this has happened to me a few times as a kid but the only time I distinctly remember being asked out as a joke, the dude comes up to me from his friend group (we are probably 12 at this point) and is like “do you wanna go out” and I was like “what” and he was like “do you want to go out with me” and I put my books in my locker and I look at him and I go “……no?” because I genuinely didn’t and his shit eating grin falters and he goes “it was a joke” and I was like “okay” and he goes back to his friends and I can see them all waiting for the punchline but instead he came back more confused than me, which is hilarious, because im sure he was expecting me, the fat nerd, to be like “of COURSE I would LOVE TO” but instead I was like “why on earth.,..?”. it probably hurt his ego more than mine. fantastic
“It was in this discourse of colonial “feminism” that the notion that an intrinsic connection existed between the issues of culture and the status of women, and in particular that progress for women could only be achieved through abandoning the native culture, first made its appearance… It was never argued, for instance, even by the most ardent nineteenth-century feminists, that European women could liberate themselves from the oppressiveness of Victorian dress (designed to compel the female figure to the ideal of frailty and helplessness by means of suffocating, rib-cracking stays, it must surely rank among the more constrictive fashions of relatively recent times) only by adopting the dress of some other culture. Nor has it ever been argued, whether in Mary Wollstonecraft’s day, when European women had no rights, or in our own day and even by the most radical feminists, that because male domination and injustice to women have existed throughout the West’s recorded history, the only recourse for Western women is to abandon Western culture and find themselves some other culture. The idea seems absurd, and yet this is routinely how the matter of improving the status of women is posed with respect to women in Arab and other non-Western societies. Whether those societies did or did not, will or will not, abandon the ways of one culture in favor of those of another is commonly presented in Western-based literature as the crux of the matter of progress for women.”
—
Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate (1992).
Feeling Like a Woman is entirely based on the assumptions about what other women feel like in regards to their womanhood (which is expected to be the traditional image sold by the heteropatriarchy), and it often grossly overestimates how comfortable women are with and in their womanhood
womanhood is alienating! many of us feel a sort of “i guess im theoretically a women but i dont feel like one”, like there’s a barrier between you and the woman you’re supposed to be. there’s no single “correct” experience of womanhood and just because butch lesbians or trans women (and butch trans women especially) dont fit into your perception of what a woman “should be” doesn’t make either of them any less of a woman
and really, in a world where women are always being told what we’re not and what we should be, you’re gonna go and use the same practice that hurts all of us against your fellow women? for shame
subverting norms, roles and expectations tied to gender have always been a big part of gay culture, so lesbians using he/him pronouns shouldnt be a hard to grasp concept
