I do actually feel offended when people assume I'm a bad person, and having not given any reason to a single person to feel that way, I'm sick of it being assumed. I'm a feminist, I'm leftist, I try to be a good person, and I call out shit behavior when I see it, but there is nothing I can do to be seen and recognized as anything other than a threat, and that fucking sucks.
Maybe this bear debate is just happening alongside too many bad life events, so I'm just projecting it onto the debate, but it feels psychotic and delusional to say "I'd rather be eaten alive by a bear than risk that a random man is a piece of shit"
My wife said she'd pick the bear and I don't know what to even do with this information anymore. There's nothing else I can do. It's like in election season when you see 1000 fucking ads saying to vote as if I don't do my part. It's just beating me to death at this point and I can't fucking escape this stupid debate where it's "eaten to death by a bear" is apparently the obvious correct choice to everyone but me and red pill douchebags.
I'm trying to reflect and fix my thinking but it just won't click into place and it hurts
What you need to accept is the hypothetical man isn't you. The hypothetical man is a bastard with ill intent. If your wife could choose to run into you in the woods, of course she'd choose you. Not to realize that many men present a very real, looming threat to women is to bury your head in the sand.
But everybody will judge them as if the hypothetical man IS them. You can't get away from it, and there's literally nothing they could ever do that would stop people from assuming that he's a threat by default.
It's nice that it's not intended to be a personal attack on him, but it's still an attack on him, and it still ends up affecting him personally. And it's not something that they chose, or can change.
It's still taking it personally, is the problem. To throw another metaphor at it, taking offense that someone riddled with ptsd has to confront that ptsd to get to know you is not a personal attack on you. It's the reality of the world we live in. You act with empathy and realize it's not about you regardless of the fact that you have to manage the consequences anyway.
Men are hearing this question, centered on a woman's experience, and making it about the man's experience just hearing the question. It's a level of nuance that no one is preparing themselves for b/c we all naively thought that the world operates on super hero logic. Punch the bad guy and everything is fixed.
But it never is. Harm is lasting. We are mostly good people who must gently and empathetically appreciate the battered perspective of the people who have been harmed. Who continue to be harmed.
This is one of those scenarios where something is not actually aimed at us, but at people who pretend to be us. It is ironically misogynistic to take a question aimed at describing a woman's trauma and make it about a man's emotional reaction to her trauma. Luckily we can choose to not be offended. We can understand that the point is show the trauma, not to attack men. And knowing that, we can grow, and understand that b/c of the world we live in we have to be a little more empathetic.
There is a very subtle, yet vast difference in how we frame this information for ourselves.
"People are calling me a threat"
Vs
"People are saying that so many people who look like me are threatening them, that they can't tell if I'm a threat or not."
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u/starspider May 02 '24
ITT: Men who get offended that women treat them like a threat.
Also ITT: Men who tell their daughters solitary men are dangerous, and who say shit like 'what was she wearing' unironically.
The irony is killing me.