>>4800
>I'm glad you have the kind of trust based relationship that allows both of you to be yourselves.
At the end of the day that story wasn't really important. Please accept my apologies, Anon—I didn't mean to boast.
>But I also have to face the fact that underneath all of that in a deeper desire to feel valuable, to feel worth defending, to be worth something at all.
>Maybe that's why I have both a praise and a humiliation kink, I feel worthless so I want my worth to be affirmed but but it can also feel good to revel, rather than wallow, in my lowness.
Sex can be weirdly sensible, can't it?
>I feel like the stereotypes are that way for a reason, but what if it's confirmation bias?
That's what I was groping at, yeah. I think both things are true: The stereotypes are that way for a reason,
and confirmation bias exists. There's no easy answer! My own rule of thumb is to deal with individuals and design for populations. I fuck both up all the time, but then most things in life require my being better than I am.
>It comes across like a sugar coating on "get back in the kitchen where you belong" when it could be more about how you can be a woman and a scientist/worker/gamer/whatever and you don't have to sacrifice your femininity to be those things.
I have to come at this one from outside, I'm afraid, because I don't really relate: Growing up as a tomboy who liked both "guy things" and "girl things", I never found that to have much impact upon whether I felt myself to be a girl/woman or not. I just like things; the fact of my liking them is neither feminine nor masculine. This is, in part, why I always found the whole GaMuRgUrL thing to be a bit of a beat-up—
yes, and?—but that's a whole different subject.
The system wants us to care deeply and worry about this for its own reasons, but I personally don't. The medium turns the messages into tar babies: They don't particularly care whether you support them or oppose them because the real (not necessarily conscious) objective of the system that carries them is to have you engage, to agree with the implicit idea that it is part of your life, which in turn makes it true. The trap is in touching them at all.
That said, I think it's important to distinguish the parts of messages that seek to control—take (destabilized characteristic of target group), glue (payload), release in direction of (target group), go to lunch—and those that arise from the culture at large doing a little introspection, which we experience as the memetic ferment. That arises from questions far too large and important for treatment in a post like this. My own experience is that it was hammered into me from all around as I grew up, sometimes in very frightening ways, that to fall pregnant was to lose and to learn any home-making skills was to set oneself up for surrender and a lifetime of soul-crushing servitude. As with all conditioning, these messages were not thought but
felt. I have only been able to dig up and confront the deeper parts in the past few years and have determined with quiet regret that on the whole it was not a good thing. I'm just lucky that I didn't get the full press.
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