Rolling Maleness and Masculinity Discussion Thread

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?

it’s kind of like a bezoar but in whales

once again nature blows my mind

we need a really manly man to eat a whole lot of squid beaks to see if we can recreate this in humans. actually, maybe that’s what is going on with rfk jr

lololol

we need a really manly man to eat a whole lot of squid beaks to see if we can recreate this in humans. actually, maybe that’s what is going on with rfk jr

― mh, Sunday, May 3, 2026 2:06 PM

aquatic squid or prairie squid?

Christopher Kemp's book about ambergris is a truly enjoyable read.

Whale vomit was ejected without human intervention, and was collected when discovered washed up on a beach or floating in the ocean, I thought.

No, they send out whale-nauseating ships. Me uncle served on one

!!

if you vomit in front of a whale it’ll get grossed out and start hurling, too

Toss more cases of Busch Light into the whale!

Toss more cases of Busch Light into the whale!

― Strait of Merzbow (Eazy), Sunday, May 3, 2026 7:59 PM (six minutes ago)

is _that_ what they did in florence in 1970

florence,OREGON to be clear

Ambergris is still collected and used (infrequently) in certain scents, its effect is largely replaced with aromachemicals

Musk is not a thing any more, but developing synthetic musks has lead to incredible discoveries (the calone overdosing in Cool Water leading to a decade of inescapable “marine” scents— think Gillette ‘click’ deodorants)

Civet and Castoreum are still used in their original form

As far as I can remember those are the four animalic ingredients

Coumarin is the aromachemical that is used to denote “lavender”, and it is that exact molecule that creates lavender aroma naturally, although it is typically synthesized, in perfuming. In comparison, eugenol is the ingredient that denotes “geranium”, and although it is exactly in geraniums, it is typically derived from clove oil, rather than synthesized.

Sorry, this post isn’t about masculinity, really, but lavender and geranium are the OG “masculine” notes, before birch tar and leather and hay and smoke and booze had everyone taking the fragrance of gender literally

Men's Health interviews dudes who are into making their balls gigantic with saline injections.

You might call it ballmaxxing—the pursuit of bigger and bigger balls by fluid infusions—and according to scrotal-stretching obsessives, it’s an exhilarating endeavor. On the subreddit r/salineinflation, which has over 8,700 followers, members share photos of exorbitantly enlarged scrotums, taut and near translucent, regaling the prismatic pleasures of the medically risky procedure. There’s no single reason that leads someone to inflate their genitals with fluid (other body parts like breasts and labia can be inflated too), but genital-expansion fanatics describe it with an array of celestial terms: Electrifying. Addictive. Euphoric. Transcendental.

i guess the satanic panic moms were worried about the wrong ac/dc song

every good boy deserves a fetish

2026 is Year of the Enlarged Translucent Scrotum on the Broheemian Calendar.

And I’d sell my soul
For scrotal control

Hence the need for the Trump ballroom, current banquet facilities will not be able to accommodate the balls of the future

florence,OREGON to be clear

― more difficult than I look (Aimless), Sunday, May 3, 2026 8:08 PM (one week ago)

i was wondering why people thought there would be a whale in florence, kentucky and then i remembered firenze lol

Men's Health interviews dudes who are into making their balls gigantic with saline injections.

― wipes chooser (unperson), Sunday, May 10, 2026 12:12 PM (yesterday)

haha i remember this being a thing back in the 90s

what if truck nuts but on humans

Only encountered this once in the wild, older dude in the back room of the Powerhouse on Folsom Sunday.

(for those of you who can’t parse that, i was in the sex room of the gay fetish club on international fetish day)

The last time I heard about this scrotum thing was on the Ween Forum twenty years ago

push th' little daisies and make em come up

Push the little testes and make them go big

haha jinx

https://neuticles.com/

this felt like a somewhat big deal to me at the time, but i guess it was just one of those too online micro news cycles that has slipped thru the cracks of history because whenever i have brought this up in the past nobody ever remembers it, but a guy in a dom/sub relationship w/ a tumblr famous blogger died from doing this in 2018

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/katienotopoulos/silicone-genital-injection-death-tank-hafertepen

as evidenced by the fact that it's not even mentioned in the story even during the perfunctory paragraph about safety issues

the possibility of dying aside, artificially enlarged ball sacks just look really gross to me, like the guys doing it get off on having bigger balls but it's not attractive to look at, like the balls aren't even bigger it just looks like exactly what happened -- someone has injected the sack w/ fluid to the point that it looks like it would explode if you poked it. this article kinda gets at the fact that nobody these guys come across even finds it hot, it's strictly an endeavor between the individual and the other fetishists, gooning adjacent in that sense i think

Is there an overlap with balloon kink people

stay away from Gallagher with those

The last time I heard about this scrotum thing was on the Ween Forum twenty years ago

― Cow_Art, Monday, May 11, 2026 5:34 AM (four hours ago)

how well would ween go over on folsom street

spoilered for tmi

only case of it i've ever run across was a side effect of body sculpting surgery, lady i know got it done without having had an orchi and yeah her sac just got enormous for a bit, i don't think it was necessarily _saline_, anyway it was _not_ a desired effect haha

Clavicular announces that he will also be getting laser beard hair removal, saying that having a beard is “cope”😳 pic.twitter.com/znM4GZHs8i

— Pulcy (@Pulcys) June 12, 2026

"Clavicular announces that he will also be getting laser beard hair removal, saying that having a beard is “cope”😳"

clav

claaaaaaaaaaaaaav

look, i refuse to start a clav thread here because there really is not that much to say about him beyond

1. cringe
2. frequently does things that are abusive, criminal, or both

and perhaps 3. the thing i am going to try to say now

"cope"? there is a saying among my people: "i don't think that word means what you think it means".

clav _i_ haven't had any facial hair removal, and i _transitioned_.

sweetie, i know i am not at the top of the list when it comes to "experts on how to be a man", and if you weren't going around hurting all the people you're hurting, i'd let it be.

this is not, like, peak guy shit. this is not peak _anything_. focusing your whole life on looking amazing at all times is something that has been done many, many times before, by people of all genders. at its best, it's a tragedy - one dies at a heartbreakingly young age, looking gorgeous and declaring oneself to be bored of everything. at its worst...

at its worst, hon, that might just be you. i'm not saying that to be a catty queen. my friend, you are badly in need of some straight talk. well, that's a little outside of my field of expertise. you know what's inside my field of expertise, though? cope. the levels of cope i've seen... boy, do i know cope, and girl (non-gendered), you are _it_.

and normally it wouldn't be my business. you know, you got some problems but so do i. i got better things to do than bother with yours. except, well.

like i say. i know cope when i see it, and i know that some people who have exceptional levels of cope... well, when the cope fails them, they wind up in places like my support group. i know, i know, you probs think you're too good for us dolls. god, i'd be shocked as hell if you showed up to my group. but you know who might? one or more of the kids who thinks that you're the apex of masculinity, one of the kids who looks up to you, admires you. it is not unlikely that i'm gonna be stuck cleaning up after some of the mess you're making of "masculinity".

with that in mind, i just want to put it on the record - we're _not_ too good for you, or anyone. and what i don't put up with, what the people i consider my community don't put up with, is the kind of shit you're pulling. we all make mistakes. i don't give a shit about fault or blame or any of that. _responsibility_. that's the rules we play by here. you fuck up, you take your lumps. i know it don't work like that for cis white men, and i know you're white, clav, like i'm white, and i know being not just a Cis Man, but the Cissest Man, that's kind of a core part of your identity.

cis? sure. man? sure. _superlative_? i mean. you're the copest man. i'll give you that.