men need to stop committing microaggressions before i start committing macro acts of violence

14/07/2025

i've mentioned this before, but i work at a hardware store. a few days ago, my coworker (who was in charge of the appliance side of our department) called me and asked if i could help a customer as he was busy with another. i don't know appliances as well as my coworker does but i have enough knowledge to sort a customer out, so i head over. start asking this guy what he's looking for, going through the qualifying questions. he's not really giving me anything. so i start showing him what we have. he's not responding to me at all. finally he asks if we have any sales on. i explain we don't, our current promotion is only for bundling several appliances. he doesn't say anything. so i try again showing him stuff. the only real thing i have to go off of at this point is that he asked about sales, so maybe he doesn't want to spend a lot of money? he asks if we can look on the website. in my head i'm like, why the hell can't you do that at home? but i'm like ok. take him over to the computer. pull up the website. i'm scrolling a little and he's just. not speaking to me. i don't know what the hell is going on.

finally my coworker finishes with his costumer and comes over to check on me, and i'm like hey can you take over? cause it's his side of the department anyway and i don't know how to pull any info out of this dude. so my coworker takes over and suddenly the customer is the chattiest motherfucker you've ever met. telling him everything he wants in this appliance. asking direct questions about our brands that he didn't even bother bringing up with me. and i'm just standing there seething with rage because the only difference between me and my coworker is that he is a man.

i'm very lucky that the majority of customers at my store are very kind, but every so often i do get this kind of male customer that clearly thinks i don't know anything simply because i'm a woman, maybe even because i'm a young woman. and it's always little things, like the tone they take or even just the way they look at you. but i'd never seen such a night and day switch between talking to me and then talking to one of my male coworkers before. all of his questions were things i could've answered. and in the end he didn't even care about the price, so why the fuck did he ask me about sales like it was important???

i told my manager about this story and before i even got to the end she rolled her eyes and said that it's so common that men won't take you seriously if you're a woman at our place of business. she told me about how we only keep male staff in the position of helping people load their vehicles now, because when we had a woman working that role, customers kept refusing her help even after asking for someone. they'd ask if the store would send a man instead, say that it's embarrassing to get help from a woman, and then struggle to load their vehicle themselves. it's so fucking stupid. she wouldn't be employed in the role if she wasn't strong enough!!

so that was the first thing. moving on. lately in runescape, i've been playing with a clan i joined. the clan is primarily made up of men, and as it's a big clan, some of them are the kind of people i try to avoid. but i've managed to carve out a little group of likeminded people in it, so i've been pretty content for the most part even though it's always a bit exhausting being the only woman around. mainly i'm just glad to have people to learn higher level content with, and the people i normally talk to are either solid enough guys or straight up nonbinary people that 100% get it, so i'm having fun while keeping an appropriate amount of caution.

but there's this one dude. i've been annoyed with him for some time now. i don't really have anything concrete to point to about it... if i had to say, it's that he pokes fun at me at a level that i think is unbalanced to how well we know each other. i don't mind teasing between friends, i partake in it myself and it'd be hypocritical of me to give it and not be able to take it. i think as long as you don't mean real harm and step back/apologize when the other person asks it of you then it's all in good fun. respecting boundaries and etc. but i really don't feel close enough to this guy to have him speak to me the way he does sometimes... he doesn't join in on playing with my little group very often though, so i've been letting it go as it's easy enough to ignore him.

today he really pissed me off though!!! it started cause i said "smh my head" at the end of a sentence in the clan chat. may be noteworthy that a lot of guys in the clan also say this meme often, but i guess it's possible he hasn't seen that. maybe. but he says "you know smh... is shake my head... right?" eughhhhh. probably nothing in this world i hate more than when a man explains something to me, whether i know what it is or not. but i felt this was especially egregious because even if you're not familiar with the meme, obviously that's the joke? so i responded "men will mansplain to women before considering maybe it's a meme smh my head" and he replied "women will womensplain to men before considering maybe it's a meme" and i just stopped responding.

i guess he could've been jokingly pointing out the obvious but i can't shake the feeling that he would never do that to another man. and the line about "womensplaining"??????? actually never speak to me again. leave me alone. what are you even talking about. that doesn't mean anything.

and the most fucked up part of it all is that even as i'm writing this i'm second guessing myself and making excuses for them. wondering if i'm overreacting. if people will read this and think i'm too sensitive. if i'm being a woman about it. but when you start recognizing little microaggressions like this and the way men, even subconsciously, put women down it becomes really difficult to control the rage at any slight. i will never blame a woman for exploding because every day you are forced to endure a little more and a little more until every straw feels like a thousand pounds of extra weight because it is!!! it is all contributing to the societal oppression of women!!!!

even as a staunch feminist i try not to fall into the trap of writing men off completely. believing that there is some inherent, biological evilness that men possess is way too gender essentialist for me and ultimately doesn't do a ton of good for the endgoal of feminism as a movement. but its so hard not to start falling into that line of thinking when every time you meet a man, it's like there's this big countdown until they are going to disappoint or belittle you. when i was talking to my coworker about that customer after, i was afraid to tell him because i felt that he would automatically make excuses for the other man, even though he's given me no reason to assume he's that kind of person. and he almost did! i had to further explain the situation! more than anything, i wholeheartedly believe that while there may not be an essential evilness men possess from birth, the way society is structured makes damn sure they carry some part of it with them.

anyway i just wanted to rant and scream about two happenstances from this week. if i have to endure another microaggression in the next 48 hours i cannot be held responsible for my actions

white boy - bikini kill