Rolling Maleness and Masculinity Discussion Thread

my worst case suspicion regarding that "can we be intimate?" comment was that it was put out there as a test of sorts, like one that if you responded positively, then it was all good, and if you responded negatively, he could backtrack and say "oh i just meant can we confide in each other about something, ha ha."

i mean i don't even know why you'd say it in either scenario, it was dumb and inappropriate.

Yes. Even though I should really know better by now, my first instinct on those occasions I do hang out with other men is to never betray signs of vulnerability. xp

@ man alive -- totally honestly -- if we had both been single and established that during our conversation, my reaction to his question would/might have been different! Hard to know for sure since the last time I was single was a very long time ago. However, the fact that we had established through conversation that he was a married new dad and I established that I am happily partnered, yeah I felt safe. I thought we had communicated that we were not trying to seduce one another, that we were relating as two people. I liked him right up to that point where he asked me if I wanted to "be intimate".

xposts to simon
oh, my bad! i think i did misunderstand you because i was reading it in the context of your previous post which mentioned that shunning people can lead to the failure to examine oneself.

i knew it was a test -- that's why it was so disturbing
i am not naive, i'm sensitive :)

I thought we had communicated that we were not trying to seduce one another, that we were relating as two people.

yeah, this makes a lot of sense in that scenario, I would say it was the reasonable thing to assume

"Can we be...intimate?"

this is weird and creepy and upsetting but i think maybe not (necessarily) 'objectification'

the "can we be intimate?" question was definitely odd and (at best) inappropriately worded. Instead of backtracking/obfuscating he should have just apologized.

one reason i would consider it objectification is bc i guess you have to consider if he'd have said it to a friendly dude who had sat down under the nearby tree.

The most important social skills I've developed as an adult male (in real life if not always on the internet) is a) knowing when and how to apologize and b) knowing how and when to shut the fuck up.

He shouldn't have asked. It's a fucking weird thing to drop on someone, particularly after 90 minutes of conversation where it's established that you and the person you're talking to are in relationships and, per LL's story, no part of the preceding conversation included the words "open relationship" or "swinging" or "looking to get my groove on".

one of the frustrating things about it is that we have this culture where everybody is individually responsible for his or her words and actions and it stops there, and if you start talking about looking at the larger picture people think you're denying individual responsibility. I hate this way of looking at the world. Maybe if "masculinity" involved people learning to acknowledge their emotions and express them appropriately men wouldn't all be fucking asshole jerkwads, but no, nobody wants to say there's a problem with masculinity, it's just that "men are jerks", full stop.

If all he really wanted to do was move to a more personal/probing realm of conversation I suppose the standard convention would be "can I ask you a kind of personal question" or something like that. (Personally I wouldn't do that in that context.) xps

as i mentioned, going from being on equal footing to being desired "intimately" is objectification
openly desiring when it has been clearly established that desire is inappropriate

he did apologize and the saddest moment was when we had gotten up to go see a performance and he said "i'm making you uncomfortable aren't i?" and i was like "well" and he said goodbye and left. it was disappointing to me. the whole situation was disappointing.

"can I ask you a kind of personal question"
this would have been totally ok

not saying i would answer it but it's an acceptable question

per LL's story, no part of the preceding conversation included the words "open relationship" or "swinging" or "looking to get my groove on".
per reality as well

lechera, yer not too sensitive..a dude shouldn't be asking that IMO in the example you described.

Thin gruel but I suppose it's "good" that he at least recognized he'd made things awkward and hopefully he thought twice about similar interactions in the future

It's like a slap in the face I imagine. It's something so outside of the boundaries and setting you've established in 90mins.

@ mookieproof, I strongly disagree, as somebody who knew Jian Ghomeshi, and saw people wrestling with the idea that this man we'd heard nothing worse than 'an anecdote about a lousy pick-up line'. My father, I've learned, had a reputation for sexual harassment at the faculty-- I am the product of a sexual relationship between a prof and a grad student, as are my younger half-siblings. Obviously, there are Actual Assholes who drug people's drinks and fuck them when they're unconscious-- I'm an abolitionist at heart, but let's put those guys in jail, please. But I intuitively disagree with the idea that a Harvey Weinstein knows what he's doing. I have read many theories on Twitter ("men in positions of power drop names deliberately to show you all that you'll lose if you rat them out") that are just preposterous. I don't think Jian knew what he was doing, or my father either.

@ Karl Malone, I'm just spitballing some ideas! It's been very weird for me.

@ man alive, I'm not arguing that rape is over-punished at ALL. The opposite. It is under-punished specifically because it is over-stigmatized.

@ DJP, I am not in the least suggesting that we "forceable disavow some forms of sexual assault" in order to address it more. I'm suggesting that we acknowledge that "the intersection of capitalism, patriarchy, and sexuality" is something that all men benefit from-- men are all participants, and beneficiaries, in rape culture whether we mean to be or not. I can't participate in a comparative discussion of sexual assault issues to race issues.

@ Simon H, I totally agree!

xxxxxxxxp wow a lot of new posts while I was typing this

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

― scott seward, Friday, 13 October 2017 17:37

He very slowly tried to kiss people in one scene, including a man who threatened to punch him.

I like Billy Eichner and Eric Andre very much but some of their work just looks like sexual harassment.

what's the point of hanging out with other guys and talking about, like, batman or some shit? batman isn't important. i'd rather talk about the weather. i'd rather talk about actual important things, like emotions and shit, but guys aren't supposed to talk about their feelings

lol I have a former bandmember I still get together with every month or two and we talk about comics and kids and family and jobs and shit, they aren't mutually exclusive. his wife is going through breast cancer treatment, his mom died recently, this was all emotional stuff to talk about.

xp

LL, the context of the situation you describe indicates that you're not being in any way too sensitive about it. Even if partners and babies and extremely awkward verbiage weren't involved, the idea of someone whose existence you've been aware of for the length of a short-ish movie attempting to pursue 'intimacy' is...off-putting?

re: Ghomeshi, back in between the mysterious quitting and his bizarre initial statement, a friend of mine informed me that "pulling a Ghomeshi" was a saying in the CBC offices and it definitely did not refer to bad pick-up lines

Yes. Even though I should really know better by now, my first instinct on those occasions I do hang out with other men is to never betray signs of vulnerability. xp

― a serious and fascinating fartist (Simon H.), Friday, October 13, 2017 12:43 PM (nine minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i do the opposite actually. honestly after years of therapy it is almost a default for me to speak more openly and vulnerably, it feels way more intuitive,, and i find that if i do that kind of thing, other dudes will relax a little and open up and be a little more loose too. and the ones that dont, well who gives a shit then?

btw la lechera in that scenario "can we be intimate" is super fucked, you are not being too sensitive

marcos otm on both counts there

yeah, I get it, it's like finding out someone was just trying to sell you something, but worse

re: Ghomeshi, back in between the mysterious quitting and his bizarre initial statement, a friend of mine informed me that "pulling a Ghomeshi" was a saying in the CBC offices and it definitely did not refer to bad pick-up lines

― a serious and fascinating fartist (Simon H.), Friday, October 13, 2017 9:59 AM (one minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i had heard friend of friend rumours about ghomeishi about a year or so before the shit came out about him. i live in vancouver and know hardly anyone in the arts or media.

i do the opposite actually. honestly after years of therapy it is almost a default for me to speak more openly and vulnerably, it feels way more intuitive,, and i find that if i do that kind of thing, other dudes will relax a little and open up and be a little more loose too. and the ones that dont, well who gives a shit then?

― marcos, Friday, October 13, 2017 11:59 AM (one minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This is really important -- learning to take that risk of being vulnerable can give other guys permission to do it too. And that's how you form the best friendships imo!

Yet another "open secret" no one felt they could speak on due to economic and social pressures. (And of course the CBC specifically squashed internal complaint/investigation.) So fucked. xp

marcos otm

i'm 33, at this point most of my male friends are ones i can be vulnerable with, and would admit they're sensitive. the other ones are sensitive too, and put up harsh walls quick, but that's fine. you can see right through it anyway how they feel tbh

lol I have a former bandmember I still get together with every month or two and we talk about comics and kids and family and jobs and shit, they aren't mutually exclusive. his wife is going through breast cancer treatment, his mom died recently, this was all emotional stuff to talk about.

xp

― Οὖτις

oh, i'm not saying that nobody should ever talk about batman or whatever, talking about stupid trivial shit is important. the problem is that in my experience male conversations are _only_ ever about stupid trivial shit.

I do *eventually* allow myself to be vulnerable with other men but I have to force it; it doesn't come naturally at all. But I have never been to therapy.

Historically, I've found that waiting around until the other party is forced to ask 'hey, lunkhead, are you going to pick up on any of these signals I'm sending and kiss me already or what?' is the surest and safest path to intimacy.

But I intuitively disagree with the idea that a Harvey Weinstein knows what he's doing.

okay. i do not concur at all

one thing that's tough even if yer vulnerable around dudes is being OK with crying. I always feel weird afterwards if I cry in front of a dude, and that's something that's so ingrained it's hard to shake.

maybe i'm a little weird on this, but in these issues i don't really care if he knows what he's doing or not. i think he's responsible for his actions just the same either way. ignorance is no excuse.

Two further thoughts.

The Bryan Singer model of sexuality-- have big parties, invite over a pile of white twinks, offer acting jobs to some of them, fuck some of them-- is extreme, 9th-circle-of-Hell. But it's only the extreme version of any gay relationship. I have a friend in his 50s who is Anderson Cooper-hot and carries cultural capital and spends his private life dating a string of 20-year-old men and dumping them at the moment that the kid falls in love with them. I have a 40-year old gay friend who routinely beds his fans while on tour, like, every night. Should I tell them to settle down? Should I tell them, "your behaviour appears unattractive, from the outside"? or "somebody is going to get hurt if you continue this pattern"?

The reason why I compare this shit to DUI is because it feels, to me, like a less-dangerous version of drunk driving. You're doing something that will probably end up OK and nobody will get hurt. But then somebody gets hurt.

I have another thought but I'll put it in a separate post

one idle thought i've had about masculinity recently is that the casual evolutionary biology take of seeing male dominance as a self-selecting, preferred trait when the human population on earth was much smaller and groups were competing for survival could be used as an argument for opposite traits - like cooperation, empathy, passiveness - being self-selecting today, when we have overpopulation and a different relationship with the world. men seem to want to go back in time and celebrate or embody predatory behavior but that ends up sabotaging their ability to thrive today. in other words, it's 'naturally' better for men to become more diplomatic and less combative in the world now.

The reason why I compare this shit to DUI is because it feels, to me, like a less-dangerous version of drunk driving. You're doing something that will probably end up OK and nobody will get hurt. But then somebody gets hurt.

Just to clarify, by "this" you mean the friends you are describing? Because if you mean Weinstein, I do not and cannot follow the logic at all; this is someone who actively spiked the careers of women who turned him down the wrong way.

Oh okay, so these kinds of things happen all the time in one form or another, I guess, but talking about this stuff over the last couple of days made me pay extra attention to this thing:

So I go to work pretty early because my workplace allows me to do so and, because I work in a big city, it eases my commute significantly to do so before most other people have begun their own commutes. So my train is generally pretty empty, and I'm just in the habit of getting on the same car and sitting in the same seat. In the past few months, there's been this kinda bro-ish older dude boarding the same train on random days. I didn't give him any thought until he started getting to the platform before me and standing where I usually stand. Which is no big deal, but noticeable on a mostly empty platform. Long story short, he's been riding this train long enough to observe my routine and now he's making what seems to be a pointed show of elbowing his way onto the train before me and sitting where I usually sit on this train car full of empty seats. To which I'm just all...really? Is this really all you have, this completely insignificant show of dominance? Are you hoping for a reaction of some sort? And naturally he's one of the full manspread dudes, arms draped over the back of the seats next to him. It's just kind of fascinating from an anthropological standpoint because I don't really care but it's also, y'know, a totally gross reminder of the kinds of things certain dudes do just as a matter of course.

I'll assume that many posters have been arrested for if not charged with DUI.

xp to map - there's a book I want to read called "Hierarchy Of The Forest" that afaict asserts that egalitarian, cooperative behavior is seen more in societies where there is actual hardship, like hunter-gatherers, and people need to stick together. Once you introduce agriculture/surplus, all the nasty stuff has no checks or balances.

@ DJP, I'm talking, specifically, about a party in Montreal called Drones where everyone goes and does drugs and has sex with each other that cannot possibly be 100% consensual, I'm talking about famous queers in NYC who have salons where they read from their latest novel or play for an audience of their peers and their young lovers, I'm talking about every DIY scene across North America and what happens to people like that person in PWR BTTM, I'm talking about Marc Jacobs and his hired sex workers, I'm talking about my father and his students, I'm talking about myself and everybody else who is sexually active and needs to be checked and managed and made sure that they're actions are not harmful. Harvey Weinstein is a monster but, like Bryan Singer, I think his monstrousness is just an advanced form of the same cancer that I'm observing in all these other places and spaces

The reason I'm bringing up DUI is because it's a more dangerous activity that is easier to police, easier to talk about, and far less stigmatized. Everybody has driven drunk at one point, no? It seems that way

Oh okay, so these kinds of things happen all the time in one form or another, I guess, but talking about this stuff over the last couple of days made me pay extra attention to this thing:

So I go to work pretty early because my workplace allows me to do so and, because I work in a big city, it eases my commute significantly to do so before most other people have begun their own commutes. So my train is generally pretty empty, and I'm just in the habit of getting on the same car and sitting in the same seat. In the past few months, there's been this kinda bro-ish older dude boarding the same train on random days. I didn't give him any thought until he started getting to the platform before me and standing where I usually stand. Which is no big deal, but noticeable on a mostly empty platform. Long story short, he's been riding this train long enough to observe my routine and now he's making what seems to be a pointed show of elbowing his way onto the train before me and sitting where I usually sit on this train car full of empty seats. To which I'm just all...really? Is this really all you have, this completely insignificant show of dominance? Are you hoping for a reaction of some sort? And naturally he's one of the full manspread dudes, arms draped over the back of the seats next to him. It's just kind of fascinating from an anthropological standpoint because I don't really care but it's also, y'know, a totally gross reminder of the kinds of things certain dudes do just as a matter of course.

― the scarest move i ever seen is scary move 4 (Old Lunch), Friday, 13 October 2017 17:19 (four minutes ago) Permalink

When I was a teacher and office drone for Kaplan Test Prep, there was this one teacher trainer who was notorious for doing the "handshake flip" -- apparently believing that if he got his hand "on top" of yours in the handshake it showed dominance. I had noticed he did it but just thought it was a weird handshake and had no idea what he was doing until a coworker explained it to me, and I was like "What?! That's the dumbest shit I've ever heard." The next time he did it I surprise-flipped him, so my hand was on top. It was very satisfying.

But I intuitively disagree with the idea that a Harvey Weinstein knows what he's doing. I have read many theories on Twitter ("men in positions of power drop names deliberately to show you all that you'll lose if you rat them out") that are just preposterous.

i'm not sure what you mean by this but i'll ask a question about this scenario:

up the street lives an art gallery owner, who had previously been very much around in our social circle, hanging out at parties w/his wife and daughter, with all of us and our kids. he was mostly close with our friends who live across the street from him.

our close friend (I'll call her "M") was housesitting for our friends who live across from him. while she was there, she was working on a stop motion video project that was expressly about her childhood. a childhood that had her and her sister both sexually abused by a couple of different men her mom dated, which in different ways really wrecked them.

while she was there, there was a knock on the door and it was this guy, who was there to walk our friends' dog. M went to the door and answered and she invited him in, since he owns a gallery and she wanted to show him her work.

As she explained that it was about her childhood sexual abuse, she got very emotional. This guy went over and began hugging her, tightly. she protested, saying she didn't really like being hugged. and he started to caress her and whisper to her, "every one needs a cuddle sometimes..." she says she saw his face for a moment and his eyes were just closed and he was breathing deeply, like in a trance.

eventually she broke free and he almost snapped out of it. then he went and walked the dogs and never spoke of it again. she immediately ran down to our house and came in crying and spent the afternoon hanging out on our couch, afraid to go back there.

this was a couple months ago but it has i think completely set her back. i volunteered to go across the street to confront him but she didn't want me to (though her mom later did!!) and what eventually happened is we all cut him off completely. his wife found out and who knows what's going on there. he claimed it was a "misunderstanding", which is a helluva thing to say when you do that to someone right after finding out their history of sexual abuse.

so did he not know what he was doing? because it felt like to me he discovered rather unexpectedly someone he thought was someone he could victimize and took action.

xp to map - there's a book I want to read called "Hierarchy Of The Forest" that afaict asserts that egalitarian, cooperative behavior is seen more in societies where there is actual hardship, like hunter-gatherers, and people need to stick together. Once you introduce agriculture/surplus, all the nasty stuff has no checks or balances.

― sleeve, Friday, October 13, 2017 12:25 PM (seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yes, sedentism, the shift to crop cultivation, and an increasing reliance on trade directly informed the shift away from the egalitarianism of hunter-gatherer societies. I also have some amateur theories about the advent of The Wall as a concept and the deleterious psychological effect that it had on communities who performed most activities in the open and in plain sight of others in their community, if you're interested in my pamphlet on the subject.

oh definitely, Chellis Glendinning refers to that as "The First Fence" in this excellent book:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/560830.My_Name_is_Chellis_and_I_m_in_Recovery_from_Western_Civilization