Rolling Maleness and Masculinity Discussion Thread

how much can mordy bench? i feel like he might be secretly swole

who knew the rolling maleness and masculinity discussion thread would be so riddled with dudes engaging in contestive head-butting displays

― had (crüt), Friday, 9 March 2018 15:39 (nine minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

who knew it would be characterised as this at any available opportunity

campaigning for this thread to be let be w/out this lameness tbh

morbs up in here advocating for male vs female mma fights

I love how outraged everyone pretends to be at the suggestion that if soref wants to know about feminist men, he should listen to them. Or did nobody read the post of his I was responding to?

You should really try and shut up and listen to a couple of feminist men some time, might learn something.

lmao

― had (crüt), Friday, March 9, 2018 7:29 AM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

poe's law candidate

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/mar/09/men-after-metoo-masculinity-fundamentally-toxic

I think macho self-effacement from social-justice inclined straight white guys can be a thing, the implication that anyone who'd feel put out or resentful at stepping back is an insecure beta, if you're alpha enough then you're confident you'll do well even on a level playing field (or handicapped to make up for pre-existing inequalities)

― soref, Friday, March 9, 2018 8:53 AM (five hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i mean...

who knew the rolling maleness and masculinity discussion thread would be so riddled with dudes engaging in contestive head-butting displays

― had (crüt), Friday, March 9, 2018 7:39 AM (five hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

was waiting for this type of comment the moment fgti revived this thread

to expand on what dmac said, this is a lame comment because every single controversial/political topic on ilx has been riddled with worse attacks

but u know u rly have to stick it to the MAN eh

the unflinching metacommentary on masculinity where a minor disagreement turns into personal attacks at the drop of a hat

also officially casting my vote as yea for separating US/non-US threads

Men Are Trash vs. Men Are Rubbish

you joke but

vs. Men are both Trash and Rubbish

Human Condition, tbh

i'm a little rubbery in parts yes

trying to work out what you have left once you remove the sensationalism from all the writing that's come out over the last ten years or so about the lazy unambitious and ultimately unhappy nature of young men, with their gaming and their low achieving and low earning and their suicide and their pornography and their propensity to live at home and so on.

while the diagnosis is at least ostensibly dispassionate & takes place at a societal level, the solutions I've seen offered are largely individual & moral (& ofc of varying toxicity), empowering ppl to improve themselves. this seems like treating the symptons rather than addressing whatever wide-ranging underlying factors are seen to be the cause, so to flesh out my reading on this immiserating topic I'd like to find something that looked at this structurally, a theory of male disengagement and laziness at a societal level that really gets at the mechanics and doesn't just fall back on pop psychology or motivational thinking type literature.

i think there is mb something to this idea that people's senses of gender develop oppositionally. idk if this is just bc it reminds me of how people in relationships often end up contrasting or reacting to the traits of their partner, or feeling trapped and forced into performing a certain role by them.

anyone else bothered by this?

massively but i mainly work with a particular neurodiverse subset of young men and i'm not sure how much of their disengagement to attribute to neurodiversity. looking at the bigger picture, i see a lot of young people of all genders with either low aspirations, no aspirations or unrealistic ones. but again this is a subset of the demographic, predominantly young people in the poorest section of society. on this specific area i think Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism has some insightful things to say on Further Education aged British kids. i can't help but think that their response to boring, inappropriate and ineffective education coupled with the realistic prospect of a life either on benefits or in shitty dead end jobs is a rational one.

I think the writing about disaffected young men, or the abuses of patriarchal figures, kind of obscures the reality that many attitudes are being questioned and people are generally changing in positive ways.

It's difficult to write an article about the ways things are going right. Not intentional positivity movements (yoga men!) or activism, just men fitting into the current landscape and trying to make sure they're pushing things forward and not just doing upkeep on the patriarchy.

#notallmen

many attitudes are being questioned and people are generally changing in positive ways.

well that's put my mind at rest

can't rest, man, you gotta keep pushing the discourse

otherwise we end up with the relatively complacent majority thinking "oh, I guess we solved misogyny and institutional sexism because not too many people are complaining anymore. time to roll back laws against workplace harassment or at least stop enforcing them"

see also every idiot who thinks the civil rights movement of the 1960s "solved racism"

To go back to disengagement, I dunno if there's a better thread or if I've got the will to start one, because imo it's more class-based than gender, tho it obviously presents differently in different people, and alt-right/troll shit is only a subset if it, and it's very depressing to watch and to be immersed in, and it's very much a result of sociopolitical policies I'm sure, and I'm getting out of this line of work because I can't be complicit any more

I think it is gender based ! it reminds me of something d-40 was saying a while ago about gendered attitudes to compromise and so on, with male behaviour tending towards being more all or nothing. this ties with a similar idea I've heard put about about differing sources of self-worth, with women tending to get it from others and men tending to get it from themselves, which is all pretty unscientific, but would chime with that. independence can look like disengagement.

i understand where you're coming from, certainly the disengagement i generally see from young men is qualitatively different from their non-male peers. i guess it depends exactly what we're talking about by disengagement, too. in the young men i'm around it tends to be a (strong) desire not to leave the house, no sense of future interests or aspirations, "friendship" groups that are almost entirely online, immersion in meme culture and a worldview largely drawn from internet politics/ideas/whatever we call those cultures, no real sense of independence or self-idealization beyond the fierce need to maintain that life forever or the belief that it will go on forever with no action on their part. there's other kinds of disengagement beyond that tho, Fisher talked about "depressive hedonia":

the condition I'm referring to is constituted not by an inability to get pleasure so much as it by an inability to do anything else except pursue pleasure

and to some extent he was talking about students slightly higher up the wealth and education ladders than the ones i deal with today.

but i see that empty tunnel vision a lot and it isn't gender bound.

also i should state the obvious - i share their impulses, a lot, to a self-defeating degree, so maybe it is tied into my gender identity too. maybe the need to turtle back into our shells has some element of "i win or i give up", i couldn't say.

NV you said something about how these students envision a life on benefits. & you spoke of socioeconomic factors as well. do you think it's good policy to permit these men to realise the lives they're envisioning by means of benefits?

i've thought for a long time that the benefits system in the UK at least has analogies to Roman bread and circuses. structurally it seems to me that monetarist/Friedmanite/Thatcherite economics relies on a base of unemployed labour as a means of controlling wage costs. however much politicians have to publicly excoriate "scroungers" their economic beliefs are fundamentally anti full employment and anti government job creation. so on one level i think the benefits system has come to be regarded, unconsciously or otherwise, as the cheapest means of dealing with surplus labour short of actually letting people die or become criminalized. obviously some people have always become criminalized and over the last few years the government has got much more daring on allowing people to die - not because the cuts they've introduced have saved any money, they exist purely for show and to maintain social coercion over the poorest in society, who simultaneously have the most and the least to lose by challenging the established system.

do i think that's a "good" policy? hell no, but i don't think it's purpose is equitable or charitable or ameliorative by intention.

pause for breath and to make sure i'm not crossposting.

i think that people who have lived in generations of benefit dependency are spiritually (? can't think of a better word right now) impoverished by the experience, whether they'd laugh at that idea or not. not because i think there's any dignity in exploited labour - and we live in a polity where labour is almost all exploitative - but because it sucks away at autonomy and self-idealization. have to recognize my own educational/class privilege there, i can't prove i'm right and i can't speak for other people's experience, but it seems to me like no way to spend your life, it looks a lot like being kept in a zoo (?) but the purpose isn't to entertain others, there are other purposes as i said above.

general summary position here with all the usual caveats: our state is not set up with the intention of maximizing individuals' potential - for self-actualization or whatever we want to call it. quite the opposite: in our kind of economic system people are objects with variable use-values, and that's why the state is entirely comfortable with wasting all that surplus use-value. it helps the system function. life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness aren't even nominally the aims of the UK as a state.

let's say that you've never articulated this to yourself but you sense that your choices in life - "choices", lol, but that's another argument - are between differing kinds and degrees of discomfort ameliorated by whatever takes your mind off the discomfort - Call of Duty, intoxicants, TV, shagging, music, etc. in that case, the path of least resistance is completely understandable. it just depends which kinds of discomfort you find most uncomfortable - work or debt or fencing with the benefits system or a combo of all of the above.

another breath.

none of this gets fixed unless the state places individual development and opportunity much closer to its central purpose. so in my gloomy view, none of this gets fixed. some people will always exceed their societal expectations, through whatever combination of circumstances they happen to have, but self-help and self-empowerment is a Victorian (Samuel Smiles) joke to make the priviliged feel innocent and to rescue a few token charity cases on the margins. even our schools are based on telling children as young as 3 what statistical means they're not living up to.

end on a rhetorical sigh of exasperation and despair.

but i didn't answer the implied bit of your question i guess Euler - the alternatives that are usually proposed, whether forms of National Service or compulsory labour - don't seem to me to be intended to fix the underlying issues, never mind actually having a chance of being successful.

as it happens i've just come across a document using the phrase "little drive to improve [themself] and no ambition for the future" like those are meaningful, incontestible facts of nature and not knots of social/personal interaction to be unpicked

these are what we call booming posts

really insightful and thought provoking. did wonders for my motivation on the commute this morning.

thanks guys, i'm fully aware they're rough thoughts that are open to a lot of argument/refinement but lately i've had a lot of stuff i need to think thru

thanks NV! that's the kind of reflection I was hoping for. "monetarist/Friedmanite/Thatcherite economics relies on a base of unemployed labour as a means of controlling wage costs is the hard problem & "the benefits system has come to be regarded, unconsciously or otherwise, as the cheapest means of dealing with surplus labour short of actually letting people die or become criminalized" is the soft solution, which could, as you note, get hardened.

I would add that benefits also keep that class from getting radicalized enough to take on the hard problem. on that note, wonder if benefits are accorded to immigrant or minority young men as they are to the whites?

i don't know a lot about how the laws currently work here, if you're talking about UK citizens then the rights and distribution is effectively the same but open to differences in family structures and living arrangements i'd guess, if we're thinking about asylum seekers or other non-citizens i think the answer is they get kept alive by some means until they can be deported

there are plenty of homeless refugees as lots of them are not allowed to work and aren't entitled to benefits and lots of people who are miss out through lack of english (terrible lack of investment in this despite everyone crowing about its importance) or isolation. seems like they've made the processes for applying as offputting as they can get away with

and cut back pretty severely on the availability of ESOL classes

Everyday Sound Of London?

english to speakers of other languages

i wrote this on the things you don't care about thread:

"i am currently at a caring deficit. can't really think of too many things i care about. on the other hand, i was reading oscar wilde's essay on socialism before bed last night and i'm still trying to figure out how you have a world where most people are fed and free and active and thriving. it's a conundrum. i keep thinking about the part where he says using private property to feed poor people and keep them alive is cruel because private property is keeping them poor."

and that made me think: well, the world just needs an entirely new system of thought and living and politics! but then i thought about how people would still be in charge of any new system. and they ruin everything! so, i dunno...change is hard.

i wish i knew a political science professor i could talk to. though NV i appreciate your posts! food for thought.

xp People are the worst.

i feel that deficit scott, like i said at the start, in the next couple of months i should be leaving this job because as much as i enjoy the kids and other people i work for, the organization and the larger system around it is just broken top to bottom and i'm done with this struggle i think

this went in a great direction, thanks NV

independence can look like disengagement

Lloyd Dobler: I got a question. If you guys know so much about women, how come you’re here at like the Gas ‘n’ Sip on a Saturday night completely alone drinking beers with no women anywhere?

Joe: By choice, man!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lesRVU1RgNg

Oh my GOD https://t.co/dQG3iNRd36 pic.twitter.com/ooMsyzo17q

— Rebecca Baird-Remba (@thecitywanderer) March 25, 2018

Sujatha Gidla, who was born untouchable and now works as a subway conductor for the MTA: "One time in a bar in Atlanta I told a guy I was untouchable, and he said, 'Oh, but you're so touchable'." https://t.co/DPNtLbpN7O

— Paul Ford (@ftrain) March 26, 2018

finally masculinity's doing something for humanity!!