Rolling Maleness and Masculinity Discussion Thread

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,

xxp That's interesting.

xp and otm imo

Sports is a big one so it’s weird that was being disparaged earlier.

sports historically filled with violence, including murder fyi

xp

yeah really

some sports more than others, of course. as team sports go, culturally, the NFL is far and away the worst in the States. at this stage virtually everything about it is pretty gross, Trump can take credit for declining numbers but it's largely due to more and more people finding the culture (this is apart from the anthem protests) and long term health issues unacceptable. NCAA football is probably even worse, i tend to believe if an NFL coach got caught shielding a pedophile he wouldn't instinctively have his legacy aggressively defended by fans like Paterno's was and is.

Sports is a big one so it’s weird that was being disparaged earlier.

― treeship 2, Friday, November 17, 2017 7:04 AM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

haven't been following this discussion but putting aggressive kids in sports definitely helps; even with mellower kids as it teaches them how to cope in situations where there are testosterone-filled boys

some kids really do need an outlet for their anger/energy and sports is a good way to release it, especially as a referee is more or less monitoring their aggression. if done properly there are consequences for a boy overdoing it. the lack of supervision that leads to something serious is not inherent to sports. it's the responsibility of the coach, trainer, and/or parents. sports is not meant to mellow out aggressive boys or cure aggression. it's just one component

having said that, minor hockey, as an example, is restricting fighting more and more since i was a kid and they are teaching kids more about technique/finesse and overall good sportsmanship

beyond the physical violence inherent in many sports like football and hockey, I was referring more to the general culture of violence that has always pervaded sports, from this to this to this. sports and sports fandom are violent.

My lived experience of being an extremely masculine American straight white man has taught me that the primary emotion is anger. at everything.

this is . . . not my experience at all, except sometimes when deej makes six straight posts on a thread

lol

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.

― bumbling my way toward the light or wahtever (hardcore dilettante), Friday, 17 November 2017 17:15 (thirty-two minutes ago) Permalink

love this

i would say it depends on the sport

european hockey has more or less been mellower than north american hockey for starters

but american/canadian sports have moved on to make attending sports events more family-friendly

when the us gov't was trying to popularize soccer in the us, that is one of the things they tried to focus on, because violent incidents had occurred at a lot of non-us/canadian soccer games. north americans have done a pretty decent job at it to be honest

sports historically filled with violence, including murder fyi

xp

― Οὖτις, Friday, 17 November 2017 17:24 (twenty-nine minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah really

― omar little, Friday, 17 November 2017 17:25 (twenty-eight minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

So has literature, music, painting and idk chess probly

now we just inflict brain damage on the opposing team's fans in the parking lot

xp

lol no darraghmac

unaware of any literary disputes causing riots resulting in the deaths of thousands but by all means prove me wrong

everybody should play chess though, fully endorse that.

xxp

this is the equivalent of singling out all the awful people in the music world and the literary world

Hmm if the behaviours of massed fan groups of literature are to be included are the measure then you can have the Soviet regime as well while you're at it

North American sports, the sports I mean, yeah they seem to enjoy a bit of the old uberviolence.

baseball and basketball qua sports are not very violent

this is the equivalent of singling out all the awful people in the music world and the literary world

it is quite different imo. music and literary worlds not inherently based on the premise of physical competition and winners/losers, nor have they historically produced violence on the scale I referenced. Historically, opposing groups of music fans have not murdered each other en masse. It has never been standard industry practice to murder a writer for failing to produce a quality work. Book clubs don't riot.

xp

unaware of any literary disputes causing riots resulting in the deaths of thousands but by all means prove me wrong

This is a patently disingenuous argument. Did you forget, for example, that The Crusades happened?

that's a p broad interpretation of "literary dispute" imo

competition about who is more right about how competitive men are
lol

otm

You're taking any number of broad interpretations yourself, certainly in your portrayal of what is commonplace or regular occurrence for a start

xps

no harm intended, i just always notice when threads devolve into "i'm more right than you are" type disputes :)
usually it's around the time someone makes it philosophical or references a great thinker or something

gender ghetto an appropriate metaphor, esp wrt "women's art" and the spaces provided for it

i was thinking along those lines too, xpost to djp's point. you could prob just as easily argue that sport is keeping our violent instincts at bay as fuelling them, imo.

although if you want to argue that the Crusaders main complaint was that Muslims were fans of the wrong book uh ok (kind of neatly elides all the non-ideological reasons behind religious wars - which were often predicated on economic, political, and cultural factors as much as handy ideological ones but then I've always found atheists' arguments for how "religion is the cause of 99% of wars" sort of arguments also patently disingenuous)

xp

example for ghetto metaphor - women play sports too and afaict enjoy it
they just don't get paid as much

lol fair enough LL

xp

i was thinking along those lines too, xpost to djp's point. you could prob just as easily argue that sport is keeping our violent instincts at bay as fuelling them, imo.

― Bein' Sean Bean (LocalGarda), Friday, November 17, 2017 10:08 AM (one minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the interaction of fitba and sectarianism in the west of scotland is an interesting case study. the glasgow derby often made a scapegoat but imo theres a compelling argument that it functions to sublimate and redirect deep-seated ethno-politico-religious animosity rather than engender it per se.

it is quite different imo. music and literary worlds not inherently based on the premise of physical competition and winners/losers

Anyways, to avoid the sidetrack discussion, sport was offered explicitly as a possible positive channel for a posited or whatever excess proclivity towards aggression or requirement for competition or physical trial amongst yr young males (NB everyone should do all sorts of physical activities always and learn themselves as a physical and present immediate being be it sport/contact or not but maybe we can presume that it's the most commonly accepted method followed by young men or where they are most commonly funnelled)

As you offering literature as an alternative or comparator for any particular reason? I can't see it serving a purpose along these lines!