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PeonForHer -> RE: The need to be rude?!? (10/11/2010 8:32:09 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Icarys
People are totally missing Sam's point or ignoring it so they can continue doing what it is they want. That's also Ironic when your talking about seeing inside where others can't.
I took Sam's main point to be that it's rude to ignore a message from a good man - to put it at its simplest. I agree with him on that. I've felt it to be rude if someone has ignored a cmail from me. I'm not used to being treated that way by women. It's lessened the hurt for me to understand why women have ignored my messages, but I still can't feel it to be a polite thing to do. I'm not capable of rearranging my feelings, dependent as they are on codes of behaviour that have been sewn into me since the year dot, overnight.
It's possible to understand a thing entirely, but still not like it.
To repeat, I learned the hard way that if my initial, long and thought-out, message gets ignored, I'll feel very low. I can't help that because I'm a sensitive sort of bloke. I don't have as thick a skin as I'd like. Good men, as I like to think I am, generally are like that. We can't deal with too many women being cold towards us.
I think women know this. The women who use CM will also know that men -including the good ones - won't understand what it's like for them. Most of those men who even use the forums - possibly, most of those reading this thread - won't understand. I think women will also want to continue, as best they can, to avoid throwing the baby out with the bath water. So, they have to continue to take the risks they've always taken - but now in a new medium, that of the Internet meeting-site. As I said, that's a bum rap and one of the massive array of reasons why I'm glad I'm not a woman. It's a bastard of a thing to have to put up with.
What we have here is a dilemma. It's not going to be resolved by one side demanding that the onus is entirely on the other side to do the accommodating.
Beneath that, most fundamentally of all, what we have is a cultural shift in which people have not caught up. Interaction between the sexes can't operate in this new, virtual world in the same way as they did in the real world. Looking at LNT's inbox, it seems plain to me that the men who are writing for the most part are making inappropriate assumptions about how communication is supposed to work. Many just say 'Hi' - as though they're smiling at a woman across the street. Others clearly assume that they need to be sending a woman CV - there's one message in her inbox that runs to more than a few pages.
We all need to get used to new ways of behaving with one another on sites like this. These new ways of behaving will have to include new ideas of what constitute 'good manners'. We'll no doubt all have to get tougher in new ways. Most particularly I think it's likely we'll all have to get tougher regarding verbal aggression, or verbal coldness.
In the meantime, both sexes have to find ways of limiting the hurt each is going to feel. I've found 'tools' of my own and, from what I can see on this thread, many others of both sexes have found their particular tools, too. To echo LNT's post - 'it's not as bleak as all that'.
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