Rolling Maleness and Masculinity Discussion Thread

eephus - no. I don't remember interacting much with adult men until high school or maybe college? I think of myself as having lived in a very feminine world, dominated by mothers and sisters and teachers.

“The average hoodie made these days is weak, flimsy … ” growled a YouTube ad for a “tactical hoodie.” “You’re not a child. You’re a man. So stop wearing so many layers to go outside.”

what this reminded me of is some article I read about Why That One Kid Insists on Wearing Shorts All Winter, according to Exasperated Adults. i googled it once because a couple of my neighbors were giving me shit for doing just that. One of the theories was the boys think feeling cold is wimpy, so it was a way of showing how tough they are. LOL. they interviewed a kid who said it was a way of demonstrating his autonomy to classmates. his parents couldn’t tell him what to wear. he came to regret it because it was freezing, and being known as the boy who wears shorts, he was embarrassed to switch to pants.

for me, it’s about transforming myself. i want to become less brooding and intense, more playful and less "cool". becoming who i wanna fuck, to borrow from another poster and thread though i don't remember which. plus the synthetic fabric feels good and I like looking at my ankles.

about this,

That I still often desire those who represent some of that masc behavior is another subject entirely, but is also part of this conversation for a lot of gay dudes. Like, some of my favorite "scenes" (iykwim) involve jocks and lockerrooms. Is this because I desire what I could never have, or what repulses me? I'm not totally sure.

the good news about masculinity that many people seem to miss is that it has sooooo much room in it that you can literally just make it fit "you." there are no rules and a million possibilities. in fact you can add feminine qualities to it for spice if you want, but like you don't have to, it doesn't have to be hyper-gendered either. and you can change it up literally every day, or every couple of hours.

is this specific kind of gender fluidity specifically a gay or gay male condition? because some of us are drawn to imitate appearances and behaviors that turn us on even though they don't necessarily square with our values? and how do those values change after slipping in and out of different roles for a long period of time? assuming attributes that on some level repulse you seems like an opportunity for growth. to grow your empathy, to stop hiding or feeling ashamed of what you really want- at least, those are two of the positive outcomes i've experienced.

you could be talking about something entirely different, of course. but.

i love wearing waxed canvas and gym uniforms and I also love wearing eye glitter and feather boas once in a while and all of it feels extremely indulgent, like the fulfillment of a wish almost. the former two are sexually charged, and they're all sort of forbidden, the masculine items in the sense that the boy from the article is embarrassed for anyone to know he wants to wear long pants. it's not what people expect of me, or it wasn't when i started. putting it on is confessional.

athletic attire pushes me to participate in life instead of just observing, and whatever hang ups i have about conformity feel healthy to undermine. that is to say, while it's taking me out of my comfort zone, it's not totally disagreeable. waxed canvas suggests someone who hunts and kills animals, which is maybe the single most repulsive act to me personally. man as operator of puncture, breaching and opening vessels (such as other lives)... just to use words other than "penetrating". there's an obvious dissonance because it's armor, but it has a fortifying effect.

eye glitter, on the other hand, draws the fear and vulnerability out of me. it fosters an instinct, above all, to withdraw from danger (predation, persecution), but also to nurture myself and others (laundering and making my bed, brushing my dog's teeth and clipping his nails, brushing the fur of my plush animals and tucking them in).

i have a toy tea set which i play with and utilize in a divinatory context. it evokes the physical and psychic heaviness of ancient Zhou bronze altar sets, and so bridges that world with Disney animation and Tiffany's Table Manners for Teenagers. there's a flattening of distinctions between regression and play therapy, theater, ritual and transformation- all of which i'm pulling from this very potent object that, really, is taboo for me to use because i'm not a child. and i don't want to misappropriate or dilute terminology that the trans women and men use to communicate their own needs and experience, but i will say that there's a healing aspect to playing with girls' toys.

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/810iIqRO-hL._AC_UF894,1000_QL80_.jpg

https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/76974

as to the question of where is the true, authentic self in all of this- is there a gendered (or other) identity that "feels right" in the way some transgender individuals talk about, the answer for me might be "no." just speaking for myself, so far everything i do is a roleplay that on some level i feel distanced from, and i don't think i'm anything more than my responses to the stimuli that agitate me. if you strip all that away, i just feel abstract. i can keep plumming the depths, and it's bottomless, but it seems also to be hollow. table's post about how his own masculinity evolved in opposition to heteronormative aggression is really beautiful, i envy that in a way.

and i realize simply stating that i don't exist in a vacuum doesn't make me masculine or feminine, nevertheless, my gut is that the difficult task before me is to feel unburdened by the emptiness instead of trying to solve it.

Anyway, I do not see a "crisis of masculinity" in the world my son and his friends inhabit. It feels to me like the kind of thing I read innumerable newspaper articles about but which don't match what I see locally (see also: downtown is a no-go zone of burned-out buildings and street crime, groceries are twice as expensive as they were in 2019.)

I realize that writing this can be invalidating so I am really not trying to stomp on other people's experiences, just recording my own.

hey scott, if you're still reading this count me in on the people who would like to see you post more, if you feel like it.

When I was younger I definitely knew without knowing that one of the reasons my gay friends - and women friends - liked my company - (especially out in public in a very scary decade for gay people (and heck its always a scary decade for women)) was that I was big and tall and "not gay". i was perfectly happy to be My Bodyguard because in their presence I could be who I really was 100%. Which was liberating beyond words.

there is so much here and if you ever want to expand on any of this i'm interested to hear more

Anyway, I do not see a "crisis of masculinity"

that's because the cure has arrived:

https://spy.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/tucker-carlson.jpg

can’t really find any other discussion of it, so want to post here about Close, the film that won the Grand Prix at Cannes last year.

it is a rare portrayal of the love and tightness of friendships between pre-teen and early teenage boys, and how homophobia and traditional notions of masculinity brutalize young men as a way of disciplining them into brutal subjects, whether conspicuous or repressed.

i have a lot of thoughts about it but mostly find myself reflecting on it and crying. how even a queer kid like me was brutalized and acted brutally toward others. it’s an absolute scorcher of a film imho, tho of course many of the US film critics were unfair to it because apparently all films need to have reasonable and legible endings and character motivations. anyway— i can’t stop thinking about this film, and plan on writing about it soon, and thought that maybe it could spur some interesting discussion here.

The homophobia I definitely got, the brutality not so much. Probably because my father was a man who would much rather be left alone with a book than seek out conflict. It was only later that I understood that he was plenty aggressive, but entirely passive about it, as he was about everything else in his life.

Anyway, the film sounds very much worth watching.

It started promisingly, but once A Certain Thing happens it loses its focus, and you could argue that this second chapter is the crucial one.

I can totally see what would make viewers love it.

I totally disagree

But I’m at work at the bar, so don’t have a lot of time to respond in-depth.

But I’m at work at the bar, so don’t have a lot of time to respond in-depth.

But I’m at work at the bar, so don’t have a lot of time to respond in-depth.

But I’m at work at the bar, so don’t have a lot of time to respond in-depth.

But I’m at work at the bar, so don’t have a lot of time to respond in-depth.

damn, sorry about that lmfao

lol

I just think that all the criticisms I’ve read of the film “losing focus” don’t actually offer any examples. The main protagonist is lost— and I don’t understand what’s wrong with a film portraying that lostness instead of enacting perfect narrative forms and resolutions.

I tried.

Yeah, I guess I just disagree. Makes me think of when a fellow student in a queer lit class said that Wojnarowicz was being “melodramatic “ in one of his iconic essays. Just reads as not wanting a given work to be real, frankly

And melodrama is a legit vehicle for anything.

table, do you work at a bar just wondering

not sure he has time right now tbh

anyway I had my butt operated on (see ILTMI) and it brought thread related stuff up for sure, still processing

keep dunking, i blame Zing ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I couldn't resist, sorry!

more to the point, I am not familiar w/the film being discussed but have this bookmarked now so I can try to keep up

comedies and dramas, and especially crime and action films, exaggerate events way out of proportion to reality and nobody questions them at all, it’s accepted as standard and everybody greedily accepts and adores them

but melodramas, which elevate emotions, are always suspect

I haven't seen it, but I sometimes think about my experience with one of my closest friends when I was a kid, who I think I intuitively knew was gay before I knew what gay was, and at least as a kid did not care at all, and I would even say I loved him in a certain way. He moved away but our families were friends so we'd visit with each other, and we were also at the same camp a couple times. When we hit adolescence, I really internalized a lot of homophobia and started being mean to him in an almost performative way. I was lucky enough to wind up at an arts high school where there were a LOT of openly gay/queer people and not a lot of homophobia, so I sort of worked all that out and then at some point realized how shitty I had been to my friend and talked it out with him/apologized. It just always strikes me how intuitively all of these developments happened along the way based on whatever I was absorbing from society at the time (not even from my parents, who I never felt were homophobic at all).

i got bullied by a "tomboy" butch girl who was about three years older than me. turns out she was gay but at the time i had no idea. she was just an asshole!

I think that part of what makes the film so compelling is that it has made me deeply reflective on how I’ve absorbed a brutal, masculine ethos both now and in the past.

This past spring , I found out that the boy with whom I was first “intimate” (at age 13) died last summer, presumably self-inflicted or an overdose based on the way things were framed. He had grown up to be a successful photographer, working as a famous photog’s studio assistant before striking out on his own.

We were best friends, briefly. And then, when it was apparent that we were becoming “too close”— holding hands sometimes, speaking about our interests in a funny private language, using pet names for each other— the bullies came out, and I couldn’t handle it and pushed him away. We were in the same homeroom, and so the tension was palpable for the rest of 8th grade. I once fell in the mud on the way to an assembly, and was actually rather hurt, but what I remember most about it was getting up and seeing him laughing at me with everyone else, and feeling like I sort of deserved it.

I knew I was gay by the time I entered middle school, and I still pushed away the person who, at that point, had been my most real connection to my own sexual nature.

I rue that I acted the way that I did toward him. I wish there was a way I could apologize to him.

that’s rough table. it’s a lot to carry around. i can imagine that movie hit you pretty hard.

missed this earlier, i feel like throwing my thoughts in

what this reminded me of is some article I read about Why That One Kid Insists on Wearing Shorts All Winter, according to Exasperated Adults. i googled it once because a couple of my neighbors were giving me shit for doing just that. One of the theories was the boys think feeling cold is wimpy, so it was a way of showing how tough they are. LOL. they interviewed a kid who said it was a way of demonstrating his autonomy to classmates. his parents couldn’t tell him what to wear. he came to regret it because it was freezing, and being known as the boy who wears shorts, he was embarrassed to switch to pants.

that child's name? william henry harrison.

for me, it’s about transforming myself. i want to become less brooding and intense, more playful and less "cool". becoming who i wanna fuck, to borrow from another poster and thread though i don't remember which. plus the synthetic fabric feels good and I like looking at my ankles.

is this specific kind of gender fluidity specifically a gay or gay male condition? because some of us are drawn to imitate appearances and behaviors that turn us on even though they don't necessarily square with our values?

as to the question of where is the true, authentic self in all of this- is there a gendered (or other) identity that "feels right" in the way some transgender individuals talk about, the answer for me might be "no."

― Deflatormouse, Monday, July 17, 2023 4:38 PM (four weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

when it comes to talking about transness, for myself i do feel a lot of pressure to present my gendered experience in a certain way in order to conform to cis expectations, to present a respectability narrative. the truth is messier and more complex. saying "it just feels right" is often a response to some cis asshole asking a bunch of intrusive questions that put the onus on us to justify our existence, the same way that "i was born like this" is a counterargument against the "social contagion" argument. in practice it's often more complex than that.

for instance, when it comes to "imitating appearances and behaviors that turn us on", "becoming who i wanna fuck", plenty of trans people do that. one of the big questions that a lot of trans women face is "do i want to be her, or do i want to be _with_ her?" (to which the answer is, frequently, "why not both?) there's a pretty severe social stigma against acknowledging that, though, because that behavior gets pathologized as stuff like "autogynephilia" - it's taken as fetishistic, even psychopathic (see: buffalo bill in "silence of the lambs" saying "would you fuck me? i'd fuck me") when it is in fact a completely normal expression of sexuality.

i've had to deal a lot with the question of identity vs. presentation, and there's not a clear divide. fucking around with presentation helped me to get a _better sense_ of my identity. "feels right", for me, isn't an _absolute_ sense, but a _relative_ sense. furthermore, what "feels right" can change over time, or as a result of other changes. for instance, i started transition resolutely "non-op" but six months in decided i wanted GRS. that's not "social contagion", that's me learning about myself through making other changes and through experimentation.

i love wearing waxed canvas and gym uniforms and I also love wearing eye glitter and feather boas once in a while and all of it feels extremely indulgent, like the fulfillment of a wish almost.

another example of simplifying a narrative for a cishet audience - i'm a non-binary trans woman. a lot of us are. i don't tend to say that around cis people because it confuses them. there's this, in queer terms, this really rigid butch/femme dichotomy, and if someone is all butch or all femme that's awesome, but for a lot of us it's a false dichotomy. i'm not butch or femme. i'm not even futch. today i'm wearing a t-shirt and a skirt. i'm not leaving the house and i'm dressing for comfort. we're in the middle of a heat wave and i'm not going to fucking wear long pants. i could wear shorts, that would be more "butch" and, honestly, look better, but a skirt is comfier today. i keep my hair short because long hair is a pain to take care of, but i have it styled in a feminine style because that's my preference.

i think the social pressures that make dressing the way we feel at any given time "indulgent" shitty and awful. like really fuck sumptuary codes. i just cannot see the harm in people dressing in a manner which suits them.

that fucking sucks table. you probably know this but it's worth saying, because it's easy to feel when something terrible like that happens - you aren't responsible for what happened to him.

re: close. i'm probably not going to watch it, but it's good to read about... i do have some thoughts

one of the ongoing challenges i have w/r/t trans media representation is the way our experiences are so often framed around _trauma_. and yes, to be queer does mean experiencing trauma, unfortunately. it's unavoidable. so often though it seems like our lives are _defined_ by it, like we don't ever get a break from it to just be _happy_.

and honestly that's kind of the impression i get from "close", you have a nice sweet story about two boys trying to navigate their feelings towards each other but NOPE queer people can't have nice things. i'm sure it's a story worth telling but i _certainly_ would not appreciate having that sort of bait and switch pulled onme. i feel like it's emotionally manipulative to dump that trauma on is in the middle of the film with no warning.

i don't know how much, if any, of this has to do with "masculinity" per se but i think it's an important topic.

I also thought the first part was visually gorgeous and the boyish intimacy carefully depicted, and the second part not exactly mishandled but drifting and less interesting. The film lacks a narrative device / force beyond what happens in the middle. Although, the way I saw it, the certain thing acted more like a revelator and early propeller into adulthood. I didn't find the dwelling on trauma melodramatic, it felt realistic enough, and the link with queerness remains open until the end iirc. It's more about facing death, guilt, and the social commentary on school harassment which circles back to gayness.

This conversation reminded me of my main boyish friendship in secondary school (early junior high), where said best friend abruptly and inexplicably rejected me from one day to the next, for about a year before he semi-apologized. It wasn't the same though, and I guess I still felt a ping of treason. Incidentally, that's pretty much the year where I found social refuge online. I had never thought of the possibility it could be related to outside perception around sexuality - I have no evidence if it was (no Close-ish intimacy or anything). Incidentally, we did find each other and became best friends again in university, and I was very surprised one day when he told me other people thought we were gay from always hanging out together / being both single (he said he wasn't surprised).

Also don't know how much that has to do with masculinity :)

i'm so sorry, table. my feeling is that relationships of all kinds tend to be very unstable at the onset of adolescence, but especially "best friends". just because it's really hard to be so close to someone at a moment when you and they are rejecting long held assumptions about yourselves and everything else, and need the freedom and space to break away from designated identities. i think this is regardless of sexuality, or bullying, but obviously those things are catalysts. there's almost an inevitability of friendships breaking up because someone who is struggling to be liberated from themselves needs to show how your understanding of them is unreliable, and that is hurtful so there's a lot of guilt that goes with being the one who changed first... but then the other person needs to go through something similar in short order.

thanks for clarifying all that so patiently, kate. it must be exhausting to constantly correct the kind of ignorant misconceptions that could probably be avoided with a little empathy and a little thought. it's logical enough that the realities are more complex. i'm sorry for having oversimplified and misrepresented your experience and others'.

"do i want to be her, or do i want to be _with_ her?" (to which the answer is, frequently, "why not both?

haha otm <3

sorry for the hurried & awkwardly worded post^ hopefully the intent is clear enough but idk

i suppose it's extremely common for 12-13 year olds to be living with a heightened burden of shame for various reasons, that include peer pressure and cultural expectations... and it's common for that burden to provoke drastic reactions like tearing yourself down or trying to escape yourself...

and honestly that's kind of the impression i get from "close", you have a nice sweet story about two boys trying to navigate their feelings towards each other but NOPE queer people can't have nice things. i'm sure it's a story worth telling but i _certainly_ would not appreciate having that sort of bait and switch pulled onme. i feel like it's emotionally manipulative to dump that trauma on is in the middle of the film with no warning.

Great discussion. Table, I teared up reading your post. The same thing happened to a close friend albeit when he and his pal ghosted him cruelly and suddenly.

*albeit when they were older

i’m sorry to hear about that, Alfred—

and also, kate, thanks for your note of support. i know that something i did to him when i was 13 probably didn’t cause my former friend’s death last year, but i still wish i could apologize— and perhaps that’s another reason why this film so resonated with me, because i want to apologize to him, but also want an apology from so many people. friends, parents, the world at large— so many of us were robbed of years of being our true selves and engaging in proper social relationships because of homophobia and transphobia and prohibitions on homosociality.

i also know that this apology probably isn’t coming from many of these people or societal forces, so what i can do is move forward and try to be as kind as i can to people— to not allow the masculine urge toward dominance and brutality to take over my person.

the film just also brought home that a lot of us, no matter our gender or orientation, deserved a lot more kindness and tenderness when we were younger.

table - fair! i do have a tendency to project my own experiences on things that have nothing to do with me... it's something i'm working on... thanks for calling me on it!

thanks for clarifying all that so patiently, kate. it must be exhausting to constantly correct the kind of ignorant misconceptions that could probably be avoided with a little empathy and a little thought. it's logical enough that the realities are more complex. i'm sorry for having oversimplified and misrepresented your experience and others'.

― Deflatormouse

it's the opposite, actually! it feels really good to be able to talk about some of this stuff. it's very rare that i, honestly, am able to trust a cis guy enough to be able to open up about this stuff, and i'm super glad that your vulnerability and insight into yourself gave me the opportunity to do that.

that, _that_, is the key thing about masculinity, it's that it's _ok_ to not be right, it's _ok_ to have misconceptions. if a guy can challenge or question what masculinity is _supposed_ to be, then he can open himself to other perspectives.

as much as it's frustrating to have to ask why it's so hard for men, in fact, i feel like i have some idea. it's a very lonely thing to do. masculinist orthodoxy is fucked up and destructive, both to men and to everyone around them, and a lot of guys know that. i know a lot of guys do. if men try to hold other men accountable for their toxic bullshit, though... what happens isn't that the people spouting the toxic bullshit will just be like "gee, i never thought about it that way, maybe you're right". no, what happens is the man questioning the orthodoxy gets ostracized as unmanly and probably homosexual. i do think there was also this time, when i was younger, when there was a lot of pressure on queer men to _not_ seem unmanly, to prove that they could be just like any other man.

what i've been seeing in the last couple of years is that a lot of gay men seem to be moving away from normative masculinity, and i'm happy about that. i think there's a certain amount of pressure, not intentional, coming from trans culture that, like, if you're not going to be "manly", why even bother being a man? and i kind of went through a phase where i was exerting that pressure, i think, because i wasn't really confident in myself, in who i was. i have a lot less distrust of cis gay men than i used to. and i think a lot of that distrust is that men who conform to masculinist stereotypes do, i think, get at least some of the benefits of patriarchy, whereas the rest of us tend not to. and i don't think that's necessarily a choice men make, but it was still easy for me to resent and distrust other queer people who had opportunities i didn't.

from my perspective there is a challenge of manhood, in that there is this very strict binary concept of what's permissible. do not conform to that standard means complete ostracism from the community of men, but at the same time, men don't have the role models or the skills to engage in healthy community. it's something i've struggled with, learning those skills, and i've had a _strong_ incentive to do so. like a lot of "male privilege" is really the privilege to not _have_ to grow, to not _have_ to change, to stay miserable. my experience living among men was one of _profound_ emotional desolation. this burden of emotional labor, a lot of it is that men just... don't know how to take care of themselves emotionally. don't know how to honor or express their emotions.

it's not a new idea. i was watching this 1943 disney propaganda film called "emotion and reason", or "reason and emotion", something like that, and wow, it was awful. i mean, it was 1943 disney, the animation was great, but the actual beliefs it was promoting were hot fucking garbage. i'm just not sure you'd find people making such a bald-facedly terrible argument today. so i don't know. maybe men in 1943 were more fucked up than they are now. i wasn't around then! all i know is that i'm really sympathetic towards men. they have a really fucking hard time of it and not a lot of really good options. i've been there. not only have i been there, i went along with ideological norms that were fucking killing me because, well, because it was the best alternative i had at the time.

anyway that's kind of a long ramble and i'm not sure it makes sense.

as much as it's frustrating to have to ask why it's so hard for men, in fact, i feel like i have some idea. it's a very lonely thing to do. masculinist orthodoxy is fucked up and destructive, both to men and to everyone around them, and a lot of guys know that. i know a lot of guys do. if men try to hold other men accountable for their toxic bullshit, though... what happens isn't that the people spouting the toxic bullshit will just be like "gee, i never thought about it that way, maybe you're right". no, what happens is the man questioning the orthodoxy gets ostracized as unmanly and probably homosexual...

from my perspective there is a challenge of manhood, in that there is this very strict binary concept of what's permissible. do not conform to that standard means complete ostracism from the community of men, but at the same time, men don't have the role models or the skills to engage in healthy community.

This is simply not as universal a condition as you have repeatedly claimed, in this thread and others. Look, I have worked in an auto parts warehouse. I have loaded and unloaded trucks on the 3-8 AM shift for UPS. I have been the editor of a porn magazine. I have been going to metal concerts since the mid '80s. In other words, I have been around a lot of dudes for most of my adult life, and the social dynamic you are describing is unrecognizable to me. Have I occasionally encountered men who acted like Andrew "Dice" Clay but weren't kidding? Sure. But the rest of us laughed at them and said, "Cut that bullshit out" and went back to talking favorably about our wives, or about movies, or sports (conversations I ducked out of because I didn't follow sports, but — amazing as it may seem — nobody gave a shit).

They may not always do so, but straight men are perfectly capable of engaging in healthy social relationships. The internet would have us believe otherwise, of course, but/because the internet is the worst mental poison ever invented by man. I'm not saying all analysis of male trauma is false, mind you, I just think the catastrophizing rhetoric needs to be dialed back a little.

unperson, pretty much all of the spaces you mention are coded as "straight."

that you mention "wives" in your post is revealing, too.

this is just to say: i know you don't like me, but want to gently suggest that perhaps your experience has been as it has because you are the "norm" which you say isn't as bad as some of us who aren't the "norm" make it out to be.

unperson, pretty much all of the spaces you mention are coded as "straight."

kate's whole post read to me as being about the hostility and loneliness she perceives in straight male social spaces, which as someone who has experienced those spaces for 50 years (and also experienced less overtly straight spaces, like working in a bookstore with a bunch of women and gay dudes) feels off. And not to be overly crude or essentializing, but I don't know if I fully trust a trans person's perspective on straight manhood? Like, to quote Suicidal Tendencies, "if you're not now, you never were."

perhaps your experience has been as it has because you are the "norm" which you say isn't as bad as some of us who aren't the "norm" make it out to be

I have definitely been the "odd man out" in plenty of situations, like being the only person in the aforementioned auto parts warehouse reading a book of poetry at lunchtime. But I was not cast out for it! Which is all I'm saying, is that straight male society is not as closed-off or hostile as kate is painting it.

sure but do you think people might have reacted differently if, idk, you wore eyeshadow and lipstick as well as read poetry?