@caketastydelish if you're really interested in hearing about women's perspectives, my first suggestion is to always be open minded and listen and not try to dictate conversation, or ask loaded questions. If you'd really be interested in talking about my views and experiences, please feel free to start a conversation with me, I have a feeling a talk like that might be far more productive privately.
I feel though as a basic thing, you're sort of missing there's still a vast power imbalance, because of historical male control over women that's still nowhere near to equal today. Men still afford higher respect to men of color than to white women.
I'll always remember a conversation I had with my father when I was younger, sometime in the 1990s. I don't remember how my talk with him started, but I remember he was telling me about American history, and he said there'd never been either a black president nor a woman president. And I asked him which he thought they'd have first, and he told me he had absolutely no doubt I'd see a black man as president before a woman, and of course he was absolutely right. I really suggest you think deeply about what that means.
I have a coworker on my team, he's been on my team for about a year and a half now, and he's from Africa. He speaks perfect English, but his accent is very thick, and while I get along very well with him and his family, I'd be lying if I said he wasn't mostly useless as a colleague. He's kind to me privately, but well honestly I do almost everything for him, and he always is contacting me for every question he has on how to do things, and I usually need to end up making programs and reports for him, and fixing things, and proverbially I have to hold his hand to walk him through basic tasks even now. And he's supposed to back me up on my reports when I'm taking a vacation, but he often calls me when I'm off work for things he should be able to figure out for himself. Well anyways, between him and myself, who do you think other managers are giving credit to and offering advancement opportunities to?
I'm sorry for how your girlfriend treated you, and I can imagine how hurtful that must've felt and also humiliating, and I agree it's problematic for anyone to have to go through something like that. I do believe you're still not really understanding power imbalances between men and women.
I also was in an interracial relationship with my long term boyfriend, he was of Indian ethnicity (but he was born and raised in Canada), and things got really bad between he and I. Both men and women are conditioned from an early age how women have certain expectations in relationships of a subservient role, and it took me a long time to break out of that mindset (many women haven't and still think that's natural order, that's why you see so many women still siding with misogynists), and for years I basically lived as his slave. I had a very difficult time getting myself out of my situation, and my perspective on life really changed a lot as a result. Of course you'll see outlier examples of things being different, but overwhelmingly women are treated as inferior by men still.
@Angst I feel a big problem is you so often see claims about "But what about the men?!" used to obfuscate women's issues and to control conversations and redirect back to being male-centric. In my mind "men's rights activism" is completely sexist at its core and is all about countering women's progress, because really as an entire group men don't have any rights at risk (unless you count things like the "right" to abuse and rape women, and have no consequences for mistreatment of women, and be entitled to dominate everything always), and especially no rights being oppressed by women. And really I feel that's what's really wrong, is they blame women for their problems, which is complete and utter nonsense, any problems they face as a group are from other men. And I fully support activism for black men, homosexual men, transgender men, and such, but again women aren't problems for those men, other men are.
#maletears
