Rolling Maleness and Masculinity Discussion Thread

I like how this topic breathes irate new life into ILX. Works every time.

― pomenitul, Monday, May 6, 2019 7:04 PM (seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I know, I'm not caught up on GOT so I can't go on that thread and I was in danger of getting bored with ilx so this is perfect.

i got an xbox one sorry lads i can only focus so much

During the week, much of my waking life revolves around work. Or getting ready for work. Or driving to work. Or driving home from work. Or texting my wife to tell her I’m going to be late getting home from work.
...

I love “dada time.” And I’m pretty good about squeezing in an hour of “me time” each day for exercise, which usually means getting up before dawn to go to the gym or for a run. But when everything adds up, there is no real “friend time” left. Yes, I have friends at work and at the gym, but those are accidents of proximity. I rarely see those people anywhere outside those environments, because when everything adds up, I have left almost no time for friends.

― There's more Italy than necessary. (in orbit), Monday, May 6, 2019 1:16 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Um yeah, this is EXACTLY me.

there's a spectrum of "requiring emotional labor from the woman in your life as your sole support"

Merely reporting my own experience here, but in my marriage it is my wife who has the enormous network of female friends and close acquaintances, while I am the hermit who much prefers to walk away into the emptiest wilderness I can find.

While my emotional life is not tranquil, it is very even-tempered and steady. Hers is much more volatile and shifting. Because of this, her need for 'support' is greater than mine. Contrary to the idea that I lean heavily on my wife for emotional support, and I think my wife would agree with this, I am by far her primary and most important source of emotional support. By way of contrast, her wide network of female friends creates a situation where she is often giving them emotional support, and she finds their demands on her to be much more difficult to meet than mine.

In our respective roles, I am happy to 'subsidize' her social activities through my more domestic ones, because I think hers are important and beneficial, and something I have little talent or inclination for. She provides me in return with very important companionship, but it isn't based on my sucking emotional labor out of her. I am more the rock on which her towering edifice of friendships is anchored. I don't really mind it. It suits my personality to fill that niche.

I'm really not trying to "not all men" this topic, I just question whether it's really accurate in this case. If toxic masculinity plays any role for me in this, it's that it makes especially unlikely to lean on my wife for emotional support, because then I'm not being "the rock of my family" or whatever I'm supposed to be.

I mean to the extent I seek emotional support (outside of when I'm in therapy, which I haven't been for a while), it's mostly from strangers on the internet, lol

Also the concept of men having female friends does not exist in this article.

yeah, from the highly-gendered "men have different lives" bit going on, I think I'd give the guys a few years tackling the idea of male friends before they get going on that one

I'm not being "the rock of my family" or whatever I'm supposed to be.

You probably don't need me to remind you, but just do whatever works for you.

mh -- but you forget that many cis het men are conditioned to/feel more comfortable sharing their emotional lives with women. the female friend is easier to connect with because talkin w women = talkin bout feelings.

many arent

i was being flip
the female friend is can appear to be easier to connect with because talkin w women = talkin bout feelings.

i was referring to the cis het men statement

if only men had a different outlet for their feelings than watching sport.

If only.

oh, don't worry, my cynical implication was that they could get used to sharing with men before making female friends so they could figure out you can share emotions with someone without trying to have sex with them

either that or these male group therapy sessions are more complex than I initially imagined

solid point!

which men's movement, rushomancy? not going to make any suppositions here because there are multiple groups that could apply to in that timeframe

― mh

honestly, i can't even remember at this point. something something warrior something. new warrior? i never got to meet speedball, though.

was kind of assuming it wasn't promise keepers

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_John:_A_Book_About_Men

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mythopoetic_men%27s_movement ?

yeah, it was definitely the mythopoetic sort. there was a lot of stuff with smudge sticks, i remember.

it was good! when i was younger, the jungian archetype stuff really appealed to me. i don't think it would scale, though, and for me at least it didn't give me a long-term healthy sense of my own masculinity. i think this says more about me than about the relative merits of mythopoeticism however.

if only men had a different outlet for their feelings than watching sport.

FP'd you for this

yeah we post bullshit on music message boards too

or, like, video games

where this all started

where all toxic masculinity started

METAL GEAR

where all toxic masculinity started

I think that Sparta can claim precedence over METAL GEAR.

i more associate metal gear with endless boring elevator rides than i do with toxic masculinity

perhaps there was something about the game i wasn't getting. or perhaps anybody who thinks there's more to metal gear than endless elevator rides is reading more into it than is really there.

i only played bioshock for five minutes but its elevator ride was way better than any of the elevator rides in any of the metal gear games

metal gear solid 2 pretty aggressively trolls masculinity

well the only thing that could make this thread worse is metal gear let's do it

self-flagellating could make it worse

you first

good mourning!

in all fairness theres volunteer flagellators here to do it for ya

The thrust of the article seems to be “give your women friends a break, save it for therapy”. Although I would agree with the former, the idea of “saving it for therapy” is the root cause of this problem.

The primary reason why a person keeps their emotional pain to themselves, instead of speaking to their friends about it, is, I believe, that we are conditioned to think that opening up about emotional pain is something that tends to break social connections and lose social currency. I cannot count the number of times that a social gathering has suddenly become focused on the testimony of an individual who is experiencing something painful— whether this “social gathering” entails a one-on-one situation or a larger group— and the individual who is in pain is later, both to their faces and behind their backs, criticized for having “spoiled the party”, or “making it about themselves”. (When people experience pain, they become self-centred as an act of self-preservation.)

Certain individuals are equipped to deal with, and help, people who are expressing pain, but many others are not. Social patterns tend to isolate individuals who express their pain to others, and so, we are conditioned to keep this pain inside, or inflict it on our partners.

If it is the case that men tend to keep their emotional pain inside more than women, and tend to rely upon women more for release of that emotional pain when they do decide to express it, I cannot comment on it. Maybe men are conditioned to be achievers and providers and do not want the people they provide for (or the group they are expected to lead and inspire) to lose faith in their abilities and abandon them? But I don’t know. I have never had any problem expressing myself, personally, to my friends and family, and I do not discriminate by gender, I wear out my female and male friends equally.

But I would argue that we need to encourage more expression of pain, not less, and encourage people to be better equipped to support their friends who express it, rather than telling them to “save it for therapy”.

My experiences with therapy have shown that although it helps, it’s a grim and expensive replacement for what could be better achieved by other means— chief amongst them, having a solid social safety net. I’ve reconnected with absent friends and/or had a successful dinner party and it felt far more emotionally sustaining than any therapy I’ve experienced.

Well said fgti. That’s what bothered me about this piece—the implication that people who are suffering and looking for support are somehow being selfish, or trying to “get something.” It’s a very atomized perspective of what relationships are—not just romantic ones but friendships and family etc. The gender analysis here was laid on top of this premise.

This sort of thing can quickly become a hall of mirrors, but I also just can't help but think that there's a flipside, which is that women are socialized to expect men to be less openly emotional than women and therefore are more sensitive to men leaning on them emotionally. It's highly anecdotal, but my experience in relationships and friendships is having women lean on me emotionally more than the other way around.

Sounds like you've got all the material you need to write an article called 'How Women Became Emotional Gold Diggers'.

it seems fairly facile to say it, but most relationships are multifaceted and change in nature over time. one person carries another for a bit, maybe that reverses when life throws up other problems. this sort of ebb and flow seems so essentially human that it is weird for it to be omitted or ignored. i mean it's practically the cycle of life and death.

I mean, this article is basically "How Men Became Emotional Golddiggers" xp

I was jokingly referring to this treesh post from upthread:

The headline for this article on google search results is “How Men Became Emotional Gold Diggers.”

oh hahaha

We all have a right to request emotional support from those people with whom we have close personal relationships, and those people in turn have a right to demur shouldering the bulk of that burden.

Pursuant to man alive's anecdotal assertion that women have historically leaned on him emotionally more than he has leaned on women, I respect this statement, but this has not been my experience. I have been leaned on typically as much by men as I have been by women. What I have observed, however, is that when men express emotional pain, there sometimes has been a response in the listener where the privilege that the man carries makes it difficult for any sympathy/empathy to be felt by the listener-- especially if the listener does not carry the same level of privilege that the man carries. I have more than twice expressed my pain to an individual with less privilege, and the discussion has become frustrated, and I've been told afterward that in expressing my pain, I was unsympathetic to the oppression (and pain) that the listener had themselves experienced. "[x] deals with threats of violence against themselves on a day-to-day basis, and isn't prepared to hear about your pain with any empathy while we're just trying to enjoy a nice meal."

In contrast, many individuals with whom I've spoken about my painful experiences who DO carry less privilege than I do, they have been extremely useful and helpful to speak to-- by dint of having matured in an environment that doesn't necessarily centre them, a series of systems that do oppress and directly cause pain, they have developed better systems of self-care and resilience and have more useful advice. Maybe this is somewhat related to the argument that the article makes about this being an gendered issue.

Privilege doesn’t wash away emotional pain and it’s no replacement for strong and mutually supportive interpersonal relationships. If there is such a dividebetween romantic partners where one cannot feel sympathy for the other’s pain—because they are seen to be too privileged—that seems like a huge barrier for that couple and they should work through *that*.

look we all have our different methods and groups innit

Also—i agree with the article insofar as putting all your emotional needs on one person is too much pressure and people need to find support networks beyond their partners. I just question how emotional dependency gets framed as “emotional gold digging.”

Seems fucked up. Like the kind of thing that can be used to emotionally blackmail someone for being a human being who wants love and support. It’s icy and transactional.

I was thinking yesterday how a lot of the more conservative men's movements (the aforementioned promise keepers, some others that aren't coming to mind at the moment) are framed as a way for men to tackle problems by being a Better Man, where that's a very patriarchal role

I mean, kudos to anyone who tackled substance abuse, infidelity, etc. that way without turning into a weird christian stereotype

It’s icy and transactional.

Yeah, there's an overcorrection at work in some current thinking that leads to thinking of friendships and relationships as a ledger that must always remain balanced, and if it's not, that's evidence of toxicity or The Patriarchy At Work Once Again.

"Emotional gold digging": I don't think it's the best description, but it's a fair description. I myself have recognized that when I am in a state of distress, that oftentimes what I need more than "an ear" or "the right answer" is a some kind of validating response. I've recognized this to such a degree that I've told my partners this: "the next time you see me upset, oftentimes I don't need a discussion so much as I need a hug." I've recognized this to such a degree that when I'm in a state of distress, I might text a friend or tell my partner: "tell me something nice." (I'm not looking for a positive news item, I'm usually looking for an "I love you and you're the best".) Although I feel as if my statements to this end are a genuine and honest expression of my needs, I have been told (by my boyfriends) that, at times, they feel that the directness of this request for validation is itself manipulative. That I'm using my state of distress as leverage to coerce validation. So, I don't think that "emotional gold digging" is off-base, insofar as my own experience is concerned. It has been described to me by my loved ones as feeling like something similar.