Anonymous asked:
So, it is okay to have a party for whoever you want. This is important morally: freedom of association is a really important part of exercising your autonomy and pursuing your happiness as a person. It’s important practically: when people don’t feel entitled to have their parties for whoever they want, and hang out with whoever they want, then they behave a lot worse than when they have space to set those boundaries however they wish.
That said, I’d be surprised if ‘stereotypical girls night’ tended to attract the people you want and be uninteresting to the people you don’t want; it seems really hard to evaluate whether one is a ‘stereotypical girl.’, and I’d expect lots of people to be very stressed if their social environment frequently demanded they decide whether they’re a stereotypical girl. The best way to handle this is to invite, individually, the people who you’d like to have at the party to the party and tell them you’ll consider ‘can I bring my friend X’ requests on a case-by-case basis.
Same deal with the dating situation: I think that people should just date the people they find hot and not worry about the fact that in talking about dating they will use a word such as ‘girls’ which includes some people they don’t find hot.
I realize this doesn’t work as well for things like “who do we allow into this shelter” or “who is eligible for this scholarship”, and some of those get challenging, but for individual-level stuff, I really do think you can solve this entirely with “invite people to your party who you’d like to have at your party” and “date people who you find hot”, and that this is much preferable than trying to define the Kind of Person you want at your party/want to date and then trying to get widespread enough adoption of your word for that category that everyone will know what you mean and you can put it on party invites. (this is how things work in gender-conservative settings too; in practice people do not invite all the women and girls they knew of to their parties and in practice men are not attracted to the set of all cis women.)
There are people who don’t feel safe asserting “I will date people I find hot and I will decline a date if I don’t think you’re hot”. That’s a serious problem we should absolutely be addressing, and I do think sometimes it’s at the root of people behaving dickishly when dating comes up. But I don’t think it’s solvable with enough approved category-words.
I was thinking about the oft-expressed view of “date people you find hot and don’t worry about how precise the words you use to talk about it are” last night and just thinking how … kind of divorced from my life it seems. Like maybe there’s some sort of assumption that the answer to “who are you attracted to?” will stop at “guys”? I mean, “people” would be approximately as useful? Like how often am I getting drinks with a friend when the conversation turns to “what’s your type?”, or talking about the Bachelor when we veer into the relative attractiveness of all the different Bachelors, or gossiping about a guy we both know when we start discussing whether or not we would date him, or advising a friend who wants to set me up with someone, or drunk at a party playing Truth or Dare with a group of people, or …
This particular thought occurred to me because my friend was scrolling through my Tinder and demanding to know why I didn’t want to message a particular guy back, and I knew that the answer wasn’t politically correct and kept responding with vague generalities, making for a rather unproductive conversation.
(I mean, in this case it was sufficient that he had “feminist” in his Tinder bio. But still.)