Recovering from Casual Misogyny

 Hey all, so I'm groggy and a half right now. Got the flu shot yesterday and it just fried me, haven't had a response this shitty (or good?) since like '14 or '15, ugh, could barely sleep last night. Anyway...


I came here to say that I've been working on healing some shit in therapy. Namely, the effects of casual misogyny/queerphobia on  me during my late teens/early 20s. It's one of those things where I didn't take note of how deeply a lot of the commentary sank in until really recently, but it was really fucking insidious. To clarify, this was a period in my life where my friend groups were probably largely male. As high school ended and I went off to college right away (remember when we did that, kids?) my friend group dwindled somewhat, down to all people who identified as men at the time, and then...me. The oddball. Of course looking back now I can see that part of it was because I looked at myself as non-gendered or a non-woman. At the time it was just natural and what I fell into.

I need to give these guys credit for the fact that a lot of conventional masculinity wasn't for them. That was apparent, especially from the fact that a lot of them fell into the "nerd" category as we were finishing up high school. But there were a lot of microaggressions that I just didn't really think about or realize until, well, really recently in therapy.

There were implications about my promiscuity (from my partner at the time) or the manner in which I was sexual

There were suggestions and mockery of my presumed intelligence level just because I wasn't up to par about certain things between any two given guys in the group

There were patronizing attitudes

And then there were expectations that I would be available to help them work through their emotional issues. As we got older and some configurations of friendships changed, the expectations turned into downright entitlement.


And so now I am sitting with my waves of anger at this, at how I was treated, but also with conflicted feelings of understanding that the masculinity they were all told to embody wasn't right for them either. Compassion and anger are strange bedfellows, but I often end up feeling alone. Estranged in groups of cishet people, and often default used to being the weirdo in "general" groups of people. Showmanic clown problems.




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