Our BetterMost Community > Chez Tremblay

Ashamed of being straight?

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opinionista:

--- Quote ---I cannot stand professional victims, as I call them.
--- End quote ---

LOL. I have a friend, a male friend who's a professional victim! I like the term. I'm going to tell him that. I stand him because otherwise he's sweet but sometimes I get sick of his constant whining.

dmmb_Mandy:

--- Quote from: ednbarby on June 18, 2006, 02:42:06 pm ---I grew up with two older brothers who essentially raised me once my Mom got to drinking.  And they did that with no help from a father figure - he was long gone.  One of my brothers taught me how to play basketball and to ice skate, the other taught me how to tie my shoelaces and ride a bike.  I climbed trees like a monkey, just like them.  And I hated wearing dresses and skirts - still do.  When I watched Westerns, I wanted to be the cowboys, too, and definitely *not* the women in their long dresses in the saloons.  I didn't even want to be Annie Oakley - I wanted to be Billy the Kid or Jesse James.

--- End quote ---

Barb, I know exactly what you mean. I grew up with 3 older brothers so I was the baby and the only girl, and my childhood was anything but girly. We played baseball, fished, played hide-and-seek and spotlight and laughed at those little girls at school in funny, little poofy dresses. When I fell, I had to take a deep breath and just shake it off. Men were my life. Oh, and I always wanted to be Batman.

silkncense:

--- Quote ---I think that makes you tomboy not a lesbian.
--- End quote ---

I have never wondered if I were a lesbian.  Funny tho' I don't think of myself as a tomboy either.  I think it's simply my mind is more hardwired masculine.  

This has made it very difficult for me to maintain friendships w/ other women & outside of the work environment most men at this age are w/ their families.  


--- Quote ---You gotta be who you are.
--- End quote ---

Agreed.  It's just one of those interesting challenges in personal relationships.

Barb & Del - Glad to know ya!

cmr107:
When I was little I wanted to be just like my big brother. He played hockey, so I liked hockey, went to all his games, watched games with him on TV. He sort of liked video games, so I would play with him (and I liked it). I loved all the superhero movies and shows that he watched. Like someone else said (Barb I think?), my first crush was one of his friends. All my cousins (except one that I have met twice because she lives in California) are male also.

What's interesting to me is that a lot of the women who have posted here about being tomboys or whatever is that they mostly seem to prefer the company of men. I love men, but my closest friends have always been girls.

I guess it is easier for women. I like being female, but I'm sooo not girly. I wear jeans and T shirts everyday, hate wearing skirts and dresses, don't like shopping. I do wear makeup, but only the teensiest amount possible. One of my very favorite things is volunteering at Habitat for Humanity in the summers, working with tools (I LOVE power tools!) and getting all dirty. One of the things I hate most is when a man comes over to try to help me when I don't need it. I work in the scene shop of our theatre on campus, mostly building sets, again using tools. I was first chair trumpet in band too, LJ! I have had many conversations with friends about which women we find attractive, both famous women or people we know. No one has ever said I was a lesbian. I think it's stupid that women are allowed to not conform to the traditional female stereotype, but men must conform to the stereotype or they are automatically gay. We should all just be able to be who we are without concern for what other people think. David, I can see how that would get annoying after so many years, but don't change who you are just for them.

nakymaton:
You know those gazillion on-line quizzes that you can take? Well, apparently there was one making the rounds about "are you gay" -- and all the questions had to do with things like "do you know the names of more than six colors?" My husband ran across it on a message board that he reads, and read me some of the questions. And, you know, I thought the characteristics that got a guy labeled as gay were pretty appealing.

None of the questions asked whether you were attracted to other men or anything like that.

And the quiz bothers me for a couple reasons. First, there's an underlying homophobia... because, OMG, you wouldn't want to be gay or anything.  ::) ::) ::) And second, because it tries to enforce a ridiculously limited stereotype of what it means to be a straight man. (I mean, according to the quiz, straight men don't exercise after age 35. Or know "ROY G. BIV". Or... well, I don't remember the entire list, but I think that being a moderately pleasant human being meant that you couldn't possibly be straight. ::) Which, if it were true, would really really suck for straight women.)

(Fortunately for me, my husband tested as "obviously gay." Which is good, because I think he's a generally pleasant human being, and I wouldn't want to discover that he's secretly a jerk.)

cmr107 -- you're right. The rules for what women can like or be interested in are much looser than they are for men. (Though they've loosened considerably in my lifetime -- when I was a little girl, I was told to wear a dress to be "lady-like," and told that girls couldn't become astronauts or do math. People still make assumptions about what I'm capable of, but the roles for women are not nearly as rigid as they used to be.) It's too bad that men don't have that kind of freedom. Because I think that, no matter what kinds of biological differences there may be between men and women, there's a lot more natural variation in interests and behaviors than the stereotypes acknowledge. And it would be nice if people could be who they are, rather than the stereotypes they are expected to be.

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