Rolling Maleness and Masculinity Discussion Thread

My point is destroy
Gender. It’s so ridiculous and toxic

Candy Crush has certainly not changed the way I think about candy.

going outside to hurl cockatoos at pigs, brb

How was it then.

I spoke to both sets of parents. One boy has a particularly unothordox home life, by all accounts (I wasn't offered/didn't ask for more detail), which gives me a comfortable line of causality. My boy has responded largely how I hoped he would, so I guess that's that for now.

Fwiw, I'm mostly on the 'non-correlation' side when it comes to the link between violent video games/films/comics and affect disorders. I'm uneasy about the casual brutality of the language but I do think the boundary-pushing is an essential part of growing up and ego formation yadda yadda. I grew up with Arnie and Sly films (and the first wave of available violent games - albeit shitty Spectrum ones) and I'm alright. Unless a kind of supernatural irritability counts as an affective disorder.

Glad that your kid has reacted well!

I think the argument that's worth taking seriously at this stage is that it's not that culture makes individual people violent, much as it doesn't make ppl sexist or racist either, but that a culture of violence impacts on society as a whole in the same way that a culture riddled with the aforementioned isms does.

Thanks, Daniel.

I talk myself round in circles with this stuff - to the point where I both believe in nature and nurture and all points in between.

https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/nathan-larson-congressional-candidate-pedophile_us_5b10916de4b0d5e89e1e4824

idk man

idk

whatthefuckingfuckfuck...

Come on man. Really? Gotta be satire.

he's been leaving a trail of dutifully reported stories from reputable news outlets

http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2017/03/nathan_larson_virginia_public.html

https://www.theguardian.com/world/commentisfree/2018/jun/05/canadas-niceness-is-the-very-reason-its-young-men-radicalize

I've seen this take coming up in different forms and in different place and it is something I want to address. People blaming progressivist for making the world where suddenly men are more violent are idiots looking for a text to be published.

1. males have been violent across eras and geography and it's kinda time we accept it as the default mode, that's the only way we can create the law that will protect future victims.
2. creating laws that protect future victims is how we go from medieval witch-burning shit to a society in which is up to transsexual to decide their gender and marry someone of the same sex. it works. progress works.
3. the work is never done because injustice is ever-existing. thanks to fuckers like the people she is so sorry for.
4. we can be proud of a country's progress when it comes to human rights without ignoring the current issues.

To me it's akin to blame the rape victim on being flirty 'ah if only you hadn't created this society standard someone willfully misunderstand, this wouldn't happen'.

In many ways, Canada is indeed a progressive country, and our legislation – like the trans rights bill that Peterson so despised – arguably shows a continued commitment to creating an equitable society. At the same time, the idea that we’re already a tolerant, liberal country is often a stumbling block for Canadians. We do not like the suggestion that we still have work to do – although you don’t have to look much further than our government’s treatment of indigenous people to understand that we have a long way to go before the reality of Canada catches up with our perception of it. Because most Canadians already have a fixed idea of how good our country is, we tend to be sensitive to even the mildest criticism. If someone points out that we’ve said or done something bigoted, the reflexive response is “but I couldn’t possibly have, because I’m not a bigot; I’m not wrong, you’re wrong.

This cognitive dissonance between who we think we are and who we actually are is fertile ground for people such as Peterson, who provide quick answers in lieu of productive soul-searching. According to him, the real problem is “identity politics”, which are wielded by “social justice warriors” who want to destroy free speech.”

Also on a purely inside-hockey Canadian tangent, not many Canadians I knew thought there was no work to do when Harper was elected in 2011.

Long post short toxic masculinity is toxic because we allowed to be toxic, not because some people view progress with a sense of accomplishment.

Yeah, both that article and the Jeesse Brown piece that made the NYT a while ago suffer from a similar flaw imo, although their conclusions are different: assuming that the presence of sometimes radical reactionaries in Canada who garner international attention (even if to a lesser extent than in other countries) is somehow reflective of some unique trait in the country. All it really means to me is that Canada is not immune to international trends.

Certainly the excerpt up there makes a good argument for Sund4r's interpretation:

Because most Canadians already have a fixed idea of how good our country is, we tend to be sensitive to even the mildest criticism. If someone points out that we’ve said or done something bigoted, the reflexive response is “but I couldn’t possibly have, because I’m not a bigot; I’m not wrong, you’re wrong.

This is literally everyone, from Texas to France. To see it as a Canadian trait is clueless.

the global exasperated screech of "we've stopped lynching you fuckers, what more do you want?"

i know sady doyle is a bit of a lightning-rod figure in general – she's a friend of mine, and i think her work has been important and that she'd get maybe 20% of the shit she does if she weren't a woman. this very well-researched piece, which connects a lot of dots, explains why, in part.

https://medium.com/s/trustissues/the-deadly-incel-movements-absurd-pop-culture-roots-e5bef93df2f5

also, fuck neil strauss forever.

This was a good read. Every time Neil Strauss comes up I have to double check that there are not two of them. I want to forward this article to a guy that just had a big #notallwhitemen moment on facebook, but he couldn't even take the joke that there is a "making white dudes type paragraphs" meme out there. I really don't know how to get through to some of these guys.

He actually announced he was leaving facebook yesterday because of the making white dudes type paragraphs joke I made. His announcement was 4 long paragraphs.

it's cool, i'm glad he's that good at typing

Yeah, he had all of his friends, former students etc. say they enjoyed reading his long paragraphs so there is that.

omg C thankyou for alerting me to the existence of making white dudes type paragraphs... I had a long boring stint at work on a holiday-day and this is thoroughly entertaining.

What Is It Like To Be A Man?

I found this article very interesting and well written.

God, sans the Milwaukee bit, the opening paragraph is so similar to my life it may as well be me who wrote it

got about two paragraphs in and fuckit

it's well written but i can't relate

got as far as this para

“What is it like to be a cis-gendered, heterosexual man?” a friend, a trans man, asks on Facebook. “What is it like to feel at home in your body?” The only answer I can come up with is that I never feel at home in my body. I live out my masculinity most often as a perverse avoidance of comfort: the refusal of good clothes, moisturizer, painkillers; hard physical training, pursued for its own sake and not because I enjoy it; a sense that there is a set amount of physical pain or self-imposed discipline that I owe the universe.

and peaced out

i've never felt at home in my body either but that's my issue and it does nothing to change the fact that the world i live in has long been built around making white cishet people like me as safe and comfortable as possible to the detriment of everyone else

hmmm yeah the more this went on, the less I felt I could relate. I don't see maleness as a silent masochism I have to endure, although perhaps that rings truer for other people?

the mindset in the article reminds me of the sort of performative masculinity I saw in high school. once you shed this shit there's just a subtler layer of shit underneath

performative masculinity written as performative wokeness

its bad

the refusal of good clothes??

nothing more manly than cutting about in a repurposed potato sack imo

this feels like a waste of a good premise and a good writing style. bit of a shame

once you shed this shit there's just a subtler layer of shit underneath

exactly. the fact that i'm not able to push myself into taking care of my body thru the kind of exercise routine the writer describes doesn't really make me less (performatively) male, there's fucking more of us like me than like him probably.

i've never felt at home in my body either but that's my issue and it does nothing to change the fact that the world i live in has long been built around making white cishet people like me as safe and comfortable as possible to the detriment of everyone else

if lots of hetero white men feel that way then doesn't that indicate that it's not *just* your issue, it's something that's better understood in structural terms and not just as an individual failing?

I'm not suggesting that this is where bizarro gazzara is coming from but I feel like there's a tendency with social justice-y type takes towards this "stand on your own two feet, you are the master of your own destiny, if you are a failure or experiencing mental distress that's on you etc" angle for those who meet some threshold of privilege? (and where exactly the line is drawn is always in flux, so no-one can ever be sure that they won't end up on the 'being to blame for your inevitable failure' side rather than the 'victim of circumstance side'?)

that's OTM too.

I quite liked reading this article which is perhaps related in its perspective on how males move through the world https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2018/07/20/feature/crossing-the-divide-do-men-really-have-it-easier-these-transgender-guys-found-the-truth-was-more-complex/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.5335c0f026bb

I'm not suggesting that this is where bizarro gazzara is coming from but I feel like there's a tendency with social justice-y type takes towards this "stand on your own two feet, you are the master of your own destiny, if you are a failure or experiencing mental distress that's on you etc" angle for those who meet some threshold of privilege?

This is literally what Jordan Peterson says, so how the heck does that get blamed on 'social justice-y types'??? Also, fuck the phrase 'social justice-y types'.

'social justice-y type TAKES', not 'social justice-y types'

'these trump voters/alt-right guys/incels/whoever are blaming X Y and Z for their failure when they should be blaming themselves' is a trope you see on the left a lot? mediocre white men who are having to compete on a level(er) playing field for the first time and angry because they are exposed as sucking, and that sucking is very much an inherent personal failing, this seems like a common analysis of where we are now from ppl on the left?

You are conflating two things. Trump voters / alt-right guys / incels constantly scapegoats other people for why they fail, and the left is good at pointing that out. But the left is also aware that the patriarchy / capitalist society are to blame for the woes of white people.

Saying to incels 'No, it's not ok to blame women for not wanting to sleep with you, or wanting society to force women into sleeping with you' does not mean we go full Jordan Peterson on them. That's what Jordan Peterson does.

playing field for the first time and angry because they are exposed as sucking, and that sucking is very much an inherent personal failing, this seems like a common analysis of where we are now from ppl on the left?

Yes, the whole mocking "you're failing at life on the easiest difficulty setting" argument is def a thing you hear

I've seriously never heard it. You need to listen to different podcasts, mate.

Not on podcasts, and not espoused by anyone I'd take seriously, just bandied about as a snark on social media / Reddit etc

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/15/straight-white-male-the-lowest-difficulty-setting-there-is/

xp

/ilx

There's nothing about failing and blaming white men in how's life's text, it's just a way to explain white / male privilege.

'these trump voters/alt-right guys/incels/whoever are blaming X Y and Z for their failure when they should be blaming themselves'

― soref

i only see "they are blaming x y and z for their failure when they should be blaming capitalism", tbh

ftr I have seen the "white men who are unsuccessful in life are pathetic losers who failed on the easiest difficulty setting" on numerous occasions, this is not something soref made up. mostly on twitter and I generally assume it's just people trolling for "white tears" and/or pushing back on white men blaming minorities for their problems. it sometimes seems a little mean but I think complaining about it comes uncomfortably close to tone policing and/or privilege denial so *shrugs*