Rolling Maleness and Masculinity Discussion Thread

This is reminding me of when all the noize board kept talking about Sparks (the drink).

no because soft drinks = nonalcoholic, hard = alcoholic

white claw has succeeded in making everyone talk about it, and that makes me want to ingest it less

they're making like a half a billion dollars a year on the stuff, the idea that part of their marketing budget is paying people to generate memes is not a huge stretch

they're okay. I think they work better than all the hard-lemonade stuff (like Smirnoff or whatever) b/c that shit has tons of sugar in it so by the time you're on your 3rd one your stomach feels like it wants to fall out. White Claws don't really taste *good* but they're actually a bit better than putting vodka in a La Croix which I used to do a lot

It's 104 degrees here during happy hour, so whatever I am drinking, I'm drinking a Topo Chico along with it.

White Claw is good and it's a huge improvement over the previous Mike's Hard generation of malt beverages that had as much sugar as a mountain dew

like if you are outside and don't feel like a beer it's p tasty

I just assume that any sweet/fruity alcoholic beverage automatically codes as 'for the ladies' with dudes because I have gotten an endless stream of flak for the 'girl drinks' in which I've shamelessly indulged throughout my drinking career.

hard seltzer is for everyone. it's the "I'm vaguely healthy or whatever but I'm having a drink" drink. Or what you have when you're definitely unable to have another heavy craft brewed ipa.

When you're definitely being healthy but want to get messed up? Well, we have a new contender: https://www.eater.com/2019/8/14/20805323/four-loko-hard-seltzer-sour-white-claw-14-abv

Unsweetened soda with vodka or gin drinks have been huge here for a couple of years and are not gendered (in the circles I travel in and in terms of advertising or packaging aesthetics)

It's like the lacroix of alcohol

pretty much!

I've noticed it taking over some of the space of cheap/light beer. So if you're a craft brew person and want to drink a canned non-beer beverage but beer snobbery is keeping you from grabbing a Bud Light, you grab a hard seltzer.

beer snobbery is keeping you from grabbing a Bud Light

Is that the only possible reason.

my little brother thinks he might have a gluten sensitivity, he got drunk on White Claws and said it was the first hangover he ever had that didn't come with a massive stomachache

xp no

some bartending friends who worked an outdoor festival a couple years back that had a white claw sponsorship started pouring a shot of vodka in with a can of white claw over ice. it makes me think that, branding aside, the four loko people may have a market

I just assume that any sweet/fruity alcoholic beverage automatically codes as 'for the ladies' with dudes because I have gotten an endless stream of flak for the 'girl drinks' in which I've shamelessly indulged throughout my drinking career.

― Amply Drizzled with Pure Luxury (Old Lunch), Friday, 16 August 2019 15:26 (twenty-seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

cider

bring back Zima

iirc Zima did come back a few years ago

it basically got laughed off in the late 90s then immediately was eclipsed by Smirnoff Ice and others which were basically the same sort of product

in short, Zima has never left us

Zima is very popular in Japan.

zima was so gross
i like white claw if i am looking to have a drink but not feel full or specifically drink a beer
we have them at band practice so they must be cool and also for women ;)

I hate hard seltzer a lot

In the universe of drinks like hard seltzer, I either want a regular non-alcoholic seltzer or a giant frilly drink wearing a blouse, preferably blue or green in color that looks like it was made by Guinan

White Claw deez nutz, is basically how I break it down to an extent

I don't think my antipathy is gendered but who knows

yeah I will happily be a girl drink drunk but I have no use for "hard" seltzer/lemonade/wine coolers whatever

*rereads "White Claw deez nutz", reconsiders last sentence*

lol

Get a good white wine. Get some seltzer. Chill both. Put them together in a 40/60, 50/50, or 60/40 ratio according to your taste. Add lime if you want. Enjoy, and opt out of capitalistic gender madness.

i liked white claw the couple of times i've had it, seemed p harmless & inoffensive to me. just tasted like lacroix more or less

my taste in alcohol though has changed a lot, i p much only drink really light cheap beers apart from sours, if i spend any amount of money it's more likely gonna be on a good cider or a if i'm at the right bar then a mixed drink

i like drinking gin/vodka and soda so having such a thing in a can with a light flavouring like a lacroix is a good thing.

these are not gendered drinks - unless they're gendered by extremely fragile males

I find that the alcohol aftertaste combined with the seltzer aftertaste is reminiscent of licking a tire

it always surprises me how much flak I continue to get from (male) servers when ordering white wine, strawberry daiquiris, or certain cocktails (anything without gin or whiskey in it, I guess?)

the only good spiked seltzer i've had is arctic summer, which is made by the polar people, and even then it depends on the flavor

You can pry my mojito out of my cold, dead, properly manicured yet large and masculine hands.

oh yeah, mojitos are magic

it always surprises me how much flak I continue to get from (male) servers when ordering white wine, strawberry daiquiris, or certain cocktails (anything without gin or whiskey in it, I guess?)

― the girl from spirea x (f. hazel), Friday, August 16, 2019 9:12 AM (five minutes ago)

i like to remember the time i got a bellini (an actual bellini with fresh peaches not the weird slushy versions which are popular) and the server went round the table offering it to every woman seated until i claimed it

lol bellinis just remind me of Matt DC's hilarious second-hand Usher-vs-bartender story so I can't take them seriously anymore

(for those who haven't read it: people who've been on TV whom you've pwned)

note that the delivery has not aged well

As the Hugo (look it up -- it's damn delicious) spreads outside of Austria, there seems to be some effort to gender it as a girl drink as well, but f that. I will have two, one for each oversized bruised-knuckled fist.

wine spritzers? we already came up with a more sugary faux version back in the bartles & jaymes days

oh my god. i had never read the usher story.

I drink a lot of wine, gin, random cocktailish stuff in my regular pub and I get joshed on it but almost never in a challenging my masculinity way which is cool really

https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2019/08/importance-friendship-older-men/596692/

Dean: Going back to your question about guys, middle-aged guys in particular—it isn’t just loneliness that a lot of people experience at that age. It’s almost a sense of despondency, and that manifests itself in all sorts of destructive ways.

You really need people around you. Otherwise you start believing the voices in your head. We are wired for community, and not that many people, our age in particular and maybe even more our gender in particular, have communities that can right the ship if what they’re thinking is a little wacky.

This belongs here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1xxcKCGljY

I watched the video. I'm mixed about ContraPoints because it feels like an obligation to me; it's not something I would choose to watch for pleasure. Natalie is smart and talented and compassionate and her creative style is not generally my thing. Also it's a little bit preaching to the choir for me sometimes.

I did kind of go through a phase where I hated men, just broadly as a group. I'm not saying I was Valerie Solanos or anything like that but I did get a little overheated and over the top about things.

I'm not that way anymore. Now that I can recognize that I'm not a man I can recognize that there are good and positive aspects to manhood, it's not just all about violence and hatred. Being part of the trans community has also really helped me with that. There are very strict rules about treating everybody as valid, with respect and kindness. It is not OK to talk about how men are awful or call a man ugly or ridicule or make fun of men. One can talk about "toxic masculinity" but it is very clear that not all masculinity is toxic masculinity. Epic giant robot battles, for instance, that stuff is very masculine and is pretty cool even though I've come to the conclusion that me personally I'd mostly just rather watch people talk about their emotions and shit.

And like Natalie, I don't believe I can possibly have the answers anymore. Men have to work things out for themselves and I don't really have a say in that because of who I am. You know, a positive vision of masculinity? That would be nice. I tried that, I tried the Iron John thing, and I'll be honest with you it wasn't really a good thing for me because the first thing I tried to do was come out as trans, and this was the '90s, and that was very uncomfortable for them and devastating for me.

Is there a larger Gender Crisis going on? I don't know, really, yeah I don't want to catastrophize but it does seem to me like everything is falling to bits, shit just doesn't work like it used to. And I can't really differentiate. Yeah I was really frustrated with the straitjacket of male expectations, but Natalie's joke, I mean, it's really a barbed one. I've been accused of not really being a woman, just a man who hates toxic masculinity. That's a hurtful and invalidating thing to say, and on reflection it just doesn't correspond with my actual lived experience.

What would make it better for guys? You know what it occurs to me that you might be happier if you could express physical affection, if you weren't afraid that looking good (I don't mean "sexy" I mean just, like, wearing clothes that fit properly) or being emotionally vulnerable made you some sort of beta soy boy, if you felt able to, at least occasionally, be kind and supportive to each other instead of this constant stream of trash talk. But I don't know, I'm not a guy, and maybe that's just not something that's as meaningful to guys as it is to women.

I feel like I am turning every fucking thread on this board into Kate's Gender Issues Workshop. Well, it's been kind of a big week for me and I have lots of shit to work through.

As a longtime fan, I was a bit disappointed in the Contrapoints video; usually she manages to dive deep and find some new angle or avenue of research, and that didn't happen here, despite her unusual (for pundits/culture commentators) vantage point of having lived/presented as a man. I get that it's not her job/responsibility but just throwing her hands up at the end felt like a cop-out.

I don't think anything she said was *wrong* to be clear, and I also totally get why someone in her position would be wary of engaging too directly in Men's Discourse or whatever.

Is there a larger Gender Crisis going on? I don't know

Feels to me more like the lifting of a set of strictly-enforced gender repressions. When women demanded property rights and the vote, there was plenty of public hand-wringing about how awful it was that women would start acting like men and gender roles would be destroyed.

Imposed gender roles were taken as ordained and gave the (false) promise of certainty. People much prefer certainty over uncertainty and get upset over losing it, even when the certainty they are trying to cling to was a mirage.

This thread is a turd gold mine:

https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/d0y94l/cmv_our_society_is_facing_a_masculinity_crisis/

A friend of mine wrote this for Harper's --

https://harpers.org/archive/2019/11/men-at-work-evryman-barrett-swanson/

damn that sounds like hell