One that always annoyed me is when it is around the holidays, when stores advertise gifts for men. They always assume a guy is into toilet humor, beer humor, assuming they’re a lumberjack who needs to survive out in the wilderness, are into bbq-ing all of the time so gotta have those available all year around for some reason.
Even when I used to have identified myself as a guy, I never once fit into any of those traits. Just because guys grow beards, doesn’t always mean they’re chopping wood somewhere and always wearing plaid.
I used to teach community college sociology. One of my students told me “it would be gay” to be kind with his 4 year old son.
I often wonder how that kid turned out. Not good I imagine.
Fire eating? That has to be a typo, lol.
Fuck you, Android autocomplete!
looks pretty gay
You know, I feel like they’re all up in the air more these days. When I was a kid the “stupid dad guy who loves BBQ” thing was so dominant. Now Timothee Chalamet is a hot item at one end, and there’s incels at the other.
I read “sexiest stereotypes” and got confused as to why you would want to stop them.
Because even Ryan Reynolds is tired of them at this point.
The market has determined the gender stereotypes that are most profitable and insecure people increasingly take on those qualities as parts of their personality.
All other interests are niche and require someone to establish a special interest club to attract like-minded folks.
Most, if not all of them, should just die to be honest. But the one that is targeted at me and annoys me most at the moment is the following.
Where I currently live, there seems to be an assumption that if you are a man, you’re going to be a deadbeat parent.
The bar is in absolute hell to be considered a “good dad”. Change nappies? You’re so “hands on”. Spend time with your kids minding your own business? Mums out of the blue coming to tell you “you’re doing great”, with optional condescension. Thanks, I didn’t ask. Or conversely if my child is crying, get offered help insistently, because yeah, you must know better than my sorry man ass, even though you only met my child 5 seconds ago.
When my partner is present, any questions from doctors or childminders about our children are by default asked to her, and if I don’t (repeatedly) chip in, I don’t even get a look.
No, I’m not “babysitting” to give my wife a rest, I’m enjoying spending time with my children. No, I don’t feel emasculated having my baby in a carrier/sling or pushing a buggy. Also no, I don’t need to be advertised “manly” looking dad gear (you know the one, looks like you’re cosplaying a spec ops soldier).
This seems to be getting better as my children are getting older but during the baby phase it was absolutely mind blowing how I felt I either had to assert my presence quite a bit, or paradoxically get infinite praise for doing the bare minimum.
the bar really is that low, tbf. congratulations you are in the top 0.1% of parents/
dadslot of people out there that really shouldn’t be having kids because they’re barely aware of themselves let alone other people
edit/crossing out dads
congratulations you are in the top 0.1% of parents/dads
This right here is what this whole question is directed at.
No, doing the basics does not put them in the “top 0.1% of dads,” like it’s some sort of anomaly (they might be, but it’s not because they changed diapers). Almost every dad I know is heavily involved in their kids lives, including when they are babies. I’m never the only dad at the park or the birthday party, and everything else. I have had many discussions with other guys about taking care of our babies, and it is very clear that it is a shared responsibility.
Do more men bail on their kids or dump responsibility on their spouse than women? Sure. Is that currently the common thing, or what 99.9% of men do? Absolutely not.
Stop perpetuating this stereotype, especially in a post about negative stereotypes.
fair enough, really meant that as comment towards parents as a whole. ime kids are basically accessories to many people, like the dog they don’t bother training or the spouse they never communicate with.
Tbf, this is not super local specific necessarily. I definitely pass judgement in fellow coworker dads who show up to work a week after they have their new born. When I chat with them about how nights are going and they say “oh fine, I just sleep in the basement so the baby doesn’t wake me” I want to throttle their weak asses.
Much of it is definitely cultural. Its made worse that we work at a company that offers dads two months full pay and live in a country with employment insurance benefits for parents that can be split over 18 months.
Yeah, by “where I live” I meant the country I am currently in. I am not saying there is no sexism where I am from, far from it, but from what little I can tell, the specifics that I am describing seem to be more prevalent in English speaking countries. Sexism expresses in different ways, that’s definitely a culture thing.
And yes, here in the UK, fathers are only entitled to two weeks paternity leave which only makes things worse. I was very lucky to be working for a company which had a great parental leave policy when both my children were born (3 months full pay) so I could do my part and bond with my children at a very early age. I remember after two weeks thinking “how do fathers even go back to work at that stage?”. And that’s not even taking into account a difficult birth, like needing a c-section, and the mum needing at least 6 weeks to start being able to safely do anything remotely straining again.
It’s just insane.
Meat. I’m vegetarian, my wife is not. When we go out to eat, if she orders meat, there’s a good chance the meat dish will get put in front of me.
We were at a Christmas market on the weekend, and one booth had a sign that said “Make your husband happy”, and it was of course a butcher stand.
Men just want this simplistic life with no amenities. No bed just a mattress, cheap canned food, cheapest tshirts bought in packs of 50 and so on. I’m sure there are people who genuinely like that, but a lot of the times I find it so sad when men think they can’t treat themselves. And often if they just tried finding out what is a good product for them they’d find that it solves a lot of their problems.
One example: my husband told me when we met that he didn’t like to go to the pool because he was very self-concious about his unclean skin and lots of akne. He was also using any cheap soap he saw at a shop. I did some research for him and we tried some medical shower gels and just a few month later his skin had cleaned up completely. He isn’t even someone who buys into this manliness-stuff, but I think society just never suggested to him that as a man he could care about what soap he buys and put any thought into it. For him it was just a fact of life that he had bad skin and he was sad that it kept him from going to the pool or sauna, but he kind of accepted it as his fate. Because somehow trying to feel good and care for your body is still coded female outside of some fitness/bodybuilder etc bubbles.
He has since also found out that investing some research and money into the right mattress and bed base helps against his back pain that he had before also kind of just accepted.
Man, you’d likely be a boon to marketing companies - help everyone realize what markets they’re underserving by targeting one gender demographic.
The timing of this post is ideal.
I’m a guy. Yesterday, a coworker (a woman) told me about a male customer who was shopping before my shift started. She tried to help him, but he said “can I get a man to help me?” Ugh.
Amusingly, only her and two other women were working at that moment. She said “I’m the best you’re gonna get. There’s only two other people on duty right now, and they’re both women with less experience than me.” She wasn’t bragging, either. She’s always the one I go to when I have questions.
I’m glad I wasn’t there. I wouldn’t have wanted to deal with that caveman.
If you were there, you could’ve just played dumb and driven the point home by redirecting each question to your coworker.
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As a teenager I never wore dresses, skirts or nail polish because I didn’t want to be seen as a girly girl. I was into science and books and that didn’t seem to fit the vibes.
I’m glad that I figured out in my twenties that being in a male-dominated tech field doesn’t require you to dress masculine or wear nerd shirts. If you’re into that, that’s great, but it’s also okay to wear dresses or put on make up if you work as an engineer or a software developer.
Anything machismo. Guys shouldn’t take pride in being big dumb oafs that can swig gasoline if they wanted to.
I even think our current view on machismo is too product-driven, rather than traditional male values.
Don’t learn to build a cabin, because that’s old fashioned. But do DRINK BEER, and drive a big truck, and mock clean energy initiatives because real men love the ROAR of an expensive motor paid for by oil companies!
Old values would’ve been about treating a lady right, or standing up for what you believe in - even if it was as simple as punching someone who mocked your wife.
I agree about male values, but has ‘machismo’ ever meant those things?
Males with exaggerated pride are rarely a positive, after all…
It can be bad to demonize all forms of pride coming from one gender. I get what you mean, but we also want to encourage things people should be prideful for. The classic image of being a gentleman, which we can continue to redefine based on what society most needs. Sometimes even just people using their physical, gender-granted strength for societally positive ways can be good.
We just happen to be in a rut of people lost in a vein of toxic masculinity because they don’t see/know of any good ways to flex on the world, and feel some agency within it.
an swig gasoline if they wanted to.
By all means let’em win Darwin Awards.
I get annoyed when I order a cocktail or a vegetarian dish at a restaurant and they put it in front of my wife.
Sometimes I want a veggie filled meal, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to pass up a cocktail because it’s not “manly”.
I have scotch at home, and if I’m buying a steak it’s going to be from a high quality restaurant. I hate overpaying for steak that I can cook better at home.
My wife is a huge prime rib fan. Invariably, the waiter gives me the prime rib, and my wife the salmon.
Lol happens to me all the time, I only drink fruity or sweet alcoholic beverages and my wife loves beer and whiskey.
Couple weeks ago we were out with some work friends and I ordered a “Trophy Wife” and it came with a flower in it and everything lmao (tasted fantastic) and one of the guys we were with (who is gay even) made a comment about my prissy drink lmao. He was doing it in jest but like… Why shouldn’t I like things that taste good? XD
I can sort of relate. I’m fat as fuck, but I really like salads and veggies. When I go out to eat, my (much smaller) partner will order like a steak and potatoes, and I might order like a chicken cobb salad, not because I’m dieting, but I because I really wanted a dinner salad. And like half the time they give the salad to my partner and give me the steak.
So I had a similar experience. I was a vegetarian, I don’t like coffee, I don’t drink alcohol.
First the waiter put the wine in front of me and the soda in front of my wife.
Then I got the meat and she the veggie dish.
Then finally she got the white tea and I the coffee.
I recently became aware of the “performative male” stereotype. Basically, if you’re a guy who doesn’t dress the way most men dress and you like to read books in public, you’re just “performing” in order to attract women.
I think it’s the whole anti-intellectualism aspect of the stereotype that irks me the most (it being shameful somehow for a guy to read).
In some cases Tik-Tokers are filming guys just sitting alone at like a Starbucks reading a book, bothering nobody, and acting like they caught a predator.
It reminds me of that old Bill Hicks anecdote where he’s at a diner in the deep south reading a book, and some dude exclaims “looks we got a reader!” as if it were something peculiar.
Here’s a good critique of it if you’re OOTL https://youtube.com/watch?v=b3jIgdbVjr4
Big penises being more manly or making you a better lover. I’m sure wars have been started by men who were upset with their dick size and would do anything to make up for it.
Men are just big children.
The other day at work, a woman said “I have three children. And a husband, so I guess three and a half children.”
Don’t usually see that stereotype in the wild.
I don’t want people to give up joy and fun things, but the idea that men are just irresponsible and their wife has to also be their responsible mother is sad.
Edit: typo
Bonus points if it’s, “He’s childish because he’s so emotional.”
And then we wonder why men are closed off emotionally.
Unfortunately that’s a stereotype that holds up way more often than it should. Women often end up taking on a huge domestic load and/or caretaker load in a household, even if both she and her husband are working outside the home.
There are couples that never fall into this or that actively try to balance domestic and caretaking activities. One set of tools I know about is “Fair Play”.
Only because the far right wing conservative shitlords like Shapiro,
Kirk, Chowderhead, and Walsh et. al. have been brainwashing guys into taking pride in having no idea how to take care of themselves. They literally take pride in not knowing how to do laundry, cook, or many other domestic tasks…That definitely amplifies the problem, but this isn’t a new problem.
Here’s a study by Pew Research that shows this (data collected from 2016 to 2021).
Here’s a paper that attempts to estimate how much time women have historically spent on “home production” (unpaid work that benefits the household, like cleaning, caretaking, etc). The estimates are based on data from 1900 to the 2000s.
On page 27, Table 6A shows employed, married women haven’t seen a significant reduction in domestic work.
Table 7 shows data for men, but it’s not clear which are married (or sharing household tasks with a woman in some other way). That table shows employed men are taking on much more domestic work than a hundred years ago, but single employed women spend 3 hours more a week while married employed women spent 10+ hours more per week.
https://econweb.ucsd.edu/~vramey/research/Home_Production_published.pdf
The thing i don’t get is why do women put up with it?
I think some of it boils down to different standards, generally the neater/cleaner person will expect the other person to change their behaviour. When I hear people moaning about significant others doing nothing I do think that it takes both people to allow it. Most people will live together for a while before marriage/kids so you have no excuse to complain if you know what they’re like and still marry etcThe thing i don’t get is why do women put up with it?
Many reasons.
Some people are taught gender essentialism from a young age. Women are like this, men are like that, and there’s no way to change it. It’s just nature (or God) that women clean and take care of the house, and men go out and hunt.
Many boys are socialized from a young age not to cook or clean. Many girls are taught that that’s what they do. Have you seen this in your life? A family gathering, where the boys run off to play and the women and girls stick around to clean up? Children learn from what they see and what they’re taught.
It’s only recently that women had any shot at financial independence. Women weren’t guaranteed the right to open a bank account until 1974, in the US. Sexual discrimination is a problem with finding a career to pay one’s own way. From that, one can infer that some women “put up with” shitty men, because the alternative is destitution.
Some women may believe that changing it is just too much work- it’s not an immutable nor innate property of men that they don’t cook or clean or know anything about the children, but changing that would be an overwhelming amount of work. If the man’s not interested in changing anything, it’s even more daunting, and may damage the relationship.
Also some men get violent if they feel threatened, insulted, or hungry.
These are just some things I’ve read or women have talked to me about. I’m a dude doing the best I can. Talk to the women in your life (but don’t make them teach you a whole seminar for free, heh.)
Some women may believe that changing it is just too much work- it’s not an immutable nor innate property of men that they don’t cook or clean or know anything about the children, but changing that would be an overwhelming amount of work. If the man’s not interested in changing anything, it’s even more daunting, and may damage the relationship
That’s what I mean though. Why stay or care about damaging the relationship? Sunk cost fallacy. Some times a hard choice needs to be made. This choice should be made before children/mortgages etc. There’s the old stereotype of men enter a relationship thinking the women wont change and women enter a relationship hoping the man will.
Well, sunk cost fallacy is extremely common.
But also people don’t have perfect knowledge. And people change, and change at different rates.
Imagine a couple that meets when they’re both pretty immature in their 20s. They have fun and fall in love. Then they buy a home together, and the woman slowly realizes she’s matured into an adult role while the husband is still basically the 20 year old bro. Would you casually suggest burning the whole thing down? Finding a new relationship in your mid 30s, especially if you want kids, when there’s no guarantee the new person will be any better, is daunting.
What if they’re not financially independent?
It’s easy to sit back and tell people how to behave in the abstract, but real situations aren’t always so obvious.
When women don’t put up with it en masse you get massive waves of men threatening women. That’s a big part of the whole gen Z gender war thing.
Threaten to do what?
If women don’t put up with it en masse then there is fuck all men can do about it. Mass action is how things change
Mass violence. The tate bs comes from this. The incel mass shootings come from this. Hell the polytechnique shooting was in conversation with this. Men who can’t get laid because women decide men aren’t worth the effort sometimes loudly talk online about how they’re considering rape about it. And that’s not talking about the pushes towards misogynistic politicians, like how young American men who can’t get laid are increasingly opposing women’s suffrage.
For a good example of all of it look at the epidemic of gendered violence in South Korea.
It’s not a stereotype if it’s true, though! /s
On a more serious note, coming from an immigrant family, you can see it very clearly in a lot of those old Eurpoean cultures (Portugal, spain, etc…) The men work, the women (seem) subservient, but honestly, without them, their husbands are absolutely useless at bills, banking, groceries, literally anything that isn’t getting up and going to work to make money.
Most men would absolutely fall apart without their wives because while they can dress for themselves, they sure as hell can’t shop for themselves, etc…
I’m not saying that that’st he modern convention. It isn’t at all. It’s changing. But there’s still a tonne of older women who come in and (half-jokingly) have to buy a bunch of premade meals for their husband because she has to go on the road for a few days and he is useless for that sort of stuff on his own.
It’s funny because the dynamic in my relationship is flipped and I can relate more to women’s complaints about mental load, cooking/household, malicious incompetence, communication, etc so this one always stands out when I come across it.
Men don’t cry or ahow emotions. Women can’t drive. Women belong in the kitchen. A man having many partners is the goat. A woman having many partners is a whore. A woman wearing “sexy” clothes wants the attention of men and is partially responsible should a man overstep his boundries. Blonde women are stupid. The men are the bread winners. Househusbands are “beta”-man. Men have to pay for the date. Men getting beaten by a their partner are weak and deserved it. Women getting beat by their partner is an exeption. Making a sexist joke is harmless. Feminism is bad for men and only helps women take away the power of men. The patriachial order is good for all men.
Sooo, this are all the cringe takes I could come up with real fast. There are many more, but I don’t want to write and essay here.
