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Huh...
This makes me think that FtM transsexuality and MtF transsexuality are actually a lot more symmetrical than I previously realized.
Someone here once mentioned that FtM transsexuality was driven by an urge to "self annihilation", which I thought was great and accurate. Although it did make FtMism out to be a rather different phenomenon than MtFism, since MtFism is pretty clearly driven by positive desire.
But if we instead think that the key issue underlying all forms of transsexuality is the individual's relation to femininity. FtMism = rejection of and flight from femininity, MtFism = attraction to and desire to possess femininity. Then we can start to conceive of the two forms as being separate manifestations of the same underlying phenomenon.
I happen to agree with the radfems who claim that men are the "default" gender and women are a deviation from the default. Although I might disagree with them over the specifics. Rather than conceiving of femininity as a "lack" of masculinity, it's relatively clear to me that femininity is something that one possesses in addition to the "default" human state. And this is exactly what we see expressed in the two distinct forms of transsexuality.
I'm curious how you'd distinguish this from desire-to-be-masculine. I think both components are present, but to provide a pretty straightforward (hur hur) example, this and this comic (cw: furry, NSFW, FtM/F) says a lot of things about how the ftm character reacts to someone he's penetrating touching there... and also is more gynophilic in his partners than I am, and a longer-running thread revolves around wanting to be a dad, and not just (or even primarily) in the breeding kink sense.
Now, tbf, I haven't stalked the writer's twitter/bluesky enough to be sure they're specifically transmale... but a lot of transmale people in tumblr space found it pretty resonant. And it's not exactly an uncommon framework: most of the other good examples just look like M/M or M/F, are really gay, and/or just a lot kinkier than bedupolker's, but I can provide links if requested. Not always or even often a plausible one in every way -- very few transguys are going to get six-foot-three with a Christian-Bale-as-Batman voice -- but if we're talking about what people want or are attracted toward or fantasize about, it's kinda relevant that you can just look at people's fantasies, these days, and find at least existence proofs.
The problem with those comics is that they left me wondering "but can rats and mice be interfertile?" which is probably not what the creator was getting at.
(Also, it had me going "wait, a rat and a mouse? why is this transspecies? ah yeah, FtM, being a rat means they can be sure of being bigger - i.e. more masculine - than their partner if the partner is a mouse" and also "hang on, the mouse already has kids? how many kids? how many does she want? does she have kids with each new partner? how many kids can they support, we're talking mice and rats here who have litters: average for mice is 6-8 pups, average for rats is 8-9" but since this is anthropomorphic rodents, probably it'd be twins or triplets and only one litter per year, not their animal counterparts multiple pups per litter and multiple litters per year).
(Also also, who the hell wants to be a rat? But I guess these are lab rats, not ordinary dump, harbour, and other wild spaces, rats).
Part of the second comic has the two treating a squirrel as if he'd 'perfect' donor, until the problem comes up that he's survived testicular cancer, not that he's from a different suborder. There's furry conventions where interspecies relationships are treated as their own type of birth control, but they don't really mesh with the 'return to small town' vibe here, so you're just not supposed to think about it much.
It's kinda cute. I think the theme is supposed to be more 'crushed on a girl, her baby-daddy/boyfriend is a jerk, and woo she's into me', which... uh, is not an unusual fantasy, nor is its distaff counterpart.
Rodents in general are a surprisingly common furry species, if not up there with the stereotypical dogs, cats, and dragons. FFIX's Freya (tbf, a white rat species) had a big impact on people. I'd say anthrofying them gets away from some of the real-world equivalent's grosser behaviors, but there's also a Skaven-specific fandom, so maybe it just doesn't matter.
Are those six kids from the past partner? Or from several past partners?
Anyway, I hope Ratty is a big earner because if they're going to have their own litter, there's going to be a lot of little paws pattering around the house.
To be fair, I do not get furrydom at all. And it doesn't help that a lot of the most visible stuff is yiff, and things like "snake women with breasts" which just makes me go "no!" If you're going to be an animal, why be unrealistic? Though yeah, I'm arguing about pretend human animals which is totally unrealistic in the first place. But, for instance, in what I suppose we can call classic 'anthropomorphised animal literature', there is no sense that Mole and Mrs. Otter can get together and have cute hybrid babies, because species are not cross-fertile like that.
(Also, I am now wincing at the idea of a mouse pregnant by a squirrel. More likely to explode while pregnant with the growing baby/babies, than to be able to successfully give birth to a hybrid squouse).
The backstory is one past partner, but I think it's intentionally a little ambiguous about whether the set that show up are from that litter or from a timeskip after a second more-intentionally-'donated' litter.
That's fair.
Uh, a lot of it's just 'if you're giving them hands...', but if you want a serious answer for that very specific example:generally straight guys with either emphasis on sensation play like coiling as an extreme version of cuddling or snakeskin clothing, and/or who have a really strong hypnosis kink. It probably doesn't hurt that a pretty well-known implementation did, too (cw: sfw, video game minmaxing), but 'straight guys still like boobs' is kinda just a convention you get used to in the fandom.
Yeah. I think a lot of it's come from comedy works, with The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992) as one of the better-known examples, but it's definitely a newer convention where present. Barring really old mythology-style stuff where mainstream belief supported a lot of bizarre cross-fertility, I don't think there are many examples pre-1900s. There are a pretty sizable number of modern furry settings that go with the more convention, either to explain all of the consequence-free sex, or for other kinks (eg 'full-service sperm donor' as a kink can range from threesome to mild mdom to extremely cuckoldy).
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New furry name for intimate partner just dropped
Consider yourself hit over the head with a plushie for that
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There's also been a trend on the internet for a while (thanks to people with pet rats) that obviously everyone knows that rats are lovely and clean and smart creatures, and only the ignorant associate rats with those old stereotypes these days".
I feel like there has to be a word or phrase for that sort of "this common knowledge thing was wrong/inaccurate, but there's been a bit of an overcorrection in the opposite direction".
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I'm with Iconochasm here: I've triangulated that I'm at the far high end of male tenderness and romantic shyness, and those examples strike me as painfully unmasculine. The rat character just feels hunched over, passive, depressed. Maybe a desire is there, but if this resonates with the trans masc community than I don't know if they really get what men aim to be like. Although I love my tenderness, I also don't want to be the guy who apologizes for kissing a woman who really wanted me to kiss her. Ask me how I know.
I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean -- I'm really not trying to be a jerk here. But, I mean, you are bisexual, and obviously you have a deep connection to gay culture. I'm not sure that being more gynophilic than you means a whole lot, particularly when we're talking about people who are exclusively attracted to women. Do you have a preference for women?
I admit, I didn't even realize you had any interest in the fairer sex until you explicitly said you were bisexual -- my ingrained mental image, which is hard to shake, is that you're twink who likes wearing programmer socks. I guess I've known too many geeky MSM or furries that fit that frame that I slotted you into it. And I genuinely want to know how wrong I am.
The "trans men are really gay" thing actually contributes to the point you're refuting: if you're flying from femininity, what is less feminine than being gay? As you've said before, femininity isn't really all that prized in gay culture, stereotypes aside.
Well, a parent, at least. There are obviously differences between moms and dads, but I don't know how to meaningfully distinguish "I want to be a parent, but I don't want to get pregnant" (which would actually contribute to the point you're trying to refute!) from "I want to be a dad."
It is also slightly humorous that the rat character throws a party to interview candidates for impregnating his girlfriend, which seems, well, like something a lot of men would find somewhere between uncomfortable and enraging.
EDIT: A few more reflections after downloading the comic PDF. I braved the rat pornography so everyone else wouldn't have to.
But most of the sex doesn't come off to me as gay, or male -- they come off to me as lesbian wish fantasies about doing masculinity better than men. In particular, the initial sex scene in the comic features the rat character pulling a strapon out of his everyday carry bag (as one does) and then insisting on putting a condom on it, because ????. This is a contradiction to the stereotype that men won't wear a rubber.
Then, during the sex scene, he asks the female character, "how do you like to do it?" and she responds by saying, "Nobody's ever asked me that before!" Again, this is a contradiction to the view that men don't give a damn about women's sexual enjoyment, which is puzzlingly common among women. The point is that the trans masc rat is a Better Man (TM) than those dirty cis rat boys who didn't treat her right.
Maybe that is how a lot of men are, I don't know. But the idea that I'd have a sexual encounter and not aim to make it a good one for my partner is like suggesting that I set my pizza sauce-side down. What's the point of getting my rocks off without having a memorable experience that ends in mutual satisfaction?
(Of course, she doesn't know what she likes, and the trans man rat character just substitutes his own judgment for her inability to state her sexual preferences, and those happen to be absolutely exactly what she likes. Another trope in sexual fiction written by women.)
The "single pregnant woman meets Good Man (TM) with dad vibes" is also a common female fantasy -- obviously it's quite adaptive. But it's not necessarily something that I'd say reflects an internalization of maleness so much as a desire to perform proper maleness for women, or in other words to be the butchest lesbian who ever strapped on a dildo.
I did definitely enjoy the transition from "we literally just reunited on the street randomly" to "we are having sex, we can separate physicality from emotions, right?" to "we are now madly in love," which took all of one evening. Can I make a u-haul joke?
Also... it really does seem like the "main character" in the sex scene I read was the female character. It was all about her. I'm not getting "I AM A MAN FANTASIZING ABOUT BEING MASCULINE" vibes, but very much a projection of women's sexual desires onto the trans male character. Particularly in the "you're my princess but you're also my slut" thing, that's textbook girl next door with a naughty side energy. Of course, I think many men would be happy to do that for a woman if she asked (but in the comic she doesn't ask -- he intuits).
The comic's depictions of sex read more to me like something written by a woman than by a man -- might as well have been written by women I've dated, it's so painfully familiar. (ngl, didn't hate it.) He's a woman's ideal man, not a man's ideal man. That's not an insult, but it is important. I don't think this proves what you think it does.
Fair. I think some of that's because (especially younger and coastal) people have a more limited framework of what's 'acceptable' masculinity rather than douche masculinity, and I think an unfortunate number of cis men have reframed or had reframed for them 'being a foundation' into this sort of more passive literal man-of-stone thing. But it is a far way from the patriarch or trailblazer mold.
I'm a bit male-leaning in my interests, fair. But I've been in a real-world relationship with women, I'm not exactly bisexual-in-theory, either.
I'm more trying to motion around how the mouse character is pointedly and almost stereotypically feminine -- not just the pregnancy, but the homeraising and the dress and the shoes and how she moves around. At the risk of improperly channeling erwgv3g34, it's not even the doth-refuse-too-much of tomboy breaking or similar genres. And she's clearly attractive to the artist, and to no small number of transmen.
That's not really compatible with a general retreat from femininity. Even if they were just cripplingly attracted to women sexually, there's ways to do that without this level of feminine stuff showing up.
Ah... off by a good bit. Even when I was younger I wasn't able to pull off twink, and while I try to keep myself to some exercise regimen, the years have taken their toll in a good few ways.
((I do own a pair of programmer socks, but I haven't worn them and don't even spend that much time programming in Rust; I'm afraid I'm a basic bitch C++/C#/Java/Python/Shell Script guy when it comes to my workday operations.))
My apologies, I mean that more in a) the sense that regardless of what framework you treat trans men as 'really' being, there's going to be some FtM/F or FtM/M that's either so stereotypically 'gay' or 'lesbian' that it's going to overwhelm any other useful understanding available from the media for people not used to the conventions of those genres, and b) the sense that most of the examples are likely to be unsettling or unappealing to straight men (which I expect most people in this discusison thread here are), regardless of how prurient they might be.
For an example, I would expect few straight men that think FtM/M is just "straight with extra steps" would find Pantheggon's Vermuda character being in the middle of what's pretty intentionally drawn to parallel a conventional gay orgy as interesting, and that's still pretty far on the feminine side ('misgendering' kink, breeding kink) of things as it goes that direction. There's what I think is information here, but it's not really going to be accessible because everything else layered on top of it being either very loud or very offputting or both.
You're right to say that many of these cases are often feminine, especially by male standards and sometimes even by female standards. But I'm not arguing that these people are flying from femininity in general; I'm disagreeing with primaprimaprima's framework where that's the "key issue".
Yeah, that's true. It's still portrayed as uncomfortable (cfe the 'voicemail'), and I don't have a good understanding for how much so it'd be for typical straight men, but I can give a rough guess about it.
The strap-on probably makes a bit more sense in context; the rat's moving back in town after a trying to move to the city didn't work out. The condom, fair. It's probably meant more to be joking, but I've seen a few transguys who treat it like a 'guys ritual', and there's definitely a 'glass trying harder to shine than real gems would' issue.
Eh... this might be a cultural thing, rather than just a gender one, but I've seen a number of guys who think women's sexual enjoyment is important, but that it's Wrong to not take the lead and pick up what your partner wants or enjoys from body language. At the risk of TMI, it's something I struggled with a decent amount at first (uh, with both genders).
Fair and fair. I'll admit I've seen that sorta thing in a lot of porn written or drawn by (cis) men for men, but there's definitely some humor to it. I still think "perform proper maleness for women" is probably a better description, if still incomplete, of what's going on with trans men who like FtM/F than "rejection of and flight from femininity", but it's reasonable to say that it's not achieving the same thing.
Hm. It's possible I'm reading it in a pretty different perspective than you are, but I'm pretty used to porn where the person who's in focus for the camera is the one viewers are supposed to be attracted to, where the person who's reacting to them is the person the viewer (or creator) wants to be. In 'conventional' porn this goes to the extreme of PoV or gonzo works, or in hentai the mysterious floating dicks syndrome, where only the characters the viewers are presumed to be attracted to appear in the camera's lens.
But that's admittedly not universal, and something hard to discuss in detail further without linking a ton of porn (tbf, mostly straight: ruaidri and dont_jinxit have some pretty good examples of the differences between 'standard' male and female frameworks), so dunno.
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You forgot the mouse insisting she wants babies by rat becasue she wants CUTE BABIES who will have his POINTY NOSE and BARE TAIL which are so HAWT and SEXXXXXY.
This is wish-fulfilment over "these are the parts of myself I hate and think ugly and think everyone else thinks are ugly, hang on, now I am being affirmed in my okayness by someone accepting me for who I am and moreover finding these things attractive?"
Imagine a guy writing a comic about a woman dying to have his babies because they'd have his cute lil' pot belly and bald spot (well, I guess some women might like a cute lil' pot belly on a guy, no accounting for tastes! dad bod is a thing, I have heard). He'd be slagged all over the place about it.
While writing wish fulfillment stories about it is a little silly, I do think it's a real phenomenon that women in love start having a halo effect feeling towards their partner's appearance. "I want to have a baby with your deep blue eyes and your cute nose and your bright smile" is a completely realistic thing you might hear from your girlfriend or your wife. Maybe not for a pot belly -- but obviously that's not exactly a genetic trait. It's not so much a statement of "they're so HAWT and SEXXXXXY" as it is a statement of "I want to have children by you in particular," which is just something that women say when they really love you.
I can say that pair-bonding with a woman also gives a halo effect about her appearance, where individual features that might not be the most attractive thing in the world dissolve into the gestalt of someone you love. You start finding her distinguishing features attractive because they're hers. I'd assert this is a symmetrical feature of human pair-bonding.
The unrealistic thing about the comic's depiction of this is that it happens so quickly, which is partly a joke I think.
I agree with your points, but since this is (we are assuming) a trans person writing their self-insert furry character, then "I am a rat and you are a mouse" take on extra meanings. And the characteristics described are ones where rats are different to mice: mice have cute little short noses and hairy tales, rats have big pointy noses and long, hairless, tails. Picking those characteristics instead of "I want babies with your white fur" or "as tall as you are" reads, to me, like a trans person picking the traits where they don't pass as the gender they present as/the traits that made them not fit in to their assigned gender at birth, traits they find ugly or dysphoric, and then this is the fix-it by cute feminine (very femme) mousie loving the ugly bits and finding them in fact attractive.
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From the long-ago lectures about safe(r) sex in the days of AIDS, because fluid transfer via sharing sex toys. If Ratty has used this strap-on with other partners, then no matter how much they've cleaned it, there's always the tiny risk. Plus good practice to get into the habit of using protection with new partners until you both agree to be exclusive and have the results of your STI tests.
(Also, Ms Mousie in the linked comics seems to be rather promiscuous, or at least baby-crazy, so it's safer to assume she's been around the block and to protect yourself as well by using condoms).
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Yeah. This is the whole thing about socialisation, and how defensive MtF get about "male socialisation prior to transition" and the same for FtM about not having male socialisation prior to transition. I do think it's a female thing; if you read slash, there have been plenty of times I've gone "no, this is not how two guys interact or talk to each other or talk about things, writing like this is how I know you're a teenage/early twenties girl".
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I'm just going off of my general impressions from hearing FTMs talk over the years. There seems to be a much bigger focus on escaping the responsibilities and restrictions of femininity, and the actual positive desire for masculinity is secondary (but it certainly still does exist in at least some individuals, as your examples show).
It's noticeably different with MTFs because there's such an obvious strong fetishistic sexual component. Of course there's a confounding factor here that explains why we might not see that as much with FTMs, because women have fewer paraphilias overall than men, and the paraphilias they do have aren't felt as intensely. But FTMs could still desire masculine traits in a non-fetishistic way. My impression is that that part of it just isn't quite as important for them on average, but I freely admit I could be wrong on that point.
Of course, if it were the case that FTMs simply straightforwardly desired to be masculine in the way that MTFs desire to be feminine, then that would be fine, because it would still support my original claim that there's a symmetry between MTFism and FTMism. But enough people have pointed out that FTMism seems different on the surface that there should be some sort of explanation for this apparent difference.
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Presumably the presence of a real effort at actual masculinity. Isn't it kind of a trope that many FtM want to be soft, emo, cuddle-and-cry boys? It seems that many transmen don't really have any idea what being a man means, aside from yaoi porn.
I guess I'm curious what you'd say "being a man" means, then. I know transguys who fantasize about having a harem of their preferred gender, or for not-bedroom examples who spend massive levels of focus on code (though I guess they do mostly like Rust...) or woodworking or car stuff or small aircraft. But if literally wanting to become a father doesn't at least give something to update around, I'm not sure there's any information that could serve as information to the gender-critical side.
EDIT: and, conversely, I'm not sure it makes sense to say someone's rejecting femininity while literally screwing as feminine MILF-to-be as possible.
"Being a man" in the "toxic" sense. Being a protector and provider, a rock and the firmament. Do transmen dream of defeating villains and being dashingly wounded in an act of heroism?
I'm going to level with you: I gave at least a token effort to reading the trans-mouse erotica comics and I could not figure out what the hell was going on. Consider my comment to be a fully general take that does not relate to those specific pieces of media at all.
Yes? Specifically for mouseworld the nearest example doesn't involve being dashingly wounded, but even ignoring outright hurt/comfort, it's a pretty common thing in RP and fanwriting circles (to the point where no few FFXIV groups have jokes about it). I don't think it's going to be a good argument against the 'was driven by an urge to "self annihilation"', but it's present.
Whether many trans guys actually do it, to the extent achieving anything so much more a process than a single event, is a more complicated question.
Fair, and my apologies.
To give the more general argument: if you believe "FtMism = rejection of and flight from femininity", how does this explain the presence of transman who present (perhaps depressed) masculinity, but like femininity in others around them, such as by having (cis, femme) female romantic and/or sexual partners, close female platonic friends, or (if sexually attracted to men) liking feminine men? Is there an explanation that can separate itself from the trans-internal claim of just not liking being/being seen as feminine?
That is fascinating, in an uncanny valley kind of way. The wounding is the key part, imo, and the resulting reverse expression of concern. I remember conversations when I was younger where the boys all agreed that the ideal dream was for a woman to gently touch the scars/wounds you'd heroically earned and dramatically gasp. I feel like I've seen that moment in a hundred action movies, and it's the pivotal one for establishing the relationship between the love interest and male protagonist. It a moment where a man is allowed to be vulnerable without it ever counting against him.
Altogether, it makes this code as a female fantasy to me, because the locus of concern is on her, but I can't discount that I'm seeing what I expect to see, because I already know the boy mouse is a transman. I might post those three images together without any explanation, and just ask the boys what they make of it.
I don't have enough personal experience to say anything particularly relevant aboout their internal states. I'll just say this: observed from a distance, though clips and articles and the one "boy" my daughter was friends with, the way they approach masculinity/manliness does not seem congruent with my own experience (which I often find to be broadly applicable when conversing with other cis men). From my distant POV, I don't see much reason to think there's a similar internal experience to what I experience, or my son experiences.
Honestly, I figured this was a lot of it. The few transmen I've encountered IRL had a strong tendency to an unfortunate "It's Pat!" type of presentation. I assumed there was a fair bit of "You can't fire me, femininity, I quit!".
But that's why I asked.
Yeah, that sounds right. There's a lot of that out there, but it's kinda hard to separate from women-coded hurt/comfort, especially when trying to find examples that aren't aggressively porn-brained (or, alternatively, so sexless than the trans guy is just A Dude, or buried behind a few hundred hours of lore in a gatcha game/mmo). Will see if I can find any better examples.
That's interesting; I'd assume that the locus of concern falls on her because she's a goal for the fantasy, rather than the target of it.
If you do, I would be interested to see the results.
Yeah, that seems more reasonable. Even trans guys who were very tomboyish before transitioning do have to work at it in ways cis guys don't, and many either intentionally aren't aiming the same place as standard guys (either 'nonbinary', or coming across as a tomboy-with-a-masectomy), and many of the remainder are either aiming at presentations that they're not going to get (tbf: me neither) or they're not really interested in doing or learning about the necessary steps to achieve.
Huh. Pre-transition, or post? I've seen a decent number who struggled to get out of Pat-mode post- and especially mid-transition, but less so beforehand, and I wouldn't expect the transition to be motivated by something that only showed up after the transition did.
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Many of them do; I suspect a dynamic (broadly) symmetrical with AGP-vs-HSTS.
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See I tend to see it in the opposite way. Men are not the default, as men have to earn the right to be seen as men. Women have to basically grow boobs and they’re women. Children are children by default as they are born as children and remain so until they become something else. If I have to achieve something to be considered a real man, then being a man is not the default.
I think in both cases you see the person not really wanting to grow up. They want to be the opposite gender in ways that don’t force them into adulthood.
I think there are women saying something exactly symmetrical. What, men only have to get tall and hairy?
I think you’re both wrong; the struggles that are easily visible to you are not obvious to outsiders, and vice versa.
So are women issued a woman card? Does such a concept even exist? Men are constantly worried about being “man enough,” yet again women don’t have to sweat it. If they have boobs, they are a woman, whether or not they accomplish anything, whether or not they have kids, whether or not they dress like women, etc. There is no woman card to issue, because unlike manhood, it’s not something you have to achieve.
Sperm is cheap, eggs are expensive, lactation more expensive, and placental pregnancy yet more expensive still. Women are precious to the tribe, automatically, by nature; while men are the expendable sex, and have to earn their "value." Such has it always been, such will it always be.
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Are men issued such a card? I appear to have missed mine.
That’s my whole point. You can’t see their card, and they can’t see yours. It doesn’t mean the card doesn’t exist.
It’s used quite often in conversation and even in marketing. It’s obviously a metaphor, but there’s really no equivalent for women. There’s no thought that being too into masculine things (like sports) makes you less of a woman, but there are numerous activities that men avoid for being too “feminine” and thus emasculating to consider. Art is a big one, and it’s almost assumed that any male who is into art is basically a sissy and probably gay on top of that. A woman never really has the same consideration. She can hunt deer, field dress it and drag it to camp secure in her womanhood. She can box and beat the crap out of people and still be seen as a woman. On the accomplishment side, a male would not be considered a man unless he had a reasonably high status job, his own place, and a non-junker car. He’s less than for that. A woman can have no job, no car, and live with mom and dad and still be seen as a woman. And on it goes. Men have to work to be man enough to be considered a man by other men and by women. If you fail, you’re stuck until you manage to leave and go accomplish masculinity.
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