Rolling Maleness and Masculinity Discussion Thread

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

I don't know that book! Thank you so much for telling me about that book!

it is really good IMO

Everybody has driven drunk at one point, no? It seems that way

you can drive drunk and get away with it if you don't hit anything. sexual predation by definition involves other people. and harming them. it's a pretty big difference

@ nomar, I don't think the gallery owner knew what he was doing. I think men are often attracted to women who are vulnerable, especially women who profess some kind of victimhood, because they feel some kind of urge toward being a sexual white knight. "This woman is hurting. I will heal her with my listening and then we will have healing sex and I will undo the wrongs of these other, evil men."

I have not driven drunk, or at all. (not hitting anything is luck, tho)

I have walked drunk and ended up in the ER.

xp that is way too sympathetic of a reading for me to get behind

you can drive drunk and get away with it if you don't hit anything. sexual predation by definition involves other people. and harming them. it's a pretty big difference

― mookieproof, Friday, October 13, 2017 6:41 PM (one minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

if you're defining sexual predation to include stuff like propositioning someone who may or may not be made uncomfortable by your advances, or sleeping with someone where there is a power dynamic that means they may or may not feel taken advantage of down the line - then that doesn't seem so different from a dui in the sense of "you might get away with it but also might also hurt someone else"?

@ mookieproof, I'm not talking about sexual predation. I'm talking about assault, breaching of consent, harassment. "Predation" suggests some kind of 1st-degree assault, like, you're planning on assaulting somebody (drugging their drink, i.e.) That's not what I'm talking about. If you're engaging in a pattern of sexually propositioning people who are less powerful than you, or getting drunk and having sex with other drunk people, eventually you will harm somebody.

I thought of this analog specifically regarding a very close friend, who spent a year hooking up with both men and women, usually while under the influence of drugs and/or alcohol. A year went by with a string of "consensual" sexual scenarios, some of them dangerous (from an STI perspective), but none of them actually harmful. Then, somebody was harmed by his behaviour.

"Predation" suggests some kind of 1st-degree assault

this is not how I think of sexual predation - predatory behavior includes patterns of exploiting power relationships to get what you want sexually from people, like an older, more powerful person that routinely "grooms" younger, less experienced sexual conquests. that's predatory.

@ sleeve and nomar, I have read other people talking about this tendency toward sexual white knighthood on Facebook and Twitter. I've actually observed it within myself, too. A friend of my boyfriend's was weird and cold toward me the first couple times we met. "Why doesn't she like me?" I asked my boyfriend. "She doesn't like men, white men especially," he said, "she had a bad experience with a white man several years ago, and hasn't dated anybody since then, and generally doesn't hang out with many other men, especially not white men." I observed in myself a weird rush of desire. Could I be the magical white man that breaks her dry spell? this dark part of my brain thought. It passed. I think it's a thing.

i am p regularly haunted by sexual experiences in the past, mostly from college but some in recent years when i was drinking more regularly, that seem... vaguer than they should, like where both parties blacked out, and at the other end of the blackout i feel like i'm not certain i would've done the same thing sober or if they would have either. these people are still my friends, and we've talked about it, and it's like... fine. but it also isn't fine imo, and i've worked very hard to never experience that kind of ambiguity again (to extend the dui analogy, which i don't think is entirely... appropriate, the one time i drove home drunk was so fucking terrifying that i can't imagine doing it ever again, luckily i currently live in a city where it is unnecessary (hi morbs)). it's the same when i drink (sidenote i feel any discussion about toxic masculinity should include a bold type subsection called "alcohol") and i feel an almost sourceless inspiration to engage in self-harm, which isn't hurting any other person but which is still an extreme form a violence, where i'm like "this isn't me.... but is this me?" observing and interrogating your own behavior is often terrifying and paralyzing and no answer that you wrest from this interrogation is ever completely clarified or easily applied. so i get where fgti is coming from on a micro-level, many men do not have the language with which to process their transgressions as transgressions

on the other hand, i discovered relatively recently that a friend and colleague of mine for many years assaulted another friend of mine. this person was someone i'd had long conversations about feminism with; they were extremely fluent in the fucking language. i cut this person off and honestly didn't even tell them that i was cutting them off, mostly because any time i tried to gently critique their behavior, the words seemed to travel over and get partially absorbed by an enormous sociopathic chasm. this is a person who'd i'd apply fgti's "they didn't know what they were doing," but in this particular case that makes it worse for me, that one's total cluenessness and inability to examine their own behavior (plus tbh their reigning sociopathy) completely insulates them from actually knowing they've done anything wrong

tl;dr it's hard

hopefully we can all figure out some way to dismantle capitalism and masculinity and ride into the utopian future on a wave of gay space communism

@ Οὖτις I agree with you, but all sexual relationships contain an imbalance of power. Youth/beauty is itself its own form of power but people don't talk about it, I guess, that much. A friend of mine who has a disability was seduced by a heroin user, who gave him a blowjob, slept in a bed with him, then stole musical equipment off him, stole money off him, started threatening him. It was heartbreaking to talk about this with my friend. My friend, who, as a result of his disability, had extremely limited (maybe even no) prior sexual experience, couldn't bring himself to accept that his young lover was actually NOT in love with him, and had only been using him for drug money. It was fucked. Anyway this is a digression

@ BradNelson, I think you should talk with that friend about this assault, as I am attempting to do

oh i guess when i was typing that out i forgot to add that i am literally way too mad at said person to actually be able to talk to them at the present moment, bc when i am mad i get very inarticulate; also the assault didn't happen to me, and for that reason it is hard to talk definitively about it

but thank you for the suggestion. perhaps at one point i will be able to

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

― fgti

what? no, not "everybody" has driven drunk. i haven't ever driven drunk. i was creepy to a girl at least once, primarily as a result of being socially awkward and inept. nobody called me out on it at the time, but it's been twenty years and i still feel guilty about it.

@ BradNelson, I think you should talk with that friend about this assault, as I am attempting to do

― fgti, Friday, October 13, 2017 11:07 AM (three minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

oh also i am not sure the person who experienced the assault would want me to do this on their behalf; pretty sure they don't want to talk about it or have it talked about (something i have transgressed even in bringing up my own anecdotal relationship to it)

Think the DUI analogy has run its course tbh

I think men are often attracted to women who are vulnerable, especially women who profess some kind of victimhood, because they feel some kind of urge toward being a sexual white knight. "This woman is hurting. I will heal her with my listening and then we will have healing sex and I will undo the wrongs of these other, evil men."

i tend to follow the maxim "don't attribute to malice what you can attribute to stupidity" but this postulates a level of stupidity that i find scarcely credible and not really different to criminal intent

hopefully we can all figure out some way to dismantle capitalism and masculinity and ride into the utopian future on a wave of gay space communism

the dream

btw there are elements of trad masculinity, 'performative' or not, that linger in gay culture specifically, and I enjoy some of them

(not pup play)

Only an asshole would make a move on someone who was upset and had just shared something vulnerable about themselves. Xp

'This woman is hurting. I will heal her with my listening and then we will have healing sex and I will undo the wrongs of these other, evil men."

i.e. the Clapton/Mayer guitar god wing of musicians

btw there are elements of trad masculinity, 'performative' or not, that linger in gay culture specifically, and I enjoy some of them

(not pup play)

― ice cream social justice (Dr Morbius), Friday, October 13, 2017 11:19 AM (two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i mean also this kind of abuse isn't exclusive to masculinity either, i use it almost as shorthand for a set of behaviors that tend recreate themselves through generations of men

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 think this is incorrect btw, i think this is not a theory but a fact of life. for example all of these women coming forward mentioning how Weinstein would mention all his did for certain actresses, the implication being their careers were in the balance...

i would suggest a) Weinstein never did anything *positive* for anyone careerwise, bc those he cited were already at a level or in a position where their trajectory couldn't be stopped, and b) he definitely boxed out others who turned him down or protested. if anyone in the latter group made it, it was because they found their way through Hollywood on their own and didn't let him stop them no matter what he did.

The DUI thing wasn't even an analogy, really! I mean, it was in my head, but I was just stating that I wished "creepy behaviour" could be de-stigmatized, and used DUI as an example of something that was just as commonplace, more harmful, but somehow less stigmatized

I find fgti's foucaultian contention that "power" differentials always exist in sexual relationships distressing. It's "true" to an extent, but it shouldn't matter if there is communication and trust. In that case you are experiencing something "with" someone; it's not two people trying to get things from one another.

But that definitely won't work if people are too drunk to communicate with one another. So yeah, drunken hookups are not good if you want to minimize the possibility of unknowingly exploiting someone.

sorry for characterizing it as an analogy, fgti!

xxp (his did=he did)

you can probably see a pattern of performers whose careers seemed to be going places but were halted in place or never got going. Claire Forlani is actually a very good example, she was for a couple of years in many, many projects and was a memorable presence. You have to wonder what HW did.

DUI is a good analogy for this danger.

they feel some kind of urge

possibly so. they also have brains, and perhaps even a sense that other people are not toys, and responsibility for how their urges affect other people

i mean, i'm a dude. i'm aware of what having an erection does to one's mental clarity. yet we are more than our urges. specifically planning and targeting vulnerable people to assuage one's hard-on is fucked up and sociopathic. it may be common but that doesn't make it something that should be destigmatized

sorry for characterizing it as an analogy, fgti!

― ToddBonzalez (BradNelson), Friday, October 13, 2017 6:24 PM (one minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I'm guilty of the same, apols

@ nomar. I'm not denying that Weinstein did that exact thing. I'm just saying that I don't think this is the root cause of why men in positions of power practice name-dropping.

Or maybe it is? As I stated above, when I was in a room once with [a famous gay actor in his 50s], [a famous gay author in his 60s], [a famous gay composer in his 70s] and [a highly accomplished gay academic in his late 40s], and they all had lovers younger than me (I was 29 at the time), and were casually talking about how Marc Jacobs had his secretary arrange for trade to appear at his hotel room every night, I couldn't help but wonder, "what comes first? Is it the accumulation of power that allows men to feel comfortable exploiting their agency to affect sexual relationships with people younger than them? Or is it the desire for sexual relationships with people younger than them that causes men to accumulate power?"

Sorry if I'm posting too much

White knight as one to heal and help a vulnerable woman is somewhat reductive to me. IME any attempts to fix anyone come from not being able to fix myself completely and not accepting I'm flawed. It's nothjng to do with heroics for me. I've learned to not bother trying to fix anyone cuz it fucking sucks for all concerned