Rolling Maleness and Masculinity Discussion Thread

The last time I did any sort of group "bro hang" in which all present were straight guys was a group of college friends when one of them was about to have a baby. We brought whiskey and a joint to a park, and about 1/3 of the conversation wound up being about birth plans.

I think statements like this men roaming about in single-gender packs, which are a menace. are kind of part of the problem, and just push the lonliest of men into groups like Proud Boys that actually ARE a menace? I.e. if there is no positive outlet for that sort of traditionally male energy that is now, it seems, largely seen as a negative force, it will find actual negative outlets. Or just simmer in loneliness.

some guys don't have female friends, it's true

man alive otm

also, a complicating factor is that if you are married or in a serious relationship you might tend to choose to "maintain boundaries" in opposite sex friendships (e.g. if, like me, you have a tendency to fall for female friends), which might limit some activities like going out drinking.

I'm not pushing any lonely men into joining the proud boys by being ever so slightly hyperbolic on this messageboard. Groups of cheerful young men wandering around together at night in the neighborhoods I spend time in make me anxious and worry for my safety more than, say, any given shouting person having a bad time. And I'm not even a woman.

ok, I can understand that, but might the solution be changing the way the men in those groups think rather than banning groups of men?

Who exactly is banning anything? Yerac? Me?

I don't think anyone ITT has advocated banning groups of men.

obv I'm being hyperbolic too

sorry only one person at a time is allowed to be hyperbolic and it's me

I'm not offended by what you and Yerac said, silby – there's cathartic value in those kinds of statements, especially in this context. But man alive is no less right to point out that such discourse potentially reinforces the very thing it denounces.

guys yerac has repeatedly admitted she trolls about white men its ok we can take it

but perhaps dnftt

Having real friendships with women will help in not objectifying them into throwaway vessels for potential fucking. I don't even know what "traditional male energy" is without making a rude joke.

I'm not offended by what anyone ITT has said, love you all

Having real friendships with women will help in not objectifying them into throwaway vessels for potential fucking.

Was this directed at me? I've had "real friendships with women" all my life. What I said is that I tend to fall for them, not that I tend to perceive them as "throwawa vessels for potential fucking."

xpost yeah, I have historically been "lucky" in having really great white straight male friends that the bar being constantly set so low for them is frustrating. It doesn't have to be like that.

xpost Do you only hang out with straight men when you go out?

I don't often know who is straight and who isn't tbh.

xpost no, it was a generalization about men not having female friends and incels that have seemingly no attempts to want to have a relationship with women if it isn't romantic or balanced only towards them.

yeah, I mean I tend to have very much the opposite problem, I wind up attracted to women I am friends with with no initial intention of it becoming that way

I mean, not across the board or anything, that would be fucking weird

although your tendency to fall for your female friends is ??? I don't know you so???

ha xpost

*extremely millennial queer voice* just be poly dude

I am now looking up gay incels and i see this may need to be looked at another day.

Fight Club, AGAIN.

Try looking up 'femcels'.

I keep hearing a story that the "incel community" was (sort of accidentally) started by a woman

something along the lines of she started a message board and coined the term for people who feel unable to have sex although they would like to, but then left it behind and it morphed into what the term means now

yeah, i was just reading about that, it was less about being owed sex. It turned into this huge misogynist thing and the women got left behind.

I mean, a lot of slightly less hopeless versions of these guys wind up in groups like the Proud Boys. So my thought is always "can't we just come up with a version of the Proud Boys that doesn't also include racism, homophobia and misogyny?"

I mean this is basically the DSA lol

― resident hack (Simon H.), Tuesday, December 11, 2018 7:13 PM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

here's the thing though like -- with the decline of organized labor and the atomization of communities by way of the homeowner's american dream (settler colonialism with an aluminum siding face) and decline in religious involvement, america no longer has significant institutions that civically engage everyday people on a regular basis, and in the 70s and 80s that allowed the likes of the NRA or the pro-life movement to step in to fill that gap. look at say hahrie han's work on the pro-life movement that incredibly found that most self-ID'd members of the pro-life movement were actually pro-choice when they first joined a pro-life organization at the insistence of a friend. in france if they impose a shit tax your middle aged besuited union rep is gonna join you in the street to throw stones at the cops. if we're not careful the imposition of shit tax here is gonna mobilize _our_ equivalent civil society, and the right's civil society is exponentially more robust and relationally deep than any equivalent leftside organization. DSA is maybe among the closest things we've got, and that's fuckin terrifying.

xp yeah and that's still at the bottom of it, like if they didn't feel *owed* sex they might feel a little more motivated to do basic things that would make them a little more appealing to a potential partner?

also sorry for xposting a BOOMING post by HOOS

significant institutions that civically engage everyday people on a regular basis

facebook iirc

i mean yeah though, like, there's a reason political discussion on facebook groups is such an insane rabbit hole

https://medium.com/@IjeomaOluo/the-anger-of-the-white-male-lie-6f9a6e646d47?fbclid=IwAR3_asv4Sym8AAzvLge_8QW3L3N2aiegpuMu_UWCGCxRjHKrYHBA20Tq9AM

And in all these tales, these articles and movies and songs — white men are angry. Justifiably angry, because they were supposed to be so much more than this. But nobody explains why.

Why were they supposed to be so much more?

Why were they all supposed to have powerful or rewarding work? Why were they all supposed to have loving and beautiful wives? Why were they all supposed to be exempt from recessions or layoffs or just plain old bad luck?

Why were they supposed to have everything when everybody can see that there has never been enough everything to go around?

Being rejected by girls will be a valid reason as to why a white man drives his car into a group of women. Being laid off will be a valid reason as to why a white man opens fire in an office. Being “frustrated” will be a valid reason as to why a white man leaves bombs on the doorsteps of black families. Being unpopular will be a valid reason as to why a white man shoots up a school.

But living in systemic poverty with no job prospects won’t be a valid reason for why a black man sells loose cigarettes on the street. Being frustrated by constant harassment by police officers won’t be a valid reason for why a black woman refuses to put out her cigarette at a traffic stop. Living in a neighborhood with no jobs, no infrastructure, underfunded schools, and no dependable police presence won’t ever be considered a valid reason for higher crime rates in black and brown neighborhoods.

Because we were never supposed to expect any of those things. We were never supposed to expect jobs or police protection or investment in our communities or quality education. We were never supposed to expect to see ourselves in movies or read about our heroism in novels.

Whatever there was to expect — we weren’t supposed to expect any of it to come to us.

And white men expected more of it to come to them than ever existed.

^^^ I think about this piece often.

Hoos anti-choice vs pro-life ffs

I feel like people can build friendships and a support network without a larger goal of creating socialism and it’s still alright. The DSA doesn’t need to fill this vacuum.

ppl oughta go to church tbh

Hoos anti-choice vs pro-life ffs

― mom tossed in kimchee (quincie), Tuesday, December 11, 2018 11:07 PM (twenty-two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Just using the terms Han used in her study but I take your point

DSA is maybe among the closest things we've got

I'd actually like to also strike this language from my post because it gives DSA way more oomph than it deserves

This is exactly how I spent ages 16-19 wearing a WWJD? bracelet. Youth Group was lit

people need something. no one was built for solitude.

some are

be the change you want to see itt, no sweeping statements

otoh In as far as adaptation goes you could accurately say humans literally aren't built for solitude.

look if we're allowed launch into evolutionary stuff then let's go but i dont want to hear any tears from the back when it goes the way it was always gonna go

hmm I'll happily call that bluff, that angle doesn't lead down that dark a hole. Especially not here.

I mean it's facts that we're neurologically wired for distributed dependency and that we experience distress in prolonged isolation. Doesn't mean solitude can't be nourishing in doses, and for some people especially so. Sarah Hrdy's work, especially *Mother and Others* is really good on the influence evolution has had on our constructions of different forms of community over time, from the village onward.

Long excerpt incoming sorry not sorry

http://faculty.spokanefalls.edu/InetShare/AutoWebs/SarahMa/Hrdy.pdf

So how did our prehuman and early human ancestresses living in the Pleistocene Epoch (from 1.6 million until roughly 10,000 years ago) manage to get those calories? And under what conditions would natural selection allow a female ape to produce babies so large and slow to develop that they are beyond her means to rear on her own?

The old answer was that fathers helped out by hunting. And so they do. But hunting is a risky occupation, and fathers may die
or defect or take up with other females. And when they do, what then? New evidence from surviving traditional cultures suggests that mothers in the Pleistocene may have had a significant degree of help—from men who thought they just might
have been the fathers, from grandmothers and great-aunts, from older children.

These helpers other than the mother, called allomothers by sociobiologists, do not just protect and provision youngsters. In
groups such as the Efe and Aka Pygmies of central Africa, allomothers actually hold children and carry them about. In these
tight-knit communities of communal foragers—within which men, women, and children still hunt with nets, much as humans are thought to have done tens of thousands of years ago—siblings, aunts, uncles, fathers, and grandmothers hold newborns
on the first day of life. When University of New Mexico anthropologist Paula Ivey asked an Efe woman, “Who cares for
babies?” the immediate answer was, “We all do!”

By three weeks of age, the babies are in contact with allomothers 40 percent of the time. By eighteen weeks, infants actually spend more time with allomothers than with their gestational mothers. On average, Efe babies have fourteen different caretakers, most of whom are close kin. According to Washington State University anthropologist Barry Hewlett, Aka babies are within arm’s reach of their fathers for more than half of every day.

Accustomed to celebrating the antiquity and naturalness of mother-centered models of child care, as well as the nuclear family in which the mother nurtures while the father provides, we Westerners tend to regard the practices of the Efe and the Aka as exotic. But to sociobiologists, whose stock in trade is comparisons across species, all this helping has a familiar ring.
It’s called cooperative breeding. During the past quarter century, as anthropologists and sociobiologists started to compare notes, one of the spectacular surprises has been how much allomaternal care goes on, not just within various human societies
but among animals generally.

Evidently, diverse organisms have converged on cooperative breeding for the best of evolutionary reasons. A broad look at the most recent evidence has convinced me that cooperative breeding was the strategy that permitted our own ancestors to produce costly, slow-maturing infants at shorter intervals, to take advantage of new kinds of resources in habitats other than the mixed savanna-woodland of tropical Africa, and to spread more widely and swiftly than any primate had before.

I agree with HOOS that DSA is not that impactful on a large scale (they take up a LOT of online discourse but are in reality still extremely tiny) but any kind of value-based community that has some tangible conception of a future that's not just a black hole, and that offers a dimension of human connection that's not conventionally transactional and/or sexual in nature, is certainly of use, and a solid prescription to people who can't conceive of any future at all in which they might feasibly continue to exist and, possibly, feel a thing that's not just completely awful