With 7 kids, you're close to crossing over from "anecdotal" into "dataset" territory.
I have two sons. One was a handful when he hit puberty and one was not. I sat both of them and a friend of theirs down one day to talk to the one who was a handful and talked to him about the impact of hormones on his mood. The punchline for that conversation was "Your problem is called testosterone, not My Bitch Mother."
All three boys laughed and all three boys were easier to cope with afterwards.
Except the joke wasn't a reply to you, but someone else, so you can be assured they were not hitting on you on that one.
Also, you don't even know 'irrational' and 'ineedasername' genders and sexual preferences, so you cant say 'he' was trying to hit on 'her'.
What I said was I fail to correctly interpret friendly banter that occurs between other people here because it isn't something I first-hand experience.
Being ugly to me and people downvoting me and all this crap for stating that doesn't change it. It's just more evidence that people are all too often not friendly to me as an individual, so I stand by all of my above observations.
1. People here are not actually friendly to me. They are sometimes faux friendly while treating me like nothing but a piece of ass, which I deem to be predatory behavior, the opposite of friendly.
2. That fact makes it hard for me to correctly interpret friendly banter between other people when it does occur.
3. I continue to wonder if posting here is a giant waste of my time given the amount of ridiculous crap I get for no real reason other than posting as openly female.
Seeing how (to me) you overreacted to both my and ' zadokshi' comment with a long reply about your stress and how much you suffer from these interactions, I guess I would suggest you either stop posting here - at least for a while - to relax, or create a username that doesn't indicate your gender or real identity in any way.
In a side note, if I was on this level of stress and disappointment (sorry, english as second language and the best word here escaped my mind) in other people and and interaction with them, I would try to see someone to talk too.
Edit: BTW, you literally said 'if a guy here is being friendly...'
Yes, I did and the very next set of words is the following qualifier:
you can pretty much bet dollars to donuts
It's not some kind of "all men" statement, but that's likely how a lot of people are interpreting it. It's a "I have to invest so much ridiculous energy in trying to not accidentally signal that I'm here hoping some random internet stranger will pick me up that it makes it hard as all hell to try to behave normally and talk normally and interpret things normally."
Anyway, I said I was leaving. This is my last clarification. All other "Wow, I can't believe people are so wildly misinterpreting my words" reactions will be kept to myself.
Have a nice Saturday. (Or whatever day of the week it is where you live.)
Then you accuse friendly people of not being friendly and treating you like apiece of ass, admit you cannot recognize friendly banter, and accuse people of sexism.
If someone here is unfriendly to others, it's you.
BTW, I'm a guy, and I'm trying to be friendly, and I can assure you I'm not looking for a date.
But that's not workable for a long list of reasons that I'm both tired of trying to explain and tired of being told are not legitimate concerns or whatever. It boils down to this: men are not expected to hide their gender to participate online. Telling a woman to hide hers as a "solution" is dismissing her very real problems and compounding them.
It shouldn't be an offense worthy of being downvoted to hell to say "Yeah, I missed the joke for the following two reasons, one of which is no joking around allowed when talking to Doreen! Can't have that!
It's exhausting to have to err on the side of being excessively serious every minute I'm here because if I make the mistake of being my normal, friendly self, everyone wants my phone number so to speak.
Making that observation isn't me being a bitch, but getting downvoted to hell for it sure makes me sympathetic to the hords of women who openly hate on men and blame the conspiracy theory of The Patriarchy for all their ills.
Anyway, I need to go do other things. This is not a conversation I really want to have. At all.
Edited: Because auto-corrupt is the bane of my existence.
A quick parting thought: one feature of HN (with which I strongly disagree) is that downvotes require no accompanying explanation or justification.
I've sometimes been pretty vexed when my perfectly good comments got downvoted.
I'd encourage you to not read too much into a downvote. It can be impossible to divine what actually motivates each occurrence.
Pointing out a comment where this has happened would go a long way to bolster the claim.
It's always strange to see this kind of thing said. It's uniquely western that this behaviour would be tolerated.
In my neck of the woods, such disrespect would result in a hiding, such that by the time a child is 3 they know not to disrespect their parents... at least not to the extent of verbal insults like that.
What would anyone other than Ted Cruz allow someone else to disrespect their spouse like that?
I'm the one in the family with a potty mouth who swears like a sailor. It was funny to them and they all three laughed in part because that line was colorfully descriptive of his cranky, blamey behavior, not because anyone in the family ever spoke to me that way.
I was hit as a kid. I have no distinct memory of being hit really, but I have distinct memories of being scared of it if I misbehaved and parents getting angry.
As a parent now, I see two reasons a parent might hit their kid, and neither is acceptable to me.
(A) you lose your temper because the child misbehaves. This isn’t acceptable because you’re reacting emotionally. The outcome could be extreme, either mentally or physically.
(B) you don’t lose your temper and make a reasoned decision to hit the child. This is even worse because you’ve justified hurting a child, to yourself.
Its not news that how a child is raised will impact their outlook on life. I wasn’t hit a lot, and I’m generally able to not make a physical reaction (such as hitting) when I am upset with my son.
I’ve seen first hand that others who had more violence in their childhood (eg hit with a wire coat hanger by a parent) will themselves be much more likely to react with physical violence if they get upset.
There are times when a parent needs to do something that will make it very clear that the child's behavior is completely inappropriate. Things for which, if they do not teach the child this, it will cause problems later. For some people, that act may be a spanking or similar. For others, it might be making the child eat soap.
Personally, I'm a bellower. I almost never raise my voice. But when I do, I am heard... period; everyone in the house stops in their tracks to find out what has pushed me over the edge. I don't like yelling, but if my child is doing something that could cause them physical injury (or similar) and I cannot seem to get them to stop by telling them to... I raise my voice, a lot.
But the comment I replied to gives the impression of a pretty harsh implementation:
> such disrespect would result in a hiding, such that by the time a child is 3 they know not to disrespect their parents...
That's a pretty rare event.
If I misbehaved at school, I'd get a caning (bamboo) or hiding (short length of hose pipe).
I was never abused. Boundaries were always known, and the punishment for crossing them also known. If you got in trouble.
I mean... you do something cheeky, and the punishment is a bit of pain for 10 seconds. That was always much much better than being told how badly you'd disappointed your parents or teacher.
I'd take a hiding over a telling off any day.
FYI, my partner was also beaten as a child, but she'd vehemently against corporal punishment now. Our children are being raised without the cane.