Here’s a cool trick to see if a man actually respects you: try disagreeing with him
A friend of mine did something with online dating where, before meeting a person, she’d say no to something minor without a reason for the no. For example: “No, I don’t want to meet at a coffee shop, how about X?”, or “No, not Wednesday”, or “No, I don’t want to recognize each other by both wearing green shirts”. She said how the potential dates reacted was a huge indicator of whether she actually wanted to meet them, something I readily believe.
I’ve mentioned this to a few people and sometimes I get very annoyed and incredulous responses from guys about how are they supposed to know that it’s a test if the girl is being unreasonable? How are they supposed to know that and let her have her way? I find it difficult to explain that if you find it unreasonable for someone to have a preference of no consequence which they don’t feel the need to explain, then you are the one being unreasonable. You can decide for yourself that it sounds flaky and you don’t want to date her, but you don’t have a right to know and approve all of her reasons for things in order to deign to respect that she said no about it. Especially in the case of someone you haven’t even fucking met yet.
The point isn’t to know it’s a test, the point is that if you would only say “yes” if you knew it was a test, then what if it’s not a test, but because she hates coffee shops, or because she’s attending a funeral Wednesday and doesn’t know you well enough to want to share that, or whatever else? Because if you’re making rules for when other people can have preferences and not explain why… yeah, that is a thing they can reasonably want to avoid.
@ all the angry dudes in the replies: the point is not to trick or manipulate men. The point is to see how a potential romantic partner reacts to a minor inconvenience. If they say, “oh, ok, would seven work instead?” or “well there’s this Armenian tea house I’ve been meaning to try out, want to go there?” then that’s a good sign that they’re safe to date. If they throw a fit and/or demand to know every little detail about your rationale over something as simple as rescheduling dinner plans, that’s a bad sign. A really bad sign.
It’s like this, dudes. Women in Western society are socialised to cooperate and compromise. Some men are socialised to get all their own way, all the time. These dudes are incredibly dangerous to women their partners,* and the only way to tell them apart from the OK guys is to pay close attention to how they react. If you’re one of the OK ones, this isn’t about you. Learn to take “no” for an answer, and you’ll be fine.
*Updated to reflect the fact that abusive men can target any gender, and the fact that I used this screening tactic to good effect during my Big Gay Slut phase.
The thing a lot of the men reblogging don’t get – they think this post is telling women to lie. They think this post is telling women to start a fake argument and to be manipulative.
Actually, this post is doing the opposite. This post is telling women to be straightforward, and forthright, and upfront about their values and opinions.
This post is telling women, “I know you’ve been socialized and conditioned to nod and smile at everything a man says your whole life, since you were 4 years old and your grandma told you that little girls should be seen and not heard. I know that by now it’s second nature to you, and you probably don’t even realize you’re doing it half the time. You don’t even realize that the laugh that just came out of your mouth is a laugh of appeasement, rather than a laugh of genuine humor. ”
It’s telling women, “Force yourself to resist your conditioning. Consciously make an effort to be open and honest in that initial conversation, when you’re making small talk, about small things. If he says something you don’t quite agree with (and he inevitably will, because nobody agrees on everything), don’t smile and concede the point like you’ve been trained to do. Consciously make a point of vocalizing your real opinion.”
It’s telling women “If a man doesn’t respect your real opinion about a small, insignificant issue when you first meet him, then he’s not going to respect your real boundaries later on when you’re in a serious relationship.”
Seriously, ladies, read this to men already in your lives. If they get outraged…maybe reconsider their place in your lives.
Wheat fields are more mystical than fields of other crops. You are 7,000 times more likely to meet an old god or see a portent of doom in a wheat field than in a field of like… soybeans.
For your consideration: cornfields
Cornfields are less mystical than wheat fields but more mystical than soybean fields. Two-bit monsters congregate in corn fields to eat people, but their power is nothing compared to the things that manifest in wheat fields.
Have been in both wheat and cornfields; can confirm. Cornfields host monsters who eat people. Wheat fields attract old gods.
I have a theory that this is because the notions most of us have of “old gods” are pretty intrinsically European, and wheat was (and is) the staple crop of European life. It is quite literally tied to the ancestral rituals and beliefs of most white people. Odin, the Morrigan, and even Zeus are actually linked to a set of peoples who cultivated wheat.
Meanwhile, corn (maize) is a crop native to the Americas. It features in the white cultural imagination in a very different way. Corn is a motif seen not in our ancestral myths, but in a much newer genre: the American Gothic. With its focus on the tensions between man and nature and—perhaps more importantly—the United States’s history of genocide against its indigenous population and trade in enslaved Africans, the American Gothic is VERY preoccupied with agriculture. Our monsters come out of corn fields because corn is a symbol for not only what we did to the Native Americans (who were the first to grow the crop), but of what we are doing to the very land itself. Corn is a monument to our cultural sins.
Meanwhile, I suspect that corn features very differently in the imaginations of people of color. If you asked a Native American person or a Latinx person what sort of mysticism they associate with corn fields, I imagine their answer would be very different than ours.
TLDR: White people associate wheat with our ancestors’ gods because our ancestors grew wheat. We associate corn with terrible monsters because it is a literal sign of our own monstrosity.
Native American here, can confirm that small plots of corn feel safe and homey; ideally they should be interplanted with other crops. You find turkeys and possums and raccoons in the corn. It might tell you important knowledge.
However.
Giant monocultures of corn, where the corn grows unbroken for miles and miles, not near human habitation, devoid of local wildlife, just corn on corn in the soft wind? Corn mega monocultures? Those sound like screaming.
….You meet gods in wheat fields? All I find are passed out and drunk Ukrainians.
And how can you be 100% sure that those drunk Ukrainians were not, in fact, cavorting with the old gods?
My mom’s side of the family has an old church in Viginia, a few miles from the land our ancestors inherited after emancipation. The church is a small building, next to a corn field, and across the road is a soybean field. The corn field is actually interspersed with wheat. It sounds like linen skirts brushing against dusty wood floors and is full of old ghosts humming, still working, and watching their descendants.
thinking in your target language: coherent and eloquent sentences. you use every verb tense perfectly, the grammatical genders are all correct, and your intonation is like a native speaker’s.
I’m coining generation Nobody Knows for people born in 1995-2000
generation Nobody Knows has the qualities of both Millennials and Gen Z. We are broke and miserable like Millenials and frothing at the mouth and out for blood like Gen Z.
When you pick up a sword for the first time you will be slow and awkward. This is frustrating, but refuse the temptation to try and become a “faster” fencer. Chasing after speed is like trying to catch smoke. If you try and pursue speed, all you will accomplish is haste. Haste is the enemy of 1st class fencing.
Speed is a lie the untrained mind tells itself when it sees an action it cannot follow. The truth is a combination of timing, control, and fluidity. Fluid motion, even done slowly, will always arrive before a hasty strike. Control will allow you to move without wasteful motion that will slow you down. Timing will eliminate the need to move fast almost entirely. There is no need to get somewhere fast so long as you get there at the right time.
“Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.”
My martial arts instructor taught me that long ago.
Do it slow at first. Get the technique down. As that comes, you will build speed.
As one of my sword instructors said, “you are never too good to take it slow and remember your basics.”
So this couple walks in- a broad-shouldered man with an accent (Italian, I think) and a man that I can best describe as looking like Cecil Palmer.
“Okay- weird question. So you guys did our wedding- amazing by the way. And it’s been a month and just about all the flowers in the vases have died by now except for this one thing that’s really holding on in there. And we want to know what that plant is and how to take care of it to keep it alive. And we don’t know how to like… describe it and it sounds kind of weird to go to up to a stranger and say ‘hey what’s this weird wiggly green plant you put in our vases a month ago?’ but I guess that’s what I’m asking.”
“Sounds like curly willow. If you keep it in water it will eventually start rooting and you can grow a new plant from it from the cutting.”
“That is too cool! What do you suggest we do?”
“Well, you can keep it in the water for now, but eventually you’ll want to pot it in soil because that’s how it’s going to get its nutrients.”
“Can we,” the Italian guy asks. “Can we plant it in the floor?” I figure he means ‘plant it outside.’
I nod. “It’ll keep growing.”
“What does it look like when it’s bigger? Does it stay like a wiggly stick?”
“Oh, no, it’ll branch out. It’s actually a tree.”
The skinnier one turns to his husband and says:
“Did you hear that, honey? They gave us a tree! We have a tree now!”
Costco has started printing backup cooking instructions directly onto the plastic wrapping on the individual pizzas in their bulk frozen pizza cases, presumably because they know that dumbasses like me always throw away the box after the first one, and now I’m feeling personally called out by a packaging decision.
rip tumblr 