Rolling Maleness and Masculinity Discussion Thread

I agree with this - I think there is a danger in attaching only negative connotations to the sorts of traits we have historically seen as male - but I don't think aggression is good or particularly masculine, although certain expressions of it obviously are. A lot of the efforts to identify masculine behaviour seem incredibly superficial to me. I think you could address all of the obviously troublesome stuff and still have characteristically male behaviour. I also don't really buy the implicit suggestion that gender differences actually decrease as you go 'up the class ladder' or whatever, I just think the expressions are subtler (cf the cute phrase "the gentrification of masculinity" in a grayson perry doc which has stayed with me).

I think some of it is that even the word "aggression" has a negative connotation, but if we think of, e.g., the feeling a person gets as they are out for a run and trying to make it up a very steep hill and trying to give themselves that extra boost to make it over, that's in some sense an "aggressive" feeling, but the connotation of "aggressive" is I guess taking things from other people or using power against others in unfair ways.

I would describe the former sensation as determination, not aggression. Aggression is inherently interpersonal.

I hear it used a lot in sporting contexts and for solo activities at least it's the most benign interpretation (although still v individualistic and selfish), but, yeah, I agree w simon, I don't know how useful the overall concept is if it's broad enough to contain willing yourself up a hill and trying to intimidate people

FWIW the dictionary definition that comes up in google has both connotations:

hostile or violent behavior or attitudes toward another; readiness to attack or confront.
"his chin was jutting with aggression"
synonyms: hostility, aggressiveness, belligerence, bellicosity, force, violence; More
the action or an act of attacking without provocation.
plural noun: aggressions
"he called for an end to foreign aggression against his country"
forceful and sometimes overly assertive pursuit of one's aims and interests.
synonyms: confidence, self-confidence, boldness, determination, forcefulness, vigor, energy, zeal
"he played the game with unceasing aggression"

And that's kind of an interesting problem at the heart of all of this I think, which is how to separate the two, and how much of the conflation of the two is culturally determined

ha! i did the same thing -- and i found that the M-W dictionary definition was different from the googled definition, and skewed more negative. The googled definition (posted above) uses confidence as a synonym for aggression. this seems significant, if not relevant. and i'm not a sapir-whorf believer, it's just interesting that culturally, via usage, somehow self-confidence has been conflated with aggression.

aggression in general weirds me out. not talking about the notion of playing a game w/competitive zeal, but the day to day. i mean i guess it's mostly manifested at least in my day to day life w/how people drive. it's probably the last frontier where people are actively trying to physically engage in some kind of combat. it's like a low-grade Pacific Rim out there!

the other day i was about to cross the street w/my six year old when a tow truck flew through the stop sign. since this tow truck does it every day, like every day for a year, i guess i was fed up at that moment esp. with the context and shouted "STOP!" and the dude pulled over, stepped out, and SCREAMED. no words, he just howled. by this point i had already walked around the corner so he was howling at a void. i guess he was angry that i had told him to stop after he drove through a stop sign when a dude with a kid was about to cross. i guess i wasn't empathetic enough!!

people are insane and unpredictable w/their aggression. they will kill you over nothing. i should remember that.

he should have been a linebacker for the Bengals, maybe.

when i was in high school, i wrote a narrative essay about how my boyfriend and i had driven to cleveland to see a concert (alice in chains if you must know, not my choice but i was up for whatever). we had gotten lost, and were endlessly winding our way through one-way streets without a map or any idea where we were going. i thought it was a funny story. my teacher handed it back to me, and said that from what i had written in the essay, she thinks i should break up with this person immediately on account of the aggression he showed when under pressure in the car -- aggression I had narrated in abundant detail, thinking it was just part of the funny story. i was really embarrassed at the time, but she was right. and i have thought about this paper and this advice on countless occasions when confronted with a friend or student or anyone i know in a relationship with an aggressive man.

halfhearted apols for the personal tmi but it felt good/like a relief to share, and is related to crazy driving as posted above

i also read a lot of narrative essays for work, so it's something i think about frequently while reading student essays

Driving does fucked up things to the ego, imo. I say this as someone who started driving to work again recently for the first time in years, and I do find myself enjoying speeding and weaving on the highway a little too much.

she thinks i should break up with this person immediately on account of the aggression he showed when under pressure in the car -- aggression I had narrated in abundant detail, thinking it was just part of the funny story. i was really embarrassed at the time, but she was right. and i have thought about this paper and this advice on countless occasions when confronted with a friend or student or anyone i know in a relationship with an aggressive man.

― weird woman in a bar (La Lechera), Wednesday, December 6, 2017 4:39 PM (five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yes. Same. After being through a couple of these situations, I see the interactions more clearly now and it's an immediate cut-off for dealing with that person.

my wife is extremely good at reading car body language, for lack of a better term. we'll be driving and she'll say, "that guy's about to do something stupid," and she's always right. the only thing i've ever noticed is that anyone hanging their left arm out and window and dangling it straight down is pretty much ALWAYS pissed off about something and is going to drive aggressively somehow.

i think a certain type of highly aggressive driving is an exceptionally good indicator of a person to steer clear of in everyday life, not just on the road.

Re "aggression" in general as a marker/performance of gender, maybe you could say aggression is a behavior, motivated by any number of feelings including anger or "competitiveness" or "determination" but equally or even more likely as a reaction to lots of feelings that it's NOT an appropriate behavior for, like sadness, grief, anxiety, discomfort, offendedness, insecurity, etc. The extent to which aggressiveness/exerting power over others stands in for a whole group of disparate emotional states is maybe the part where toxic masculinity becomes clearest? That it rewards men for depriving themselves of all those richer options for self-expression and affect.

the only thing i've ever noticed is that anyone hanging their left arm out and window and dangling it straight down is pretty much ALWAYS pissed off about something and is going to drive aggressively somehow.

Especially in the UK imo

Re "aggression" in general as a marker/performance of gender, maybe you could say aggression is a behavior, motivated by any number of feelings including anger or "competitiveness" or "determination" but equally or even more likely as a reaction to lots of feelings that it's NOT an appropriate behavior for, like sadness, grief, anxiety, discomfort, offendedness, insecurity, etc. The extent to which aggressiveness/exerting power over others stands in for a whole group of disparate emotional states is maybe the part where toxic masculinity becomes clearest? That it rewards men for depriving themselves of all those richer options for self-expression and affect.

― Conic section rebellion 44 (in orbit), Wednesday, December 6, 2017 12:10 PM (thirteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yes, absolutely, all of this.

I also am coming to realize my own complicated relationship to this because I grew up in a household where any kind of male anger was per se considered threatening and was strongly discouraged, so I'm sort of coming to deal with a lot of unexpressed anger later in life and trying to sort it all out, including its relationship to sadness and other feelings.

'we're going to aggressively address sexual harrassment in the workplace'

i found this program after watching the weinstein frontline doc and it covers some interesting ground
the host is well seasoned and isn't afraid to ask questions. the guests were well-chosen and had interesting perspectives.
would recommend i guess? http://www.pbs.org/program/metoo-now-what/

This:

Toxic masculinity is a panopticon that trains boys at an early age to live in constant fear of deviating from a very narrow & constricting prescription of behavior & the alienation & other reprisals that would come should they be outed as individuals with complex interior lives.

— Annie Sugar (@sugarphd) March 4, 2018

Is it

Huh

What % of masculinity is toxic tho

the theme song for this has made a big comeback in my head over the last couple of years http://i.imgur.com/t14gINP.jpg

Was it not avengers or what am I recollecting

barfy word salad

I GUESS I agree with some of this, but I am not sure I agree with the framing.

Toxic masculinity is a panopticon that trains boys at an early age to live in constant fear of deviating from a very narrow & constricting prescription of behavior

Okay, but. Sure, I do think that some of my peers had (at times) a fairly narrow and constricting prescription of behavior. And I do think I was punished for deviating from it. But not all deviation is automatically laudable, and that's sort of what this implies. Some of the time, I was in fact being a precious, affected dorkwad. That's why this seems a bridge too far for me:

& the alienation & other reprisals that would come should they be outed as individuals with complex interior lives.

I didn't enjoy getting beaten up on the playground (and I don't think I "deserved" it). But I would stop short of the implication here that every bully is a dumb brute and every victim is a saint (with a complex! interior! life!).

Like a lot of people, by 10th grade or so I fell in with a bunch of other weirdos. We were all SO CERTAIN that our weirdness made us special and the NORMIES just couldn't handle our SPECIALNESS, because they were all stupid automatons who lacked a "complex interior life."

Now I am old enough to understand that those guys were going through their own things, and they operated under constraints and within boundaries that made sense to them. Treating that as a morality play where "they" are the bad guys and "we" are the good guys is oversimplifying at best, not least because it is so flattering.

Darragh - are you thinking of this guy?

http://t2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQ5SpY3YhOzbz40pCE3_EX41aEBW3XKPCyKZlwuvgfGuExSkfk2

Ya

I know nothing more than the term tho

Tho he looks certainly both toxic and masculine

Anyway tl;dr: If I had gone into my junior high school every day wearing assless chaps and a tutu, that would have been weird and tone-deaf.

If the other boys had reacted negatively (reader: they would have), would that be because I was a shining golden spirit with a "complex interior life" and they were just mindless conformist automatons?

needs more shoehorned foucault buzzwords

I'm not attacking the concept ymp

I think possibly being seen to defend how groups reinforce arbitrary norms is a step far but

Mainly I've decided america

foucaulttahere

I dunno about that definition of toxic masculinity. I don't think it's about men being afraid of interiority, I think it's about men being resistant to inward interrogation, as it would only upset the power they hold by dint of their gender

For the past couple months, ever since it became apparent that People Are Listening To Jordan Peterson And Giving Him Money, I've been talking about and hoping to find either an individual, a collective of individuals, or a collection of texts that centre men, and give them the tools and language to forfeit power gracefully, to accept criticism and adopt malleable attitudes toward their outlook, to cultivate a productive response to being called out (instead of immediate defensiveness), and to change their language and patterns and operative methods in ways that benefit not-male people, (rather than the current result of woke maleness being simply men learning the language so that they can better navigate ways to maintain their power)

I've been... hoping to find either an individual, a collective of individuals, or a collection of texts that centre men, and give them the tools and language to forfeit power gracefully, to accept criticism and adopt malleable attitudes toward their outlook, to cultivate a productive response to being called out (instead of immediate defensiveness), and to change their language and patterns and operative methods in ways that benefit not-male people

I hear you but a "collection of texts that centre men" / "tools and language" sounds like you are asking for yet more man-o-centric words when "shut up and listen" still seems like pretty good good advice.

Might one not simply answer as follows? The text is "shut up and listen." The tool is "shut up and listen." The language is "shut up and listen."

lol yes that’ll convince the men that I know for sure

TS: finding just the right language to approach racists and convince them to not be racist vs. finding just the right language to approach sexists and convince them not to be sexist

Shut up and listen is not effective rhetoric no matter who you’re trying to convince of what.

https://i.imgur.com/qz5nf7p.jpg

@ YMP

Ya, text that centres men. Instructs them in how to not centre themselves. "Shut up and listen" is just putting Jordan Peterson on the top of bestseller lists. Not saying "shut up and listen" is wrong, it's just not working

The psychological effects of being asked to forfeit power, or to shut up and listen, haven't really been fully investigated? or at least I'd like to read about their investigation, if they have been. And then, a methodology devised to process those effects that isn't just resistance to forfeiture

Shut up and listen is not effective rhetoric no matter who you’re trying to convince of what.

otm

you also can't force real understanding through telling people to "listen" any more than you can make people confident by telling them to be confident. it takes more than that imo.

i've done a lot of 'shutting up and listening' to feminist rhetoric, i can assure you it doesn't work. hasn't changed opinion #1. if anything it makes it all the more clear how little ppl care to understand men. we are not you.

also is the understood implication to permanently shut up and listen? cos that's a pretty rude and idiotic thing to say to someone

turns out sometimes shutting up is correct

if anything it makes it all the more clear how little ppl care to understand men

Yes, these mysterious creatures called "men," hardly anyone cares about trying to understand them.

Maybe we need to send reporters out to Rust Belt diners to listen more to the esoteric inchoate concerns of these people. From whom we have heard so little. Their hopes, their fears, their dreams, their aspirations.

A completely unexplored area of mystery. The elusive male soul - what does it want?

Seems like we have heard so little about these creatures and how they tick for the last I dunno four thousand years.

The Troma character The Toxic Avenger is in the Troma cartoon Toxic Crusaders

he's right in the centre of the picture

just like a man