Rolling Maleness and Masculinity Discussion Thread

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.