Rolling Maleness and Masculinity Discussion Thread

Maybe i do need to get off the internet

jeeeesus

well now he's definitely gonna get laid amirite

Maybe individualism is the problem. The fact that this guy thinks his loneliness is more valid than other people’s lives suggests a flaw in the calculus

if only these creeps could realize that 'losing your virginity' is boring and nbd

i mean i thought it was great but they should realize it doesn't stop you being the piece of shit loser you know yourself to be

Per an organizer of the indigenous rally too, one of the reasons for the rally was to bring attention to the missing and murdered indigenous women. The woman who was raped and gave birth while in a vegetative state was native american. Jayme Closs was just randomly chosen by the guy that murdered her parents. I mean it's all bad.

https://mcrumps.com/2019/01/23/letter-from-a-french-incel-phd-response-to-the-aeneid-for-incels/

Allow me to introduce myself. I am French, born and raised in Paris, but have fled this city—where a disenfranchised middle-class son cannot have roots unless he sucks the right dicks—to get a try elsewhere. This was a good choice. I managed to pull from a master degree in philosophy to a PhD program. Now I can write my name with the famous three digits put after. However, although this allowed me to develop my intellectual abilities and master many social cues, hard analytical paradigms and rhetorical tropes, this is not the most interesting part.

Shocked that someone who kept going on about how middle-class and white he is, as though either of those things or the combination are of intrinsic value, had difficulty forming connections with people.

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/01/23/americans-views-on-masculinity-differ-by-party-gender-and-race/

http://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/FT_19.01.23_Masculinity_Raceeducationparty.png?resize=310,510

http://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/FT_19.01.23_Masculinity_Morethaneightinten.png?resize=310,485

also very good stuff here: http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/interactives/strong-men-caring-women/

The replies on this tweet are an endless bounty of gifts.

found a new guy pic.twitter.com/i9GpFs8ZFs

— virgin (@wwwdotyoutube) February 8, 2019

I would almost feel bad for dogpiling on this weirdo if it weren't for the extremely upfront racism

I can’t

#sideoffruit

i'd watch an Odd Couple type show w/him and M4rc L01

Alright, fuck it. here goes. The Hardrocknick / Aly Ashley Jash Story.

— DeepThroatBDN (@BdnDeep) February 10, 2019

oh my god

Anything I would say here would be inappropriate for the internet.

how come the mildly entertainingly horrible ones always end up being the total and complete scum of the earth

actually, never mind

this is really good imo:

https://popula.com/2019/02/24/about-face/

weird that it talks about the symbolism of the punisher without reference to don pendleton's executioner, though

ok

I thought this piece on sex, male domination and abuse was interesting, and I have found ppl's attempts to take solid definite lines on the topic unconvincing - https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/evewdm/why-i-decided-to-start-kink-shaming-myself

I'm struggling to find a line between "consent makes everything fine" and "anyone who wants to be spanked is ultimately feeding the patriarchy"

i don't think it's possible for there to be solid, definitive lines on the topic! like, ok, i'm personally biased, but i don't think construing a relationship as having a permanent, fixed power dynamic is totally healthy. obviously there's a desire to differentiate kink from abuse in a concrete, testable way, but "safe", "sane", and "consensual" are all relative terms. the real benefit of kink is not the "ssc" mantra but its overriding insistence on communication and negotiation in relationships.

i do think there's a difference between kink-_shaming_ - beating oneself up or judging oneself as "bad" for having certain thoughts or desires - and kink-questioning. maybe some people are into kink, in part, because they grew up in abusive environments and internalized it! that doesn't translate to "i shouldn't be kinky" imo; it translates to "having this knowledge, what do i do with it?"

Expelling catharsis and sublimation from the bedroom (or art, for that matter) is a recipe for libidinal disaster.

sure, but all sorts of things can be done in the name of catharsis, so again: what's the criteria for determining when they go over the line?

so, yes - there are important differences between sex and fantasy, shame is unhelpful, some people are better at keeping things separate than others, and people aren't really sure how they feel about things more often than they usually admit. how much regret or self-disgust can you feel before it no longer falls under 'healthy self-exploration'?

everyone's sexuality is formed in a frequently abusive, sexist &c. society, even those without any obvious kinks, and while ppl are good at pointing out the relationship between the private and the social, it's not clear to me exactly what we should be aiming for when trying to navigate through

I'm tempted to say that the underlying tensions are because sex & desire are about mutability* and will immediately incorporate and pervert any attempt to judge or legislate it, but even if that's right, what do you do with it?

*there's a bad joke about becoming in here somewhere

There are no criteria, or rather none of them are set in stone, and things are bound to remain undecidable. I'm fine with this.

it's default position to drift towards but it bothers me that it suits abusers and makes any sort of accountability very tricky

Unquestionably. 'I'm fine with this' is my way of saying that I have no adequate response to this most legitimate of concerns. There's an underlying passivity and powerlessness at the heart of the matter that I'm not certain we'll ever overcome, even should we choose to obliterate ambiguity (which isn't feasible to begin with).

I saw two threads in that article that are distinct and different.

The desire to have violence exerted upon oneself by a partner is something that I’ve found empowering and enjoyable— I’m not fancy, I just like to get hit. The root of my desire for this is the enjoyment of the pain itself, and also the trust I have for my partner in exerting that pain.

The idea that a partner might hit me for any reason than my own pleasure, or with my explicit invitation, is revolting to me, and if it ever happened (and it has) it is as upsetting as the author described in the above article.

I do not associate any sort of shame or childhood experiences with the desire to be hit... it’s just something I enjoy, both physically and as a trust exercise with a sexual partner.

The whole second half of the article, describing emotional abuse— that’s a whole different thing, and unrelated, in my experience.

If one has a particularly low self-esteem, one is highly susceptible to being held in thrall of emotionally abusive people. If your partner is saying stuff like “I hated you when I first met you, but I grew to like you,” or “you look so cute with your beard; you looked ugly when you shaved,” and other such things, these manipulative statements read internally as “truth”, not as “abuse”.

If you dislike, or hate yourself, hearing people put you down sounds “real”. It fulfills the part of your brain that has always told you that you’re garbage, and worthless, and that all the people who have treated you well in the past don’t actually love you. When emotionally abusive people, in turn, stop belittling you to praise you or express love to you, it is the most addictive feeling one can ever experience. Full body dopamine rush.

I don’t see too much of a link between “the tendency to fall into emotionally abusive relationships” and “the desire to be dom’d by your partner”— but that’s just my experience. If anything, being emotionally abused by a partner made me extremely reticent to be dom’d— I sought more control in my life, not less.

For all these reasons, I have made the decision to stop having this kind of sex, even if only for a while.

preceding 2k words not inspiring me to imagine this a lengthy while

If you dislike, or hate yourself, hearing people put you down sounds “real”. It fulfills the part of your brain that has always told you that you’re garbage, and worthless, and that all the people who have treated you well in the past don’t actually love you. When emotionally abusive people, in turn, stop belittling you to praise you or express love to you, it is the most addictive feeling one can ever experience. Full body dopamine rush.

There's a whole ContraPoints video about this IIRC. At the very least, she spends a significant portion of a recent video talking about it.

currently just staring at that paragraph wide-eyed and having thoughts

one of the more interesting things about this thread is what people choose it for imo

/not snark/

Good essay

it's default position to drift towards but it bothers me that it suits abusers and makes any sort of accountability very tricky

― ogmor

ogmor there's a qualitative difference between interrogating one's own desires and holding other people accountable for their actions. a culture of accountability, to me, it about actions and not about feelings. when i do something to hurt somebody else, to my mind fostering a culture of accountability means acknowledging that and accepting the responsibility and the consequences. if i do something and i feel miserable about it later, that's something i have to be accountable to myself about, and sometimes the answer is "don't do that thing that will make you miserable", and sometimes the answer is "there's no reason to feel miserable about that", and all points in between.

Fresh points in here, as someone who knows a lot of guys who are more lone wolves than Entourage bros, combined with a yearning for a Jordan Peterson to take care of these men:

https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/features/a27259689/toxic-masculinity-male-friendships-emotional-labor-men-rely-on-women/

“This isn’t him going to grab a beer with guys. He’s going to find psychological and emotional support from men who understand his problems,” Liz explains. “They’re not just getting together to have a bitch fest, gossip, or complain about their lives. They’re super intentional about what they’re talking about, why, and what’s important to them.”

this sounds like a nightmare

just sounds like the men's movement thing all over again. i did like 25 years back. it was fine, but i feel like the fear of effeminacy is pretty intractable even in these sorts of groups.

Yeah. This is funny because a friend of mine is writing a (very different) article about men's groups for Harper's, but people kept thinking he was from Harper's Bazaar.

The persistent idea that seeking therapy is a form of weakness has produced a generation of men suffering from symptoms like anger, irritability, and aggressiveness, because not only are they less likely than women to pursue mental health help, but once they do, they have a hard time expressing their emotions. (This is so common there’s even a technical term for it: “normative male alexithymia.”) For millennial men in particular, a major challenge is understanding they need help in the first place.

millennial men are more emotionally repressed and aggressive than other generations? can that possibly be true?

which men's movement, rushomancy? not going to make any suppositions here because there are multiple groups that could apply to in that timeframe

millenial men are maybe more likely to falsely think they have an affinity group with other men or are working on emotional development because of the availability of social media and messageboards

therapy or a real life group where you hash things out can be a harder sell to someone who thinks they're being social or confronting those issues because they have a group they regularly chat and joke with online

most men i know have done therapy. the idea that it's exclusively men who bottle up their problems, lack self-awareness or behave in a self-destructive manner seems a strange one.

plenty of people are also resistant to therapy. the most resistance i've ever seen in my life is my mother. the idea that this generation, male or otherwise, is more resistant than the one that went before seems like bs to me, but unlike that article i'm not going to assume my anecdotal experiences of the world allow me to deduce hard exact truths about billions of people.

i think it's weird to frame the mental health epidemic facing both genders as just one more front in the gender war, with women bearing the "emotional burden" of their depressed partners

please ban me from ilx

i don't doubt these women's anecdotes and it sucks being with someone who won't get help. i've even been there. and men are less likely to get help and that is on them to an extent. but why is everyone clinically depressed and also too poor to get treatment?

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jul/16/mental-health-political-issue

yeah it is fairly strange that someone could write an article about mental health, and presumably talk to a lot of depressed people and those who attempt to treat them, and ultimately decide that the big takeaway is to dole out some blame.

xpost