Rolling Maleness and Masculinity Discussion Thread

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.

FWIW I think I initially misread/misinterpreted the post to mean that he was no longer friends with the guy, I see now that that's not the case.

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'.

― Never changed username before (cardamon), Tuesday, October 17, 2017 11:13 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The women's version of this thought is "This is horrible, I need to extract myself from this situation, but whatever else happens, at least I won't get raped." So....

just saw the loooooooooooooooongest post by a dude on my FB about how #metoo should be all about women and not about men's stories and yet it totally felt like someone had felt left out and needed to add his looooooooooooooooooooooong two cents. and he got patted on the back by a ton of people. for being so understanding. i dunno, maybe he's great. just felt like the longest mansplain.

plus, it felt so after the fact. to be lectured on what it means by a dude. he was probably polishing it up for a few days.

There's a whole thirst aspect to any issue being discussed on facebook that's hard to escape. I did wind up making a post about this, specifically because I saw a female friend saying it bothered her that it seemed to be mostly women paying attention/liking/posting. So IDK, no one complained about my post, but I would welcome criticism if anyone had it.

i think if something comes from your heart you should go for it. this long thing i saw definitely felt mansplain-y and ME TOO! in an ego way. like they were having the final word.

you just don't manderstand

lol

i think if something comes from your heart you should go for it. this long thing i saw definitely felt mansplain-y and ME TOO! in an ego way. like they were having the final word.

― scott seward, Wednesday, October 18, 2017 3:13 PM (six minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

"listen up"

Well, having seen a bunch of women post "more men need to step up and post on FB the ways they've fucked up and be held accountable"

and my internal response was "men aren't stepping up to being held accountable because in doing so they'll possibly face legal reprisal and/or stigma"

(sure enough a cursory Facebook search of the #itwasme tag revealed that several women were posting that they were searching #itwasme and summarily blocking any man who admitted to abusive behaviour)

and also I thought "the really abusive people I've met are so unable to admit their own accountability, even to themselves, about anything, so how could they possibly have the wherewithal to step up to make a statement?

so instead, in order to remedy both these problems, I'm collaborating with a friend of mine to organize an anonymous group where men can talk about their abusive patterns and we'll do readings and stuff

Yeah, I was much more vague about copping to things in my fb post than I even was here, it's just too broad and public an audience and it doesn't feel right, too much fear that giving specifics of something that happened 20 years ago would nonetheless color my future interactions with people, not to mention that I don't know how much I can trust everyone I'm "friends" with.

here is semi-anonymous even though I know a few of you irl, different feeling

i saw the #dobetter hashtag a little. for men who want to, you know, try harder.

IIRC Chapo Trap House had a good riff on how empty "I'll do better" is.

I might be overly concerned with how things are received but I am not sure publicly explaining how you harassed someone is the best idea if they're in your social circle and might read it and either wonder why you're posting it without apologizing and asking if it's ok, or if their perception was that it wasn't harassment and your outing of your negative intentions makes what was previously fine now harassment to them

if you're posting real shit maybe vet it with the people it involves

otm

I did a fairly mild #metoo about the grossly grabby/handsy goth scene in my hometown 20 years back. All the women who'd been in it at the time replied with "hell yes" type responses. The ONE guy who replied basically said 'the women were just as bad!". Irony is he's one of the people I was thinking of when I posted what I did, not that Id've named names... sigh.

But yeah beyond that I'm not going to call anyone out because it involves other people and thats their place not mine.

can i mention that the concern with (and time/energy spent) criticizing other dudes' responses is making it ("it") about men
and that seems like a waste of time to me
i have seen 0 admissions or #dobetter or anything like that

i thought man alive's fb post was thoughtful and restrained. now is a good time to be conservative in that regard (which is probably why the offensive posts offend -- they are florid?)

Thank you DL for posting on Facebook about this - it made me feel able to do so as well, though in a smaller, far less brave way.

know what else? i do think there is a severe lack of male understanding that sexual violence/aggression isn't like other forms of aggression. it leaves its own indelible impression on the body and mind.

i remember when jon krakauer wrote about rape on college campuses and admitted on live radio that he didn't understand that rape is different than other forms of violence. at the time, i was completely appalled. now i know there are lots (apparently LOTS) of men out there who don't understand the difference between sexual violence/aggression and other forms of violence and aggression. idk why but i had assumed everyone gets that. apparently not!

(he said that before writing the book he didn't understand the difference, and that writing the book helped him. the guy has written a number of books and still didn't get this before he wrote a book about it? alright. i tried to be understanding but it was admittedly kinda difficult for me to imagine NOT getting that)

Great point.

I think that understanding of rape (or its politer, but necessary euphemism “sexual aggression”) happens in proximity to victimhood. Maybe this is obvious to say, but I know that a LOT of people who are not directly affected by rape who don’t understand it. Most of these people are men - who, as part of male privilege can easily skate past the issue - but there are also women (especially of a certain generation) who are dismissive/minimizing of rape in general — especially in higher ed.

In college, when I was working (cluelessly) to get a friend to help after a sexual trauma, I was SHOCKED at the road-blocks went up before her, and even more shocked to find that they were thrown up by three middle-aged women in positions of nominal authority, who — because they did not want to make a “big thing” of my friend’s experience — tried to squash her accusation. It was only by seeing THAT, and not the aftermath of the immediate trauma, that I began to see the long and pervasive tail of the incident as distinct from other experiences.

i think straight men are acculturated to not identify with victims. i remember thinking about this a lot in the aftermath of the jerry sandusky scandal, when women and gay men i knew tended to identify with the victims and straight men tended to identify with the bystanders. i think misogyny is at the core of that: so much energy devoted to never putting yourself in the position of "getting fucked," but it's not conscious and it's in the ether (prison rape jokes, etc.)

xp to LL

Horseshoe OTM; sadly I think it's even worse than that, in that straight men in some cases are afraid to even empathize with women for related reasons.

wow, that's bleak.

Our American culture has an unfortunate support of brutalizing and preying on the "weak". So it's not really a surprise. It's not just misogyny, it's a general attitude that applies to anyone outside of the ruling class. I mean, we have a prison slave system going on right now, and most employees are wage slaves with no rights or protections.

I don't think that's specifically American, that's human nature. American government/society does a lot less to protect "the weak" than other similarly prosperous nations, and a lot of our rights and protections exist only in theory. One of my friends' stories was reported being sexually assaulted by a male professor in college. She reported it 9 months after the incident -- after she no longer had to worry about repercussions academically. The administration said, "Sorry, honey, the statute of limitations is only 6 months." This guy is still a professor at that school, 25 years later.

my friend i mentioned upthread who had to deal with the predator neighbor, she's left social media bc with all the #metoo and news stories coming out she was getting triggered constantly. her experience when she was young coupled with other events of her life have left her retreating very far inward and away from real life. she doesn't even want to work jobs in offices, so she's supported by a group of families who all know her and who give her work, all while trying to encourage her as best they can. but it is tough for her. the cost of sexual assault and abuse can be horrific, and she's sometimes just barely hanging on.

Yeah, human nature is fucked up. It'd be nice one day for a society to create things like a social safety net, stronger employee rights, a more balanced taxation scheme, consumer protections, tax-funded public health insurance, and things like that ... but there isn't a single country in the history of the earth that's figured that out.

One day we'll advance as a species. I'm a little too harsh in my idealism for what America could be, since no other country has done any of that, either.

Xp yeah I mean I don't want to exaggerate it, I don't mean that straight men are literally rendered incapable of identifying with women, but there is definitely a way that men are trained to fear and squash the "feminine" in themselves that I think by extension diminishes the capacity to imagine oneself in the place of a woman, because as horseshoe points out, fuck or get fucked.

Uh I live in one, actually. PS Wrong thread for this xp

What I mean is, the culture that produces what I mentioned, derives from a mentality which also leads to a whole slew of other abuses. It's a poisonous mindset that's infected anything ...

And I'm no America hater, I just want to see this country as great as possible for everyone, like it could be, but isn't for some stupid reason.

Rape culture is alive and well in countries with great welfare states, I think probably most ppl itt would agree w/ you that the lack of same is a problem in the US but within the context of this thread it's going off on a tangent and kinda disrespectful.

Yeah rape culture's awful here in NZ, more tied in to sports and binge drinking than any lack of a welfare system

Xp yeah I mean I don't want to exaggerate it, I don't mean that straight men are literally rendered incapable of identifying with women, but there is definitely a way that men are trained to fear and squash the "feminine" in themselves that I think by extension diminishes the capacity to imagine oneself in the place of a woman, because as horseshoe points out, fuck or get fucked.

― IF (Terrorist) Yes, Explain (man alive), Thursday, October 19, 2017 3:25 AM (six hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

OTM. It's not that it's impossible to feel empathy, but the idea that empathising somehow makes one appear weak or 'less of a man'. This extends from not being sure how vocal to be in expressing feminist values online, all the way to feeling a bit weird carrying your girlfriend's handbag while out in public. So much irrationality going on, all in the fear of being perceived 'the wrong way'.