gender neutral" bathroom where all the stalls are just small little rooms that are completely walled off with lockable doors, but I've never felt like using it. However if that was my only option... I guess it would do. For locker rooms, either making changing areas like that (separate small rooms with locking doors) and discouraging/prohibiting full nudity outside of there (like it's one thing to change a pair of pants quickly or throw on some clothes over top of a bathing suit, but if you actually want to remove the thing you go into one of those rooms). Or having a third single-stall bathroom without a gender signifier on it- given how few people are trans in the population I feel like that wouldn't be too much of a problem. I'm also more than willing to bet a well-passing trans woman has used the women's bathroom with me before and I just never noticed. I don't understand why they're making a big deal out of it that way. I understand as this movement gets bigger and the rules looser it attracts more creeps, and I am worried about that, but I sort of feel like there are TIMs who aren't making a big deal of it, if that makes sense? Like either they were in the stall and then left while I was in the stall, or they came in after me, or I just didn't look closely at the sinks, or whatever, and they didn't make a big fuss, just peed and left. I don't have an issue with that. But my mom and I have both had experiences of being in large women's washrooms alone and having someone come in and use the stall next to us with their feet facing the wrong way and been too scared to say or do anything. I hate that I can't talk about my fear of that being more common as self-ID becomes more of a thing. Maybe those were just men who used the closer bathroom, maybe they were just confused, or maybe they didn't care, maybe they get off on making women feel uncomfortable or are power tripping. Also don't understand why TRAs say they want to get away from men in the washroom but then say that bathrooms should be unisex or push for self-ID. like... women don't want men in the bathroom either, but you're making it easier, so what the fuck? Also tbh I just hate using bathrooms men use because men are absolutely fucking disgusting. Near my lab there are two single-occupancy washrooms and sometimes the SMELL or the not-flushing or even just the KNOWLEDGE that men aren't washing their hands, the seats left up, the piss on the seat... it doesn't have to happen that often for it to be annoying. Not to say I haven't encountered some of those issues in women's bathrooms, but not nearly as often.

DangerJelly · 2020-07-03T23:06:52+00:00

(side note- it is so often people whose first language is not english apologize for their english- yours was perfect! Wouldn't have known you weren't a native speaker until you said so. Although I am just now considering this is probably because the internet likes to jump on typos or grammatical issues without first considering if the poster is a native speaker... but I digress). Completely spot on, thank you for adding this. Sometimes the stuff they said was useful but again- they were taking over a space that wasn't theirs and the complete lack of unified response by women was detrimental. There were really only a few women there who had done the kind of critical self-examination you are talking about, and it was so frustrating to see them downvoted because "we need men for this to succeed"... like yeah but we need men to actually DO stuff not just post online all day about how they really get it now (and illustrate how much they don't get because they are still posting in a women's space!)

DangerJelly · 2020-07-03T19:57:54+00:00

Yeah, I noticed- I thought I'd give it a go again this summer (0 words so far! Woohoo!) and wanted to join a discord for grad students. Except as part of the intro I had to give my pronouns. I figured saying "I'm female" or just skipping that part might not go over well but like. Come on. (Or perhaps I could claim that question was upsetting to me and I was still in the process of figuring it out... I think that actually may work). I know it's such a small thing, but a gesture like that IMMEDIATELY lets me know what kind of space I'm walking into and I decided I wasn't having it. It's exhausting enough trying to blend in to all the other grad student groups I'm a part of without adding one more that I feel might be even woke-r.

DangerJelly · 2020-07-01T19:30:25+00:00

This did happen a couple of times on GC though... it was WILD how many women were like "no you're totally welcome here" like no, stfu and go to GCGuys and make it into a useful sub. It was wild. And EVERY TIME a man would comment some long, stupid thing where he repeated himself 50,000 times and only talked about his own experience he would just close normally but every time a woman came in with a short, insightful story or question she would be like "i'm so sorry if this isn't the right place, let me know, sorry this is so long, I know it's annoying" like. Really puts things in perspective.

DangerJelly · 2020-07-01T17:23:20+00:00

A lot of other places I've found are either poorly modded or consist of a lot of people who just... haven't done even the bare minimum of background work. I miss GC so much, it was filled with so many smart, insightful women sharing stories just like this, or resources, or their take on things. More than once I got into arguments there and that's good, women felt comfortable calling me on my shit and I felt comfortable doing the same. Those 60,000 GC/radfem women don't just go away because reddit banned the sub. We are still out there and we will organize again, women have been doing that for well over 50 years. Also love hearing about activism from other parts of the world. As a Canadian I support you, feel free to share news, petitions, etc! (and knowing about all the spanish radfems makes me wish I'd kept up my spanish after hs)

DangerJelly