Rolling Maleness and Masculinity Discussion Thread

(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

I really enjoyed that piece.

my beard means something

tastes like a brown crayon.

We've been getting a lot of mileage out of this one over the last few months

“What a lot of literacy folks don’t realize is that boys have a different brain structure than girls,” he says. Females are auditory learners, he tells me, whereas boys are “more visual.” Over the past decade, Robert spent a million dollars on market research, trying to figure out what boys wanted to read by visiting schools and speaking with parents and teachers, all of which yielded an adventure series called Time Soldiers. In it, camo-clad tweens defy the space-time continuum with helmets and skateboards. The series pairs cinematic photos with skimpy blocks of text, creating what Robert suggests is an entirely new type of literature. To me, though, it sounds like your standard picture book. “What do you call this genre?” I ask. “They’re movie books,” he says. Part of the reason he’s joined the Evryman movement is that he lost four million dollars in the venture and has been lugging around a surfeit of anger as a result.

I almost looked up that website but didn't want to feel even more of a certain way for that guy.

That entire anecdote baffled me

Ford: "Surfeits in the space-time continuum"
Arthur: "Ah... is he. Is he"

What do you do with the mad that you feel
When the Time Soldiers take all your dough

Different brain structure? Fuck that dope.

Got to imagine there are cheaper ways to produce picture books for remedial adolescent boys than spending 4 million

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAGQkmh3oeI

that article has good stuff in it, thanks Jordan.

The historian E. Anthony Rotundo has observed that the masculinity of the colonial era wasn’t defined by chest-thumping machismo or brawny, entrepreneurial pluck, but was measured instead by a man’s willingness to forfeit his time and resources for the betterment of his community. Hardly was this a matter of “emotional intelligence.” Rather, his duties were fulfilled through “publick usefulness.” Often this led to nascent forms of mutual aid, because in a world where “creditors were neighbors and kinsmen were clients, a man’s failure at work was never a private concern.” Meanwhile, those men who saddled up and lit out for the territories were roundly condemned as “frontier wastrels,” as the historian Vernon Louis Parrington called them, princes of thoughtlessness who pursued their own agendas and roamed the country as they pleased.

Yet the rise of industrialization and the birth of modern capitalism rewarded precisely those attributes that colonial communities were prone to denigrate: aggression, guile, and an overwhelming will to power.

this is interesting. it's probably half true, as these kinds of things are. a figure like trump--in his megalomania and solipsism--is a creature of sociopathic capitalism. our economy perversely rewards antisocial behavior and indeeds thrives on it.

i don't think he, or like alt right mass shooters, represent the final curdling of long and static construct of "masculinity." i think something more specific is happening that is making men think that they aren't part of society.

masculinity has to be deconstructed and everything don't get me wrong, but i don't think it is always one thing. it changes with the times.

Its odd that the author failed to note that all the emotions the men were encouraged to let out/experience/process were negative ones: fear, anger, sadness etc

It wasn't explicit but I thought he was saying that throughout.

I was just looking up the rates for the weekend workshops and I guess it's about what I thought they would charge.

that’s kind of a bizarre reinforcement of masculine solidarity: all of the emotional discourse is purging of negative thoughts, complaints about the world, and you get back to trudging forward. despite all the hugs and crying, you never talk about the things you love and how they hold you up. too soft, maybe?

the more i live with this topic the more it feels to me like the real "toxic" source of the problem is a need for unimpeachable authenticity or ground truth to frame masculine gender performance. and the thing that makes the above critique and many similar ones i've encountered before it so unsatisfying is that they really seem to be looking for ground truth as much as their subjects are, they just want to locate it in something more tempered, reasonable, widely read and "truthful". i just think that by freeing masculine gender performance and signifiers from the burden of needing to be 'a truthful thing' allows one to 1) have so much more fun and 2) stop damaging others by trying to turn one (of many) gender performances into truth claims.

I was worried that there doesn't seem to be a licensed mental health professional available during these retreats. It seemed irresponsible based upon what their exercises are.

Shoehorning everyone into traditional gender roles is just bad bad bad for everyone involved. Except I guess those at the top of the hierarchy. It's a pyramid scheme. There is no reason that any worthy attribute, ambition or desire should be gendered.

i'm really starting to think (and i'm sure i've mentioned this upthread) that the way forward wrt masculine gender performance is to center trans experience.

and now for a real hot take, i think 'iron john' is good actually. there's absolutely nothing of substance to it but as a LARPy book about masculine gender performance it's kind of fun.

i think trans men are so so cool! they seem to have so little of the toxicity that so many cis men have.

the more i live with this topic the more it feels to me like the real "toxic" source of the problem is a need for unimpeachable authenticity or ground truth to frame masculine gender performance. and the thing that makes the above critique and many similar ones i've encountered before it so unsatisfying is that they really seem to be looking for ground truth as much as their subjects are, they just want to locate it in something more tempered, reasonable, widely read and "truthful". i just think that by freeing masculine gender performance and signifiers from the burden of needing to be 'a truthful thing' allows one to 1) have so much more fun and 2) stop damaging others by trying to turn one (of many) gender performances into truth claims.

― cheese canopy (map), Thursday, October 24, 2019 9:10 PM (eleven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

i really like this post

same!

ive been thinking a lot about why im drawn to mr rogers and i think bc he represents a nurturing model of masculinity that doesnt really exist in the public conscious anymore

I feel like the closest recent equivalent in pop culture terms was Coach Taylor on FNL

Then there was my neighbor, the thirtysomething man who occupied the apartment next to mine, who lived alone and worked at one of the big tech companies in town—I knew this thanks to his corporate-issue tote bag. I had never exchanged more than a passing greeting with him in the hall, but through the scrim of our parchment-thin walls, I could hear the war-blitz of his video game console, which began like clockwork each Friday evening and continued without rest—rain or shine, winter or summer, with little regard for holidays—until the end of the weekend. It’s difficult, in hindsight, to account for the sadness I experienced listening to him holed up for days on end in front of a screen, blasting Elder Dragons or whatever. Sometimes, late at night, he would get drunk, put on indie music from the late 1990s, and sing along in a voice that was full-throated, plaintive, and remarkably on key.

had to look up the author to make sure he didn't live in my city

(because I missed the "on key" part)

Coach Taylor is good. But then I was just remembering all these guys I know who are 20+ years out of high school football or used to be football coaches and they still talk about warrior spirit, viking style and who among their coworkers/clients are obviously alphas or betas. UGH.

sad lol

xp

Isn't Keanu the current ideal?

keanu is Good but he is not Fred Good bc his movie roles are Shooting People

i think trans men are so so cool! they seem to have so little of the toxicity that so many cis men have.

― Spironolactone T. Agnew (rushomancy), Friday, October 25, 2019 2:26 AM (nine minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

absolutely. xps thanks guys!

i may have mentioned this before too but i've been following daniel mallory ortberg doing the 'dear prudence' column for slate for a while now, and during and after his transition i noticed this uptick in emotional empathy in his writing, like there was a new tenderness apparent. i have no idea if or how that inflection is related to his transition but i'd love to read or hear more about these kinds of experiences and agree that real and loving caretaking is such an appealing quality that can derive power from, compliment, 'make more of' one's gender identity.

Whenever I read about these Evryman types and their various ilks, I always hit the gender essentialist bits, and wonder how they feel about trans men. If they pay lip service to inclusiveness, or if they have ever even thought about how terribly transphobic their gender essentialist garbage is. They really, really strike me as the male equivalent of 'TERF's (hate that phrase, but at least people recognise it). In that clinging so hard to trying to improve things for their own sex, they just throw trans people under the bus.

(But who am I kidding, no one ever calls out cis men for their transphobia. Transphobia is considered AFABs' job to fix.)

While, at the same time, I have, as I've started presenting more and more masculine, become really wary of their inverse - the cis dude who makes it sooo clear right up front that he appreciates and wants to learn from trans masculine folks. Because it really can be about 30 minutes from "I'm so respectful of your gender identity and want to learn" to "here, let me lay all of my emotional problems on you, because AFABs are my Designated Listeners and Emotional Problem Fixers." Don't do that.

nod