Even my beloved, who does not at all prescribe to gender roles etc, is not immune to the socially reinforced nonsense, at times.
Today, he sent me a reel of a mother panicking about the fact that one of her children had their diaper off and there was clearly poop in several known and yet unknown places in the house and she was trying to wrangle multiple kids, including the naked poop perpetrator and was getting a little hysterical. The husband was filming this situation as if it was a joke. At one point, the mother asks for help, which he does not do, so he can keep documenting the chaos.
B sent this to me as a bit of a poop-related inside joke. But I didn’t find it very funny and I responded “oh, yeah, the divorce really came out of nowhere.” And he was like, “what do you mean? She’s laughing.” Except any woman who listened to that audio knew exactly what kind of stressed out laugh that was. It was not funny to her. She needed help. She was asking for help. She was not receiving help.
So I said, “let’s open up the comments for peer review.” The most-liked comment with 11k likes was “someone help me means YOU, bro” followed by the second-most “DUDE GO HELP HER” and third, “The divorce came out of nowhere” (great minds think alike). This went on. There are hundreds of comments, most by women, pointing out that the man was useless and his wife was literally begging for help in a gross situation while he filmed something to post on the internet for laughs.
And B was like. “Well damn. I didn’t even have an inkling this was a shitty thing but that makes sense”. And I was like, “yeah, that tone you’re hearing is a close cousin to the ‘someone is being creepy/aggressive and it’s been reinforced since childhood that I’m not permitted to scream in their face despite my discomfort so I’m going to awkwardly giggle and make it a joke and hope that someone saves me from this situation,’” and. He had no idea what I was talking about. So then it became a larger conversation about social conditioning and such. Productive! But eye opening that even a man who I’d consider a champion of non-toxic masculinity was completely oblivious to some things I thought were obvious. Or like. Regularly experienced in my youth (I have no issue directly calling out creepy dudes, now. But it took a while for me to get there).