Rolling Maleness and Masculinity Discussion Thread

Welcome to the MANCAVE bros! Lol psych, this is for contemplating serious issues NOT raised by the men's rights movement, and also we need to stop hijacking the Weinstein thread for real.

this is maybe going to sound incredibly dumb, i'm not trying to be #notallmen or #reversepence, but these days i just don't like to hang out with a group of dudes for a night out, or a party that's all men, etc...the energy weirds me out a lot of the time. most of my friends these days all are couples and we hang out as such, but i have other male friends who will just socialize with THA BOYS and i find when i join them that the conversations just go places i'm not comfortable with a lot of the time, or the vibe is just weird, the balance is all off, etc. i don't like the "men's club" feeling. i don't know.

― nomar, Thursday, October 12, 2017 11:39 AM (fifty-one minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

agree

― mookieproof, Thursday, October 12, 2017 11:42 AM (forty-eight minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah, I totally feel you. I am generally averse to 'dude hangs', particularly 'white dude hangs'. Speaking as a white dude, no demographic is more likely to creep me out than other white dudes.

― the scarest move i ever seen is scary move 4 (Old Lunch), Thursday, October 12, 2017 11:43 AM (forty-seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

same

― brimstead, Thursday, October 12, 2017 11:44 AM (forty-six minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I think the only time I'm in that situation is at band rehearsal but we aren't all white and we aren't all male so it's only intermittently when there's just a subset of us there. idk it doesn't bother me, there's no assholes in the band lol

― Οὖτις, Thursday, October 12, 2017 11:47 AM (forty-three minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Just don't hang out with assholes imo.

― IF (Terrorist) Yes, Explain (man alive), Thursday, October 12, 2017 11:48 AM (forty-two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the classic Max Ophuls film Letter from an Unknown Woman is relevant on this point

Did you see the cuts Harvey demanded?

― Anne of the Thousand Gays (Eric H.), Thursday, October 12, 2017 11:48 AM (forty-two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

"That's locker room."

― Josh in Chicago, Thursday, October 12, 2017 11:48 AM (forty-two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

men who feel the need to exclude women aren't usually up to anything worthwhile ime

where does the conversation go that makes you uncomfortable? i'll admit to being curious.

― weird woman in a bar (La Lechera), Thursday, October 12, 2017 11:48 AM (forty-two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I mean, IDK I haven't had that experience so much. I don't hang out with anyone that much these days, but I get together with a group of guys to play music and it's mostly just talk about music, being a dad, work sucks, and maybe football in which case I tune out.

― IF (Terrorist) Yes, Explain (man alive), Thursday, October 12, 2017 11:49 AM (forty-one minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Seems like a thread derail anyway.

― IF (Terrorist) Yes, Explain (man alive), Thursday, October 12, 2017 11:49 AM (forty-one minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

men who feel the need to exclude women aren't usually up to anything worthwhile ime

yeah I think this is the real issue

― Οὖτις, Thursday, October 12, 2017 11:50 AM (forty minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I really hate the idea of stag weekends

― good art is orange; great art is teal (wins), Thursday, October 12, 2017 11:51 AM (thirty-nine minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

in the future they will figure out a way to lower testosterone in unborn male fetuses. or something like that. i'm an optimist! #scifireader

― scott seward, Thursday, October 12, 2017 11:51 AM (thirty-nine minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the company i work for has a large salesforce of mostly men . they come into the office from all over the country for training and meetings and want to go out in the City while they are here . I only went once and never again , the worst part was that most of them are married but when they come here it's like they are on some fucking weied free for all, it's horrible .

― (•̪●) (carne asada), Thursday, October 12, 2017 11:52 AM (thirty-eight minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

that's disgusting ^^^

it's not the testosterone -- it's the culture
we can change it if we try. y'all have kids. time to destroy the fratriarchy :)

― weird woman in a bar (La Lechera), Thursday, October 12, 2017 11:54 AM (thirty-six minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I have a great core of friends, no assholes, but one of them keeps gravitating toward these sort of fratty activities. For example, he had his 40th birthday in Vegas, and my wife and were all, who actually does this? (So we decided not to go, since Vegas sucks - sorry, Vegas). The other week he made this half suggestion that we go back, but he added "and this time it should be just the guys!" And another friend of mine basically looked at him funny and said, "why? I like having my wife around." Which is to say I think some guys, even not assholes, sometimes get it in their head that they should do guy things in the most cliched guy way possible, and when a group of dudes, even good dudes, get that in their head, things can escalate into assholetry.

Or, like a different friend around the backyard fire pit the other night, actually take out his acoustic guitar and start strumming (and singing!) rudimentary classic rock songs. Don't do that either!

― Josh in Chicago, Thursday, October 12, 2017 11:54 AM (thirty-six minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^^Harvey would have been a lot better off if he'd just done that tho.

― to fly across the city and find Aerosmith's car (C. Grisso/McCain), Thursday, October 12, 2017 12:00 PM (thirty minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah that's my attitude to stag parties, just complete befuddlement. "A pre-wedding party, but no women allowed!" Lol what, no, that sounds fucking terrible and dumb. Where are we going, your treehouse?

― good art is orange; great art is teal (wins), Thursday, October 12, 2017 12:00 PM (thirty minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The only all-male context I have in my life right now revolves around the alumni group for my all-male college chorus and even there enough of the guys are married to women that it's rare to have a meetup that is actually all male. (We do have an alumni chorus gig every two years, alternating between West Coast US and Japan, where the rehearsals are all-male but we are also in the middle of an activity so there's no real opportunity for things to go super gross.)

I will say that as a straight guy in this context, there is apparently some intragroup harassment that completely bypasses me; one issue that we've had in getting younger alums involved is apparently a core group of guys in their 60s-70s who make a habit of trying to prey on anyone under 30 who shows up. I knew nothing about this until one of my friends told me some stories about rescue missions he and his partner have gone on to keep things above board.

xp: lol, my wife had her 40th in Vegas, as did one of the guys I mentioned who was cockblocking old predators on the last alumni chorus trip.

― Marcus Hiles Remains Steadfast About Planting Trees.jpg (DJP), Thursday, October 12, 2017 12:00 PM (thirty minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

"we can change it if we try. y'all have kids. time to destroy the fratriarchy"

my kids were lucky enough to go to a really kind/loving/progressive school during their formative years and it totally helped form them in a really positive way. they are very quick to cry foul if they see/hear anything unfair/sexist/racist. not everyone gets that opportunity. i wish i'd had that!

― scott seward, Thursday, October 12, 2017 12:01 PM (twenty-nine minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

a core group of guys in their 60s-70s who make a habit of trying to prey on anyone under 30 who shows up.

as someone who used to attend an LGBT church (overwhelmingly white men), this is not an unfamiliar phenomenon to me

― ice cream social justice (Dr Morbius), Thursday, October 12, 2017 12:03 PM (twenty-seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I wholly reject the notion that ending toxic masculinity requires men not hanging out in groups together, that seems silly. I've had great groups of male friends where no such toxicity existed. But I'm all for ending what-happens-in-vegas style weekends and frat culture and the like. And there is definitely something to the idea that "good" guys will feel pressured to act in a certain guy way when in these situations. I was at an all-guy work dinner recently that got very close to crossing some lines, but thankfully a senior mgmt guy read the situation and was like "Ok, it's time to go."

― IF (Terrorist) Yes, Explain (man alive), Thursday, October 12, 2017 12:04 PM (twenty-six minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

so happy i don't know what a "stag party" is and have to guess

and yeah i have/have had a lot of friends who are extremely "the boys" mentality. i.e. daydrinking & playing Xbox & doing blow. shit is dark. it's so stupid

― flappy bird, Thursday, October 12, 2017 12:05 PM (twenty-five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

La Lechera -- i guess it's that the conversations turn towards talking about women a lot or relationships in a way that feels a bit retrograde, there's always going to be a bit of that type of flirting w/servers that makes me feel like i'm with a bunch of embarrassing uncles, and it feels kind of gloomy for some reason in a very existential dude way. i can't really explain that latter part, it's more an overall feeling i have. that's probably not a great answer.

it differs from other friends where the couples will hang out and it's just fun and easy and no one has any hangups about the lack of dude nights in that particular circle. though there are times when i'll go hang out with one of those dudes. we just don't get all together as a group to visit the secret world of men, away from the women!

we have a son, and his two oldest friends are girls. and i think that's been more helpful than any advice i could give him. i think he's weirded out by dude energy too, maybe. it's good to err on the side of caution!

― nomar, Thursday, October 12, 2017 12:06 PM (twenty-four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

as someone who used to attend an LGBT church (overwhelmingly white men), this is not an unfamiliar phenomenon to me

As someone who used to host trivia in the only gay bar in town that attracted a 55+ clientele, me neither. The difference here, though, is that these men were not in positions of power, comparatively speaking. Not excusing, just observing.

― Anne of the Thousand Gays (Eric H.), Thursday, October 12, 2017 12:06 PM (twenty-four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Stag party = bachelor party. If they don't have those where you are, hopefully you can guess from "pre-wedding party for men" xp

― good art is orange; great art is teal (wins), Thursday, October 12, 2017 12:07 PM (twenty-three minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

xxxxp yeah man alive otm, ya gotta call em as ya see em. Shit is pretty widespread though. I didn't go to college, but a lot of the friends I was referring to above went to art school. "the boys" / frat mentality extends way beyond actual frats.

― flappy bird, Thursday, October 12, 2017 12:07 PM (twenty-three minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I wholly reject the notion that ending toxic masculinity requires men not hanging out in groups together, that seems silly. I've had great groups of male friends where no such toxicity existed. But I'm all for ending what-happens-in-vegas style weekends and frat culture and the like. And there is definitely something to the idea that "good" guys will feel pressured to act in a certain guy way when in these situations. I was at an all-guy work dinner recently that got very close to crossing some lines, but thankfully a senior mgmt guy read the situation and was like "Ok, it's time to go."
― IF (Terrorist) Yes, Explain (man alive), Thursday, October 12, 2017 6:04 PM (two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

for the record i'm not suggesting that but then again if men really never hung out in groups that were exclusively men...hmm

― nomar, Thursday, October 12, 2017 12:08 PM (twenty-two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I feel you, man alive, inasmuch as I have male friends (that I've known 15-20 years and who can comfortably hang out with like my mom) I can chill with as a group of just guys, so I don't condemn the practice in and of itself as much as I personally generally avoid it because the majority of my creepiest hangs have been dude-exclusive.

― the scarest move i ever seen is scary move 4 (Old Lunch), Thursday, October 12, 2017 12:09 PM (twenty-one minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The difference here, though, is that these men were not in positions of power, comparatively speaking. Not excusing, just observing.

A detail I'm leaving out is that the people I'm talking about are all on the board of our alumni organization.

― Marcus Hiles Remains Steadfast About Planting Trees.jpg (DJP), Thursday, October 12, 2017 12:09 PM (twenty-one minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

There’s also work-related male hangouts before or after meetings where the women who don’t go/aren’t invited are not given career breaks or don’t get bondy face time with superiors.

― kim jong deal (suzy), Thursday, October 12, 2017 12:09 PM (twenty-one minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This should probably be a separate thread, huh.

― the scarest move i ever seen is scary move 4 (Old Lunch), Thursday, October 12, 2017 12:10 PM (twenty minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

There's no "power" per se as far as other alumni are concerned but we do make decisions that affect the current students' abilities to tour, etc.

― Marcus Hiles Remains Steadfast About Planting Trees.jpg (DJP), Thursday, October 12, 2017 12:10 PM (twenty minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah, where can we move this discussion?

― IF (Terrorist) Yes, Explain (man alive), Thursday, October 12, 2017 12:10 PM (twenty minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

some kind of NO GIRLS clubhouse

― Οὖτις, Thursday, October 12, 2017 12:12 PM (eighteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Rolling Tree House Thread 2017

― flappy bird, Thursday, October 12, 2017 12:12 PM (eighteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

― Οὖτις, Thursday, October 12, 2017 12:14 PM (sixteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

?!?!

"the boys" / frat mentality extends way beyond actual frats.
otm
i foolishly thought if i stayed away from broey fratty people, i could escape it. wrong!

― weird woman in a bar (La Lechera), Thursday, October 12, 2017 12:15 PM (fifteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yea i agree w/ man alive. probably a better thread for all this btw but whatever

i was extremely averse to all-male situations after going to a boys' catholic high school which was frequently toxic, homophobic, misogynist, crude, awful. after that experience, when i went to college i sought out friendships mostly with women, and i now work in a profession that is 80% women.

but eventually i've found great value in cultivating close, intimate friendships with other men and that sometimes that intimacy can be facilitated by male-only environments. they don't have to be toxic.

in the past decade, i've been part of a few all-male things, all of which have been super healthy, positive, and rewarding, and have never gone into that kind of toxic gross shit mentioned itt: 1) a men's group to talk about healthy sexuality in the context of being a man; 2) a regular "dad's night out" for special needs dads (mostly autism parents) organized by a local autism/special needs non-profit; 3) a regular friday night group w/ some of my childhood male friends, mostly we talk about music, politics, food, art, film, sex too but ime some men are able to talk about sex without being fratty creeps.

though i have talked to male friends and family members that work in male-dominated professions and tbh it sounds fucking horrible

― marcos, Thursday, October 12, 2017 12:15 PM (fifteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Rolling No Girls Allowed Treehouse Thread (All Gender Identities Welcome)

― IF (Terrorist) Yes, Explain (man alive), Thursday, October 12, 2017 12:16 PM (fourteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

that's exactly what bob pollard said
"no girls in the treehouse"

― weird woman in a bar (La Lechera), Thursday, October 12, 2017 12:17 PM (thirteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I could've sworn there was already some "masculinity" thread

― Οὖτις, Thursday, October 12, 2017 12:19 PM (eleven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i would like to add, perhaps relevant to this thread, that my bad-vibes groups are men who work in the entertainment industry. not all of them are these bad dudes, most are not, but the conversations which wind up occurring are often...not the greatest.

― nomar, Thursday, October 12, 2017 12:19 PM (eleven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

there's a few xp

plus like...... most of ilx sadly

― marcos, Thursday, October 12, 2017 12:19 PM (eleven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol, my wife had her 40th in Vegas
Ha! Well, women do their own shit in groups, but defending this from afar, I doubt large groups of women get together and turn into assholes the way men often do. Or at least certainly not the same way.

― Josh in Chicago, Thursday, October 12, 2017 12:20 PM (ten minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I doubt large groups of women get together and turn into assholes

lol sometimes I think there is nothing more terrifying than a gang of 10yo girls, the level of real emotional cruelty can just be insane

we're wandering rather far afield here...

― Οὖτις, Thursday, October 12, 2017 12:23 PM (seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

(ftr my wife made me go to Vegas with her for her 30th birthday - it was just us though. also I hated almost every second of it apart from the Star Trek experience thing)

― Οὖτις, Thursday, October 12, 2017 12:24 PM (six minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Don't get me started on kids.

BTW, per "locker room," back when the Access Hollywood tapes came out, the same friend who was anti-"dudes only!" in Vegas didn't defend Trump but did observe that the shit he was saying wasn't that different from the shit any one of us (guys) might say in private. My first thought was, not me! But my second thought was that I at least understood what he was talking about. One man's ironic quip ...

― Josh in Chicago, Thursday, October 12, 2017 12:25 PM (five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The last time I was in Vegas, for a wedding (bride was from Vegas), was actually fine, but after that my wife and I basically breathed a sigh that we would never have to go to Vegas again.

― Josh in Chicago, Thursday, October 12, 2017 12:26 PM (four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

where all my gamergate bros at

outmoded. deal

I remember Andrea Juno insisting that men hanging out in groups occasionally was good for them but I didn't understand why she thought that.

Marcos- I understand the male only sexual health group but not the other examples.

I've been to one small bachelor party, maybe a dozen years ago. I had some experiences, as the only queer there (afaik), that I had not had before. (The groom behaved impeccably btw.)

FWIW my "bachelor party" was just me and my close friends getting ethiopian food and drinks and seeing some music. There was a brief moment of me and a friend talking shit about a woman we had both dated, with a sort of knowing "Okay, just this once, since it's a *bachelor party*" wink. Even that shittalking didn't get all that ugly.

Being a straight, white male has pretty much always felt weird to me inasmuch as I don't relate to most of the things I'm 'supposed' to relate to as a straight, white male. Beyond even just like sports or whatever, I mean weird-ass competitive displays of dominance and strength and machismo and whatever the hell. Just trying to describe the prescriptive aspects of maleness that squick me out, I feel like someone who's always experienced it at a remove and barely has any idea what he's talking about.

yeah I hear you.

bewar! others have trod where you wish to tread: maleness

i think progressive men who don't want the world to be the way the world has always been need to STEP THE FUCK UP. but i don't know how you change the world. i just try to change myself on the regular. and evolve. i am all for evolution. which can be difficult for people. and which is a daily process. and this is why a lot of men just choose to put their hand down their pants Bundy-style and turn on the boob tube and fuggedahboutit.

One thing I was thinking reading the Weinstein thread is how important it is for men to kind of guide other men away from the wrong kinds of attitudes and behaviors and give them an alternative. I feel like I was extremely lucky that I had this freshman year roommate who happened to have this friend from home who was at the school and who became my very good friend -- he was a very confident guy and just wasn't having any of the bullshit. My first weekend we went to hang out with some junior that one of them knew and he was being a complete piece of shit, saying gross stuff about women, pressuring us to get wasted, etc. and the guy who became my friend made an exit for us and then talked on the way home about how much the whole experience sucked, and it made me feel like "Okay, college doesn't have to be like that, I'm not going to go that route."

I'm gonna be the contrarian and say....I don't mind when my buddies wanna hang with me away from wives and girlfriends? And I like/love their wives and girlfriends. I don't see the big deal. Maybe my gayness is the x factor.

also, marcos on the other thread describing his gross toxic high school was a description of EVERY school i ever went to. and i went to....five schools. just being around that for so many years was so detrimental.

I've tried steering other men's behavior before and ime it is thankless and usually unhelpful, which is not me saying it's not worth attempting.

i have a friend whose marriage ended and he has apparently quite literally gone down a rabbit hole of cocaine and escorts. meanwhile a mutual friend told *me* that guy actually has some kind of problems w/my low-key lifestyle, like how i don't actually want to party anymore (ftr, my partying w/him involved having two beers and him having three cocktails and then insisting we split the bill, so...)

dude i don't want to hang out w/you and listen to your BS "true man" advice about how to live while you're doing lines with someone you're paying to have sex with you.

Our friend group has never done all-male things (even the bachelor 'parties' were co-ed), but there are definitely 'ladies only' nights that get organized and my wife hates it.

That said there have been issues over the years with certain dudes tending to dominate the conversation (shocking I know), so I can appreciate wanting a different dynamic. But most of us who are in relationships, y'know, like having our partner at social gatherings with mutual friends.

xp

yea that's gruesome xp

i have better friends than that guy, fortunately. i think one aspect of this is that sometimes you change and other people don't change.

Maybe my gayness is the x factor.

yeah having non-heteros in an all-male mix definitely alters social dynamics in my experience

I'm often in the exclusive company of men when I socialize, and not always all-gay. Generally things don't get gross.

or should i say, sometimes you change in one direction and other people change in another direction. xp

I didn't have to deal with much toxic maleness as a kid/teen. I'm very thankful for the friends I had back then. I had lots of time with other young men and we were mostly never gross about women, or like weird and competitive. Began to experience it a lot more as an adult, which definitely made my social anxiety worse and led to me being pretty much a shut-in.

We discuss music, movies, politics, our sex lives in an adult, non-gross way, problems with dating/wives/girlfriends. They find it more helpful than I do. I don't see anything wrong with me for wanting to see them a couple times a month without their spouses and girlfriends. In fact, if anything, in Hispanic culture there's too much of an obsession with couples doing everything together.

I've tried steering other men's behavior before and ime it is thankless and usually unhelpful, which is not me saying it's not worth attempting.

― a serious and fascinating fartist (Simon H.), Thursday, October 12, 2017 5:54 PM (seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I feel like this is a massive public health issue and want to do something about it, but I have no idea where to begin

"I don't see the big deal. Maybe my gayness is the x factor."

i would be totally happy to hang out with a group of gay guys. i miss hanging out with gay guys. living with gay men in philly and knowing a wide range of gay men was one of my favorite things about living there. living in squaresville can suck sometimes.

i think men should make sure they listen to a lot of music by artists who are not male and read a lot of books by authors who are not male. that sounds like a very simple thing, but it's important.

i will say though on behalf of my squaresville that the men i know and am friends with tend to be mellow/creative/metrosexual/progressive/not gross/freak folkers and i can't say enough good stuff about them. but i don't really hang with men outside of music events that much.

xps: I would definitely not categorically exclude gay guys from the group of men who think they can let loose with their misogyny once they think it's 'just us guys'.

i mean a lot of the men i know COULD be gay if they just tried harder. those are the str8 guys i get along with best.

Several straight friends are gayer than I am.

i think men should make sure they listen to a lot of music by artists who are not male and read a lot of books by authors who are not male. that sounds like a very simple thing, but it's important.

― nomar, Thursday, October 12, 2017 1:03 PM (five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Totally. I can't really shut up about it, but I've been somewhat obsessed with Adrianne Lenker/Big Thief lately. The first song on the new album has been having a huge affect on me, the way I see male-female relationships, sex, etc., it really puts some things together that I sort of was subliminally aware of but hadn't allowed myself to get in touch with. In general her lyrics are so humanizing and I find her very therapeutic to listen to.

*effect

I would definitely not categorically exclude gay guys from the group of men who think they can let loose with their misogyny once they think it's 'just us guys'.

this is def true but gay misogyny is a different beast, it's coming from a different place where the sexual frustration/aggression angle doesn't come into it

xp

The most heinous group I know is around an acquaintance/former lover who never lets an opportunity to shame women slip by.

this is def true but gay misogyny is a different beast, it's coming from a different place where the sexual frustration/aggression angle doesn't come into it

I don't really buy that. The misogyny I've seen from both straight and gay men revolves around demeaning women and reducing them to objects that are at disposal; whether they want to touch them sexually or not doesn't drive the behavior, which manifests similar patterns of diminishing, gaslighting, and undermining.

one of cyrus's best friends has a gay dad - this kid has two moms and two dads for the total western mass package - who is totally into 80's/synth/disco and when he comes around i try not jump on him with madonna talk but i get starved! rupaul was his roommate in the 80's! how can i resist?

some sorta x-post

The misogyny I've seen from both straight and gay men revolves around demeaning women and reducing them to objects that are at disposal; whether they want to touch them sexually or not doesn't drive the behavior, which manifests similar patterns of diminishing, gaslighting, and undermining.

otm

Nomar OTM about reading books by women, listening to music made by women, experiencing art made by women. I've made a concious effort the last year to read more women, and I don't know if it has profoundly altered the way I see thee world, but it's also helped me understand some subleties abt the experience of women in the world. Idk. I try, but I'm no paragon of virtue. I think especially when I was younger, late teens/early twenties, I probably said lots of inappropriate or terrible things when hanging out with dudes. But it's important to be work at being better and acknowledge the fact that by making (even ironic) sexist or racy jokes we are perpetuating a bad thing.

Ass far as hanging out in male groups -- I think a significant portion (20%?)of my socializing is in a male only environment, but it's never organized or thought of in those terms. There are a couple of guys I get together with once or twice a month to listen to 78s. We're just the only ppl we know who are nerdy about that music at that level, and we're all happily married. Rarely does the topic of wives come up; too busy talking about alternate takes and who was playing 2nd guitar on a session. If anything, we most often express how thankful we are to have partners who indulge our weird hobbies and other quirks.

Helen and I don't go out with other couples very much in a "double date" kinda way, but our neighborhood pals are a healthy mix of men and women. A group of people coming over for dinner or to listen to records is never one or the other. Definitely having close friends who are women has helped me to be a better person and more concious of my words/actions.

Maybe ILB should stop having FAPs :(

i think w/the exclusively male nights out i've had, there is this sense of MEN, TO BATTLE, for tonight we etc etc. it's a little lame. i do have a few male friends with whom i have some record listening parties and talk audio shop and equipment and the like, though we've also had women involved w/both (just not most of the time.) that feels a bit more natural as opposed to a "just the boys" night out.

you need a gay man in your life, nomar

maybe it's because i think my friends skew younger but if there happens to be an all-dude hangout it's unintentional and ends up being like record shopping/listening and beers and n64 basically. and it's usually 2-3 guys, never like a big posse

xp no kidding, i mean none of my bros want to talk about saint etienne w/me

oh so you all take it seriously this time

This discussion has prompted me to try and remember the last time I hung out with just guys (who weren't my brothers)...and I honestly think it could've been a decade or more ago.

Like the closest I can think of was an all-male anxiety group (organized and run by my then-therapist, a woman). And that isn't quite what I'd call a 'hang'.

Heh, it's actually kind of a problem that a lot of my straight male friends are musicians who often want to talk to me specifically (and not my wife) about music shit that only we care about.

My gay friends want to talk about books (but are way better about including everyone in the conversation).

Wow, you guys have whole groups of friends!

I often see a conversation on twitter where
1. women will talk about how men have a responsibility to challenge problematic comments made by male friends, esp when in all-male groups
2. a bunch of men will respond saying that avoid hanging out with the kind of guys who say stuff like that, or avoid hanging out in all-male groups altogether because they find them toxic
3. women will respond saying that this is not helpful/an abrogation of responsibility etc, that men who consider themselves 'allies' or whatever have a duty to engage with these ppl/situations.

idk, befriending ppl you don't enjoy spending time with solely so you can admonish them for their bad behavior seems unlikely to end well for anyone? to actually maintain those friendships imo you would have to pick your battles to a certain extent, let some things slide, be complicit up to a point, and where do you draw the line? but I can see the logic of saying that a guy who avoids this kind of environment to keep himself 'pure' is actually doing less to help than someone who hangs out in groups that are problematic but makes some attempt to push back against that.

^^^ this is what I was thinking about earlier in the context of this thread, I don't have any easy answers but I sure don't want to hang out with assholes just so I can argue with them

i guess w/that i try to lead by example and live a more decent life, ian otm here:

I try, but I'm no paragon of virtue. I think especially when I was younger, late teens/early twenties, I probably said lots of inappropriate or terrible things when hanging out with dudes. But it's important to be work at being better and acknowledge the fact that by making (even ironic) sexist or racy jokes we are perpetuating a bad thing.

^^i mean i went through a period of my life where while i wasn't a terrible person i was certainly not ideal. the only thing you can do is try to change yourself and work on yourself, because if you sense that what you're doing is wrong then you need to reset yourself. it's never too late. i've seen a lot of people i know make a concerted effort to change and have been successful, and i think i count myself among them, or at least i hope so. i've seen others who have never changed and don't seem to want to.

I avoid people who are assholes because I don't have the fortitude or wherewithal to deal with assholes. That said, I don't have an issue calling foul if the generally-decent people I know behave indecently.

"Nomar OTM about reading books by women"

most of my fave writers are women because women writers tend to speak to me more but i am reminded of a recent thing where i was talking to a friend's mother who is a big reader and i told her i had read those elena ferrante books and she kinda looked startled and said "you're the first man i've ever met who has read those!". and i told her "i learned it through the ILB!" okay, i didn't say that. but ILB definitely responsible for me reading them.

whether they want to touch them sexually or not doesn't drive the behavior

lol waht

I don't think it's disputable that misogyny (no matter who it's coming from) takes similar forms and has similar effects but straight male misogyny often comes from a different place than gay male misogyny ime, which was my only point.

I mean do I really need to point out all the trad MRA/sexist crap about how women are only fit to be sexually subservient to men and guys complaining that their continued rejections by women are all rooted in the inherent collective failures of the female gender, feminists etc. that kind of shit comes from a specifically hetero POV.

Thinking about this stuff atm I'm realizing that the most stereotypically-male presence in my life right now is probably the ten-year-old that I tutor. He plays basketball and does karate. He could probably kick my ass, were he so inclined.

xpost 2 skot -- i wanna read those ferrante books! but i think i'm gonna wait until they are $1 at a thrift store or free on the street.

Misogini as expressed by gay men stems from the same kind of revulsion: the purported weakness of women, the way they smell, and, worst, their monopolizing of men.

uh misogyny

misogini (demo version)

gay men think women smell bad??

when was in high school and trying to stay afloat in a sea of toxic masculinity, almost everyone acted like they thought women smelled bad

idk Alfred what is the gay analog to the straight guy that can't establish or maintain a relationship w women and turns that into "it's not me, it's THEM!" standard misognist perspective (honest question!)

itt many mispellings of mesoginey

I have genuinely never heard of this thing about women smelling bad as a thing before. It seems...kind of insane and completely out of sync with reality?

Kind of like misogyny!

that's universal.

x-post

cooties yo c'mon man xps

i mean "it's not me, it's THEM!" is kinda universal. unisex.

Also, "smells like fish" is lazy-joke-about-women #1 and I don't believe anyone who says they've never heard it before.

I loved the Ferrante books but most of my female friends did not get into them at all (except for one, who's a writer).

i mean "it's not me, it's THEM!" is kinda universal. unisex.

I guess... but a gay man doesn't feel crushing sexual frustration if he doesn't have any female relationships, it doesn't seem realistic to me to just overlook that dynamic in straight guys.

xxpost Okay, that I've heard, but like in dumb movies or whatever. I genuinely don't remember kids in school saying stuff like that about girls, though. Not to say that they didn't exist, but I was pretty good at avoiding the CHUDs.

i had a gay roommate in high school (when i got sent away to bad boy's school) and he totally thought the idea of smelly pussies was hilarious/terrifying. i can still see him rolling around on his bed in agony at the idea. his saving grace was a great love for "no parking on the dance floor". his obsession with Clinique products was the only smell i had a problem with.

Sorry to divert the thread, but I think I just stumbled upon the sad endpoint of masculine stupidity.

Look. A man thought toilet seats were for girls only and has spent his entire life taking uncomfortable dumps because he is MANLY pic.twitter.com/n6gN3TvUQ3

— Another Scary Ghost (@stavvers) October 12, 2017

i had a gay roommate in high school (when i got sent away to bad boy's school) and he totally thought the idea of smelly pussies was hilarious/terrifyin

haha yes I *definitely* encountered this. not so much from straight guys that I can recall.

(of course a thread about masculinity promptly devolves into a discussion of what female genitalia smell like lol)

Also, "smells like fish" is lazy-joke-about-women #1 and I don't believe anyone who says they've never heard it before.

― Marcus Hiles Remains Steadfast About Planting Trees.jpg (DJP), Thursday, October 12, 2017 2:27 PM (four minutes ago) Bookmark

agree
even if they claim not to have heard of it, even girls said this in high school
the degree to which the early 90s were saturated in toxic masculinity is what has come back to me the most strongly with this weinstein thing

as distinct from which era?

not distinct, just not the utopia of riot grrl power that the early 90s are characterized as sometimes

No one is overlooking that dynamic in straight guys.

I am saying that the driving behavior, which is common to men across the board, is one that is about controlling women like playthings. Some men want to have sex with their toys. Some want to dress them up. Some want to punch and kick them. It's all coming from a place where the person in question is seen as an object rather than an autonomous being.

I keep going back to Isaac Mizrahi's appearance on the 2006 Golden Globes preshow for E!, where he fondled Scarlett Johannsen's breasts, looked down Teri Hatcher's dress, and kept asking all the women if they were wearing any underwear. I don't think this was driven by sexual desire.

It's possible that recognizing from an early age that one has a constantly-spewing fountain of toxic masculinity for a dad helps one to recognize and avoid those who are similarly skewed. Thankfully.

i must have the male macho asshole look or something because the number of times i've been in situations with strangers or semi-strangers and they start talking inappropriately like i'm good with it is way too high.

then there's m1lo Y, who is another unholy creature entirely. xxp

in re things the Weinstein scandal has reminded me of and general toxic masculinity, it occurred to me that growing up there was a lot of popular media that had the trope of a woman who "slept with someone to get the job/part", and we usually learned this from an envious woman (and that woman was presumably scripted by a man) and it was always presented as though that woman was conniving and unscrupulous, and not as though the man was exploiting a massive power imbalance, and it literally just never fucking occurred to me what was really going on there, it was just this accepted, slightly curious thing to me growing up "Oh, there are women who sleep with men to get jobs". As though women would just want to do that, of their own volition.

and it always worked out great for them in the end!

Also, "smells like fish" is lazy-joke-about-women #1 and I don't believe anyone who says they've never heard it before.

― Marcus Hiles Remains Steadfast About Planting Trees.jpg (DJP),

I heard it in gay circles when I was younger, never in straight ones.

let's not forget the super attractive woman who invades a successful man's life, seducing him and later trying to ruin his career and also KILL him

Miranda Lambert and Blake Shelton?

my question to you all is: what are you going to do about this? i don't think you need to go around educating random assholes, but if some guy you know makes you feel uncomfortable when he (for example) objectifies the waitress, what are you going to do?

may i recommend shunning. it's about time people stopped inviting assholes to the table regardless of how powerful they are.

I'm an excellent shunner of assholes.

I def shun and will continue to shun.

I'm hoping-not-hoping this comes up in the course of my tutoring/mentoring so that I can hopefully engage in some conversations and healthy redirection in that regard. Which is probably more constructive than the freeze-out I'm more likely to give to adult assholes.

I'm an excellent shunner of assholes.

― the scarest move i ever seen is scary move 4 (Old Lunch),

first sentence of your memoir

ian’s post about not being perfect/an angel in his past really resonates w me because of the whole glass houses thing. trying to be a better ally for me is about shutting the f up and getting out of the way as much as possible when surrounded by friendly/strange company. i have no problem rolling on assholes if i am thrust into a situation that i wouldn’t be in by choice.

I already shun, both socially and professionally. I plan to continue doing so.

but if some guy you know makes you feel uncomfortable when he (for example) objectifies the waitress, what are you going to do?

honestly this scenario is so inconceivable to me, I can't think of anyone I know who would do this. and if it was just some random guy I didn't know but happened to be eating with, my immediate instinct would be "note to self: avoid this person". I guess I could start an argument but that's usually not a good tactic when in public with strangers.

how are y'all defining "objectifies"?

"The waitress is beautiful" is a level I can tolerate.
"Damn, them titties!" is not.

shunning is insufficient in most circumstances (though it's a fine step)

murder is against the law, though

I do shun but I usually just freeze people out, make it plain, non-verbally, I don't want to talk to them. That I'm pretty good at.

I suspect there are other options in most situations xp

I was defining it as "makes a comment on waitress' appearance" or worse

xp

as i mentioned in the other thread my field is 80% women so the gross outright sexist statements aren't as common (though they do happen obv, and even though it's 80% women i think the leadership positions are taken slightly more by men), it is more about men dominating conversations, not listening to or valuing perspectives offered by women, ignoring the labor of women that generally keep everything running in this field. when i see that happening firsthand i try do things like properly credit ideas, highlight the labor that was done for a given project, show active listening.

the only kind of gross thing i've seen firsthand in my field was at a professional conference chatting w/ two colleagues, one a younger woman about my age and the other a middle-aged dude. the young woman had to leave and when she left the guy said to me "boy she is a cutie huh" and I was kind of stunned and didn't know what to say so I didn't say anything :/

after the boys of shunner are gone

"The waitress is beautiful" is a level I can tolerate.

if one of my (relatively few) single male hetero friends made this comment I would look on them more with pity than disdain but I would still think it's kinda weird. Like, you keep those thoughts to yourself, I don't need or want to know about your preferences.

xp

Sometimes mocking can actually work, in the right scenario, like "Holy shit, the waitress is a woman and has breasts, so cool!"

treating a person like an object
i am against "the waitress is beautiful" fwiw -- it is objectifying

i think it's the same mentality that leads to phrases that end with a woman being called a "thing" (pretty little thing, sweet young thing, delicate precious thing) i loathe being called a thing and i've even had women call me a thing and it feels really condescending.

i'm kind of uncomfortable w/even that low-level flirting with women working at restaurants because they're not there to be flirted with, they're doing a job and as a part of the job they feel pressured to put up with it. i know a lot of people who do that, which doesn't rise as obviously to the level of objectifying but it's still something i'm not really into.

it IS objectifying

yeah I never publicly comment on shit like that and it's extra shitty to do in a service context

I've worked in bars and restaurants and I can count the number of bartenders and servers who enjoy being hit on at work on no hands

yeah I think especially in service industry jobs it's good to operate under the assumption that "this person is being nice to me because they have to, so I'm not going to abuse that relationship even a little bit." If you chat with a waitress and you actually like her, you can ask her, nicely, if she'd like to meet sometime, and she can say no. Just commenting that she's hot or whatever *is* objectifying, even if you say "beautiful" because it's like she's there for you to look at.

yeah and the other weird thing about it is um why do they feel the need to comment on it to another man? Like, what do they expect me to do - agree and chuckle? Why would you need my validation? what's next, a circle jerk? Like Marcos, I would just be stunned and feel awkward and maybe say "I didn't notice" or "keep it to yourself" or something.

xp

i guess what i mean by that is sort of when someone comes to your table, there's this very male tendency to extend the conversation, to flirt, to joke, to touch on the arm, etc.

i think it's rare in this day and age to ever have anything rise to the level of something outwardly inappropriate but i find it very awkward...

and i'm sure i find it much less awkward then the servers!

If you chat with a waitress and you actually like her, you can ask her, nicely, if she'd like to meet sometime

i don't know about that : [

maybe (maybe!) if you're a regular somewhere and you've become friends with someone who's serving you. or if you see them in a social setting outside of their workplace.

Definitely don't ask out the bartender.

i guess what i mean by that is sort of when someone comes to your table, there's this very male tendency to extend the conversation, to flirt, to joke, to touch on the arm, etc.

Not this male!

don't ask out servers for the love of christ

save it for tinder

I agree that hitting on service industry people is not a good luck, but a friend of mine did meet his fiancee that way. He wasn't gross about it though (and it didn't work out in the end, but that was years later).

luck = look

I would tolerate someone at my table telling me they thought our server was attractive much more than I would tolerate someone at my table asking our server out on a date.

Well, I guess I could see the argument for having a blanket rule to just not do it too. I asked a barista out once when I was in college and she said yes, and that's the only time I've ever done such a thing. It's sort of a hard balance to strike between "we don't stop being human beings just because someone is working" and "this might be a context where the person doesn't want the attention because they're getting too much of it already." I guess it would be better if men were just better at reading situations as to when attention is wanted and when it isn't, but since we're not so good at that, maybe it's better to just not do it.

I think there has to be some way to do it that isn't gross, but maybe as said above it needs to be a situation where you've talked to the person a few times already, not just like "you're pretty wanna go out?"

Sometimes I think I am too friendly or jokey to people without even realizing it. I have no problem talking to a stranger about some current events shit, especially lately when there is WTF news on a daily basis. Maybe I should keep it to myself. But it's also not a gendered thing. I'll talk to a dude about Txxxx or hurricanes while I order my beer; I'll ask someone how their day is going. I dunno, I hope it doesn't come across as weird. Especially before I was married, I was always cautious about even like, complimenting female friends cuz I didn't want ppl to think I'm a creep.

my first interaction with my partner of almost 20 years was as his waitress
he paid literally no attention to me -- we wound up talking at a show but he did remember me

Like, you keep those thoughts to yourself, I don't need or want to know about your preferences.
i call this "absorb your boner" -- a valuable skill if you want to interact with people

you can talk about whatever you want -- be friendly, it's nice! i like friendly people.
just keep your boner to yourself!

lol "absorb your boner" so otm

I dunno I feel like the benefit of apps/sites like OKC, Tinder etc is that there are dedicated spaces for this. In reality, let women take the lead and eat your fucking dinner.

i am against "the waitress is beautiful" fwiw -- it is objectifying

Unfortunately I've got a tendency to comment on people's good looks because my mother used to do it all the time! Still does. I think a 'fine looking man' is one of her all-time favourite expressions. Generally about Rock Hudson or Bryan Ferry or whoever, not about waiters or random men in the street though.

I feel like that is something I very much learned to do, to "turn off the vibes" as it were. Now it feels easy to do, there are all kinds of ways you can change your body language, eye contact, tone of voice etc. to take the horny connotations completely out of things.

I dunno I feel like the benefit of apps/sites like OKC, Tinder etc is that there are dedicated spaces for this. In reality, let women take the lead and eat your fucking dinner.

― a serious and fascinating fartist (Simon H.), Thursday, October 12, 2017 3:41 PM (one minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

FWIW I was married before Tinder came out, so I never experienced the world of "dedicated spaces for this." I think it's probably better in a lot of ways.

make no mistake they are also terrible

i think it's the same mentality that leads to phrases that end with a woman being called a "thing" (pretty little thing, sweet young thing, delicate precious thing) i loathe being called a thing and i've even had women call me a thing and it feels really condescending.

― weird woman in a bar (La Lechera), Thursday, October 12, 2017 4:28 PM (thirteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

there is something about the "little" that so often accompanies phrases like that that is infantilizing and awful

And I think there is probably some social confusion on the part of people who did a lot of dating in the pre-Tinder world, because, like, you needed a way to meet people, and that meant asking people out, often strangers, and that's harder to navigate.

so nerve-wracking, I don't miss dating at all

I don't see the problem with complimenting men and women in a non-skeevy way. I love objectifying men.

The least sexist office I ever worked in was when I edited a porn magazine in the early 2000s. Yes, it was porn, and we looked at photos and watched videos all day long, but actual women who showed up in a professional context were treated with courtesy and respect, and I don't remember anyone ever telling a "dirty" joke that devolved into actual misogyny. Most of the non-pornography-related conversations were about music (I burned a copy of the Steely Dan box set off a co-worker) or ridiculous pop culture (another co-worker was mildly obsessed with movies about animals playing sports - Air Bud, MVP: Most Valuable Primate, etc., etc.). Even when we all went out for drunken lunches after closing an issue, the product we were putting out never seeped into our interactions with each other, or how we treated live human women in the world.

Before I worked there, I worked in an auto parts warehouse, and there was this super-embarrassing try-hard guy there who was always talking about going out on the weekend and doing coke with girls and screwing them in a limo, etc., etc. I used to try to be busy whenever he came around, because he'd try to rope everyone else into a conversation explicitly so he could do his whole Andrew Dice Clay act, and it was just weird and sad. Like, the way he talked about women made me doubt he'd ever actually had a conversation with one go beyond the third sentence.

But as others have said above, I'm not gonna hang out with dudes like that just so I can tutor them in how to lift their knuckles from the sidewalk and become human. Life is too short.

so nerve-wracking, I don't miss dating at all

― Οὖτις, Thursday, October 12, 2017 3:46 PM (two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Total aside, but I was 18 when I asked that barista out, and it turned out she was like 23 or 24 -- we were both "in college" but I was a freshman and she had gone back to school. This fact came out at the beginning of our date, she was visibly displeased, and that made for a very awkward dinner and movie. Yeah, dating sucked.

"but if some guy you know makes you feel uncomfortable when he (for example) objectifies the waitress, what are you going to do?"

i am definitely taking tips from my 12 year old son who when he sees something on t.v. that is inapropriate/sexist says out loud: "that is SO innapopriate/sexist!" and this is what i plan to say to anyone who says anything like that to me in real life. for years i just rolled my eyes and didn't say anything. because i figured people after a certain age were beyond hope. now i don't care if they are beyond hope i just want them to know that not everyone agrees with them and that some things aren't cool/right.

but this would be some random person. nobody in my life would ever say anything like that about the waitress.

non-skeevy way

the danger lies in where this line is drawn

yeah, gay men objectify other men all the time. Don't hate us. xxxxp

i don't see the problem with complimenting men and women in a non-skeevy way. I love objectifying men.

― morning wood truancy (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, October 12, 2017 4:47 PM (thirty-six seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ya alfred/morbz otm, that's something i want to reconcile bc i honestly do think that objectification, to some degree, is an inherent part of sexual attraction

I just want my friends to know that if I say "Hey, that's an awesome skirt", I am not trying to sleep with them.

yeah, gay men objectify other men all the time. Don't hate us

I consider this yr own problem, I'm not getting involved! lol

yeah I restrict my edict to my fellow straights / people who are attracted to women.

i worked with an editor who enthused about all the times he'd go to Vegas and hook up with women, and how at a recent bachelor party he and his pals "ran a train" on a stripper. he would tell this to the a producer when it was just the two of them working on a show. i mean this is a married, middle-aged guy.

anyway he was later fired because someone walked in on him watching porn on his laptop, and he had a problem taking editorial direction from the woman who was the supervising producer. : /

complimenting what someone's wearing is fair game imo, there's nothing inherently sexual about that (although you easily *can* make it sexual if you're an asshole)

yeah, I also feel kind of unresolved about the objectification thing. I guess part of the problem is that objectification of women in particular has gone wayyyyy too far in one direction so there's some need to push back against that. xp

yeah and the other weird thing about it is um why do they feel the need to comment on it to another man? Like, what do they expect me to do - agree and chuckle? Why would you need my validation? what's next, a circle jerk? Like Marcos, I would just be stunned and feel awkward and maybe say "I didn't notice" or "keep it to yourself" or something.

xp

― Οὖτις, Thursday, October 12, 2017 9:32 PM (fourteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

xps this seems odd to me, surely women and gay men also discuss the attractiveness of wait staff/work colleagues etc? (not talking about to their face or within earshot here, that seems like a different kind of thing) I can see the argument that context means it's problematic for straight men to do this and so they should avoid, but the I don't get being baffled that it's a subject that could even be of interest?

Also an aside but the waitress in my above anecdote later opened her own restaurant, which still later closed in part because certain kitchen staff and business partners had huge issues being told what to do by a woman. :(

i think w/anything it's just that you have to read the situation appropriately and yes: absorb your boner!

friendly interaction is great, flirting is also great, but i think there are times where the latter isn't welcome and i think it's just about reading when that time is..

sexism is a MASSIVE problem in kitchens particularly.

You've got p bad male friends groups, if the OP cluster holds true for ilx

If I think that may be a function of the typical make ilxor idk

I have a few male friends but not a "grouo" on them; by and large my closest, most reliable friends have always been women

*group

I literally never have conversations with other men about what real-life women they find attractive. It's just not something I am interested in hearing about, and it seems like the kind of thing that could rapidly go off the rails into gross/misogynistic territory. Maybe it's just me, it just seems like a weird thing to want to talk about with other guys. What am I supposed to do with this information? How am I supposed to respond? I don't feel any need - at all - to offer my own opinions or feelings on the matter. (Discussing the relative attractiveness of celebrities is fair game and less problematic, to me, since they're already objects by the nature of the medium)

For some reason I don't have the same aversion to discussing actual sex lives with other guys, which, while obviously still personal just doesn't carry the same connotation, it doesn't have the "let's objectify women!" subtext when you're talking with someone about how great/not-great their sexual experiences have been or their problems with their partner or past partners or whatever. It's more like sharing a story, commiserating, seeking advice, normal conversation-type stuff.

xp

the relative attractiveness of celebrities is fair game and less problematic, to me, since they're already objects by the nature of the medium

a-HA! j/k

"absorb your boner" as a pithy response to this makes me irrationally angry.

In college I found out I had a reputation as a massive sexual tease because I befriended several women and didn't try to sleep with them. I found this out when I started dating my wife and she spilled the stories that were circulating through our friend circles about me. The reason for this was because I grew up as the only black kid in a town full of racist white people and I was terrified of accidentally becoming a father at a very early age because everyone would 100% know the baby was mine; this paranoia spilled over into my gendered interactions when I got into a more diverse environment and had basically socialized myself into not expressing any type of lust or physical attraction until a woman expressly told me that she liked me as a self-defense/coping mechanism. Some of these women were people I would happily have dated/hooked up with had they shown any form of overt interest in me; none of them did. However, because I was nice to them, I got a reputation for leading women on and then not following through. (Note by "nice to them" I mean "talked to them, hung out with them, tried to make them laugh which is what I do with all of my friends, and included them in plans when I was getting together groups of people to do something"; I wasn't buying women things or arranging dates and then being platonically cold or any games like that. I was just being nice and non-threatening.)

There's something to be unpacked there about expected behavior in the 90s, probably. The wider point with regards to the original question about harassing/objectifying your waitress or asking her out or initiating flirting, etc, is no, of course you don't bother the server; she is at work and you are a customer. If someone said to me "I thought the server at that restaurant was really beautiful" as part of a private conversation, either at the table or after we left the restaurant, I'd likely say "okay" if I didn't agree or "yeah" if I did and then move on with my life. That's my level.

in somewhat related news I've found myself on a sort of anti-harassment task force in the context of an activist group I'm involved in and it's been interesting, especially because it's forced me to think about how informal hierarchies and a lack of clear behavioral guidelines in an org can allow space for people to behave badly (though in the context of this thread the behavior is fairly mild, it still needs to be stamped out swiftly). so basically when we look at tackling these issues, though it will involve one-on-one discussion with some folks down the line, it's really not *about* them at the end of the day - it's about effectively fostering a culture of mutual respect and making sure everyone understands what that looks like from the get-go. I've found it helpful, that need to separate the behavior from the person in some respects and I think that's maybe a good way to think about it if you have someone behaving problematically in your life and are thinking of intervening, though of course it's tougher when there's no organizational context to think about it in and it's your friend or acquaintance or whatever. this is why I recoiled a bit to the notion of just shunning people - not sure anything changes at the end of the day except that your life is less awkward. which is a fine goal in and of itself but I think we all want more than that.

Men can objectify even straight men because the straight men are so unaccustomed to being objects of desire. Not only do they deserve to be treated as man-flesh, but it might help them to know that they can be made to squirm.

In my club days, I would go out with my gay male friends a lot to try to trainspot what the DJ was spinning; my wife hated it because she would end up buying her own drinks and I'd end up drinking for free.

Gotta love those times I've been caught giving some guy the eye on the street and gotten a nod with a "How ya doing?" ie you were checkin' me out but no thx.

Best recent experiences: at a Starbucks the girlfriend of the guy I was eyeing top to bottom caught me. She mouthed "I know" and smiled.

i must have the male macho asshole look or something because the number of times i've been in situations with strangers or semi-strangers and they start talking inappropriately like i'm good with it is way too high.

― (•̪●) (carne asada), Thursday, October 12, 2017 2:39 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

BTW this raises a totally different "maleness" point I wanted to raise bc I know you post on the sw0le thread and I've come to my slight sw0leness pretty late in life, and sometimes I feel weirdly conflicted about it, like, am I basically consuming a lot of extra unnecessary protein in order to project a retrograde male image? Sometimes I feel like because I'm in a very traditionally "alpha male" industry I use it to compensate for the fact that I'm naturally more the soft-spoken artsy type. It gives me a little more physical presence and confidence or something.

lol Alfred. BTW I noticed in Miami people check each other out like 10x more brazenly than in NYC.

Best recent experiences: at a Starbucks the girlfriend of the guy I was eyeing top to bottom caught me. She mouthed "I know" and smiled.

― morning wood truancy (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, October 12, 2017 5:27 PM (one minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

haaaaa

xxp haha i definitely don't look too swole , i mean i'm a big guy i guess 6'2 about 225 right now. I don't why this happens to me but being in a situation where a guy out of the blue makes a remark about a woman in close proximity after she walks away or something sucks ! like do I tell the stranger to fuck off and get a life ? I think I just look at them like they have three heads and they get the idea .

yer my kinda big stud, carne.

lol <3

dumb dudes have never had ANY problem confessing any and everything to me. because they thought i was a member of their dumb dude tribe.

I've never dated anything but dumb dudes; I wish they'd been mutes.

yeah and the other weird thing about it is um why do they feel the need to comment on it to another man? Like, what do they expect me to do - agree and chuckle? Why would you need my validation? what's next, a circle jerk? Like Marcos, I would just be stunned and feel awkward and maybe say "I didn't notice" or "keep it to yourself" or something.

xp

― Οὖτις, Thursday, October 12, 2017 9:32 PM (fourteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

xps this seems odd to me, surely women and gay men also discuss the attractiveness of wait staff/work colleagues etc? (not talking about to their face or within earshot here, that seems like a different kind of thing) I can see the argument that context means it's problematic for straight men to do this and so they should avoid, but the I don't get being baffled that it's a subject that could even be of interest?

― soref, Thursday, 12 October 2017 21:57

I find this weird too. If this is just something shared with friends it's lovely to hear. Why wouldn't I want to hear about something that enriches other people's lives? Just like any other kind of beauty in their life.

I love hearing Alfred, Branwell and others praise someone's beauty. Alfred's talking about Antonio Banderas had me looking and thinking about him more intently.
I loved that meme about how handsome the Korean president's bodyguard is.

All this just seems to illustrate that women's behavior or responses in these scenarios are policed a lot more strictly than men's ever are.

^^ otm

as a straight white male I agree with the sentiments of this thread but I've got to say the idea that these assholes who behave this way around women could actually learn from being called out by a stranger or whatever doesn't ring true in my experience here in the good ol' southern u.s. if anything, it will just cause them to double down on their shitty behavior the next time out of spite. i dunno what the answer is on how to confront these people but giving a disapproving look or even a small lecture will not get through to them. it may be different elsewhere and/or in more urban areas but these folks aren't just shitty people, they're really stubborn and really really fucking dumb.

i've got a bit of glass house confession to do -- when i was younger, my reaction to having been objectified was to do it right back. this did not work the way i thought it would and i wish i had sought more substantive company on a number of occasions.

we could've tag teamed, Lechera!

I love hearing Alfred, Branwell and others praise someone's beauty. Alfred's talking about Antonio Banderas had me looking and thinking about him more intently.

I loved that meme about how handsome the Korean president's bodyguard is.

― Robert Adam Gilmour, Thursday, October 12, 2017

I can post a Banderas gif right now that'll make your toes curl.

celebrities or abstractions on the internet are different

a guy ogling an irl woman and wanting to share his enthusiasm w me is just ... ew

Alfred- I'm ready.

*posts phantom gif from andrew lloyd webber special*

a guy ogling an irl woman and wanting to share his enthusiasm w me is just ... ew

― Οὖτις, Thursday, 12 October 2017 23:05

You mean staring inappropriately or remarking after looking at all?

the remarking is more objectionable imo

Rhapsodising?

i think women are totally cool looking and i am really attracted to women and i definitely look at women but i also learned from an early age what not to do thanks to a totally gross dad who i love dearly but who was an anti-role model of sorts when it came to women and sexual politics thanks to his fabulous 50's homophobic and sexist youth.

yeah I also never really like receiving that kind of comment, it's like "Ok man, that's between you and your boner." But tbc I really am never in these situations, all of my outside work conversations with men these days are like "Fuck, it's hard to have two working parents and two kids, I'm exhausted" or "How is ___ adjusting to kindergarten?" I'm rarely in a restaurant or bar with other guys, and I certainly can't remember the last time I heard someone say "Check out the waitress" or w/e.

"rhapsodising" covers a lot of ground, both appropriate and inappropriate. a guy composing a sonnet on the spot would be weird and awkward but ostensibly less offensive than "lookit them tittays!"

xp

I certainly can't remember the last time I heard someone say "Check out the waitress" or w/e.

yeah me neither, this just doesn't happen

At least, with the one exception being my welcome dinner for work, which was DEFINITELY not a situation where I could call someone (i.e. one of my bosses) out.

it was your welcome dinner. i think you had the upper hand here.

the sonnet composers are some of the worst offenders bc they think they are innocuous when they are not

i had some guy leaving notes on my windshield/stalking me in college and even though i discovered i had some things in common with him, it was the letters that freaked me out
i saved them all if you wanna read them -- going back to read them was pretty disturbing, he talks about wanting to make me his 'sex slave"
:scream emoji:

also you guys are fixating on the example -- would it be better to change the situation to "a guy you are hanging out with in whatever situation says something you consider inappropriate"

as a straight white male I agree with the sentiments of this thread but I've got to say the idea that these assholes who behave this way around women could actually learn from being called out by a stranger or whatever doesn't ring true in my experience

my biggest beef with the culture of contemporary wokeness or whatever is the overreliance on "calling out" strangers as a tactic. more often than not it just makes people double down. I think there's room to engage with how people speak and behave that doesn't just boil down to this kind of dynamic, but it's best done by people who know the person in question, which is why (again) I argue against just cutting people out without comment. if someone you have some level of closeness with is behaving problematically you're often in a unique position to help change it.

I don't just mean the example, it really doesn't happen generally. My one all-male hangout situation right now is a guitar/vocal group I play in and we pretty much just play and go home, and I just don't see the guys in this group making that kind of comment. Other than that it's just talking to other dads on the playground. Last time I got a drink with another guy we just talked about work and kids and news. The only close male friends I have, who I don't see that often, just wouldn't do that kind of thing.

I used to know this dude, we were co-workers at two different places and bonded over movies, music, whatever. when you're working a shitty job it doesn't take much. the better I get to know him the more I learn he had some pretty backwards ideas about a lot of things, the most upsetting of which was his bizarre orientalism - I found out he was obsessed with Japanese girls in particular and found Western women "too entitled" or some shit (which, obviously, massive red flag). so whenever we got to talking about things like this I'd interrogate his ideas about power dynamics, consent, relationships, culture, etc. he was also profoundly self-loathing among and probably an alcoholic among other issues, which certainly didn't make matters any simpler. I was able to get him to admit his positions were wrong or immoral on a number of occasions, but ultimately he ended up actually moving to Japan and I haven't spoken to him since. Admittedly in the year that led up to that I only saw him a couple of times; we were no longer co-workers and it was tougher to motivate myself to make an effort when I wasn't seeing him n the course of day-to-day life. it was worth trying to engage with him and shake his perceptions a bit, but ultimately I don't think we were really close enough for me to make much of a dent. still, just disengaging and not even making the effort at all would have been even less effective, I think.

I can relate to the examples given of bad shit going on in all-male groups. Especially work. There was some discussion of 'call-outs' upthread; I don't think these work well in my locale (UK). And I would feel presumptuous. Tbh the nearest I've got to a successful 'call-out' went like, 'Male colleague, you have to stop saying loudly that you want to fuck attractive lesbian colleague whenever she walks past because you sit on my table and it's affecting my reputation with women'; the thing is, lol @ cardamon's 'reputation with women'. That was posturing I had to put on to get the point across. It was really the ugly atmosphere this colleague was creating that was pissing me off, not my 'reputation' and I feel like I was only able to say half of what I wanted to.

(Reading this thread I half wish I lived in US and am half-glad I don't. In the UK it's just very difficult or so it feels to me to have a serious conversation with your friends about whether some behaviour is 'appropriate'. That would be seen as taking things too seriously. Here you'd have to appeal rather to a sense of 'decency' or 'fair play' or 'a joke's a joke but this is out of order', or something. The more assertive 'Appropriate' is not available as a tool. Yet on the other hand I feel like I'm spared the true insanity of dedicated 'frat', 'vegas' etc behaviours.)

"Hey that's not cool" is sayable. I've said it. It may not reform the target, but I think there is value in communicating that not everybody is down with misogyny (or racism or whatever).

In college I got a roommate who joked with his buds about fucking a woman's eye sockets and I requested a new roommate the next day. Saw the guy shortly thereafter and he knew why. He seemed genuinely contrite; said the conversation had simply gotten out of hand. It didn't endear me to him or make everything okay but at least he moved forward in his life with a better sense of the boundaries of what people are willing to let slide.

the message i'm getting from this thread btw isn't "don't hang out with men" it's "don't hang out with coworkers"

over the last two months or so i've been in a new work situation that has been really distressing for me in some ways. it's a bunch of dudes, almost entirely white dudes. i'm not used to that. the younger ones generally keep their shit together, but the older men literally just sit around a table and ogle women and talk about who they want to fuck. they are "old school". before i officially started, i shadowed my friend for most of a workday to see what it was like, and because i followed him around too closely, i heard that another guy there called me a "pussy". the last time i worked, i met the head honcho for the first time. it was important that i make a good impression because it's a freelance kind of job and i need him to like me so that he'll hire me again for gigs in the future. i helped him pack up some equipment and then pushed a heavy-ass cart with him down a looooong tunnel, a two or three minute trip. during this sweaty journey, a woman in a tight skirt suddenly came out of a side door and walked about 20 feet in front of us. i heard my boss make a weird grunting noise and looked over. he looked at me, glanced at her, then looked back at me and mouthed "WOW". then he said "HOLY SHIT!", loud enough that she could hear. but she was in a deep conversation with some guy. my boss just kept making loud comments about the hotness of her ass and then looking over at me. i wish i could say that i told him to fuck off or "don't do that" or anything at all, but in reality i just avoided eye contact and pushed that heavy cart as quickly as i could (not very quick). i didn't know what to do. when we got out to the truck there were about 10-15 dudes standing around, and he literally pointed to the woman, now in the parking lot but still only 40-50 feet away, and yelled "LOOK AT THAT ASS!" the entire crew looked, laughed, and cheered. i don't know how to explain it, but it was almost like he didn't get the proper dude reaction that he needed from me so he had to get it from the other guys.

in general, i've never had to deal with much toxic masculinity in social settings on a regular basis. i grew up in a rural small town, and it was everywhere, especially among the cowboys (stereotyping but sorry it's true) but for the most part, none of my friends were like that. i think it's because i was a really tiny, skinny, unmanly kind of boy. the brosephs didn't want to hang out with me. the guys who did hang out with me just weren't like that. i've heard "locker room talk" and shit like that, but none of my friends were like that, to an almost abnormal degree. like sometimes i hear women talk about how in high school they openly discussed sex and who was good or bad at it, and it seems fairly normal. but i never had any conversations like that, and if my friends did, they didn't do it while i was around. possibly it was because i was super religious until 9th grade or so, and they didn't realize that i had given all that up.

on the Chatting with Bartenders subtopic, just the other day I was up in Wisconsin and grabbing a drink with a friend, and "Unknown Legend" was playing on the jukebox and the bartender was singing along loudly to it. As she was grabbing my drink, I told her "I love this song! I was just listening to this song this morning while I was walking my dog!", and she gave me a really funny look and I realized that either a) that was a really awkward detail to share with a stranger, b) she thought I was hitting on her, or C) both. i definitely understand her reaction, because i'm sure as a bartender she has to deal with many terrible things from men every single night. i guess i just naively long for a society where i can share my awkward anecdotes with any stranger, regardless of their position on the gender spectrum, but i realize that my complaints about wanting to talk about neil young in literally any situation don't really compare with those who can't walk down a hallway without hearing some creepy guy yell "LOOK AT THAT ASS!"

1. that song in particular might have made that situation more awkward. 2. i hope the dog anecdote was to be your segue into a conversation about "Doghouse"

Ugggggggh, so sorry about your workplace, KM. That sounds intolerable. I sometimes grumble about working in a stodgy, stuffy workplace/industry that's geared toward the olds but it's better than some of the alternatives, for sure.

I am also a smaller than average guy, and I think there's something to your thinking. Me and bigger dude-brahs have always had a mutual lack of interest in one another, which works out great for everyone, I find.

xpost
RE: 1) oh shit, i didn't even think about that! jfc, this life.

xpost OL

it sucks but it's gotta be much worse to be the subject of that kind of shit rather than just a dipshit bystander worrying about how they should react

happy to work in a low-drama chill office where people mostly keep to themselves and wait to die

here, Robert:

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/b7/8f/25/b78f2598806c442c1945a7cc022f5128.png

Send to your straight friends.

Having spent the past two years with several straight friends being called out and called in for various crimes, including my best friend, who (it seemed) I was the sole voice of “holding him accountable” and “wanting to stay friends with him”, and nevertheless saw his life descend into nightmare, near-constant suicidal ideation, and eventually, moving back home and going on serious meds to just get him through the day...

And viewing amongst my gay friends several instances of sexual assault and rape committed by some of the loudest voices of “wokeness” and then feeling subsequently weirded out when their public commitment toward “wokeness” felt like self-protection and a soothing of their own guilt...

And having seen certain women experience assault, and be talked about in the community afterward by their friends and others as this scenario as being “inevitable” as a result of their own patterns of promiscuity...

And having observed in one gay community of affluent “cultural pillars” an unreserved exploitation of their own cultural capital in order to affect relationships with men 20+ years younger than them... to the point that I asked myself, “what came first? The desire to achieve greatness for its own beauty, or the desire to bed younger men by achieving greatness?”...

And having observed patterns of abuse manifest themselves online (mostly) where “allies” and “survivors” alike pile-on the abuser-du-jour...

I’ve had the following thoughts percolate in my head, and with no real outlet to express them:

1. Much of the anger and rage about sexual transgressions have to do with displaced rage against power dynamics that are created by capitalism, both cultural and financial

2. Abusers (and men in general) will be better reformed if the mechanisms in place stop shunning then, and instead embrace them and correct them—shunning abusers only causes them to double down (as noted above) and, in some cases, ramp up their abusive patterns as a response

3. The idea that abusers are “assholes” should be terminated, as abusers are usually (in my experience) average sexually active men who simply haven’t been checked, or called out, once their sex habits pathologies themselves

4. Sexual assault itself, if destigmatized as being a massive transgression, and rather thought to carry the same weight as, say, a DUI or a drunk driving accident, would be easier to address in dialogue, as the entire sexual viability and career of the offender would not be held in the balance, and thus an easier path toward rehabilitation

5. I’m fully in the “men are terrible and should be genocided” camp, but history has recently demonstrated that abusive shitty men are not going anywhere, and cannot be genocided, and in fact, still vote, and so writing abusive men off and isolating them and dismissing them only exacerbates the problem

6. The biological aspects of “creepy old men” really ought to be a discussion, because it seems to me to be not so much a result of culture, or specific deviancy, but a biological imperative, that is far too embarrassing at this juncture to speak about effectively

7. The discussion about “what is consent?” in not enough, all members of society should be taught the five components of healthy sexual relationships (consent, equality, respect, trust, safety)

8. The black-and-white attitude toward “abusers” and “abused” needs to be reformed

I mean, even that book by Schulman (“Conflict Is Not Abuse”) was being dismissed amongst my Facebook friends as being “coverup for the author’s own abuses”. This is crazy. Discussions about predators like Weinstein are one thing, men who are pathologically harmful. But beyond that, we are talking about sex and capitalism and where they intersect, and the current dialogue is just fucked up and toxic and enabling all manner of further toxic behaviour.

A case in point: a certain journalist called me for post-trial comments about the Ghomeshi trial. This journalist was fuming: “I can’t believe this monster still has a social circle. Still has Christmas parties. It makes me sick.” I was like, what, you want him dead? Imprisoned? The same journalist was this year publicly derided for their own abusive activity and lost their job. I just don’t know anymore

Man, I was supposed to go out to "dad's beer" with neighbor dads tonight and was kind of tired and grumpy and instead told myself I'd get some work done, but I feel guilty about not going out and socializing, and now here's this thread that somehow makes me feel worse about not going to dad's beer -- dad's beer is just dads who talk about politics and I dunno, our kids and home repair shit and "we should get together and play some music" but we never actually do -- it is neither gross nor particularly bonding/important

i should have gone probably

ten minutes later, i still feel bad about this -- but they've surely all gone home by now, we are middle-aged dads who don't stay out or even up late

I guess the relation to this thread is that we are trained to feel that having "a group of guys" is something an adult man can survive without but would be slightly worse off without, like a minor vitamin -- even if the "group of guys" is selected at random by some mechanism like "who live on the same couple of blocks as I do"

i think that's a really astute observation

I'm trying to have more meaningful male friendships in my life. wish me luck

3. The idea that abusers are “assholes” should be terminated, as abusers are usually (in my experience) average sexually active men who simply haven’t been checked, or called out, once their sex habits pathologies themselves

nah. that no one checked or called out harvey w. until now -- no one with the power to stop him, at any rate -- is fucked up in a host of different ways, but he knew very well that what he was doing was wrong. and he kept doing it, for decades, with apparently zero understanding or empathy or care about the human beings he victimized. even now he's unable to conceal that he thinks of no one but himself. 'asshole' is too weak a term

fgti, in the abstract i like the idea of embracing/correcting/empathizing rather than shunning or condemning. but your post seems to assume that the standard social response to misogyny has been shunning, the ending of careers. personally, my observations have been that the response is rarely open shunning OR empathy/correction - it's looking the other way. you may have an unusual point of view in being a person that a journalist might contact to ask about your opinion about something. maybe in your world the shunning is flagrant and careers are ending all around you, left and right. but in my world, at least, that rarely happens. to the degree that shunning takes place, from my perspective, it usually results in the potential victims of the violence (verbal or otherwise) just staying the hell away from those who would inflict it. or keeping their mouths shut so they don't lose their jobs.

In my youth I lived in a very female world (single mother for much of it; four older sisters; lots of close female friends).

I never felt especially good at interacting with guys outside of a few specific realms (music, theater, journalism, literature). I am okay with a core of old friends who are dudes, and I am generally okay with other musicians as long as the subject is whether guitars are awesome (hint: the answer is yet). But I have a tough time finding much in common with neighbors or other dudes not already in my circle. I can talk about children, of course. But I can't small-talk about sports or shooting small animals or car repair or whatever yr stereotypical dudebros talk about.

Generally I feel like my life is sufficiently full of connections - family, online, childhood friends, musical collaborators - so as not to need more. I feel some slight social pressure to engage with the dads of my kids' peers, but that always feels forced and false to me. Yeah, sure, otherdadbro. Our daughters are strongly bonding over My Little Pony (or whatever); that doesn't mean you and I need to be friends too. And my work is all remote so I can keep coworkers at arm's length too. Everything's cordial but I'm unlikely to bond strongly with new people at my stage of life.

*the answer is yes

I'm not entirely sure where to put this but here seems a reasonable place.

I just went for a job interview in Manchester. It was very thorough, but in a good way, all relevant. The work seems interesting, and the people were all nice. They are 5 founders (and one employee who was away on holiday so I didn't meet that one).

They have an office in the downstairs of a big terraced house.

And they all live in the house! 5 20/30 something guys. They were very focussed on the product they were building, and you could see they were professional and focussed, and I went for drinks after the (very long) interviews and they didn't say anything which was off - there was no suggestion of anything offputting and I wouldn't describe them as 'techbros', despite the 'silicon valley' setup, (havent seen the tv show, so im guessing)

Yet for the first time I felt, this is very 'the guys'. probably exacerbated by the intensity of an interview situation, but didn't feel super comfortable there!

tech is pretty bad for this. my office is like prob 100 men and about genuinely 10 women. it's a gov digital project and since most people are contractors i don't think it's subject to any diversity rules or even has a moral centre to its hr approach. it is embarrassing tbh. also it's v overcrowded and smells genuinely like a locker room.

as for this thread, i'd say my oldest group of friends is an all-male group, feels like that's because we know each other since being about six years old, playing football in the park, climbing trees etc. i guess we had female friends as slightly older children but not living on our street and not that we hung out with every day of our youth. dunno if that's societal or what, but it does mean that bond is quite strong and we will all get together. we all live in diff parts of the world now but we see each other about twice a year as a group, maybe i see some of the individuals more often. it's a bit like family at this stage, i can't exactly follow their views or politics on everything, or their prejudices, and i could have a guess that one of them in particular might have some p abhorrent views about some things, but we're such old friends that the familiarity and closeness seems to carry our interactions when we meet, old stories and catching up about the ostensibly boring life stuff. definitely lots of drinking.

maybe ireland is just a conservative country but to me the concept of a married man, or woman, going out with their friends of the same gender now and again, for like a big night out, is extremely common and seems normal. the most well-functioning couples i know spend time together and apart, in this way. i see this with my friends in london, who are mostly irish, all the time.

I'm probably one of the youngest of my pub drinking compadres and tbh the company is bloke-ish but rarely horrible - probably have more issues with the occasional unsavoury racist comment than much in the way of misogyny

my work friends are almost exclusively women - neatly divided into two class-oriented subsets - and I always have excellent times when I go out with either group, whether it's coffee and art gallery or messy pub crawl. there's definitely a different vibe to hanging out with mainly men or mainly women and if push came to shove I probably enjoy the latter slightly more but for me they serve different social needs

In my 30s for the first time in my life, I see more male friends than women regularly - marriage and kids have pushed the latter into more staid group activities like dinner before 10PM bedtimes, with a once or twice a year party. I don't feel that much of a shift in the overall dynamic of friendship, but there is a little less tension about my social group with women I date.

Totally. I can't really shut up about it, but I've been somewhat obsessed with Adrianne Lenker/Big Thief lately. The first song on the new album has been having a huge affect on me, the way I see male-female relationships, sex, etc., it really puts some things together that I sort of was subliminally aware of but hadn't allowed myself to get in touch with. In general her lyrics are so humanizing and I find her very therapeutic to listen to.

― IF (Terrorist) Yes, Explain (man alive), Thursday, October 12, 2017 2:11 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Thanks for this rec.

😊

Btw FGTI's post upthread was really interesting and I kind of want to give it more consideration.

Fgti otm insofar as judging ppl and "getting even" never work as intended & have terrible side effects.

I was particularly struck by the idea that overpunishing rape societally and criminally may have the opposite effect from what's intended, making it so that only the most extreme and obvious cases ever get anywhere. The idea that maybe instead we could ratchet down the level of heat over certain kinds of sexual assault and harassment might bring it out into the open more and allow us to deal with it as a society is a really smart one and one I hadn't ever considered.

I can't even consider fgti's idea dispassionately. If someone told me "as a society, we've decided that we are not going to forcefully disavow some form of racism so we can coax it out into the open and address it more humanely," my takeaway would be "you are telling racists it is open season on me"; I don't see any way to view this discussion about predator behavior differently.

the message i'm getting from this thread btw isn't "don't hang out with men" it's "don't hang out with coworkers"

― call all destroyer, Thursday, October 12, 2017 5:08 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

generally otm

what is meant by ratcheting down the level of heat? since i think for years it was the opposite, that there wasn't enough heat. i guess this is also the place to say that men are not the ones who are largely affected by sexual assault, rape, or even harassment, so it may be easier for men to regard the punishment or outcry as too harsh.

Well, I don't want to speak for fgti, but I think it's possible that both things could be true at the same time -- the problem with the criminal treatment of rape is not the level of *harshness* of punishment imo it's the lack of prosecution whatsover in most cases. Increasing sentences isn't going to lead to more rapes getting reported or prosecuted, the sentences for rapes are already -- in theory -- harsh, it's the enforcement that's the problem. And I think there's this bad dynamic right now where people still have in their mind "rape" as the guy with the ski mask breaking into a woman's apartment and not also the guy at the party with the obviously too-drunk-to-consent woman, but then when you start calling for the more commonplace second type of rape to be treated like the first kind, people think "oh, so some guy is going to get fifteen years in prison because he *made a mistake* at a party." Which of course is really far worse than just a "mistake," but I think the point is that making every incidence of this such a serious crime that it would completely ruin the perpetrator's life *in theory* only makes it less likely that the offenses get prosecuted. And instead we have a binary where people on one side think men just shouldn't be held responsible for that at all. I don't know whether this is right, I'm literally thinking about it as I type and I hadn't really considered it before reading fgti's post.

the original post wasn't about criminal punishment vs empathy, it was about *shunning*/losing careers/etc vs empathy, which is very different.

4. Sexual assault itself, if destigmatized as being a massive transgression, and rather thought to carry the same weight as, say, a DUI or a drunk driving accident, would be easier to address in dialogue, as the entire sexual viability and career of the offender would not be held in the balance, and thus an easier path toward rehabilitation

I can't really argue for a Weinstein losing his career or being shunned, fwiw, but the world is overrun with lesser offenders.

i think a DUI or drunk driving accident are incidents where people were perhaps arrogant in the sense that they thought they would be a) safe, b) not get into an accident, c) make it home without getting pulled over.

sexual assault comes from a very different place, i'm not sure that comparison remotely holds up.

I can't decouple my feelings about systemic abuse from my feelings about capitalism and hierarchy generally. imho one of the very best ways to ensure that future generations of men will be less abusive is to create a more egalitarian society and economic framework in which these power dynamics don't exist to be exploited in the first place, or at least aren't subject to conspiracies of shame and silence due to economic pressures

xpost
i'll stop trying to guess at what fgti meant, but imo the post on the whole was not about criminal punishment (and thus the long sidebar about how we criminally treat rape and sexual assault which the thread was about to go on), it was about how we deal with these men at the workplace, in social settings, as friends, etc.

That was how I took it.

DUI should be punishable by execution xxps

Also, completely shunning / banishing people from your life when they fuck up (speaking strictly of "relatively" minor offenses here) is a good way to leave your own behavior unexamined and unchallenged

i'll stop trying to guess at what fgti meant, but imo the post on the whole was not about criminal punishment (and thus the long sidebar about how we criminally treat rape and sexual assault which the thread was about to go on), it was about how we deal with these men at the workplace, in social settings, as friends, etc.

Right, and much like I put my former coworker on blast after he told me a story where he called a black man a "dumb monkey", I will continue to put on blast guys who say and do horribly inappropriate shit to me, whether it's sexist, racist, or homophobic.

A black person calling out someone for using deeply racist language against black people is somewhat of a different dynamic from men talking to men about being sexist, since the most obviously directly affected demographic isn't party to the conversation, and that makes the dismissal in that context less authoritative. (At least, I *hope* your remarks to said co-worker had considerable impact.)

Maybe this is so obvious as to be not worth mentioning, or I missed it but -
In the scenario where men are hanging out and drinking together and says something uncool or demeaning, sometimes it might have a more positive effect to email the guy next day when everyone's sober, and more importantly, where he's not being called out in front of his peers (cuz guys hate that shit. i guess everyone does?) idk. There are a lot of ways to handle the situation, I guess, and not all situations warrant the same blanket response.

otm^^
wow. i came here to say two things

1) I can't even consider fgti's idea dispassionately. If someone told me "as a society, we've decided that we are not going to forcefully disavow some form of racism so we can coax it out into the open and address it more humanely," my takeaway would be "you are telling racists it is open season on me"; I don't see any way to view this discussion about predator behavior differently.
i can't either. misogyny is the final frontier of reprehensible behavior that people are still asking us to "be cool" about. as a woman with a full range of experiences where being cool did not protect me, this doesn't feel sufficient.

A black person calling out someone for using deeply racist language against black people is somewhat of a different dynamic from men talking to men about being sexist, since the most obviously directly affected demographic isn't party to the conversation, and that makes the dismissal in that context less authoritative. (At least, I *hope* your remarks to said co-worker had considerable impact.)

The conversation ended. Dude looked chagrined but that was about it. He later left the company to go work with another former coworker and is still remembered fondly by several of my contemporaries; every time I remind them that he is a racist and the reaction is always "What???? He said that? No!" and then they go back to reminiscing about the good times we all had together 10+ years ago.

Dude's name doesn't come up very often because the number of people still around who worked with him has diminished dramatically but whenever he comes up, it's always from someone else and it's always a positive mention until I tell my story again, and I tell it every time.

2) i have an example of objectification to share. i have a lot of them over the course of my life (i believe every woman does) but this was the most recent and also the most shocking to me. before i tell you what happened, i'll tell you that i barely ate for days afterward (this is a symptom of extreme stress for me, PTSD i guess idk), called my best friend and told her the whole story, and have told two other irl friends about it -- both of whom reacted supportively. am i "too sensitive"? i have always been sensitive; whether i am "too" sensitive usually depends on whether a person is being defensive about hurting me.

I'll give you the short version: I was looking for a place to sit down at a music festival. and I saw a tree with a spot to rest my back on. It was next to two guys about my age (older than your average attendant but not ancient) and I asked to sit down. Because I am friendly and these duders were about my age, I struck up a conversation with the one sitting closest to me, and we proceeded to have a really nice conversation. He had an interesting job, seemed very smart, liked talking about music, had a 9 month old baby he was getting away from for the first time. I mentioned my partner, we kept talking. I chatted with his friend when he went to the bathroom. It was enjoyable. I felt like it was a pleasant enriching experience. At one point, after we had been sitting there for about 90 min he looked right at me and asked "Can we be...intimate?" and after I recovered from making sure I had heard him correctly, I said "no, I don't know what you mean but I do not want to be intimate with you" and then the guy went on rather profusely about how he wasn't talking about sex. I still have no idea what he actually meant. Not only did our conversation never fully recover from that, I felt like my trust in people had been shattered. It was really bad.

Am I too sensitive? Is this my problem and not yours? Maybe. But that's what unwanted objectification feels like for me. Thinking someone is treating you as an equal human being when in reality they are waiting to pounce feels awful. It's scary too. Makes me not trust people, and I don't like that. It's not fair.

i really don't think men consider how the mere phrasing that they use around women, phrasing that is going to be different from what they use around men, can have a negative effect and elicit feelings of being targeted.

also the most shocking to me
*the most shocking recent event, not the most shocking of all time
i'm not generally a confessional person and i can't believe i typed all that out but it felt good! it is a clear example.

xpost to simon
A black person calling out someone for using deeply racist language against black people is somewhat of a different dynamic from men talking to men about being sexist, since the most obviously directly affected demographic isn't party to the conversation, and that makes the dismissal in that context less authoritative.

while it may be a different dynamic when the person doing the calling out is the victim (be it a black man calling out a white man, or a woman calling out a sexist man) as opposed to someone from the same offending group (in both cases, in most cases, a white man), that doesn't make it any less necessary for white men to call out other white men for chronic mistreatment of women or people of color. it may make the rebuke less "authoritative" in that context, i guess. but different people respond to different forms of social rebuke. some white men are SO white manly that they don't take the advice of people outside of the group seriously. i have witnessed women standing up to men being total dicks, and as soon as she walks away, the guy just smirks to the guy friends standing around and makes a joke about mom getting him in trouble. that kind of dickhead almost takes pride in a woman standing up to him. he might have more of a response from someone in his in-group calling him out.

also i kept typing out "DJP otm" as part of several other messages that i typed and then erased as the thread continued to progress, but DJP otm

that doesn't make it any less necessary for white men to call out other white men for chronic mistreatment of women or people of color

yeah if I implied this I REALLY did not mean to

xp to LL: I don't think you're being too sensitive either, but can I ask -- how much of a role did the fact that he was a married guy with a baby and you had a partner play in how it felt? I mean if you had been single and he had been single and he struck up a conversation with you (and putting aside the weridly gross pickup line he used), would you have felt the same way just because you don't want having a nice, enriching conversation with a man to necessarily have to lead to him wanting to get with you?

Simon, you're 100% otm wrt the problems of capitalism but the problem for me is always shoring up that gap between the way I'd like the world to operate and the way it actually operates. The question I always come back to is: how do we incentivize equality, empathy, basic decency, etc. within a context which fundamentally undermines those notions? How do you incentivize e.g. standing up to one's sexist boss when it may come at the cost of a promotion? Like, in that scenario, I'd put decency before no-holds-barred hustling but there would be no material incentive for me to do so. I'm just more okay with being poor than I am with being a shitty person. It's kind of a facile example, but there are countless instances where people are faced with similar decisions between maintaining decency and status grabs, and I don't know how you encourage people to choose the former in a society where the common good is deemphasized in favor of me gettin' mine.

"Can we be...intimate?"

what a bizarre thing to say. ew. like even if he meant "emotionally intimate" how gross, and also how easily misinterpreted and stupid.

I was talking about this thread with my wife and discussing my/our male friends in general and she did remind me of a guy who was in our social circle for about a decade and how weird/creepy/sexual he could be. He was never threatening or outright but he def lacked boundaries and just felt entitled to erm express his sexual thoughts and opinions inappropriately and people called him on it constantly, to little to no effect. He turned up at a show we were at last year and my wife was like "I am not talking to you" towards him. I didn't really interact with him either beyond a brief exchange of pleasantries. The really weird thing about this guy and how he got that way is... I blame his mom, who raised him largely on her own. I met her and hung out with her on numerous occasions and her eagerness/openness to discuss her son, his sexual proclivities, and sexuality in general with him in public, and with other people in public, just made me think man wtf here is the problem right here - dude was never given any boundaries cuz his mom didn't want to "shame" him or make him feel inhibited, and he turned into an adult with no inhibitions or sense of boundaries, it was just fucked up.

xp

An anomaly in the guys I hang/hung out with, but I had to be reminded of it. My social circle is a good deal smaller now than it was back then, and I had forgotten.

it's about effectively fostering a culture of mutual respect and making sure everyone understands what that looks like from the get-go.

Yes. Model the behaviors you want from others, and to the extent that you have control over community culture/group norms in any situation, there's nothing wrong with being direct and purposeful about stating what acceptable behavior looks like. Have some measure of alertness for low-level comments like, "Women always takes things so seriously" or any kind of gender absolutes being trotted out for you--it's a test. There will be a follow-up comment eventually and it will be worse. It's not that everyone is an evil genius, it's just normal human behavior to see if people agree with you and then build on that. Put your standards out there and expect people to meet them.

The question I always come back to is: how do we incentivize equality, empathy, basic decency, etc. within a context which fundamentally undermines those notions? How do you incentivize e.g. standing up to one's sexist boss when it may come at the cost of a promotion.

Unfortunately I feel the answer to this is that you can't. The mode of production structures all. For now the best thing we can do as men is to police each other more effectively.

Am I too sensitive? Is this my problem and not yours? Maybe. But that's what unwanted objectification feels like for me. Thinking someone is treating you as an equal human being when in reality they are waiting to pounce feels awful. It's scary too. Makes me not trust people, and I don't like that. It's not fair.

― weird woman in a bar (La Lechera), Friday, October 13, 2017 4:23 PM (two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

You are absolutely not *too* sensitive, LL. You've been deceived, lead on to believe you had a nice, even meaningful, contact with a stranger (which can be amazing things). I can imagine you were shattered. It destroys trust in other people, which indeed is not fair. Next time you'll wonder when this particular cat will come out of the bag. It instill suspicion when you do not want it, didn't deserve it, didn't ask for it. It being after 90 mins almost (almost) makes it seem worse than when it's right off the bat. You invested in a contact and when you didn't expect anything like this anymore, bam, there it was.

Have some measure of alertness for low-level comments like, "Women always takes things so seriously" or any kind of gender absolutes being trotted out for you--it's a test. There will be a follow-up comment eventually and it will be worse.

Yup. Letting borderline-of-acceptability remarks or behavior go unremarked upon is an excellent way to make sure that worse trespasses occur down the line.

reminded of when i was watching Billy On The Street with the kids and we were laughing and he was doing that thing where he just runs up to people and maria got disturbed by it when she came in the room and if you watch that show you will notice that when he runs up to a man he usually will say "excuse me sir!" and not be quite as crazy so that he doesn't get beaten to death but when he approaches women he goes totally nuts and just runs up and screams in their face and it completely freaks them out and scares them. and i don't know if i would have noticed the difference in approach if maria hadn't gotten disturbed by it. he definitely thinks its HILARIOUS to scare women. i still think he's funny. but it is handy to have a live-in reality check. it totally makes me see things with different eyes.

you guys would love to hear my classroom stories from the '70s

i don't see any positive value in maleness, or any ("heterosexual") definition of masculinity that isn't toxic. what's the point of hanging out with other guys and talking about, like, batman or some shit? batman isn't important. i'd rather talk about the weather. i'd rather talk about actual important things, like emotions and shit, but guys aren't supposed to talk about their feelings - that makes them weak and feminine.

i'm not surprised that trans people have become more visible in the world today. gender is a construct, and "masculinity" is defined in an increasingly restrictive way that doesn't meet the needs of a lot of biological males.

my worst case suspicion regarding that "can we be intimate?" comment was that it was put out there as a test of sorts, like one that if you responded positively, then it was all good, and if you responded negatively, he could backtrack and say "oh i just meant can we confide in each other about something, ha ha."

i mean i don't even know why you'd say it in either scenario, it was dumb and inappropriate.

Yes. Even though I should really know better by now, my first instinct on those occasions I do hang out with other men is to never betray signs of vulnerability. xp

@ man alive -- totally honestly -- if we had both been single and established that during our conversation, my reaction to his question would/might have been different! Hard to know for sure since the last time I was single was a very long time ago. However, the fact that we had established through conversation that he was a married new dad and I established that I am happily partnered, yeah I felt safe. I thought we had communicated that we were not trying to seduce one another, that we were relating as two people. I liked him right up to that point where he asked me if I wanted to "be intimate".

xposts to simon
oh, my bad! i think i did misunderstand you because i was reading it in the context of your previous post which mentioned that shunning people can lead to the failure to examine oneself.

i knew it was a test -- that's why it was so disturbing
i am not naive, i'm sensitive :)

I thought we had communicated that we were not trying to seduce one another, that we were relating as two people.

yeah, this makes a lot of sense in that scenario, I would say it was the reasonable thing to assume

"Can we be...intimate?"

this is weird and creepy and upsetting but i think maybe not (necessarily) 'objectification'

the "can we be intimate?" question was definitely odd and (at best) inappropriately worded. Instead of backtracking/obfuscating he should have just apologized.

one reason i would consider it objectification is bc i guess you have to consider if he'd have said it to a friendly dude who had sat down under the nearby tree.

The most important social skills I've developed as an adult male (in real life if not always on the internet) is a) knowing when and how to apologize and b) knowing how and when to shut the fuck up.

He shouldn't have asked. It's a fucking weird thing to drop on someone, particularly after 90 minutes of conversation where it's established that you and the person you're talking to are in relationships and, per LL's story, no part of the preceding conversation included the words "open relationship" or "swinging" or "looking to get my groove on".

one of the frustrating things about it is that we have this culture where everybody is individually responsible for his or her words and actions and it stops there, and if you start talking about looking at the larger picture people think you're denying individual responsibility. I hate this way of looking at the world. Maybe if "masculinity" involved people learning to acknowledge their emotions and express them appropriately men wouldn't all be fucking asshole jerkwads, but no, nobody wants to say there's a problem with masculinity, it's just that "men are jerks", full stop.

If all he really wanted to do was move to a more personal/probing realm of conversation I suppose the standard convention would be "can I ask you a kind of personal question" or something like that. (Personally I wouldn't do that in that context.) xps

as i mentioned, going from being on equal footing to being desired "intimately" is objectification
openly desiring when it has been clearly established that desire is inappropriate

he did apologize and the saddest moment was when we had gotten up to go see a performance and he said "i'm making you uncomfortable aren't i?" and i was like "well" and he said goodbye and left. it was disappointing to me. the whole situation was disappointing.

"can I ask you a kind of personal question"
this would have been totally ok

not saying i would answer it but it's an acceptable question

per LL's story, no part of the preceding conversation included the words "open relationship" or "swinging" or "looking to get my groove on".
per reality as well

lechera, yer not too sensitive..a dude shouldn't be asking that IMO in the example you described.

Thin gruel but I suppose it's "good" that he at least recognized he'd made things awkward and hopefully he thought twice about similar interactions in the future

It's like a slap in the face I imagine. It's something so outside of the boundaries and setting you've established in 90mins.

@ mookieproof, I strongly disagree, as somebody who knew Jian Ghomeshi, and saw people wrestling with the idea that this man we'd heard nothing worse than 'an anecdote about a lousy pick-up line'. My father, I've learned, had a reputation for sexual harassment at the faculty-- I am the product of a sexual relationship between a prof and a grad student, as are my younger half-siblings. Obviously, there are Actual Assholes who drug people's drinks and fuck them when they're unconscious-- I'm an abolitionist at heart, but let's put those guys in jail, please. But I intuitively disagree with the idea that a Harvey Weinstein knows what he's doing. I have read many theories on Twitter ("men in positions of power drop names deliberately to show you all that you'll lose if you rat them out") that are just preposterous. I don't think Jian knew what he was doing, or my father either.

@ Karl Malone, I'm just spitballing some ideas! It's been very weird for me.

@ man alive, I'm not arguing that rape is over-punished at ALL. The opposite. It is under-punished specifically because it is over-stigmatized.

@ DJP, I am not in the least suggesting that we "forceable disavow some forms of sexual assault" in order to address it more. I'm suggesting that we acknowledge that "the intersection of capitalism, patriarchy, and sexuality" is something that all men benefit from-- men are all participants, and beneficiaries, in rape culture whether we mean to be or not. I can't participate in a comparative discussion of sexual assault issues to race issues.

@ Simon H, I totally agree!

xxxxxxxxp wow a lot of new posts while I was typing this

when he runs up to a man he usually will say "excuse me sir!" and not be quite as crazy so that he doesn't get beaten to death

― scott seward, Friday, 13 October 2017 17:37

He very slowly tried to kiss people in one scene, including a man who threatened to punch him.

I like Billy Eichner and Eric Andre very much but some of their work just looks like sexual harassment.

what's the point of hanging out with other guys and talking about, like, batman or some shit? batman isn't important. i'd rather talk about the weather. i'd rather talk about actual important things, like emotions and shit, but guys aren't supposed to talk about their feelings

lol I have a former bandmember I still get together with every month or two and we talk about comics and kids and family and jobs and shit, they aren't mutually exclusive. his wife is going through breast cancer treatment, his mom died recently, this was all emotional stuff to talk about.

xp

LL, the context of the situation you describe indicates that you're not being in any way too sensitive about it. Even if partners and babies and extremely awkward verbiage weren't involved, the idea of someone whose existence you've been aware of for the length of a short-ish movie attempting to pursue 'intimacy' is...off-putting?

re: Ghomeshi, back in between the mysterious quitting and his bizarre initial statement, a friend of mine informed me that "pulling a Ghomeshi" was a saying in the CBC offices and it definitely did not refer to bad pick-up lines

Yes. Even though I should really know better by now, my first instinct on those occasions I do hang out with other men is to never betray signs of vulnerability. xp

― a serious and fascinating fartist (Simon H.), Friday, October 13, 2017 12:43 PM (nine minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i do the opposite actually. honestly after years of therapy it is almost a default for me to speak more openly and vulnerably, it feels way more intuitive,, and i find that if i do that kind of thing, other dudes will relax a little and open up and be a little more loose too. and the ones that dont, well who gives a shit then?

btw la lechera in that scenario "can we be intimate" is super fucked, you are not being too sensitive

marcos otm on both counts there

yeah, I get it, it's like finding out someone was just trying to sell you something, but worse

re: Ghomeshi, back in between the mysterious quitting and his bizarre initial statement, a friend of mine informed me that "pulling a Ghomeshi" was a saying in the CBC offices and it definitely did not refer to bad pick-up lines

― a serious and fascinating fartist (Simon H.), Friday, October 13, 2017 9:59 AM (one minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i had heard friend of friend rumours about ghomeishi about a year or so before the shit came out about him. i live in vancouver and know hardly anyone in the arts or media.

i do the opposite actually. honestly after years of therapy it is almost a default for me to speak more openly and vulnerably, it feels way more intuitive,, and i find that if i do that kind of thing, other dudes will relax a little and open up and be a little more loose too. and the ones that dont, well who gives a shit then?

― marcos, Friday, October 13, 2017 11:59 AM (one minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This is really important -- learning to take that risk of being vulnerable can give other guys permission to do it too. And that's how you form the best friendships imo!

Yet another "open secret" no one felt they could speak on due to economic and social pressures. (And of course the CBC specifically squashed internal complaint/investigation.) So fucked. xp

marcos otm

i'm 33, at this point most of my male friends are ones i can be vulnerable with, and would admit they're sensitive. the other ones are sensitive too, and put up harsh walls quick, but that's fine. you can see right through it anyway how they feel tbh

lol I have a former bandmember I still get together with every month or two and we talk about comics and kids and family and jobs and shit, they aren't mutually exclusive. his wife is going through breast cancer treatment, his mom died recently, this was all emotional stuff to talk about.

xp

― Οὖτις

oh, i'm not saying that nobody should ever talk about batman or whatever, talking about stupid trivial shit is important. the problem is that in my experience male conversations are _only_ ever about stupid trivial shit.

I do *eventually* allow myself to be vulnerable with other men but I have to force it; it doesn't come naturally at all. But I have never been to therapy.

Historically, I've found that waiting around until the other party is forced to ask 'hey, lunkhead, are you going to pick up on any of these signals I'm sending and kiss me already or what?' is the surest and safest path to intimacy.

But I intuitively disagree with the idea that a Harvey Weinstein knows what he's doing.

okay. i do not concur at all

one thing that's tough even if yer vulnerable around dudes is being OK with crying. I always feel weird afterwards if I cry in front of a dude, and that's something that's so ingrained it's hard to shake.

maybe i'm a little weird on this, but in these issues i don't really care if he knows what he's doing or not. i think he's responsible for his actions just the same either way. ignorance is no excuse.

Two further thoughts.

The Bryan Singer model of sexuality-- have big parties, invite over a pile of white twinks, offer acting jobs to some of them, fuck some of them-- is extreme, 9th-circle-of-Hell. But it's only the extreme version of any gay relationship. I have a friend in his 50s who is Anderson Cooper-hot and carries cultural capital and spends his private life dating a string of 20-year-old men and dumping them at the moment that the kid falls in love with them. I have a 40-year old gay friend who routinely beds his fans while on tour, like, every night. Should I tell them to settle down? Should I tell them, "your behaviour appears unattractive, from the outside"? or "somebody is going to get hurt if you continue this pattern"?

The reason why I compare this shit to DUI is because it feels, to me, like a less-dangerous version of drunk driving. You're doing something that will probably end up OK and nobody will get hurt. But then somebody gets hurt.

I have another thought but I'll put it in a separate post

one idle thought i've had about masculinity recently is that the casual evolutionary biology take of seeing male dominance as a self-selecting, preferred trait when the human population on earth was much smaller and groups were competing for survival could be used as an argument for opposite traits - like cooperation, empathy, passiveness - being self-selecting today, when we have overpopulation and a different relationship with the world. men seem to want to go back in time and celebrate or embody predatory behavior but that ends up sabotaging their ability to thrive today. in other words, it's 'naturally' better for men to become more diplomatic and less combative in the world now.

The reason why I compare this shit to DUI is because it feels, to me, like a less-dangerous version of drunk driving. You're doing something that will probably end up OK and nobody will get hurt. But then somebody gets hurt.

Just to clarify, by "this" you mean the friends you are describing? Because if you mean Weinstein, I do not and cannot follow the logic at all; this is someone who actively spiked the careers of women who turned him down the wrong way.

Oh okay, so these kinds of things happen all the time in one form or another, I guess, but talking about this stuff over the last couple of days made me pay extra attention to this thing:

So I go to work pretty early because my workplace allows me to do so and, because I work in a big city, it eases my commute significantly to do so before most other people have begun their own commutes. So my train is generally pretty empty, and I'm just in the habit of getting on the same car and sitting in the same seat. In the past few months, there's been this kinda bro-ish older dude boarding the same train on random days. I didn't give him any thought until he started getting to the platform before me and standing where I usually stand. Which is no big deal, but noticeable on a mostly empty platform. Long story short, he's been riding this train long enough to observe my routine and now he's making what seems to be a pointed show of elbowing his way onto the train before me and sitting where I usually sit on this train car full of empty seats. To which I'm just all...really? Is this really all you have, this completely insignificant show of dominance? Are you hoping for a reaction of some sort? And naturally he's one of the full manspread dudes, arms draped over the back of the seats next to him. It's just kind of fascinating from an anthropological standpoint because I don't really care but it's also, y'know, a totally gross reminder of the kinds of things certain dudes do just as a matter of course.

I'll assume that many posters have been arrested for if not charged with DUI.

xp to map - there's a book I want to read called "Hierarchy Of The Forest" that afaict asserts that egalitarian, cooperative behavior is seen more in societies where there is actual hardship, like hunter-gatherers, and people need to stick together. Once you introduce agriculture/surplus, all the nasty stuff has no checks or balances.

@ DJP, I'm talking, specifically, about a party in Montreal called Drones where everyone goes and does drugs and has sex with each other that cannot possibly be 100% consensual, I'm talking about famous queers in NYC who have salons where they read from their latest novel or play for an audience of their peers and their young lovers, I'm talking about every DIY scene across North America and what happens to people like that person in PWR BTTM, I'm talking about Marc Jacobs and his hired sex workers, I'm talking about my father and his students, I'm talking about myself and everybody else who is sexually active and needs to be checked and managed and made sure that they're actions are not harmful. Harvey Weinstein is a monster but, like Bryan Singer, I think his monstrousness is just an advanced form of the same cancer that I'm observing in all these other places and spaces

The reason I'm bringing up DUI is because it's a more dangerous activity that is easier to police, easier to talk about, and far less stigmatized. Everybody has driven drunk at one point, no? It seems that way

Oh okay, so these kinds of things happen all the time in one form or another, I guess, but talking about this stuff over the last couple of days made me pay extra attention to this thing:

So I go to work pretty early because my workplace allows me to do so and, because I work in a big city, it eases my commute significantly to do so before most other people have begun their own commutes. So my train is generally pretty empty, and I'm just in the habit of getting on the same car and sitting in the same seat. In the past few months, there's been this kinda bro-ish older dude boarding the same train on random days. I didn't give him any thought until he started getting to the platform before me and standing where I usually stand. Which is no big deal, but noticeable on a mostly empty platform. Long story short, he's been riding this train long enough to observe my routine and now he's making what seems to be a pointed show of elbowing his way onto the train before me and sitting where I usually sit on this train car full of empty seats. To which I'm just all...really? Is this really all you have, this completely insignificant show of dominance? Are you hoping for a reaction of some sort? And naturally he's one of the full manspread dudes, arms draped over the back of the seats next to him. It's just kind of fascinating from an anthropological standpoint because I don't really care but it's also, y'know, a totally gross reminder of the kinds of things certain dudes do just as a matter of course.

― the scarest move i ever seen is scary move 4 (Old Lunch), Friday, 13 October 2017 17:19 (four minutes ago) Permalink

When I was a teacher and office drone for Kaplan Test Prep, there was this one teacher trainer who was notorious for doing the "handshake flip" -- apparently believing that if he got his hand "on top" of yours in the handshake it showed dominance. I had noticed he did it but just thought it was a weird handshake and had no idea what he was doing until a coworker explained it to me, and I was like "What?! That's the dumbest shit I've ever heard." The next time he did it I surprise-flipped him, so my hand was on top. It was very satisfying.

But I intuitively disagree with the idea that a Harvey Weinstein knows what he's doing. I have read many theories on Twitter ("men in positions of power drop names deliberately to show you all that you'll lose if you rat them out") that are just preposterous.

i'm not sure what you mean by this but i'll ask a question about this scenario:

up the street lives an art gallery owner, who had previously been very much around in our social circle, hanging out at parties w/his wife and daughter, with all of us and our kids. he was mostly close with our friends who live across the street from him.

our close friend (I'll call her "M") was housesitting for our friends who live across from him. while she was there, she was working on a stop motion video project that was expressly about her childhood. a childhood that had her and her sister both sexually abused by a couple of different men her mom dated, which in different ways really wrecked them.

while she was there, there was a knock on the door and it was this guy, who was there to walk our friends' dog. M went to the door and answered and she invited him in, since he owns a gallery and she wanted to show him her work.

As she explained that it was about her childhood sexual abuse, she got very emotional. This guy went over and began hugging her, tightly. she protested, saying she didn't really like being hugged. and he started to caress her and whisper to her, "every one needs a cuddle sometimes..." she says she saw his face for a moment and his eyes were just closed and he was breathing deeply, like in a trance.

eventually she broke free and he almost snapped out of it. then he went and walked the dogs and never spoke of it again. she immediately ran down to our house and came in crying and spent the afternoon hanging out on our couch, afraid to go back there.

this was a couple months ago but it has i think completely set her back. i volunteered to go across the street to confront him but she didn't want me to (though her mom later did!!) and what eventually happened is we all cut him off completely. his wife found out and who knows what's going on there. he claimed it was a "misunderstanding", which is a helluva thing to say when you do that to someone right after finding out their history of sexual abuse.

so did he not know what he was doing? because it felt like to me he discovered rather unexpectedly someone he thought was someone he could victimize and took action.

xp to map - there's a book I want to read called "Hierarchy Of The Forest" that afaict asserts that egalitarian, cooperative behavior is seen more in societies where there is actual hardship, like hunter-gatherers, and people need to stick together. Once you introduce agriculture/surplus, all the nasty stuff has no checks or balances.

― sleeve, Friday, October 13, 2017 12:25 PM (seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yes, sedentism, the shift to crop cultivation, and an increasing reliance on trade directly informed the shift away from the egalitarianism of hunter-gatherer societies. I also have some amateur theories about the advent of The Wall as a concept and the deleterious psychological effect that it had on communities who performed most activities in the open and in plain sight of others in their community, if you're interested in my pamphlet on the subject.

oh definitely, Chellis Glendinning refers to that as "The First Fence" in this excellent book:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/560830.My_Name_is_Chellis_and_I_m_in_Recovery_from_Western_Civilization

I don't know that book! Thank you so much for telling me about that book!

it is really good IMO

Everybody has driven drunk at one point, no? It seems that way

you can drive drunk and get away with it if you don't hit anything. sexual predation by definition involves other people. and harming them. it's a pretty big difference

@ nomar, I don't think the gallery owner knew what he was doing. I think men are often attracted to women who are vulnerable, especially women who profess some kind of victimhood, because they feel some kind of urge toward being a sexual white knight. "This woman is hurting. I will heal her with my listening and then we will have healing sex and I will undo the wrongs of these other, evil men."

I have not driven drunk, or at all. (not hitting anything is luck, tho)

I have walked drunk and ended up in the ER.

xp that is way too sympathetic of a reading for me to get behind

you can drive drunk and get away with it if you don't hit anything. sexual predation by definition involves other people. and harming them. it's a pretty big difference

― mookieproof, Friday, October 13, 2017 6:41 PM (one minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

if you're defining sexual predation to include stuff like propositioning someone who may or may not be made uncomfortable by your advances, or sleeping with someone where there is a power dynamic that means they may or may not feel taken advantage of down the line - then that doesn't seem so different from a dui in the sense of "you might get away with it but also might also hurt someone else"?

@ mookieproof, I'm not talking about sexual predation. I'm talking about assault, breaching of consent, harassment. "Predation" suggests some kind of 1st-degree assault, like, you're planning on assaulting somebody (drugging their drink, i.e.) That's not what I'm talking about. If you're engaging in a pattern of sexually propositioning people who are less powerful than you, or getting drunk and having sex with other drunk people, eventually you will harm somebody.

I thought of this analog specifically regarding a very close friend, who spent a year hooking up with both men and women, usually while under the influence of drugs and/or alcohol. A year went by with a string of "consensual" sexual scenarios, some of them dangerous (from an STI perspective), but none of them actually harmful. Then, somebody was harmed by his behaviour.

"Predation" suggests some kind of 1st-degree assault

this is not how I think of sexual predation - predatory behavior includes patterns of exploiting power relationships to get what you want sexually from people, like an older, more powerful person that routinely "grooms" younger, less experienced sexual conquests. that's predatory.

@ sleeve and nomar, I have read other people talking about this tendency toward sexual white knighthood on Facebook and Twitter. I've actually observed it within myself, too. A friend of my boyfriend's was weird and cold toward me the first couple times we met. "Why doesn't she like me?" I asked my boyfriend. "She doesn't like men, white men especially," he said, "she had a bad experience with a white man several years ago, and hasn't dated anybody since then, and generally doesn't hang out with many other men, especially not white men." I observed in myself a weird rush of desire. Could I be the magical white man that breaks her dry spell? this dark part of my brain thought. It passed. I think it's a thing.

i am p regularly haunted by sexual experiences in the past, mostly from college but some in recent years when i was drinking more regularly, that seem... vaguer than they should, like where both parties blacked out, and at the other end of the blackout i feel like i'm not certain i would've done the same thing sober or if they would have either. these people are still my friends, and we've talked about it, and it's like... fine. but it also isn't fine imo, and i've worked very hard to never experience that kind of ambiguity again (to extend the dui analogy, which i don't think is entirely... appropriate, the one time i drove home drunk was so fucking terrifying that i can't imagine doing it ever again, luckily i currently live in a city where it is unnecessary (hi morbs)). it's the same when i drink (sidenote i feel any discussion about toxic masculinity should include a bold type subsection called "alcohol") and i feel an almost sourceless inspiration to engage in self-harm, which isn't hurting any other person but which is still an extreme form a violence, where i'm like "this isn't me.... but is this me?" observing and interrogating your own behavior is often terrifying and paralyzing and no answer that you wrest from this interrogation is ever completely clarified or easily applied. so i get where fgti is coming from on a micro-level, many men do not have the language with which to process their transgressions as transgressions

on the other hand, i discovered relatively recently that a friend and colleague of mine for many years assaulted another friend of mine. this person was someone i'd had long conversations about feminism with; they were extremely fluent in the fucking language. i cut this person off and honestly didn't even tell them that i was cutting them off, mostly because any time i tried to gently critique their behavior, the words seemed to travel over and get partially absorbed by an enormous sociopathic chasm. this is a person who'd i'd apply fgti's "they didn't know what they were doing," but in this particular case that makes it worse for me, that one's total cluenessness and inability to examine their own behavior (plus tbh their reigning sociopathy) completely insulates them from actually knowing they've done anything wrong

tl;dr it's hard

hopefully we can all figure out some way to dismantle capitalism and masculinity and ride into the utopian future on a wave of gay space communism

@ Οὖτις I agree with you, but all sexual relationships contain an imbalance of power. Youth/beauty is itself its own form of power but people don't talk about it, I guess, that much. A friend of mine who has a disability was seduced by a heroin user, who gave him a blowjob, slept in a bed with him, then stole musical equipment off him, stole money off him, started threatening him. It was heartbreaking to talk about this with my friend. My friend, who, as a result of his disability, had extremely limited (maybe even no) prior sexual experience, couldn't bring himself to accept that his young lover was actually NOT in love with him, and had only been using him for drug money. It was fucked. Anyway this is a digression

@ BradNelson, I think you should talk with that friend about this assault, as I am attempting to do

oh i guess when i was typing that out i forgot to add that i am literally way too mad at said person to actually be able to talk to them at the present moment, bc when i am mad i get very inarticulate; also the assault didn't happen to me, and for that reason it is hard to talk definitively about it

but thank you for the suggestion. perhaps at one point i will be able to

The reason I'm bringing up DUI is because it's a more dangerous activity that is easier to police, easier to talk about, and far less stigmatized. Everybody has driven drunk at one point, no? It seems that way

― fgti

what? no, not "everybody" has driven drunk. i haven't ever driven drunk. i was creepy to a girl at least once, primarily as a result of being socially awkward and inept. nobody called me out on it at the time, but it's been twenty years and i still feel guilty about it.

@ BradNelson, I think you should talk with that friend about this assault, as I am attempting to do

― fgti, Friday, October 13, 2017 11:07 AM (three minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

oh also i am not sure the person who experienced the assault would want me to do this on their behalf; pretty sure they don't want to talk about it or have it talked about (something i have transgressed even in bringing up my own anecdotal relationship to it)

Think the DUI analogy has run its course tbh

I think men are often attracted to women who are vulnerable, especially women who profess some kind of victimhood, because they feel some kind of urge toward being a sexual white knight. "This woman is hurting. I will heal her with my listening and then we will have healing sex and I will undo the wrongs of these other, evil men."

i tend to follow the maxim "don't attribute to malice what you can attribute to stupidity" but this postulates a level of stupidity that i find scarcely credible and not really different to criminal intent

hopefully we can all figure out some way to dismantle capitalism and masculinity and ride into the utopian future on a wave of gay space communism

the dream

btw there are elements of trad masculinity, 'performative' or not, that linger in gay culture specifically, and I enjoy some of them

(not pup play)

Only an asshole would make a move on someone who was upset and had just shared something vulnerable about themselves. Xp

'This woman is hurting. I will heal her with my listening and then we will have healing sex and I will undo the wrongs of these other, evil men."

i.e. the Clapton/Mayer guitar god wing of musicians

btw there are elements of trad masculinity, 'performative' or not, that linger in gay culture specifically, and I enjoy some of them

(not pup play)

― ice cream social justice (Dr Morbius), Friday, October 13, 2017 11:19 AM (two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i mean also this kind of abuse isn't exclusive to masculinity either, i use it almost as shorthand for a set of behaviors that tend recreate themselves through generations of men

I have read many theories on Twitter ("men in positions of power drop names deliberately to show you all that you'll lose if you rat them out") that are just preposterous.

i think this is incorrect btw, i think this is not a theory but a fact of life. for example all of these women coming forward mentioning how Weinstein would mention all his did for certain actresses, the implication being their careers were in the balance...

i would suggest a) Weinstein never did anything *positive* for anyone careerwise, bc those he cited were already at a level or in a position where their trajectory couldn't be stopped, and b) he definitely boxed out others who turned him down or protested. if anyone in the latter group made it, it was because they found their way through Hollywood on their own and didn't let him stop them no matter what he did.

The DUI thing wasn't even an analogy, really! I mean, it was in my head, but I was just stating that I wished "creepy behaviour" could be de-stigmatized, and used DUI as an example of something that was just as commonplace, more harmful, but somehow less stigmatized

I find fgti's foucaultian contention that "power" differentials always exist in sexual relationships distressing. It's "true" to an extent, but it shouldn't matter if there is communication and trust. In that case you are experiencing something "with" someone; it's not two people trying to get things from one another.

But that definitely won't work if people are too drunk to communicate with one another. So yeah, drunken hookups are not good if you want to minimize the possibility of unknowingly exploiting someone.

sorry for characterizing it as an analogy, fgti!

xxp (his did=he did)

you can probably see a pattern of performers whose careers seemed to be going places but were halted in place or never got going. Claire Forlani is actually a very good example, she was for a couple of years in many, many projects and was a memorable presence. You have to wonder what HW did.

DUI is a good analogy for this danger.

they feel some kind of urge

possibly so. they also have brains, and perhaps even a sense that other people are not toys, and responsibility for how their urges affect other people

i mean, i'm a dude. i'm aware of what having an erection does to one's mental clarity. yet we are more than our urges. specifically planning and targeting vulnerable people to assuage one's hard-on is fucked up and sociopathic. it may be common but that doesn't make it something that should be destigmatized

sorry for characterizing it as an analogy, fgti!

― ToddBonzalez (BradNelson), Friday, October 13, 2017 6:24 PM (one minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I'm guilty of the same, apols

@ nomar. I'm not denying that Weinstein did that exact thing. I'm just saying that I don't think this is the root cause of why men in positions of power practice name-dropping.

Or maybe it is? As I stated above, when I was in a room once with [a famous gay actor in his 50s], [a famous gay author in his 60s], [a famous gay composer in his 70s] and [a highly accomplished gay academic in his late 40s], and they all had lovers younger than me (I was 29 at the time), and were casually talking about how Marc Jacobs had his secretary arrange for trade to appear at his hotel room every night, I couldn't help but wonder, "what comes first? Is it the accumulation of power that allows men to feel comfortable exploiting their agency to affect sexual relationships with people younger than them? Or is it the desire for sexual relationships with people younger than them that causes men to accumulate power?"

Sorry if I'm posting too much

White knight as one to heal and help a vulnerable woman is somewhat reductive to me. IME any attempts to fix anyone come from not being able to fix myself completely and not accepting I'm flawed. It's nothjng to do with heroics for me. I've learned to not bother trying to fix anyone cuz it fucking sucks for all concerned

don't apologize fgti you're bringing a totally different and valuable perspective in

@ Treeship, I think Foucault and I filter our "there is not such thing as a sexual relationship without a power imbalance" conclusion through a gay lens.

@ mookieproof, I'm of the opinion that all men's actions, and capitalism as a whole, are entirely the result of The Possibility Of A Boner.

Gay space communism sounds fun, sign me up please. And absolutely agree that fgti's perspective is thought-provoking and valuable.

Anyway more anecdata: male friend of mine (childhood playground buddy, high school classmate, occasional bandmate), roughly my age, so 45-47. In general a socially liberal, intellectually nerdy, feminist-allied, social-justice-enthusiast Sensitive New Age Guy, more or less like me. Nontoxic.

Anyways he's become a father recently. I got him to come out to a divey bar, bought us both a lot of bourbon, and we were shooting the shit as we normally do (catching up on people from the old neighborhood, trading in-jokes, talking culture and music and such). I tried to draw him out (gently) on parenthood and how it feels - how it might rearrange one's priorities, what it might do to one's social life, whether it alters one's general perspective on the universe.

It was like pulling teeth.

Some guy friendships just seem to take on a structure that constrains interaction within safe boundaries. Sometimes, our mode is such that we can have utterly sincere, profoundly moving heart-to-heart talk about a teacher we had in fifth grade. But if the topic is "how the fuck does marriage work?" or "damn, things are very different with a baby" or "I am terrified about death" or "what if I lose my job?" some kind of failsafe kicks in and we clam up. Anything relating to one's own vulnerability is much harder to talk about. At heart there's some pack-animal thing where the dog who shows his belly is forfeiting hierarchical dominance or something.

whoa, fgti and his blind items ;)

fwiw i've recently had a... playful... relationship with a much younger man in the arts, and he's got all the power. It's strange.

{i'm not painting myself as exploited, to be clear)

The Possibility Of A Boner

probably my least favorite concept album

re: The Possibility Of A Boner, there are different kinds of boners, different kinds of desire. they aren't all about damaging or exploiting someone, you know?

My theory of desire is this picture I drew on my phone

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C-w6kScUMAARA_f.jpg:small

Quick survey for those interested: how many of the rest of you never had an actual conversation with your father?

Like a father who was actually physically present for all/most of your upbringing.

I have a ton of issues with my dad and am not currently engaging with him, but both my sister and I have definitely had "real" talks with him at various points. The problem is that he forgets we had the conversations.

Quick survey for those interested: how many of the rest of you never had an actual conversation with your father?

I am not in this group, but a relevant recent story: I went to a cousin's wedding a couple weeks back and my dad (early 60s, I'm 31) got fairly drunk and started berating me for not getting up and dancing with the many inebriated women at this wedding. "If I were you I'd be all over that!" To which I answered "I have no idea which of these people I'm related to, and also, I can't possibly describe how little interest I have in doing that regardless." In conclusion, I hate weddings.

I have a good relationship with my dad, conversations included (usually prompted by some kind of crisis or major event, but not always)

all sexual relationships contain an imbalance of power

this is true about virtually everything, not just sexual relationships. but where that power imbalance matters in sexual relationships is how it's used - if power is exercised to take advantage of someone or coerce them, then that's wrong. that's where the predation is.

many xps

my dad can be a huge asshole, is often narcissistic, can be an enormous insensitive bully and a pompous ass when arguing with him but overall i appreciate and respect him and admire many qualities about him. he was a pretty good dad overall but there are times when hate talking with him, because he is often narcissistic it is difficult to approach him about a personal issue because he will end up just talking about himself

Like a father who was actually physically present for all/most of your upbringing.

― the scarest move i ever seen is scary move 4 (Old Lunch)

hahahaha, that's me out

it's kind of a weird one for me, because my dad was always more emotionally present for me than my mom was. i might have actually talked about stuff with him if he wasn't literally hiding from all human contact for most of our overlapping existence.

my dad calls my mom "woman" (just "woman", and sometimes "tiny woman") and has an interpretation of the bible that involves him being the Head of the Household with final authority, literally handed down from God, over all important decisions.

@ mookieproof, I'm of the opinion that all men's actions, and capitalism as a whole, are entirely the result of The Possibility Of A Boner.

Idk, I think there are lots of ego-driven actions in the ambition/'leave a mark' category that don't necessary have anything to do with boners or the possibility thereof. Maybe it comes from the same primal procreative urge but don't have anything to do with actual sex or even the fantasy of it.

my dad can be a huge asshole, is often narcissistic, can be an enormous insensitive bully and a pompous ass when arguing with him but overall i appreciate and respect him and admire many qualities about him. he was a pretty good dad overall but there are times when hate talking with him

replace narcissism with "reactionary contrarianism" and "being a pedant" and this is my precise relationship to my dad also

but where that power imbalance matters in sexual relationships is how it's used - if power is exercised to take advantage of someone or coerce them, then that's wrong. that's where the predation is.

many xps

― Οὖτις, Friday, October 13, 2017 8:05 PM (nine minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

'take advantage of' seems fairly hard to define though? if there is a power imbalance then how can the more powerful person know for sure that the other person won't feel taken advantage of, regardless of the former's intentions?

yeah that does get into intent, but the first step in avoiding it is obviously not doing it intentionally.

I think the closest to a conversation I ever had with my dad was:

Me (age 15 or so): I don't understand why money is so important.
Dad: That's just the way it is.

Otherwise, probably the most revealing thing he ever said was that when he died he just wanted to be tossed in a ditch on the side of the road (nb. we did not honor those wishes, sorry dad).

My father and I can happily talk for hours about Flaubert, David Bowie, Mozart, drinking, Cezanne, architecture, Blondie, Proust, or sexual exploits. But we have not ever ever ever talked about my parents' divorce, Vietnam, bullying, my childhood, or his childhood.

as in the kind of scenarios that prompted this whole discussion - rich and powerful man treats younger less powerful women as disposable sexual conquests. don't do that.

xp

lol Morbs I posted those blind items for you, you probably know exactly the crew I'm talking about

And yeah. In the interest in protecting the majority of survivors (female, young), "power" is something that's generally talked about as being in the hands of older, less-fuckable men, who have the money and the agency. But youth and beauty and sexual viability are its own power.

I've felt exploited in a relationship, once, when I realized that my lover (ten years younger) was actually not going to return the money he'd borrowed from me, in fact, he was just going to pocket it and pretend that it wasn't a loan. That guy totally sucked!

Worse than that, a friend of mine has a disability that has rendered him (and I say this as kindly as possible) unfuckable. He was preyed upon by a young man with a heroin addiction, given a blowjob, told he was loved, slept next to, and then squeezed for professional favours and cash for the following year. My friend was so fucked up about this. He couldn't deal with the fact that this man who said he loved him was actually just using him. The dissonance he was experiencing was overwhelming.

And ya @ Οὖτις

I just, again, reject the idea that people even like Harvey Weinstein at all have any idea what they're doing. People who are drugging women's drinks? yes, they know what they're doing. People surfing a power structure to behave in grossly inappropriate ways toward women? I doubt they have any idea.

I have a close relationship with my father.

When I turned 35, and saw my boyfriend-of-many-years start to prioritize his lovers over our relationship, and found myself doing the same, and saw many of my friends' marriages fall apart, usually because one person left the other for a younger lover, leaving behind kids and stability for The Possibility Of A Boner, I started to feel like toxic masculinity was not a side effect of capitalism and patriarchal construct, but actually a biological imperative, perhaps linked to the moment in men's lives when their boners become less possible? I certainly remember the captivating excitement of having a teenage-sized erection when I first hooked up with somebody who wasn't my boyfriend, it felt like "holy shit, I'm not one foot in the grave after all"

So, I decided to ask my father about this, as a man who was married five times. I asked him if he felt that there was some link between a desire for a new relationship with biological function, like, the imperative toward procreation (and thus immortality) was linked toward boner strength, which is why a dude like him would leave four wives and remarry increasingly younger women. I asked him point-blank: was this because your boners were getting less frequent and you felt a biological imperative to have a younger wife? (My father is a scientist.)

He gave me a weird answer that I didn't expect. He said, "all my younger wives and lovers came to me. I've never actively pursued anybody in my life." I wanted to talk about boners, but he gave me this defensive answer. Like, really, Dad? You need to express that to me? Of course these women were drawn to you, you were an eminent scholar, top of your field. Anyway, it wasn't a useful conversation in the end I guess.

But yeah, my father clearly had no idea that his actions may have been exploitive. And if he was carrying any guilt about it? he was creating scenarios in which he was guilt-free. And then extending those scenarios to me with little-to-no provocation. I don't think abusers know what the fuck they're doing.

IDK, it's pretty hard for me to see what he did in these accounts as much different from drugging a woman's drink:
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/from-aggressive-overtures-to-sexual-assault-harvey-weinsteins-accusers-tell-their-stories

e.g. forcing a woman's head down onto you as she is saying "over and over, ‘I don’t want to do this, stop, don’t'"

fgti - sounds like some frog + scorpion "it's just my nature" angle

Right. Weinstein seems like a serial predator who understood he was pushing women into non-consensual encounters. This kind of thing is really different than misreading social cues or being (perhaps wilfully) oblivious to power differentials in one's relationships.

One time I hooked up with a dude who told me he was worth $30 million. I was giving him a blowjob and I really wasn't into it and wanted to stop. The sudden thought "this guy is worth $30 million" crossed my mind, and with that thought in mind, I redoubled my fellatious efforts. (He wasn't worth $30 million, in the end. Who was exploiting who, in that situation? I wonder.)

Not that anyone here is trying to blur that line. I am just saying as a side note that there are true blue abusers out there who knowingly hurt people.

self xp

Who was exploiting who, in that situation?

mutually exploitative relationships can occasionally work out on balance lol

lol Morbs I posted those blind items for you, you probably know exactly the crew I'm talking about

naaah, I'm (almost) never hip to such networks; i'd guess 1 out of 4 suspects there, with luck

One of the bigger revelations I've had in recent years is that, as a straight white dude, the Golden Rule is an insufficient place for me to start from wrt relating to those who aren't white/hetero/male/etc. Like, I long thought that treating everybody equally was enough without taking into account that, for example, just because I'm pretty darn unimposing compared to most guys, I'm still a guy, and some people are always going to see me as a representative of Guyville and relate to me in terms of their past relationships with guys. Trying to recognize and empathize with the larger context through which others might be seeing me has been a big deal, and it's an obstacle I think a lot of people have trouble overcoming (see #notallmen).

Lol @ outic

Yeah, I have said several times in this thread "Harvey Weinstein and people like him" and I gotta retract. I just re-read the Ronan Farrow thing and Weinstein is some next-level monster.

Trying to recognize and empathize with the larger context through which others might be seeing me has been a big deal, and it's an obstacle I think a lot of people have trouble overcoming (see #notallmen).

My very healthy and normal response to this problem has been to not date

Jesus, been reading this thread and Weinstein stuff, then within five minutes saw article about the dude from Real Estate (who I was never a fan of, but know one of the dudes) and then this (who I was definitely a fan of):
https://www.stereogum.com/1967168/the-gaslamp-killer-responds-to-allegations-that-he-drugged-and-raped-two-women/news/

xpost Sad lol. I geddit. The inherent inequality of power dynamics that are much bigger than yourself and about which you yourself have limited ability to change can be paralyzing, for sure.

Gaslamp Killer's response statement is interesting, struck me as possibly the least objectionable one I've seen that still constitutes a denial

Yeah, I can't tell if it's just an unusually well-manicured version of the stock response or if it's a genuinely unusual situation, though I strongly suspect it's the former.

Kind of hard to believe him when it appears that one woman accused him, then he literally went to the other one to say "back me up here," and she was like "what the fuck, you raped both of us!"

The best benefit of doubt I could give him is maybe he was intoxicated and doesn't remember the whole series of events.

i have a question, and please do not feel like you need to respond or talk about it if you don't want to, but have any men posting itt been sexually assaulted before?

i have been, by an older guy, J, when i was a teenager. i think i was 16. J was probably 25 or so. it took me about 10 years to really understand that it was sexual assault, rape? i think so, given his age and mine, and that i was pretty intoxicated. it’s been a hard thing to process, for years i just thought, no, it wasn’t, because i wanted it, too. but looking back it was a fucked up experience.

J was the older cousin of a close friend of mine, and he would often housesit/babysit when my friend's mom was out of town. all of us thought he was a fun, outgoing, and hilarious dude, he would let us throw big parties at the house, buy beer for us, get drunk and smoke weed with us, tell us hilarious jokes. he was openly gay, quite flamboyant, and made frequent jokes about it, and among a bunch of teenage dudes attending a very homophobic catholic boys high school i found it wonderfully refreshing that everybody just loved J and set aside the rampant homophobia. the parties at my friend’s house when J housesat were generally the most fun parties we all went in high school.

at that particular time, a male friend, M, and i had an ongoing sexual relationship that we didn't share or talk about with anyone else. we didn’t even really talk about it between each other, it was always just “you wanna smoke a bowl and mess around a little?”) and that was that. M was possibly the most popular kid in any social circle i was a part of, but we were well aware that if our sexual relationship became public knowledge we would've probably been tortured and alienated. there were no openly gay kids at my high school, the harassment and bullying would've been too intense, all these kids' love for our friend's older gay cousin J notwithstanding. at the time i was not really sure if i was gay or bisexual, i knew that i was really attracted to women but i also really loved being sexual with M and fantasized about it all the time.

anyways during one of these parties when J was housesitting, i was very drunk and high and chatting it up with J. he was pretty drunk, too, i think. he was an opera and men's choir singer and he loved all kinds of music, and we're talking about music that we like. i really loved the pet shop boys at that point and when i mentioned them, J asked me, jokingly, “ha are you suuuuure you're not gay????”

no one to whom i would safely feel responding honestly to that question had ever asked me that before, and my inhibitions were down because i was pretty drunk and high, so i responded “uhhhh yea i’m not really sure” and i started to tell him about M and i, this secret that no one knew and it immediately felt so exciting and refreshing to be able to say it to somebody! and he then says excitedly “oh wow we gotta go talk!” and so we went to an empty room and i start telling him more and more about everything that’s going on.

he then, after i’ve told him this secret about myself and all this stuff i’m going through, says to me, “i really want to kiss you right now.” we kiss, and at that point i’m so excited by the attention. despite really wanting to date girls, i did not have much luck until college, and so to have someone show that attraction to me and seduce me felt really thrilling. he then took me to an empty bedroom upstairs where we spent the night together having sex.

i woke up the next day feeling so hungover, anxious, scared and ashamed. i remember taking a shower but feeling like i couldn’t get clean. mostly i just felt in a daze though. it’s weird, despite being so intoxicated i remember that night very clearly.

i saw J here and there at a number of subsequent parties. i kept kind of a distance and we were never sexual again. he asked me once “how’s the gay thing going?” and i was scared and just told him that, actually, i wasn’t thinking about it much because there was a girl i was crushing on really hard.

i feel like i put the whole thing out of my mind for years, until i was in therapy in my mid-20s and began to think about the whole dynamic. why hadn’t i considered it to be sexual assault/rape? how would i have responded if i heard about a 25-year-old straight dude buying beer for a teenagers party and then fucking a drunk and high 16-year-old girl? i still don’t know what to do with this memory sometimes, and i don’t always know how it fits into my sexuality as a whole or my life as a whole or my ideas about sex, consent, and sexuality as a whole. maybe sometime i will. right now the memory is there and sometimes it feels weirdly erotic and exciting and sometimes it just feels like shit.

marcos <3

wow that's intense

I do not think your story is that unusual as far as young men and early homosexual experiences go tbh

marcos <3

marcos <3

marcos <3

^

sometimes it feels weirdly erotic and exciting and sometimes it just feels like shit.

This is amazing. I don't want to get into the couple times I was assaulted as a child, but one of these men I was like really in love with, and I still feel completely confused by what happened

Thank you marcos for sharing

thank u all <3

Honestly I'm not comfortable disclosing my most upsetting brush with this subject (I was not directly involved; my then-partner was) but suffice to say it still has a profound impact on my life

<3 marcos

yeah I grew up associated w/hippie 70's communes and a guy crept into the room I was sleeping in one night (I was maybe 10?) and tried to molest me, I laid face down w/my hands over my genitals and passively resisted so he went away. for years I thought of this as a victory, and only late-20s therapy revealed the extent of the damage (sleep issues, etc.).

the killer thing back then when I started talking about it (late 20s) was that my mom still wanted to call the guy a friend. I'm not sure how we got over that in our relationship, but we did. there's more but this thread ain't 77.

Marcos <3

love and empathy to everybody here who's been victimized

i look back on my own drunken sexual history and tho i don't think i've ever crossed a hard line there's enough there to make me pretty ashamed of myself

marcos!

I spent a lot of my childhood with a family where the father later turned out to have molested someone I knew, I don't really want to say more than that about the specifics, but with my experience of being around the guy it was so not shocking that my reaction when I was told was pretty much "of course." He had been extremely inappropriate and disgusting with me and touched me in "non-sexual" inappropriate ways many times, hugs, kisses on the cheek, grabs that sort of thing. I was very resistant to it and while I don't want to blame the person who was his victim I think this might have had something to do with why he didn't choose me to prey on further. I can still smell/feel his gross facial hair and it's nauseating me as I type. What was shocking, and still hard for me to get over, was the realization that my parents had let me spend a huge amount of my childhood with this person, him driving me to school sometimes, me sleeping over at their house, etc. For years and years.

don’t always know how it fits into my sexuality as a whole or my life as a whole or my ideas about sex, consent, and sexuality as a whole. maybe sometime i will. right now the memory is there and sometimes it feels weirdly erotic and exciting and sometimes it just feels like shit.

^^^ see, THIS, right here, this is life.

So much of being a man for me is being scared of myself. I don't know, is manhood just a hormonal imbalance? The amount of anger and hatred and desire for cruelty I feel, no idea what to do with it, no idea how to even talk about it. Can I get shots to make me a gay space communist?

aw sleeve that is terrifying xps

man alive too

I don't know that I'm "scared of" myself per se but I do consider my retirement from dating to be a form of public service. (*Not* because I'm worried about trespassing in some way, just because I'm consistently an emotional wreck and too disgusted with dating culture to participate with any enthusiasm.) Disengagement feels like the only dignified option I can execute reliably.

and co-sign on

love and empathy to everybody here who's been victimized

dating isn't dignified, everybody who does it is a needy, fucked-up mess trying to pretend they aren't. but i've spent long periods of time single because i was too fucked up to be in a relationship, and i'm certainly not going to judge.

the killer thing back then when I started talking about it (late 20s) was that my mom still wanted to call the guy a friend.

― sleeve, Friday, 13 October 2017 20:19 (thirty-four minutes ago) Permalink

btw the reason I was reminded of my account was because of this. My mom did eventually end her friendship with them, but she put me in harms' way for years with a guy she knew there was something not right about, but I guess in her flawed way she was blindered about it. The family was like my second family growing up. I can't imagine letting my kids be alone with someone I had even the slightest bad inkling about. So I can see how that's one of the hardest things to deal with -- the lack of protection from someone who is supposed to protect you.

marcos <3

sleeve too. what a mess we live in.

these days I view it as a battle scar in the struggle to raise liberated children, which occasionally (frequently?) backfired in the 70's. There was so much of an emphasis on breaking with former traditions that an anything-goes vibe left a lot of room for people to take advantage of the lack of clarity regarding the brave new hippie world's limits.

yeah there was this strain of parenting that didn't want to be "uptight" or "inhibited"

I don't see so much of that these days re: sexuality

(I def see a lot of "let yr kid be whatever they want" re: gender tho)

that was it exactly re" not wanting to be "inhibited", in fact one of the things that made my parents leave the commune as members (we already lived off-land) was that this same guy had a community-approved "consensual" relationship with one of the other boys there who was slightly younger than me. we're still friends with the family 40 years later, but I have no idea how this all played out between them all in the long run. note that my parents had no idea anything had happened between this dude and me when they left.

n.b. this was in like 1978 or something

OMG, I totally hung out with a dude friend all day today at the store! Such good timing for this thread. My pal Willie. Who is an excellent musician and an excellent friend. We even drank some beers. Such a rarity in my boring life. It was fun. We just talked about music and I played him cool music really loud. It was nice.

If it's Willie L4ne I feel like he is one of the least macho dudes ever. great guy.

Maybe move thread to 77?

Not to speak for anyone, but

If this thread moves there i'm out

yeah keep it here pls

I'm glad this thread is working so well so far. I feel like even five years ago it might not have.

I'm good with it here fwiw

im fine with it here

When I was a kid my mom would force me to wear women's clothing as if it were normal... not dresses or anything, but clothing with a feminine flair. She did it so I would attract violence from other people, which I most certainly did! She'd make me hang out with kids who'd torture and murder animals in the woods I told her about.

The worst of it was getting kidnapped and almost murdered at 10 years old, which I had to escape from like in a fucking episode of 24. And they just laughed in my face, and my brother brought my kidnapper home to show me my life meant nothing to them.

My entire family created this fake identity of me as a gay faggy woman loser... when I was actually a pretty masculine guy. Heterosexual, too!

The crippling PTSD they induced in me they used as fuel for this alternate identity, because weak = woman/gay/non-man in our culture. It wasn't helped when I got molested at 14 by two older men I met off the internet, because I was forced to live in isolation from all human contact, and any human being taking interest in me was like water in a desert from genuine solitary confinement. Theoretically, the only salvation was school..

Which didn't work out. My older brother told everyone in high school I was gay after I got molested, and they all believed him, so I had to spend my entire high school career with everyone convinced I was gay. I'd ask girls out, and they'd say, "I thought you were gay!!!" and friends moms would say, "don't be alone with him, he's gay! Watch out!"

Of course I was never gay, or a woman, or even all that feminine. Just a regular heterosexual guy. That was a real head trip to live through. The foundation that built on led me to getting sexually harassed by creepy as fuck women and men at work... so on and so forth.

The world's a pretty fucked up place! I've made my peace with all this, so there's nothing "downer" here from me. And I left out the worst stuff.

Good vibes to you all who've lived through shit, it's nice in a way to see that it's not just me who lived through crap...

I'm having a little trouble with this narrative and especially the "faggy"/but I'm masculine part. If you're trolling uh fuck you

The "faggy" is what was forced on me. The "masculine" is what I personally identify with. I was a bare knuckle boxer when I was kid, my dream was to go to West Point and be one of those great generals from WW II I'd read about, maybe a captain of industry like Carnegie.

I was a fierce, terrible motherfucker. And they put that shit on me because they're the same way, just beyond psychopathic. I'm telling this because I think it's darkly hilarious, and I also consider it a badge of victory I survived that shit and made it out better than most people make out of their normal, healthy lives. Apple doesn't fall from the tree...

No, I'm not trolling you. This is real shit. There's way worse out there, and I've seen it with my own eyes. Ex. a case I worked on where a father chopped up his family and threw them out in garbage bags on garbage day. That one didn't make the news.

A - it's not darkly hilarious
B - claiming that a body in garbage bags didn't make the news is not helping your case

It wasn't "a body", it was an entire family. I think it's darkly hilarious, because if you lived through it and didn't, you'd blow your brains out.

note: my story as darkly hilarious, not that awful case I worked on...

ILX 2017, where someone opens up about being molester and abused and is immediately shouted down because it wasn't PC enough, kudos

*molested

uh Whiney are you familiar with carpet_kaiser?

Beyond politics threads, not really

Aw hi whiney, go fuck yourself and your new leaf of convenient concern troll bullshit.

I think the issue most of the time is kaiser appleton's posts tend to be phrased just about as melodramatically as possible, not so much that he isn't sufficiently PC or whatever. he's mellowed a little since his first handle got banned but that's not a high bar, and after a whole thread of guys opening up about rough, ugly experiences growing up, to be like "yo yo but my ENTIRE FAMILY is PSYCHOPATHS" is at the very least a technical foul

Guys whiney is here and he's worried about everyone's feelings as usual

finally we can talk about our feelings

seriously this thread has been good so far, KIU, KIP, etc.

There's no reason to disbelieve kaiser's claim that he suffered trauma and abuse but his way of talking about it has concerned a lot of posters over a long period of time. The specifc details he's shard seem a little unbelievable but unbelievable things happen I guess. I don't know how to phrase this without sounding condescending, but I really, really hope kaiser has someone to talk to about all of this in real life, hopefully a mental health professional.

Ahahahahaa. Sorry dudes. I forgot once again I can't talk about my life under any circumstance ever. I know the deal, trust me.

Melodrama. Fuck you. Fuck you all! Now you see why I think this is darkly hilarious.

I'm with whiney on this. Kaiser has talked about his family's abuse and his trauma before and I know he annoys you guys and he's over the top, but I think we should treat him at least as if we take him at his word, even if what he says isn't 100% true. not everyone is gonna communicate like the quintessential ilxor and this in fact seems like the source of most of the conflicts around here, because most of us don't communicate like quintessential ilxors all of the time.

Fuck you too! It is hilarious.

"That modifier is always hilarious, by the way," he posted, darkly.

It's definitely not hilarious. Carpet kaiser is clearly a person in distress. Shouting him down or insulting him is definitely not the right thing to do.

like, say instead, "that's terrible, I'm sorry that happened to you, btw it makes me uncomfortable when you say 'faggy' as if that were a bad thing."

I think you mean darkly shouted down

anyway moving on:

Lads

Yes I'm sorry, it was insensitive to react with disbelief when you said you found a garbage bag full of people and no one ever noticed, obviously you are a reliable source in all those other cases silly me.

even if what he says isn't 100% true

Here's the thing: this is 100% true. There are witnesses you can talk to, who are very real people, respectable people, who've told me to get the hell out of dodge from that scene.

The fact that you all can't even bear to think this could possibly be real... yeah. How do you think I feel having lived through it. Ahahahahaha! That's all I can say to that. Just laugh.

Yeah, moving on. I keep forgetting this stuff is like this...

fwiw I just think you're probably in your cups just a little whenever you post, thus the OTTness. your previous incarnation was insufferable on the politics threads though. since this is a thread about maleness, consider my feedback the equivalent of a friendly punch in the shoulder that's intended to get you to take it down a notch.

If I come across as OTT, it's probably because I use language like knives to take out my anger, and I do that on the internet. Cuz ya know, I'd be living in a dumpster if I did any of that in real life... I'm probably going to take up a combat sport to deal with that particular issue.

you use language like melon ballers

don't take up a fucking combat sport, find a decent therapist that's "on network" and stick to it. goofy ass mindfulness exercises and talking through stuff with a trained LCSW might do you a world of good.

The combat sports is because I have a nuclear level of energy inside of me, and no therapist can do anything about that! I mean dude, I come from a family of military people, entrepreneurs, boxers, and more, who lust after destroying people, and the world, in total warfare.

I'm a decent guy with a conscience, but I have so much energy inside of me I could destroy a fucking city. That's how it feels, at least. I need an outlet for that.

If I can find a therapist who has fuck all about what I'm dealing with, all the better, but I haven't found one yet. The best I've found are authors like John Le Carre who sort of get it.

Okay, punching people in a ring with pads and helmets might be a worthwhile outlet, but a lot of people here that care about angry internet randos have suggested you keep plugging away on the talk-to-a-professional front.

good mourning!

https://24.media.tumblr.com/a16a78dc124f5b249276aa292e81307b/tumblr_morqmcKh6p1qakh43o1_250.gif

I'm fine with what carpet_kaiser has posted here given it closely parallels my upbringing except that my (much older) brothers were nice to me, though unfortunately too far from my life to be of much help. Sleeve and man alive's accounts also very relatable for me. I don't have the time or inclination at the moment to share my story and I don't want to be 'that guy' who drifts the thread. I'll add though that years of therapy didn't help me much (hurt additionally by the unfortunate passing of the therapist I saw for two years and didn't keep her file on me to give to someone else to continue where we'd left off). I found online and IRL support groups for people who were molested as children or teens to be far more useful.

Carpet Kaiser
Have you looked into men's group therapy?
If you can find a good group I think it might be very helpful and is usually cheaper
It's definitely a different dynamic than one on one and great if you find the right group

K

Kinda bummed this thread turned into a clusterfuck a little

tbf I assumed it started that way, just looking at the title.

It was destined

Sorry for ruining your thread Marcos

u didn't! also man alive is the thread starter

i do think a certain thing happened to this thread and that what exactly happened to it should be fairly obvious to a dedicated reader. i'm not going to say anything more than that.

p much

Def but I don't think it's too late to get it back on track tbh

possibly, but it's difficult without addressing the underlying cause.

I read The Girls and Nugent Miller by Robert Sheckley the other night and it reminded me of this thread. It has such a bleak and scary ending. It basically ends with the idea that all men become monsters under the right circumstances. Kind of an insane story to find in the middle of an old space rocket SF magazine!

https://www.amazon.com/Girls-Nugent-Miller-Robert-Sheckley-ebook/dp/B002JIN6PW

Did I ruin it? Sorry if I did

no, fgti, you didn't ruin it.

Does anybody else mentally pronounce my username as "faggoty"?

I mentally pronounce it "lovely."

I mentally pronounce it as "flamboyant goon tie" :)

anyone who's anyone knows its an acronym

Did I ruin it? Sorry if I did

― fgti, Saturday, October 14, 2017 2:08 PM (seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

definitely not

Well, that's all right then.

For a while in my early-30s, I was really actively looking for an older gay man that I could look up to as a role model. Somebody who had figured out a way of growing old with dignity, allowing their "gayness" to not necessarily be defined by the man on their arm, or something? Because, I don't know if you know this, but all gay men die sad, lonely and broke. Or at least most of them.

I met this actor dude who has got to be in his 80s. Really great guy. Just met him through friends, we had tea together. He was hilarious and smart and funny. I invited him over for dinner, and was hoping to kind of gently open up a conversation about "how do you transition from being a sexually active young/middle-aged gay man into being an oldster? How do your goals and aims change? How does your relationship to your sexuality change?" Guy came over and basically reminisced about "all the dicks he'd sucked through the years". An entire dinner of dick talk. Lol!

Most humans die lonely and broke I suspect.

I know what you mean, though. I hope marriage equality changes that for y’all. It springs eternal, hope; that’s what I’ve heard.

Marriage is not a solution to any systemic issues, come on.

V curious about that Sheckley story scott! He's an interesting one

Um many xps

Does anybody else mentally pronounce my username

fagheddi, like spageddy, like T✧✧@K✧✧.E✧✧

this was and is inspiring to me. i think when i first read it was just good to remember that people have been fighting for the progressive evolution of humanity for a long time and even though it's probably an endless process (will the earth even be habitable long enough for people to evolve?) it's always worth fighting the fight. this is from 1839. my great great great grandfather on women's rights. i love the disclaimer at the beginning from the editors of the magazine. he speaks for himself not us! and i love the part where he basically says that women have no responsibility to the government because the government is a usurpation of women. punk rock!

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.32044011393303;view=1up;seq=366

that link doesn't go right to it. jump to page 350.

it's totally Too Long/Didn't Read. i get that. but there is good stuff in it!

Marriage is not a solution to any systemic issues, come on.

I know many people have happy marriages, but as a cure-all for "having a sad life" ... just no.

I am well on my way to dying sad, lonely and broke, so that's my part done.