Rolling Maleness and Masculinity Discussion Thread

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!

this may be tragic but i reckon sport is a release valve for all sorts of potentially negative or even dangerous things, patriotism, anger, depression, loneliness. i guess for men in particular, tho it seems to me the drug of sport is becoming more and more popular with almost everyone post-social media.

it's no surprise that like the more modern sports podcasts i listen to are talking about men's mental health more and more, again it's a bit sad that a lot of men seemingly need to hear a famous sports star talk about depression or seeing a therapist to legitimise that but i guess it does go against the idea that sport is (just) a melting pot of negativity and hatred.

xpost to jim - i don't consider myself at risk of joining the ira anytime soon but i know i often feel sport is a sort of safe way of loving your country for 90 minutes at a time, even though i seldom have such feelings about ireland in any other sense once the final whistle goes.

Trying to catch up: Yes/both vs no/neither C or D? Chicken, meet egg.

When people get all rhapsodic about Little League or Pop Warner or whatever and its ability to magically channel all the inevitable negativity of boys into a constructive collaborative team endeavor.... yadda yadda. Great if it works for you or worked for you. Honestly.

However, it also helps to reinforce a zero-sum mindset in which half the people participating "won," and half the people participating "lost," and this colors every subsequent discussion. That is the way every encounter ends: and every bit of luck, effort, spirit, talent, practice, and execution collapses into a binary: W or L.

Similarly, people get all glurgey about the Olympics, spirit of humankind, coming together in friendship, celebrating the best in us, festival of peaceful striving, etc. etc.

And it is also mimic warfare, where "we are #1" is not a standalone statement; it requires that someone else be #2, 3, 4, and so on. All manner of jingoistic nationalist fever-dreams make themselves felt at Olympics time, so can you please spare me the gauzy soft-focus narratives of Striving Against the Odds.

Sport(s) is/are/can be a healthy release valve (as LocalGarda says) for the allegedly inevitable aggressive and competitive urges inherent in our young people. Especially those rambunctious boys with all their Anger Issues and Daddy Issues. It is, I suppose, one of the safer possible outlets for aggression, physical dominance, regionalism, and nationalism. Okay.

At the same time, cultures that prioritize zero-sum competitive success tend to downplay collaborative, cooperative, non-zero-sum activities.

Even the arts constantly attract systems of ranking and competition and I'm-up/you're-down-ism. The Grammy goes to Artist X, instead of Artist why, even though they both made awesome records and there's room for both. A whole genre of game shows exists specifically to tell people there is a hierarchy, and most people are at the bottom of it. In an ideal world, the arts could be comprehended as a rampantly, deliriously chaotic garden of multiple, innumerable, infinite winners.

the meaningless of sport combined with how much you can make it mean is prob the greatest thing about it

xpost

xps you can argue football riots amongst regionally or sectarianally (word?) or class or whatever division of any type your 'opposing fans' identify with are as much to do with actual football as the crusades are to do with the Bible

I mean, it's not unarguable like

the meaningless of sport combined with how much you can make it mean is prob the greatest thing about it

xpost

― Bein' Sean Bean (LocalGarda), Friday, November 17, 2017 10:14 AM (one minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is a great way of putting it

'd say our inherent capacity for violence predates a great deal.

xpost to deems

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

― Universal LULU Nation (upper mississippi sh@kedown)

the particularity of poland re: sports and masculinity is interesting. hooliganism is super popular there and hooligan groups are partly responsible for the rise of right-wing nationalism in the country, and it's really a full-fledged culture: from petty stuff like grafitti wars where they grafitti swastikas against historically jewish teams, to organized criminal activity like drug trade + fighting cops for sport. it's this nexus where sports + hypermasculinity + (proto-)fascism converge. not saying that football is responsible for the far-right marches recently, because a lot of the right-wing drift has mostly to do with how strong conservative catholicism is there (also true of italy)

"the meaningless of sport combined with how much you can make it mean" - cf. "the reason academic politics are so vicious is that the stakes are so small"

xp to lg well yeah I mean that's the thread kinda but throwing sport under a bus is.....I don't wanna say it's maybe what you'd expect a ilx poster to do while advocating we all do music instead.....but ....

women play sports too and afaict enjoy it

you brought up music and literature, not me, smart guy

xp

True but iirc twas you isolated sports as a realm that involved these bahaviours

But lookit

Behaviours that make you go bah before you ask

At the same time, cultures that prioritize zero-sum competitive success tend to downplay collaborative, cooperative, non-zero-sum activities.

― loretta swit happens (Ye Mad Puffin), Friday, November 17, 2017 10:14 AM (four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is like almost every modern nation, even the most communitarian countries

we've reached a point in the discussion where the philosopher is beating himself now

True but iirc twas you isolated sports as a realm that involved these bahaviours

no. please learn to read. someone else brought up sports as a good example of an outlet/channel for turning violent and aggressive behavior towards non-violent and non-aggressive activities.

to which I pointed out that sports are historically very violent. which is a fact.

So is everything

ps can't read did sports at school

turning violent and aggressive behavior towards non-violent and non-aggressive activities.

― Οὖτις, Friday, November 17, 2017 10:31 AM (twenty-one seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i never said sport is non-violent and non-aggressive

you should take your own advice

Lads

I bumped a sports thread fyi

can't believe i'm quoting my god damn self now on ilx

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

― i n f i n i t y (∞), Friday, November 17, 2017 9:38 AM (fifty-four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

xp to lg well yeah I mean that's the thread kinda but throwing sport under a bus is.....I don't wanna say it's maybe what you'd expect a ilx poster to do while advocating we all do music instead.....but ....

oh yeah, i was agreeing with you by pointing that out.

Historically, opposing groups of music fans have not murdered each other en masse.

Historically, sports fans haven't either, unless you're thinking of examples I can't call to mind.

I grew up in the age of mods vs rockers, teds vs punks, that's fairly analogous to football hooliganism as far as I can tell.