That’s probably not a true statement, but I do believe that certain positions may make you question things you didn’t before. I’ve noticed this a lot when I take a stance one way I’m suddenly question jokes some of my friends make. I’ll admit, tumblr helps with this a bit.

For example I consider myself a men’s rights advocate, and this, I never thought, interfered with my life at all. However then I hear some friends talking about how guys with 4 letter names are always “fuckboys” (note: they had recently been scorned by a Mike, a Jake, and a Mark). Sure they were kidding but my boyfriend (named Alex) was in the room and they really didn’t care. I did ask him how he felt about it later and yeah he was kind of uncomfortable (”Don’t mind me, just dickbag Alex over here” were his words). I say tumblr helps with this because it’s probably largely because of tumblr that I know that there are people who do believe some pretty absurdly bad things about males.

Then there’s my coworker who seems to legitimately think men never help with children and any kindness or compassion I show towards other people was my “motherly instincts” coming out. (Note: I am not a mother and don’t plan to be one for a while yet, just to avoid confusion.) This time I did try for a more direct approach as did Alex who said he’d help, and I told her that Alex was rather neutering. Her response was somewhere along the lines of “Yeah, we’ll see when it happens.” Fucking hell lady, how about I slap the shit out of my baby, will that convince you that father’s aren’t the worst thing to happen to children? Though this woman seems to be in a relationship with a man she seems to deeply resent.

I see this happen with race and sexuality as well, sometimes I wonder if all the jokes a gay friend of mine makes about me needed to “choose a side” are serious, but not so much towards women. I’m not sure if there has been a change with the jokes people make or just me, but I do remember have a “boys are stupid, throw rocks at them” folder in middle school. At the time it was funny because there was a fun boys vs girls mentality but no one was actually throwing rocks! Now I guess I have to pause for a moment to see if anyone actually wants to throw them, you know?

Either way let me know if you guys experienced anything similar or if you think I’m just slowly losing my sense of humor.