That’s him advocating for wider adoption of prison culture or what?
Also I think I’d be dumb to try to make Röhm’s stormtroopers my role models to learn empathy and kindness, and they were much into that. Or Spartans.
does this apply to women? do women need lesbian friend to learn empathy and kindness? asking for a friend.
as a society we already teach girls to be more reserved, thoughtful and kind, which also encourages empathy. the problem is that we teach boys to be tough and strong, and not much else. so they either need to learn these values from women or gay men who may have avoided the traps of toxic masculinity. of course if you’re friends with women or gay men you’re already self selecting as you’re also avoiding some trappings of toxic masculinity.
though Obama is bullshitting obviously because he showed none of that when he ordered drone strikes on random brown people celebrating and dancing in a wedding and shit… but the point stands.
how DARE you
🥰
It’s an awkward way of saying that we should seek out a broad variety of peers, friends and acquaintances.
A shocking number of comments in this thread that apparently were not able to parse that out. Sure it was awkward but it wasn’t that monumentally opaque this many people should have missed the message.
Yet OP still felt so compelled, so out of the loop that here we are all talking about it, as if it’s that hard to parse out…
The entire post feels like it is made of false pretenses while comments like yours wonder how it all got here… they all missed the message because of the disingenuous nature of the original post.
Kind of a dumb quote. We need to be around gay men to learn how women feel when we’re trying way to hard to bang someone who isn’t interested.
Ah. Yeah. So when I first went to uni, I had long hair, oversize jeans and in general for me it seemed kinda hippie, but apparently made a different impression.
So there’s a moment when I stand talking to others from our group, feel a so-o-oftish touch on my shoulder and a male-made-feminine-with-effort slow voice “hi, my name’s Rustem”. I was fucking terrified.
So, not gay, but being autistic I might sometimes look that for normies. Broken signals might be perceived as gay signals or something like that.
There are some horrible gay men out there. Ask gay men. Or look at Peter Thiel. Like yes you should ideally have some variety in your friend group because that helps with empathy but this is not explicitly about gay men. Kinda tokenizing to act like it is. Similar to “You need black friends so you learn to dance better” or some bs like that.
Yeah. I was about to post the first gay man (that I knew was gay) was an asshole. I didn’t think all gay men were assholes, but I learned empathy before high school, so I was able to assume he was just a selfish dick.
you met a gay man for the first time in high school ?
I disagree with it. Nothing wrong with having friends of whatever shape or size. But to act like you need those sorts of friends in order to learn basic human traits is utterly false.
Also, in terms of role models and gender stuff, it’s just weird to think how that’d come in to play for a younger person. You can look up to role models for any reason – typically for excelling in a field or pursuit that you’re also interested in pursuing. But it’s a personal relation imagined in your head between you and them. When gender enters into that relation, in terms of who you’re modelling your behaviour after, a straight guy modelling himself off a gay man doesn’t make sense. If you have an interest in the gender of your role model, as a guy, it’d be mostly in seeing the reaction they get from women, and wanting to emulate their success by dressing / behaving similarly. Like kids who saw rock stars gettin bras thrown at them, pursuing becoming a rock star because they wanted the same gender-oriented treatment.
Hell, you could argue that’s one reason the incel’s are so keen to model themselves after psuedo “alphas”, and shitheads like Trump – Trump’s a disgusting pile of yuck, but he’s rich, has a hot younger wife, a large family all living pretty well, and has tons of extra-marital affairs without any seeming repercussions (he’s likely to dodge even that Epstein stuff). It’s hard to argue that he hasn’t ‘succeeded’ at life. Same goes for all the tech bro fascists who’re fathering, literally, hundreds of kids. Meanwhile, Mr Too Much Empathy is going to internalize all the negativity about men from feminist sources, won’t be able to ask a woman out because of that internalized trauma, and will disappear from the gene pool.
Love the sentiment. Diversity helps empathy. People don’t need a specific type of friend. But I do like the general idea that people need exposure to others.
No idea what the expanded context is though.
I think it comes from that gay men are more likely to have taken a step away from toxic masculinity than straight men (please note the emphasis). Obama is not incorrect that having gay men as friends can, then, help some straight men step away from toxic masculinity as well, and thus expand their sense of empathy and kindness, but the quote as it’s shown in the meme is insufficient and implies a more essentialist than cultural view of the behavior of homosexual men.
The quote could be out of context. Or Obama could just be showing his age - ultimately, he is definitely a man from a prior generation.
Isolating from people who haven’t developed social skills is how we got incels in the first place.
Ahh yes because kindness and empathy is stored in the gay genes of course lmfao, what dribble.
shit take. gay people shouldn’t have to act as a token friend to teach you not to be a shitty person. as a minority he should understand it even more. does he think all the dumb proud boys need a black friend so that black people can take on the burden of showing racist assholes they are normal human beings?
Also I know tons of gay dudes with 0 empathy barack, not every gay man is an empathic queen. Maybe you should have learned some empathy though before you droned all those people
Here’s the pertinent section from the article:
Reflecting on his own experiences, Obama shared that young men need a “diverse” network of role models – and that one of his own was his out gay college professor.
“I had a gay professor in college at a time when openly gay folks still weren’t out a lot, who became one of my favourite professors and was a great guy and would call me out when I started saying stuff that was ignorant,” Obama shared.
“You need that — to show empathy and kindness.”
So his point was really that people need a diversity of types of people as role models, and that one of his own was a gay professor who showed empathy and kindness. The meme changes it a bit.
Reminds me of that Terry Gilliam interview where he said
I hated ‘Black Panther.’ It makes me crazy. It gives young black kids the idea that this is something to believe in. Bullshit It’s utter bullshit
And everyone was blowing up about how he was being a racist POS. But then if you actually read the whole thing:
"What I don’t like is that we all have to be superheroes to do anything worthwhile. That’s what makes me crazy. That’s what these movies are saying to young people. And to me it’s not confronting the reality of, you know, the quote-unquote human condition. You know what it is like to be a normal human being in difficult situations and resolving them surviving,” he said.
“Where’s the gravity, where’s real gravity? Because [in superhero movies,] everything is possible,” Gilliam said of the limitless worlds of the MCU. “It’s the limitations that make life interesting. Okay, so your suit burns up. So you get another suit because you’re Tony Stark. It’s not enough. They dominate so much”
But engaging with a nuanced opinion is boring. Everyone wants to divide the world into manichean extremes, to find out who we hate now.
So he words it better in the article but the core message that minorities should carry the burden of emotional labor and growth for the ill informed and bigoted is essentially the same
“[the gay professor] would call me out when I started saying stuff that was ignorant”
Granted one can’t learn the struggles of every single minority group in existence but maybe take it upon yourself to learn empathic approaches to listening and communicating. You won’t be perfect of course, no one is, but you’ll put a lot less people in the position of having to explain to you “this is why you’re being an ass right now”
but the core message that minorities should carry the burden of emotional labor and growth for the ill informed and bigoted
That is not remotely what he said. You’re trying really hard to find a reason to be offended by this, huh?
How would you describe elevating someone described as “he called me out when I said ignorant stuff” if not “this man performed the emotional labor I was unwilling to do so instead of asking society to be better I am asking it to further burden people like him with the task of educating people like me”
Are you unfamiliar with how humans interact with each other within that society you’re talking about? They call each other out on shit an the time. Some people only listen to their close aqaintences. No one can know everything, we all rely on others to tell us if we’re wrong about something.
He did not say to solely rely on one person to make you not am ignorant biggot. He said make sure you have a diverse set of aqaintences so there’s more than one perspective to call you out on stuff for. See the difference?
That’s not the message I took away from what he said. What I got is that people should have diverse role models because if everyone is just like you, you don’t learn empathy. He had someone who would correct him when he was wrong in a kind way, and that person happened to be gay. That experience helped him learn empathy and kindness.
As a straight white guy, I also feel that I’ve benefited from getting to know queer folk on a personal level - that that experience helped me understand and appreciate diversity, even for people from groups that I haven’t yet gotten to know personally. I get to know someone who’s, say, trans, and get at least a little exposure to what their experience of life is and how it’s differed from mine. It makes me work that empathy muscle, so it’s more developed when I met the next person whose experience is different from mine.
That doesn’t mean that those people have some responsibility for educating me or teaching me anything. It just means that my exposure to people from different walks of life is useful for my own personal growth.
I think what you say is better than what he said
You describe hearing people you consider friends and learning from them with empathic listening. Reading the article (though tbf I did not listen to the podcast to hear his full remarks and what is in the article is extremely limited) obama presents the idea of minority ambassadors to empathic reasoning:
“That’s one of the things that I think a lot of times boys need, is not just exposure to one guy, one dad. No matter how good the dad is, he can’t be everything.
“And then that boy may need somebody to give the boy some perspective on the dad.”
Perhaps I’m reading too much into his words but this, to me, reads as “pick up the slack for shitty dads that are letting the Internet turn out an army of andrew tate clones”
Also note that unlike you he does not refer to having “friends” but “role models”, putting people on a pedestal and inherently being part of the problem. I again think your comment is better largely because of this point; rather than elevate to a prop you consider these people your actual friends. Again, maybe this is something that obama says in the podcast, which I assume is far longer, but also maybe as a career politician he is so disconnected from reality he doesn’t know what friends are anymore haha
I just fucking love little bites of information shared in meme form out of context. Really gives a good enough picture for judgement, right?
Here’s the article that probably prompted this: https://www.thepinknews.com/2025/07/21/barack-obama-gay-college-professor/
If you read it through, the message is just a bit different from the sentence in this image.
Nice in an ideal world
But just as it’s not a woman’s job to teach men emotional skills, it’s not a gay persons either.
Others can’t keep carrying the burden for this.
I love this.
Pakistan’s champion wedding crasher has no place talking about empathy and kindness.
And then he started blasting
