Nordic wrote:Actually it wasn't just you, it seems that particular statement of mine got a wide response from a fair number of people, which is why I wanted to go on the record and state that it was meant in a humorous way, so the reactions could perhaps stop and we could spend our valuable time talking about things that actually mattered.
You bring up something I have been meaning to add to this thread, which others have touched upon, and that is that women often treat men as if we have no feelings. We are expected to watch every nuance of what we say, including our tone of voice, our body language, every little thing, yet women seem to feel a complete freedom in spouting off whatever the hell they feel like saying to us, no matter how hurtful, and expect us to have no emotional wounds from it whatsoever.
Men do have feelings. As much as women do.
While I couldn't speak for all women (or even most women) on a subject that kinda requires a subjective knowledge of individual attitudes, I can say that in my experience and among women known to me, those expectations and beliefs and practices would be regarded as frankly insane.
As well as precisely opposite to a very broadly stated and generalized truth along the same general lines that doesn't apply to all men by any means, and which I therefore present with an a priori proviso and a full advance concession of whatever qualifications anyone wants to make to it:
Men are so heartbreakingly, hopelessly and excessively sensitive to just about all perceived and real criticism, rejection and/or abandonment by women
and have so much unaddressed guilt and fear and anger and performance anxiety about sex
and have so few resources and coping mechanisms for dealing with those feelings that (loosely speaking) it's generally either pointlessly cruel or pointlessly dangerous to raise those issues and/or a host of associated issues with them at all directly. In those terms or, for that matter, even closely related terms.
Because no matter how carefully, lovingly, impartially, or non-critically you do it, they just go into a complete state of defensive meltdown immediately. They are, in fact, that thin-skinned. So the conversations all end up like this thread. Women try to say something about themselves, then spend the next eternity soothing, handling, wrangling with, or expiating themselves for whatever brutal thing about men the men who heard them thought they said.
I think -- although as I said, I have no way of knowing -- that most women know that better than most men do.
In any event. It always goes that way. Every single time. And it really is heartbreaking, first and foremost. As well as frustrating, both on one's own behalf and as a matter of love and consideration for the man and/or men, assuming a relationship in which that's present.
If you have any ideas about how that might most constructively be approached, please share them.
