#current gender crises of being a man and wanting to be perceived as a man but enjoying dressing up in prominently feminine things

[aethersspacetime]

Being trans and also feminine is so odd sometimes, like yes I'm a man, yes I'm also wearing a push up bra and a top that shows of my boobs if I'm going to be forced to have them until I cam get top sugery I'm going to use them as accsessories

[beardedmrbean]

PORTLAND, Ore. – Portland residents fear being assaulted or encountering people experiencing a mental health crisis while walking around town, according to a recent survey, but those Fox News spoke with had mixed opinions about safety in the city.

"I walk around all the time and during the day I feel fine," said Amber, who recently moved to Portland from California. "I still keep my wits about me and I'm cautious, but I don't feel like I'm really in any danger."

But Brenda disagreed.

"I’m worried about being physically attacked," she told Fox News. "It's not safe. It's just flat not safe."

MAN, 20, SHOT DEAD AT PORTLAND ILLEGAL STREET RACING TAKEOVER

Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler commissioned the survey from local firm DHM Research. Nearly half (48%) of the 500 Portlanders who responded felt unsafe walking alone at night in their own neighborhood. Of those who felt unsafe, 78% told researchers they were afraid of being physically assaulted.

"I'm not going to live in fear, but we're a lot more aware of our surroundings," Meredith said. "I won't walk alone as often. I used to just walk all over, no thought about it, at night. I think twice now."

There were 5,960 reported crimes in July, the most recent month for which police statistics are available. That's up slightly from 5,618 the same month last year. Theft, vandalism and assault were the most common offenses reported.

MAN BAILED OUT OF JAIL BY LIBERAL PORTLAND FREEDOM FUND CHARGED WITH MURDER ONE WEEK LATER

People living on the city’s east side were more likely to fear being physically attacked than those in west Portland, according to the survey. Of female respondents who felt unsafe, 81% said they feared being assaulted compared to 74% of males.

"I'm sure a lot of people don't feel safe," said Jon, who was visiting from Seattle. "I do, but I'm not a 120-pound woman walking by herself at night."

Shane agreed that there is a gender divide.

"My partner is physically smaller than I am … she feels completely uncomfortable being out and about downtown," he said. "She started carrying pepper spray with her."

As a "tall guy," Shane said he thinks he’s less of a target.

"Also, I don’t really look like I have a lot of money," he said, laughing.

Amber said she gets nervous at night or in neighborhoods perceived as more dangerous. She said she has been yelled at and followed by strangers and makes sure to stay alert.

"It is the people who have mental health issues because you don't really know how they're going to react," she said. "I don't listen to anything in my headphones. I always have my pepper spray on my keychain.

OREGON MAN CHARGED AFTER FENTANYL OVERDOSE DEATH OF PORTLAND TEEN

She added that she constantly looks over her shoulder, "so I'm not oblivious to my surroundings."

Concerns about interacting with people experiencing mental health crises or drug intoxication are front and center on many Portlanders’ minds, according to the survey and residents Fox News spoke with.

"Taking our granddaughters for walks and finding syringes on the ground and things like that, it’s disheartening," Meredith said.

The Portland Police Bureau has suffered from staffing shortages since 2020 and currently has more than 100 sworn police vacancies, according to the bureau. As anti-police protests rocked the city in 2020, the city council voted to cut the department's budget by $15 million, though activists had demanded cuts of $50 million.

Many officers have retired or left to work in other cities, citing dissatisfaction with city leadership and poor morale during the months of nightly protests.

"I think we need more police," Brenda said. She can understand why people don’t want to become officers, but the city isn’t doing enough to promote safety, she said.

More than half of the survey respondents told researchers they did not think police would respond quickly to an emergency, according to the results, which were obtained by Fox News.

"With the police force, overburdened people think they can do anything now," Carol told Fox News. "I feel like it won't always be like this, but right now we're in the midst of … lawlessness."

Portland has seen a sharper increase in violent crime than many other major cities. Homicides in the city increased 83% from 2019 to 2020, while nationally killings increased by an average of about 30%. There were 90 homicides in the city last year, breaking the city's previous record of 66 in 1987, Oregon Public Broadcasting reported.

"They show a lot of stuff I know on the news about the shootings … and I'm sure they're up," Dave said. "But up over what? There used to be very little."

"I think the news has definitely made this area out to be a lot more chaotic," Shane said.

[fursasaida]

*asking you about your foucauldian critique of social media*

Okay! This will require several steps, so long post ahoy.

Foucault’s view of discipline argues that power does not only constrain people; it is not only a negative force that stops, silences, or limits. It is also a positive force that pushes people to perform certain behaviors, say certain things, act certain ways. Power is productive.

In line with this, Foucault argues that the idea ofdiscursive freedom–being free to express yourself–is in many ways also ademand that converts the energy of being “saved” from Christianity intoself-expression. Naming your sexuality, for example, becomes a form of“confession”–not necessarily of a sin (the parallel here is not that straightforward), but ofthe inner contents of your being. Literally ex-pressing your self–pushing your inner self out–becomes liberatory, in that it is telling the truth (or rather, producing a truth). His point is that while this seems liberatory, and may be experienced that way for some, it is still inescapably tied to power’s productive side. Power has already inflected what it is possible to say about yourself, what such statements mean (the words as well as social effects), and so forth, and so by engaging in such acts of confession one is participating in and upholding the power of such systems. Here’s an excerpt from The History of Sexuality:

Whence a metamorphosis in literature: we have passed from a pleasure to be recounted and heard, centering on the heroic or marvelous narration of “trials” of bravery or sainthood, to a literature ordered according to the infinite task of extracting from the depths of oneself, in between the words, a truth which the very form of the confession holds out like a shimmering mirage. Whence too this new way of philosophizing: seeking the fundamental relation to the true, not simply in oneself—in some forgotten knowledge, or in a certain primal trace—but in the self-examination that yields, through a multitude of fleeting impressions, the basic certainties of consciousness. The obligation to confess is now relayed through so many different points, is so deeply ingrained in us, that we no longer perceive it as the effect of a power that constrains us; on the contrary, it seems to us that truth, lodged in our most secret nature, “demands” only to surface; that if it fails to do so, this is because a constraint holds it in place, the violence of a power weighs it down, and it can finally be articulated only at the price of a kind of liberation. Confession frees, but power reduces one to silence; truth does not belong to the order of power, but shares an original affinity with freedom: traditional themes in philosophy, which a “political history of truth” would have to overturn by showing that truth is not by nature free—nor error servile—but that its production is thoroughly imbued with relations of power. The confession is an example of this.

Self-expression is also self-production, but this is framed as a moment of liberatory truth. If confessing your sins liberated you from their weight and consequences, enabling salvation, in our secular world confessing your self liberates you from repression, invisibility, non-recognition, “living a lie.” (Obviously the current politics of “representation matters” are tied to this.) You can only be sure that you exist by confessing what you are.

Rey Chow talks about this same confessional idea with regard to ethnicity in ~the West~ (from The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism):

From the perspective of ethnicity and feminism, the logical conclusion from Foucault’s analysis is, quite clearly, unappealing and unflattering. It demonstrates that the supposed radicalization performed by race and gender awareness on representation—by the insistence on the marginal, the local, the personal, and the autobiographical, for instance—needs to be modified by an understanding of the symbiotic relation between the radical and power as such. Within this relation, resorting to the self-referential gesture as an ethnic and/or sexual minority is often tantamount to performing a confession in the criminal as well as noncriminal sense: it is to say, “Yes, that’s me,” to a call and a vocation—“Hey, Asian!” “Hey, Indian!” “Hey, gay man!”—as if it were a crime with which one has been charged; it is to admit and submit to the allegations (of otherness) that society at large has made against one. Such acts of confession may now be further described as a socially endorsed, coercive mimeticism, which stipulates that the thing to imitate, resemble, and become is none other than the ethnic or sexual minority herself. When minority individuals think that, by referring to themselves, they are liberating themselves from the powers that subordinate them, they may actually be allowing such powers to work in the most intimate fashion—from within their hearts and souls, in a kind of voluntary surrender that is, in the end, fully complicit with the guilty verdict that has been declared on them socially long before they speak.

I wanted to include this because it underlines that the confessional power relation is not limited to sexuality (where the idea of the closet might make the direct transfer of a notion of “sin” easy to assume) and ties the whole thing more closely to the idea of self-representation. What she adds to the point of Foucault’s that I summarized as “You can only be sure that you exist by confessing what you are” is that for many, you can only be what you are by confessing it. Recognition depends on it. If you are not talking about what it means to you to be Asian, announcing/performing your participation in “Asian culture,” your Asianness is suspect. (Perhaps you are an assimilationist, or “white on the inside.”) Same goes for any other form of marginalized identity. That’s what she means by “coercive mimeticism”–you must imitate what you are supposed to be in order to count as being it.

Elsewhere in this same chapter, Chow talks a lot about liberation and ultimately asks, liberation from what? Her point is that much Western thinking and politics assumes that the masses are repressed–silenced, invisibilized, made to feel shame–precisely so as to make it necessary for them to liberate themselves through confession. To be clear, this doesn’t mean that no one actually is silenced, made to feel shame, or invisibilized; they surely are, as decades of media criticism have shown. It is, however, asking whether this kind of self-announcement actually addresses the root problems. If you can only liberate yourself from repression through coercive mimeticism, how liberating is that, really?

Many marginalized people have talked about the exhausting burden of always having to be “the one in the room,” always having to talk about their particular marginalized experience, rarely getting to speak about anything else. For example, Ava DuVernay has repeatedly noted that film journalists ask her about the representational politics of her work constantly, and the craft almost never. In such interviews the journalists are effectively inviting her to, as Chow puts it, “Confess yourself!” By providing her the forum to represent her identity they nonetheless mark and other her with that same identity.

Now, as we all know by now, social media exists not to connect people or to provide a forum for expression but to sell advertising and collect data. It nonetheless does do those other things, but in particular ways. Social media is unlike a diary in that a diary has nothing to do with engagement. A diary does not require others to recognize you via the statements you write in it; it does not require others at all.

But social media does require those things. Without them, the algorithm buries your posts as “low engagement” and punishes you with a feeling of neglect in that your expression has been, it seems, ignored by your friends and loved ones. This obviously encourages users to trammel their posts into specific vocabularies, genres, and types of subject matter that the algorithm will like and that people will engage with. (Zeynep Tufekci illustrates the mechanics of this very well in her discussion of the particular challenges algorithmic favorability poses for activists in Twitter and Teargas.) In that sense it intensifies the “relay” effect of social power on what one is moved to say.

But it’s more fundamental than that. It’s not only about what one is moved to say but that one is moved to speak in the first place. Stefan Higgins elaborates on how the pressure to “share” arises from the general state of anxiety that many social media platforms induce:

Social media platforms use our ambivalence about attention and our own agency to their own benefit at the same time as they seem to cater to us. […T]hey mobilize our negative feelings to give us the impression of agency.

Crises, like sparkplugs, spur us into action: gathering information, waiting for updates, searching for opinions. This process keeps us forever suspended, forever updating, and forever in “crisis mode.” When platforms show us things that make us feel bad and anxious, it is not because they are working defectively but because they are working correctly.

This state of anxiety makes sharing updates, commenting on recent developments, commenting on the discourse about the crisis, or cracking jokes about the shared state of anxiety extremely natural. You have to do something while you’re hanging out refreshing your feed; you mark yourself as a good observer by what you retweet, respond to, comment on. This feeds the overall tendency to actually express oneself on these platforms, not just use them to observe. And much of this expression is made up of confessions: about how the crisis is making us feel, about how we don’t care enough or care too much, about how it affects us as the type of self we are imitating (coercive mimeticism).

This rising tide of expression/confession has a secondary effect in turn. In a world where (seemingly) everyone has a public megaphone and makes frequent use of it, the act of not speaking becomes, itself, potentially suspect. This is why after, e.g., a terrorist attack in Paris, many people changed their Facebook icons or added a filter that stood for solidarity with/grieving for the victims. (In other words, they did not only observe this iteration of crisis in Higgins’ sense; they commented on it.)

Many, perhaps most of those users had never been to Paris, knew no one there, and had no special expertise about the place or the event. Practically speaking, they had nothing to do with it. But not to participate in these icon “confessions” becomes tantamount to saying “I don’t care about this tragedy.” More and more public figures are functionally obligated to speak about any issue in the news cycle, whether or not they actually have anything of value to say about it, because otherwise their silence is “telling” or “deafening.” In other words, the pressure to confess one’s inner truth becomes more and more constant for more and more people, because not doing so becomes a statement in itself.

I thought the Duchess of Cambridge’s recent appearance at the Golden Globes was a good example. It was the year that the women attending wore black in recognition of #TimesUp. Kate compromised by wearing a dress that was partially black and partially a dark, solid color. There was MASSIVE discussion about what this meant–did she support the movement? Was she saying she didn’t? Why hadn’t she spared everyone the angst by releasing a statement, if she wasn’t going to wear black? A few decades ago this would have played out differently. The royalty are supposed to be “apolitical” (lol), and so the standard operating procedure would have been simply to say nothing. Saying nothing would not have meant active disagreement or non-support in the eyes of much of the public (though activists would probably feel differently). It would have been the thing to do if you want to stay neutral. I think her people were operating on that outdated playbook when they chose a compromise frock and agreed that she shouldn’t issue a statement to clarify what the dress did or did not mean. But nowadays, silence or even ambiguity automatically means “I’m against it” (or whatever the suspect, Bad view is) because the expectation is that one should always come out with a statement of some sort. So if you don’t, it must be because your inner truth–what you think about it–is something you think wouldn’t be well received. A lot of people (including happy royal-watchers who love Kate) were very troubled by her silence, even though she is not in the industry, not even from this country, and arguably not really in a position where her opinion ought to be offered.

But silence does not mean silence anymore. When the social default is to express oneself all the time about everything, silence becomes a statement of refusal to participate, which must be meaningful in itself.

This, in turn, reinforces the increasing ubiquity of the obligation to confess. And it’s so easy! And it comes with various kinds of rewards! All of this in turn serves the business models of social media companies: “Liberate yourself through confession by generating more data and eyeballs for us to sell!” (Again, this is not to say that people don’t actually find liberating community and connection on social media. Tufekci makes this very clear in Twitter and Teargas. But that’s not what social media is for.)

I strongly suspect that the tendency for individuals who are not marginalized in any major way to identify themselves as somehow deviant is part of this. It’s not only about the representational dynamics described above: people are disaffected in general, and we live in an individualist society with strong narratives about personal branding, self-discovery, and setting oneself apart. So people deal with their sense of disaffection by producing themselves as (supposedly) unique, whether this means creating a fake online identity, identifying with diagnoses or sexualities that may or may not really apply or mean much (”heteroflexible,” anyone?), or getting really obnoxious about their taste in music or whatever else. This is basic culture of capitalism stuff. But part of how it actually happens is through confession.

Chris Fleming summarized it well, I think:

I’m also tired of people normalizing the word “freak.” “Sometimes I’ll have two lattes! I’m such a freak!” “Sometimes I’ll sing along to music in my car. I’m a goddamn freak!!”

I think it’s really notable that people repeatedly confess their freakiness, even when it is incredibly normal shit. Why put it in these terms? Why not distinguish oneself through excellence or accomplishments or anything else? Why do so many social media posts start with “Is it just me or…” “Am I the only one who…” “Does anybody else…” and all the other phrases that imply that the poster is confessing a quirk or oddity, or something they at least think might be abnormal? Even when it’s super-duper boringly normal?

Basic insecurity is part of it, of course. So too is the fact that these phrasings invite others to engage: to chime in, saying “@ me next time,” “called out,” “I feel seen,” etc. This is one of the “genres” of posts that social media encourages by its engagement-oriented algorithmic structures. But more than that, speaking this way turns what could be just “sharing” a stray thought into an act of confession. Pretending that one is expressing something from behind a veil of repression (because it means you’re ~coming out as a freak, confessing something) allows the poster–even those belonging to the most normative categories–to access that sense of liberation, of self-production, of “speaking your truth” that is involved with the acts of confession structurally required of the marginalized.

People often fret about the reward structure of social media as being a kind of dopamine factory, where you get positive responses for posting. Various critics are worried about people counting likes and comments and reposts, on the model of a lab rat getting pellets. This is probably a real thing; I’ve experienced it at times. But it’s not the whole story. To go back to Higgins, the emotional experience of social media is ambivalent (more than positive). We sit in what Sianne Ngai calls “ugly feelings”:

Historically, scholars have tended to interpret unambiguous feelings like anger, fear, and happiness as the primary drivers of our actions, but for Ngai it’s the ugly feelings — ambivalent emotions like envy, irritation, and anxiety — that are “perversely functional.” Ngai argues that ambiguous and ugly feelings are non-cathartic, because they “foreground a failure of emotional release.” This failure prompts a kind of “suspended action”: exactly the kind of obstructed agency we often feel at the mercy of endlessly updating platforms and algorithms. To feel irritation is to feel a kind of ongoing, weak anger that does not come with the emotional release of an outburst of fury, since we may not know what, exactly, we are irritated about. The suspended and even disorienting feelings of irritation or anxiety drive an unceasing desire to act in some way to overcome the confusion these feelings cause.

Because ugly feelings are confusing, and because that confusion motivates a desire in us to “feel better,” negative emotions are actually productive of action — a productivity perfectly suited to information-gathering, capital-accumulating platform corporations.

There are two points to be made here. First, that last line about productivity is easily paralleled to Foucault’s understanding of discipline and power. Second, while Higgins is more focused on how the desire for catharsis keeps us refreshing feeds, looking for something that will help us feel that our “ugly” emotions are resolved, I would point out that another way to generate a sense of catharsis (however fleeting or week) is the liberatory rush of self ex-pression, of confession. And social media makes it possible to get that anytime you want.

While this affordance is definitely tied to engagement–confession requires a hearer–it’s not simply about the mechanics of wanting more likes. It’s also not just about moving your thoughts and feelings out of your brain, like in a diary. It’s about not just being seen, but being seen to have confessed: that is where the reward of confession lies. In this reduced, micro form, it is a way of reminding ourselves that we exist, proving to ourselves and others that we are who we say we are. Higgins again: “Although many critiques of technology and social media claim that ‘compulsive’ platforms nullify our sense of agency and alienate us from an idealized ‘real life,’ it may be more accurate to say they flatter us into thinking that we are in control.“

In all of these senses, the availability of social media and its algorithmic structures and its business model encourage, indeed almost require, acts of confession. They discipline us to express ourselves. This is subordinate to capitalism’s bigger structures, obviously (Chow didn’t title her book the way she did for nothing), but it is particular to surveillance capitalism because only a situation in which confession is a) very easy to do, b) incentivized by institutional, social, and infrastructural conditions, and c) able to be recorded and quantified serves that model of accumulation. There have always been people who wander the streets pouring out their life story (or ideas, or whatever) to anyone who will listen because they have no other means of feeling seen and recognized--of producing their own existence. But social media makes street preachers of us all, and our confessors are data brokers. Power is productive, and what it produces in us on social media is an endless torrent of confessional speech.

[gaiatheorist]

Will it change?

Sexual harassment. Everywhere you look, even if you try not to. I don’t even know how to spell the noise I made when I read that sport-coaches are to be banned from having sexual relations with 16-17 year olds. I’d assumed that was ‘a given’, the age of consent in the UK is 16, but anyone working with under-18s should always have been bound by a duty of care not to take advantage of their charges? 

There is hand-wringing, and panicking amongst ‘some’ men, ‘some’ women are encouraging a shut-up-and-put-up approach, and a certain UK celebrity chef has banned his daughter from posting ‘selfies’ on Instagram. (Watch her other platforms, Daddy, it’s a brave move to come out and say you’re policing her profile, but you are only one of many push/pull factors in her life.) Gods, that’s an odd side-spin, the ‘Daddy’ angle, and I need to mind myself not to go off on a tangent of “As the father of daughters...” My mother saw me as a commodity, and wanted to parade me around grotty wine-bars in short skirts and low tops, my father had already laid the foundations of eroding my self-esteem to a point where I should have been ripe for the picking. In a way, I suppose I was.

Away from my possibly-unusual developmental experiences, with my father trying to keep me princess-pristine, and my mother trying to whore me out, I’m observing an attitude-shift, and I’m hoping it catches on. ‘Too late for me’, I suppose, but I will, eventually, re-engage with the world, and influence other people, in whatever way I can, that nobody has to ‘put up with it.’  Not just the sexualised angle, I’m currently ‘having a wobble’ about the gas-men. I don’t know which gas-men are coming to fix my heating today, more to the point, I don’t know if anyone’s coming at all, but that’s just the lettings agents being slack, and not confirming when they said they would. The heating has never worked properly, and I’ve reported it at every gas-safety inspection, and every condescending rental inspection for nine years. The landlord did have the boiler exchanged about four years ago, but putting a new boiler into a system that doesn’t work didn’t fix the heating, it just gives him a better ‘energy efficiency’ rating if he decides to sell the house. 

I’m hardly likely to come across as ‘bored housewife’, and, unless I actually mention it, nobody knows I’m that most fearsome of things, a single 40-year-old-woman. I’m wrapped in multiple layers of clothing, no make-up, no hair-do, I don’t ‘dress like a woman’, I dress like a human. If it’s the horrible old gas-man that usually does my safety inspection, I might not ‘bite my tongue’ this time. (In the ‘verbal inhibition’ sense, not the faux-coy 50 shades sense.) I avoid interacting with him as much as is possible, not because I’m a ‘nice girl’, or because he rambles on about different types of pipe-fittings, but because he infuriates me. He’s old-school, and me not being barefoot and pregnant upsets his view of ‘women.’ I have, on occasion, ‘talked back’ when he’s been offensive-assumptive, the only reason I usually stay out of his way is to avoid him making complaints about me to the lettings agents, and me ending up on some sort of list of ‘difficult tenants’. 

He, like the “Don’t try to lift that, lass, I’ll pick it up, it’s heavy.” father-in-law, are ‘too old to change.’ Defeatist? I don’t think so, more realistic. 20+ years of ‘lifting that’ didn’t stop the mole-man insisting I shouldn’t attempt multiple tasks or activities, due to the fact that I’m female. Old dogs, new tricks etc, a proportion of the population, regardless of the configuration of their genitalia, have very fixed perceptions of gender-roles and such. I don’t, but I’m just a collection of meat no-one eats, my son seeing that has taught him that the old ‘pink or blue’ rules are nonsense. Fair enough, that’s given rise to multiple identity-crises in him, but he knows he’s ‘not done yet’, and, as horrible as the wobbles are when he has them, he comes through the other side every time.  

That ‘family’ dynamic must have been difficult for him, there’s the ‘normalisation’ angle, in that small children just accept and absorb their environments, but, as he started to develop his own identity, I can imagine that the polarisation of ‘me’, and his dad’s family raised some questions in his mind. The ones he asked, I answered. His dad wanted to be ‘looked after’, I hate people doing things ‘for’ me. His grandma, aunts, and female cousins like cake, and flowers, and soap operas, I very much don’t. I made myself this way, as a protective mechanism, rejecting the perceived-vulnerabilities associated with femininity, I won’t have other people’s less-than perceptions projected on to me. The kid spent more time with me than his Dad during his formative years, I worked 20 hours a week, and the ex established a routine of his parents caring for ‘the grub’ during most of that time, grandma was ‘better’ with babies than the ex, and the ex never made any effort to improve his own ‘babysitting’ skill-set. He was 32 when the kid was born, not quite in the ‘too old to change’ bracket, but he chose not to change, handing over his infant son to the grandparents because he didn’t know ‘how’ to interact with the tiny, helpless thing. Neither did I, at first, one of us learned. 

The ex won’t change. He still wants to be the centre of attention all of the time, he ‘sits on’ the kid, when the boy’s busy reading, studying, or doing whatever else 19 year olds do. The man has no perception of personal space, he’s like a cat, if he wants your attention, and you don’t give it to him immediately, he sits on you. The ex has been raised to see a divide between ‘male’ and ‘female’ tasks, the mother-in-law must be in her eighties now, but she takes in his laundry, and cleans his flat, because he works. I worked. I worked full-time and then some, but he was somehow exempt from household chores, asking me to ‘have a quick tidy round’ when he had friends or family visiting. I should have said no, I allowed that to continue.  

There needs to be change. I’m exceptionally cautious on who I interact with because I genuinely don’t have the energy for arguments, that is a defeatist attitude, but I’m still in self-preservation mode. My ‘social circle’ is minuscule, in part because I hate the ‘justifying myself’ aspect of interacting with people, single-disabled-unemployed, and the audacity to be female as well? ‘Most’ people want to fix me, or fix me up. I’m broke, I’m not broken, I don’t need ‘fixing’. I fully accept that I’m the different/difficult one, and that ‘most’ people aren’t intending to be patronising, condescending, or offensive, they’re just ‘trying to help.’ In a way that reinforces the hetero-normative gender stereotypes partly responsible for this whole mess. (The world, not me, I’m almost entirely responsible for my own personal mess.) 

“Ooh, you can’t be on your own in the house all the time!” I can. 

“Do you want me to fix that for you?” No, I can fix most things myself.

“You ought to go out more, and have some fun!” Going out really isn’t fun when you have brain injuries, it’s overwhelming-exhausting. 

“Oh, I didn’t realise you’d split up! Are you ‘looking for someone’ now?” HELL, no, I’m a viable entity in my own right, I don’t ‘need’ to be part of a couple to exist. (Mad cackle, there, at the time I shocked my former managers into silence with “I have no desire to belong to anyone, or anything.”)

It’s a weird one, while-ever females continue to take advantage of their perceived enfeeblement, nothing will change, and some males will take advantage of the power imbalance. We’re not that different physically, and I doubt we’re as different emotionally as old fashioned thinking would have us believe. We’re all just mobile meat, with these invented-accepted rules and societal norms and such. (I walk on the side of the path closest to the road when I’m with my son, fifty, or a hundred years ago, that would have raised eyebrows, because it’s the male party that’s supposed to take the road-side, not the female. He’s taller and stronger than me, but neither of us carries a sword, so it doesn’t matter which of us walks on which side. I take the road-side so that if a vehicle does mount the kerb, it hits me before the boy.)  

For me, the ‘accepted’ could do with examining. Old fashioned good manners are one thing, but the assumption that all females are weak and feeble creatures, incapable of holding a thought in our pretty little heads needs to go. I’m under no illusion that I’ll see equality in my lifetime, but I’m hopeful that, as unpleasant as some of the disclosures are, that they might start a shift in attitudes; this gender power-imbalance needs to be challenged, and it needs to change.