Hello all, OP here.
I strongly believe that men telling you to smile on the street is absolutely non-toxic and not at all evil. I also feel that this behaviour is not at risk of ‘taking over’. That phrase really just made me imagine a girl walking down the street with literally every man shouting “SMILE SMILE SMILE” and I had a small giggle to myself.
Men telling you to smile is annoying.
When a man on the street tells me to smile, I roll my eyes. Because he’s being an idiot.
When my ex co-worker told me to smile, I told him I was busy. He and I maintained a great and appropriate friendship throughout the rest of me working there.
Feminism, to me, is not a joke. I take it quite seriously. I think it is one of the many, unfortunate consequences of the Self Esteem Movement that our generation, and a couple generations before us, have been raised in.
We really are a weak generation, but it is not our fault. Our idiotic caregivers never let us lost. Never let us figure out bullying on our own. We got participation ribbons when we showed up, even when we lost. Teachers are no longer allowed to write “F” or “0” on a paper. A teacher actually lost his job for this and I’ll post it later.
I was lucky enough to be raised by quite a realistic man. When I was nine and was in long jumping, I lost, and I got a “Participation” ribbon. When I showed it to him, he said “No, sweetheart. You lost. And I wish they showed you that. You lost, because you didn’t try hard enough.” Being raised in the Self Esteem Movement, I thought instances like this were absoultely atrocious. But he always insisted that when I grew up, I’d thank him.
And I do.
I can handle being confronted, being treated unfairly, without throwing an absolute temper tantrum, one specifically towards men. I’m competent, and I think modern day feminism shows that women are incompetent. That in the 40s, we said we can handle being in society. And now, we are proving that we cannot, because we apparently cannot handle any sort of criticism, or being laughed at.
Yes, there are assholes in the world. Many, so many. That’s the world. If everyone were pleasant, where would be the value in pleasantness.
Modern day feminism is not about women. It’s insecure, manipulative little girls with a victim complex. Because being a victim is rather luxurious.
To all feminists: You’re stronger than this. Women are stronger than this. Do not underestimate your gender.
That man who raised you is a fucking asshole. When someone gets to win, everyone else gets to lose, and how hard you try doesn’t always matter. The world is not this fantastical place where the people who put in the most effort always get the best rewards, and it is unbelievably toxic to inject that kind of fantasy into a nine-year-old’s head. Now whenever you fail, no matter what you may have done, it’s something wrong with you for not being better. (Not to mention how that fucks up the notion of what failure even is. Failure is a fabulous learning tool, not a thing to be ashamed of.)
And you certainly took the lesson to heart: here you are, blaming everyone else for not already winning, for not trying hard enough. It doesn’t matter to you that Western society is still blatantly overflowing with preconceived notions about women’s roles and limitations; if only women would try harder, far harder than men need to try for some reason, there’d be no problem. If only the poor and homeless would try harder to not be poor, if only transpeople would try harder to not get shot, if only anyone anywhere on the wrong side of a power imbalance would try harder to compensate for it.
The people I’ve seen and met with the most interesting feminist insights have also been the people with the most crap piled on them their entire lives, who attract yet more of it for bothering to speak up, and who keep buggering on despite it. Fuck your trivialization; it insults them far more than teenagers’ proclaiming their hatred of all men just because it looks like a trendy bandwagon.
ETA: The more I mull this over, the less I think I have a problem with participation ribbons. Fuck the self-esteem, that’s your own thing to work out, but it’s always nice to have a reminder that you did something, that you did try, and that even if you didn’t win, you’ve now had an experience that most people haven’t.
I observe that “Olympic athlete” and “Oscar-nominated” are still treated as pretty damn special, and nobody tells them “oh, honey, if only you’d tried harder, you pathetic failure”. You can only tell this story in the first place because you tried. I didn’t; I have no long-jump story. Taking that away from you by turning it into a shame of failure is a massive dick move. People who learn that lesson just stop trying so they don’t fail so often, and here you are, railing against trying.