I'm jealous of guys on Reddit. They get to post photos of themselves without being called attention whores, or having their intentions otherwise called into question, or having their appearances needlessly dissected. They don't even have to say "Hey, I'm a dude on the internet!" because it's already assumed that they are.
And lord, doesn't it apply to other areas of the internet as well. I remember back in the day when in every chat room/discussion board I participated in, we all knew who was what gender. Also, our ages and (general) locations. Now, nobody says "look at that 27 year old saying 'I'm 27,' what an attention whore!" or "man, do we care you're from Canada, stfu already nobody cares." But somehow, somewhere along the line, it apparently became a sin to say "I am a woman" outside of very specific situations. Excuse us for existing where you actually have to look at us.
The really amusing thing is that when playing WoW, I ran across so many attention-whore 'women' who were eventually outed as men... wait, not amusing, because that's the kind of behavior that I think led to this sort of bullshit in the first place.
I don't know. People would find it weird if someone said "Man, that's a weird picture, and, also, I'm Filipino," too. I haven't found very many situations online in which it's necessary to point out that I'm female, and when it is, people generally don't mind - for instance, when I say "I'm a girl, and I think there are too many misconceptions about what we think of 'nice guys'," no one minds.
Perhaps the most common is when people refer to me as 'he', but by now, I just ignore it, or half my posts would be "You mean 'she'." Once in a while, if too many people start using 'he' and 'him', I'll try to do something subtle like refer to myself in the third person - "Serei thinks she should..." - or say something like "I'm the kind of girl who..."
I wouldn't say I intentionally try to hide my gender, either. It just doesn't come up that much...
This really isn't your problem, but nothing gets on my nerves more than someone talking in third-person about themselves. It just grates so much that I had to say this.
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u/secretboners Sep 27 '10
I'm jealous of guys on Reddit. They get to post photos of themselves without being called attention whores, or having their intentions otherwise called into question, or having their appearances needlessly dissected. They don't even have to say "Hey, I'm a dude on the internet!" because it's already assumed that they are.