this has been on my mind a lot. I follow some lesbian meme shitposting groups and there’s tons of memes that are just like “This girl looked at me and I died and then she smiled at me and I came back to life” and I just cannot think of any cishet men’s spaces that bring that have that level of absolutely dorky dysfunctional love for women. And, like, cishet men, their whole thing is supposed to be being in to women, and that just strikes me as really weird that there’s not an equivalent. Like the closest I can think of is wife guy memes but that’s just one wife, usually.
Do any spaces like that exist? Is it even possible given the way gender works in society?
why are u as a man liking a woman pretty gay bro 😂😂😂
I was literally asked if I’m gay by a friend, I told her “No, I like women. Especially tall and muscular ones”. And then no joke, she said “So you’re Bi?”.
How the fuck does one come to conclusions like these 😭😭😭
Gender and sexuality as social performance : p you can’t just be, you also have to do the musical dance number correctly.
It’s so fucking tiring, I don’t want to.
The wonderful thing about patriarchy is that it circles back around and slaps men too.
Bisexual men be like
We do be like that
Crawled out of bed for this post. Cis men worse than lesbians at being attracted to women? Indeed, the sun will rise and set today. Being a lesbian is so much fuckin cooler.
cishet men, their whole thing is supposed to be being in to women, and that just strikes me as really weird that there’s not an equivalent.
So you know about the patriarchy,
Bros are completely incapable of presenting a self that’s anything but domineering, usually. I will say I think some of our dorky soft loverboys here do things like this now and then, which I approve of.
I will say I think some of our dorky soft loverboys here do things like this now and then
look out everybody its ya boy
It feels nice being recognized apart from the filth :crush:
I’ll never be cool 😔
In a hypothetical situation in which I was a guy whose eyes were temporarily replaced by cartoon stars due to the attention of a cool lady, I would not feel comfortable indulging in that feeling online due to fears of both the potential negative reaction of other men and the potential negative reaction of women.
Exactly.
I feel like changing the observer to a cis man changes the dynamic significantly. It can easily come off as desperate or some other negative associations. It also seems a bit like the default. “Oh, you’re a man that likes women? No way, wow.”
I love women and cute ladies but I’m not about to be making memes about that any time soon.
Right! It feels like that sort of sentiment expressed by a man would generally come off as creepy or threatening to a woman reading it. That’s no fault of the writer or reader, it’s just a nice sentiment buckling under the weight of… well, all of human history w/r/t gender. I’m sure there are places where one can express such things (here? maybe?), but in general, it feels much safer to just not bother.
It’s one of the many reasons that I enjoy seeing the viewpoints of trans folks. I’m a cis man, but the way trans women express appreciation and affection toward women on this Internet is lovely and resonates with me
No, that’s illegal under gender. Plenty of men feel that way, and are allowed to quietly discuss it with one or two other men in a sufficiently relaxed and emotionally open environment, but under no circumstances can they publicly state that they have feelings.
I wonder if fishing has persisted as a bro-bro pastime partially because it is one place that feelings can kind of be let out in private.
“omg a pretty girl looked at me and I forgot how to exist”
The fact that I didn’t know if you were going to dunk on the men for saying something like that or not answers your question perfectly.
Even half this site would take a cynical approach to a dude being that way
This is one of those blowback cases of patriarchy hurting men. Because the dominant social structure has men objectifying and harassing women constantly, it can be difficult to openly admit to finding a woman attractive as a man because people, very understandably, are going to assume that he means that in an objectifying way or is going to go harass her in public trying to get a date out of her and respond accordingly.
It obviously doesn’t compare to the consequences faced by femme presenting people, but I’ll have a moment every now and again where my bi femme partner and I will notice someone in a cute outfit and I have that moment of knowing that she could walk up to them and compliment them on it without issue, but if I tried to do the same they’re likely to be defensive and assume I’m about to ask them for their number.
Yeah. Like a man expressing, idk, affection? Awe? Fascination? With women in ways that aren’t grotesquely sexual or objectifying doesn’t really seem to be a thing. Which, again, what?
I’m not even sure how much of cishet bro culture actually allows men to like women without seeming weak somehow. It’s all about contempt and domination and performative emotional constipation.
Expressing any sort of weakness towards a woman risks some other man to try to boast at your expense.
And, like, cishet men, their whole thing is supposed to be being in to women, and that just strikes me as really weird that there’s not an equivalent.
I mean, read any het romantic poetry written by a man from now to like, the beginning of writing and you’ll run across some version of:
“This girl looked at me and I died and then she smiled at me and I came back to life”.
Sure, poetry’s not as popular now as it used to be, especially for heterosexual men, but people are still making it and sharing it, so presumably those spaces. I’m pretty sure that line almost verbatim is in at least two recent pop songs.
Skill issue. Say it. I’ll say it with you.
I was in a nice discount shop looking at toy foam swords trying to convince myself that if I bought them i would use them. I locked eyes for a second with a goth mommy who was comparing limited edition exotic animal 3d puzzles. In that moment i saw in my heart six months from now when she and I were in the kitchen making novelty snacks for a game night we invited our friends to. She has me taste a spoon. It is too salty. She looks away. I have to spend ten minutes sitting in a display recliner pretending to read the nutrition facts of a bag of hello kitty strawberry marshmallows. After which time I have contemplated all the mistakes I have made in life that prevent me from knowing that moment and I can continue my dayThis is actually beautiful. I feel ~7% more alive after reading this post
:
In that moment i saw in my heart six months from now when she and I were in the kitchen making novelty snacks for a game night we invited our friends to. She has me taste a spoon. It is too salty. She looks away. I have to spend ten minutes sitting in a display recliner pretending to read the nutrition facts of a bag of hello kitty strawberry marshmallows. After which time I have contemplated all the mistakes I have made in life that prevent me from knowing that moment and I can continue my day
Based beyond words
this is beautiful
I have a hard barrier around expressing anything like that, online or off. The inherent hetero power dynamics make it creepy even if it’s not a sexual impulse.
Word. I’m really careful about compliments. I never compliment someone’s body, it’s always something related to skill or taste - you make that dress look great, your makeup is on point, those boots look so cool. I always try to direct compliments towards something that acknowledges a person’s agency and the effort they put in to their appearance and presentation, to try to center and acknowledge them as a person rather than creating them as a body that exists for male perception and pleasure.
Cause, like, otherwise, you’re just saying “your body conforms to beauty standards in a way I find sexually appealing”. There’s nothing in that about the person, it’s dehumanizing, reducing someone to a social ideal instead of engaging with an individual.
Do any spaces like that exist? Is it even possible given the way gender works in society?
I think you can find cishet men that be like this but under no circumstances would you ever find an intentional community of explicitly cishet men doing this.
under no circumstances would you ever find an intentional community of explicitly cishet men doing this
:sadness:
Not any public cishet male spaces. Either privately amongst trusted friends or in a very niche community where you can trust they won’t try to out-masculine you for showing weakness.
The concept of cishet male spaces is weird because so many spaces are de-facto cishet male, very few spaces are explicitly for them. Like imagine justifying a space as explicitly for cishet males only… The best I can think of is a church men’s group. Anyways, all those de-facto spaces are either mostly sexless in discussion or it quickly descends to the lowest common demoninator of sexual discussion, which is quite low.
i just learned not so long ago the concept of “man cave” where they have rules like “no women allowed here” which in my opinion, sounds everything but het. but for some reason, it is considered very manly and very het
Man Cave isn’t defined by being “no girls allowed” its just a spare room where the man puts all his toys. Usually its the only room which he has creative control over. As in the woman would have creative control over the rest of the house. You also don’t have a man cave without the presence of a woman. Otherwise its all just a bachelor pad.
Its like an affluent middle age suburbanite thing. Most often theres only one guy in it.
Okay, so - R Crumb and Frank Frazetta. Both horny as hell, drawing very stylized, sexualized women. Now, compare them to anime waifu art.
Crumb and Frank, I’m going to say, they see women that actually exist in the world. They draw women in a very stylized fashion, but they actually look like and art meant to be understood as real women.
And then you’ve got the anime waifu crowd; the waifus aren’t representations of anything or anyone real. They’re not stylized representations of women, they’re like second order simulacra - anime women look like anime women and are only distantly representations of actually existing women.
Like, crumb? The women he draws have massive thights and unreasonably bouyant boobs and so forth, but I think that shows what Crumb sees when he looks at real people. Those are qualities that he sees in actual people and finds beautiful. The stylized exxageration is over-emphasizing something real. Crumb sees real women in the world and draws that.
Same think with Frank. His attention to anatomy and dynamic poses is excellent. He draws people in motion the way people actually move. That’s someone who studied the human body in a very deliberate way and reproduces the human body with skill, creativity, and joy. Again, very stylized, hyperreal, but it’s a representation of what Frank sees when he looks at real people.
But then the anime waifus, they don’t look like people nor are they supposed to. They’re not drawings of women, they’re drawings of waifus.
I think that’s kind of what i’m getting at somehow. Like so much of how cishet men talk about women, how they create women in online spaces, it’s not really women, it’s not people that really exist. It’s these really abstracted simulacra that don’t really reflect anything real.
It reminds me of that Miyazaki quote about how the people who make anime, unlike good artists, do not study the real world and real people, and are in fact disgusted and repulsed by real people.
You beat me to it by like 8 minutes
And then you’ve got the anime waifu crowd; the waifus aren’t representations of anything or anyone real. They’re not stylized representations of women, they’re like second order simulacra - anime women look like anime women and are only distantly representations of actually existing women.
The actual translation of the quote from
that is memed as “anime was a mistake” was actually specifically about this problem, that the anime industry is by and large by otaku and for otaku now, so it’s copy of a copy bleakness and pandering with less and less lived human experience involved in what is presented.
The lack of this space for cishet men is heavily related to my affinity for lesbian spaces online. I tend to observe but don’t participate in them because I don’t consider myself a lesbian, but I relate a lot to the way they tend to express their affection for each other. I love my wife so fucking much and it really seems to alienate me from my cishet male friends. I’ve been with my wife for over a decade and I’m still so crazy about her but a lot of them seem to barely like their partners. I just don’t understand. I’m in a very straight-passing relationship because of how masculine I present and people have always just pointed out how different our relationship seemed.
I love my wife so fucking much and it really seems to alienate me from my cishet male friends.
he/they so maybe it doesn’t count but fwiw i am heavily pro wifeguy. i might even consider myself Wifeguy Aspiring. might even go so far as to say that you are, in fact, goals
Oooo I’ve never been goals before. That feels nice
I struggle with this sort of thing myself. It’s like I’ll see someone and find them so instantly attractive that I lock up and don’t know how to proceed socially. I usually end up feeling guilty, like I’m staring too much. I felt like it was a male gaze thing for the longest time.
For me some of it is envy vs. attraction, am I into them or do I want to look like them? I’m not always sure, and it could be both or neither. I’m attracted to guys, but women catch my eye more.
I’ve lost my own point! In any case, whoever experiences this, I sympathize, because I am still trying to understand my own tendencies to be awkward around the beautiful people
I might have been interested in memes like that before i got married but i doubt there’s much out there.
It was a pretty common thing to happen on TV when i was growing up for a guy character to lose the ability to speak when trying to talk to a girl and just start going um uh buh guh but i can’t say I’ve seen anything in the meme age
I’d say that it’s still a very common trope, and that’s part of the reason it’s not discussed much. The other reason is that, as the cultural “default” cishet men don’t really create spaces centering their shared cishet experience, since basically all communities are awash in that already. Lesbians obviously carve out spaces for themselves where they can discuss their own culture, which is not often on display in the wider culture.
Like if you went to a forum for cishet dudes, it would be a bunch of guys who think there aren’t enough places already to talk about being a cishet dude and that’s a big red flag.
