I feel very similarly to you on this. I think I understand some women’s discomfort with the gender discussions here more than you appear to, perhaps because I was brought up to try to be aware of privilege and bias, but much of the rest rings true.
my deep friendships are mostly with men
I’m curious: are the exceptions women who also have mostly male friends (for whom you are an exception)? I ask because I’m the same way, and when I ask my few female friends, they tend to agree. I’m interested in that phenomenon, and I’d love to have a data point outside my own social circle.
Not exactly—my closest girlfriends actually live in a very female world. But there were always things I wasn’t comfortable telling them.
For what it’s worth, my sister and my mother are very much like me. My sister, especially, experiences that same tension between being a feminist and being a geek/tomboy/”one of the guys.” I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if genetics have something to do with it.
I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if genetics have something to do with it.
I wouldn’t be surprised either, although I don’t trust similar observations about my own family as evidence for it (since they’re almost by definition the people culturally closest to me).
I was going to ask what kind of ideas about gender roles dominate in the area where you grew up, exploring another theory, but then I remembered that a lot of my current friends didn’t grow up anywhere near me either. Although I suppose they all made a choice to live here now, so maybe it does have some meaning after all.
I feel very similarly to you on this. I think I understand some women’s discomfort with the gender discussions here more than you appear to, perhaps because I was brought up to try to be aware of privilege and bias, but much of the rest rings true.
I’m curious: are the exceptions women who also have mostly male friends (for whom you are an exception)? I ask because I’m the same way, and when I ask my few female friends, they tend to agree. I’m interested in that phenomenon, and I’d love to have a data point outside my own social circle.
Not exactly—my closest girlfriends actually live in a very female world. But there were always things I wasn’t comfortable telling them.
For what it’s worth, my sister and my mother are very much like me. My sister, especially, experiences that same tension between being a feminist and being a geek/tomboy/”one of the guys.” I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if genetics have something to do with it.
I wouldn’t be surprised either, although I don’t trust similar observations about my own family as evidence for it (since they’re almost by definition the people culturally closest to me).
I was going to ask what kind of ideas about gender roles dominate in the area where you grew up, exploring another theory, but then I remembered that a lot of my current friends didn’t grow up anywhere near me either. Although I suppose they all made a choice to live here now, so maybe it does have some meaning after all.