Rolling Maleness and Masculinity Discussion Thread

Easiest path to being sports-conversant - only pay attention to the playoffs. Paying attention to December basketball is work, if you wait til May things are more exciting.

I got into soccer 5 years ago and it made my life more fun

But lord is it harder to fake in convo

the idea of art as the ultimate luxury commodity

cheap art is the best. i’ve discussed the “ultimate luxury commodity” bit with friends and it usually means one of:
- artwashing
- status symbol
- money laundering

ding. ding. ding.

Soccer is cool because (having never played it or watched on TV until this decade) I can't tell good from bad so MLS is just as interesting/dramatic as a Champions League match.

the "art world"--or art market more like, the gallery world--is the weirdest and most disingenuous thing. sometimes there is good worked mixed up in it, some is nonsense, but the way it is all discussed is strange. especially because so much of the work, and the language around the work, is heavily political and almost always left wing, but the people who collect the stuff are weapons manufacturers and investors in private prisons and whatever. i just get vertigo in this world. i hope my employer does not know my ilx name.

idk what this has to do with masculinity

Treeser Soze

more like, tangent treesh.

<3

https://www.ilxor.com/ILX/NewAnswersControllerServlet?boardid=1078909029

get over here

no, cricket is literally the only sport I know due to coworker pressure and when someone asks me about another sport I can only shrug because... not cricket

Ha, sorry champ (link nsfw)

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/01/the-miseducation-of-the-american-boy/603046/

Nah

i think it's good - i've always liked orenstein

Anything that promises it will speak comprehensively about "the American boy" tells me it is cast in a journalistic mode that will invariably be unequal to the intellectual task its title pretends to address. I know authors rarely get to choose the titles that appear over their work, but it's just hard for me to believe in the quality of a magazine essay, when it is so evidently under the editorial control of imbeciles.

<\old_man_yelling_at_clouds>

it's a good essay/report

Hey, at least it's not by Caitlin Flanagan or Christina Hoff Sommers.

i read it

i don't know peggy orenstein or caitlin flanagan or christina hoff sommers though

idk i feel like i have read this article a million times. i am so much less interested in exacting description of the symptoms than i am of ideas for the cure.

eggy poorenstein

(idk who she is either)

i feel like i have read this article a million times.

you surely have, it's pt. 34985859340293849494 in the 'men (bad) should be women (good)' series. there's nothing wrong with these kids. teenagers are horny??? men laugh at jokes their friends make instead of chastising them for being inappropriate???? my stars, it all just makes me want to cry

you could try shutting the fuck up sometimes

not even all the time! just sometimes

Nah

The thing where Cole joined the military after learning about the My Lai massacre and wanting to be in a position to stop it happening again but can't call out his fellow soldiers on their casual use of slurs is interesting. You get the sense he thinks of moral behavior as capital you can hold and decide to spend or not, and he's saving up all his for some future event, not wanting to waste it on what he deems inconsequential bad behavior. But that's like he's trying to rest up for a marathon!

not even all the time! just sometimes

― peloton for the painfully alone (m bison), Monday, December 16, 2019 10:53 PM (nineteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

nah all the time would work

i was tryina be nice but yeah

51ing time

i am so much less interested in exacting description of the symptoms than i am of ideas for the cure.

in Susan Faludi's (very good imo) book Stiffed, she makes the case that capitalism/atomisation has destroyed one of the key components of male identity, which was helping the community out as a group (the example she uses is barn-raisings, a thing of the past now). so in a word, my answer to this is "community" which of of course one of the many mortal enemies of capitalism. I think we just have to wait for late-period capitalism to devour itself before we can begin to address how it has affected "masculinity". I also think the advent of public transgender consciousness might help with all of this, idk

oops:

which ofis of course

I also feel like I've read that article a million times and I always feel like there is something missing from them although I've been trying for a long time to articulate it. It's like there's some depth or nuance of the experience that they don't really capture, it becomes this very 2D sort of male pressure cooker where your entire life as a boy is just other boys punching you on the arm and calling you a bitch, and you're either that or the sort of 180 degree opposite of it and outside of "jock culture" entirely, in which case you are a skinny poetry guy or something. Maybe I just grew up in kind of an anomalous setting but I didn't feel like it was that simple. Separately I also think these articles often fail to capture what the participants in the culture get out of it, as though they're only in it because they're being tortured into it, and I mean "get out of it" in both good and more sinister senses. But the good ones are important too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOgwP9wROrY

you could try shutting the fuck up sometimes

― peloton for the painfully alone (m bison), Tuesday, 17 December 2019 03:53 (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

aggressive dominant response.

article, as far as i got into it, was as said upthread, same as all the others rly

I didn't find this particularly enlightening either tbh, feels like it could have been written 25 years ago, which is itself a sign of something but it came off superficial to me

ilx needs a barnraising

There wasn't much new there, but thought this was a good metaphor to use when discussing this stuff with people who refuse to get it

Instructing them to “respect women” and to “not get anyone pregnant” isn’t enough. As one college sophomore told me, “That’s kind of like telling someone who’s learning to drive not to run over any little old ladies and then handing him the car keys. Well, of course you think you’re not going to run over an old lady. But you still don’t know how to drive.” 

how do you feel about the lads

what if yer lads started becoming the lads

what aspects of that would you feel the need to interrogate and curb if need be, what aspects might be healthy or would you not understand enough to make a call on, etc

at my high school in the early 90s it seemed like every boy's energy was directed at not being gay or a boff, so removing the homophobia and anti-intellectualism would be a start, but even without either of those it was a toxic environment.

high school is or isn't UK?

uk lad culture, the parts you know of that are ok, the parts that youd be wary of, though?

i mean i think the perspective of an ilx parent heading into this could be interesting but tbbh (and with much love) the memories of ilxors of how much they resented jocks in their own school days kind of isnt what i was looking for in asking!

(we have twenty years of threads on one, but im not sure we have much of the other perspective, is all)

think it's officially called 'secondary' rather than 'high' in UK but everyone called it the latter.

I have little or no idea what the positive aspects of lad culture are here, I have never felt part of it.

my boy turns 17 next month. the main difference I note between his life and mine is how much more central drugs are for his peers than they were for mine.

I am generally pro bro though

I also think the advent of public transgender consciousness might help with all of this, idk

― sleeve

i hope so? but at the same time if the issue is "how does one be a healthy well-adjusted cis man" i have nothing i can possibly offer from my personal experience!

The solution I've come to in my adulthood is if you lift weights and act confident you can get away with not acting sterotypically bro-like on most other fronts. It also helps to work for a woman-owned company with a relatively good balance of men and women in the workplace. And also I think hanging out with other "involved" dads (assuming there is a significant group who are not involved) kind of self selects for gentler and more decent guys.

I sort of wish I had discovered the weights part as a youth, but IDK if that would have exempted me from toxic stuff or just thrust me into it more. Going to an arts high school with a large openly gay population also made it a lot harder to waste time worrying about not being thought gay.

Can one just do the pther things and not the lifting

Asking for a friend

Yeah I'm sure there are a lot of ways to go about it, it just seems like making one major concession to bro culture helps you get away with not making others. Also I've come to find I like lifting weights and the way it makes me feel after.