In my deep-dive study of online resources addressing “the ick” (you can read Part 1 here and Part 2 here), I purposely sought sources that I would consider credible.
As a native Clevelander and someone who’s benefitted from the Cleveland Clinic (always among the top-rated hospitals in the world), I was happy to find this article on the ick published by that institution. When I read it, though, I was horrified.
Here are a few super-problematic lines (bold text) with my “talking back to” responses following:
OR, an ick might not be projection based on cognitive bias at all. It might be your trustworthy intuition based on eons of human evolution and decades of direct personal experience. It’s not that you—a silly silly woman—are “confusing it as a dealbreaker”; it’s that it should, in fact, be a dealbreaker, and on some deep reptilian level you already know it.
It’s not projection; it’s protection.
Frequently, when women say the relationship is “going too fast,” what they are expressing is that their boundaries are being violated, their words are dismissed, and their body language is being ignored. These experiences are red-hot flags of toxicity and reside in a separate universe from women “picking something we don’t like” in order to “give us permission” to not be in the relationship.
This should not need to be stated, but women don’t need permission to not be in a relationship. Ever.
Yet another phrasing that unsubtly suggests women must not only “have a reason” (who vets this reason? There’s an implied paternalism here) but “hold ourselves accountable” for ending a relationship.
The assumptions here are misogynistic and offensive and serve to position women as obligated to remain with men who make us uncomfortable, as though there’s some tacit societal mandate to remain in relationship unless you can “prove” your way out, presumably through something that this mysterious vetting authority deems “more serious than an ick.”
How serious does it have to be? Does she have to be demonstrably abused? Is that how she gets to earn her freedom in a way that releases her from accountability?
Exactly. And also before she ends up exploited, violated, neglected, etc. There are many relationships that should never be granted a solid chance of getting started. Women listening to our icks is one of the most reliable ways to cut those relationships off before they hurt us.
Let’s break this one into two parts: the offensive part, and the downright moronic part:
First: There are hundreds of thousands of women in the Burned Haystack community. I’ve never heard of a single one of them cutting a man off for something like not using the right utensil. When women share their “icks,” those icks are almost always directly tied to consent violations, verbal aggression, gaslighting, and other deeply antisocial behaviors; they are not trivial displays of superficiality, as dating media loves to suggest.
The next part is downright hilarious. I love that the writer of this article (clearly Cleveland Clinic is not above hiring writers simply to “generate content”) not only invoked these crazy hypotheticals but then came up with hypothetical explanations to justify the original hypotheticals:
“Maybe they didn’t give you a napkin” [who, the restaurant???] or “your utensils were dirty and you were forced to use what was left” [are there people forcing men to use “leftover utensils”???]
Do you see what happened there? Someone is suggesting it’s MORE LIKELY that men are being “forced” to use dirty utensils than it is that women are getting the ick from them for totally valid reasons.
I feel compelled to write this final response in gigantic text:
Okay, I’m done now. Please share your thoughts in the comments ⬇️
No posts
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.