In response to a question from drbitch about my last post.

[randomness]

One example is the man who has figured out that the "sensitive New Age guy" is attractive to women. As a result he is endlessly willing to listen to your problems sympathetically. On the other hand, he sticks to the old male stereotype of being a "strong, silent type" because he is entirely unwilling or unable to share his own emotions with you.

cme did share notes from a panel discussion on men and femininity whose URL is unfortunately in a chat log on a machine several hundred miles away. That discussion did cover a lot of the difficulties men face in letting down their guard with regard to feelings. I want to be clear that I'm neither minimizing how much resistance men encounter in doing this nor asserting that men are acting out of dubious motives when they behave this way.

(drbitch, I know I covered this in private email in less detail but I thought it might be worth sharing this part of the conversation in my blog.)

Comments

Re: sensitive, caring, and emotionally what?

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

I found it interesting that things went from a three-word general description to one that was quite strongly traditionally-gendered.

Sure, but to be clear, I was following everyone else including you over there. :)

There are lots of women who fit the description if you change "emotionally inaccessible" to "emotionally undemanding" or even "selfless."

I think those are distinctly different situations: he won't tell her, she certainly would if she didn't fear scaring him away.

Re: sensitive, caring, and emotionally what?

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

To be clear in turn, I'm indeed part of the sociologically "interesting" group above. I'm soaking in cultural presuppositions as much as anyone.

As are we all, but that's not the point I was making. "I was following everyone else including you" was trying to say that I had made the conscious effort not to try to channel a conversation which was clearly progressing in a particular direction. Unanimously, even, both in terms of gender specificity and heteronormativity.

I thought this was fascinating. cme's original formulation was "the sensitive, caring, yet emotionally inaccessible guy" (my emphasis, not hers). I truncated it both so it became an adjectival phrase instead of a noun, and to see if the removal of gender specificity would result in a conversation about both genders; it didn't.

I also like to make them explicit when I can as a first step to maybe changing them some day. For the record, I'll note we're presupposing hetero-normative relationships too, at least here on lj.

Sure. I'm glad in retrospect that I decided to truncate her quote, which I did without careful thought, because it made this comment thread possible. If I hadn't ambiguated the original phrase there the gender specificity would have been explicit from the outset, but I think the conversation(s) would not have been as illuminating.

[W]hat got me questioning the original post was that I don't find such people irresistible.

Like many other quick one-liners it's got some underlying resonance for many but isn't expected to be universal. But the fact that it elicited the comment it did does speak to its resonance.

cme does come up with good quips. :)

Backing away from the meta, I do think the type she summed up as "the sensitive, caring, yet emotionally inaccessible guy" evidently pushes a number of buttons in a lot of people. In your case, it pushes some buttons that raise warning flags, which it seems is different from many of the other responses. Do you have any theories as to why your reaction is what it is? And why do you posit it may be damage? From here it looks like it's actually been beneficial.

Re: sensitive, caring, and emotionally what?

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

I suspect that being recently Wisconned makes everything look even more than usually meta. Ever considered going? Madison has great food

I did think about it, and then there was the whole kerfuffle over the GoH. That was enough to tip me back because I was pretty much on the fence about going that far anyway.

To be honest, I'm no longer much of a fan if I ever was one. Back in the day when there was an actual NECorridor con circuit it was a fun way to see people I knew all along that string of cities, but as we got older most of us drifted away. Since I was there to see people--I rarely went to programming--after the people I wanted to see went away, I did too.

would be happy to expound further elsewhere

Sure, that's fair.