Problems that men have to deal with

[DementedSheep]

A lot of the stupid is stupid and pointless and face very real issues but considering I don't think women should be acting like "women" I certainly don't want men to start.

define "acting like women"

Note that women is in quotation marks. I don't necessarily think stuff is inherent. Still I'm talking about things like being overly emotional and sensitive, screaming and crying and carrying on over stupid things, being fearful of everything (every-time I see a women get silly over a bug or mouse I want to slap them) or getting hurt, "talking" about their emotional problems without a purpose and going to councillors for nothing, inability to handle physical pain, fucking about with clothing and make-up even when the end result is crippling, obsessing over relationships and drama (I despise most media targeted at girls), being passive and being content to leech off of a spouse. A lot of women are far too comfortable being incompetent and needing help or even worse handing a task completely over to someone with simple things that you really shouldn't need help with. Even in a lot of women's fiction the girl ends up being completely outclassed by the guys and I end up wondering why we have them as the POV character. It seem a lot of women would rather attach themselves to a hero rather than be one. I see men lament being expected to be strong, stoic, capable and able to provide but everyone should want to be that. Having shame for negative traits and failures is a good thing within reason.

 

[mecegirl]

I'm not. I was commenting on how, as a guy, shaving my face is extremely annoying and I'd give anything to not have to do that and its one of the things I envy about women. Also I've shaved my entire body before and as a guy thats still much harder than a woman considering we tend to get hair in more places than they do.

I'm preeeeety sure women have hair in all the same places men do, its just a question of density

Exactly, down-like hair isn't noticeable or really needs to be shaved. I'm well aware there is hair there, but my experience has been that women don't get the same noticeable thickness. I didn't mean to claim they don't have any, just that its not the of the shaving necessity type. Yes I realize there are women who get that type of hair in similar/same areas, and I can sympathize with them on it. My whole point was that there are far far more men who have to deal with shaving their faces constantly than there are women who do. I've also been written up at a job for not shaving in a timely manner (even though I had bad razor burn and a doctors note saying I wasn't supposed to shave at that time). Aside from modeling/acting, I don't know of any jobs a woman could have that would put shaving as a requirement, but hey I could be wrong.

Overall shaving is something that both sexes have their difficulties with. Most women use tweezers, a hair removal cream, or wax to get rid of the hair on their faces. And I can't think of too many women that would go to work with obviously unshaven legs or armpits unless they were wearing clothes that would cover it. It shouldn't matter, but social conditioning tends to hold fast.

Not all workplaces have issues with a well trimmed beard. Nor does society at large. But if a woman goes somewhere while obviously unshaven then she can be considered unhygienic. Which is weird since body hair has little to do with hygiene.
But yes, women don't have to remove hair from their faces that often. Usually it is the hair on our legs and pubic area that grows back the fastest. And if you think razor burn on your face is bad try getting it on your bikini line (ah youth, learning how to shave, and having to resist the urge to claw my skin off down there at school the next day)

In a corporate environment I'm more than sure that shaving would be required(in the sense that it would be codified within a dress code). But for the most part it would probably be something an employer would assume a woman did anyway. Even for a retail job, if a woman showed up with obviously unshaven legs to an interview some employers would think she's being slovenly and not hire her. And I doubt that showing up to work in such a manner on a repeated basis wouldn't get her a warning. I could be wrong though.

 

[Zaeseled]

I don't have a lot of them, mostly because I'm careful with who I take on as friends. I have very long hair, favor fedoras and trench coats without apology, and very rarely get shit for those things.

However, I do get crap for not liking beer. Seriously, I can't stand it. Most beers taste like some combination of sweat socks and licking hot aluminum to me. If there's one thing a man is "supposed" to do, it's enjoy a cold beer. It also leaves me out of the beer discussions for the most part, as my contributions consist of, "Well that label doesn't taste quite like Cthulhu's pit sweat."

Also the whole "men are to initiate all romantic overtures" business constantly gives me grief. I wouldn't mind being the one pursued instead of doing the pursuing.

I feelses you, I can't stand beer either. The problem is that all my friends used to tell me that I just hadn't found the right kind of beer yet, so I got to try a lot of them. I do, however like vodka, have a high tolerance for alcohol and don't get hungover. They stopped doing that after a while but I still feel that they're excluding me from whatever "beers-r-us" they're in.

 

[Trude]

Male, heterosexual and white as lard, I grew up in a very balanced house with two very well educated and rounded parents. Being academics, they put school first but never at the expense of physical hobbies like sports, which I've taken part in since I was six. Mother being a politician though, you're not likely to be bullied based on your gender, ever.
Honestly the worst examples would have been gender profiling, which got me into trouble when a group of smart ass girls in elementary thought it'd be a riot to cover themselves in mud and claim some random boy pushed them down.
Ask me again in twenty years, maybe then I could contribute to this conversation.

 

[FieryTrainwreck]

snip

Just a heads up: in response to that (admittedly dry) video, the insanely progressive nations of Nordic Europe completely defunded the Nordic Gender Institute, which had been responsible for the majority of "gender theory" informing public policy throughout the region. That goofy comedian wandering around and interviewing people completely altered one of the most "gender-sensitive" landscapes in the world, demonstrating once more that truth bombs don't need a degree - especially when so many modern degrees are completely suspect/outright bullshit.

 

[Vault101]

hoo boy....

Note that women is in quotation marks. I don't necessarily think stuff is inherent. Still I'm talking about things like being overly emotional and sensitive, screaming and crying and carrying on over stupid things

this ones a little hard to measure isn't it? feeling things aside from anger isn't actually a bad thing, or a weakness regardless of what were lead to belive

[quote/]being fearful of everything (every-time I see a women get silly over a bug or mouse I want to slap them)[/quote]
I'm sorry but as much as a REALLY wish I wasn't bothered by spiders I am, same with Lizards and I think Lizards are cute, but both things set off my fight/flight response, its involuntary

[quote/]or getting hurt, "talking" about their emotional problems without a purpose and going to councillors for nothing,[/quote]
talking about your emotional shit is actually really useful

[quote/]inability to handle physical pain,[/quote]
child-birth...nuff said

[quote/]fucking about with clothing and make-up even when the end result is crippling, obsessing over relationships and drama (I despise most media targeted at girls),[/quote]

...so? how'd you get from being into cloths and stuff to being....difficult? an interest in ones appearance isn';t inherently bad and you know I hate womens fashion as much as anyone but I get over it and not get a flase sense of superiority over people for their different priorities

[quote/]being passive and being content to leech off of a spouse. A lot of women are far too comfortable being incompetent and needing help or even worse handing a task completely over to someone with simple things that you really shouldn't need help with.[/quote]
ok this is not a good trait

[quote/]Even in a lot of women's fiction the girl ends up being completely outclassed by the guys and I end up wondering why we have them as the POV character. It seem a lot of women would rather attach themselves to a hero rather than be one. I see men lament being expected to be strong, stoic, capable and able to provide but everyone should want to be that. Having shame for negative traits and failures is a good thing within reason.[/quote]
I don't particularly like women centric media either...but anyway

while I've picked apart your points I get the vibe that overall you're very frustrated with the expectations and less than steller stereotypes that get placed on women

except I don't think directing your grievances on those who you perceive to "follow" the "rules" is the right way to look at it, it makes you no better than people who might chastise you for not being "feminine" enough

 

[Phasmal]

I've never really liked the idea that masculinity is supposed to be about being `strong`, but in itself is really frail. Like, `Oh no I cannot let you carry the heavier shopping bag! It's not manly!`, `Oh damn, I lost a hand at poker to a girl, better go outside and brood for a while`, `NO I WON'T HOLD HANDBAG FOR A SECOND, IT GIRL THING!`.

I mean, it's like some people think the Secret Man Police are gonna jump out of the bushes and stick you in a pink dress.
It just strikes me as insecure to believe in `emasculation`, and just further confuses me that there's pretty much no `other side` to it, women don't worry about being `effeminated`.

I like a man who can rock some pink.

Other than that, reading this thread has been educational.

 

[Ikasury]

suppose i have a strange take on this, as a girl...

i grew up in a matriarchy, so when i went out into the 'real world' AKA 'MAN'S WORLD!! RAWR!!' and did all the stuff the 'guys do' i was looked at as if i were an alien species... i liked playing soccar, i played a better defense in our class football skirmishes then all the whimpy 'dudes' twice my size, and wiped off a bloody nose like it was no problem... my cheif loved me calling me more of a 'man' with 'bigger balls' then all the other dudes in my class...

personally i think all gender sterotypes are bullshit... i have no idea how to wear makeup, i burn magazines (unless they're video game ones), the concept of 'weak' makes no sense to me or why its expected of my gender when in my experience i find guys to cry more often then girls... the day guys deal with a bout of legitimate debilitating cramps from PMS is the day i'll stop calling them pussies for whining about a broken nose when i punch them for hitting on me and not taking 'no' the first three times...

i get irritated when i have a guy friend who gets upset when other 'dude-bros' call him not manly enough for not liking the same inane bullshit they like, i've had to learn to not punch these guys in the face and stand up for them as apparently that's even worse... luckily my husband is all for me doing this, so any time a guy calls him 'unmanly' for liking to cook and clean so i beat the offending 'dude's' ass hubby can just walk away grinning saying 'yes, i get to tap that'... suppose that's a win-win for gender equality...

suppose i have a reversal of this, my mother essentially raised me in the same mentality you guys did so to me that's all the same stuff i feel compelled to do as well, because you're not 'woman enough' if you can't do everything better then the boys, in my mother's opinion at least... sigh, suppose i could just say our parents fuck us all over no matter what .-.

 

[Vault101]

i get irritated when i have a guy friend who gets upset when other 'dude-bros' call him not manly enough for not liking the same inane bullshit they like, i've had to learn to not punch these guys in the face and stand up for them as apparently that's even worse... luckily my husband is all for me doing this, so any time a guy calls him 'unmanly' for liking to cook and clean so i beat the offending 'dude's' ass hubby can just walk away grinning saying 'yes, i get to tap that'... suppose that's a win-win for gender equality...
.

I found it funny that "feminine" is charachterised as being petty, weak, and prone to cracking a sad at the slightest provocation...yet if anything dude-bro culure seems the very definition of petty bullshit

[i/]waaah! somone might think I'm "teh gay" its not faaaaaaiir[/i] <-GOD

 

[someonehairy-ish]

Eh, there's plenty of stuff. Not even just the expectations of liking sports or knowing about cars or whatever. I'm more troubled by the fact men in abusive relationships are either treated as though it's their fault, or are summarily ignored. Men have higher suicide rates, make up a larger percentage of the homeless population, have virtually no reproductive rights in many countries, are acceptable targets for violence, etc.

I'm not an MRA, it's obvious that women have plenty of shit to deal with too. It's just not as one-sided as is popularly believed. Obviously this varies a lot by culture and country. Women definitely have it far worse than men in say, Saudi Arabia, for example.

As for what has affected me personally, it's only minor stuff. Yes there are the people who look at me like I'm mad when I say I don't follow football (soccer) or support a team, and yes people attack me occasionally for liking novels and poetry and art and music over anything 'manly', and yes people assume that the best way for me to deal with depression is exactly that; 'deal with it', and yes women assume that if I turn them down it's either because a) I don't find them attractive, or b) I'm gay or something, and not because sometimes men actually aren't in the mood, who'd have thought?

Overall though, apart from the depression thing I've had it pretty good. I know plenty of guys who've been in the abusive relationship scenario I mentioned earlier, or things of that ilk, but for me personally it's not so bad. I think the fact that I look like some kind of cross between a skinhead and a bear might let me get away with far more 'feminine' shit without criticism than I otherwise would.

 

[BathorysGraveland2]

Well, speaking purely from personal experiences, about the only thing I've had to put up with that's been gender related is being told by a few people to cut my hair. As if having long hair is something that should be exclusive to women.

And to be completely honest, if that's the worst I've gotten, I'm doing pretty damn okay.

 

[Pinkamena]

Reading this thread makes me feel very lucky! I have not had to deal with any of the stuff you're talking about, with the exception of "What, you don't like sports, particularly football?" questions. Other from that, most people here are really not going to give a shit about you having to act "manly".

Of course, I'm talking about how it was from high shool and up. In high school I had a few friends and we were not exactly super manly. We played games, didn't really enjoy sports, one was fucking amazing at drawing, and we were all generally pretty "unmanly" in the oldy timey sense. Nobody really gave a shit.

Nowadays I live in a very, very multicultural environment where we're all pretty much nerds in some regard, and that means that being non-normal is in fact the norm. It feels great! I don't feel like I have to be someone else than myself. If someone asks me what I did during the sunny weekend, I can tell them I watched cartoons without hesitation.

 

[Lieju]

Well the guys I know have mostly suffered from being judged of being 'not real men'.

The latest instance I can remember was people making jokes about how a guy I know is henpecked for not having a say on how their house is decorated. Because he has no interest in interior decoration. But of course if he did, that'd be totally gay, bro.

So I guess the only real manly way is to exclaim how you don't care and tell your wife to do it, while making grumpy faces when shopping for furniture, but making sure the wife asks for you for permission for everything.

 

[MetalDooley]

At our school we had similar and it was usually a choice of football (soccer) or trampolining. It was clearly intended to divide the boys and the girls. I like football but some days (if it was particularly cold/wet trampolining sounded like a better option. You would get called gay for not doing football. Being a relatively smart kid my retort was usually "So you are telling me that being in a room surrounded by girls jumping up and down is gay. Yet taking part in an (almost) exclusively male activity isnt?" Needless to say they shut up

Saw a routine by a comedian(think it might have been Steve Hughes)about growing up in Australia which is a very macho sports orientated culture.He had no interest in sports so chose to do home economics in school instead and as a result was called gay/fag etc.His response was something similar to yours "I'm in a room surrounded by women meanwhile you're showering naked with 30 other blokes but yeah I'm the gay one"

OP: Female on Male violence is pretty much ignored or made a joke of and is something men are just supposed to shut up and deal with.I dated a girl years back who thought nothing of hitting me.Now it wasn't major like she was kicking the shit out of me but if we had an argument or I said something that annoyed her she had no problem punching me on the arm.If I complained I was basically told "man up".That shit would never fly if the roles were reversed.I can pretty much guarantee that if I had ever hit her I would have had her father and 2 brothers kicking in my front door and curbstomping me

On a less serious note - Weird hair growth as you get older.This is something most men will have to deal with where as you get older the hair on your head gets thinner while hair on other parts of your body gets thicker.I have way more hair on my back and in my ears now than I did in my 20's

 

[Lilani]

While I am a female, I have witnessed a few problems that I really pity men for having to deal with. I worked in a retail store for a while that had two floors, and you could get to the second floor by escalator or elevator. Obviously most people take the escalator, and one day I was working in one of the departments near the entrance to the up escalator when a man toting THREE very young children decided to brave the climb. There were a girl and boy who were probably 6 and 5 respectively swarming around him, then he had another tiny boy by the hand who was no more than a toddler and very wobbly on his feet. The toddler wasn't afraid of the escalator, so the guy chose to let the boy stand rather than pick him up.

Well, when escalator stairs form, they pop up and then scoot back a little. When the steps in front of the boy scooted back, he was just a little too close to the front of the step he was standing on, and the metal step scraped his knee. The boy started crying halfway up, and then the dad picked him up and started cooing to him when they got to the top. Myself and another coworker watched them get to the top just to make sure he wasn't seriously hurt, and that nobody fell in the bedlam.

When we saw everything was okay and turned to walk away, an older woman who was behind us and apparently just got there looked alarmed and asked us, "Are you sure those are his children?!" Apparently to this woman, a man carting three children around alone in public is more likely to be a kidnapper than a father babysitting the kids while mom shops, and if a child is crying with a man alone that obviously means they're being kidnapped. Never mind that he was going UP to the second floor, which is a dead end with no exits and connects to no other stores.

I also have a couple of male friends who have gone into elementary education, and they're both having to deal with 5-9 year old girls flirting with them and giving them special gifts and keepsakes. I'm sure female teachers have to deal with boys flirting with them, but male teachers receiving such attention is much more worried about than female teachers. Just this week someone on my Facebook shared a news story about two female teachers who had a threesome with a male junior high student with the comment, "Atta boy!" It's this sort of hyper-retaliation to male pedophilia and statutory rape combined with a trivialization of female pedophilia and statutory rape that really grinds my gears as far as problems I see men having to deal with.

 

[Lokis Maliki]

My personal grip is media. The way men are portrayed in media as incapable of taking care of themselves and being stupid/pig headed pisses me off.

 

[lord.jeff]

I've gotten crap for my long hair even to the point of being turned down for a few jobs, once by a women with hair not much shorter then mine. Also I get some shit for having a somewhat submission personality and when things do bug me I'd rather walk away then fight in most cases, I get told to man up a lot and for liking fruity drinks over beer but I stopped drinking at bars.

 

[Thaluikhain]

My personal grip is media. The way men are portrayed in media as incapable of taking care of themselves and being stupid/pig headed pisses me off.

Also very annoying, is the assumption that the male audience members identify with that, or aspire to be like that. When Britney Spears has a meltdown, she's setting a bad example, when Charlie Sheen has a meltdown, he's living the dream, or somesuch.

 

[the December King]

suppose i have a strange take on this, as a girl...

i grew up in a matriarchy, so when i went out into the 'real world' AKA 'MAN'S WORLD!! RAWR!!' and did all the stuff the 'guys do' i was looked at as if i were an alien species... i liked playing soccar, i played a better defense in our class football skirmishes then all the whimpy 'dudes' twice my size, and wiped off a bloody nose like it was no problem... my cheif loved me calling me more of a 'man' with 'bigger balls' then all the other dudes in my class...

personally i think all gender sterotypes are bullshit... i have no idea how to wear makeup, i burn magazines (unless they're video game ones), the concept of 'weak' makes no sense to me or why its expected of my gender when in my experience i find guys to cry more often then girls... the day guys deal with a bout of legitimate debilitating cramps from PMS is the day i'll stop calling them pussies for whining about a broken nose when i punch them for hitting on me and not taking 'no' the first three times...

i get irritated when i have a guy friend who gets upset when other 'dude-bros' call him not manly enough for not liking the same inane bullshit they like, i've had to learn to not punch these guys in the face and stand up for them as apparently that's even worse... luckily my husband is all for me doing this, so any time a guy calls him 'unmanly' for liking to cook and clean so i beat the offending 'dude's' ass hubby can just walk away grinning saying 'yes, i get to tap that'... suppose that's a win-win for gender equality...

suppose i have a reversal of this, my mother essentially raised me in the same mentality you guys did so to me that's all the same stuff i feel compelled to do as well, because you're not 'woman enough' if you can't do everything better then the boys, in my mother's opinion at least... sigh, suppose i could just say our parents fuck us all over no matter what .-.

So a 'Problems Men have to Deal With' thread and we have a girl-thug, a bully who uses violence as an answer, and who unironically calls men 'pussies'. Huh.

I guess when women want to discuss feminism, and men show up screaming 'what about the men?' that this is what it's like?

 

[giles]

So a 'Problems Men have to Deal With' thread and we have a girl-thug, a bully who uses violence as an answer, and who unironically calls men 'pussies'. Huh.

I guess when women want to discuss feminism, and men show up screaming 'what about the men?' that this is what it's like?

I thought it was more like the equivalent of "make me a sandwich".
But honestly, after someone else started denying widely reported facts like "The average man has a higher pain threshhold than the average woman" with "child-birth...nuff said" this was just taking it to the next level. Also note the same person commented on the post you quoted not by replying to the criminal assault, but by making fun of "dude-bro culture". Also note the very same person gave us a wonderful thread about how to approach gender debates on this forum.

Now we have shit posting from both sides in gender issues threads. At least equally shit is still equality.