no boys allowed in the room!!!!

It’s such a trip, like being back in Convent School, with Mother Superior coming in and demanding I apologise for how terribly I behaved to those poor boys who were bullying me, like, don’t you know one of those boys hurt his foot kicking your head in, you apologise right now, you sinner!

Like sure, OK, Mother Superior! I’m sorry my knuckles were in the way of your ruler, too!

🤣🤣🤣

I sincerely apologize to you and anyone else that felt that my post in this thread was in response to CP's post in the 40s thread, rather than the posts that followed from about a half dozen cis-men whose posts did not indicate the awful circumstances of CP's post. The other posts were what inspired my line of discussion here, because when there are FB threads about one's 40s that are mostly women/non-cis-men -- you end up with a long thread of "actually I felt way better about my self in my 40s than in my 30s" -- and a lot of "50 is the new 40!"

Yes, I share that general perception that I hear more from men that they feel they're in decline, and I hear from women that they're experiencing relief from a lot of burdens as they age. I'm sorry that posters were hurt by talking about it here and now.

I apologize for any offense I've given, too.

38 was when I realized I wasn't young anymore, and 47 was when I realized that my bad planning and tendency to throw away every opportunity I've ever had was catching up to me.

I don’t apologise - Mother Superior is genuinely detached from reality when it comes to misinterpreting the motives and intentions and behaviour of Sarahell and myself, for the worst possible outcome.

None of you did anything even remotely wrong and it actually bothers me that you feel you should have to apologise for liking your lives too loudly.

I saw your post, sarahell, and then the 40s thread, and I've got to say I was pretty shocked because it definitely looked to me like you were following on from CP's posts, and that was... really fucking shit. It did feel crass and dismissive of real problems, and it did upset me. Obviously I believe you when you say that you didn't intend it that way, but I'm not surprised that other people were also shocked by the conjunction of topics. I mean, I don't know that this post is helpful and I'm not asking for you to self-flagellate about it, but I just wanted to note that it wasn't only one person who felt that way.

Sarahell I believe you when you say it wasn’t your intention.

But I can’t look at this thread and what it has become without being really uncomfortable about the line of conversation here, like it’s ok to mock certain posters because they’re cis men, with the implication that their pain matters less. Again, it’s cowardly to use this thread and the post above is probably supposed to be cutting but it really just comes across as so much projection. Am I a bad person because of the things I say? Perhaps. But frankly I’m not going to feel bad about saying that the cruelty that has been on show itt for far far too long - and it’s not a great feeling being the only person speaking up against it because people don’t want to deal with fallout - is inappropriate and absolutely out of line and I shouldn’t be expected to tolerate that. Nor should anyone else. Oh btw sarah I don’t mean you when I say this, it’s Branwell, though enabling their behaviour isn’t doing anything good.

End post before I go full Fizzles.

I don’t apologise - Mother Superior is genuinely detached from reality when it comes to misinterpreting the motives and intentions and behaviour of Sarahell and myself, for the worst possible outcome.

None of you did anything even remotely wrong and it actually bothers me that you feel you should have to apologise for liking your lives too loudly.

, I don't know that this post is helpful and I'm not asking for you to self-flagellate about it, but I just wanted to note that it wasn't only one person who felt that way.

― emil.y, Saturday, February 20, 2021 10:31 AM (five minutes ago)

I didn't assume that gyac was making up other posters also being upset; I had no reason not to believe that part. I really do apologize. There is so much horrible awful shit that people have dealt with and are dealing with, and I don't want to add to that. And I know that I have a tendency to do the "it only hurts when I laugh" type of coping with suffering and the pointlessness and misery inherent in living in this world. And I know that not everyone copes that way, and that to some, it comes across as insensitive and I am truly sorry.

And for the record, if gyac wants to not be reminded of my existence, I will refrain from posting positive comments about the very attractive cat photographs she posts. I also sincerely appreciate yr cat.

I have two cats, you can enjoy them the same as anyone else :)

and I hope this doesn't sound disingenuous, but I really do respect the way that you assert yourself and stand up for what you think is right and aren't afraid of people getting angry.

Me? Well I’m not sure it’s one of my better qualities but it makes me me and at this stage I’m too old to change entirely.

i respect that too. i am extremely resistant to getting involved in these conversations but the posts did not give me a good feeling, to put it mildly. she and emil.y are not alone here and it shouldn't be assumed that they are just because they're the only ones saying so.

Me? Well I’m not sure it’s one of my better qualities but it makes me me and at this stage I’m too old to change entirely.

Yes, you! ... and I think it's that "at this stage I'm too old to change entirely" feeling that is what a lot of one's 40s are focused on and some people are like, "you know what, fuck it, that's me, I can try to be my best self, but I'm not going to become a different person." and others are like, "fuck ..... just fuck ..."

she and emil.y are not alone here and it shouldn't be assumed that they are just because they're the only ones saying so.

thanks for that, harbl. I would rather work things through with people who are bothered by my behavior and who I also really respect and like.

Also--and I hate to bring class issues into this--most of the 40+ women I know are either still pretending they're teenagers or they're dealing with their grown children's problems and/or raising their grandchildren.

(Know in RL, I mean.)

most of the 40+ women I know are either still pretending they're teenagers or they're dealing with their grown children's problems and/or raising their grandchildren.

honestly, I know a fair amount of these too --

You're right, Christine, and I've been wanting to validate your sharing here without assuming anything about you. I wanted to say...the economic precariousness and/or straight poverty that a lot of Americans live in crosses a lot of other intersectional lines.

Kate Manne has written extensively on what misogyny is for: a system of sorting Men (people) from Not-Men (women).

Misogyny doesn’t work by “hating all women” - what it does, subtly but powerfully, is sort “women” into “Good Women” who comply with the (conflicting and impossible) needs of patriarchy, and “Bad Women” who don’t - and punishes the latter, the most harshly.

Under a misogynist system, a woman can only gain power by positioning themselves as “Good Women” and weaponising “Bad Women’s” badness against them. By harshly punishing the “Bad Women”, she gets both power over other women, and the respect of men.

It’s win-win for the “Good Woman” and the system of patriarchy. Once you realise that, you understand why some women do this! But ultimately misogyny hurts all women, non-men, and “Men” as well - and you have to work to dismantle the entire dichotomy to destroy the system.

Imagine having to believe this instead of thinking about your own behaviour.

I disabled killfile for a while, and clearly that was a mistake. I've The "No Boys" thread has always functioned (as well as a kind of social club) as a space where we could talk freely, without worrying about offending the everpresent ~feelings of men~. That was how I, and I think a lot of the people who responded to Sarahell, were using it. A collective sigh of "it does get better". To then have someone come screaming in, that the conversation is inadequately taking into account feelings of men and the feelings about men? It's a derailment.

To bring this back to the topic of conversation at hand, for me there are (at least) two streams both running in parallel and interbraiding, in many ways.

I believe the thing behind a lot of introspection at the moment is the constant overhanging threat of the pandemic. The pandemic has been this omnipresent tsunami of death and grief and fear, which has flattened everything in its path, but has dealt out burdens in different ways and different magnitudes. That I've noticed, even in my friend group, that the structure of our societies and the ways lockdowns have been constructed, mean that the burden of the pandemic has overwhelmingly been shifted onto mothers, gestational parents, and caretakers / carers. Who are overwhelmingly not-men. (While very different but no less real troubles have been shifted onto those who live alone, disabled people, LBGT/Queer people who don't necessarily have conventional family units that are protected by lockdown regulations. For me, it's not just the people who have died, it's my entire in-person, away-from-screen support network that I spent the previous few years building.) Everyone is coping with their tsunami of grief, including me, in different ways.

The other is this large-scale, cultural shifting of the narratives around "Women" (non-men) as we age. That 40 is not the traditional ending of one's life, it may be a rebirth and a beginning. I, personally, have a very long, multi-generational line of women and female role models in my family who went on to long, fruitful and rewarding "second acts" after their children were raised and their husbands either dropped dead of sudden ailments and/or dramatically left the family. 4 generations of women that I met, telling me that their lives *began* in their 40s and 50s. (Funnily enough, including an Edwardian relative who, after her husband died, cut her hair, started dressing like a man, took over the farm and asked her neighbours to call her "Tommy". I've always wondered about that!) That was my expectation for how my life would unfold, and I was finding it true, pre-pandemic. But I also think that many women are questioning the narratives around ageing in women automatically meaning a shrinking and narrowing.

I don't think that's *just* a middle-class narrative, it's just that the stories of, e.g. older women fighting for their pensions, class narratives about the feminisation of poverty hitting older women and child-rearing-aged women particularly hard, those stories are just not seen as glamourous or even political. All of the political and economic forces that are driving the feminisation of poverty, are coming from conservative male-supremacy-white-supremacy, about driving women back into family structures that best support capitalism, rather than being good for women. Discussions of ~patriarchy~ are not a distraction from 'class issues' - patriarchy *is* class issues.

Anyway. For me, personally, the narratives of "your life will get better in your 40s/50s" and "a global pandemic has changed everyone's lives to be unrecognisable in oppressive ways" are a huge collision.

Getting vaccinated on Friday was the first glimmer in a full year, where I felt like there might be an "After Times", rather than the smashed-up debris where the "Before Times" used to be.

I'm interested if other folks have started thinking about their After Times, how you think they will change, or if that's just not a thing yet in your countries?

In case my questions weren't overt enough in the wall-o-text:

What expectations were you raised with, within your families (mothers, aunts, grandmothers) as to how women should age? Did your female elders have "second acts"? Are your experiences similar to / different from them, and how?

Also, the thing that kept coming up while I was showing, is... What does "acting like a teenager*" look like, for a generation where the traditional markers of adulthood have been rendered inaccessible by economics?

*(I generally know what "acting like a teenager" means, in terms of, the person who does this in my family is my Boomer father, who has decided to spend his 70s doing all the funstuff he was too busy studying/working to participate in when he was young. I'm guessing you mean something else?) Please explain?

It’s a shame they’ve killfiled me again* because this

where we could talk freely, without worrying about offending the everpresent ~feelings of men~.

I'm sure that the despair of a middle aged cis man whose wife recently died of cancer is really about how he never became a patriarch in the patriarchy.

Exactly, it’s deliberately disingenuous because the men of ilx aren’t the abstract patriarchy, they are real people with real pain and the only way BB can look at those posts they made yesterday (in reply to me) is by removing all context from the matter.

Zelda, I made it clear before posting that, that I had not read the thread - and even before my second set of posts, that I had read only a bit of it, which was... not that.

The idea that we should have to check the feelings of everyone in the room, including people who aren’t even in the room (and in fact are not even who the room is designed for) before having conversations about our own lives? That’s structural misogyny.

(That’s not even getting into the ableism of presuming that everyone is *capable* of pre-emptively doing that checking or understanding when and how it’s supposed to work. That goes double when that kind of sympathy-checking is seldom exercised on your behalf. Do I need to remind you how ILX reacted when I found out my mother has cancer? It is ableist to hold autistic people to these highly gendered neurological standards around the management of other people’s emotions.)

And yes, I do think the disparity between “how cis men are raised to believe their middle / old age is gonna look like” and how “people raised as women are taught to believe their middle / old age will look like” DOES contribute to the stuff that Sarahell was talking about.

And that I *would* like to talk about.

It is ableist to hold autistic people to these highly gendered neurological standards around the management of other people’s emotions.

To be clear, I’m sorry someone’s wife died of cancer. That’s awful.

As far as I know, he’s never read or posted in this thread. I don’t see how these discussions connect. Sarahell moves the conversation to a different topic!

About as ungracious as you’d expect. Incredible how everyone else was able to see how it came across and acted accordingly, whereas you doubled down, mocked me (in some fairly misogynistic terms, no less) for even bringing it up, and now finally have squeezed about the most terrible excuse for an apology that you can bear now that it’s become clear that you’re alone on this. It’s such an indictment of ilx that you haven’t hit twenty yet.

Having known and interacted with Sarahell for a long time, her action of “there’s a grieving widower in here, I’m going to take this conversation about gender to another thread” absolutely 100% WAS an act of consideration and being sympathetic.

It’s *bizarre* to me that anyone could read that act of consideration as inconsiderate or hostile.

It seems to me, to be about the complainers’ hostile views towards the poster(s), rather than anything she said it did.

We need to talk, again and again, about he gendered expectations of emotional labour. How this emotional labour of “anticipating and managing the emotional needs and reactions of other people, and always putting them before their own” is something disproportionately placed on people raised/treated as women.

Maybe because of my autism, maybe because of my unconventional upbringing, I honestly did not realise that this was something expected of me/women until I was in my late 30s. It’s one of those aspects of ~performing womanhood~ that I absolutely suck at because: autism - and I really chafe at the idea it is only *expected* of “Women” (cis men who can do it, will be rewarded for it, as the *skill* of emotional intelligence.) It’s OK for cis men to put their needs and emotions first. But if “women” don’t do it - RAGE!

It wasn’t until I was in my 40s, and in therapy, that I connected the ragestorms and clusterfucks of people being intensely angry at me for reasons I could not figure out - with this “transgression”. I had failed to anticipate someone else’s needs or manage their unexpected emotions; I had put my own needs first.

The weirdest thing was, that the biggest explosions of anger at my failure to perform this expected emotional labour were NOT actually from the men who tried to throttle me, or pulled over CD shelves on top of me, or threatened me and tried to physically hurt or discipline me.

It’s similar to the way that the biggest explosions of rage and hatred about female fat don’t come from angry men - they come from thin women who are FURIOUS that they have spent their entire lives hungry, on diets, and how dare we SHIRK our female obligation to be attractive by being so unapologetically fat while they work so hard at it.

It’s the same with these explosions of RAGE that I cannot (or as they have it, WILL not) perform this gendered emotional labour. The RAGE is about their fury and frustration and anger that *they* feel about having to do it, when here am I in my unapologetic autistic transmasculinity saying “this gendered labour is unfairly distributed. No one should have to regulate other people’s emotions as much as women are expected to do.”

This anger isn’t about me refusing / being unable to (delete as to your level of ableism) - it’s about their own resentment at still forcing themselves to. Hence why it’s Sarahell or me that end up as the punching bags for this rage. Other people’s rage is... not my job to manage.

Absolutely fuck this. Fuck this blasé attitude about real people who we really care about. FUCK YOU. Your refusal to care about other people has NOTHING to do with rejecting patriarchal standards and everything to do with the fact that you don't care about other people and can't be bothered to.

That's my fucking FRIEND. Fuck off with your idea that people getting upset are in service to the patriarchy. Funnily enough, I consider sarahell my friend also, and I STILL got upset. It isn't about ilx beef, it's about CARING ABOUT PEOPLE. If other people's rage is not your job to manage, then don't even think about attempting to manage HOW MUCH RAGE I AM EXPERIENCING RIGHT NOW. FUCK OFF.

I’d settle for them managing their own shoddy behaviour, but all they ever have in the tank is “no u” and “actually here’s why my terrible behaviour is your fault. It’s unacceptable.

I'm angry, too. I've always been angry at how everyone excuses Branwell's behavior, but I always just held my tongue and left any thread that they were in. Now I can speak my piece.

I'm neuroatypical (probably autistic, but I've never been diagnosed. I was diagnosed as mentally ill.), non-binary, and was bullied pretty heavily when younger. We are painfully similar people. I was clueless when I was younger, and I probably hurt some people. The difference? I was willing to admit that I was wrong sometimes. My self-centeredness and selfishness has been a burden that I fight against every hour of my life. I don't seek out social issues to validate my self-image, I seek them out to try to change things. Also, "acting like a teenager," in rural Floridian underclass terms, means that you drink and heavily and get arrested all of the time. I'm crying in RL right now and getting incoherent, so I'll say
one more thing. Go away. Please go away. Stop seagulling us, by which I mean swooping down periodically, shitting on everything, and leaving. You are as bad as Dom ever was.

I apologise when I have done something wrong. The idea that I should have to apologise for the absurd fantasies that people build up around their intensely negative interpretations of what I say?

Nah, mate. Not on.

Can we go back to the conversation we were having?

Because it’s not me that shits up threads at the moment - it’s people’s bizarre inability to ignore me or mute me rather than carry on feuding like this.

Dom used to go around saying things like “sometimes I fantasise about punching women in the face”.

I say things like “cisheteropatriarvhy oppresses ‘men’ and ‘not men’ in different and unequal ways’.

These are 100% exactly the same thing!!!!! Are you kidding me?

are you now Whitney G Weingarten?

omgggggggg!!! lol

So I sometimes get a one or two big hormonal zits around my period but I just got my period midway between my two vax shots and JESUS CHRIST my chin/jaw are an absolute mess, like, just the worst acne I’ve ever had. Anyone else having hormonal issues after their vax?

now that you mention it, i did break out after my first vaccine and i usually don't

Interesting you say so, because I’ve had the same. I also missed a period but that could have been stress related.. but that’s usually a delay, not a complete skip.

i had an unusual forehead breakout after my first dose that i thought was due to increased peanut butter consumption since i discovered you can add powdered peanut butter to anything. also really weird small, painful zits on the end of my nose. i thought it was getting better, and it mostly has, but i got a few new pimples on my forehead during period, plus a huge cyst near my upper lip, though i usually get hormonal cysts. i'm not ready to say it was caused by the vaccine but it's possible. either peanuts or vaccine could have increased inflammation in my body. good news is i can try eating peanuts again?

Which vax did you all get? Mine was moderna

moderna

Pfizer. Didn't have any discernable breakouts and my periods were already deranged.

Sorry yall, I got the Pfizer and I experienced no side effects, I haven't had a period in ages and I didn't have one then, and my skin is excellent right now especially considering my personal habits which are not the healthiest. But I did pick up a new cleanser and moisturizer from TJ Maxx's sale section so I credit cosmetic science.

I got moderna and my period was same as always, maybe the mood symptoms were a little worse? Hard to say why but I doubt it was related to vaccine tbh. Prob just good old me.