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?
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?
why are u as a man liking a woman pretty gay bro 😂😂😂
Bisexual men be like
We do be like that
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.
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.
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:
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.
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
:
this is beautiful
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
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.
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
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.
4chan
Seriously.
I was thinking that I see it in greentext memes, on the off chance I see a greentext meme.
Yeah that’s what I was gonna answer. Especially the /r9k/ board. Greentext stories about getting so flustered when a qt3.14 makes eye contact that you spill your spaghetti.
now that you mention this when I was, idk, maybe 12? I got so flustered by a pretty girl I walked in to a swimming pool. Haven’t thought abut that in thirty years.
Yer doxxing yourself
I feel like tumbler would have better but it is hard to guees who would be easier to find
Men today hate women and are like two steps away from advocating openly killing anyone who won’t fuck them.
That’s kind of the way i’m leaning. Like do straight men even actually like women?
Like do straight men even actually like women?
The idea of a woman to fuck is what they’re after, outside of that no.
I have several friends that specifically do not like women and it is weird. Like, homie, what do you event want a woman for if you are not endlessly fascinated by the way they happy dance when you feed them.
Right? There’s a scene in the battle angel alita movie where the love interest gives Alita an orange and her face just lights up and I have very many feelings like how amazing would it be to give someone you love the experience of an orange for the first time omgmgmgmmgmmgmgmggllglglfedofryeduirfundmorifdcneruoedncrdks! B!!!
Like do straight men even actually like women?
I used to think that it was a
specific curse, but unfortunately plenty of young men only seem to want women for RooshV-style BAAAANG points and otherwise seem to outright hate them.
cishet men? no
“cishet” eggs? oh you betcha
do spaces like that exist? maybe some corners of tumblr. I think this is a common experience for young boys having their first crushes.
Grown feminist men are supposed to have figured out how to relate to women as other people so they’re not paralyzed by trying to talk to them. Even without explicit theory you learn not to put women on pedestals. Posting this kind of stuff would look like softboi performative harmlessness (usually a lie), and it would be weird to try and combine that with an open expression of desire anyway. If you are a left-of-center man who’s attracted to women, the cultural norm is to shut up about it because the misogynists are saying gross shit in locker rooms and you don’t want to do that. There’s not really space for healthy/nonthreatening desire yet.
Grown anti-feminist men are supposed to have learned a specific script of heterosexuality (PUA, etc) to follow, where they are in control of the interaction and set the terms of it. For these men, open expression of harmlessness or being disarmed by a woman’s gaze or whatever makes you a cuck and is therefore verboten.
I have seen softboi performative harmlessness in action and ickkkkkkkkkkk that shit is frightening. Like, trying to clear a stalker off a neighbor’s porch when he was doing the full softboi emo thing, or a guy I knew who was in his late thirties but always dating seriously mentally ill 20 somethings and being extremely manipulative towards them with softboi bullshit. : p
softboi performative harmlessness (usually a lie)
The ancestor of that was performative fake-gay posing, particularly among college cishet fratbros, specifically to try to get laid in an underhanded “I am your sassy lisping friend that gets to insult you but on the downlow I just want to score more BAAAAANG points and then abandon you” way.
Shit was everywhere in college life in the early 2000s.
