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RantGender: Unsolicited Male Advice
I’m getting so sick of unsolicited male advice and boundary pushing. I have one former colleague who has become extremely clingy and has told me that his marriage to his wife is basically over. He now keeps asking me extremely creepy questions, e.g. ‘Can sexual orientation ever change?’ and rings me on an almost nightly basis to pick a fight about my ‘negativity’ and things that I’m doing ‘wrong’ in my life, such as not renting a house where he wants me to, not negotiating with my landlord over rent, not choosing the job that he wants me to (saying that he didn’t want me to move as I wouldn’t be around to meet him). Even if I am not making a negative statement, everything is twisted into one. I have trouble with my neutral or even positive statements coming across as negative but I feel as though he uses this to provoke a fight.
He rang me in the middle of work a week ago to admit that he tried to influence/sabotage me in trying to get me to accept a job near my home town and not move away. I think that he criticises me in an effort to keep me arguing and on the phone for longer.
I struggle with boundaries and always have and it’s got to the point where I have to turn my phone off as I will get constant calls and texts (I left my phone in the car a few days ago and came back to 4 missed calls and multiple texts spaced out over the afternoon). I feel like this is peak female socialisation (be nice and accommodating) vs male socialisation. But every time that I try to assert my boundaries, he just steamrollers them and then also guilt trips me if I am not constantly talking to him or even if I am going on a date with a woman (considering that I have always been open about being a lesbian, he should have taken the hint).
Between this and other recent situations where unsolicited male advice features heavily, I’m dreading it every time they roll out that line ‘Can I just tell you something?’. I often point out to these men that I don’t go around offering ‘advice’, so why do they feel the need to do it to others? Often it is about things that are the symptoms of my autism so the ‘advice’ just serves to make me feel more anxious about them, therefore making it worse.
I just needed to let it out somewhere as it’s affecting my work and social life due to the amount of time he spends ringing me, and I feel as though he often does it when he knows that I have social events to either make me late and/or make me too exhausted to go after he starts another fight.
Edit: right on cue, one hour after this post, I got another phone call just now during work, which I duly ignored.
Edit 2: I then got an email to my current workplace 1.5 h later with some insult 'Actually doing some work are you?', duly deleted it as it's again, trying to cause conflict to get a reaction. He won't be getting a reply even if he goes through different methods of trying to communicate with me
Edit 3: There is another dimension to this that I haven't added. Whenever we were meeting in person, he would constantly be trying to push me to drink alcohol, so much so that I vomited on public transport for the first time in my life after a night out with him. I stopped drinking alcohol around him and he kept buying me drinks and basically demanding that I had 'just one', etc, quite literally pushing a can of beer into my hand or saying 'I paid X amount for this, you have to drink it'. or constantly questioning and trying to make me justify why I wasn't drinking. Aside from not feeling comfortable around him, the main reason that I am not really drinking is that I can't afford it and also that I am working to improve my health - it feels like he is trying to sabotage my new healthy lifestyle when it's taken me years to get a handle on what I'm eating and drinking.
A bit unrelated but I just noticed the description for r/MTF is “A Safe Haven for MAAB Transgender People.” I have never heard of “MAAB” before, I assume it means “male assigned at birth.” What happened to AMAB? Is it considered offensive or something? Does anyone know?
As the terms AFAB/AMAB have entered common parlance, they are being used as synonyms for female/male, and hence they have become transphobic. Of course the problem is that biological reality itself is transphobic, so any neologism referring to it will inevitably become transphobic as well.
Well said! You'd think that if biological sex was as irrelevant as they claim it is, they wouldn't need to constantly reinvent new terms for it 🤔
Why is MAAB any better? Same words, different order? I know asking for a logical answer on this is already crazy, but curious on where they’re going with this.
It's actually outdated language-- FAAB/MAAB used to be the standard abbreviation probably circa 2010-2015. They used to sell t-shirts for example for transmen that said "FAABulous". A bunch of trans people got upset that the order of the letters "centered" their sex at birth and so the standard became AFAB/AMAB (where the "assignment" language became the priority in the acronym.)
Fun fact: as a person possessed of quite substantial sacks of joy, I can exclusively reveal that they get cold when I get cold. Due to, you know, being on the outside part of my body and made moreover largely of fat. My hips and butt are also often cold to the touch when in cold climates. THE MORE YOU KNOW TIMOTHY.
Yes! In really hot weather plunging your boobs in cold water or just wetting them and letting the water dry works wonders! Must be all that fat?
NB Please do not tell the TIMs this. It is too good to share.
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I imagine he never uses a canoe that's for a single person only, he just gets in with another person who has to paddle while he fondles himself.
Like those people who just sit on a tandem bike to let the other person do all the work, just with more fetish involved.
huh? life vests are so clunky, ill fitting, and awkward that i would find it difficult to even touch my boobs while wearing one...:/
What? It doesn't even make sense.