Rolling Maleness and Masculinity Discussion Thread

so much otm above - i think a huge flaw with things right now is people assuming they're doing something just by screaming angry things on twitter, or even politely stating encouraging things. i mean if people are going to spend time there anyway then i guess by all means state the things you believe, but sometimes it feels as if people think the main battleground for change is this actually quite small social media tool.

many, many people i know don't use twitter and the discussions i have offline are far more civil and thoughtful, present company excepted.

also, more and more i feel like people who mean well on twitter are just amplifying the views of those they oppose. i saw breitbart in my feed for the first time this year because somebody was quoting a tweet of theirs and criticising it. i've prob mentioned this before but "banallmuslims" trended as a hashtag in the uk before and i clicked on it and almost all the tweets were people criticising the fact it was trending.

having said all that, i find it difficult to point myself in any one direction. i find it difficult to unite it with people, i always find problems with things or think that actually we all disagree about x, y and z. i'm aware that's a position of privilege in itself. i mean by modern definitions i have a disability, as someone with chronic illness, and i think to an extent that fuels a sort of deep independence which was prob there to begin with, to an extent.

also like, hashtags are just kind of stupid.

I only responded to one metoo post as it was from a relative

As to whether men would be better joining in the metoo conversation or keeping out of it and listening, or where, between those two behaviours, we should be, I don't know; I don't know what women want us to do; but feel like keeping out of it is the best way to avoid dragging arguments right now

many, many people i know don't use twitter and the discussions i have offline are far more civil and thoughtful, present company excepted.

i should say that i'm sure there are far worse discussions i could be having offline too - i just tend to socialise in a small circle of friends who are v liberal.

no predator has ever in history been like wow i'd really like to touch this woman on the bus but now i remember this v passionate male ally told me on fb that wasn't cool any more

― Mordy, Tuesday, October 17, 2017 4:27 PM (twelve minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

maybe not quite to that extent, but opening up the topic and making it accessible to men (via other men) might make them think about their own past behaviour with a view to changing their own everyday sexism

if men peer-pressure each other into sexist behaviour, surely it can work the other way round

I would like to post about my own experiences regarding abuse and assault but I'm going to have to do so on 77

I was thinking yesterday about what a decent progression of understanding others looks like, in this particular context but also in general. The end goal is to not harass or even offend others, but that's the thing you strive toward, not the thing on which you judge your success.

I'm wondering if there's a good formal list, or if I'm even cribbing from something I've read:
Acknowledging you have some attitudes and behaviors that are based in sexism and might be harassment
Accepting (and soliciting) feedback from others
Others feel comfortable giving feedback without soliciting it, and you accept it
Recognizing the reactions of others and realizing you've said or done something inappropriate
Being able to identify when your own thoughts and behaviors are coming from faulty conclusions and adjusting without feedback from others

no predator has ever in history been like wow i'd really like to touch this woman on the bus but now i remember this v passionate male ally told me on fb that wasn't cool any more

you know, i'm like you, mordy, i'm reading the posts and just listening and not saying anything, but your argument in favor of my practice is actually pushing me away from my practice, because the predators aren't all creeps on the bus -- some of them are people in my workplace who wrongly think that all their male co-workers know about and are on board with what they're doing, or don't know about but WOULD be on board with what they're doing.

Extremely Online Allydom weirds me out tbh. many people who have truend out to be huge creeps also used that sort of language in very public and demonstrative ways.

I hate these fuckers, tbh

There's a character that's been hanging round my friendship group for about ten years - can't really get rid of him because he's friends with too many of my friends - basically, is as feminist as you can get on social media and in around the table discussions irl but, but, programatically selects older 'mumsy' forgiving girlfriends to live off whilst cheating on them with lots of, I dunno, 'sexy art girl' types and has been doing so for ten years

It's that thing of claiming impossible levels of awareness whilst doing the very basic thing wrong

I think one thing that pushes men towards the reddit shithole mra alt-right whatever ideology is seeing other men energetically performing pseudo-naive moral purity (so not for the first time, men disliking each other makes everyone else suffer, huh)

some of them are people in my workplace who wrongly think that all their male co-workers know about and are on board with what they're doing, or don't know about but WOULD be on board with what they're doing.

But then the place to make that correction is face to face with those male co-workers. Not shouting into the social media void and hoping they get the message.

why one and not the other? people are influenced by social media

bc serious predators know it's wrong already and ppl who allow themselves to operate in moral grey areas are already avoiding the meaning + consequences of their actions so ignoring some fb post from a male ally is a breeze. if you want to make an actual difference with people you need to confront them personally and in person.

it's kinda like what my rabbis used to say in yeshiva during ethics lectures - the people who most need to hear this are the ppl who aren't in the room. the ppl liking your status messages on fb aren't the ppl you're trying to reach.

feel like at some point in the last few years people went from using social media to talk about things they do irl to using real life to talk about things they do on social media.

serious predators

imo this phrase is the whole problem with this series of posts. You are creating this separate "serious predators" category and not recognizing a continuum of behavior and attitudes.

@Mordy - And when the people who need to be reached are encountered in the wild they're fucking terrifying

xp weird - bc i explicitly spoke to the spectrum in that very post

bc serious predators know it's wrong already and ppl who allow themselves to operate in moral grey areas are already avoiding the meaning + consequences of their actions so ignoring some fb post from a male ally is a breeze. if you want to make an actual difference with people you need to confront them personally and in person.

― Mordy, Tuesday, October 17, 2017 5:02 PM (four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it's not just about 'serious predators', it's about systemic change in a society where sexism/harassing behaviour is so endemic that no one can truly acquit themselves of

i mean just for example, even stopping a Weinstein-type figure is not just about trying to convince Weinstein to stop (which is probably useless) but trying to wake up all the "well-meaning" guys to the fact that they might be brushing something off as relatively harmless, "old-school" behavior or "oh he's a bit of a creep" when it's much worse and not a laughing matter.

i didn't say this campaign shouldn't happen. it should. and men should listen and read and adjust their behavior and not brush off creepy behavior as a laughing matter. i said that those men should then go and make their interventions irl and not in grandstanding posts online.

it /is/ terrifying sometimes to intervene. it's much easier to post online to a mostly friendly audience. but that's the problem. the guy you need to reach is not participating in that venue. he's ignoring your post. so who are you writing it for?

I had a coworker who was relatively beloved who retired a couple years back that would occasionally trot out something patriarchal or borderline misogynist in conversation but for the most part it'd result in eye-rolling or someone half-jokingly saying his name slowly at him. But side conversations, some of them on social media, kind of illuminated the fact that his shtick was genuinely harmful in some ways and people started to make that clear to him.

Now, a few years after he retired, it's more likely someone immediately thinks "wow, that guy was a relic" than "that guy was fun" because attitudes have changed and that shit just really doesn't fly.

so who are you writing it for?

the army of commenters everywhere saying lets not be hast and do a witch hunt here lets wait for a court of law

you're writing it for woody allen okay

you're writing it for all your friends and coworkers who know that guy, and it's a declaration of solidarity that you're going to all call him out!

maybe the one guy will see it and shrug it off or think "wow some people suck" but when multiple people realize they need to tell him _he_ is the guy who sucks maybe things change

when the woman from comcast was changing my modem today she said that things looked different in the store and i said i was always moving things around and she said i was as bad as a woman and i thought of this thread. that's all i've got today.

At leastwe got in a good 600 posts before the conversation started drifting towards "I'm not a men's rights activists but they sure do have a point here"

i don't know who that's directed to but no one said that or anything like that

you're writing it for woody allen okay

the flying lotus guy!

let's be real, a lot of serious predators think what they're doing is just what people do, or people in powerful situations do, and they think grabbing someone's ass is as bad as jaywalking on the legal/moral scale

The broad point afaic is to continue driving home some aspirational notion of behavior in the hopes of it becoming more normalized. The one thing that I say about how I feel people should be treated may not make much of an impact on any one person, but many people continually saying the same things has at least a chance of slowly influencing behavior in a positive way.

xp and a lot of people who wouldn't be bold enough to do it would still excuse it as such -- "Eh, big deal, he grabbed someone" etc.

xpost to mh Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. It seems very odd to assert that people who do unacceptable things are necessarily cognizant that the things they're doing are unacceptable.

the entire "they know it's bad" thing is true, but some of them (not the Weinstein, obv) think that accusations and payouts or w/e are just part of what you deal with when you're powerful. because everyone's constantly accusing you of things or suing you, because that's just part of business and part of sex

it seems completely fucked up to me that personal relationships can be that cynical and depersonalized, but after listening to a acquaintance explain his friend was getting divorced and immediately jumping to how much alimony was going to be, child support, how he's going to get "ripped off", then yeah... people dwell on that

xpost Not even cognizant. Willing to accept. People are very good at justifying and rationalizing their own shitty behavior.

like it seems incredibly fucked up to me that people view relationships like business transactions, where you're trying to get the upper hand and might end up in court as part of the cost of business, but people are fucking weird

and to be fair, when I say “people,” I mean nearly without exception, men

there are so many instances of people viewing relationships as business transactions. we have an entire social network dedicated to that purpose.

oh you do, do you?

And it was known to happen in earlier centuries. xp

Hmmm I think when relationships actually were business transactions that was one thing, but people viewing relationships as a business transaction is another, different thing? And very often involves the one projecting mercenary impulses on to the partner, in a paranoid way, so as to justify their own as if in retaliation

dude, didn't you read Dennis Prager

and to be fair, when I say “people,” I mean nearly without exception, men

― mh, Tuesday, October 17, 2017 12:02 PM (three hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

gonna push back on this one a little, using another person for personal gain is not an exclusively male trait, it's a narcissistic trait. I've had destructive female narcissists in my life.

I mean, tbf it's a human trait that is found in excess in narcissism, and that is also encouraged, in general, by capitalism.

dude, didn't you read Dennis Prager

No. Help me out, I don't get the reference

are women narcissists sexually violent and see it as transactional?

that wasn't what the statement I was responding to said

just asking for clarification! I did let the scope broaden, there, but the main issue is sexual harassment and violence

i guess i just felt like exploitation is so widespread and multifaceted and historical that many instances/types prob need their own specific analysis, is all.