I'm dark Irish, but people frequently think I'm Jewish because of my coloring and curly hair. My boyfriend is Jewish and racially mixed, and doesn't present as white.

Microaggressions I've gotten: "So, what are you exactly?"

Definitely find yourself a new gyno. I'm 28, no kids and have had the Paragaurd for 18 months. My periods were a hot mess for the first 9-12 months and are finally starting to even out. Which for me is 3-4 days of bad pms with 6-7 days of bleeding. The cramping was super bad the first couple months but has…

The problem arises when a certain contingent uses evolutionary biology to claim that male promiscuity is "natural" but insists that women are hard-wired to be monogamous. If that were the case, we wouldn't have thousands of years of human culture using various methods of force and punishment to keep women chaste. If…

Me too. The guys who called me that were guys who had no tolerance for doing any one thing around my schedule, that I wanted to do. They could not hear one second of a conversation that would result in them having to compromise, help me in some way, or explain themselves. I am very cool headed, and if I very subtly…

YASSS to all of this. My last long term, serious relationship ended 4 years ago and it is JUST NOW dawning on me how fucked up it was. I was constantly gaslighted and being called "emotionally imbalanced" and "crazy" and "demanding" when I simply tried to explain my concerns and what I wanted/needed. A few examples:…

It took me from 15-23 to realize I let soooo much bullshit slide to be the cool girl instead of the needy girl. In retrospect, it makes me hate myself a little bit for letting myself be treated that way.

This shit is ages old. It still boils down to: women should not have appetites. Women need to contain themselves, and be contained, in all aspects.

Yeah, believing that you're obligated to stifle your thoughts and needs and desires in an attempt to be perceived as not crazy is a pretty sure way to actually make yourself crazy.

In my early relationships, I was the opposite of needy, and actually much more distant than my boyfriends wanted me to be. I was the cool, aloof one with her eye on the prize at school/work. Sometimes I wouldn't answer a text for a few hours, since y'know, work (not some weird/mean/mysterious game, I'm not heartless),…

I don't know about you guys, but in my own love life, there is a 100% correlation between guys who label me "crazy" or "needy" or "possessive", and guys who have cheated on me.

Some of them manifest it the same way women do. I've gone out with multiple guys who texted me 20+ times a day whether I responded or not, jumped straight from the first date to Serious Relationship, freaked out and apologized if I seemed to want to do anything other than be with them every day, etc.

YES, yes, yes. I so agree. I didn't realise until I was out of my first serious relationship how often I'd squashed my own feelings because I was worried about being seen as the crazy girlfriend. Some of the stuff I let slide was just gobsmacking. I'm also quite an independent person naturally, who relies on my girl…

Everything you just said, co-signed and +1'ed. Particularly as I've hit my 30's, I've found that every guy I know (friend or boyfriend) has entered "this one is PERFECT, I'm going to lock it down!" mode. It's alarming.

You know what guys like even less than girls who are needy? Girls who are not needy. Seriously, I have had men comment to me before that I was much less needy than their previous girlfriends. And this was not a compliment. Ultimately, they wanted to feel needed because it made them less insecure about the…

Well, then you can just watch the second act. There is only like one song there.

Another great snippet from Stafford's article points out the problem of taking sex-differences in adults as innate, essential biological differences:

Another good, critical look at the coverage and interpretation of this study by cognitive scientist Tom Stafford is published here. Some really good points, including this one:

No fair! You changed the outcome by measuring it!

Tiger wins. Lion returns to sleep.