if she said things that genuinely merit further discussion, or if you think you need to get down on both knees and beg for her forgiveness, do that *after* she's back in the driver seat and not jacked up on adrenaline. it's vastly better to have a serious conversation about relationships and try to resolve conflict when the brain's flooded with black tar endorphins and weepy post-fight oxytocin rather than racemic rage and freebase spite -- trying the latter is all but guaranteed to wreck your shit.
and unfortunately, as part of the ongoing program of feminist cultural engineering and enforced Gender Equality®, western cultures have largely deemed it Officially Misogynist to admit the existence of hysteria, much less teach men how to handle it.
@velartrill I'm pretty sure you are massively overgeneralizing. Neither is this kind of mental state as common as you describe, nor as drastic, nor exclusive to women (although I guess you might not be saying the last part?). And the effects of reactions you describe are definitely not as clear cut – different people react massively differently in emotional situations and generalizing to "always attempt to take charge when a woman is emotional" is a recipe for disaster.
In general I think you are overstating the importance of gender in many areas. Do you really think it's that crucial, or is it just an attempt to (over)correct for the liberal/parts of feminism insistence that gender is completely irrelevant?
but while hysteria may not happen to all of us all of the time, it definitely happens to most of us some of the time. i've experienced this first- and secondhand and heard from enough men about their experiences from so many different corners of society that i have no doubt of this whatsoever.
> I'm pretty sure you are massively overgeneralizing
i'm pretty sure you are. i am not the outlier here.
> generalizing to "always attempt to take charge when a woman is emotional" is a recipe for disaster.
this is bluepill nonsense. it's the one thing that works in the vast majority of situations, and doing anything else will make matters worse. (i'll note that the first response i got to this thread, while i was still in the middle of writing it, from was a man who experienced exactly this phenomenon, was baffled and traumatized by it, and was grateful to me for helping him understand what was going on. it really is that common.)
> In general I think you are overstating the importance of gender in many areas. Do you really think it's that crucial, or is it just an attempt to (over)correct for the liberal/parts of feminism insistence that gender is completely irrelevant?
men and women are radically different creatures, as literally every culture before ours had no problem acknowledging (it's even in sociologist Donald Brown's famous list of "human universals"). we share a common humanity but the details are very different, and why wouldn't they be -- virtually every other mammal is like us in that respect. the stark divergence between male and female gender psychology clearly long predates the human race; it would be far more surprising if we had someone contrived to evolve such as to magically eliminate the majority of those differences.
frankly, it's monumentally arrogant to believe that our civilization, and only our civilization understands the truth about the sexes, and that every other civilization that came, conquered, and flourished before us (and most that are contemporary to us) was completely ignorant and foundationally wrong about everything. we've had millions of years to work out the kinks in our gender relations, and there's a very good reason every human culture we have been able to reconstruct or study in vivo was patriarchal, despite what a fantastically diverse species we are. there is also a very good reason that our culture's refusal to adhere to these common norms has been so disastrous for everyone, while the cultures that followed their traditional gender norms built empires that lasted centuries or longer. (hell, our cultures were doing pretty well for themselves before they went and bulldozed Chesterton's Fence). and it astounds me that simply saying the things that have been common knowledge for as at least long as we have had language to express them with now incur disbelief and anger when we do so. (c.f. https://pleroma.site/notice/9x7V50W1y2PU9RQRWK )
i'm not interested in getting sucked into yet another redpill/bluepill debate; i've made my position clear and i've heard every feminist argument so many times i could recite them by rote in my sleep, because five years ago i was the one brandishing those arguments. i have seen fully convincing refutations for all of them, which is why i abandoned my former beliefs, and there is no more of a chance i'll ever go back to them than there's a chance i'll go back to being the idiot anarchist hellion i was in high school.
@velartrill
> if you haven't seen it for yourself, consider yourself very lucky
I have, both from women and men, but extremely rarely. I can think of maybe up to 10 instances over my life, depending on what exactly you consider an instance.
> i am not the outlier here
Well, IIRC you do have a mental ilness, so I wouldn't expect your experience to be typical. On the other hand I don't know the details, so I'm not sure how relevant this is.
Perhaps more to the point this might be culture dependent – I'm not american and I expect there might be some cultural differences in emotioinal expression. We might have also lived in somewhat different subcultures within our cultures, which could explain the difference in our experience?
> it's the one thing that works in the vast majority of situations, and doing anything else will make matters worse.
My experience is completely different. In such situations I attempt to empathize with the other persons emotions, listen to what they are saying and respond. So far this has served me well, and my relationships with the people involved seem fine. I am pretty sure that in at least one of the cases attempting to "take charge" would have made matters much worse.
This advice is dangerous not only because situations and the people going through such episodes vary, but also the responders. Maybe some people are better at taking charge, but others have different conflict resolution strategies. I suspect it's more important that the person executing such strategy does it well, rather than tries using a specific one.
Yes, men and women are different, contrary to what liberalism would like to believe (and I actually too, but well, not believing in reality seldom helps). But the difference is not *that* big – humans have some significant cognitive differences from other mammals, which I would argue diminish the relative importance of gender differences. The variance in character traits is big enough that any sweeping generalizations over all, or even just most, people of one gender must fail. You still get strong statistical evidence for any specific gender related trait, but there is enough of these that a majority of people will have some of them atypical for their gender.
I'm not convinced that our civilisation is failing (maybe the US is, but that's not the whole civilisation), so this argument doesn't convince me at all. Some parts of Chesterton's Fence have definitely been buldozed with too much zeal, but from my point of view the net effect was still positive.
Besides, our civilisation went through many changes unrelated to gender roles in a very short period of time. Focusing on just these changes oversimplifies the whole thing.
I understand you won't go back to being a feminist – I suspect that even if we agreed about all the facts, there would still be enough value differences between us that we would disagree about overall goals. I'm just trying to point out that I think you have overcorrected from the feminist beliefs into something that is again not accurate – I hope you stay open to the possibility that this is the case. My thesis is that gender-related forces are not the main thing driving human behaviour – they are massively more important than your previous ideology stated (which might make them appear larger), but they are only one of many factors influencing people.
Sorry for the shitty psychoanaysis in the last paragraph, but I think it was necessary. If it's any consolation, writing it down made me wonder if I'm not overcorrecting for some of the ideologies I have held previously (not related to gender at all), but this requires more introspection to fully explore.
