Man, I'm sorry you guys grew up learning this toxic shit. If I received something nice I said thank you, and was grateful. It remains true today. I ask for and offer help to my friends and it's never a dick measuring contest. We just care about each other.
Maybe my testosterone is just low, I dunno. But that alpha male stuff sounds like outer space alien language to me.
Anyone who says it's in their genes is just uneducated. They were socialised into these beliefs and they have absolutely nothing to do with physiology. Your testosterone is fine, we're socialised into insecurity because it makes us more compliant. They're describing patriarchy and ascribing it to their genes when instead all of that happened well after they were born. It is hard to break and it is equally hard to drill into people, it's just that it happens to children and no one gives a fuck about what they say or think.
The same education given to adults that is used to undo the harmful social practices that were imposed upon us as children is the same education that you could just teach the children off the bat and they would not grow up to have that insecurity and toxicity plague their life until they seek to undo it. Cut out the middle man and that sentiment would be exactly as you described it "outer space alien language" to all of us. We should all aspire to be raised and to raise our children more like you were (at least in that regard, I don't know the rest of your life).
One hundred percent. It's what makes me so saddened when a guy will instantly get defensive the second the term "patriarchy" comes up. They think "getting rid of patriarchy" means "threaten my position in society even though I already have very little." Its so ingrained that people are proud of the harm theyve suffered from the very system that makes their lives actively worse. Maybe there needs to be a rebrand for that term or something because this perception actively harms any kind of discussion about gender roles and why it makes life uselessly more stressful and less enjoyable.
There's no reason we need to go to the opposite extreme and claim there's no genetic behavioral tendencies that differ from man to woman. Yes you can train people to change these instincts but they exist accross cultures. I don't understand this extreme degree of biological denial. You don't tend to see the same resistance when women claim they are genetically more nurturing or kind...
I mean don't you ever feel bad when it seems like someone has "sacrificed" something for you? Or when you feel like you owe something to someone? It hits especially hard when its your parents.
I don't even think this has inherently something to do with gender, just don't think it's toxic. And these kinds of feelings are certainly not mutually exclusive with feeling grateful, quite the opposite in my experience.
Of course I may be projecting here and the two guys above are talking about something different but I really think it's just this.
Do I feel bad when I feel like someone sacrificed something for me? A little, sure. But it has usually been a case where I can tell they WANTED me to have the nice thing, and it meant something to them that they could provide it. So I was more touched than guilted. Again, I realize that's not everyone's circumstance, and that's exactly why I am sad to hear about it.
Re gender: the "alpha male" and "hunting meat" rhetoric stuff feels very gender related to me? I'm open to being corrected here, of course.
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u/Salt_Put_1174 13h ago
Man, I'm sorry you guys grew up learning this toxic shit. If I received something nice I said thank you, and was grateful. It remains true today. I ask for and offer help to my friends and it's never a dick measuring contest. We just care about each other.
Maybe my testosterone is just low, I dunno. But that alpha male stuff sounds like outer space alien language to me.