Bachelor for 2 Nights

[canyonwalker]

I'm a bachelor for the next 2 nights. Well, not technically. I'm still married. But my wife is away on a business trip, so I'm leading the life of a bachelor tonight and tomorrow night.

Yes, she's back to business travel before I am! Her trip is a company offsite with other senior managers. My first business trip after a 2 year break is still 5 weeks away.

So, what am I doing with my pseudo-bachelor self? Honestly, little different than I'd do if my wife were here. I went shopping at the liquor store after work this afternoon. I was planning on doing that this weekend but the schedule didn't work out. When I got home from that I cooked myself dinner... or should I say, reheated leftovers. Tonight maybe I'll flip on the TV and see if I can find an interesting movie streaming. That's the one thing that would be different from an evening together.

Comments

[sorcyress]

Huh! After reading your journal idly for like three months, I'm having a sudden moment of "we don't actually know where Punt is"¹ as your offhand mention of bachelordom and wife means maybe my assumption that you're a woman is incorrect!

(Not that there aren't plenty of women with wives, who'd refer to themselves as bachelors, but the clever gamble is that people-with-wives are men...)

This is interesting to me both because it's always interesting to look at what gender gets assumed (based off what cues? I don't know that I could tell you. Maybe a vague assumption that everyone writing online is female or queer because men don't journal?) and because it's interesting to think about the process of making friends (especially online) and what pieces get revealed when.

((Anyways, don't feel you have to reveal any specific demographic data about yourself in response to this! I just was amused and pleased to realize the assumptions/knowledge-gap and thought you might find it amusing as well.))

~Sor (who is nonbinary but also who talks about themself in the third person a lot more often so that might be easier to figure out)


1: You know, the thing where ancient Egyptian records have told us lots and lots about the great trading partner of Punt, but no one ever bothered to write down where exactly it was, because obviously that's common knowledge.

[canyonwalker]

I have no desire to be mysterious about it so I'll just state it clearly: I'm a guy, cis-male.

I'm really intrigued by what cues I've given, or haven't given, that led you to believe I'm a woman. ...Not that I'm offended; I'm legit curious! Is it because I write about cooking? And don't write about sports?

[sorcyress]

I genuinely don't know! I've been wracking my brain all day, because it intrigues me whenever I realize I'm making gendered assumptions of any sort. I do try what I can to break them.

Some ideas I've had so far:

*I might have been assuming Hawk to be a boy's name (or nym)? Not that everyone is straight, but a stranger with an (assumed) husband is more likely to be a woman than a man. (I also don't know that I have confirmation that she's your wife, although a quick search of your recent entries does give her a pronoun)

*Related to that, you do tend to write very much first-person, without giving pronouns to yourself or others as often. This isn't a feminine trait, but it is a "don't think about gender" one

*I don't think it's "writing about cooking/not about sports" but I do think it's partly because of the ways you write about media. Maybe I shouldn't assume that only women are discomfited by the overuse of sex (and rape etc) in Game of Thrones?

*More broadly, I think I currently assume all people writing at length on the internet to be women. This is patently absurd for many reasons, not the least of which is that there are absolutely other men on my DW feed whose entries I read, but maybe it's in part because 2/3 of my boyfriends almost never write anything longer than a few tweets, where my girlfriend writes plenty, so the people who are closest to me are only writers if they're female-aligned

*(the above is not aided by lots of time on Ask a Manager, since the author has a policy of referring to unknown people with she pronouns, specifically as pushback to the default/assumed he)

Yeah. Nothing particularly concrete that would give me this impression. Exactly the right combination of not-paying-attention and...something else? I wouldn't be surprised if there was some writing feature I interpret as feminine, although I'm vaguely annoyed at myself for making the assumption.

Anyways. Nice to meet you more! Thanks for keeping an interesting journal.

~Sor

[canyonwalker]

Don't feel annoyed by the assumption. I'm not. I'm just intrigued by it because I try to be inclusive in how I think and express myself. I always figure my cis-male-ness will shine through unconsciously anyway. When it doesn't I try to learn from what happened.

BTW, Hawk often is assumed to be a guy online. One, her name is seen as masculine— even though hawks, the wild predators, are both male and female. Two, in many forums, the default assumption of male-ness is supported by the fact men are the majority, sometimes the lopsided majority, of participants. And three, she eschews traditional gender norms. You won't see her writing about makeup or shoe shopping (except to complain occasionally how all but a few brands/styles are impractical). Though if you read Ask A Manager (the forum) a lot, you've almost certainly seen her write there.

Finally, I actually agree with your shorthand that anyone writing a blog about themselves— not strictly about external things like books, movies, or sports— is likely female. Writing (or speaking) about oneself requires a willingness to be vulnerable. Expressing vulnerability is very much not a traditional male trait. (I endured frequent finger-wagging about this from acquaintances and even family when I was younger.)

[merhawk]

I’m often assumed to be a guy offline as well, due to my short hair, lack of skirts & dresses & makeup, along with only wearing pants with pockets so I never wear a purse. My chest makes it clear my gender, though.

Except I have decades of experience that show people look at your hair first because I get misgendered *all the time* for male. It doesn’t bother me - people should pay more attention than one trait to figure out who a person is. However, it tells me a lot about the people who misgender me, and most of it is bad. The stuttering and apologizes they give me show very clearly how they hold tight to traditional gender norms.

[merhawk]

*Definitely* don’t assume that about GoT. I’m a very feminist, minority, female who is a big proponent of diversity, inclusion, fucking up gender norms, and a strong belief that bad things like rape happen to men as well. We wouldn’t still be together after 27.5 years if he was more of a typical male.

[canyonwalker]

Also: great use of Punt as a historical metaphor. And formatted as a footnote. I'm loving it!

[some_other_dave]

I was going to laugh about his user pic being so obviously male, but then I actually looked at it again while trying not to specifically associate it with anyone. And I can definitely see how the pic could be someone of any gender identity (except for full-on frilly femme). As for me, I'm a fat old white guy.

Gender is pretty strange to me nowadays. I'm old enough that for most of my life things were quite binary, but young enough that hetero was not assumed of everyone. There are three or four people in one particular social circle of mine who are NB, but they all seem to be in various stages of a MtF transition now.

Can I ask where you know Canyonwalker from? My own assumptions (there's that word again!) were that most of his readers were from the Darkfriends social group from back-when, plus a few other folks that know him face-to-face, like me.

[sorcyress]

FWIW I hadn't looked closely enough to ID the userpic as a photo (rather than a cartoon, or a clipart, or what have you) and could have been persuaded that it was a still from a movie or something!

I know Canyonwalker entirely by accident --I saw a comment he made on one of Silmaril's entries back in November, and went "huh, this person seems interesting and has a public journal, I often want more journals to read on DW, let's follow for a while and see what's what". I haven't read everything from the last three months, but I've at least skimmed most of it and read over half --his voice is interesting!

~Sor