this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2023
968 points (97.4% liked)
> Greentext
7551 readers
2 users here now
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
According to my gay British friend, at least, Tom’s accent is super flamboyant by their standards.
I think I can give some insight into this. I grew up in the UK in the same sociocultural bubble that Tom did, although a live in another country now. I have also been called skinny and not very manly, and people have asked me once or twice if I'm gay. When I was younger I cared a lot about Following the Rules and being liked by everyone. Ie. typical Nice Guy stuff. I was also always quite tense, especially with my sexuality around girls. Mine and Tom's thing is quite common in the UK and after giving it some thought I think what does it is the authoritarian upbringing. I went through the British school system, and their insistence on uniforms, graceless punishments for normal human mistakes like forgetting your PE kit, and the expectation that you will be a Responsible Young Adult (and not a wild teenager) frightened the cheekiness out of me when I was 7 and made me into what you see there. I'm 20 and it's only started coming back to me in the past couple of years. I have no other childhood trauma so this is what it's got to be.
you forgot to mention the fact that all most all secondary schools here are single sex.
I barely talked to post puberty women at all until i was in my late teens
you miss out on a lot of primary socialisation in that kind of environment
Depends on where you live I guess. One of my friends at Uni grew up in quite a posh area and went to an all-boys grammar school, but I'm pretty sure mixed-sex is the norm. I mean my first ever friend in primary school was a girl, it's just that all the ones after that were boys and I just stuck with male friends after that. Doesn't help that I started getting crushes on the girls in class when puberty hit so it was even harder to approach them normally
I can't verify if he his gay, but he did run for parliament under the name "Mad Cap'n Tom" in 2010 After he lost a bet about the New Orleans Saints winning the Superbowl.