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3:09am August 15, 2013

➸ Urocyon's Jaunts: Not wanting to deal with that awful upstairs neighbor to try to get a...

clatterbane:

youneedacat:

clatterbane:

Not wanting to deal with that awful upstairs neighbor to try to get a package reminded me, Mr. C and I both had to laugh at him over the weekend. As I’ve mentioned before, anytime it’s not pouring rain he likes to take his phone out on the deck right over our back door. Sometimes he’ll put it on…

Regarding stereotypical burly guys…

My dad looks big and burly to most people. People tell me he “looks like a lumberjack”. I guess I never notice.

Anyway he brought a baby squirrel to a wildlife rescue place. And the woman there wrote an email to my mom about how great it was to see “this big burly man with so much compassion in his eyes for this tiny creature”.

But that’s my dad in a nutshell. He’s mostly really sweet and kind of shy and gentle. But people (at least middle class people and up?) seem to rarely expect that based on his size and muscles and hairiness and clothing.

I’m not sure quite why people tend to expect him to be different from who he is, but they do. Like I kind of know the stereotypes but I also know HIM, not the way people see him at first glance. It’s always startled me the expectations people have.

Meanwhile my mom (who was tall in her youth) has shrunk down pretty short and looks, and generally is, just like a “nice woman”, to most people. But you don’t want to cross her.

There are stories of her being approached by a group of men with bad intent in the woods, and fending them off just by sliding her hand onto her Bowie knife whenever they tried to approach her. And I’ve seen her intimidate men over a foot taller than her and decades younger and stronger by sheer force of personality. Not that she’s always like that, but she’s capable of it when she needs to be.

Yeah, my uncle gets similar too sometimes, generally from rather snotty people who have moved into the area. Probably a lot like with the way your dad dresses, a lot of that seems to be based in weird classist assumptions too. (Though they actually have a firmly upper middle class income going, and he enjoys clowning off the bad assumptions sometimes.) Some really bizarre stereotypes going on there.

Especially since I haven’t actually run into many bigger men who are that aggressive-acting. IME, they are usually pretty firmly taught not to behave very aggressively, since they are obviously capable of hurting people if they do. (Some athletes fall into a different category there…)

Here’s Mr. C, since I remembered posting a photo last month when we got the new appliances. Scary-looking character. 0_o The Google shirt maybe helps, with competing stereotypes and all. :)

(Also, he’s apparently spot on average height for his age group in Sweden, which has actually increased some since then. And not far off average where I grew up either, AFAICT. Which puts him like 6” over the average British male height. Just looks “normal”-sized to me, but yeah.)

Also, your mother sounds kind of like my Nana there. She was always a little birdlike woman, even before she lost height with osteoporosis. Very kind person, but nobody messed with her. They very quickly learned better if they tried. She didn’t start things, but she would finish them. (Unlike my mom, who was just OTT aggressive sometimes thanks to her own PTSD problems.)

But, yeah, that is pretty much the type of role models I had, and honestly more what I think most people are expecting back home. So I maybe find it even more disconcerting when I run up against some very different assumptions and expectations involving gender there. Women are usually the ones I expect to act more openly aggressive when appropriate. And sometimes when it’s not so appropriate, thinking of my mother and some other people I have known. :/ Dismiss them at your peril.

Yeah I’ve always been confused by gender roles that get expected by a lot of people, specifically because my parents don’t follow those. At all. So I wasn’t exposed to that at all in the home, and my mom made a point of challenging any kid who brought those ideas into our house.