#in politicized therapeutic language not just to interact with women but increasingly with many men too

[soulvomit]

I have lots of thoughts about how girls and boys in the US (and lots of places, I just didn’t want to overgeneralize) are brought up in totally different social, cognitive, and linguistic silos that we’re raised in from the earliest part of childhood. As soon as we can talk and our words are corrected by the people around us, based upon their perception of our gender, we’re being socialized into a gender silo.  Now, before I go on with this, I want to point out that for all kinds of reasons - unusual upbringing, gender identity/conformity, neurodivergence, being raised in a culture space without strong homosociality norms, etc - it’s possible for someone not to end up in a silo from early early childhood. So there being no one biologically essential experience of girlhood or boyhood, can absolutely co-exist with the existence of social and cognitive silos.  The thing with these silos is that, in my opinion, men and women have more of the same experiences and emotions in common than not. I am not saying - necessarily - that men and women are the same.  What they’re taught is completely different expected social norms around these things, and different ways of dealing with conflict within their groups and with their friendships. Now, if you are my age and you’ve read Deborah Tannen then this seems like a no-brainer. But I don’t think people really think about how far down this rabbit hole goes, or the probable Sapir-Whorf-adjacent implications of the whole thing.  Boys and girls are given completely different messages by children’s programming and by the world around them about how they’re supposed to interact, communicate, and even PERCEIVE THEIR WORLD, and what words they’re supposed to use to describe their emotions.  Depending upon how sealed off their silo is - they may grow up thinking that only *their* gender experiences specific emotions or life experiences. For example, some women thinking all men are inherently predators, because they’ve never known any men except the ones who preyed upon them. Some hetero-attracted cis men thinking ALL women can get any sex they want, and are never lonely, and that the rich, mean hot girls represent the attitudes of all women - because they’ve never known, in their entire life, unrelated girls or women outside of a very specific social context. Women with almost identical types of attitudes thinking that entitled incels are always male. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.  It always looks like, from within your particular social silo, the opposite sex has actually different emotions and needs as opposed to being socialized to talk about those things differently. Like... it became really clear to me that “bunny boiler discourse” and “crazy ex girlfriend discourse” in the 80s and 90s was actually a conversation about female-on-male abuse and/or predation, filtered through an 80s average male-normative vocabulary instead of the therapy-influenced language that we’re taught as middle class women is “the right way to describe things” (particularly in a social environment where men are ALWAYS seen as victimizers and never victims). When you actually listened to what these guys were saying instead of getting pissed off at their choice of words, you actually absorbed that there was a legitimate experience being described here that cut across gender lines... guys just didn’t use the same words to talk about it, and were dealing with the social minefields of *their* particular silo in trying to articulate this rotten experience that was happening to them (that happens to all genders), and were just as socially slapped for using the wrong choice of words as women are.  And when middle class girls talked about the same experiences, they were often directed away from blunt, short/succinct “working class” or “male” language and reinforced to express their thoughts/feelings in terms of the “polite” therapeutic or academic language that passes for Obligatory (White) Middle Class Female English in your particular era. Further, they were reinforced by practically all adults and all media that it was their job to police the speech of any boys in their presence. What’s frustrating is that a lot of upper class feminist approaches don’t really acknowledge that Compulsory Middle Class Female English is practically constructed so that women DON’T succinctly describe their experiences and feelings, yet this particular style of feminist discourse tends to present this form of communication as the *only* valid communication and actively problematizes other styles of communication.  A big problem with a lot of approaches to feminism is that they don’t question the existence of this metaphysical silo or even try to leave it. You’re stuck inside Plato’s Cave, thinking that’s the whole universe. You don’t try to dismantle it and in many cases the things you’re doing that you think are “feminist” actually just reinforce this cultural silo. And I think it may even go deeper than the most popular approaches to Deborah Tannen’s analyses because there’s a whole Sapir-Whorf Adjacent metaphysical worldview/cognitive component to being siloed, it’s not *just* what words you use... but how you’re taught to relate to the world based upon what words you use and how it may even affect your development.   And it’s also the fact that these silos act as social protection rackets that reinforce compulsory gender-conformist behavior. 

#this is where The Matrix really nails gender if you think about it #reason the millionth that I'm an egalitarian #my own experience is that I was raised to communicate my boundaries and needs in short/blunt ways and had to learn how to use and speak #in politicized therapeutic language not just to interact with women but increasingly with many men too #the Sapir-Whorf adjacency and the cognitive aspects of these silos is why I feel that yes - correcting someone's language about describing #their own feelings and experiences - is just often just straight gaslighting