I’ve seen this new trend of girls posting videos like “I hate my boyfriend for bringing all of his stupid boy things into our apartment when we moved in together 🙄” and then pictures of his hot wheels collection or a Halloween skeleton or an extremely cool pirate flag. Give him to me you do not deserve him.
Buckle up, folks. I’ve got a lot to say on this…
I’m not one of those guys who subscribes to the “Man Cave” idea. That theory that once you’re in a relationship, you’re required to forfeit 99% of your own home and be grateful to have one room in which you can be yourself and have your own possessions on display. I think if you’re in a relationship, you have a right to make your home reflect your personality and interests as much your partner does. I’ve run into a couple of instances where a woman thinking a man has no right to his own possessions has not gone over so well and it was hysterical.
I once knew a guy who worked in the telemarketing department of a company I worked at. One Friday night after work, he told me about how he ended up breaking up with his girlfriend.
This guy was like me, very clean and orderly and liked things a certain way but he wasn’t volatile about it or anything. He and his girlfriend decide to have a weekend sleepover at his house, a trial run in his mind for moving in together. She showed up and the red flags sprang up immediately. “Where’s your bag?” he asks. “For a weekend? I don’t need one.” she says. His mind reels. “So you’re not gonna change clothes…or shower…or brush your teeth…?” “No. Why would I do that in just a couple of days?” He tries to be okay about it but then she starts “cooking” and the kitchen looks like a war zone. Then there’s the fact that her B.O. seems to get stronger by the hour.
The last straw comes towards the end of the weekend when she walks around his place, eyes his Elvis Presley memorabilia collection and says “If I lived here, all this Elvis shit would get set out for trash, I’m not wasting space on all that.” When it finally comes time for her to go back home, she says “This was fun! Can’t wait to do it again.” “Yeah, about that…” and he dumped her in his own driveway.
He said if he had to choose between hygiene and an Elvis collection he’s built for years and her, he’s gonna be happier being single, cleaner and having his collectibles around than he would be with her.
Another instance happened when I had a garage sale and one of the things I was selling was a talking football player action figure from the 90s that someone had bought me under the presumption that because I was boy, I was into sports (I was not). The action figure was brand new in the box because that was how little I cared about playing with it despite my mother’s best attempts. A woman shows up, sees the action figure and loses her shit.
“Oh God, I am so sick of seeing these! My husband has the whole set and all I want to do is throw them in the trash!” A guy at the sale overhears this and says “Well, I’m sure your husband has a list of things that he’d like to get rid of that you’re partial to but he doesn’t say anything because that’s the give and take of being in a relationship” She blows him off and says “I should be the one to decide what goes in the house and what he can buy, THAT is how marriage works for ME.” The guy changes his argument. “Maybe on your husband’s list of shit that needs to go, you should be at the top of the list…” Everyone else at the garage sale (including me) was now watching silently and wondering when the throw down would happen…
“What did you say?”, she asks him a bit taken back. “I said if I was him, I wouldn’t take that shit that somehow being married to you means forfeiture of my belongings and personality and substituting it all for your bullshit. I’d sooner throw you out than my action figures.” After picking her jaw up off my driveway, the woman hurumphs and storms back to her car. I high-five the guy for making an excellent point after she leaves.
I have a lot of collectibles myself and am currently in the creative habit of going through my childhood Power Rangers and Pokémon toys and putting the ones I absolutely want to keep in shadow boxes and hanging them on the wall as conversation pieces and selling the rest.
I have Funko Pops. I have lunchboxes. I have special edition magazines and comic books in floater frames on the wall. I have more books than I have time to count or read. I have tub after tub of Halloween and Christmas decorations because that’s my favorite time of year. I would never throw all of this stuff away because I’ve purged plenty already and kept what I wanted to keep. It’s all a reflection of my personality and my story. If someone came into my life and said our life together would mean giving all of this up and doing what he wanted, I would consider that a toxic situation and I would end it before I got in too deep.
Men, gay or straight, can find themselves in toxic, abusive relationships, this is not a phenomenon only experienced by women. It just seems that way because men, especially straight men, rarely speak up about it and mistakenly settle on what they assume is some unchangable default result of being in a relationship. It’s not.
I would never move in with someone and tell them to throw everything out that has been a part of them or spoken to who they are in order to make room for me. I am all about organizing and making a space feel cozy, functional and fun and would go out of my way to make sure we both had space for our things and our personalities and stories. One does not have to overshadow or overpower the other in order to make a relationship between two people work.
So, the next time someone says “It’s me or the Star Wars action figures on that one shelf that aren’t bothering anyone but I hate that that shelf isn’t all about me anyway” say “May The Force not hit you in the ass on the way out” as you show them the door.
My dad broke up with the girlfriend he had when he was 20ish because she said “the motorcycle goes or I go”. And not because she genuinely didn’t like motorcycles, no! Because a friend of hers told her bf to get rid of the bike or lose her, and that guy choose the girl. Dad’s ex saw it as a power play she could pull on my dad as well. He turned her out on the spot.
I used to think guys just didn’t have any interests?? Or hobbies?? Because of all those images of homes where the wife designs everything and there’s basically no touch of the husband there anywhere, and how it was implied that that’s “normal”.
I just reblogged this but then I thought and I just have to make this addition?
Yeah, that last comment, that’s how fucked up our society has gotten, because men have to conceal or hide or at best get ONE room to put their stuff in, and even then it’s treated as terrible and regressive and should not be allowed. The ‘Man Cave’ aka the one space in a person’s house where they’re allowed to express themselves and their hobbies and it’s treated as a terrible thing because he’s 'excluding’ his wife from it, while the things that are in there are NOT ALLOWED ANYWHERE ELSE.
We have allowed people to brainwash us into two dumb ideas, one that men are expected to give up everything that they love for their significant others, and the second that it’s a burden on women that they have to determine how everything is in the household. Because that is also how it is in so many cases.
Felt this meme would be important here.
The meme is perfect here and this thread as a whole makes me realise how screwed up society is and also how happy I am to not be living in such a household
this kid is 14 oh my god is no one teaching children to protect themselves online anymore…
Meanwhile us olds are like: I don’t have a carrd and I’m not reading yours
Please don’t advertise your personal information, anyone could find that and use it however they want.
Oh my fucking god it isn’t 1998 anymore no one cares
??? Wtf does this mean??? 80% of employers google you before hiring you, child predators use that info to groom kids, abusers use that info against victims, police/government track activists online? Do you honestly think the internet has gotten safer since 1998????
also don’t tell any rando who wanders onto your blog with unknown intentions the specifics of how they can trigger you???? no????
the fact that its not 1998 anymore is exactly WHY you should be more fucking careful. do you have any idea the tools people have now compared to then? the fact that its gotten exponentially easier to find people in real life based off online info while young people have gotten extremely comfortable sharing all their personal details is deeply concerning.
im sorry no one ever taught you internet safety but that is NOT because its not important anymore. ITS MORE IMPORTANT THAN IT EVER WAS. please listen to the people whove been on the internet longer than youve been alive. our intentions are good and internet safety is vital. especially if youre queer, which i know for a fact a lot of you are.
Listen, guys and gals and nonbinary pals. I know you’re going to think this is all overblown. But give me two minutes of your time.
My current roommate and I met on Tumblr. In the first three minutes I knew her I KNEW HER ADDRESS FROM HER ETSY. She only lived three miles down and one block over from me. Once we became friends, it took me literally fifteen minutes to drive to her house.
“Okay, but you guys are friends, roommates even, you love each other, what’s the problem?”
The problem is, this story doesn’t always have a happy ending.
The problem is, in another story I’m still 32, but she’s 15 instead of 43, and I’m an asshole.
The problem is, I am an adult. If a first meeting goes wrong, I have a car, a cell phone, and a tire iron in said car that I could defend myself with. What do you have?
The problem is, if you put identifying information out in the open, it could cross paths with someone who only lives 15 minutes away. And maybe they don’t care, and maybe they’re a chill person! That’s often the case.
But maybe they’re not.
“But I don’t put that kind of information—”
Listen. I’m gonna tell you I went to high school at General McLane and grew up by the cove. I’m going to mention that I HATED walking to my bus stop because it was out by the highway. At some point in our conversations, I mention that I’m walking down to the corner to get some ice cream.
Go onto Google and see how long it takes you to figure out, within a quarter-mile radius, where I grew up.
I can tell you how long it took me, using only the information I just provided you: two minutes. I looked up the school and got the address. That gave me the town name. I put that into Google Maps. I found Edinboro Lake and another body of water near it. Zoomed in on the streets near that second body of water, and boom. Cove Drive, right next to an ice cream shop, opening onto a highway.
You now have a radius of less than two blocks where I might have lived.
Do you feel a little less safe putting that information out there? You should. Because I didn’t use any special programs, any elite hacking knowledge. I used nothing but Google, the name of a high school, and two offhand conversational mentions, and in two minutes I’d narrowed it down to a single block. Go ahead—try it yourself.
And yes—I can do this for my roommate, too, even having never been to her hometown. All I need to know is the name of her town and a story about crossing the street and a neighbor’s yard to get to the Walmart.
Do not put this information out there, guys. 95% of people you will meet online are legit. Many are delightful.
But some are not. And those are the ones you need to watch for.
THIS. Almost 20 years ago, I took a class on internet security. Nothing fancy, just an overview of the ways that people with bad intentions can gain access to your accounts and information. The number one security risk? People. You. It doesn’t matter how safe you make your systems when a tiny bit of social engineering and half a brain cell can get you to give them the info they need.
Our “final exam” was to find all of the information that we could on the teacher. Now, he supposedly knows everything that you should and shouldn’t do, right? So we shouldn’t be able to come up with much. Except, apparently I’m really good at finding info on the internet. I managed to find his hometown, high school, year of graduation, and even yearbook pictures. I passed the class, but it just goes to show that any schmoe can come up with enough info to track you down and hurt you.
That list of ‘just the basics’ filled me with a feeling of disbelief and horror.
We all remember the Twitter thread where a person IDed the storage unit of a guy hoarding hand sanitizer from a single photo, right? They weren’t a genius. I mean, probably they were very very smart but mostlh they were methodical and had a little experience deducing things from the most inconsequential details. I believe one was a bit of gutter.
Please be careful and just…know what you are putting out there. Especially if you are young and there is anything about you or what you do that could make you a target.
And don’t list your triggers under any circumstances. Most people won’t go to the trouble of trying to find your address, but if you annoy some folks with something you post on this here hellsite, someone will absolutely eventually send you the most horrifying shit they can find, and that is, like, extremely preventable.
Well… Here he is 👀 my perfectionist brain tweaked these constantly until I had to convince myself to just post them. Hope you all enjoy these as much as I did making them (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*.✧
the fact that jenna marbles is leaving youtube bc people are dragging out things she said and did almost a decade ago and since apologized and grew and learned from meanwhile at least 3 big name youtubers got outed as s*xual predators this week and still have followings supporting them and fucking p*wdiepie still has a channel which he uses to spread racist/fascist propaganda…….
People change. She doesn’t deserve to be punished for being human. I love this woman’s humor and have followed her for the longest time. This is why cancel culture needs to die in a terrible fire. 🙃
