a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment by _refugee_

I slightly misread your comment and edited appropriately but to be honest, my tone's still there. If you did catch anything that read as super-confusing before I re-read your post and edited, that would be my bad.

I think that your snark about 'being a woman' because you have experienced something that women routinely experience rubbed me the wrong way. Don't get me wrong. It's okay to be flip on Hubski and all that. I'm trying not to come down on you too hard. But I'm irritable, and I'm a feminist, and saying "women tell me to smile too" is like saying "I'm not one of those men who tell women to smile" which is how I ended up at "Not All Men."

I think that while you experience something similar to what women experience in one single aspect of interaction when people tell you to smile - it's not transferable to true comprehension. And I know, you were joking. You were being flip. But you know what? As a man, you maintain a right to say "fuck you" to strangers who try to tell you what to do with your face that women don't. Because saying "fuck you" is unladylike. Because physically, 90% of the time or more, a man saying "fuck you" to another man is a lot more defensible of a position than a woman saying it to a man. Because if a stranger walked up to me and told me to smile and I said "fuck you" my mother would scold me. For wanting to preserve my own autonomy. And not just my mother but many people - it would be me who was rude, not the stranger trying to tell me what to do with myself and my face, with how I should present myself to the world.





havires  ·  3592 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Nevermind the deleted comment. I was making a jab at another comment (or was it post?) that said men aren't allowed to have feelings. You came off as really condescending, which is why I flipped the post on it's head with a related incident. Well I'm an egalitarian, so I don't there's much of a difference between us. I was also raised pretty goddamn good, meaning that if some woman comes up to me and tells me to smile, I'm going to look her in the eye and shake my head no and then continue doing what I'm doing. Why? Manners. Yeah it was a bit disrespectful, but you know what? I wasn't disrespected enough for me to look her dead in the face and openly say "Go fuck yourself." I digress you're right, I should fall back on "Fuck off." every time it happens, if ever again. Relying the fact that I'm male to justify my telling a woman to fuck off for saying "You should smile more."

EDIT: I was going to be flip for the rest of what you said, but in light of your PM I'm going to let it go. Ignore was too strong of a word.