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?
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
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.