Rolling Maleness and Masculinity Discussion Thread

@Mordy - And when the people who need to be reached are encountered in the wild they're fucking terrifying

xp weird - bc i explicitly spoke to the spectrum in that very post

bc serious predators know it's wrong already and ppl who allow themselves to operate in moral grey areas are already avoiding the meaning + consequences of their actions so ignoring some fb post from a male ally is a breeze. if you want to make an actual difference with people you need to confront them personally and in person.

― Mordy, Tuesday, October 17, 2017 5:02 PM (four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it's not just about 'serious predators', it's about systemic change in a society where sexism/harassing behaviour is so endemic that no one can truly acquit themselves of

i mean just for example, even stopping a Weinstein-type figure is not just about trying to convince Weinstein to stop (which is probably useless) but trying to wake up all the "well-meaning" guys to the fact that they might be brushing something off as relatively harmless, "old-school" behavior or "oh he's a bit of a creep" when it's much worse and not a laughing matter.

i didn't say this campaign shouldn't happen. it should. and men should listen and read and adjust their behavior and not brush off creepy behavior as a laughing matter. i said that those men should then go and make their interventions irl and not in grandstanding posts online.

it /is/ terrifying sometimes to intervene. it's much easier to post online to a mostly friendly audience. but that's the problem. the guy you need to reach is not participating in that venue. he's ignoring your post. so who are you writing it for?

I had a coworker who was relatively beloved who retired a couple years back that would occasionally trot out something patriarchal or borderline misogynist in conversation but for the most part it'd result in eye-rolling or someone half-jokingly saying his name slowly at him. But side conversations, some of them on social media, kind of illuminated the fact that his shtick was genuinely harmful in some ways and people started to make that clear to him.

Now, a few years after he retired, it's more likely someone immediately thinks "wow, that guy was a relic" than "that guy was fun" because attitudes have changed and that shit just really doesn't fly.

so who are you writing it for?

the army of commenters everywhere saying lets not be hast and do a witch hunt here lets wait for a court of law

you're writing it for woody allen okay

you're writing it for all your friends and coworkers who know that guy, and it's a declaration of solidarity that you're going to all call him out!

maybe the one guy will see it and shrug it off or think "wow some people suck" but when multiple people realize they need to tell him _he_ is the guy who sucks maybe things change

when the woman from comcast was changing my modem today she said that things looked different in the store and i said i was always moving things around and she said i was as bad as a woman and i thought of this thread. that's all i've got today.

At leastwe got in a good 600 posts before the conversation started drifting towards "I'm not a men's rights activists but they sure do have a point here"

i don't know who that's directed to but no one said that or anything like that

you're writing it for woody allen okay

the flying lotus guy!

let's be real, a lot of serious predators think what they're doing is just what people do, or people in powerful situations do, and they think grabbing someone's ass is as bad as jaywalking on the legal/moral scale

The broad point afaic is to continue driving home some aspirational notion of behavior in the hopes of it becoming more normalized. The one thing that I say about how I feel people should be treated may not make much of an impact on any one person, but many people continually saying the same things has at least a chance of slowly influencing behavior in a positive way.

xp and a lot of people who wouldn't be bold enough to do it would still excuse it as such -- "Eh, big deal, he grabbed someone" etc.

xpost to mh Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. It seems very odd to assert that people who do unacceptable things are necessarily cognizant that the things they're doing are unacceptable.

the entire "they know it's bad" thing is true, but some of them (not the Weinstein, obv) think that accusations and payouts or w/e are just part of what you deal with when you're powerful. because everyone's constantly accusing you of things or suing you, because that's just part of business and part of sex

it seems completely fucked up to me that personal relationships can be that cynical and depersonalized, but after listening to a acquaintance explain his friend was getting divorced and immediately jumping to how much alimony was going to be, child support, how he's going to get "ripped off", then yeah... people dwell on that

xpost Not even cognizant. Willing to accept. People are very good at justifying and rationalizing their own shitty behavior.

like it seems incredibly fucked up to me that people view relationships like business transactions, where you're trying to get the upper hand and might end up in court as part of the cost of business, but people are fucking weird

and to be fair, when I say “people,” I mean nearly without exception, men

there are so many instances of people viewing relationships as business transactions. we have an entire social network dedicated to that purpose.

oh you do, do you?

And it was known to happen in earlier centuries. xp

Hmmm I think when relationships actually were business transactions that was one thing, but people viewing relationships as a business transaction is another, different thing? And very often involves the one projecting mercenary impulses on to the partner, in a paranoid way, so as to justify their own as if in retaliation

dude, didn't you read Dennis Prager

and to be fair, when I say “people,” I mean nearly without exception, men

― mh, Tuesday, October 17, 2017 12:02 PM (three hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

gonna push back on this one a little, using another person for personal gain is not an exclusively male trait, it's a narcissistic trait. I've had destructive female narcissists in my life.

I mean, tbf it's a human trait that is found in excess in narcissism, and that is also encouraged, in general, by capitalism.

dude, didn't you read Dennis Prager

No. Help me out, I don't get the reference

are women narcissists sexually violent and see it as transactional?

that wasn't what the statement I was responding to said

just asking for clarification! I did let the scope broaden, there, but the main issue is sexual harassment and violence

i guess i just felt like exploitation is so widespread and multifaceted and historical that many instances/types prob need their own specific analysis, is all.

I've encountered - I think - a female narcissist, which was interesting. Definitely no violence was used (but perhaps it does happen - wd need to know more about narcissism). The lack of violence was interesting in fact - compared to a male narcissist, it was like 'this is horrible, I need to extract myself from this situation, but whatever else happens, I'm not going to get punched'.

God, this isn't a discussion about which gender, in the aggregate, is morally superior. That would be a stupid discission that wouldn't help anyone.

Of course there are female narcissists. Women are people. Everything a person can be a woman can be. Even bad things.

Also anyone can see relationships as transactional and devalue the people in their lives. Men who think this way have caused more harm over the years due to the way our society is set up. Undoing the harm is what I thought this discussion was about. That means being more considerate and aware of other people's desires and experiences and perspectives and not unthinkingly repeating sexist behavior or attitudes. It doesn't mean going back to old style stereotypes where men are lascivious pigs and women are naive romantics.

Which is where I feel that logic can head.

Marc Loi, etc

Didn't mean to imply women are morally superior! Just an observation. I don't think women being less violent is natural, much more a cultural thing, men being less hesitant to use force because they get brought up that way

Yeah i mean that is unquestionably true.

Men hurt women more than women hurt men, in all sorts kf ways, due to institutionalized misogyny. But it's important to examine this dynamic in a way that doesn't underestimate women's agency. Or perpetuate the toxic idea that men are just clueless aggressors and never vulnerable themselves.

I was probably being ott in the way i made this point. No one here was really venturing into that territory, but I feel like it's an attitude I see among some men trying to be woke.

Yep

But then the place to make that correction is face to face with those male co-workers.

I don't know who they are. But it just doesn't seem realistic to imagine/hope none of my co-workers are doing this.

Not sure if this is a job for 77, but...

So following #metoo a female acquaintance from a long time ago whom I'm still friends with on Facebook, posted an update anonymously calling out an incident of harassment that took place a few years ago. From the description it was clear who she was talking about - someone I've been fairly good friends with for about 12 years now and lives in my old hometown. She has since been in touch via PM with me confirming that yes, it is him, and to be aware of this as she suspected she wasn't the only one. She wanted to make sure that any of my friends haven't been affected too.

I'm feeling very depressed about this. I don't see the guy very much any more as I now live much further away, but we still keep in touch when I'm back. I'm feeling especially hacked off with myself for not having noticed it before, judging by his behaviour. Thinking back, the warning signs were all there but I was younger at the time and did the typical cowardly thing and brushed it off.

From what I understand, the incident took place a number of years ago. He has since been married and had children. The guy is very popular, almost a hometown hipster celeb, and he and his business appear in the local paper on a semi regular basis.

I've since written back explaining that I believe her, that I don't see him very much any more, but I am going to treat the guy with extreme caution from now on. I also said that if there's anything I can do, I will. But knowing what else I can do is the tricky part. Do I confront him on this next time I see him? (I am back in town next month and may end up seeing him).

Maybe others will disagree but my thinking is no, there isn't a reason to go confront him about something your friend told you happened a few years ago, especially if she didn't ask you to confront him about it. You don't have to become an informal justice system. You can definitely be more aware of the way the guy behaves next time you're around him though.

I do disagree. I think that it's with our friends that we can do the most/best work of helping dismantle the patriarchy/toxic masculinity/associated bullshit. One of the biggest takeaways for me from the past few years has been that our silence creates the spaces where these things perpetuate. For a while I did a lot of shouting on social media to uh demonstrate that I wasn't being silent, til I figured out that wasn't in fact helping. The only progress I've made has all been done been face to face, offering apologies to women I owed them to, working with male friends to hopefully become less of a problem, supporting individuals.

DL, I think you have an opportunity to help this guy understand - through friendship - that he's been (and likely continues to be) a problem & that he's got a responsibility to correct that. How much you invest and how deep you go will depend on a lot of things including the nature of your friendship & connection, and his reaction (short & longer term) to your engagement. One calculation that shouldn't come into play is his celebrity; if he can't or won't address this, he needs to see his social capital erode because the loyalty of his friends is contingent on his not being in fact a creep.

I'm trying to keep this brief and agnostic; all of the above is shorthand & all the how and what and when (and, yeah, even the whether) is up to you.

My 2c FWIW.

if you can't reach your friends, who can you reach? and denying that your friends, or at the very least, their friends, don't need the message because they're already on board is some deep denial imo

I should clarify: I do agree that approaching it as a "confrontation" or an "informal justice system" is the wrong approach, and if there's any chance your female friend doesn't want you to bring it up with him, you would want to talk with her about it first. Personally I'd not bring up any specifics about the individual incident or the female friend at all when discussing it with him, if at all possible. So much for agnostic, but FWIW anyhow.