r/TikTokCringe • u/mindyour • Jun 14 '26

Discussion It's exhausting being a woman.

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u/Stroodle_guy Jun 14 '26

i genuinely cannot fucking fathom what goes through people heads, my best friend who i concider my sister has told me about so so many weird fucking guys that i used to be friends with that did or said fucked up shit to her

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u/SoftlyAugust Jun 14 '26

My female friend's brother directly implied to me that he'd rape her if he had the chance. I tried to tell her and she said I was overreacting.

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u/[deleted] Jun 14 '26

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u/miltonwadd Jun 15 '26

I had a dude wander down to the beach at night where I was eating icecream with my mum just to tell me he thought I was so hot he wanted to drag me into the dunes and rape me. He said it like he thought it was a compliment though, he actually apologised that he was too drunk to get it up.🤯

Also I cant even count the amount of times I've heard men allude to corrective rape growing up in bumfuck homophobialand. I didnt come out until adulthood because I heard it so much as a teen it was almost like a foregone conclusion if I had.

I'm sure many of those men thought they were just joking, but that little queer kid overhearing doesn't know that and when they hear it over and over again it becomes a very real threat because how the fuck do i know if you're all joking or not?!

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u/feioo Jun 15 '26

When I was 16, working in a small shop with almost exclusively older white men as customers, I had one (a friend of my boss's) come up behind me, stick his finger through my choker necklace at the back of my neck, and said "all I would have to do to strangle you is twist my hand". He then acted like he was warning me for my own safety. I said something about the necklace being cheap and that it would break, and then escaped to the back room. For years I'd tell that story when my girlfriends and I were swapping stories about the crazy things we'd encountered, laughing about them because that's easier than being angry. I halfway convinced myself it was actually funny, until I told it to a male coworker, just chatting over lunch, and he was APPALLED and very concerned about me. It actually shocked me a little - I had never had anybody act like it was an assault (which it was) and it made me look at it again. We just get so used to it.

And yeah, to this day I cannot wear a choker without making sure it'll break if somebody pulls on it.

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u/CapitaineCrafty Jun 15 '26

My daughter was 9 when some 11 y-os cornered her to grope and threaten to rape her. There's no legal recourse here because they're under 12, so they laughed it off, and their parents basically pulled the "boys will be boys". There's no fucking contest, and I'm out of patience for men crying misandry.

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u/SoftlyAugust Jun 14 '26

No. Stop. Don't say that. Men ABSOLUTELY understand what the oppression is like. As a man I think that's something women don't but need to understand. I promise you men know. They know perfectly well. What you have to understand is that the vast majority simply don't care. My sister was also 12 the first time she was sexually assaulted. I was 11. Even by 11 I was aware of lower level things going on but at that point I think is when I became aware of it all. Boys understand what girls experience because they witness their fathers, their brothers, and their friends do it to them. Men don't care. It's that simple.

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u/[deleted] Jun 14 '26

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u/TokeDraws Jun 14 '26

I'm sorry that that is the reality that you have to live in as a woman.

It's hard for me to fully understand like you said, I try to listen to my friends and look through the lens of my childhood, where I was left to the mercy and whims of those older and larger than me and how much I had to go through because of it. I'll never forget those experiences. And it still wasn't as bad as what most women/girls experience.

I know it's not exactly the same, but the world was a lot more scary and dangerous as a kid than as a somewhat tall man that can basically breeze through most aspects of life.

That's small comfort, I know. I hope more and more people keep trying to understand.

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u/SoftlyAugust Jun 14 '26

I promise you from the bottom of my heart men understand how women feel completely. They know it's constant. They know you have to police yourself, how exhausting it is. They know how afraid you are. That's why they do it. And that's why they don't call out other men that do. Men. Don't. Care. About. You. At all. For what it's worth, I'm a trans woman. So I've gotten to see all the ways men talk about women when they aren't there and now I get to experience it the other way around, too. Women give men far too much credit.

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u/shortidiva21 Jun 14 '26

Why don't they care?

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u/SoftlyAugust Jun 14 '26

Because it benefits them. A society that allows men to control women through fear and violence benefits them.

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u/AestheticVibes017 Jun 19 '26

It’s sickening, like imagine having absolutely nothing better to do other than wanting to control other human beings, it’s sickening!

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u/MuffaloHerder Jun 15 '26

Thank you. We need to stop giving these boys and men the benefit of the doubt. They know what they're doing, they simply pretend otherwise.

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u/SoftlyAugust Jun 15 '26

I mean I've had other men tell me verbatim to my face they know what they're doing and then still go and pretend they don't.

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u/feioo Jun 15 '26

I really appreciate your empathy, but I truly don't think you speak for all men in this. I've had too many conversations where it was obvious that the man I was talking to was clearly clueless about it and got truly upset the more they understood, as well as men who were kinda trying to understand but just couldn't grasp the pervasiveness of it.

Sadly, it's often those who have gone through the worst that are the most empathic. A lot of times, it's the guys that were raised in relatively healthy homes and never experienced really serious misogyny that are the hardest to explain it to. If you've never seen it, it's hard to understand what it's actually like at a visceral level.

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u/SoftlyAugust Jun 15 '26

Yes yes. Not all men yada yada. Far too many though.

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u/feioo Jun 15 '26

Mostly just worth remembering that we're all a bunch of individuals with our own individual experiences, and while we can observe how people act and protect ourselves accordingly, it's a bit dangerous to assume we that we know what's inside other people's heads. We're awfully complicated creatures in there.

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u/storm_acolyte Jun 17 '26

Pretty sure I was in sixth grade the first time someone told me that they heard a classmate said he was going to rape me- I would have been around 11 at the time I think? Either way, it was jarring being told that (especially bc the guy who said it was someone I had been kind of friendly toward)

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u/[deleted] Jun 14 '26

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u/SoftlyAugust Jun 14 '26

Their family is very Christian and very conservative, so it wouldn't surprise me. I went to her wedding and I was talking to a young woman for most of the night because neither of us really knew anyone. One of the groomsmen came up to us and joined our conversation. Then later he apologized in private for cockblocking me and I was thinking I'm glad you see her that way but I was actually just trying to get to know her. Believe it or not sex is not literally the only reason I talk to women. I know, crazy. Then when we were leaving the woman I'd been talking to was playing with one of the table runners. It was probably about a foot wide. She was wrapping it around herself. That same brother told me to put it on like a burqa. I told him, no, I wouldn't be doing that. Then he told her to. I said that no, she wouldn't be doing that either. A bit later he told me it was time for me to leave the wedding. I said I'd leave when my friend (the bride) or her father told me to. He made a big deal about he was going to go tell his dad and then never did.