Tag Archives: entitlement

Which part of ‘no’ are you having trouble with?

life, , , ,

Creepy stalker face
That smile…
One night last week I was doing my thing—reading news online, occassionally checking my twitter feed—when a message pops up on IM. Honestly, I’d forgotten that my instant messaging client was up. I’d run it earlier in the day because it was a work-from-home day, and just forgot to log out of all the accounts. Anyway, the message that pops up says, “I liked what you wrote.” I didn’t recognize the name, but sometimes that’s just because I forget all the handles some of my friends use (and let’s not even get into the friends who have a habit of changing the name and user picture on their accounts all the frikkin’ time…).

So I type back, “Thanks. Which thing, specifically, did you like?”

I write a lot of things, and have them posted/published lots of places, so this seemed like a reasonable question… Continue reading Which part of ‘no’ are you having trouble with? →

Missed signals and entitlement

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Otter with his paw up.
“No, thanks. I’m fine.”
Before overhearing the conversation the other night, where I heard a young man cajoling a woman of his acquaintance for not liking one of their mutual acquaintances enough to date him, I had been thinking of the many ways that we are all socialized to accept, excuse, and even enable a lot of socially aggressive behavior from guys. And also how we, as guys, are socialized to aggressively take what we think is ours.

It started at the end of a previous weekend, but I’m going to save that story for later, because it involves a topic that causes some people to stop listening and start arguing. Instead, I will start nearer the end of the week, and rant about bit about a guy on the bus…

Continue reading Missed signals and entitlement →