It’s probably about time for another open thread for personal stuff. As is always the case with these open threads, NO MRAs, no trolls, none of that shit.
It’s probably about time for another open thread for personal stuff. As is always the case with these open threads, NO MRAs, no trolls, none of that shit.
@Kat
My heart just broke.
@dhah85
Thank you! And best to your wife too. I’m sure it’s been a hard road for both of you, so good job!
I’m at work so haven’t had time to read many comments but I just wanted to say to Johanna I’m so sorry for the loss of your sister. Addiction is so cruel, like a monster that takes everything from a person and from everyone who loves that person. I mentioned in a previous thread that I’m a drug and alcohol recovery worker, we’ve recently had some client deaths and it’s awful.
Wanted to vent this at the next open thread:
Found myself stuck in a conversation at a Halloween party with a nerdy tech misogynist who decided to mansplain to me that “actually,” (don’t we all LOVE the mansplain “actually”?) the reason women aren’t programmers as much as they used to be is that the job got too hard and too stressful for women to be willing to do it anymore.
I should have just chortled and said nice try douchebag, but instead I was more polite than I should have been and asked him where the hell he was getting his information. He was really, really affronted at that, of course.
So the Moscow Ballet is doing its annual tour of the states performing The Nutcracker. Interestingly, the ballet selects students from local dance schools to fill out some of the roles (sugar plum fairies, etc.). Even more interesting, my friend’s son was selected and will even have his own solo bit in the performance.
I am so proud/happy for him.
@Kat – I tend to feel depressed during Winter, too. I’m trying to find a winning combination of Good Habits so that I eat properly and keep momentum going to keep the house clean and tidy. Have you got any good tips?
Stuff that seems to help so far:
I always have something informative to listen to on the radio while I do chores so I don’t have to listen to my mind wandering.
I might have an ongoing project or specific goal for the day, so that I can feel useful and productive, even when my jerkbrain wants me to feel like a failure.
I “allow” myself time to be lethargic and self-indulgent when I’ve completed my task for the day and the urge to hibernate is strong.
I avoid The News when I feel like I can’t process Global Events, because they make me feel frustrated and powerless.
I try to plan the weekly shopping around a list of nutritious meals, and stock up on oily fish, multivitamins, bananas, and whatever else I’ve been told might “boost my mood” (it probably works on the placebo effect more than anything, but last year I was malnourished, so I’m trying to take care of my Vitamin D intake).
I have a weekly activity that I do with friends that isn’t overtly social and gets me out of the house.
Christmas is coming up and I have a lot of feelings tied up in being able to give good gifts vs. being chronically underemployed and having had to cheap out the last 3 years in a row. I previously overextended myself with labour-intensive home-made gifts, so this year I think I’m just going to buy gifts, but I’m not sure what yet.
Last year I said I’d start buying gifts in June, but then I know I would have put them in a cupboard and forgotten that I’d bought them… so much for good intentions. :/
@ej:
When someone brings up “men get harassed, too”, I like to say, “Yes, and your point being?”
Almost invariably, the point is: Men find it to be no big deal, so neither should women. Which is completely irrational. Even if we grant the premise (and I don’t), the conclusion doesn’t follow. One group of people putting up with shitty behavior doesn’t obligate everyone else to do so. Especially since women have much more reason to fear assault, rape, and murder from those who feel entitled to their bodies.
I was groped once. On my walk back to my apartment after celebrating my university’s national championship in the street, two conventionally attractive young women stepped off of the sidewalk they were walking on outside of a parking garage and started walking toward me. It took me a bit to realize they were walking toward me intentionally, and as soon as my body language said, “What’s going on?” they ran up to me, grabbing my ass and feeling my abs under my shirt, and then ran off, yelling, “Woo-hoo!”
They were obviously drunk. Initially, I felt a bit of the pride our toxic culture expects men to feel in that situation. But very quickly, that was replaced with feeling like my personal space, and my right to decide who gets to touch me were violated. I felt ashamed that I had let it happen; and then I felt ashamed that I couldn’t feel proud of it, and isolated because I felt like I couldn’t tell anyone, or I would be laughed at.
And then I thought about how I would have felt if the genders had been reversed, and I had been a woman in that same situation. When I realized that two men were approaching me in a dimly light area with no one around, I damn sure wouldn’t be worried about being groped for two seconds and my assailants running off, yelling, “Woo-hoo!”
So, no. I reject the premise that to men, harassment is no big deal.
Do women have more sympathetic ears available to them when they are the victims of non-violent sexual assault? Sure. Is that a privilege that men don’t have in our toxic culture? Sure. But weighed next to my privilege that night of not having to fear that I might be killed, or beat up and raped — yeah, I’ll take my privilege any day. Because I’ve also been in a situation where a guy in a pickup truck cut me off (because he didn’t like that I was on the edge of the road on a bicycle, and that I had reacted with a “Whoa!” when he buzzed me as he went by), by putting his truck right against the curb and forcing me to his left. As he started to get out of his truck (to confront a person on a bicycle!), I had a moment of pure terror as my brain made the split-second assumption, “He must have a gun. Why else would he get out on foot to confront a bicycle?”
That moment of panic that my life was about to end was indescribably worse than what I went through when those two young women felt me up, and it’s something women don’t have the privilege of not feeling when two men approach them with grins on their faces when they’re alone at night.
And yes, most street harassment of women happens when there are plenty of other people around. The problem is not that all street harassment makes women feel as if they are in imminent physical danger. The problem is that the consequences of legitimizing harassment and entitlement to others’ bodies are far graver for women than they are for men.
So, no, knuckleheads, you shouldn’t expect women to react kindly to street harassment.
It’s also absolutely worth saying that feminists were (and are) the only people I felt comfortable talking to about feeling violated and isolated.
tl;dr Thanks for the rant, no apologies ever necessary, and sorry you have to deal with that.
I recently started defriending people on Facebook who post racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, or otherwise bigoted stuff.
Mostly just people I haven’t seen since high school but my real friends have been supportive and it’s nice knowing I’ll see less of that sort of stuff
I don’t think I’d agree that women are treated more sympathetically when it comes to something like being groped. It’s just that men and women are given differing unsympathetic responses. Men are supposed to enjoy it. They definitely aren’t supposed to feel threatened. Women are either given a boys will be boys excuse, or they are blamed for the situation. We should expect to be harassed if we dress sexy or are out alone at night.
You know when you do something wrong and the cat punishes you by pooping in the bathtub?
That’s what this pic has me thinking about.
Weirwoodtreehugger makes an excellent point. There is very little sympathy for victims.
Many years ago at a friend’s party, a girl I didn’t even know put something in my drink. One moment I was talking to some people, and the next moment I woke up, it was morning, and that girl was lying next to me.
Sure, I wasn’t told it was my fault, or that I should have watched my drink. I wasn’t told I should have worn different clothes, or that I asked for it. But I did get told I shouldn’t complain, that I was “lucky”, and oh how “funny” it was. Of course, I wasn’t laughing while I was waiting for my STI test results…
So yeah, victims of sexual harassment/assault won’t get much support unless they choose their friends *very* carefully. Men might get what looks like “support”, but it’s all really just another way of silencing victims. It all amounts to finding ways to tell victims: “you’re not allowed to complain.”
“You know when you do something wrong and the cat punishes you by pooping in the bathtub?”
I’ve never had cats, do they really do calculated stuff like that?
“So, no. I reject the premise that to men, harassment is no big deal.”
littleknown, I think the men that sexually harass women are the men who would like to get sexually harassed by women. They see sexual harassment in a positive light. Like “sexual interest is the highest compliment you can give a person”. A famous PUA actually made that statement.
“My reaction was extreme, and out of the norm for me, but in my defense, I am TIRED. Does it never stop? I am in my early 40s, and I swear it’s getting worse. ”
I’m with you Raysa, but if you read my comment above you see that there are men out there, who claim they would “love it” if they got from strange women in public the kind of attention you get from strange men. So they actually cannot understand how you would be upset . I’m wondering if the roles were really reversed and there were women doing this regularly to men if they really would love it or if they would get just as fed up and frustrated as we do.
I haven’t been around much for a while; My dad was diagnosed with Leukemia on the 8th of October and I moved my life to his house to help him (with no internet besides my phone.) Sadly, he passed on the 24th and now I’m splitting my time between my house and his to get it cleared out so I can sell it because that was his wish.
Some days I’m okay and others I’m a mess. I’ll miss him until the end of my days. I am privileged to have had him in my life and to have had the opportunity to be there for him at the end of his.
Love and warm wishes to all who have lost loved ones. Mourning is a weird experience for me.
@Hambeast
All the hugs (if wanted)! That’s terrible.
I had a guy sort of wandering along in the general path I was taking through the aisles of Walmart and that ended up in his grabbing my ass while I was on my tiptoes to get something off the highest shelf. I immediately turn around and give him the “look of death” and he’s smiling like it’s no big deal. This pissed me off, told him to get far the f!ck away from me. Apparently that registered in his noggin as “Ooooh she likes me, I’ll just have to follow her around some more grabbing my crotch I just gotta leave some more distance while I do it….”…He did go towards the opposite end of the store after a bit (probably saw some other woman he wanted to bother) and I figured it was done with by the time I went to the register to pay and headed out to my car when I heard footsteps behind me, so just when I’d popped the trunk and could see the top of creepy guy’s head in one of the window’s reflection as he approached I turned to face him and surprised his dumb self with my taser.
The cops doing their cruise through the parking lot saw him creeping up and me tasing him, then stopped to make sure my taser was legal and sent me on my way while detaining him…One said that creepy should know better than to try and sneak up on a woman like that and that he’s lucky it was only a taser. Fun times at Walmart…
In summary, I am more likely to give a random guy a shot from my taser when he does something similarly stupid as the creepster than smile and act flattered. Especially when they’ve already established that they are willing to act in a repugnant manner and do something disrespectful like touch me without being expressly asked to. I might not even speak, just *bzzzzrt!*…continuing to act in a vaguely threatening manner will ensure that I keep that taser on whatever part of them it’s on until either they stop moving or the batteries die.
I hope it’s cool if I just drive by with an update on my life.
Bf and I both lost our jobs in April. I’ve been working since July but he’s still out of work and having a bit of a rough time of it. I’m trying to keep positive for his sake, since I know this is a much worse for him. We’re doing fine on just my income for now, anyway, although I worry about what will happen if the EI runs out.
But really I feel like our lives are on hold. I want to be planning a wedding and decorating a home and instead I’m just… sitting. Waiting. Going to my trivially simple job that I took a pay cut for day in and day out. So proud of my partner for persevering but also so tired of the whole thing.
I booked my first psych appointment in forever which is really good,but that sh*t is so expensive. My insurance will cover less than 7 sessions at 90% before it runs out. Bleh. Everything is bleh. Whole world feels grey.
I certainly didn’t mean to erase the massively negative responses women get from general society when they speak out about being groped, and I apologize. That shit is everywhere. Our society does not have a sympathetic ear to victims of sexual assault. I do think women are more likely to have a greater number of friends who would understand and be sympathetic, but that privilege is very small by comparison, and toxic masculinity is the only reason it exists in the first place.
Feminists are the ones who are trying to undermine the unsympathetic responses for everyone. Feminism doesn’t tell me to “buck up”, nor laugh at me: when I say it made me feel objectified, or that those kind of experiences made me feel guarded in relationships, or that unsolicited fawning over my appearance made me question my value.
MRAs and “well-meaning” guys like ej described, who argue that harassment is no big deal (and/or that it’s the only way for awkward men to approach women) — less than fucking useless, and actively harmful.
@msexceptiontotherule: Nice. Also, another example of something that, as a man, I don’t have to worry about. I might, once or twice in my life, get groped by a couple of drunk girls…but it’s not as if I had to worry that if I told them to fuck off, they might follow me home, or back to my car, grabbing at their crotches the whole time. (Or throw a basketball at me…)
@Virtually: You would think, then, that the men who cry “women harass men, too” would despise the PUA and Red Pill types. But that’s assuming that their goal is “no more harassment”, rather than: “stop whining about harassment; harassment is great”.
I’ve been struggling with my feelings about art. Specifically, I want to draw and I don’t know why. This gets bent into wanting to not want it, trying to overcome that, and searching for external permission to either draw or not draw.
So much of what I find online is by the kind of person who’s been drawing/painting/sculpting etc since forever, and is very big on ‘making art is fun!’ statements. Apparently, if it’s not fun you’re doing it wrong. The last thing I can think of that I did purely for the fun of it was public speaking. Drawing is not like that; it is more usually inspires anxiety and self-consciousness.
I seem to believe that knowing *why* I want to do this would help. Does anyone have any ideas about why someone who does not think of hirself as an ‘artist’ would want to draw?
https://youtu.be/1BsC3Zq2vZQ
@Virtually Out of Touch
Yes, cats intentionally punish their people when they’ve been disappointed by them. They pee in your purse or barf on the kitchen floor if you clean their litter boxes insufficiently often, feed them too late, lock them out of the room, go on vacation….
Some kitties don’t exhibit the kind of personality that results in these behaviours but, yeah, lots do.
@Arianna Higgins: my condolences! I hope you’re doing well!
@scalyllama
Aww, thanks. You know what? My heart broke when I read your comment. In a good way.
Here’s a video you guys might enjoy:
What If Bears Killed One in Five People: