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Neil's discussion
Jul. 17th, 2005 09:42 pmInspired by ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
thekinginyellow and dergnoam, I'm /also/ going to post on the "dilemma of the nice guy" seen here since it bugs me, and I couldn't even read the whole thing in one go. (Note: For simplicity's sake, I'm going to /only/ be talking about guy/girl pairings. Nobody's mentioned other possibilities yet, and certainly there are no general-society-dictated rules about how other relationships should come about, so please don't think that I'm assuming that guy/girl relationships are the only thing that should happen.)
It's way too gender-polarized. Sure, society dictates that guys should ask girls out rather than the other way around, and it seems to be a commonplace thing for a guy to buy a girl a drink in a bar, but in that discussion someone actually said that women have it easy because they don't have to ask out guys, and the possibility of girls' actions making guys uncomfortable never seems to come up. (Incidentally, I did skim the rest just now, and I /really/ don't like RZ there, though I haven't read all of what he's said.) It seems to me that girls can have all the same issues when interested in guys, and that they can just as well ask guys out. (Just in order to preempt "sure, you're saying that but you wouldn't have the nerve to try it" comments, even though I probably wouldn't get them as RZ etc. are surely not reading my LJ, I /have/ asked two guys out--two uninterested ones, at that. This is primarily because like Noam, I often find signals and subtleties difficult to understand or deal with. {To anyone who snorted, grinned or laughed when they read that, grr.}) Furthermore, if a girl shows too much interest it could certainly make a guy uncomfortable. On this kind of minor scale, it seems to me that girl-guy actions should go both ways. On the large scale, of course, sexual harrassment etc. is much more common coming from guys and directed at girls, but that's not a license for girls to act however they like, nor for people to decide their behavior according to their behavior when finding a partner. Is that really just me?
(Comments, please?)
thekinginyellow and dergnoam, I'm /also/ going to post on the "dilemma of the nice guy" seen here since it bugs me, and I couldn't even read the whole thing in one go. (Note: For simplicity's sake, I'm going to /only/ be talking about guy/girl pairings. Nobody's mentioned other possibilities yet, and certainly there are no general-society-dictated rules about how other relationships should come about, so please don't think that I'm assuming that guy/girl relationships are the only thing that should happen.)It's way too gender-polarized. Sure, society dictates that guys should ask girls out rather than the other way around, and it seems to be a commonplace thing for a guy to buy a girl a drink in a bar, but in that discussion someone actually said that women have it easy because they don't have to ask out guys, and the possibility of girls' actions making guys uncomfortable never seems to come up. (Incidentally, I did skim the rest just now, and I /really/ don't like RZ there, though I haven't read all of what he's said.) It seems to me that girls can have all the same issues when interested in guys, and that they can just as well ask guys out. (Just in order to preempt "sure, you're saying that but you wouldn't have the nerve to try it" comments, even though I probably wouldn't get them as RZ etc. are surely not reading my LJ, I /have/ asked two guys out--two uninterested ones, at that. This is primarily because like Noam, I often find signals and subtleties difficult to understand or deal with. {To anyone who snorted, grinned or laughed when they read that, grr.}) Furthermore, if a girl shows too much interest it could certainly make a guy uncomfortable. On this kind of minor scale, it seems to me that girl-guy actions should go both ways. On the large scale, of course, sexual harrassment etc. is much more common coming from guys and directed at girls, but that's not a license for girls to act however they like, nor for people to decide their behavior according to their behavior when finding a partner. Is that really just me?
(Comments, please?)
