no boys allowed in the room!!!!

Just caught up on this thread. fwiw, i do know a lot of married/long term couples who live apart. But it's primarily academics who can't find jobs near each other so they make do until such time they can live together. And usually they are so busy the time apart helps with staying focused. I would've loved to have lived with F the entire time (18 years now), but being countries apart sometimes was fine because we tended to make each other lazy and it gave us time to grow up on our own. Our marriage is not hard work. The marriage was basically paperwork (3 or 4 years ago?). We have been each others best friend forever. Well except for when we had our dog.

Now I am don't even want to look at that incel thread except to blow it up. Someone else (kinder) should post what you were going to post about women being killed. They obviously did not read the piece that inorbit posted.

nah I'm going to bed

Also, don't tim burton and helena bonham carter keep separate homes?

inorbit, plus your partner seems to know a lot about hardwood floors and this seems like A+++.
I also recognize gyac's name. Post more!

The director of a non-profit I worked for and her husband kept separate homes and said it was the best decision they ever made.

I think it’s super important to know what relationship “style” works for you and be ok with it, don’t worry if it’s not conventional. My husb and I live in each other’s pockets bc that’s what we both like, but I don’t think it’s weird that other ppls relationships function differently to mine. You gotta do what works for you.

Speaking of unconventional...
So I’m friends with this couple who’ve been together 10 yrs or so but we sort of lost contact about 4 yrs ago and only recently reconnected.
They bought a house about a year ago.. a few months after they split up bc she wants kids and he doesn’t. They couldn’t afford to live alone separately but they could afford to buy a house. So they did. After they split.
She was planning to use a sperm donor but wasn’t at all psyched so her ex offered to do it... but will not be a father to the child. That will be living in the same house as him. It is v v unusual.

xpost

My thoughts on the incel thread: something about it just rubs me the wrong way. It got me reflecting on the fact that ilx feels very more dude than it did in years past. It's always been pretty dude, but I really feel that women's participation has dropped off precipitously. And what really gets my goat is that dudes don't seem to find this particularly bothersome. Like, no skin off their penises or whatever. Maybe they overall prefer a dude-centric ilx. Like, they can be outraged feminist allies but don't bother thinking about why and how so few female posters are around compared to five years ago or whatever.

Ilx has been a part of my life for a while, and I really feel a loss here. Perhaps in a year that didn't feature Trump, Kavanaugh, and other awfulness it wouldn't bother me so much. But it does and I'm pissed. On a board full of dude feminists, the feminism is directed *outside* of ilx, and shit all to do with our own little piece of the internet. Because it doesn't seem to bother ilxdudes, and I like a lot of these dudes and am bummed that their ilxlives seem none the worse for absence of fifty one percent of the fucking sky ha.

xpost OK that is pretty weird. Although I had a friend that did marry her friend (who was her ex bf of 3 years) so he could get a green card. They never did get back together or anything and totally led separate lives. Finally got a divorce after 10 years.

inorbit he seems like a great guy. Taxes get harder but other administrative stuff is easier. If things work for you guys, it works. F and I are always 2 feet away from each other but if one of us has to go away it only takes a day to get into our other lives routines. And don't worry about your family. I got some grief about it but I would've been miserable otherwise, and i felt way too old for that shit. I was already freaking out about just having to make a dinner reservation for 16 people and making sure all people would get there. There was no way I could've dealt with an actual wedding.

literally no-one seems to know or care about women being murdered all the time by men or the general level of domestic violence that ruins lives

i think about this a lot. esp when that doctor was murdered in front of a chicago hospital where she worked by a man she had recently broken up with. i heard and saw more than a few news outlets report it began as "a domestic dispute" and no -- it did not. she broke up with him and he couldn't deal so he murdered her. he had been booted from the fire academy for (literally) "misogyny" and yet someone still sold him a gun legally. like...what the fucking fuck. no.

i don't feel like recounting my experiences with being attacked but most recently i was harassed by a student last semester. i am purposely not sharing the details of what he did because that doesn't matter. what matters is that it affected me in a number of adverse ways (which i also won't detail because I am a private person) and my other students picked up on it and would wait with me after class every single week until he left. i reported it and we resolved the issue. i was not physically attacked in any way. did it take a toll on me? fuck yeah it did. fuck that shit.

There are so often stories in the news here (aus) about a woman being found dead, and every time I say to myself "I bet the partner did it" and EVERY TIME I am right. Every fucking time.

I mean it feels like it is higher than the road toll at the moment. Australian men have some real fucked up anger issues. A lot of problems with alcohol in this country. And ice.

quincie, it also rubs me the wrong way because it's the exact same discussion from however long ago and seemingly despite this shit being in the news every single day, they are still like ..nah, why in the world are some people uncomfortable with groups of men??? It was so trumpian. I had a serious gap in ilx posting where I was seeing people in real life more and just forgot about ilx but I don't remember this feeling of disappointment in the guys here.

I have almost posted this several times on that incel thread about it but didn't because I know how inflammatory it would be but "I really don't give a shit if a guy is sad and jobless and he doesn't want to leave his house because no woman wants to fuck him. Just don't kill or assault anyone."

I’m on my phone and feel like an idiot but I can’t fond this thread. Which is it?

It's the maleness and masculinity thread.

i 100% sure do not need to dissect their poisoned worldview. no thank you. i really do think they need some intense and fundamental reprogramming. that's my inflammatory opinion.

and back to the harassment situation -- you know why it doesn't matter what he did? i should be given the benefit of the doubt about what happened to me. i am a reliable narrator. i should not be expected much less required to relive the experience just so some jackhole knows i was sufficiently harassed to warrant disciplinary action. just believe me. that is what i have always wanted and seems to be in short supply in the world at large. the demand for "evidence" of harm makes me so angry that i can't see tbh. (i had evidence btw) see also: kavanaugh shit, which sent me all the way over the edge :(

Kavanaugh has been worse for me than the 2016 election. I have discovered depths of anger that frankly surprised me. There were a few days there where I really think I could literally have ripped eyeballs out of someone's head. I thought myself a pretty nonviolent person, but I *fantasized* about it.

xpost The evidence is you, but I know it doesn't work that way when it's a woman.

Just now had a guy, the second this week, stop by the house and ask if my husband was home. Because the guy was selling firewood. Which *I* purchase every year. S didn't know that a cord was a unit of measurement. But apparently he is more capable of business transactions than I, the person standing in front of you right now. fuuuuuuuuck yooooooou

also "is your husband home" is a fucking creepy question!!!!!

Maybe the firewood had a hole to stick a dick in, did you ever think about that? I am so sick of these stupid, stupid men. But then again my spouse is pretty great, and even though I get pretty evil sometimes he always thinks I am great.

If anyone is sad by the weather in the US they can come visit me in Chile right now. It stays bright out until 9pm.

i am unable to control myself and go completely off the rails when i am confronted with men (performing a home-related service) inside my house who won't listen to me
have had a number of bad experiences with that
hence my malfunctioning nervous system obvs :(
god -- CBF and the second front door, i still think about that from time to time

actually the malfunctions are not caused by the incidents -- they are inflamed, which causes days of aggravation and recovery
fuck that shit

la lechera, ,I am firmly against people needing to see excessive pain of women or needing to know the assaultive details to consider it serious enough. No. The entire world needs to be reprogrammed.

indeed :(

i'm single and live alone, and sometimes when I go outside to have a cigarette, some man I don't recognize will walk by, and sometimes I will flinch. Then there are the occasional attempts at flirtation which are usually not too creepy, but there are a handful of guys that every time they walk by when I'm outside they will say something ... and I have this client, who's a guy, who will come over and I will work with, and sometimes I wish the awkward flirters would walk by when I am outside having a cig with the male client so I can give the impression that I have a boyfriend or am married and they might leave me alone ... also feel shitty about having that thought because I feel like I'm finally getting over the "if I'm not in a relationship, I am a failure" thing.

Have you ever tried an aggressive eyeroll when someone tries to awkwardly, repetitively flirt. If it's bothering me, I don't care if they just think I am a bitch. But of course you need to do the calculus. sometimes when my spouse hugs me from behind or grabs me when I am focused on something else, i totally flinch or knock his arm away and i've never had anything traumatic happen to me but of course it's just the history of having hands on you that you don't want and being alert to defend yourself.

Being alone is better than being with someone who sucks. A lot of men are pretty lacking in being adequate partners. Having your time to be alone is freedom (this is totally take from that Jeong Kwan Chef Table episode).

Trayce, it's pretty much always the partner (or ex partner). It happens so much it becomes almost mundane. I expect it's the same if you're a POC and experience varying levels of racism *all the time* - it's there, it's outrageous, everyone's used to it so needs to find something new to make a Twitterstorm about

the levels of entitlement people must just be walking around with.

New people! *waves at gyac* *waves at Eliza D* welcome to us!

On the marriage thing, in orbit, some EU countries are doing the thing of extending Civil Partnership to Teh Straights? That might be something to look into, if your partner's country does this? I am not a fan of Marriage or even Gay Marriage (for many complicated reasons). But the whole idea of Civil Partnership being, "This means what *we* think it should mean, not what 5000 years of Patriarchy says it should mean" - might be a way to just do the thing without, you know, Doing The Thing?

I don't even want to touch on the incel thing, or the rolling maleness / masculinity thread. (Which usually means I'm going to fire off 7000 words, but not today.) But just to say... I admire women and/or non-boys who can continue wading into those threads and having the arguments and saying the things that need to be said. But there *IS* a wall of frustration. And the penalties that one must pay, as a non-boy, for pointing out "ILX males are very quick to performatively point fingers at persons outside ILX; while steadfastly refusing to address their own biases" eventually become too high.

(I have found amazing other places and other people, with whom I can discuss AFAB masculinity, and trans-ness and non-binary-ness... and it's been life-alteringly good.)

But there's a lot of online conversations I have found I have just had to mute or switch off, not to be a screaming mass of anger, all the time - with hugely deleterious effects on both my psychological health and eventually my physical health. (It's not just getting other people to take your pain seriously - sometimes it's getting *yourself* to take your own pain seriously, when others keep telling you it doesn't matter.) It's too high a price to pay, living in that state all the time. Like, there are so many cognitive *taxes* that non-cis-men have to pay, that cis-men are blissfully unaware of. On one level, psychologically, it's like, "you're allowed to mute those conversations if that's what you need to survive" but the end result is, certain voices become louder and louder, and other voices... go on mute.

Just in case people didn't see the story, because I think various other blogs have been writing off of it as well but the Washington Post had a lead on this:

The Washington Post found that nearly half of the women who were murdered during the past decade were, like Parnell and Cisneros, killed by a current or former intimate partner. In a close analysis of five cities, about a third of the male killers were known to be a potential threat ahead of the attack.

I’m sure a lot of terrorists recently have also had a history of domestic violence, iirc.

👋🏻 at everyone - i will definitely post more here :)

Re: going to the dr, I understand the hesitancy because doctors are documenting as dismissing female problems which then turn out to be actual issues and this has happened to very dear friends of mine. I remember having a weird random ache years ago and being told by a doctor it was “nothing” - it was my lower abdomen on my right hand side. Obviously this was true because I’m still alive but I always thought about how quickly it was dismissed.

I'm always glad to see the "no boys" thread resurface and I'm always glad to see a gyac post, so hi! welcome! welcome to Eliza D. too and welcome back Branwell. Actually I am always glad to see a post by any ILX ladies. <3 to you all and apologies if anyone didn't want to be <3ed by an idiot like myself.

I do share most of yr feelings about the incel conversations here and elsewhere, but I had some p. incel-like trains of thought in my early 20s (so probably diarised on ILX somewhere, sigh), feeling like an outsider on the edge of male-dominated scenes and blaming my looks instead of examining my own failings wrt social interaction (or what I could do about my looks, which tbh I still resent the obligation to do), and I got into a spiral of semi-enjoying feeling bad and hated for things I thought were out of my control and blaming everyone else and taking any hints to change as confirmation that everyone was out to get me. anyway, there were a couple of good posts about that kind of thinking which I look forward to unpacking and rearranging into my worldview at my leisure

as an only child of relatively openminded-ish parents who found it far more important that I could fake "I am clever and like science" chat than performative femininity I was prob just socialised in a male privilege kinda way without even being male. unfortunately the clever/science part was also v fake and performative, and now I am secretly also dumb as rocks, having been brought up to believe that being smart is the most important thing without ever needing to learn how. but oh well.

uhh nobody wanted to read that much about me, sorry, and I'm sure you don't want to rehash any of that conversation here, so please do carry on

aps I was wondering where you were! I like reading your posts. now where's emil.y?

I think I understand you in some ways, a passing spacecadet. I always had sort of “male interests” as a child and to varying degrees am not really into performative femininity for the most part! This used to be a pain when I was younger because I felt I was different from my peers. Sad to say I did have a brief not like the other girls phase, but quickly got the fuck over myself. Most of my friends are female now and most of my closest friends have been too.

Also, you’re not dumb at all, I’ve read your posts and you always come across as very on it!

btw justin3 that situation with your friends and potentially babby is a total recipe for disaster imo!!

Replying to three different things at once time!

1. Sad to say I did have a brief not like the other girls phase, but quickly got the fuck over myself.

oh, I totally had an "I don't like/am not like ~girly girls~" phase, which, what did I even mean by that? There wasn't anyone in my class at school or among my acquaintances at any other point in my life who remotely fitted the description, even among the people I didn't particularly get along with, but I still felt the need to go "that straw woman there, I am not one, please!"

2. kinder otm, that situation sounds like it has many possibilities for becoming super awkward for anyone who isn't 100% immune to emotions/attachment/sleeplessness/hormones/suddenly having a whole lot of baby stuff going on all over the house. for the record, my personal opinion is that no humans ever have been immune to that combo. but, good luck to them

3. my mother has chronic health problems which were not properly diagnosed until her 40s because up until that point doctors liked to say things like "so your stomach hurts a lot, well, that's what you should expect when you're a woman". I'd hoped we'd got past that now but a friend of a friend nearly died this summer because of a giant ovarian cyst, the symptoms of which had been totally dismissed, so I guess there is still some way to go, alas.

though, one of the GPs at my surgery has told both me and the bf that (separate) things are "just one of those things" in a very "can't be bothered to look" kind of way, so some people are just like that to both sexes, and they shouldn't become GPs imo, but they do

...some of them do. Some (most?) GPs are good obv.

But it can be a bit random and there's the maddening feeling you might need to keep an .xls of what GPs are available at your surgery and what subjects they have seemed particularly receptive or unreceptive to enquiries about, so you don't ask the perma-bored dude GP about your ovary pains, and you don't ask the slightly sniffy about mental health GP about brainfeelings, and you don't ask the GP who is mostly v nice and good but a bit hippyish about any skin conditions you don't want to be told a natural home remedy for, etc.

I just looked up on the internet why men become gynos thinking it would soothe my fears and nope. I've had a 2 male gynos for maybe 10 years combined and now I am like "what was I thinking?" They were totally fine but eh, that choice is really suspect.

As I get older I am more assertive about requesting things from doctors. I know when I go that I need something serious and even if they dismiss me that they can't hear anything in my lungs (even though I know I have asthma) or that I don't seem that sick (because I walk in with makeup and dressed?) I ask that they run blood tests or take xrays of wherever. And there is always something they find after. Like bitch, I am paying for this so just do the test.

Literally the last three times I had some kind of bronchial infection (from traveling too much), I finally had to give in and go to the doctor and each time I was dismissed as seeming fine. I had to actively request a blood test so that they could confirm I had an infection and I could get drugs.

Hi spacecadet! <3 back to you.

I keep typing stuff out and deleting it, but yes.

Nevermind the rampant domestic violence issues within police officer, border patrol and ICE ranks.

I keep thinking about one of your previous posts about how your background checks found domestic violence incidents for every person applying to ICE? DHS?

Hi Bran and aps!! Missed your faces!

it's like the no boys thread holiday gathering, where everyone comes together to celebrate!

xpost, the background checks you also always had to speak to the ex spouse (if there was one). Those positions (border patrol ICE) I remember dreading if there was an ex-spouse or partner where they had a child together. They never wanted to talk to me or they didn't want to meet in person, and they tried to keep everything as short as possible. This was not the case in any other single type of position.

as an only child of relatively openminded-ish parents who found it far more important that I could fake "I am clever and like science" chat than performative femininity I was prob just socialised in a male privilege kinda way without even being male.

I am also an only child, and yeah, was definitely socialized as "not strictly feminine" -- because I served as both daughter and son to my parents. I was talking to a friend who also had this experience, and her family was fairly traditional in terms of gender stuff, but because she was the only child, she got more of the "male training" than if she'd had a brother. For me, also my dad did way more of the babysitting/was around more when I was growing up, so I definitely assimilated more male traits and interests as a kid than if my mom was home more and my dad was a workaholic (i.e. typical gender roles). Actually I was kinda thinking about this in terms of voice - like speaking voice - and whether the parent you spend the most time with affects how you speak, in terms of tonal range?

http://msmagazine.com/blog/2015/10/26/police-wife-the-secret-epidemic-of-police-domestic-violence/

https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/09/police-officers-who-hit-their-wives-or-girlfriends/380329/

I have said this before about gun control, but even though domestic violence is a greater predictor of future escalated violence than any other sign, we are unlikely to get gun control focused around domestic violence because of high rates in police and military families.

— Kristen Hanley Cardozo (@KHandozo) December 9, 2018

Hey APS, that’s what bugs me about incel talk - as if women don’t experience the same kinds of alienation and isolation. But as yerac mentioned earlier, we’re conditioned to act as if we couldn’t possibly feel that way, and to put others’ emotional welfare before our own.

Also: I feel like this often deemed a controversial opinion but I think male gynos are all creeps.

*shrugs* I don't see any reason not to run with that as a basic concept tbh.

I’ve had both male and female gynos and prefer women but don’t really mind the men. My mom, on the other hand, thought the idea of having a female gyno was really strange but I think that must have been because she was older and for much of her life most doctors were male full stop.

But I remember telling her my first gyno was a woman and she was horrified: