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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Elder Millennial here. I think I just have that “eww pedostache” reaction because, when I was young, such mustache styles were common among middle-aged men who hadn’t updated their styles since the '80s. Some of those men were creepy, so the mustache style became associated with creepy old men. And of course, teenaged giggling among ourselves about “eww pedostache!” really cemented the association.

    I’m pretty sure our parents had the same initial reaction when we brought aviator glasses back into fashion. We’ll get over it, the cycle continues.


  • I’ve had good and bad experiences with mostly-male and mostly-female groups. I think it has less to do with the actual gender of the group, and more to do with: (a) the manner and extent to which group members are invested in performing their gender, (b1) whether the group embraces deviation from that performance, or (b2) whether one’s own performance of gender is similar enough to the group’s.

    I’ve often described myself as “not very good at being a woman.” My weirdness and difficulty with hidden meanings has gotten me shunned by fellow women and usually bullied out of all-female groups, particularly when I was young. But as I discovered a few years ago after adopting a more active lifestyle, I get along fantastically with most women who play sports.

    All-male groups were usually not much better. I still had to keep LARPing a persona, it’s just that the “cool girl” persona came easier to me. The main advantage was that mostly-male groups didn’t tend to say one thing while meaning the opposite. (For example, “stay as long as you like” actually means “you should probably go home now” and that is absolutely nonsensical to me.) But all-male groups never accepted me either, so the best case scenario meant being tolerated instead of shunned.

    When it comes to work environments, it’s only been women who played the game of psychologically tormenting me until I have a breakdown and quit (although one of those was a woman boss in a mostly-male small office). So mostly-male groups have been somewhat better because I usually don’t have to waste as much brainspace on LARPing the correct persona. I still tended to be treated more as a tagalong or novelty, though, and gender isn’t a guarantee of future behavior (for example, one of my current coworkers is a man who politicks like a woman).





  • I was also expected to be very quiet and perfectly behaved, and have also struggled with resentment toward rowdy children as a result. Even now, at 39 years old, I sometimes want to retaliate with an Aztec death whistle.

    Therapy can be really helpful in learning to deal with that resentment. If possible and reasonable, so can talking about it with your parent(s).

    Several years ago I said to my mother, “I’m feeling angry right now because I’m thinking about that loud kid we saw in the store today and remembering how I had to repress myself as a child.” Then we had a really productive conversation about the pressure to defy stereotypes about poor parents, being a parent with unrecognized and unsupported neurodivergence, and sensory issues.

    I hope you’re able to dissolve a significant amount of your resentment, too. In the meantime, there’s a kind of reusable earplug that reduces noise just a little bit so you can still have a conversation (can’t remember the brand name though).