Rolling Maleness and Masculinity Discussion Thread

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

I don’t really identify with the search these men appear to be making for some kind of definitive masculinity, but I definitely understand the purposelessness they feel

One of the arguments I had to deal with when I started transitioning was "You're not really trans, you just hate toxic masculinity". Which is total bullshit in a couple different ways. First is the insinuation that not only am I totally a man, I'm an irresponsible man who's just trying to run away from his Problems. That's an argument I'm very familiar with. The implication more useful to this thread is that opposing toxic masculinity makes one fundamentally NOT a man, that this is the only way to address the crisis of masculinity.

Which is, unsurprisingly, the complete opposite of the actual issue. It is not only not the responsibility of women to "fix" toxic masculinity, it's not even something women are capable of fixing!

My admiration of trans men, personally, is driven not by any special expectation of them. It's more that, well, I have had to deal with the temptation of misandry. Men, all men, seemed to me to be stupid and terrifying, even the "good ones". I wasn't violent, but I could relate to some of the stuff Valerie Solanos said. Encountering trans men taught me that men were not inherently bad, helped me see the positive aspects of masculinity, aspects that were strong and admirable and worthy of respect.

I am slightly appalled that there would be any expectation placed on trans men beyond what they are already working to do, beyond being their authentic selves.

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 had to re-read this a couple times to grasp it but interpret this as being similar to objecting to the gender essentialism of this kind of exercise. This insistence that there's something essential about having a Y chromosome that requires this "DEALING WITH MAN FEELINGS/MEN ONLY" approach seems really stupid and unhelpful to me. And it seems to often result in these default routines like in the Evryman seminars where the basic premise is that men must undergo some male-specific cathartic exercise to safely express their negative feelings so that they can continue to function in the world.

The other thing - which I alluded to in my previous post - that really bugs me is that this catharsis is always about "getting out" negative feelings, based on the premise that men are not allowed/don't have outlets for these feelings in their daily lives. Which is a bunch of horseshit - our culture totally caters to men expressing their desires, expressing violence, their fears of impotence/devaluation, their need for constant reassurance etc. What our culture doesn't currently provide much is templates or outlets for men to express love, or happiness, or communal belonging, or even just regular old male friendship.

I don't feel like I have a lot of psychological issues wrapped up in my gender role, I always end up feeling kind of sorry for these tortured wannabe alphamale types that are processing abuse and negative role models and internalized self-loathing. I didn't grow up with that kind of aggro patriarchal framework (all the men in my family were/are, to varying degrees, nerds and goofballs) so I tend to bristle at the implication that I'm supposed to automatically identify with it because I am a cis-man and this is supposed to be a common thing among us all, because I really don't identify with it or have a lived experience that matches it. The guy in the story who said he "just didn't have any anger in him" during the Anger Exercise or whatever it was called = it me.

I don't feel like I have a lot of psychological issues wrapped up in my gender role, I always end up feeling kind of sorry for these tortured wannabe alphamale types that are processing abuse and negative role models and internalized self-loathing.

This is me.

Is there a name for invariably feeling like a dude but not really caring about what that supposedly means? I'm speaking for myself and myself only – there are obvious reasons to be anything but indifferent to such matters if you're experiencing gender dysphoria, for example.

The piece that sparked this whole discussion was quite good btw. Thanks for posting it, Jordan.

Is there a name for invariably feeling like a dude but not really caring about what that supposedly means?

“cis male” iirc

I knew that was coming, but even if it's a half-joke, I don't think that's true at all. A lot of dudes very much care about their dudeness and what it stands for.

but obviously all the cis-males at Everyman *do* care about what "being a REAL MAN" means, in their blinkered, warped way...

lol xp

i really don't empathize with how these men - for whom their beard means something - situate the locus of their emptiness/unhappiness with some form of "not performing masculinity correctly" and not, you know, just general existential feelings of emptiness and meaningless which people of all gender expressions and none feel (without getting into the political aspect, late capitalism, humanity domesticated by capitalism etc.).

while seemingly, at the same time, and kind of in contrast with this, looking for catharsis through very "non-masculine", in the archetypical sense, ways - being vulnerable and opening up about their feelings (but in a dudely setting).

the main takeaway from this also is that this is essentially a very goopesque self-care retreat - with all the banality that infers, but given the "marketing masculinity" treatment. it's like a camo print yoni egg for the soul

if I'm reading map's post right, I think ultimately I feel the same: there isn't some single, essential, authentic way to be a man - there's nothing there. There are all these constructs and culturally ingrained ideas about what it means to be a man, and those are worth dissecting and analyzing and critiquing, but they are all ultimately empty constructs that can't be universally applied to those of us with physically male characteristics.

xps

in a dudely setting

lol can we append this to the thread title plz

I was unfortunately raised by someone who likely would've fancied himself an alpha or somesuch and I consider myself lucky that I had the perspective from a very young age to regard his expressions of 'masculinity' as like the dumbest and most unappealing shit in the world. Which isn't to say the experience didn't leave me a massively broken individual in a myriad of superfun ways, but I can at least say I genuinely DGAF about presenting as (Randy Savage voice) MA-CHO.

i kinda wish i was more macho tbh. i’ve been in rome the last two days and i’m kind of in awe of how some of these dudes are. of course if a woman acted those ways i’d be equally in awe so maybe it's not about masculinity per se and maybe that's the whole point!

I can empathize with the yearning for a social and moral framework to apply to your life, and a faith that following that roadmap will affirm your choices and give you clarity. It's interesting to me how for my grandparents' generation it was mostly received that these are the things you do and for my dad's father, parenting was mostly a matter of making sure your son was doing the right things and applying discipline or disapproving when one of his kids strayed from that path.

The branding of masculinity is what we're left with when we've inherited the detritus of religious and social institutions that have diminished and created this caricature of an ideal male figure. Fix your life by reaffirming your alignment with masculinity, which is a vague construct absent any larger framework.

I think it’s a version of “toxic masculinity” to be condescending toward people who are just trying to find out where they fit in in the world in an era of shifting norms. If you believe the answer is to let go of confining and rigid expectations—n.b., i think that—you should just make that case instead of mocking people’s identification with “dudely” spaces or whatever the fuck.

oh come the fuck on treeship

if you want me to mock these people i can. nobody has been that mean on here.

otm, i think we're all saying "this doesn't resonate with me" for reasons x y and z. if this has a positive effect on some men then cool, great. there's a lot of shit out there that works for people but seems dumb as hell to me.