Rolling Maleness and Masculinity Discussion Thread

See, again, I guess we're not "supposed to", but I do genuinely sympathize with some of these "incels" or whatever. They have a right to be angry. Not at women - that's utterly stupid - but at a societal norm of "maleness" that never teaches males how to relate to women, either sexually or non-sexually. I mean, Jesus, as best I can tell the only people even promising to teach men how to initiate sexual contact are the fucking PUA scammers!

Maybe I'm in the minority (not to get all hashtag-notallmen-ish about it) but I don't think gentleness / respect / consent / boundaries should need to be taught.

Plenty of people seem to be able to figure it out without lessons.

Plenty of people seem to be able to figure it out without lessons.

Bullshit. They were taught; it just happened at an early enough age that by the time they entered the world, it seemed innate. But it wasn't. Children are clay-brained primates. Everything good about adults was forced into them by responsible authority figures while they were still clay-brained primates.

If it didn't need to be taught, assault and harassment wouldn't be the epidemic it is.

Well, whatevs. I don't think lessons from PUA fuckheads are the answer in any case.

How about having normal human relationships that include women? Friends, classmates, co-workers, sisters, mothers, neighbors, etc.? Approach them like they don't have cooties and strangely human relationships happen.

how many people itt have had consent lessons? seems like most people here have at least a decent sense of what it means - i'd have thought having a decent view of human morality and how to treat others would lead many to a naturally progressive view about consent.

i do accept that some form of teaching or education (re-education) which challenged the stereotypical view of what a man's role is, in relationships/society, could be useful. there is so much confusion out there about how men should behave. i am a p passive person in my interactions with others, and also when it comes to initiating relationships, the amount of times that people urge persistence or whatever is p weird. it's engrained in so many of our stories about love etc that men should pursue women - and even like at a wedding or something you might sometimes hear a romantic narrative about how the man just kept trying after initially being rebuffed. prob just one of many, many ways in which "romantic" acts and creepy acts are almost interchangeable - whether it's one or the other seems based on entirely arbitrary factors.

and then like if you start to think beyond traditional gender roles - it's a bit like how do relationships begin in that world? do they even begin? maybe they don't. maybe everyone is alone. or maybe we need to build it all from some year zero which erases all expectations, prejudices and limitations for each identity.

xpost

I had a few ambiguous bed encounters in college like the one described above. One involved an ex wanting to come home with me from a bar and getting into bed with me but then telling me she didn’t want to do anything. I obliged of course but was also left wondering “did she want me to be more persistent or did I do something wrong or something?” Even in relationships I have had women tell me they wanted me to be persistent when they initially didn’t feel like it. But the benefit of a relationship is you can build up the trust level and the understanding of signals to know the difference between “get me in the mood” and just “no.” That’s one reason casual sex isn’t always all it’s cracked up to be.

I have attended a consent class/workshop and it was helpful. But the fact that I was even inclined to do that reflects a lifetime of, fortunately, really positive and and informal (in the course of daily life) instruction from partners and friends - the great, too-generous role models that I'll never really be able to repay. Being in a women's studies program, with the social world and after-class conversations that implies, obviously also played a part.

My parents would never have talked to me about sex in a million years --- but they did at least raise me to be a somewhat nice and considerate person I think. And they would have backed up, rather than rolling their eyes at, media depictions in which male aggressors are the bad guys. I remember my mom pointing out that she didn't think "Bigmouth Strikes Again" was as funny as I did (age 13 or 14) because "there are men out there who beat women." There were probably a million pushes and micro-pushes like that which got me to the point I'm at now.

Agreed with plenty of the above. I also was beyond useless at picking up on signals and even worse about being able to do something about them. Fortunately I never went through this incel women-hating phase, quite likely due to being raised by a feminist, so that's good, but I was still very lonely and depressed and honestly felt like I had no place in the world. Obviously I learned how to do this human interaction thing over the years, but it would have been nice to have an idea about this stuff when I was still young. As the father of two boys I will really make an effort to help them with this when they are a bit older.

Not a parent myself and have no real business asserting an opinion, but are there other things, probably ones you're doing anyway, that lay the groundwork and just build up consent as a normal mode of behavior? I dunno like... stopping the kid to remind him that it'd be nice to *ask* if the girl wants to play Candy Land, imagining things from other people's emotional and decision-making perspective etc. etc...

I imagine a lot of this is the normal apparatus of teaching empathy and consideration, which then becomes a basis for talking points when a scene in a movie raises the possibility for a teachable moment. I mean obv 95 percent of parenting is just keeping your head above water, and stuff doesn't play out according to a master raising-your-child plan, but sexual consent probably isn't really a totally separate skill off in its own box. Though I agree totally that it's an area where exact what-to-do guidelines are in short supply. I for one am okay with the fact that I (generally) erred on the side of caution and probably missed out on a few experiences that would have been consensual and great for all parties. Better than the alternative, and the times that are closest to "something was maybe fishy there or I passed over some kinds of signals in my excitement" are the times I still feel the most troubled by, fifteen years on.

i am a p passive person in my interactions with others, and also when it comes to initiating relationships

Well, tbf, being willing to hang back and wait to see what happens kinda helps. Not as an explicit strategy*. More like, this may be a good way to avoid coming off all creepylike and stalkery**.

Almost all of my high school/college/young-adult relationships were with people who were already good friends in my social circle. If you're close friends with someone for 10+ years? It's not all that weird to attempt to date during one of the periods you're both available. Fortunately a lot of these people are still friends.

Anyway I had a decent "career" (ew) of dating, then settled happily into marriage/house/kids with my all-time fave gf. Personally, I would have NO idea how to hit on someone in a bar or whatever; the idea seems alien to me. But kudos to those who can make it work or have made it work.

* = pls do NOT use this as an explicit strategy, gross ew yuck
** = yeah and there is also a way to do this that IS creepylike and stalkery, pls do not do this

i was also terrible at it when i was young. and i was really immature. women basically had to hit me over the head with a club and drag me back to their cave for me to get the picture. i think i was just afraid. which is one reason why i drank so much back then. for courage. luckily, i wasn't a horrible drunk. if someone had crawled into my bed back then and i was attracted to them i totally would have made some kind of move though. because i was drunk so much. and young. and horny. but if i had heard no/i'm sleeping/etc that would have been the end of it. that never happened though. i had a friend when i was 19/20 who decided to become obsessed with me for a bit - she was very cute and we actually went to a big d.c. women's march together in 1989 which was amazing and huge - and one night we were at another friend's house drunk and she wouldn't stop latching on to me and i decided to go home because it was kind of a drag and she followed me home! barefoot! for about 15 blocks in philly late at night. i was scared for her so i told her to come in to my apartment and she immediately got naked and got in my bed and bugged me for sex until she passed out. it was kinda scary. plus, i just worried about her in general. being young isn't always so footloose and fancy free.

XXp I think that's one side of it, sure, but I had plenty of training to be a nice, considerate person and found that left me still not equipped to deal with the adult world. My education - about relationships, not just about consent - could have been much better.

Me, I have a 10-year-old daughter. She is probably 2-4 years away from having to contend with boys who've probably had more or less unlimited access to hardcore pornography. We do not know how that's going to go. We are working to prepare her without freaking her out entirely, and that is a balancing act.

My son (now 6 but seriously intellectually disabled) is on a different path. He can't talk, but sometimes communicates with an assistive device. Will he be able to understand consent, empathy, boundaries? Will he develop some type of sexuality on the usual timeline? Not at all? Early? We have no idea. I hold out some hope that he'll be able to date (within a very protective cocoon) but I am not sure he should be a parent. Hard to know where to go with that.

How about having normal human relationships that include women? Friends, classmates, co-workers, sisters, mothers, neighbors, etc.? Approach them like they don't have cooties and strangely human relationships happen.

In my last post I maybe gave the inaccurate impression that I turned down every opportunity for sex; no, I've had some sporadic experience since I was 14 (i have no idea how that happened so young), several relationships, some random hookups that I'm sure were consensual (or in the aforementioned time when I was 14, almost forced on me). But I still feel awkward the first time with anyone new, so extremely cautious about not doing anything that could possibly be misconstrued as non-consensual. Not only was I never taught anything about how to relate to other people (sexually or otherwise), I was often lied to if I asked about it when I was growing up. As a teen I had to seek this information out myself, and learned all the things I should never do with women. But nobody seemed to offer up much advice as what I *should* do; I consider myself fortunate to have been able to figure it out on my own, albeit not until I was almost 20.

I had to google some of the terms used above that i was unfamiliar with, seen the abbreviation a few times but didn't know what a PUA was. Wow, what an incredibly creepy scene....

Maybe I'm in the minority (not to get all hashtag-notallmen-ish about it) but I don't think gentleness / respect / consent / boundaries should need to be taught.

Plenty of people seem to be able to figure it out without lessons.

People have covered this already but this position is horseshit. It is the analogous position to teaching your children to be "colorblind", which then opens the avenue for them to absorb all of the shitty status quo racism that exists in our society.

Haha @ scott seward

I was exactly the same way

I wasn't afraid of initiating anything so much as "I couldn't conceive of somebody actually being sexually attracted to me"

DJP - Ok (if the "teaching" comprises a life of decent people showing/telling you how to be decent). But smarmy-ass PUA manuals or lessons are not the antidote.

xp - I think just about all of us will be confronted with shitty status quo racism whether we're taught to be "colorblind" or not. Not sure if by "absorb", you mean accept. I wasn't taught to be colorblind (I'm white); I observed racism; I never accepted it.

self-xp: "smarmy-ass PUA manuals or lessons are not the antidote."

Which was what I was responding to!

I've got two sons and I've made sure I've told them everything I can about consent, respect and boundaries - because nobody taught me, and I wish they had.

(talk to my daughter about this stuff too but it's different, obv)

The complexity of society is such that we (meaning people in general) require laws and codes of morality in order to help prevent people from behaving in ways that are destructive to society, because we otherwise don't often immediately see any direct consequence of our actions. We reinforce these codes with consequences wrt transgression, because we otherwise might not feel particularly compelled to comply. If basic notions of kindness, empathy, etc. aren't taught and reinforced, we're simply rolling the dice and hoping that people will naturally come to accept the importance of these qualities in a society where, for example, the POTUS is a complete piece of shit who does whatever he wants and never suffers any consequence. I don't think there's ever been a time in my life when it was more crucial to have explicit conversations about how a person should ideally behave as a member of society. Because those ideals aren't just instinctual or picked up through osmosis. The viability of society rests entirely on people subscribing to those ideals, and the extent to which we're just like 'eh, people will figure this shit out for themselves' is the extent to which this shit will ultimately just unravel completely. </stridentdidacticism>

She is probably 2-4 years away from having to contend with boys who've probably had more or less unlimited access to hardcore pornography.

Have you considered that your daughter has probably had more or less unlimited access to hardcore pornography, too?

My young life was more or less like Scott's, except that I wasn't drunk - I discovered early (around age 19) that I couldn't write drunk, so drinking would have to go. Anyway, I was really bad at reading signals from women - I would be told, weeks later, "She was really into you!" and say, "Oh really? Huh." My wife and I were introduced by a third party. I would probably never have spoken to her were it left up to me.

I stated this upthread but it was surrounded by the detritus of other ideas and blathering

Consent is easy to teach, but it's only one aspect of a healthy sexual relationship.

A model I was taught was the CERTS model. Consent, Equality, Respect, Trust and Safety.

You can have harmful sexual relationships that are entirely consensual, if Equality, Respect, Trust and Safety aren't respected.

I feel as if focussing too plainly on "consent" is missing the point. "Consent" is the aspect that is policed legally, so it's usually where people tend to dwell when discussing unhealthy sexual relationships.

But it's just as important to ensure your sexual relationships are ones in which both parties feel an equal amount of agency, where both parties respect each other, both parties trust each other, and safety is prioritized.

*revise my fourth paragraph to read: you can have an entirely consensual sexual relationship that is harmful, if Equality, Respect, Trust and Safety aren't respected

Have you considered that your daughter has probably had more or less unlimited access to hardcore pornography, too?

It's def possible but tbh it's p easy to keep a 10yo away from that

(in my experience)

I mean, do people actually ask each other "can I fondle your hips?" or whatever?

Yes. It's called affirmative consent. "Are my hands OK here?" "What if I did this?" and "Do you want to keep going?" Online dating sites are good practice if you've been in an LTR and it's been a while since you dated; you'll end up going on a lot of first and second dates. It is not hard to get the hang of. Fair warning though, you'll get made fun of a little. But the awkwardness of it should not be your focus; sex is awkward for everyone. As I understand it, you're trading a bit of awkwardness to lighten a burden that women carry in sexual encounters due to cultural assumptions about consent. Our culture defines consent for women situationally; their consent is assumed merely by their presence in situations where sex is a possibility. Men's consent is defined volitionally; their actions declare a situation both sexual and consensual. As a man, you can short-circuit that asymmetry by sharing volition... asking explicit questions that challenge the assumption of consent (do you want to keep going?) for the benefit of both parties. You're doing it to avoid scenarios where someone wants you to stop and for a myriad of reasons doesn't feel like they can ask you to stop.

Addressing the messed-up cultural assumptions is a different problem. As has been said above, this stuff needs to be taught. I definitely was not taught anything about it by informed parties growing up.

Some of the most harmful sexual relationships I've observed, for example, have been entirely consensual, but fucked up regarding those other important aspects:

Equality: a relationship between a rich artist and a fan, where there is love, and consent, and enthusiasm, but the disparity of agency continues to fuck up everything about their relationship

Respect: a relationship between a white man and a black man, where there is love, and consent, and enthusiasm, but then the white man made fetishizing comments about the black man, and the black man required a year of therapy as a result

Trust: a relationship between two men where they were both lying about fucking other people, and the revelations about their respective infidelities basically destroyed both of their sanities, and their capacity to trust other people

Safety: unprotected sex that has resulted in pregnancies, unprotected sex that has resulted in STI transmission, even unprotected sex that has been entirely consequence-free but has caused significant anxiety in the aftermath of getting tested, going on PreP 'just in case', etc. etc. etc.

So true about trust/respect/equality, and yet this is an area I've found women to "absorb" almost as many unhealthy ideas they were exposed to when growing up as men do. I've often heard women talking amongst themselves about when in a budding relationship they should "put out" or "give up" sex, and I just had to intervene and mention how totally messed up this sounds as a man hearing this. As if sex is something a women "gives up" and by extension, something a man takes from you. Really, anyone in 2017 who thinks of it as "putting out" is so living in the dark ages I wouldn't want to be in a relationship with. I mean, you're not enjoying this or thinking of yourself as an equal partner but just doing it because you think you owe it to me at this stage? I mean, just, yuk.

Regarding affirmative consent, it frankly blows my mind that there are people out there who do not verbally check in at every stage of their intimate activities.

I told a female friend recently that I'd never, even in my 13-year relationship, engaged in any intimate activity without verbal confirmation. She said this was extremely anomalous, that she was constantly dealing with "what if it's just the tip" negotiations and "but we don't have any condoms" bullshit

@ Lee626

As a reluctant bottom who regularly "puts out" for no other reason than to make my boyfriend happy, I think it's a little more complicated than that

there is definitely a range in between those two points! plenty of people who take consent very seriously do not want the step-by-step verbal confirmation. for some people the ideal might be "i want to let you know at the outset that i am down for everything the two of us have done in the past but i want you to check in with me for anything else" - - - or "i want you to actively ask step by step" or "i want you to not actively ask but for me to assert something when we seem to be going in a direction i'm elss sure about," or some version of a red-yellow-green system or a multitude of other possible configurations. but this is why it can be really great to have meta-consent conversations: what type of consent are we each thinking in terms of? do they overlap someplace where we can have some confidence that both parties are going to have a positive experience here?

I feel as if focussing too plainly on "consent" is missing the point. "Consent" is the aspect that is policed legally, so it's usually where people tend to dwell when discussing unhealthy sexual relationships.

i disagree strongly though i understand the point you're trying to make about safety, equality, etc. the focus on consent doesn't stem from its legal policing imho - in fact a lot of the voices pointing us to think hard about consent are very critical or outright hostile to the legal construction of consent, the way the legal system responds to victims, etc. i would say that the focus on consent comes from the fact that experiencing a violation of consent is horrible and often traumatic, and also a problem of epidemic scale. there's a reason why we identify a wider body of problematic behaviors, customs and discourses as "rape culture" and not "unsafety culture" - it's a continuum and consent violations are at (or near) one end of that continuum in a way that defines and structures the problem. imho.

"the two points" referring to fgti's post about antioch-model verbal confirmation vs. awful skeevy "but we don't have any condoms" bullshit.

@fgti, but you're in an established relationship with your boyfriend that (i'm assuming) has already included sex. I was talking about two people who had never had sex with each other, and the woman (or bottom) feels a need to hook up against her real wishes due to cultural baggage. I think that's a different situation.

I understand the step-by-step verbal confirmation works and is desirable in many circumstances, esp with young people and/or sportfucking, but the idea of my using it at age ** in an encounter with another man is absolutely fucking hi-lar-ious.

(I have most often employed "If you don't like something, say stop")

@ Doctor Casino that's a very good response!

I'd never, even in my 13-year relationship, engaged in any intimate activity without verbal confirmation.

i agree this seems a little OTT personally but if it makes sense for you it makes sense. also, and forgive me for speculating, but i can definitely imagine this ritual being very hott

here's where i show my age and utter alienation from this stuff, but verbally checking in at every stage of my intimate activities... I'd rather watch movies, then.

@ Lee626, I wasn't talking about an established relationship, I was talking about preparing myself to act outside of my natural impulses (have a big dick in my ass) in order to maintain a new relationship with somebody. In my experience, I've approached being penetrated as something that I hope I can grow to enjoy-- this is something that I've talked about with reluctant-to-be-fucked female friends, too, that there is a desire to make-it-work and hopefully arrive at a position in which it is regularly pleasurable.

People don't suck dick because the sensation of having a dick in one's mouth is inherently pleasurable. The pleasure comes from the fact that it is an act of "putting out"-- doing something that causes your sexual partner enjoyment

surely it can be both!

@ Morbs, to be specific, in my case, it's like an opening "do you want to hook up" question, then a question preceding any kind of oral, and then a question preceding any kind of penetration. I don't think it's that weird? I myself get really weird when people don't ask

"People don't suck dick because the sensation of having a dick in one's mouth is inherently pleasurable"

speak for yourself, junior. oh wait i'm not gay. wait, am i? i just like sucking on stuff, i guess. #freudsucks

anyway, that's still not the same as feeling you're *obliged* to do it

and i am with tracer. the asking for permission thing sounds hott. gonna try that with the only person i am legally allowed to try stuff with.

OK fgti, I was probably misinterpreting into a Pythonesque micromanagement scenario... I guess I've most often begun with 'What are we gonna do?' at the top and dealt with fine-tuning on a 'speak up' basis.

"Would you prefer me to rotate my digits around your left nipple in a clockwise or counter-clockwise fashion?"

lol yeah