You can absolutely get away with it, dudes. Kick out the jams. Go for it.

@Zero_Democracy
man one of my male friends was deriding me for wearing pink socks to the gym, and i was like, mate i own it, why you so afraid of being perceived of as gay??

@0x3F My favorite bit of trivia regarding this is that blue used to be feminine, and pink masculine. They just arbitrarily reversed it at some point.

@Zero_Democracy @0x3F Oh that history is interesting, that came about because of nazi germany. The nazis branded homosexual men with pink triangles so to avoid the association with gay men, blue became the mens color in the western world

@Laurelai @0x3F If you look at prewar childcare stuff, like from the late-1800s to the 1930s, all the boy stuff is pink and all the girls stuff is blue. It's fascinating.

@Zero_Democracy @0x3F Goddamn nazis ruin everything

@Laurelai @Zero_Democracy @0x3F Not just Nazis but homophobic Nazi sympathizers across the entire Western world.

@Zero_Democracy this is, liiiiike, definitely a thing.

like. the "welp, am i actually queer enough for this to not be, in some weird backwards way, like, appropriative and stuff[1][2]?" like. ime.

which. yeah. idk. is a whole thing, and i'm super not sure what to do about it. 🤷

[1] which, like, okay, that's not really even a meaningful question.

[2] and, like, even if it ~was~~~~... :\

@gdkar @Zero_Democracy I think there is a line - back when everyone was rainbow filtering their avatars on social media, I felt like /that/ would've been appropriative to do to my own avatar, as I'm cishet.

But, denying yourself things that aren't stereotypically masculine because you're afraid you're appropriating queer culture? I actually wonder if some of that is... an attempt to justify deep-seated queerphobic reactions in queer-supporting terms.

@Shotagonist @Zero_Democracy I've read stuff like a guy recommending other guys to go to gay bars to hit on girls because girls "have their guards down" when they assume they are around gay men

but that is only one anecdotal thing in support of gatekeeping

on the other hand, my irl lgbt friends all said that we should definitely go to a gay bar, so, idk

@grainloom @Zero_Democracy thats a useless distinction, you'd also have to throw out bi guys or non-passing trans lesbians then because straight men could also pretend to be those - you see where this leads?

@josemanuel They demonstrably do exist, and cishet men enjoy a position where they're subject to much less consequences for challenging them than any other group, as well as largely being their own police force.

@Zero_Democracy Can you prove to me that they exist, then? I am what you call a cishet man, I know many others and I can't find anything that I'd call a norm that unifies us all into the same group. Same goes for the women I know. (I work in an all-women environment, so I'm pretty close with them.) Each one has their own way of being a woman and none seems to be challenging anything by being themselves.

@Zero_Democracy Also, what do we gain by challenging the ‘norm’? Why should we do it if, as I think you suggest, it makes us uncomfortable? Why should we do something we may not really want to do? What would we prove with that?