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Old Apr 30, 2015, 04:49 PM
Azafadaza Azafadaza is offline
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Member Since: Jun 2014
Location: USA
Posts: 9
I like men as much as I like women; in that pretty much everyone has to pass a few basic filters for me to like them at all.

1) Treat the waitstaff/counter persons like they're relevant
2) Have compassion
3) Be honest
4) Be approachable

As long as these four things are met, I'll generally like anyone without regard for their sex or gender. There are things that are socially/culturally engrained in men that drive me crazy when I run into them, though, and same with women (including myself!) Since I study anthropology, I tend to step back a lot and look at the big picture when a man acts like a pig or a woman acts like a shallow twit, and look at what social factors are influencing this blind obedience to stereotypes.

The cool thing is, more and more I notice that it's acceptable to flaunt contradicting those stereotypes. A man who once hid his moisturiser now just says "Hey, I'm metrosexual" and keeps right on lotioning up. Men are now permitted (more so than a decade ago, anyway) to admit to emotions, insecurity, eating disorders, and so on. Women are definitely much more permitted to wear trousers, not care about getting married, not want to have children, or want to work in construction. I'm not saying that all of these things don't have detractors, but it's no longer so socially stigmatised. So, with these changes, a lot of the assigned "masculine" and "feminine" attributes that really only got set in stone when the Cult of Domesticity became the reigning social control are also getting wobbled off their tracks.

I know guys who hate sports and women who won't miss a football game, men that want to get married and women who couldn't care less. Guys who don't want to have cheap meaningless sex and women who collect one-offs like postage stamps. The social norms are a'changing, and I say huzzah for that!
Thanks for this!
Irrelevant221, Trippin2.0