Rolling Maleness and Masculinity Discussion Thread

I learned early how to tell from bullies who can easily be ignored because they’re all talk, bullies you can turn because they just want someone to talk to and can’t engage except by starting a confrontation, and bullies who are really looking for a fight. In any case, fear and humiliation is blood in the water, so you don’t ever give them the satisfaction. I was taught that, and I learned it by experience as well, sometimes from unexpected people in places I thought were safe.

But I’ve always been lucky. To get all Larrycarpet Applekaiser, you wouldn’t want to fight me unless you have the jump and 40+ pounds over. Which is just a shitty macho way of saying lucky. Sorry.

Boys are horrible to each other from the get go. It doesn’t give us the right to use that poison on anyone else. But everyone should know what it looks and sounds like, maybe that would help in coping, I think that’s where my head was trying to go.

if tombot's point to some extent is that this 'undoing masculinity' is something one can opt out of only through some pretty high levels of privilege i dont disagree

I just realized there’s no way on earth I would ever give that cheap of a bully the satisfaction of screencapping his idiotic crap.

Screencap surely not really about the bully but about showing ppl the consequences of speaking out? Like you're probably right that the bully's gleeful about the screencap and thinking "I got her!" but he doesn't really matter enough that she should have to take that into consideration imo.

And I thought, that is how other boys talked to me and my friends since we were 10? 11?

I was bullied pretty badly through most of middle and high school and I gotta say, none of my bullies ever sounded this psychotically enraged - the tone was more along the lines of chirpy, mocking sadism. A cultural thing, I suppose.

D-40 sadly otm I think

Anyway time to take a break from ilx

Dan RF: at least ime, the trope that all bullies are basically abused kids is real, so yeah, the occasional mocking semi-sadistic stuff could come from anywhere, but there were other kids who would be relentless and focused because they really, really needed someone else to be lower on the order than them, because they were getting relentless shit from somebody at home. I got both.

I don’t know if that tweet is necessarily an issue of masculinity outside of the defense of a sexual predator, because I’ve witnessed women using the same language. Seeing bullying as a male thing, especially written or verbal bullying, is kind of wrong?

I just observe girl bullies operating differently most of the time? I’m certain the motivation is identical. Anyway despite best intentions I should never engage with personal shit on the internet, it’s literally never worth it.

I definitely think there's utility in acknowledging and preparing oneself for the variety of ways in which people are cruel to one another, but I would never fault anyone for being ill-prepared when faced with a manifestation of that cruelty. I totally understand what Tombot's saying on one level, inasmuch as I had a bully for a father, which gave me a lot of time to examine that shit close up and learn how to deal with it. So I see for instance the way a pathetic manbaby like Trump throws his weight around and it seems so familiar and I'm just like, guys, he's a total pussy under all the bloviation, push back fer chrissakes. But then I have to remind myself that bullying works because not everyone has the unfortunate opportunity to get enough exposure to it that they build up an immunity to its psychological impact. And while I have a keen radar and good bit of psychic buttressing in place for a particular kind of bullying, there are all kinds of other manifestations of cruelty (physical violence, for example) which I know I'm not as prepared for and which I find traumatizing and difficult to cope with. Those sources of potential trauma are going to be different for everyone.

We all learn that from our parents

WHAT NOW?? How is that remotely acceptable, as a way to speak to your children and teach them about the world? You're a dad! You would never do that!

Once again for the record, when men use sexualized threatening/hostile language against women, it has an extra lens of inherent violence because that language is dehumanizing. And we all know what happens to people when others find them less human.

I agree with you; I'm just not sure why it isn't also dehumanizing when men use it against other men.

Of course it is.

Yes, there's also the thing where telling people clinging to the rungs below you on the privilege ladder how they should feel about something is NAGL.

While I agree with that in a general way, if you're referring to DJP and me, we each have different components to our identities that are more or less marginalized than each other in different ways so it's not really a productive comparison probably.

No, that and my previous post generally were in reference to:

I just realized there’s no way on earth I would ever give that cheap of a bully the satisfaction of screencapping his idiotic crap. That’s fucking life.

Is this the part where I admit my cishet white dudeness and my tax bracket

I got myopia though

Also io of course I would never demean my own child. I’ve seen what it does!

We all have myopia. It's hard as hell to escape the gravity of our egocentric perspective of the world, but I find it helpful to constantly remind myself that every person's 'no doy' is someone else's 'I had no idea'.

So congrats on breaking the cycle in which this arguably abusive/violent way of interacting with people is normalized! Break all the cycles.

Like I get so irritated with both of my immediate superiors at work because they tend to focus almost entirely upon what's asked of them by their superiors rather than what they people under them need, but I have to remind myself that they're both minority women (one with a disability) and that the pressures they deal with and the needs they have to respond to in particular ways are so much different than they would be if I were in either of their positions.

I would like to keep the krebs cycle and the water cycle going btw

I’ve seen people get attacked, sometimes pretty viciously, online for not approaching these issues in the correct ways - using the “mother/sister/daughter” trope, talking about the ways in which patriarchy harms men, & so on. But given our myopias, individual and collective, aren’t these potentially useful gateways into understanding? Maybe for some guys - the chunk of men who are this side of irredeemable but who will never be woke as such - it’s as far as they will ever get, and maybe that’s ok. Progress is progress. And if they’re a little less shitty, even for essentially for selfish reasons, they’ll be less likely to pass it on to their kids and perpetuate it with their peers. Give them a “what’s in it for me”, ferfucksake, because we know that asking for pure empathy is often just too much to ask.

Anyone got any good reading material on the ways patriarchy harms men? I present very cishet because dammit that’s the easiest thing to do (and yes I recognize how privileged that makes me) but there’s all sorts of complicated gender & sexuality shit bubbling under there (I figure I’m probably about 40% female, a small percentage of which would be het female, to put it in shorthand) but I have zero interest in martyring myself to the cause by claiming trans or queer space. I work in an extremely old-school, masculinity-dominated industry where even the women tend to be pretty unprogressive when it comes to gender/race otherness & it’s tough enough being a voice for centrism & diversity as a member of the in-group.

I would love to arm myself with arguments for (at least) weakening patriarchy that focus on how it would benefit “men’s men” who have no interest in giving up their notions of masculinity - the obsession with toys, with status, with sports - I think if they could keep those things they’d be willing to budge on valuing the things that people who don’t share that sphere bring to the table.

tl;dr - Any good writing on how to convince men that it’s in their own interest to not be such dicks?

Give them a “what’s in it for me”, ferfucksake, because we know that asking for pure empathy is often just too much to ask.

This is sure to be a controversial perspective but it's a valid point that I've pondered quite a bit. How do we incentivize empathy (or some simulacrum thereof) among those who don't see the personal benefit in changing their attitudes (and may see far more personal benefit in remaining steadfastly-regressive)? I understand the knee-jerk reaction of saying 'fuck 'em, ignore 'em, let 'em die off, problem solved' but the fact remains that those people are still out there perpetuating those attitudes. And it's really hard to make persuasive arguments for maximizing the common good in a society that overwhelmingly incentivizes the exact opposite behavior. It may be a weak tea suggestion and it certainly isn't a pat solution, but I guess just trying to personally model the behavior you'd like to see others adopt is the best way to go about it for a start.

My lived experience of being an extremely masculine American straight white man has taught me that the primary emotion is anger. at everything. Start with the assumption that if you're dealing with such as I, that guy's deal is being angry all the fucking time, and whatever pastimes he might have, they are escape valves for colossal amounts of anger. And anything that doesn't get exhausted via another channel - sports, drugs, toys, video games, etc - radiates internally, as self-loathing, and externally on to whomever is around and seems available for abuse.

Ok, and what’s behind that?

he won't say "WOMEN" so I will

re Tombot - well, it's easy to choose anger as a dude because we're not supposed to exhibit sadness overtly, especially to other men. It's a toxic mentality and turns to tears eventually anyway.

i think that's as much about being american as it is about being male

http://d28hgpri8am2if.cloudfront.net/book_images/cvr9780743456081_9780743456081_lg.jpg

This was recommended on another thread somewhere and does a great job (at least to me) of illustrating the ways men are harmed by the patriarchy.

http://d28hgpri8am2if.cloudfront.net/book_images/cvr9780743456081_9780743456081_lg.jpg

ogmor at 3:35 17 Nov 17

i think that's as much about being american as it is about being male

look at Italy, look at Poland right now, it's everywhere

no sleepingbag not the plural

sad lol @ “what’s behind that” oh really

xp UMS
what's the it? I don't think they have the same type of angry, violent & indignant culture or turn other suppressed emotions into anger in the same way

to change/understand masculinity I think it's useful to think about how it's differently manifested across time and space, seeing how it is entwined with broader social/cultural factors. reductive views on social issues like masculinity strangely tend to be very US-centric, which is a real weakness (& ofc frustrating for everyone else)

On ilx or in popular theory or ...?

Sorry, re reductive views

Reductive views on Americanity always acceptable of course

damn i guess you guys aren't indignant after all

but really though, I don't think men I know are really angry, or, for the most part, emotionally inarticulate. sometimes I wonder if there is something generally destructive about masculinity but even then idk if it really holds true everywhere

Genuine q!

i just mean that as with most social/cultural issues, at least in the anglophone world, the US dominates & those experiences are centred. there are different other factors playing into specific things, but the americanness of a lot of these thoughts and experiences is erased, invisible, but I think the differences are often more salient than the commonalities

observing boys from 3-7 years old from a variety of backgrounds while raising my daughter I think there is certainly something instinctively destructive in the Y chromosome and it seems easy enough to reinforce that at the expense of teaching fluency in other emotions.

Obviously my society invented the Western genre and the murder mystery and the nuclear bomb so we definitely have some fucked up ideas about who men are supposed to be and what they should be good at so you have a point but I think it’s a boring one.

Actually the differences vs commonalities is interesting, belay my last

the impulse to point to some essential badness in masculinity is v strong especially given the history of e.g. war and violence, but ends up being quite defeatist & you could even say convenient in terms of nothing changing - 'that's just how men are' - & i think it has a big impact on male self image

In my experience most men, even most “madculine men,” are not repressed ticking time bombs, seething with anger. I don’t see myself that way. If people end up like that it doesn’t have to do with the Y chromosome.

in sooth i will belay when it please my lord *bows*

xposts

i just mean that as with most social/cultural issues, at least in the anglophone world, the US dominates & those experiences are centred. there are different other factors playing into specific things, but the americanness of a lot of these thoughts and experiences is erased, invisible, but I think the differences are often more salient than the commonalities

― ogmor, Friday, November 17

otm

Men are the people who caused and fought wars because historically the gendered division of labor put them in that role. The origins of war are complex, overdetermined, whatever but it’s way too facile to say it has to do with masculinity in some sort of biological sense. I just don’t buy it.

“Aggression” as a personality trait has something to do with testosterone, but it only leads to violence when it is channeled in anti-social ways. There are tons of pro-social ways to satisfy a competitive drive. Sports is a big one so it’s weird that was being disparaged earlier.

Also like even connecting aggression to masculinity — the small point I conceded — erases women’s experiences. Women aren’t being “more masculine” when they are angry. All people experience the full spectrum of human emotions. I get really uncomfortable when these discussions lead to generalizations. I don’t think it helps women or non-binary people even when on the surfaxs it seems to be “men” who are being disparaged.

Gender essentialism and binarism is reductive &, when taken as a truth, harmful. (It can be used as a useful shorthand - it’s not possible to always use language that parses out all the nuances.) so in some sense I agree w/you, treeship, but aggression is connected with masculinity culturally (nearly universally) and - through testosterone - even with biological maleness. I understand gender largely as a performance, and the space each of us carves out within our gender (whatever that may be) as a kind of dialogue between authentic expression of our inner selves (partially innate, much moulded by culture) and the role we play socially.

Taking it as a given that we’re not going to just magically erase gender binarism and live in a post-gender (post-race etc) utopia, probably the best we can hope for is a massive broadening of the acceptable range of gender expression within the binary categories. If we think of any trait as being exclusive to one gender or another, we’re doing disservice to the gender as a whole & to the whole person underlying the gender performance. Denying a wide range of emotional expression to men, as noted above, virtually guarantees that they will channel those emotions into acceptable outlets - like aggression.

The phrase “gender is a ghetto” keeps bouncing around in my head & I can’t figure out whether I heard it somewhere or I made it up, but it seems like it might be a useful metaphor to explore. Ghettoes are places where people are kept powerless to the larger society, where harmful behaviours are contained even as they may ensure survival there. Theyre both exclusive (if you’re not of it, you don’t belong there) and excluded (if you’re of it, you don’t belong to the broader culture). They’re also communities where people with something in common engage with each other, live lives, make progress. When they cease to become dysfunctional they cease to function as ghettoes but simply as communities, become both inclusive and included. I dunno, maybe it’s horseshit.

the impulse to point to some essential badness in masculinity is v strong especially given the history of e.g. war and violence, but ends up being quite defeatist & you could even say convenient in terms of nothing changing - 'that's just how men are' - & i think it has a big impact on male self image

― ogmor,