Rolling Maleness and Masculinity Discussion Thread

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?

right so my point is that despite all of that pete hegseth has sort of accomplished the impossible in making the modern american soldier a sympathetic figure

if people don't want to be part of hegseth's elite cadre of unvaccinated supersoldiers

yeah but I think there are career folks in the Coast Guard or whatever that just have to wait him out.. they want full retirement, VA benefits for life, etc, and honestly he could be fired any day he's so fucking weird

yeah but I think there are career folks in the Coast Guard or whatever that just have to wait him out.. they want full retirement, VA benefits for life, etc, and honestly he could be fired any day he's so fucking weird

― Andy the Grasshopper, Wednesday, July 15, 2026 1:15 PM (forty seconds ago)

sure, just like every single other person working for the federal government

I mean his thing about making the flu vaccine 'optional' was a huge mistake that should have sunk anyone in a normal administration

Pete's got the t

He thinks a “T-room” is where you get the shot

just saw somewhere online that Pete's testosterone campaign is basically gender-affirming care, i.e. woke

just saw somewhere online that Pete's testosterone campaign is basically gender-affirming care, i.e. woke

― Andy the Grasshopper, Wednesday, July 15, 2026 4:26 PM (one hour ago)

_almost_. he's _almost_ there. see, uh, the problem is that gender-affirming care is, like, actual _science_, and this administration has demonstrated pretty marked hostility to science. hegseth's approach to hormone replacement therapy is what he _thinks_ "the trans agenda" does, and no, honestly, no, i'm utterly horrified reading this, because i do have some faint idea of what hormones do. he wants to go around handing out testosterone, both a controlled subtance and a drug and abuse, to cisgender men who haven't asked for it?

ahhh, it's probably fine. probably it'll be in quantities too low to actually do much of anything, the levels of T that post-menopausal cis women take. it's the kind of thing that _could_ do a lot of harm, but just because these people are ignorant, malicious, and incompetent doesn't mean they're going to do any actual harm here.

i just feel bad for men. it's not just "the american soldier" who i see as a sympathetic figure. i genuinely do feel men have it really fucking hard here. how the fuck are you supposed to be a man when you look at these people who are supposed to be "role models" and they're, like, saying. all these guys want to give clear, simple, and wrong answers to the question of "what is a woman", and i'm sitting here trying to figure out what the fuck they think a "man" is.

"the american soldier"

you misspelled warfighter

the problem with that phrase, as it’s been helpfully been detailed in a few places I’ve read, is no one who does hateful anti-trans stuff gives a shit about it. they want women to be subservient and men to be manly men. if anything, they’d probably be in favor of giving trans women all kinds of testosterone treatments and the same for trans women with estrogen. they have nothing against hormone therapy necessarily, just hatred for trans people. I am sure some essentialists are out there and some don’t think menopausal women should get medication but that’s just because they think women should suffer.

Hegseth gettin testosterone colonics three times a day

the problem with that phrase, as it’s been helpfully been detailed in a few places I’ve read, is no one who does hateful anti-trans stuff gives a shit about it. they want women to be subservient and men to be manly men. if anything, they’d probably be in favor of giving trans women all kinds of testosterone treatments and the same for trans women with estrogen. they have nothing against hormone therapy necessarily, just hatred for trans people. I am sure some essentialists are out there and some don’t think menopausal women should get medication but that’s just because they think women should suffer.

― mh, Wednesday, July 15, 2026 7:46 PM (three hours ago)

i mean, if they're out there trying to make women suffer, mission fuckin' accomplished there. yeah patriarchy has been hurting women since, as far as i can tell, literally the dawn of history. cool, great job hegseth, you have all the power, we have very little power within your wonderful political and economic system, and there's very little any of us can do, individually, to change that. that's been made pretty fucking abundantly clear over the past decade or so. what is a woman? a cunt. breeding stock. a pretty thing for them to play with and discard. that's what the patriarchy thinks a woman is. that's what the patriarchy has _always_ thought a woman is. all this "defending womanhood", it's about defending _that particular vision_ of womanhood. i think that definition sucks and i reject it, and, you know, they can and do treat me just like any other woman, while simultaneously insisting, in contradiction to their own actions, that i'm somehow an insult to womanhood.

the more interesting question to me is "what is a man", because the answer, i increasingly suspect, is nobody. nobody really qualifies as a "man" by their standards, or at least not a _real_ man. over the past decade i've seen them require anybody who wants to be a "man" - and i did, at one point, want to be a man - to jump through increasingly absurd hoops and if we can't do it we're faggots. and i just got sick of it, i didn't see the point. like, ok, fine, if you say i'm a "faggot" and "not a real man", i'm a faggot. what's wrong with that? these jerks bully me no matter what i do, have always bullied me no matter what i did, and i'm through pretending that _i'm_ somehow the problem here. that's why i feel bad for men. because the patriarchy does still, i think, have functional power over them, power it doesn't have over me anymore. "i may be cringe but i am free", as the meme goes.