itt blogs instruct you how to be a man

http://blog.gntlmn.com/post/26812519401/a-gntlmns-way-of-presenting-cheese-earlier

"A #GNTLMN’s way of presenting cheese."

unreadable scrawl. tags: "behaving"

please don't buy tote bags, guys

i mean, if you really want to, for a good cause, for food shopping, go ahead

here was the "teaser image" for the tote bag:
http://blog.gntlmn.com/post/26721167648/photo-by-brian-vernor-and-a-tease-at-what

I suddenly have a case of the giggles.

hahahaaaaa

"we're terribly excited"

on this cliff
with our magnificent tote bag

this has to be a joke

a noble tote, staring seaward, full of possibility

The French Lieutenant's Tote Bag

dudes need to advise me what sort of stylish spelunking-style head lamp I need to wear when I am as far up my own ass as they are

this reminded me, I meant to start a thread on ILS a few weeks ago:

recommend a new man bag for me

tbf that guy's bags are pretty nice but a tote bag is not really an urban man bag

mh, if he needs to see up there, a real man can start a fire in his own ass with flint and dry grasses

xp

this is why I need a consultant on being a man, obviously

dudes need to advise me what sort of stylish spelunking-style head lamp I need to wear when I am as far up my own ass as they are

― hot sauce delivery device (mh), Thursday, July 12, 2012 10:01 AM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

haaaa

we can do listicles that start out with one seemingly rational piece of advice like "a true gentleman understands the importance of listening" and then accelerate into still-true-but-batshit advice like "a true gentleman does not insert the entire fist without warning or permission"

oh man, did i draw some attention from the office laughing at that.

whoops forgot to check back on this thread! definitely read the umbrella thing as advertising how a great solid single-piece-of-wood umbrella has the great feature of not standing up to the elements.

can we start one of these

yes

we can do listicles that start out with one seemingly rational piece of advice like "a true gentleman understands the importance of listening" and then accelerate into still-true-but-batshit advice like "a true gentleman does not insert the entire fist without warning or permission"

hey just to interrupt our regularly schedules hate-a-thon for a second, my neighbor (& potential friend? we were recently introduced and he is cool afaict) is writing a series of columns titled "self made man" about masculinity re: transitioning to living as a man, they are lovely and thoughtful and you should read some of them:

http://therumpus.net/author/thomas-mcbee/

elmo, my god, these are wonderful.

:D

Gonna bookmark those to read at work tomorrow, they look excellent.

all the more personal stuff is beautifully written, but the more general curiosity about masculinity is really interesting and contrasts so strongly w/ the sort of stuff in this thread.

I have so many mixed feelings from some of the posts! The idea that you need to know how to throw a punch, or fight, makes me want to yell that there is nothing to the masculine experience that demands that, but when you juxtapose it with the mugging and the fact the mugger shot men... I don't know, it's difficult. I like to think that we decide the person we are going to be regardless of gender but there are some things you're going to fight against or pick up regardless of intentions.

w/ the preliminary caveat that i'm v unsure about all this, i think, mb, someone transitioning is much more invested in some sort of notion of masculinity than a lot of cis guys... idk, i feel totally unable to express myself on this, but it is v v interesting to me.

http://gawker.com/5924960/when-gay-men-think-baseball-caps-make-them-masculine

teaches you how to be a stereotypical masculine man who is into men?

did u read the article? friend of mine posted it on Facebook and I think it's a little more nuanced than that

oh, I was being way reductive, yes. not criticizing this article as all, just interesting to me as an actually-good look at what masculinity means to people who aren't waspy dickbags trying to justify their sartorial and misogynistic sides.

i think about this a lot! when rich calls the term 'straight acting' as corrosive, i gather that he means it qualifies machismo & links certain modes of masculinity to being exclusively heterosexual, which I find really constraining. But there's also the idea that some gays who act "straight" are interested in 'passing' as straight, and the idea of someone performing the role and accruing the cultural privileges of being straight almost feels like a betrayal, or at least a shameful cop-out. But on the other hand, many closeted gay men perform these roles out of fear & perceived necessity, so I'm not without empathy for that struggle, having lived it myself. it's complicated.

I am not very "straight-acting" btw. Well, not consciously. I have no idea.

personally, i find that backwards ball caps tend to make guys look, well, really juvenile, and according to my own bonerometer, that is neither particularly masculine nor very attractive

bonerometer SAYS!

*descending slide whistle*

haha

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ytCEuuW2_A

That self-made man blog is very powerful, and emotional, but also bringing up memories and emotions that I have kept stuffed in a box for 20+ years. Narratives around masculinity are so strange and twisted. And a reminder that no matter how badly I have always failed at Being A Girl, I could perform masculinity no better than I could perform femininity. Painful to be reminded.

everything according to one's own bonerometer scale imo

tee hee

SPECIAL NEW YORK TIMES EDITION

http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/07/12/are-modern-men-manly-enough/men-need-to-rediscover-the-don-draper-within

shit like this makes me want to sharpen my castrating knife & go a-hunting i mean what can you say to this except FUUUUCK YOOOUUUU

I got messed up by my feminist mom in the 1970s, who taught me that gender was a social construct. I can’t believe that social experiment went on as long as it did, since it’s clear by month six of having a child that William does not want a doll. Ladies do go first. We are not free to be you and me. We are born different.

Kill yourself & fuck the body.

murder joel stein's balls

maybe it's dumb of me to be so reactive to such an obvious idiot's brainless bullshit but god help me this attitude is a fucking cancer

well i'm with you there, just ughhh why does anyone pay this goober to write

Rich's piece: I've been considering adopting an affirmative-action policy toward femme guys. I tell myself, "Get into it," like the drag queens/all of us say. I just want to say that I adopted such a policy and I was shocked to find that I was able to consciously change my preferences! 15 years ago I found femme guys distasteful, and when in the early 2000s I became more tolerant, I still thought it would be impossible to find effeminate men sexually interesting b/c I figured you're into what you're into and you can't force the matter. But over time I started seeing femme guys as fully male and fully sexual as masculine guys and that change reminded me of a book about Jewish gender roles and ideas of masculinity that I read for a religious studies class about gender. One point in the book was (I'm going to really badly sum it up!) about how in Jewish (religious scholarly) culture, masculinity in men has been frowned upon, and how "sissy-ness" (the book uses the word sissy) did not undermine a Jewish man's maleness or sexuality. There was a sentence that I can't quote or find that for the first time ever made me realize that a sissy could be fully a man and fully sexualized - he could function sexually and romantically as more than just some level of sub (and bottom) to a more masculine man.

Uh, originally I quoted the sentences above to ask: What does "get into it" mean?? I've never heard it used. Does it mean exactly what it says or is it a figure of speech?

Also, I can't recall the title of the book I referred to. It's not really super important except that that one sentence I read in 2002 or 2003 planted the seed in my mind that being a sissy wasn't a naturally a bad thing, and it could even been appealing.

idk if this is what you read, but Daniel Boyarin discusses something like this in Unheroic Conduct, i find an excerpt here: http://neareastern.berkeley.edu/Web_Boyarin/BoyarinArticles/144%20Unheroic%20Conduct%20(2009).pdf

found*

here's the book which is excellent btw and made a huge impact on me in terms of envisioning alternative idealizations of masculinity:
http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520210509