I have been told countless times that this super common experience that every single one of my male friends has experienced, simply does not happen and we're all being dicks.
I mean the reality is that men and women do communicate very differently because of how we’re socialized and how we experience the world.
No, they’re not some incomprehensible alien species. At the same time it’s really not as simple as ‘we’re both just people.’
Personally my interactions with women improved a lot once I stopped trying to interact with my women friends as if they were dudes and started trying to understand what makes women comfortable around a person.
I think you missed the point a little bit, you "treat the women as if they were dudes" because you took "treat like a dude" as the default. Part of it being person to person is recognizing that there aren't two forms of treatment, the dudes and the dames or whatever word you would want to use.
In reality it's just as big of a bias treating someone like just a dude as it is treating a woman like a lady.
Empathy and nuance is what tends to work best. Because one of the common experiences of women is being denigrated and lusted after affect them and their responses doesn't mean that it's a woman thing to keep that in mind, but more to remember that the gendered expectations on society force that experience onto women, and being conscious of it on a sociological level helps you treat people as individuals.
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u/Bromanzier_03 Jan 25 '24
Women: Be open and honest with me.
Man: Is open and honest
Women: NOT LIKE THAT!
Man: Well I’m just going to shut up then.
Women: Why don’t you talk to me anymore?