Things Tumblr Has Taught Me
- Kids today are not nearly as stupid as my peers and parents believe them to be.
- Kids today are not nearly as smart as they’d like to believe, but they’ll get better.
- I have a whole new respect for what women deal with in an environment filled with ambient, aggressive sexuality. This blog brings me as close as I’ll ever get to being sexually objectified by random women, and it’s been an eye-opening experience.
Guys are always arguing, “Hey, I’d love the attention!” And they’re right, the attention is awesome. But awesomeness has issues with scale, as it turns out. Being a sexual object is like being the most Z-list celebrity on the planet; people are generally nicer to you, but some people are inexplicably nastier. And that attention, which used to feel like a refreshing spring rain on your parched ego, occasionally turns into a flash-flood of shallow compliments and come-ons that wash past in a meaningless blur.
As a large, older man with a certain sort of personality, I rather enjoy a nice downpour and can easily keep my footing, especially since I can isolate the experience to Tumblr. If I were a small, younger woman with a different sort of personality, and no ability to compartmentalize the experience, I could see it becoming maddening and fucking exhausting.
I have all of you out there to thank for this new level of empathy I’ve attained, and obviously, you’re also to blame when I use that empathy against you in the next story I write. Enlightenment is my weapon of choice.