At the beginning of the year, I expressed to a friend that I fear for my rights as a woman with multiple marginalized identities and the rights of queer people around me. This led to a debate on male/female energy and gender roles. I don't believe in gender roles as something that is innate but rather something that we are socialized into, he believes that gender is something that is soul-deep.
I get frustrated with him because we are having two different conversations at once. He is trying to tell me that Queer people are unnatural while not looking like a bad person. Being queer and being heterosexual are two different experiences that cannot be conflated. I am getting frustrated because I find myself defending my experience as a cis-gender heterosexual woman with chronic illness and an invisible disability that has taken so much from me, while also defending the LGBTQ+ experience but still holding space for my cis-gender heterosexual man who also has multiple marginalized identities. It is exhausting.
He is homophobic because he had a bad experience with the community as a child, I try to empathize with him and validate his anger but still express that it still not an excuse to dislike an entire community and encourage their decimation. I was abused by cis het people my entire life, even if I wasn't a cis het woman, I still wouldn't see it as an excuse to hate an entire group of people. I still support other women, even though it was other women in my life who hurt me so badly that I had to spend my entire 20s healing from mental illness while everybody else's life went on.
I loved talking to him because he reminded me to be balanced in my view of the world, but I am also aware that we see the world extremely differently. He doesn't believe that we see the world differently because we are so civil with each other. I believe in intersectionally. Though our points meet at an intersection because I am trying to empathize with him, we still end up at opposite ends of each other on the opinion spectrum. It eventually frustrates me because I ignore the red flags. I am comfortable with having disagreements based on experiences until someone shares propaganda. He always eventually shares propaganda, but this time I realize that this friendship is over and it hurts like hell.
At first, I appreciated the civility in our conversation and I tried to see things from his perspective but I eventually sensed that the undertones of the conversation were the exact danger that I was expressing to him that I feared. I find myself trying to plead with him to change his views and then forcing myself to accept him. I understand that we both trying our best to prevent another person from experiencing similar traumas to the individual experiences of our childhood selves. He tells me that he doesn't care about what adults do but he cares about the children.
As a person who has grown up with undiagnosed PCOS and Autism spectrum disorder, I wish society was advanced enough to protect a child like me. A child who was made to feel not woman enough for not being able to handle excruciating period pains and felt rejected from girlhood because of other symptoms that came with having PCOS like having a body that developed too early but didn't look "feminine enough" and being autistic leading me to be punished through rejection and humiliation for being "weird", struggling with school, being unable to communicate and struggling with crippling anxiety. The loneliness eventually led me to be groomed by older men and enter a string of abusive relationships, which I was still heavily judged for by the same women who caused me harm.
I empathize with Queer children because I know how it feels to be different and the world being against you in your most crucial years. Also, Queer people were always there for me when it felt like the world was against me.
This conversation started with my friend announcing that he is now a father and that's how we started speaking about our fears for the future. He speaks about the need to protect his children. As we speak, I notice he doesn't mention the mother of his children. I questioned him about the woman who risked her life to bring his children into the world, he gives me a very unsatisfactory reply. He had children with a woman he despised and made it sound like it wasn't an active decision that he made.
I am so exhausted with this conversation. People, both men and women, speak about the moral decay of society as being an issue external to them but are never taking personal responsibility for their part in what they consider moral decay. People who think Feminists and Queer people are breaking the "traditional family structure" but are not providing their children with the most basic needs of a safe home environment. The family is the first place that children learn how to build relationships, what are they learning if all they see is anger?
In my late teens-early 20s, I would go through advice after advice from people around me, magazines, and YouTube on how to attract a man. However, the relationship advice never made sense to me. I don't understand the concept of "pretend like you don't like him" or "pretend that you are busy". If I like you, I will tell you. If I like you, I will express it in many ways. I grew up hearing how expressing affection to a man, requiring intimacy and clear communication was desperate. As a woman, dealing with a man felt like a maze with booby traps that you could fall into at any minute and be discarded.
Watching the frustration that both men and women are expressing about modern dating is heartbreaking, but what did we expect as a wider society when we normalized harmful ideas when it came to heterosexual relationships? Men and women are taught to value different things and are taught to villainize each other for those differences. I don't find gender roles to be healthy for this reason, because if it was innate, we would not have to beat people into submission and it would not hurt so much to rigidly fit ourselves into these boxes. For a society that prides itself on evolution, we are really refusing to evolve with the times.
I could foresee my relationship with my friend heading in the direction that it did but I still wanted to believe that we could find common ground. I understand our worldview is shaped by our experiences. I don't mind that we disagreed with each other but it was his hypocrisy and the spreading of misinformation that made me upset.
Gender conversations scare me at each end of the conversations. Incels scare me. The hatred that is growing in the world towards women is scary. Yet, I don't feel safe within feminist spaces either. If you ask me what I think about radical feminist movements such as the 4B and decentre men, I will tell you that I understand the anger. There is so much in the world to be angry about. I am angry too but in these spaces, I don't feel the freedom to deal with my anger in a way that is healthy for me. I don't want to fixate on hatred for men and there is something icky with the "we told you so" reaction to women's suffering. If something is genuinely for a grown adult's well-being, you wouldn't have to beat them into submission.
If you ask me what my personal aspirations are, I don't want to be a girl boss in the sense of climbing corporate ladders and being an inspiration. I want to look after a community and uplift other women while fighting injustices in the world. Then I want to come home to a man who fills my emotional cup and makes the world feel less scary. I want to have a reciprocal relationship with a man, even if I take a submissive role. I don't want a transactional relationship. I don't want to hold resentment towards my person because I could not be honest with myself and I definitely wouldn't want them to hold resentment towards me either. I feel conflicted because why can I not find the same sense of safety in my female friendships? Am I searching for the masculinity that I am denying exists? Also, am I a bad feminist for thinking that romantic relationships are important? lol
I am trying to unlearn toxic ideas about relationships, starting with communication. However, the ways that we are taught to communicate in mainstream relationship advice is such a shitshow, communication doesn't work if you are not on the same page when it comes to your values. I am not interested in rigid ideas on what is "wrong or right". I have observed enough couples to know that there isn't a formula. Internet conversations can guide you but they can never tell you what is the best decision for you as an individual. It doesn't matter if someone else had the same experience.
I have many friends who made decisions that I considered bad decisions for myself but I would never imagine judging them for it. Shame doesn't help anyone. I would never imagine weaponizing those decisions against them if they do end up being bad decisions. I rather find a solution with them. Life has no formula, you can do everything "right" and still suffer.
There is a difference between genuinely caring for someone's well-being and having a savior complex. Savior complexes are disempowering. It is selfish. It centers your feelings above everything and harms the most vulnerable people. Everyone wants to "save" the world, but it's so difficult to set your feelings aside on what YOU have been taught is "right or wrong" and listen to what individuals actually need. Even as someone who considers themselves progressive, I don't think I got it right either but every day is a journey to learn. Still, I will never understand people turning to hatred of innocent people, to "fix" the bad in the world.
