Harmful Stereotypes in The Man Cave

So I fed yesterday's post into the AI prompt on Peakd from Chat GPT. It was an interesting thought experiment as to what GPT would say about what I am writing.

You see when I wrote for big magazines I would have to be careful of what I had in my content. For instance whenever I would refer to myself, my editor would change me to cishet man, which stands for Cisgender Heterosexual -- which basically means I was born with the identity I now identify with, and that I like women.

Phew, that was a thought-fuck. Anyway,

GPT wrote back telling me that my analysis was harmful and I was perpetuating stereotypes of women and men in traditional gender roles. I mean, this is the response I expected anyway, but perhaps maybe I was curious if because it was hosted on hive it may be a little more unleashed, it was not. And I do like hive because I can write what the hell I like without having some crazy feminist shout me down with the full weight of the platform behind her. It's every person for themselves here.

What piqued my curiosity is how from a surface level analysis and skin deep hive post about social dynamics between men and women can be harmful. Harmful to who? The perpetually offended? But then if they are offended then they weren't harmed. It's silly language meant to obfuscate the traditional meaning of the word.

And then that got me thinking about our little spot in hive. To the fly on the wall it sometimes may seem that we are a bunch of rampant loons hell-bent on saying the most shittiest of stuff to each other day in and day out if you don't know us well, but in reality men bond in this way. It's a strange bonding mechanism that us men have -- if you haven't been thrown a mother joke by one of us then we probably don't know you that well.

And it's through that bonding that we've grown to somewhat trust each other. Whilst we're a tight nit bunch in there I've always thought we were at least hospitable to the random entrant that comes in and wants to be a part of what we do in the man cave, and isn't scared away by having to open up a bit more, because we're quite inquisitive over in there, and we'll eventually know.

So I really wouldn't say we're harmful to anyone. We're welcoming, if anything. Some may say we aren't welcoming, but that may be because they were quite hostile to us in the beginning - we're not going to open our arms to people that come in and start attacking our long standing members.

That being said, and the meat of this story is the people who create harm are mostly the people that talk about creating harmful stereotypes. Because they'll get horny for the word "safety" -- you can mostly hear them saying things like, "I didn't feel safe" and I've worked out that's usually code for I want to bend whatever place I don't feel safe to my whims. People start to have to make allowances, and others start to have to shut up, so that they can speak.

And um, that's not happening, not on my watch.

So we'll just say what we want and do as we place and create as much harmful stereotypes as we can and everyone will be good! And happy!

Peace