11/22/23 - Whenever people see you driving a cute car, they know you’re a girl, so they deliberately fuck with you.
A thread discussing …aggressive sexist drivers?
“Greatest story I have this year so far. I went out driving with my boyfriend at night, and he was driving in front, and I was following behind. There was another car on the road beside the two of us, and for no reason at all, the other car tried to merge into me twice [where a car driving parallel to you starts merging into the side of your car, forcing you to change lanes]. So my boyfriend forced him to a stop. After he got out of the car, he was still running his mouth, about how he can merge whenever he fucking wants. My boyfriend demanded he apologise, and he was ballsy as hell. And that’s when a traffic cop passed by on a motorcycle and asked what happened. And the guy started explaining in a panic that nothing happened. And the traffic cop asked to see our license. And it turned out! The guy was driving without a license!! Hahaha go stay in jail.”
“Were you driving a pink car? My sister has a red car, and people try to merge into her all the time.”
“Yeah, it’s pink. He told the traffic cop that he was trying to make me crash into the car in front of me.”
“I don’t get it, I just don’t get it.”
“Whenever people see you driving a cute car, they know you’re a girl, so they deliberately fuck with you. And then they run their mouth about female drivers this and that. No wonder.”
“This is why I bought a pink bike helmet. I got three helmets stolen from me before I switched to a pink one. Haven’t lost it for half a year now.”
“Cause it’s hard to fence a pink helmet.”
“I’ve got pink decals on my car. One time, my husband and I took a business trip out of state, and came back through the highway. And a car started flashing his brights at us and changing speeds to try to run us off the road for almost 30 km. My husband was all like, “Ah, shit, he thinks a girl’s driving this, so he’s trying to bully you.”
From the same poster: “I drove this car to and from work while I was pregnant too. And one time, I was waiting for the red light at an intersection, and it was raining, and another car rearended me. When the cops came, he insisted that I’d thrown my car into reverse and hit him??? Before the police came, several guys got out of that car and tried to force my car door open and to drag me out. I told them I was pregnant and to please not hurt me. Plus, it was raining outside. Why do we need to stand around outside? So I refused to get out of my car. So they started viciously beating on my glass. It was super scary.”
“Yeah, they’re just bullying female drivers. That’s why my brother and my husband wouldn’t let me buy a pink car. Because shameless men really will deliberately fuck with you. I ended up buying a silver car.”
“He won’t really hit you. He just thinks it’s funny to see you try to get away from him in a panic. Makes him feel powerful. And if you’re particularly panicked, because you’re a new driver or something, and switch lanes blindly and hit another car, the liability would be on you.”
“They’re not smart enough to think about whether this is legal. They just like to bully the weak. As soon as they spot a woman, they think they’ve found a weak target they can take advantage of. They never even thought about what’s going to happen afterwards. Look in the comment section, and you’ll see people who back down as soon as the cops come, or people who try to buddy up with the cops, or people who try to joke it off and pretend it’s no big deal. They just want to screw with you, there’s nothing more to it. I don’t get this kind of mindset, but some people are just inherently shitty. They look down on women and take joy in bullying women. They really exist.”
“My brother is an actual traffic cop with a badge and everything. His personal vehicle is full-on barbie doll pink. His record is 12 guys trying to merge into him in a single afternoon. One of them was driving without a license. One of them was drunk-driving. And one of them was even driving while high.”
“I’ve got a pink van, and I often get merged into by other cars, but I never try to get out of the way for them. I just keep going straight, and they’re only testing the waters. If you slow down or try to dodge at all, they’ll squeeze themselves in. But if you just stay in your lines and go forward, even if he bumps over and scratches your car, it’s his legal liability. I run into bitches like these while driving all the time, and sometimes, I’ll roll down the windows and cuss them out too. Once we get to a red light, we might even have a proper fight, so they know they can’t get away with fucking with just anyone.”
“I’ve been merged into tons of times driving my little red sedan. But if I’m driving my dad’s jeep, no matter how slow I’m going, nobody tries to pass me. One time, I was following behind a military vehicle, figuring that no way any cars would try to fuck with it, right? But all the male drivers were all trying to run the military vehicle off the road too.”
“It’s because military personnel aren’t allowed to fight back. They bully whoever they can get away with.”
“Being single is a way of life.
I know a woman who’s in her fifties, who’s living the high life right now.
She was born in the early 70s, the only daughter of a wealthy family in a first line city. The words “left over women” was invented in society to refer to her and her peers.
Right around when she turned 30, China got internet, and in a chatroom about stock investment, she met her future spouse.
He a native of another first line city, tall, rich, and handsome, a couple of years younger than her, same diploma and family background as her.
Neither set of parents approved of them dating.
The man’s parents thought she was too old.
Her parents didn’t want her to marry too far away. But the man worked in central government. He can’t possibly move away.
After a couple years of back and forths, she abandoned her life and married far away. And after marriage, she had a daughter at a geriatric age.
After all of this, she was close to 40. It’s hard to find any decent job now, and no point in finding not-so-decent work. So naturally, she became a full-time housewife.
Coincidentally, right before covid hit, her husband was assigned work out of state, and for three years, they barely saw each other. Once the lockdowns were lifted, she thought everything would go back to normal. But her husband told her, “There’s no love between us anymore, let’s get divorced.”
She said, “Fine, but we have to wait until our daughter’s done with her exams.”
Her daughter is taking her high school entrance exams in 2022, and college entrance exams in 2025. Right now, she’s in high school, boarding through the week and only coming home on the weekends.
So my friend used all the weekdays to go out everyday. She doesn’t solicit prostitutes or gamble or anything like that. She just eats out, watches movies, learns horse riding, and flower arrangement. She joined a drama club and takes acting lessons every week. She goes to all kinds of lectures and listens like she’s one of the students. She hasn’t been working for years, so she doesn’t have a lot of friends. But she’s been contacting her old coworkers one by one and asking them out to eat. When they talk about relationships over the dinner table, she’ll cry sometimes. Coworkers a couple of years younger than her will try to comfort her, saying, “That’s how men are. We’re used to sexless marriages.”
And she shakes her head and says, “You don’t get it.”
I listened to her, and she’s right, they don’t get it. Right now, she’s learning. Learning how to live the rest of her life by herself.
Chinese people spend their whole lives living in a crowd. At her age, with her background, she would have grown up in her family, spent her schooling years in a dorm with several people, and spent her entire marriage with her spouse and her children. She never learned what it’s like to live by herself. What she’d run into and how to deal with it.
A lot of young women who talk about being single and childfree and how awesome it is, they don’t have a lot of worried. Or at least, nothing they couldn’t complain about to friends and get it out of their mind.
But middle-aged people have very heavy worries. And so they must face a question: How do they deal with it? Who can they talk to? How do they ask for help?
This woman’s parents are both dead. She doesn’t want to go back to her hometown. Of course she still has family there, but if she goes back, she has to face her failure and her shame. But it’s been too long with her past coworkers. They’re not particularly enthusiastic to hang out. Right now, she still lives with her husband’s mother, her mother-in-law. Her MIL doesn’t know she’s preparing for a divorce, so her MIL is not particularly pleased with her going out so much.
She has other options. They own other houses. She could go live there instead. And she could afford to buy a brand new place if she had to. She’s voluntarily choosing this, because up until now, in the past fifty-or-so years of her life, she’s never slept alone in a house before.
And she needs to learn all of this. How does she live by herself? When she’s upset, does she cry by herself or call friends over? How does she maintain healthy habits when there’s no one around? If she’s never had hobbies her whole life, how can she figure out hobbies for herself? Friendship and romance both cost money. If social outing go over budget, what should she do about it?
When she asks people out to dinner, going to an okay restaurant takes about 300 RMB. They usually wrack up 2000 RMB a night. If she wants to go see a theatre performance, a ticket is 800 RMB. If she invites two friends out, that’s another 2000 RMB. Does she have to spend this money?
But if she doesn’t want to spend that money, the only thing she can do is stay home and scroll on her phone, or job in her neighbourhood. So if she’s not hard up for money, then it seems more worth it to spend it.
I can more or less predict what she is going to do next:
She’s going to get plastic surgery. She’s go vacation some place like Thailand, maybe learn scubadiving and get a license for it. She’ll go take lifecoaching courses in Yunnan. Either way, the goal is the same. She’s learning how to live by herself for the rest of her life.”
Comments say, “Are life coaching courses a scam? My 30-year-old classmates are already attending.”
“If she has money, what worries does she have? Poor old people are the one with worries.”
“Go get a PhD. What the hell is she doing with her life? The more time she wastes on this kind of bullshit, the more empty she’ll feel?”
“My mom loves eating hairy crab.
I put in an order yesterday, and it got here today. But my mom has no grip strength in her left hand, so she can’t eat it by myself. So, I have to get all the meat out of the crab for her, like some kind of crab slave.
As she was eating, she asked how much per pound it was.
Considering her usual spending habits, I told her an amount that was only half as much as I paid, thinking that it would be acceptable to her.
But she got furious, like, “For this little bit of meat!? This is nothing but shell!”
But she loves hairy crab. I’m so busy shelling crab for her that I don’t even have time to eat my own food.
After a while, she said, “Don’t buy it again. It’s such a pain in the ass.” And then, a pause later, “You’ve found a good career to go into though. You could do this for a living.”
As she finished up, I shelled another bowl of crab meat for her and thought about making some rice, to make her crag yolk fried rice the next day, or some crab meat buns maybe?
My mom was watching a show on the TV about crab yolk buns, and as she watched me shell crab, she commented, “What a pain in the ass these must be to make.”
And I said, “They’re professionals, though, they do it faster. If I worked at this pace in a crab factory, I’d get fired the first day.”
A long PSA educating people on what the Interpol is and how their notices work, after the latest case in America when a Chinese national went drunk-driving and cause an accident that resulted in the death of a man in her passenger seat, and she fled the country while the police were gathering evidence. It’s all very basic stuff about how Interpol was founded and what kind of work they do, that you can easily google for yourself, so I won’t cover it in detail.
Comments say, “So, did she get caught or not?”
“So if you flee to America after embezzling, and get a red notice put on you, you’d give up a part of your money to buy freedom, right?”
“There’s a lot of red notice people in America, right?”
“We’ve been trying to get pregnant since June this year. With the advice of our friends, I got my husband to go to the hospital to check his sperm count. We did the test at noon, and when we got the result in the afternoon, it was like being struck by thunder.
I never thought this would happen. That there wouldn’t be a single living sperm. I thought the test had to be wrong somehow. We even did the test again, and there’s still no sperm. I educated myself on Azoospermia, combined with how my husband doesn’t grow any facial hair and his body type, I started wondering if he had Kleinfelter’s. So I got the hospital to run a chromosome test, and that took a week before the results came out. After a lot of uneasy waiting, the results were just what I expected, 47 XXY. Definitely Kleinfelter’s.
The urologist suggested that if we wanted a kid, we’d have to a) buy sperm to fertilise my eggs 2) adopt from an orphanage, or 3) cut open the testicle to see if they can find any sperm to do an IVF.
After informing the parents on both sides, they took the news surprisingly well. After considering all our options, we decided to buy sperm. I really couldn’t accept it at the time. I was already scared of having a kid (there’s just too much information on the internet now. I’m worried I’ll die giving birth, or have a bad baby, or that I’ll be a bad mom). I can’t believe this is my only option. But if I have the kid, and my in-laws change their mind and won’t acknowledge the kid? So I had to fight with myself for the longest time.
After the results came out, my husband was really upset too. We didn’t want to get a divorce, so my dad really gave me a boost of confidence when he said that if my in-laws kick us out, he’ll take care of us. He’ll always support us.
Then, in September, I took a bunch of tests at the hospital, checking my hormone levels, getting an echocardiogram, a vaginal ultrasound, chest x-rays, putting dye in my tubes. After everything, it turned out, all of my systems were working great. Really, as soon as I got all my results back, I called my mom right away to thank her for giving me such a healthy body.
Then, the next thing to do is to go to the fertility department to open an account with all our test results, plus ID cards, marriage license, copies of everything, signing documents, getting a doctor’s note, listening to their PSAs. Not that we paid any attention. We’re doing artificial insemination, it’s not that big of a hassle.
11th of October, day 5 of my cycle, I went and got an ultrasound at the hospital to check for ovulation and a pee test. The doctors gave me meds to eat for 5 days. Did another ultrasound on the 18th, and my eggs were growing really well. Then, we filled out a form, and went to their records room to pick out sperm. And we ended up giving up on this round, because only 6 people matched my husband in blood type. And my husband is 188cm, and the tallest donor they had was 176cm. I didn’t want my kid to be short and for people to gossip around us.
Speaking of, I have a question. I told the records room why we didn’t want to pick any of them, and the doctor said, “But it’s not great for girls to be too tall, right?” At the time, we didn’t realise what he was saying. After we thought about it at home, I started wondering, do they only take in X sperm or something? Why else would the doctor be so certain? Does anyone who have similar experience know? I’m super confused.
We didn’t pick out any sperm in October, so we went to Jinan to see if the hospital there have better sperm. After all, that’s where the largest sperm bank in Shandong is. We went to several hospitals, where the doctors told us that we couldn’t select for heights, but all donors are above average height.
After we got home, I had a fight with my mom too. She thinks we should’ve just settled and not been picky. But I’m already settling a lot. Why can’t I get the sperm I want? They’re all going on about how it’s not that big of a difference, but everything is a huge difference! If I pick someone who’s tall, even if the kid turns out to be short, I wouldn’t feel bad about it. My husband and I basically spent the whole time comforting ourselves.
10th of November, went back for more tests in the hospital, took more meds. My eggs weren’t growing as well this time around, and it took until the 21st before it got to a decent size and I got to pick perm again. Not that there was much of a choice. It’s the same couple of people. I settled on someone with double-lidded eyes. It was donated in 2014. The sperm fee + surgery fee added up to 6280 RMB.
22nd, today, at noon, I went and got a shot to encourage HCG at the hospital. On the 23rd, we can officially implant the foetus. Guess I’ll update tomorrow.”
Comments say, “I mean, personally, if the husband has no sperm, then there’s really no need to have kids. It’s hard being pregnant, and the kid doesn’t have any blood relation with the guy. If anything goes wrong with your relationship at all, it’ll become a thorn in his side. It’s not so bad being childfree. Or you could try to adopt.”
“In a marriage, if a man is sterile, then they’ll probably stay together. But if a woman is sterile, the rates for divorce skyrocket up.”
“Huh? The guy can’t have kids, and the women doesn’t want kids, so why the hell are they having kids?”
A blogger shows screenshots of interviews with someone, who said, “I just want to ask people who bought presold houses, why they think they deserve cheaper stuff than other people? What, are they more good-looking or something? Everyone involved is at fault here. Yeah, the house didn’t get built. But the buyer isn’t totally innocent either. They’re refusing to pay their mortgage. They don’t even want to just pay back the interest. They think they shouldn’t have to shoulder the loss at all. Holy fuck. What if the presold house was built and delivered? If housing prices had kept rising, then the buyer of a presold house could easily make a profit on the price difference between when they bought a house and when they received a house, plus however much value the house gains after they own it. Shouldn’t they be giving back a part of that money to society? But has anyone actually done this? Sure, it’s not great that your house fell through, but I don’t feel bad for these people at all.”
The blogger says, “Holy shit, are we actually starting to criticise the victims of presold houses now?”
Comments say, “WTF. The reason presold houses are cheaper is because the buyer gave the developer access to their money preemptively. Any discount they received should be seen as the interest the developer paid towards the buyer for use of their money. Once the contract deadline comes up, the developer pays back the capital with the house, and the contract is closed. Not coming through with a house is violating the contract, plain and simple. It’s refusing to pay back the capital. What’s it got to do with the buyer at all? Whether housing prices rise and fall is just risks associated with the buyer’s own personal assets. It’s a completely different story. What’s it got to do with whether the developer comes through or not?”
“At least go after the people who are speculating on houses. Why the hell are you mad at people just trying to get a roof over their heads?”
“Either way, you’ve got to hand over the house, right? If I went to the supermarket to buy rice, and I handed over the money, can you refuse to give me any rice just because “but rice prices just fell”?”
A tiktok video of two J-20s performing low altitude manoeuvres at an airport while a plane transporting the bodies of 25 soldiers comes home and drives through an archway of water, apparently the highest honour in civilian aircrafts in China.
Comments say, “Today’s a happy day! We’re home, my family!”
“History books are too thin. It can’t contain their greatness. We flip a couple of pages and it covers their entire lives. And yet, history books are too thick. We can’t remember their names. We just know they’re called heroes.”
“My ancestors! Can you see? We’ve got our own big planes now. We have our own spycrafts. No one can bully us anymore T_T”