Develop into your own beautiful human, first. A lot of dudes are mid at best; myself included
I feel the specificity is to drive home the point to the target of this message. You can generalize advice to be more accurate and apply to more people, but it’ll be as wide as an ocean and deep as a puddle.
People are really great at excluding themselves from general advice like “don’t worry about judgement”, they need to feel like the message is tailored to their own experiences.
You can definitely recycle the message with a male or gender neutral tone, but that’ll lead to different conversations. Sometimes people don’t want to speak out to a generic broad audience, they want a more specific conversation.
Valid point. Narrowing the audience of the message can make sense, but weakening the actual lesson by ignoring all the other people you shouldn’t please with no regard for your own feelings I don’t think is a great idea. After all, we all seek validation from our peers far too often and this can be devastating to our mental health and wellbeing.
But you often should worry about being a good friend and a good student and a good daughter and a good person. And much of how we judge if we’re hitting those marks is how other people feel about us. And sometimes being a good friend/student/daughter/person means some degree of self-sacrafice. So “don’t worry about what anyone thinks”/“don’t compromise on your feelings” isn’t the right message either. That message gets nuanced and complex fairly quickly, whereas it’s reasonable not to worry about romantic relationships, period, when you’re young.
