It’s sunny and very chilly, enough to get into you and tell you it means it, even though the temps may go up again. It’s fall in Chicago, what can you do?
I’ll tell you what I can do, say a huge thank you to a fellow member of the wolf pack who very kindly bought me a coffee yesterday. Not only do we all know how much I appreciate coffee, but the timing was exceedingly perfect. Thank you for listening to those howls.
And on we go to Wednesday!
Took another ride on the Block-Me-Go-Round yesterday, and it strikes me how different women’s (and likely people of a range of genders, though I don’t have this experience) blocking is, generally, versus men, generally.
Most of the people I block are people who step into my threads and will not leave them. Sometimes I block simply because I’m annoyed, but other times I block because the person is abusive in some way. And, of course, I always block back.
What I’ve found with men who block me, though, is they frequently jump into my threads, don’t like how I’ve responded, and block. On Spoutible, that makes the whole conversation go away.
With so many things in life, for women a lot of the time blocking is self-defense. For men a lot of the time, it’s about aggression and control.
And don’t start with the “not alls,” because that is another form of control, a means to change the conversation away from the original point so the original point vanishes, is quashed, is rendered irrelevant next to the pressing issue of exactly the number of men you mean.
I even got a literal one the other day when talking about a post I saw that pointed out that men will give resistance to women just for the sake of it.
I don’t think irony was his forte.
There are many days I simply get tired, and, as I coined yesterday, it’s another mystogyny. Wear us out, over and over and over and over again.
I can’t say I don’t think about turning the tables. But we’d have to do it together.
I just get blocked.
It’s not in my make up, I think, to say the things people want said rather than the truth as I see it. I seem to have been minted without verbal bubble wrap, and while that’s a quality that people admire and elevate in men, in women, that’s akin to human treason.
And I’m sure the gentle men, the careful men have thoughts on this matter as well.
Gender “norms” are a prison for everyone, every single one of us. Because the moment they dictate how a person should be, based on such arbitrary factors, the moment life’s paths are fenced off, are turned to dead ends.
Women are not cushions to soften the blows of life for the men around us; we are not pressure valves, and we are not objects. I understand this thought is very binary and I am not meaning to exclude, only meaning to be specific about a particular dynamic.
There is more to the complexity of human existence than biological markers of sex and what they are supposed to mean for a person’s life. Every nuance is a vibration, a wave that can range as far or as closely as infinite nature allows.
It is diversity that got us this far as a species.
It’s the war to end diversity we’re witnessing now that would spell the end.
Have a great Wednesday and break a gender norm or two.
A Bit to Read 
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