Rolling Maleness and Masculinity Discussion Thread

Man, I was supposed to go out to "dad's beer" with neighbor dads tonight and was kind of tired and grumpy and instead told myself I'd get some work done, but I feel guilty about not going out and socializing, and now here's this thread that somehow makes me feel worse about not going to dad's beer -- dad's beer is just dads who talk about politics and I dunno, our kids and home repair shit and "we should get together and play some music" but we never actually do -- it is neither gross nor particularly bonding/important

i should have gone probably

ten minutes later, i still feel bad about this -- but they've surely all gone home by now, we are middle-aged dads who don't stay out or even up late

I guess the relation to this thread is that we are trained to feel that having "a group of guys" is something an adult man can survive without but would be slightly worse off without, like a minor vitamin -- even if the "group of guys" is selected at random by some mechanism like "who live on the same couple of blocks as I do"

i think that's a really astute observation

I'm trying to have more meaningful male friendships in my life. wish me luck

3. The idea that abusers are “assholes” should be terminated, as abusers are usually (in my experience) average sexually active men who simply haven’t been checked, or called out, once their sex habits pathologies themselves

nah. that no one checked or called out harvey w. until now -- no one with the power to stop him, at any rate -- is fucked up in a host of different ways, but he knew very well that what he was doing was wrong. and he kept doing it, for decades, with apparently zero understanding or empathy or care about the human beings he victimized. even now he's unable to conceal that he thinks of no one but himself. 'asshole' is too weak a term

fgti, in the abstract i like the idea of embracing/correcting/empathizing rather than shunning or condemning. but your post seems to assume that the standard social response to misogyny has been shunning, the ending of careers. personally, my observations have been that the response is rarely open shunning OR empathy/correction - it's looking the other way. you may have an unusual point of view in being a person that a journalist might contact to ask about your opinion about something. maybe in your world the shunning is flagrant and careers are ending all around you, left and right. but in my world, at least, that rarely happens. to the degree that shunning takes place, from my perspective, it usually results in the potential victims of the violence (verbal or otherwise) just staying the hell away from those who would inflict it. or keeping their mouths shut so they don't lose their jobs.

In my youth I lived in a very female world (single mother for much of it; four older sisters; lots of close female friends).

I never felt especially good at interacting with guys outside of a few specific realms (music, theater, journalism, literature). I am okay with a core of old friends who are dudes, and I am generally okay with other musicians as long as the subject is whether guitars are awesome (hint: the answer is yet). But I have a tough time finding much in common with neighbors or other dudes not already in my circle. I can talk about children, of course. But I can't small-talk about sports or shooting small animals or car repair or whatever yr stereotypical dudebros talk about.

Generally I feel like my life is sufficiently full of connections - family, online, childhood friends, musical collaborators - so as not to need more. I feel some slight social pressure to engage with the dads of my kids' peers, but that always feels forced and false to me. Yeah, sure, otherdadbro. Our daughters are strongly bonding over My Little Pony (or whatever); that doesn't mean you and I need to be friends too. And my work is all remote so I can keep coworkers at arm's length too. Everything's cordial but I'm unlikely to bond strongly with new people at my stage of life.

*the answer is yes

I'm not entirely sure where to put this but here seems a reasonable place.

I just went for a job interview in Manchester. It was very thorough, but in a good way, all relevant. The work seems interesting, and the people were all nice. They are 5 founders (and one employee who was away on holiday so I didn't meet that one).

They have an office in the downstairs of a big terraced house.

And they all live in the house! 5 20/30 something guys. They were very focussed on the product they were building, and you could see they were professional and focussed, and I went for drinks after the (very long) interviews and they didn't say anything which was off - there was no suggestion of anything offputting and I wouldn't describe them as 'techbros', despite the 'silicon valley' setup, (havent seen the tv show, so im guessing)

Yet for the first time I felt, this is very 'the guys'. probably exacerbated by the intensity of an interview situation, but didn't feel super comfortable there!

tech is pretty bad for this. my office is like prob 100 men and about genuinely 10 women. it's a gov digital project and since most people are contractors i don't think it's subject to any diversity rules or even has a moral centre to its hr approach. it is embarrassing tbh. also it's v overcrowded and smells genuinely like a locker room.

as for this thread, i'd say my oldest group of friends is an all-male group, feels like that's because we know each other since being about six years old, playing football in the park, climbing trees etc. i guess we had female friends as slightly older children but not living on our street and not that we hung out with every day of our youth. dunno if that's societal or what, but it does mean that bond is quite strong and we will all get together. we all live in diff parts of the world now but we see each other about twice a year as a group, maybe i see some of the individuals more often. it's a bit like family at this stage, i can't exactly follow their views or politics on everything, or their prejudices, and i could have a guess that one of them in particular might have some p abhorrent views about some things, but we're such old friends that the familiarity and closeness seems to carry our interactions when we meet, old stories and catching up about the ostensibly boring life stuff. definitely lots of drinking.

maybe ireland is just a conservative country but to me the concept of a married man, or woman, going out with their friends of the same gender now and again, for like a big night out, is extremely common and seems normal. the most well-functioning couples i know spend time together and apart, in this way. i see this with my friends in london, who are mostly irish, all the time.

I'm probably one of the youngest of my pub drinking compadres and tbh the company is bloke-ish but rarely horrible - probably have more issues with the occasional unsavoury racist comment than much in the way of misogyny

my work friends are almost exclusively women - neatly divided into two class-oriented subsets - and I always have excellent times when I go out with either group, whether it's coffee and art gallery or messy pub crawl. there's definitely a different vibe to hanging out with mainly men or mainly women and if push came to shove I probably enjoy the latter slightly more but for me they serve different social needs

In my 30s for the first time in my life, I see more male friends than women regularly - marriage and kids have pushed the latter into more staid group activities like dinner before 10PM bedtimes, with a once or twice a year party. I don't feel that much of a shift in the overall dynamic of friendship, but there is a little less tension about my social group with women I date.

Totally. I can't really shut up about it, but I've been somewhat obsessed with Adrianne Lenker/Big Thief lately. The first song on the new album has been having a huge affect on me, the way I see male-female relationships, sex, etc., it really puts some things together that I sort of was subliminally aware of but hadn't allowed myself to get in touch with. In general her lyrics are so humanizing and I find her very therapeutic to listen to.

― IF (Terrorist) Yes, Explain (man alive), Thursday, October 12, 2017 2:11 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Thanks for this rec.

😊

Btw FGTI's post upthread was really interesting and I kind of want to give it more consideration.

Fgti otm insofar as judging ppl and "getting even" never work as intended & have terrible side effects.

I was particularly struck by the idea that overpunishing rape societally and criminally may have the opposite effect from what's intended, making it so that only the most extreme and obvious cases ever get anywhere. The idea that maybe instead we could ratchet down the level of heat over certain kinds of sexual assault and harassment might bring it out into the open more and allow us to deal with it as a society is a really smart one and one I hadn't ever considered.

I can't even consider fgti's idea dispassionately. If someone told me "as a society, we've decided that we are not going to forcefully disavow some form of racism so we can coax it out into the open and address it more humanely," my takeaway would be "you are telling racists it is open season on me"; I don't see any way to view this discussion about predator behavior differently.

the message i'm getting from this thread btw isn't "don't hang out with men" it's "don't hang out with coworkers"

― call all destroyer, Thursday, October 12, 2017 5:08 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

generally otm

what is meant by ratcheting down the level of heat? since i think for years it was the opposite, that there wasn't enough heat. i guess this is also the place to say that men are not the ones who are largely affected by sexual assault, rape, or even harassment, so it may be easier for men to regard the punishment or outcry as too harsh.

Well, I don't want to speak for fgti, but I think it's possible that both things could be true at the same time -- the problem with the criminal treatment of rape is not the level of *harshness* of punishment imo it's the lack of prosecution whatsover in most cases. Increasing sentences isn't going to lead to more rapes getting reported or prosecuted, the sentences for rapes are already -- in theory -- harsh, it's the enforcement that's the problem. And I think there's this bad dynamic right now where people still have in their mind "rape" as the guy with the ski mask breaking into a woman's apartment and not also the guy at the party with the obviously too-drunk-to-consent woman, but then when you start calling for the more commonplace second type of rape to be treated like the first kind, people think "oh, so some guy is going to get fifteen years in prison because he *made a mistake* at a party." Which of course is really far worse than just a "mistake," but I think the point is that making every incidence of this such a serious crime that it would completely ruin the perpetrator's life *in theory* only makes it less likely that the offenses get prosecuted. And instead we have a binary where people on one side think men just shouldn't be held responsible for that at all. I don't know whether this is right, I'm literally thinking about it as I type and I hadn't really considered it before reading fgti's post.

the original post wasn't about criminal punishment vs empathy, it was about *shunning*/losing careers/etc vs empathy, which is very different.

4. Sexual assault itself, if destigmatized as being a massive transgression, and rather thought to carry the same weight as, say, a DUI or a drunk driving accident, would be easier to address in dialogue, as the entire sexual viability and career of the offender would not be held in the balance, and thus an easier path toward rehabilitation

I can't really argue for a Weinstein losing his career or being shunned, fwiw, but the world is overrun with lesser offenders.

i think a DUI or drunk driving accident are incidents where people were perhaps arrogant in the sense that they thought they would be a) safe, b) not get into an accident, c) make it home without getting pulled over.

sexual assault comes from a very different place, i'm not sure that comparison remotely holds up.

I can't decouple my feelings about systemic abuse from my feelings about capitalism and hierarchy generally. imho one of the very best ways to ensure that future generations of men will be less abusive is to create a more egalitarian society and economic framework in which these power dynamics don't exist to be exploited in the first place, or at least aren't subject to conspiracies of shame and silence due to economic pressures

xpost
i'll stop trying to guess at what fgti meant, but imo the post on the whole was not about criminal punishment (and thus the long sidebar about how we criminally treat rape and sexual assault which the thread was about to go on), it was about how we deal with these men at the workplace, in social settings, as friends, etc.

That was how I took it.

DUI should be punishable by execution xxps

Also, completely shunning / banishing people from your life when they fuck up (speaking strictly of "relatively" minor offenses here) is a good way to leave your own behavior unexamined and unchallenged

i'll stop trying to guess at what fgti meant, but imo the post on the whole was not about criminal punishment (and thus the long sidebar about how we criminally treat rape and sexual assault which the thread was about to go on), it was about how we deal with these men at the workplace, in social settings, as friends, etc.

Right, and much like I put my former coworker on blast after he told me a story where he called a black man a "dumb monkey", I will continue to put on blast guys who say and do horribly inappropriate shit to me, whether it's sexist, racist, or homophobic.

A black person calling out someone for using deeply racist language against black people is somewhat of a different dynamic from men talking to men about being sexist, since the most obviously directly affected demographic isn't party to the conversation, and that makes the dismissal in that context less authoritative. (At least, I *hope* your remarks to said co-worker had considerable impact.)

Maybe this is so obvious as to be not worth mentioning, or I missed it but -
In the scenario where men are hanging out and drinking together and says something uncool or demeaning, sometimes it might have a more positive effect to email the guy next day when everyone's sober, and more importantly, where he's not being called out in front of his peers (cuz guys hate that shit. i guess everyone does?) idk. There are a lot of ways to handle the situation, I guess, and not all situations warrant the same blanket response.

otm^^
wow. i came here to say two things

1) I can't even consider fgti's idea dispassionately. If someone told me "as a society, we've decided that we are not going to forcefully disavow some form of racism so we can coax it out into the open and address it more humanely," my takeaway would be "you are telling racists it is open season on me"; I don't see any way to view this discussion about predator behavior differently.
i can't either. misogyny is the final frontier of reprehensible behavior that people are still asking us to "be cool" about. as a woman with a full range of experiences where being cool did not protect me, this doesn't feel sufficient.

A black person calling out someone for using deeply racist language against black people is somewhat of a different dynamic from men talking to men about being sexist, since the most obviously directly affected demographic isn't party to the conversation, and that makes the dismissal in that context less authoritative. (At least, I *hope* your remarks to said co-worker had considerable impact.)

The conversation ended. Dude looked chagrined but that was about it. He later left the company to go work with another former coworker and is still remembered fondly by several of my contemporaries; every time I remind them that he is a racist and the reaction is always "What???? He said that? No!" and then they go back to reminiscing about the good times we all had together 10+ years ago.

Dude's name doesn't come up very often because the number of people still around who worked with him has diminished dramatically but whenever he comes up, it's always from someone else and it's always a positive mention until I tell my story again, and I tell it every time.

2) i have an example of objectification to share. i have a lot of them over the course of my life (i believe every woman does) but this was the most recent and also the most shocking to me. before i tell you what happened, i'll tell you that i barely ate for days afterward (this is a symptom of extreme stress for me, PTSD i guess idk), called my best friend and told her the whole story, and have told two other irl friends about it -- both of whom reacted supportively. am i "too sensitive"? i have always been sensitive; whether i am "too" sensitive usually depends on whether a person is being defensive about hurting me.

I'll give you the short version: I was looking for a place to sit down at a music festival. and I saw a tree with a spot to rest my back on. It was next to two guys about my age (older than your average attendant but not ancient) and I asked to sit down. Because I am friendly and these duders were about my age, I struck up a conversation with the one sitting closest to me, and we proceeded to have a really nice conversation. He had an interesting job, seemed very smart, liked talking about music, had a 9 month old baby he was getting away from for the first time. I mentioned my partner, we kept talking. I chatted with his friend when he went to the bathroom. It was enjoyable. I felt like it was a pleasant enriching experience. At one point, after we had been sitting there for about 90 min he looked right at me and asked "Can we be...intimate?" and after I recovered from making sure I had heard him correctly, I said "no, I don't know what you mean but I do not want to be intimate with you" and then the guy went on rather profusely about how he wasn't talking about sex. I still have no idea what he actually meant. Not only did our conversation never fully recover from that, I felt like my trust in people had been shattered. It was really bad.

Am I too sensitive? Is this my problem and not yours? Maybe. But that's what unwanted objectification feels like for me. Thinking someone is treating you as an equal human being when in reality they are waiting to pounce feels awful. It's scary too. Makes me not trust people, and I don't like that. It's not fair.

i really don't think men consider how the mere phrasing that they use around women, phrasing that is going to be different from what they use around men, can have a negative effect and elicit feelings of being targeted.

also the most shocking to me
*the most shocking recent event, not the most shocking of all time
i'm not generally a confessional person and i can't believe i typed all that out but it felt good! it is a clear example.

xpost to simon
A black person calling out someone for using deeply racist language against black people is somewhat of a different dynamic from men talking to men about being sexist, since the most obviously directly affected demographic isn't party to the conversation, and that makes the dismissal in that context less authoritative.

while it may be a different dynamic when the person doing the calling out is the victim (be it a black man calling out a white man, or a woman calling out a sexist man) as opposed to someone from the same offending group (in both cases, in most cases, a white man), that doesn't make it any less necessary for white men to call out other white men for chronic mistreatment of women or people of color. it may make the rebuke less "authoritative" in that context, i guess. but different people respond to different forms of social rebuke. some white men are SO white manly that they don't take the advice of people outside of the group seriously. i have witnessed women standing up to men being total dicks, and as soon as she walks away, the guy just smirks to the guy friends standing around and makes a joke about mom getting him in trouble. that kind of dickhead almost takes pride in a woman standing up to him. he might have more of a response from someone in his in-group calling him out.

also i kept typing out "DJP otm" as part of several other messages that i typed and then erased as the thread continued to progress, but DJP otm

that doesn't make it any less necessary for white men to call out other white men for chronic mistreatment of women or people of color

yeah if I implied this I REALLY did not mean to

xp to LL: I don't think you're being too sensitive either, but can I ask -- how much of a role did the fact that he was a married guy with a baby and you had a partner play in how it felt? I mean if you had been single and he had been single and he struck up a conversation with you (and putting aside the weridly gross pickup line he used), would you have felt the same way just because you don't want having a nice, enriching conversation with a man to necessarily have to lead to him wanting to get with you?

Simon, you're 100% otm wrt the problems of capitalism but the problem for me is always shoring up that gap between the way I'd like the world to operate and the way it actually operates. The question I always come back to is: how do we incentivize equality, empathy, basic decency, etc. within a context which fundamentally undermines those notions? How do you incentivize e.g. standing up to one's sexist boss when it may come at the cost of a promotion? Like, in that scenario, I'd put decency before no-holds-barred hustling but there would be no material incentive for me to do so. I'm just more okay with being poor than I am with being a shitty person. It's kind of a facile example, but there are countless instances where people are faced with similar decisions between maintaining decency and status grabs, and I don't know how you encourage people to choose the former in a society where the common good is deemphasized in favor of me gettin' mine.

"Can we be...intimate?"

what a bizarre thing to say. ew. like even if he meant "emotionally intimate" how gross, and also how easily misinterpreted and stupid.

I was talking about this thread with my wife and discussing my/our male friends in general and she did remind me of a guy who was in our social circle for about a decade and how weird/creepy/sexual he could be. He was never threatening or outright but he def lacked boundaries and just felt entitled to erm express his sexual thoughts and opinions inappropriately and people called him on it constantly, to little to no effect. He turned up at a show we were at last year and my wife was like "I am not talking to you" towards him. I didn't really interact with him either beyond a brief exchange of pleasantries. The really weird thing about this guy and how he got that way is... I blame his mom, who raised him largely on her own. I met her and hung out with her on numerous occasions and her eagerness/openness to discuss her son, his sexual proclivities, and sexuality in general with him in public, and with other people in public, just made me think man wtf here is the problem right here - dude was never given any boundaries cuz his mom didn't want to "shame" him or make him feel inhibited, and he turned into an adult with no inhibitions or sense of boundaries, it was just fucked up.

xp

An anomaly in the guys I hang/hung out with, but I had to be reminded of it. My social circle is a good deal smaller now than it was back then, and I had forgotten.

it's about effectively fostering a culture of mutual respect and making sure everyone understands what that looks like from the get-go.

Yes. Model the behaviors you want from others, and to the extent that you have control over community culture/group norms in any situation, there's nothing wrong with being direct and purposeful about stating what acceptable behavior looks like. Have some measure of alertness for low-level comments like, "Women always takes things so seriously" or any kind of gender absolutes being trotted out for you--it's a test. There will be a follow-up comment eventually and it will be worse. It's not that everyone is an evil genius, it's just normal human behavior to see if people agree with you and then build on that. Put your standards out there and expect people to meet them.

The question I always come back to is: how do we incentivize equality, empathy, basic decency, etc. within a context which fundamentally undermines those notions? How do you incentivize e.g. standing up to one's sexist boss when it may come at the cost of a promotion.

Unfortunately I feel the answer to this is that you can't. The mode of production structures all. For now the best thing we can do as men is to police each other more effectively.

Am I too sensitive? Is this my problem and not yours? Maybe. But that's what unwanted objectification feels like for me. Thinking someone is treating you as an equal human being when in reality they are waiting to pounce feels awful. It's scary too. Makes me not trust people, and I don't like that. It's not fair.

― weird woman in a bar (La Lechera), Friday, October 13, 2017 4:23 PM (two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

You are absolutely not *too* sensitive, LL. You've been deceived, lead on to believe you had a nice, even meaningful, contact with a stranger (which can be amazing things). I can imagine you were shattered. It destroys trust in other people, which indeed is not fair. Next time you'll wonder when this particular cat will come out of the bag. It instill suspicion when you do not want it, didn't deserve it, didn't ask for it. It being after 90 mins almost (almost) makes it seem worse than when it's right off the bat. You invested in a contact and when you didn't expect anything like this anymore, bam, there it was.

Have some measure of alertness for low-level comments like, "Women always takes things so seriously" or any kind of gender absolutes being trotted out for you--it's a test. There will be a follow-up comment eventually and it will be worse.

Yup. Letting borderline-of-acceptability remarks or behavior go unremarked upon is an excellent way to make sure that worse trespasses occur down the line.

reminded of when i was watching Billy On The Street with the kids and we were laughing and he was doing that thing where he just runs up to people and maria got disturbed by it when she came in the room and if you watch that show you will notice that when he runs up to a man he usually will say "excuse me sir!" and not be quite as crazy so that he doesn't get beaten to death but when he approaches women he goes totally nuts and just runs up and screams in their face and it completely freaks them out and scares them. and i don't know if i would have noticed the difference in approach if maria hadn't gotten disturbed by it. he definitely thinks its HILARIOUS to scare women. i still think he's funny. but it is handy to have a live-in reality check. it totally makes me see things with different eyes.

you guys would love to hear my classroom stories from the '70s