Women who no longer care about male validation, how?

45 comments

1. It is called being gay

2. I dont need a man to validate my existence or what ive been through. I had enough of being invalidated by men, and took it into my own hands.

   What happened to me is real, just because a man cant accept it as truth doesnt mean it didnt happened. If they tried to invalidated me, id just ignore them.

3. Because who gives a shit what anyone else thinks, do you and be happy.

4. Having many many other things you care more about including yourself.

5. I don’t care about validation from anyone. No one is universally liked or respected so it’s best to just live the way you want. Those who value you will validate you.

6. Why would I care what men think of me. Why would I care what ANYONE thinks of me. It’s a useless time and energy waster.

7. I realised that you should only care about someone’s opinion about you when they mean something to you. Why would I care what a random person thinks of me? This goes for men and women.

8. The only people who’s opinions I care about are the people I love that love me, regardless of gender. And those people don’t do things to make me feel bad

9. If nobody’s ever had a bad opinion of you, then you’ve never stood up for anything. Get in line, fellas!

10. 40 years old

11. You get to have an opinion on how I conduct myself when you’re paying my bills or being the one I go to when I’ve fucked up. I’ve dated plenty of men that were flat disasters and realized that I need to approve of *them* before I let them in, not the other way around.

12. You gotta work on realizing your self worth. Once you really know who and what you are… A man’s opinion/validation won’t have the “value” it used to.

13. This sounds bad but I did it by finding a guy…

    …who loves me for me!!! He don’t care if I didn’t shave my legs or if my hair is washed. Once I felt what being loved is really like I knew I didn’t need to impress anyone 🙂 just happy being me has landed me the man of my dreams

14. Coming out helped.

    Being part of a sports team with other women who didnt give a fuck helped.

    Befriending older women helped.

    Being validated for things I thought would never take someone’s heart – my SO loves how hairy my body is for a woman – helped a LOT.

    Reading and listening to feminist media helped.

    Finally, of I’m being honest, in a society in which we constantly hold men in high standard, a little bit of well-placed misandry helped restablish good balance.

15. Think just time. You need to experience enough shit to understand that no other opinion define who you are. Also, so many people are real assholes and within time you understand that what ‘that’ person did to you is an actual donkey move, not the ‘wrong’ way you live life or see things. You do you, and there will be people who love you for that.

16. Age, wisdom, and the realization that historically I am happier, healthier, more successful, and achieve more when I am doing my thing in between LTRs v when allllll my excess time, energy, and emotional bandwidth is siphoned into a man (who has *never* been worth it and I realized waaaaay too far into things).

17. Because those who mind, don’t matter. And those who matter? Don’t mind.

    Also it takes a LOT of self work. We are encouraged from an astonishingly young age to make ourselves palatable so men will like us. That’s a lot of brain washing to undo if you ask me.

    It also helps when you realize that the bar for men being good partners is almost literally subterranean and MANY can’t even seem to attain it. If all they have to do is be a kind person and they can’t even match that…why do I want their attention at all?

18. For me it was just something that snapped in my brain. I think getting older and maturing also helped, but after being so “reliant” on male validation for most of my life, one day I was just like “why the FUCK do I care?” At this point in life I don’t rely on validation from anyone… My opinion of myself is the only one that counts in the end. Not to say I have super high self esteem, cause I don’t at all, quite the opposite, but at least I don’t need someone’s opinion about me to build how I feel about myself.

19. I’m gay. Married to another woman. Even before I realized I was gay I never really needs a man’s validation.

    I guess the way I see it, what does a random guy have that I don’t have? I’ll get my validation from me.

20. I’ve been burned most of my life by men I loved and cared for. I’ve sort of hit a point where I don’t care anymore.

21. I am not 20 anymore. Opinions are like aholes, everyone has ones and they all smell. I just do me. We only have an infinite time on this floating green/blue ball of gas so why waste it worrying about anyone else. Be the best person you can be for you and keep moving forward.

22. I’ve been hurt waaaaay to much. When I was younger (somethings weren’t said but definitely implied) had to be thin, get married have babies. Thank god education and getting a good job was in there too so I can hold my own which is a blessing now. Even now being 50 and single there are those hints like you should be dating blah blah blah. But the thing is those people do not know me and the hurt and shit that I put up with from men. Not horrible but bad enough that I’m not looking anymore for a partner. I’ve learned the lesson over and over and over again that they are not here for me. The only thing they’ve ever wanted was the cash and sex. So I’m living my life now for me. I don’t give a flying f if they think I’m cute, nice, hot or anything don’t care. They have always talked the talk but never walked the walk. I know they aren’t all like this. Maybe I’m to nice not sure. But I will never care about what they think of me because I know who I am after all these years. The only male I need to be there for is my son. Some guy saying positive things about me doesn’t do shit. Doesn’t charge my life, doesn’t help with the burden or stress of life. No thanks. When I was younger I thought I’d have to prove shit or hope that my dad seen me in a certain way. Now I don’t care

23. it stems from my internalized misandry 🙂 i just hate the majority of men so much that i don’t even think about them and don’t care about their problems unless they are close to me. i’d much rather focus on how *i* feel, not how some random man does. i also have a very supporting boyfriend who loves every inch of me + a supportive family. i’ve never felt the need to beg for validation, i always got it or found it in myself to love me for me. idk if any of this makes sense tho

24. I’ve been apathetic about men since they started hitting on me when I was eleven.

25. Because so many men are so utterly terrible at literally anything. It’s like getting feedback from a toddler. It’s a sweet gesture, but doesn’t mean anything.

26. Because I live for myself and I’m very self-confident and self-assured. I also just generally don’t care what other people think about me.

    I wasn’t always, it just took time and age.

27. I like validation from people. I like to give validation to people. I don’t “need” that validation. And I don’t like to be around people who do “need” the validation.

    Edit: meaning genders got nothing to do with it for me.

28. I got into my 30s. I got a wrinkle – attention from men immediately fell away, and I was like wtf?? Realized that there are men who are attracted to women who are smart, cool, funny, and hardworking and I should cultivate those more. The guys who are worth it are still into me, and I still get sidelong glances from the ones who are attracted by the way I carry myself and my personal style. I’m more interested in making real connections with people, than getting attention from little-hot-baby-boys

29. Age, time, and running out of fucks to give.

30. Bc men are not up on some pedestal that makes their validation worth seeking.

    Do you care about women’s validation the same? It’s perfectly normal to want to be accepted by people and liked. But seeking specifically male validation means you are living your life for their consumption… and baby, they ain’t worth it.

    You just gotta live your life for YOU. It’s tough to shift your thinking when we’ve been programmed to view finding our heterosexual life partner as the biggest success. But you’ll get there, if you want to.

31. Have you met men? Dudes will jerk off/have sex with/hit on literally anything. Their approval means nothing when they’ll give it to anything that even remotely catches their attention

32. No reason to. What is male validation? A guy wants you to risk STDs and pregnancy so he can disappoint you sexually for ten minutes? Men wanting to shove their dicks in you means nothing. It has zero value. When grown men were hitting on me when I was 11 is when I realized it had no value and is fucking disgusting. Most will hit on any and everyone. A dude wanting to fuck doesn’t make you special. It makes you about 1 of thousands of women he’d like to shove his dick in. No value whatsoever

33. Happens when you love deeply and that individual and their family shred your entire life and self-esteem for years before kicking you to the curb. You grieve and slowly notice your hands and realise you’ve been given the ability to build and rebuild, and that’s when you stop viewing men the way you once did.

34. I was ambitious and took their criticism as a challenge. I started working in a male dominated field requiring licencing at different levels. My new coworkers didn’t think a woman could do it. So I made sure I found a way to do the job in my own way, just as well, if not better. Then I started upgrading my licence, beating nearly everyone elses scores and getting a higher licence than people that have been there for 20 years.

    I beat out one of the guys for a permanent position, I started later than him but outperformed him in every aspect. They berated me and said I must have done “sexual” acts to earn it, however the proof is in the pudding. I’m smarter, more intuitive and ambitious. Eat it. Now upper management wants to promote me to be my plant’s next supervisor. As funny as that would be, I was offered a job elsewhere that pays much more. Again, no need for male validation. Those guys are falling fast behind me. Tell me I can’t and I’ll make a fool out of you.

35. it’s weird but tiktok. i never truly gave a real crap about what men thought of me but there was always this underlying feeling of being a piece of worthless meat. but when i got on tiktok and my algorithm was constantly showing me stunning feminists of every race, size, and age, i was inspired and humbled by them.

36. Therapy helped me realise that I pur too much stock in what other people wanted me to be.

    My trauma convinced me that attracting a man was my only purpose in life. I moved towns for a new job and suddenly realised that, by changing environments and getting away from the toxic people I surrounded myself with, I did not crave that validation anymore. I began exploring who I am as a person and I’m so much happier now.

    As cheesy as it is the movie Runaway Bride talks about how we change ourselves to fit our partner and it feels like it was a lightbulb moment to suddenly get that about myself

37. Feminism. When you read more on it and understand it, you recognize all of the toxic habits and ideas that you’ve learned and are embedded in you. Knowing that men don’t define your value as a person, and how illogical a lot of the things we are taught to do as women is (since we were little girls) has given me 0 interest in caring about how desirable I am to men.

38. Because it doesn’t make women happy in the long run, just pisses them off instead when the guy shows no respect and/or care. After a while you’ll get tired of that and realize you’ll be fine on your own, and the future guys can join and add happiness to your life or stay out of it.

39. *laughs in sapphic*

40. “You can be the ripest, juiciest peach in the world, but there’s still going to be someone who hates peaches.” – Dita Von Teese

    Be yourself. Live your life for you. Do things that make you happy. You don’t need validation from anyone.

41. The more educated I became on men historically, socially, statistically, i just don’t view them as anything worth getting validation from honestly.

42. When I realized that men were just people. They are as confused, messed up, complex, wonderful, awful, great, terrible as women can be. Even when I got their validation, the high from it only lasted so long. Most of them I didn’t even really want to be with anyway.

43. I know a handful of wonderful men who I love and admire. When I think about what they all have in common, it’s that they like me for who I am and don’t act like I owe them a fucking favour for caring about me. Toxic masculinity is real and when you acknowledge that we don’t owe men shit – we don’t owe them our attention, our bodies, our love and affection and that we don’t need to compete with other women for those things – you can have real relationships with people.

44. Self-confidence, which just naturally grew as I got older.

    When I was in my teens and twenties, I used to look around to see if men (and other women, even though I’m not into women) were noticing me, because it made me feel better about myself.

    As I got older, I just started caring less, because I realised the opinion of (and attention from) someone who didn’t know me was irrelevant.

45. Also remember this ” No matter what you do, no matter who you are, theres going to be people in the world who just dont like you..so keep being yourself”

    or think of it this way, do you really want to live in that prison of a purgatory where your mere existence is dictated by the attention you receive from someone or how someone feels about you? fuck that..