Rolling Maleness and Masculinity Discussion Thread

for us it's pretty rare that we have to raise our voices but when we do, we a) apologize but also b) explain why we did it. we always try to explain the situations in which we raise our voices and why we have to do it. usually this is mostly in dangerous situations yeah..

ime anger and being a male parent are not connected. my mom & my wife get angry long before my father and me. same for my boy & my girls. this may be biological but lots that’s biological is individual.

Oh yeah no I'm not saying anything about feeling anger, just being allowed to display it or enact it on others--that was reserved for men, in my world.

oh ok yeah when I said get angry I meant act angry. but iirc you and my wife come from similar bg west MI and her mom doesn’t get angry but rather hurt where she’s like “why do you treat me this way” it’s not as effective as yelling bc my s-i-ls (who I think you sorta knew at C@1v1n ?) ignore that and act out accordingly (yes still as we’re all at/nearing 40)

my mum's way of quietly getting upset and disappointed was much more effective and guilt-inducing than my dad getting angry. anger is increasingly ineffective as kids get older and realise they have all the cards and their parents' authority is a phantasm

i struggle a lot with anger, i definitely yell, usually when i'm tired. in general i think i am a good, patient, involved father to my sons but when i'm tired i'm kind of a shitty, irritable parent and it's something i'm working to rectify.

i always apologize after i yell, which is something that basically never happened when my dad yelled at us growing up (i don't have a single memory of him apologizing for anything really) and that helps i think send a message that i'm fallible and make mistakes and that it's important to own them and take responsibility. it still sucks though.

and yea ymp otm yelling at a kid in a tantrum never works

my dad used to grit his teeth and pout a lot, it drove me crazy. he wasn't fooling anyone by seething quietly.

Tbh when a child or any person's behavior is harmful to others or harmful to the well-being of the family or community, disappointment and grief is not an unreasonable reaction--but it has to be about something that's direct and real, like "I'm sad because when you lie to me, it means in the future I can't believe you" or "Your sister is sad because when you bite her, she learns that you're someone who likes to hurt her and she doesn't want to play with you anymore." Not like "I'm sad because I gave birth to you and you treat me this way" etc etc guilt stuff.

West MI is seriously so repressed and fucked up. As in many things, I largely blame Calvinists. For the rest of it, I blame a culture of taciturn Swedes.

As a child my behavior was MUCH more motivated by fear of disappointing my mother (and the resulting guilt) than fear of angering my father and having him yell.

When I'm angry about my son's behavior, it's because my parental toolbox is otherwise empty. I'm frustrated by my inability to gently influence him away from naughtiness. I'm hurt and confused that his love for me doesn't lead him regulate his impulsiveness. Which is crazy, I know.

feeling a lot of these posts

he wasn't fooling anyone by seething quietly.

maybe he wasn't trying to fool anyone. maybe he was trying to moderate his actions down to quiet seething in order not to do worse. after all, it's pretty hard not to feel your emotions. they rise up and there they are, whether or not you want them. it's what you do with them that matters most.

i guess you probably know him better than i do

hey we're back on topic! :D

We're back where we were a few days ago anyways

so I just had a round of first-hand experience at (maybe) counteracting sexual assault, I'm too viscerally upset to detail it right now but let me tell you the experience has left me all kinds of fucked up

wtf Simon

all I feel comfortable saying is, I ended up facing off against a male friend (previously unbeknownst to me) of a fairly close female friend of mine, who took off his shirt and got in bed with her after she was passed out and clearly unresponsive. (we'd all had a lot to drink.) I tried to gently urge him to get out (she has/had a roommate asleep in the next room and I wanted to avoid a scene if at all possible), but he instead repeatedly informed me that I was "retarded" and "lacked social cues" because I was watching over "two normal people" like a "creep." he doubled down a few more times, and eventually the roommate woke up and called the cops on both of us (thank god tbh; I didn't know where my phone was; I still don't have it, I assume it's back in that apartment somewhere) because she didn't know/recognize either of us, at which point I tried to physically remove him in the hopes we could avoid having to deal with cops. this didn't work; the cops showed up. I left immediately but waited outside to make sure the other guy got removed; on the elevator ride down with the cops he gave a smirk, which the cops failed to find amusing. when I got home around 6:30 (an hour ago) I sent her as full an account as I could. I hope to speak to her later today.

I'll sidestep all of the other things that upset me deeply about the situation and say what really struck me now and in this moment were his attempts to gaslight me into thinking this was all completely fine

Sounds like you handled that very well. It's a good thing you were there.

Absolutely, well done man. Must be really nasty to witness.

That takes a lot of guts and you handled it in the best way possible.

if I could do it over I'd have proactively flagged down the roommate early instead of letting her call the cops and potentially get treated as a suspect myself (not to mention needlessly prolonging the whole thing) but you know not exactly a time for super great hyper lucid thinking

The thought of being gaslighted in that situation is scary, especially if I’d been drinking. I hope that it wouldn’t disrupt my better judgment long enough to let something bad happen, but who knows?

"a fairly close female friend of mine..." "...because she didn't know/recognize either of us..."

This is confusing, are you saying that she was so drunk or groggy that she didn't recognize you?

he's saying the roommate didn't know either of them

yes, that.

anyway I spoke to her today, she's ok, I'm still pretty freaked out. the dude apparently sent some awful texts afterwards (no shocker there)

OK, missed that.

The thought of being gaslighted in that situation is scary, especially if I’d been drinking.
the term gaslighting was not popular during my teen/youth years but i am pretty confident saying every close female friend i have has experienced being gaslit in that situation while drunk :(

it is scary!

not that identical situation obvs -- but one similar in >1 way

i had the pleasure of watching the movie Gaslight years before gaslighting became a term and being super fucking creeped out by charles boyer and i still think of creepy charles boyer every time i hear it

my central understanding of that term is from an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation

yes it was scary. and being already fairly drunk myself there was a small part of me that doubted my own account of the events. I'm just thankful for my alcoholic genes and general heft that I was considerably more lucid than the other people present were, so that I could trust my senses enough to know what was happening was not right. It could have gone so much worse so easily.

https://medium.com/@ebruenig/a-better-sex-ethic-19e0e55a0e4e

idk if this thread is the best place for this Elizabeth Bruenig article or not, but it seemed to engage with some of the same questions regarding consent and power relations that were being discussed upthread. if I understand her correctly she's saying that sex can be 'consensual' but also harmful/unethical - that the common progressive response to this problem is to expand the definition of 'consent', argue that this harmful/unethical sex is not *really* consensual, but in her opinion it would be better to split this into two separate questions ('is it consensual' and 'is it harmful')? idk if this just makes things more rather than less "murky" tbh, but I thought it was interesting.

almost bought dude wipes yesterday

but opted for the cheapest option instead

i had the pleasure of watching the movie Gaslight years before gaslighting became a term and being super fucking creeped out by charles boyer and i still think of creepy charles boyer every time i hear it

― harbinger of failure (Jon not Jon), Monday, November 6, 2017

I rewatched it last Thursday. There are few villains in movies you wanna punk in the dik as hard as Boyer.

I really enjoyed that Elizabeth Breunig article. It's interesting that one of her conditions for ethical sex is that it be good for the people involved, not just harmless for them. That's a rather more demanding standard, one that a huge amount of consensual sex may not meet, depending on how strict you are about "good for".

Yeah there's a reason one might ask "was that good for you?" rather than "did that harm you?" But of course much better to try to find out beforehand if it's a good time ("this ok?") and check during ("should I keep going?").

Longtime couples can develop nonverbal vocabularies for all this, and that's fine too, but it still doesn't hurt to occasionally talk about how things are going.

Something from a friend's consent zine that's really stuck with me, not that I've always lived up to it, was swapping "do you want..." or "what would you like to..." or similar for "is this okay?" on the grounds that it is a lot easier for people to quash their own reservations/desires for "is this okay?" Like, depending how comfortable you are articulating your feelings, "okay" can feel like "well - it's not terrible, I'm surviving fine, it's acceptable, I can tune out and pass the time" but that's actually really really different from "I actively want this to happen."

stop watching the remake of Gaslight

BUT PAULA

Like, depending how comfortable you are articulating your feelings, "okay" can feel like "well - it's not terrible, I'm surviving fine, it's acceptable, I can tune out and pass the time" but that's actually really really different from "I actively want this to happen."

Maybe people should only be having sex with people they actually know and are comfortable communicating with.

That sounds kind of conservative maybe but reading all of this it seems like the best option for preventing the nightmarish scenario presented above where someone ends up being cowed into doing things they don’t want to do.

people you know and are comfortable communicating with can absolutely violate your trust and boundaries, it happens constantly.

But if you’re worried about unwittingly crossingg someone else’s boundary, that’s harder to do when it’s someone you really know and feel able to speak openly with. Assuming one is genuinely well meaning.

right, from the POV of well-meaning partners, sure.

I dunno if it sounds "conservative" but it reads a little weird and... I dunno, like, we're talking about someone you care about and want to help have a good time presumably; wouldn't it be reasonable to approach the situation from the point of view of "what can I do that helps them?" rather than "psssh well if they don't have a great time it's their own fault, they should have said something" ?

To connect back to broader masculinity question, it reminds me of defenses of confrontational/agonistic/high-stakes conversations about politics or music or whatever - hey, this is just how we enjoy talking, if someone else wants to join in they're welcome to, they just have to be ready to argue and jostle and shout over the other people at the table and defend their position! (Not going after you here, but me: I can still hear myself at age 20 making that defense to a professor when I was dominating the conversation in a classroom and it still stings me.). And it's like okay, this "neutral" position where it's someone's job to speak up and tell you xyz... maybe sounds good on paper, but what's at stake in *not* saying, actually, it's MY job to adjust my own behavior to give them chances to participate, assert themselves, articulate their desires as opposed to confirming their acceptance of mine, etc...?

also assuming that your definition of well-meaning has the understanding of what actions are generally considered harmful. if all of your immediately role models have emotionally abusive relationships, and all of your relationships have fallen into that pattern, then it's going to take some work to internalize better norms

wouldn't it be reasonable to approach the situation from the point of view of "what can I do that helps them?" rather than "psssh well if they don't have a great time it's their own fault, they should have said something" ?

Well I was talking about what you should do if you are worried about unwittingly crossing someone else’s boundary so this isn’t relevant.

xp I get where you're coming from, DC, but the idea that you're going to determine what can help someone, rather than pushing that person speak to their own interests, is pretty much the dichotomy of social policy in a nutshell

I'm on the same page, and obviously people don't speak up for their best interests because of power dynamics, or they genuinely don't understand a situation is exploitative. It's the weakness of the self-interest advocacy position, in that people aren't empowered to do so