I think I’ve found a reason for why I clash with some types of women online.
They may be expecting me to relate or write in a female-typical way, with female-typical values, and they get disappointed or upset when I don't.
This may be because, like many gay men, I have some female-typical traits and mannerisms, but I still retain a pretty sex-typical approach to talking and writing.
I'm direct and blunt. I generalize, and I don't list out a sub-pamphlet of exceptions and "not alls".
My approach is not "nice". My primary concern is what I have to say, not "how might someone reading this feel and should I have made sure that no class of reader would feel that I was criticizing them."
This bothers some women a lot, I've noticed.
They push back in ways they think are reasonable (I do not agree). I read the pushback as either scolding, or as an indirect way of saying, "You should have prioritized my/their feelings, and it's more important to me to express that you were wrong for not doing that than it is for me to acknowledge or engage what you said at all."
I react very badly to that. When anyone, of either sex, refuses to engage the content and instead goes for the "mistakes" I've made first, it's disrespectful.
Note carefully---it's not disrespectful to disagree with me. It's disrespectful to ignore my point and subject matter, to not even acknowledge it, before one starts in with the "corrections."
Women take this approach with my writing much more than men do.
In my case, I suspect it's that women have learned to see gay men as "on their side." Though they don't think of it this way explicitly, there's an unconscious presumption that gay men are "honorary women" sometimes.
I'm not a woman. I'm a man. Women's issues are not my issues. As a man, I am not morally obligated to take on women's issues, or to speak about them in a way that women want me to. They are also not obliged to do the converse with men.
People's feelings are not my primary concern. I do not and will not mother-hen my writing this way. This is a woman's inclination. It is not a rule from God binding on men.
What do you think about this?
I had an argument with a male friend once because he asked me to edit something he was writing. He compared having his email account hacked to rape by saying "I felt like I'd been raped." He thought that I objected on emotional grounds. I did, but only in the sense that he was going to make readers (nearly all women and any man who has been raped or helped someone deal with the atermath of rape) completely miss his larger point, which I thought was important, and focus only on the rape metaphor. This inadvertent self-sabotage is quite an easy thing to do when writing for an audience.
So I suppose that I think that it is easy for people who have good reasons to pre-defend to miss it when they're going to do something similar--harm their own ability to communicate. I have done it. I'm not sure if you have or not because I read you charitably, because we're friends. As long as a writer bears in mind this shooting-oneself-in-the-foot possibility, then a "fuck their feelings; I said what I said" approach seems right to me.
I vastly prefer what you'd call male-typical communication. It puts me at ease. "Say what you mean, mean what you say" clarity. Female-typical communication often makes me feel like I'm suffocating. The pussyfooting seems to go hand in hand with passive aggression and other crazymaking forms of indirectness and general chaos. Straightforwardness is a salve, and it doesn't preclude vulnerability, sensitivity, etc.