kirby1024: Something every male should read

Lee Davis-Thalbourne (

kirby1024) wrote,
@ 2008-04-29 18:09:00

Something every male should read
Yes, even you. And you.

How not to be That Guy. (Originally from here)

To be fair, everyone should probably read it. But men especially. It's handy knowledge.

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	deird1 2008-04-29 08:13 am UTC (link)
	Have you been keeping up with the whole OSBP debacle? Kinda relevant to this article... (Reply to this)(Thread)

	kirby1024 2008-04-29 08:16 am UTC (link)
	The essay was originally the LJ post of someone's comments about that, in particular. I just felt that the essay had a good deal of merit without the original context, so I posted that version. So yes, I have been keeping track of it. :) (Reply to this)(Parent)

not_in_denial
2008-04-29 08:35 am UTC (link)

It makes me so angry that stuff like this needs to be laid out for people. :(

I kind of hated reading it because it wasn't just coming from being a female and having woman history... it's from everything. I see that attitude in every minority/majority situation, in so many people that talk to me, almost always from "allies".

Blaaaaaaaargh. I hate the world. I'm going to drown my sorrows in Bec's dad's cooking. And then grocery shopping.

(Reply to this)

	odin_jones 2008-04-29 08:56 am UTC (link)
	Aside from the tl;dr I did actually read the whole thing and while I wholeheartedly agree with what's being said, the note made somewhere near the bottom that all conversations started are automatically male centric by virtue of men being dominant simply isn't true. (Reply to this)(Thread)

	kirby1024 2008-04-29 09:11 am UTC (link)
	Of course, even if it isn't true, isn't the issue important to keep in mind in general interactions anyway? Edited at 2008-04-29 09:13 am UTC (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

odin_jones
2008-04-29 09:25 am UTC (link)

Yes it is important, and I've seen cases personally where conversations get hijacked in that way and I agree that it is important to be wary of that.I think in a more general sense what I am objecting to is there is a sense of 'trying to have it both ways'.I can't really phrase it better than that at the moment but I think it can put people off meaningful discussion when things get phrased in that way.

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	(Anonymous) 2008-04-29 09:46 am UTC (link)
	I wish I could have read this when I was 15 or so. (Reply to this)

	darkteddy 2008-04-29 01:36 pm UTC (link)
	Fuck I've been 'That Guy' in almost every possible social situation, including women, people of colour, disabled people, ANY PEOPLE WHO AREN'T ME essentially. Wow, I'm even doing it right now. WIN. What if one's entire personality consists of being 'That Guy'? (Reply to this)(Thread)

kirby1024
2008-04-29 08:35 pm UTC (link)

That's probably when you need to read that essay, and start keeping some of it in mind. :)

Being That Guy is not a life sentence, and being aware of what you're doing is the first step to being able to combat it. As the essay points out, when you start realising that you're being That Guy in a situation, learn to step back for a moment, and then try and not be That Guy. The trying counts as long as it's honest!

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	darkteddy 2008-04-29 11:20 pm UTC (link)
	I had a dream/nightmare last night after reading this before going to bed. In said dream I was being 'That Guy' with a girl from uni and then I was being chased down by a group of other guys and beaten. O_O (Reply to this)(Parent)

gorynna
2008-04-29 02:49 pm UTC (link)

There's a couple of things I really dislike about it. I feel like instead of it encouraging men to encourage women to stand up for themselves, it almost encourages men to, paraphrasedly, "accept that women are THIS way due to society, the end, and just assume that none of them can stick up for themselves". For instance, in part one, Entitlement-

Then say to the guy, once she's gone[emphasis theirs]: "Hey, I think you were making her feel really awkward. Back off a little next time, hey?"

Because no woman could handle a guy telling another guy that he thought she felt awkward. As if she were too delicate to listen to one person telling another person their feelings. As if this were some sort of advice unique to a guy-bothering-chick situation.

I just find that particular patronising excerpt amusing in an article in which there is bitching about patronisation.

But no, I dislike how the tone of the article is that women are each and every one of us socially molded flowers who need guys to subtly pull strings to make life easier for us. Subtly pulling strings is equally patronising to being blatently patronising.

Also, I dislike the assumption that being the qualities of being "that guy" are strictly male. They're not. If anything, it's more of a "how to not be an aggressive personality" essay, with a sociopolitical spin thrown into it to justify the author's Arts degree or for the hipster quotient or because the author genuinely thinks that women are incapable of having aggressive personalities.

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darkteddy
2008-04-29 11:24 pm UTC (link)

You make a really valid point. But now I begin to wonder how to behave at all. Should I change my behavior? A lot? A little? Should I change it around particular people? How do I know who?

I do agree that this points out how PEOPLE should behave around other PEOPLE. Not just men around women. But still. It makes me wonder about what I've been doing and how I should be changing it. :\

I'm almost too open to self criticism by assuming that I MUST be doing something wrong at all times. Now I'm paranoid about leaving the house in case I fuck up.

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kirby1024
2008-04-30 12:40 pm UTC (link)

Well, the thing is, you're going to fuck up. Everyone does at some point, seeing how this stuff isn't meant to be easy. The more important part is not to get defensive when you get called out on it, and to accept that you've fucked up, and try not to do it again. More importantly, when you do fuck up, to understand the why and how of the fuckup and work hard on not repeating the problem.

I mean, hell, even the author acknowledges that she fucks up (and in fact, fucked up in that essay - read the bottom comment re: Male Rape). The point is not to let each fuck up get you down. Learn as best you can, understand what happenned with the fuckup and keep working on not fucking up. Eventually you'll find that you tend to fuckup less and less. It's a learning curve for anyone, for us white middle class guys it's even more of one, seeing how we're kinda who society is built around...

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omnot
2008-04-30 02:38 am UTC (link)

I noticed the same thing, and as a woman who has been dismissed as described, it rankles. But I give the author the benefit of the doubt because they *may* be observing that for some people, anything a woman says won't register as valid purely because it is coming from a woman.

*Under those circumstances*, a verbal slap upside the head from another male might be the only hope of modifying the behaviour of the creep.

If the creep is oblivious to this feature of their behaviour, no 'word to the wise' from a woman will get it across...

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bonvivanta
2008-04-29 11:31 pm UTC (link)

I love the article personally but knowing men the way I do, do you honestly think they have the attention span to read all of this? The men I know might read the first two paragraphs, not think it relates to them and glaze over, losing interest. Honestly, this long winded article needs to be summarized and put on male toilet doors to be relevant so that the message can come across. This is too full of words and mere men don't have the attention span to cope. So summarise it into point form then the point will come across much better than this wall of words.
- Eilish

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darkteddy
2008-04-29 11:37 pm UTC (link)

Now I have to say, I do find your comments about mens' attention spans slightly offensive. Mostly because it is not only men who have trouble with keeping interested enough in something to finish it - it can be women too! And I, as a man, read the entire essay from beginning to end. I may have missed a word or two here and there because I don't read EVERY word, but I did read every sentence. So I resent your comments.

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	bonvivanta 2008-04-29 11:45 pm UTC (link)
	that's fine, you can resent my comment all you like but I'm not retracting my opinion NOR am I apologising for offending your preciousness. Get over yourself. Do you want an elephant stamp for reading it all the way through? You would be in the minority. No man I know would be bothered reading this so fuck off (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	darkteddy 2008-04-29 11:47 pm UTC (link)
	Wow, take a chill pill. I was merely pointing it out it may have been wiser to address people as a whole, rather than one specific gender. I didn't kind of expect to get attacked like that. (Reply to this)(Parent)

omnot
2008-04-30 02:53 am UTC (link)

In many social situations, I can never be sure whether I am supposed to be the lion or the gazelle. I suppose that role is, to a large part, designated by the people with whom I am interacting.

Perhaps the author of the article is suggesting that people oughtn't automatically categorise others? Or maybe... maybe it's about recognising the default roles as being broken? Or... is it about people presuming that their perception that another person is a gazelle just because they want them to be ought to be reconsidered? Or is it about recognising that people might get tired of being treated as prey, and can get kind of twitchy about it?

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kirby1024
2008-04-30 12:34 pm UTC (link)

I believe that it's partly the third there. I think it's also supposed to be something of a crash-course in the idea of social privilege, because it's not something that a lot of people come to naturally (because much of the point of privilege is that it's not something you actively think about, much like a fish doesn't really see the water around it) and because it's something that does actually cause some significant issues with people that don't have your privilege.

I think much of the essay is trying to get people to actively look at this stuff, and by doing so trying to get into the shoes of others.

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	originaluddite 2008-04-30 11:00 am UTC (link)
	And I think a lot of this stuff would be taken care of if we just spent a bit more time thinking "how would the other person feel if I did this"... (Reply to this)(Thread)

	kirby1024 2008-04-30 12:29 pm UTC (link)
	I so greatly agree with this. It does seem to me that few people realise that, no matter who you are, no matter how little you're known, you're still a person, and that this goes for everyone else you meet too. And that saddens me somehow. (Reply to this)(Parent)

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