I don't mean this in a dismissive "haha you've got daddy issues" way but I really am coming to suspect that most if not all people who view the opposite sex as like, fundamentally alien on a mental or emotional level really just do not have healthy family relationships. You see it with the weird Trad and Alpha Male guys who can't seem to conceive of women as fully-aware human beings instead of some sort of symbiotes who need men to guide them, you see it with the weird radfems who like to go on about men being incable of feeling real emotion and just being driven by instinct and needing to be ruled over like dogs. I just find it really difficult to imagine arriving at those worldviews if you ever had a mutually caring and respectful relationship with an opposite-sex parent or sibling.
i’ve had radfems go off on me for talking about my relationship with my dad. things are more complicated now after i came out, but when i was a baby he stayed home with me and worked part time so my mom could work full time, he was never weird about my periods and didn’t use weird euphemisms (he would just say “are you cramping? do you need tylenol? need me to buy you some tampons?”), taught me the basics of sex ed since my conservative school wasn’t going to do that, was very understanding and supportive for the most part when i would talk to him about personal problems (when i left a shitty relationship at the end of high school he was the first person i told and i cried on his shoulder for like half an hour), when his best friend/my godfather died he didn’t hide his tears.
there were many things i wish he’d done differently, but there were many things he did right, and so many people get legitimately angry when i try to talk about it. people have even accused me of “trying to make excuses for shitty men” for just talking about the fact that not all fathers are emotionless assholes who never see their families. it really solidified in my mind that some people don’t want things to change. they just want to stay angry with the way they are currently because anger is cathartic and much less effort than actual systemic change.
I have a couple popular posts on tumblr that are funny or heartwarming stories about my dad, and all of them get regular comments that boil down to, "men suck and he's probably really shitty behind the scenes."
And it's like. He's a human person, of course he's not perfect. But if your response to seeing someone tell a nice story about their dad is to immediately dissect all the ways the dad in question must secretly be awful, that's...that's a problem. That's not an appropriate reaction to someone telling a happy story about a parent.
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