righteousness
As an overthinker, I think one of the reasons it's hard for me to make friends is that I worry that the person I would hypothetically meet will not meet my moral expectations.
I like to think that I have a strong sense of justice, but at the same time the things I believe in are not at all novel; I honestly think that they're mostly the bare standard of basic rights. However, there are so, so many people in this world who refuse to even reach that bare minimum, and more often than not, I get disappointed by the beliefs of people who I considered somewhat close to me.
In the past, someone had come up to me in class where I was a new student, and as someone who struggles to make friends, I was excited to finally have a new friend. Then came a day where we were chatting and he asked if I was a feminist. The word "feminist" somehow has a negative connotation to many people (read: to misogynists). In reality, feminism is just a movement toward equal rights regardless of gender, and would greatly benefit men as well (I would hope that this is just common sense, but evidently not to some people). Of course, to this person, "feminist" was a negative word. Why would I, a woman, not be a feminist? Unfortunately, internalized misogyny exists in perhaps every woman, and those who suffer more greatly from it treat the word "feminism" with scorn.
I recently found out about these TikTok trends (I do not use TikTok and whatever TikTok-related thing I see is from friends or has been trickled down to other social media platforms) of "girl math," "girl lunch," etc. where people take bad habits that they do and gloss over it with the idea that "teehee I'm just a girl so I'm bad at [XYZ]!" If we look at "girl math," it is essentially the idea that bad spending patterns are just a cute little girly thing.
For example, some people might jokingly think that if they have some money in their Venmo/PayPal (i.e. a digital wallet) balance, then that money isn't actually their real money, so whatever they spent that balance on was free. Sure, I've jokingly said similar things while in a situation like this myself, but the problem is prefixing these things that are generally seen as negative as things that girls do. A friend of mine tried to argue that she believed women made up these terms, so it's fine. I have to say I disagree. As I mentioned earlier, women experience varying degrees of internalized misogyny. Women might joke amongst themselves that they girl mathed their way into getting something for free (when in reality they did in fact use their money), but when malicious groups of people get their hands on these terms, they are then used as a way to justify why marginalized groups of people (in this case, women) are inferior. We see this sort of thing happen time and time again throughout history with race, gender, socio-economic status, etc.
Perhaps I am being too high-and-mighty, but I would like to create bonds with people who can think critically and also believe in basic human rights.