The Wrong Impression Of Women

[LukeExChristian]

I was trained to bottle up and drown any thoughts about women. "take every thought captive." From a societal point of view, I saw women as only wastes of time and energy. and i never made any 'friends' just casual acquaintances. i never truly got to know anyone because they weren't "saved." so i had maybe 3 people i called friends, all christians. my social skills were abysmal. i have gotten maybe a tad better since then.

 

From the "christian" point of view, I "struggled" early on with my fleshly and sinful feelings for girls. But by high school, i had nailed not having any feelings. I was not going to have a girl friend, and i MOST DEFINITELY was not going to have sex, none of that before i am a fully mature adult. I had already come to terms with it. I was a child of the most high god and I He had better plans stored for me. I remember once my dad (who believed in god but did not attend church or practice religion) once asked me if I was gay my freshmen year. I only took it as a sign that what jesus said was true (somewhere in the gospels, i think) That we would be persecuted for our beliefs. but today i'm kinda pissed that i didnt go off on him instead of being polite.

 

I had always already thought that when that time comes, which by the way was not going to happen most likely. i was going to have to make the first move, but it was a shock to my world to discover that there was a girl... interested in ME. I threw religion out the window, i knew god probably wanted me to reject her, brush it off, and move on. but the feeling of having someone care for me like that was too fulfilling and lovely! i could have a GF?! WHAAAT??? NO WAY!! and i discovered what has been discussed in this thread. it led to me having a social reputation! who knew i could have the approval of society! who knew having friends wasn't such a bad thing!

 

It made me feel like a 17 year old in an 11 year old's body. I soon became OBSESSED with internet dating. i discover that i COULD talk to girls... and not be bad at it, in fact, i found out i am GOOD at it. biggest shock of my life. after 6 months of this it eventually led to me getting scammed out of 75 dollars.

 

i'm not sure who or what to blame but im glad i broke free from religion since then.

[LukeExChristian]

I remember sitting in the church pew one time with my family.  I was just a little thing about 12 years old.  My bra strap was hanging out because of the cut of my shirt collar.  I knew it was but I was unconcerned about showing a bra strap.  Soon a woman's hand behind me, grabbing my strap and trying to tuck it in.  Trying to "protect" her children.  I was really embarrassed by this at the time.  Made me feel dirty and god I was just an innocent autistic twelve year old kid that was focusing on the sermon and unconcerned about a stupid bra strap.  But the woman grabbing it and trying to hide it made me feel like I was doing something shameful in church.  Another time I was trying to be a helper with carrying furniture and was reprimanded by a man because I am a female and he thought only men should do that job. 

I'm really proud of being a woman and I don't need any religion that makes me feel uncomfortable with my femininity.  At our strict church it was as if you had to pretend you didn't have breasts because ooooh, a man might catch sight of a boob and end up in hell if he likes what he sees.  It's all stupid.  If god made this world then he made the damn boobs so get over it, apostle Paul. 

best rant ever

[ExCBooster]

Well Clara you're welcome to disagree, but at least some stereotypes (?) about women I absofuckinglutely don't want to believe keep getting reinforced time and again by my personal experience... one of them being that if women have any sex drive at all it must be ridiculously weak compared to that of men. I've seen women express serious interest in sex maybe a handful of times in my entire life, and only within an already established relationship. For all I can tell, before a woman starts to even just think about the possibility of sex she needs to have a durable relationship, and if none is available, oh well, who needs sex anyway?

 

Is it still a stereotype if you actively want to disprove it but never find any evidence for that?

I don't think you're raising a shitstorm, Thurizaz. I think you do want to understand, and I'll try my best to explain things.

 

Look at it from my perspective: I am a woman. I have a fairly strong sex drive. The difference, though, is that - because of Christianity poisoning the culture, like this thread details - I have to be extremely careful, when it comes to sexual encounters, or even normal interaction. There are men - not all men, but they do exist - who think that women, any women, owe them sex. I work a public service job, where being friendly and polite is part of the job description. I have had creepy stalkers, as a result. I was friendly, and polite, and they automatically think that I owe them sex. Or, men who think that if they're "nice enough" to you then you absolutely owe them sex - this is especially unsettling, because it implies that they treat any woman, and any sexual encounter as prostitution, just people to be paid off and used for their own sexual needs, without a thought to hers. People who don't take "no" for an answer are especially, viscerally, gut-level threatening to me, because what if they're willing to ignore "no" in a sexual context too - I think possible rapist. Do I know for sure? No, I don't. Do I want to gamble? Hell no.

 

Let's say I did go home with a reasonably friendly and attractive guy, just because I wanted sex. It might be just for fun to him, but to me, I have to ask myself: What is he going to say to his friends about me? How it was so easy to "score" sex from me? How I'm such a cheap whore? I don't know this guy, this is just casual sex, and he might not be like that, but then again, what if he is? The stakes are pretty high for me, and that's just the social and emotional risk. Let alone what pregnancy costs females, in terms of physical health. Let alone social stigma. This sort of treatment really hurts, and it has real consequences. If people were willing to treat you like something worthless to be used and discarded, or de-value you as a human being, just because you had sex, you might be pretty cautious, and confine sex to serious relationships, where you had already built trust with someone, too.

 

The reason I'm posting this here, is that it does tie in with the "wrong impression" theme: the whole reason this dynamic even happens, is that Christianity has permeated the whole culture with a negative attitude towards sex, and a denial of female sexuality. If the culture treated sexuality as normal and healthy, and applied this equally to men and women, it wouldn't be an issue like that.

 

As it stands, I just can't win:

 

If I DON'T hop into bed with people, then I'm a frigid, man-hating "feminiazi."

 

If I DO, then I risk being treated like like a sex doll or otherwise less than human.

 

For myself, I navigate the situation as I can, and make my own choices. I don't like this situation, and this false dilemma, but I do demand respect, for whatever choices I do make.

[Leo]

For some reason quotes are not working in my browser today.

My prior posts did have context, sorry, looks like they came off as disjointed.

[Thurisaz]

XCB I know what you mean, and within the context of the US and such I absolutely agree (unless everything I ever heard about US culture regarding that aspect EVVAH has been bullshit )

 

Germany is a very different thing though. In some regards probably even more insane. I don't have much time right now (it's my morning peek into the forums before I have to get ready for work) but I'll try to come back to this in the afternoon and post some more.

[ClaraOlive]

 

 

Germany is a very different thing though. In some regards probably even more insane. I don't have much time right now (it's my morning peek into the forums before I have to get ready for work) but I'll try to come back to this in the afternoon and post some more.

 

I don't see you as trying to stir up shit. I'm kind of wondering how long it was since you deconverted. It was really hard for me to navigate casual sex/casual dating at first. I think difficulties men and women face are sometimes different in this regard, but for both, there's an aspect of coming across as someone who is confident about their sex choices instead of being Christian-awkward (which both tends to be a turn-off to normal people and attracts crazies and really clingy people).

[ClaraOlive]

 

But as to the complaint about us wanting to maintain a system that benefits us. I'm willing to be wrong here, but have never been given a rational explanation of how that system benefits me. I understand it probably benefits some alpha males in particular, of which I am not one, by anybody's standards. So if I am upholding a system that benefits me and oppresses other people, what system is that? I think that is a fair question.

 

In the case of the ex-Christian community (I am not thinking of anyone specific here, honestly), the "system" that I see is one where men blame women for their problems, which benefits them by not having to take responsibility and by having an outlet for their anger.

 

For example with the aforementioned dating threads, if the response to a guy having trouble meeting women interested in sex or who wants to date him is "women don't want sex, they want to manipulate you into paying for things" or "if you're nice to them, they'll put you in the friendzone and end up with some asshole", this does zero to help a guy actually meet a woman. But it often does make him feel like he's doing everything right and it's just the dumb bitches who say one thing and do another so his lack of sex is their fault. Definitely, one can have a run of bad luck where the women he's met haven't been good people. But since one can only control himself, he's going to have better luck doing things to put himself in a position to meet and talk to more women than developing internet theories about why women are such bitches.

[Thurisaz]

I don't see you as trying to stir up shit. I'm kind of wondering how long it was since you deconverted. It was really hard for me to navigate casual sex/casual dating at first. I think difficulties men and women face are sometimes different in this regard, but for both, there's an aspect of coming across as someone who is confident about their sex choices instead of being Christian-awkward (which both tends to be a turn-off to normal people and attracts crazies and really clingy people).

(once I start to write about these topics my fingers tend to get out of control easily... I hope this here won't be a total disaster, but you'll be the judges, obviously...)

 

An understandable question, but religion didn't play any role at all with me. Christianity (at least the mainstream churches... we do have morons here who desperately want to shove US-style jebus taliban crap into everything and everyone but they are rare) in Germany is 95 % a social gathering thing, and what's left is (shock!) a message of kindness toward everyone and of charity. I've never, for example, heard any preacher rant against gays or "pro-choice" people or whatever.

 

(But for the record, it's been some 11 years now since I left my old church )

 

So, also regarding sexuality in general, I never had any problems with any dogma of chastity or purity or whatever other crap you know so well from the US cults.

 

Over here, the "cult of choice" is "feminism" (as its proponents here call it) or better the lunatic fringe of feminism as one really has to call it.

 

Go to one of those infamous "feminist" hate sites like jezebel or heartless bitches, read away for a while. Note how in all those articles there's never even the remotest possibility of maybe not all men being evil rapists and serial killers and childfuckers and whatever other thing you can imagine as a horrible trait in men. This is what I see and hear 24/7/365 here in Germany.

(Wait that's not entirely true... once on jezebel I did find one single article that said, in one half-sentence, that not all men are pigs. And immediately after that it was back to "men do...", "men say...", "evil men", "men are pigs"... et cetera)

 

To be fair, it may well be that these hateful bitchocrats are just some few percent of the entire movement (heck, the entire population). But I'll never know. No disagreeing opinion ever makes it through the established selfcensorship of all the major media and the public discourse and politics. And as there's never a way to know whether a woman I meet somewhere is one of the bitchocrats or a reasonable gal, I'm flirting with a lawsuit for sexual harrassment whenever I approach a woman for anything.

 

Remember that twitter thing a while ago "#yesallwomen"? We've had a similar thing here (#aufschrei), a while before the US version started. Ironically it was started by a very obvious attempt at political libeling, but oh well. Guess what the unspeakable crime was that the women in "our hashtag" were ranting about the entire two hours or so I was following it?

 

The unimaginable sin of a man looking at a woman.

 

You'd think that at least some of the ranting would be about real problems like indeed groping or worse. But nope. We German men are pigs as soon as we're looking at a woman. Sadly, I'm not joking.

 

But back to the question of sex drive... which is actually one of the reasons that make me come back to this site regularly. This is pretty much the only place where I reliably hear the claim that supposedly not all women are, as has been said somewhere above in this thread, "frigid bitches". Over here, all I can perceive confirms the frigidity claim.

 

So "you women" supposedly have just as much of a sex drive as we do. I wonder, then, why this "drive" never really drives women (at least over here) toward any action. No woman ever initiates a flirt or such, one night stands are a pure fairy tale for all I know, online dating is one huge scam (lots of men looking but all "women" in there are scammers or, at best, dead profiles that may be those of retired scammers)... and what's best, I've heard women say a number of times that they rejected the men of their dreams like they were talking about the weather. I mean that literally.

 

I sure don't deny that you ladies have a certain interest in sex, maybe even somewhat of a desire. But I cannot call it a "drive" because there's apparently no driving effect at all. If anything, there's the opposite, namely the permanenly regurgibabbled message that men having interest in women in any way is evil and thus every woman must stay away from them, period.

 

Funnily, this is strictly limited to male come-ons. My wife, who is bi and as adventurous as I am, occasionally flirts with a cute lady when we're out there among people... and it never fails to amaze me how she always gets away totally unharmed, with things for which I'd have been hung, drawn and quartered in no time. Even though most of the women she's hitting on are hetero, the worst that ever happens to her is irritation because her approach was too unexpected.

 

Apparently, if German women don't consider sex in and of itself a bad thing, at least they certainly do see any contact with men that way.

 

Like I said above, I don't fucking want to believe that... but I never see any evidence to the contrary over here

[Leo]

Wow a ton of good points.

Human, this is what I heard also, we do attract things from our upbringing, both good and bad. Hence, once I learned that, I decided I couldn't be irritated by certain types of things, as I apparently attract them. So, either attract them and be okay with it, or figure out how not to attract them. Due to my own personal temperament, I've gone with the attract them and be okay with it, for better or worse. Neither way is right or wrong, in my opinion, so long as I'm not ascribing blame.

It is true that women owe us nothing, but as I tell young men out here, equal is equal: you owe them nothing also. You don't have to buy things for them, pay for their drinks, do stuff for them, help them move, and on and on and on that we men are conditioned, often by our fathers and other older men, to do. Let them be independent. Easier said than done. And, if you asked my wife, she'd say I don't do very well at letting other people get out of their own mess. But if you are attracted to her, you owe it to her to be honest up front. And if she says no never, take off, bro. She owes you nothing, you and she are equal. So it logically follows you owe her nothing either. Aside from human kindness, of course.

I believe I have a bit of insight on the other side, or the women side of this, albeit from a different angle. I had to learn to be independent, as a blind guy. Not someone who overheard a dirty joke, but someone who almost got f-ing KILLED! by a silently oncoming electric train I couldn't see, or nearly got smashed flat by a truck when I was learning how to walk through deep snow, something that is very difficult without eyesight. I'm not dismissing either side of the so-called friend zone situation, but it does in fact take two. If you're the dude, the best thing you can do for her is what was done for other minorities like me: let her struggle with it all by herself, let her be respected. I'll never forget being 8 years old and being told by a coach: "Boy, nobody's gonna respect you if they always have to make special exceptions for you." I've found that to be true for my entire life. And I have often had to have some rather simple things done by someone else, like a sign read to me, even though I'm relatively independent. Being the exception always removes respect from other people. So I tried to teach my daughter that very same attitude: respect yourself, don't buy into the victim culture, and other people will respect you for real.

As to the sex drive thing? I don't know how they measure that. How truthful are people on those surveys. It's a complicated individual thing. The "Men think about sex hundreds of times per day" fallacy has been dismissed by the scientific community based on how thought actually works. You can find that fallacy (favored by Tumblr and Jezebel) on Snopes, by the way. Snopes being an Internet archive of fallacies and the accompanying explanations.

My major problem with the YesAllWomen hashtag? Tragedy appropriation. Women getting looked at by a creeper aren't the same sort of victims as the families of the women and men mowed down were victims. Actually the men who died outnumbered the women, to be numerically accurate. But the tragedy was and is, some humans died in a senseless, horrible tragedy, at the hands of a deranged and sick individual. And some young, inexperienced, victim-culture kids on daddy's dime decided to appropriate this tragedy to every little thing they have had go wrong with them, real and imagined. Sad, and sick, really. I admit I can't understand their thinking. When a blind woman was terribly injured out here by a hit-and-run driver, sitting on the bench waiting for a bus, Portland was quite upset. So was I, I had known her a bit in the early 90s. Her dog guide was killed and she was very seriously injured. But although I was in my early 20s then, I couldn't imagine appropriating her real tragedy into some other life situation of mine. Hers was way worse than when I nearly got hit by a train, or got lost in Japan for a few hours, or nearly got mugged by four guys. Know why? I was standing on my own two feet for all of those, and she was injured, nearly dead. My major problem with the YesAllWomen hashtag, and Tumblr, and Jezebel and all these Internet justice warriors, is the gross disrespect they show for the real victims of crimes and tragedies. They're just so eager to play the victim, they're willing to co-opt other people's tragedies to make a point about their own usually smaller issues. They imagine one can demand others to respect them. I admit, I totally don't understand their thinking. And I'm not a white privileged Donald Trump here: I've been rather honest on where I'm coming from.

But where does that leave us with the sex drive thing? Respect and no blame. I hate that as a young man I thought any time she didn't get an orgasm was my fault, and she thought that if she didn't get an orgasm it was her fault. And my feeling guilty about things actually succeeded in making her feel worse. Blame is best left to the grade school playground, in my opinion. Genuine respect for one another, both sides, and try and ask, not assume. Xianity is a multi-billion-dollar industry, radical feminism is another multi-billion-dollar industry, both have the same goal of keeping the working person down and the groups of persons divided against each other. I buy none of it, personally. I think if we start seeing these religions and movements as industries, and their moral platitudes as advertising, we'll probably take them a lot less seriously. If someone points out where I'm wrong? Good, I'll change. But I'm not going to run behind "all men do this," because that would make others guilty of something I did, and would not actualy be me taking responsibility for something.

Hope some of this makes sense. I do feel most strongly about the not blaming each other part, and the not appropriating other people's tragedies part.

[OralRobert]

Well Clara you're welcome to disagree, but at least some stereotypes (?) about women I absofuckinglutely don't want to believe keep getting reinforced time and again by my personal experience... one of them being that if women have any sex drive at all it must be ridiculously weak compared to that of men. I've seen women express serious interest in sex maybe a handful of times in my entire life, and only within an already established relationship. For all I can tell, before a woman starts to even just think about the possibility of sex she needs to have a durable relationship, and if none is available, oh well, who needs sex anyway?

 

Is it still a stereotype if you actively want to disprove it but never find any evidence for that?

You may want to try hanging around totally different women!! If you're meeting these women at 1pm on sundays at the Swiss Chalet that explains a lot. You won't meet many free thinking, lovers of pleasure there. Those Baptists...are WAY too concerned about eternal damnation. Their reasons to have sex typically are procreation and the occasional awkward birthday bop!

 

Now...all that being said, when you do find a good churchy girl looking be real enough to enjoy the pleasures of good sex...then hold on, its a helluva good time! You can trust me on that one. :-D

[Deidre]

we need a popcorn-eating emoticon.

hmmm...

[OralRobert]

Popcorn is wrong...our pastor told us we could it eat stale crackers. Air popped corn kernels are the devils snack. He is after all, the prince of the power of the air. ;-)

[Thurisaz]

You may want to try hanging around totally different women!! If you're meeting these women at 1pm on sundays at the Swiss Chalet that explains a lot. You won't meet many free thinking, lovers of pleasure there. Those Baptists...are WAY too concerned about eternal damnation. Their reasons to have sex typically are procreation and the occasional awkward birthday bop! [...]

Eh, that's obvious

 

But fact is, there's very little jebus taliban crap in Germany (so far!) compared to the US. What I've described, I saw tih all kinds of women I met (whether I was actively looking or just happening to get to know someone, say, by her being a new coworker or such) for some 20 years or so.

 

Kind of hard to imagine that during all this time in all kinds of situations I've just somehow run into only one single "type" of women no?

[OralRobert]

Dude...I don't know what to tell you. There are clearly more "types" of women than just the one you speak of. Sounds like you just strike out...shouldn't blame that on the ladies! There's really not much more to say.

[Thurisaz]

Well that's exactly what makes me mad every time I even just start thinking about it dude. Everyone tells me the world (and women) is not like it seems to me, but whenever I look around I only find confirmation of my "established" opinion.

 

If that's somehow my fault then neither me nor all my friends and acquaintances have been able to figure out what that fault is exactly for at least two decades. Which then means it's time for me to consider that an unsolvable problem and just give it up.