Sometimes I wonder if things like the hexbear bouncing cat emotes are a bit twee and cringe, but then I see the aesthetics the other side has run with…
Decades of trying to reeducate myself about what I’m allowed to like, leave it to Chapos to bring me right back to the start :agony-deep:
Hey, if it’s not hurting anyone, you’re allowed to like it as far as I’m concerned :heart-sickle: . I was just raising a point about taxonomy.
There’s nothing wrong with women liking “boyish” things, right? So men liking “girly” things should be fair game too!
Thanks for the kind words, much appreciated. No worries tho, I didn’t take it in a bad way from you or from Ideology. Nowadays “girly” doesn’t mean much to me anymore, just reading it made me think of teenage years. It took some navigation to get away from the circles where it meant much at all.
I was in a rush, there’s just a shortage of anything not-cishet-dudes in the emoji picker. Cool enby stuff and fem/soft boy stuff would be just as much of a pleasant change. There’s lots of ways to be any gender but “man in suit” is what we can post normally. :glucker:
Edit: I was also attempting to push back on the idea that the blobcats are cringe, because there’s a general trend in pop culture to view anything cute or “for girls” as more cringe than edgy “boy” stuff. Pop culture would view them as “girly” even if queer people and allies like us wouldn’t. I don’t think it’s very fair and erases the ability of non-masc people to express themselves. Most of the time when I post, I feel like I have to de-emphasize feelings I have irl to kind of fall in line with norms that enforce emotional distance and a certain ironic machismo. It’s only when I get deep in a comment thread where I start sounding like myself.
You are right of course, and that’s honestly how I interpreted your original comment too. I was playing up the unfair reading of it and should have probably communicated I didn’t mean it so serious. Or I should just drop the sarcasm in the first place lol
Reading that I asked myself “do I sound like myself here? how do I present?” and, after spending a while thinking about it, I just don’t know. It’s a little disconcerting, but probably not as much so as actively pretending to be someone else.
It’s pretty normal to have masks or sociolects. I think the main thing is how you feel about the parts of yourself they bring out or suppress. Like I act a little different in queer threads or comment threads than I do responding to people I suspect are cis/straight or white because letting your guard down in the latter instance feels more vulnerable.
