Rolling Maleness and Masculinity Discussion Thread

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.

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.

― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive)

i don't think an article can ever convey the true experience of cis male entitlement as well as reading esby's posts can

For some reason I was thinking about my late grandfather this morning and how I grew up admiring him as a "tough guy who had a sensitive side" and thinking about how (according to his own self description) had been sensitive when he was young but had to be tough because of circumstances (growing up in a poor neighborhood, fighting in the pacific theater etc.). But then it hit me, aren't all boys born sensitive? There's no such thing as a tough baby.

not reflecting on your grandfather obviously ma but of course there's growing up tough as in "learning to deal with other people being assholes for little to no reason" and then there's "learning how to become one of the assholes so you fit in" and that distinction is a part of the contest around performing masculinity

it's amazing to me how young kids are when they start to show distinct personalities

some kids are more rough and tumble than others

I wonder a lot about masculinity in light of Jacob + Esav (esp recently since it was the last couple parshiot) who are respectively described as a man of the tent and of the field (Gen 25:27) and I wonder if the problem in our culture is that it's too Esav focused. Nerdy or sensitive boys have always existed but somehow the dominant model for performing masculinity today became athleticism/aggression etc. I never felt much anxiety about being male I think particularly because I had this model within my community that I could aspire to and not feel emasculated because I lacked hand-eye coordination. I agree w/ the critiques above that the Orenstein piece doesn't offer solutions (I liked it because I thought it illustrated the issues in a non-judgmental/empathetic + almost ethnographic way) but I wonder if this is a possible solution. We have these models in our mythological + religious histories that we can use. xxp

xxp "Says you" - a tough baby with abs, smoking a cig.

In all seriousness though, that's OTM.

I'm always a little surprised to learn how common it is for fathers to try to raise their boys to be sociopaths, and how rare the reverse experience (my own) is.

not reflecting on your grandfather obviously ma but of course there's growing up tough as in "learning to deal with other people being assholes for little to no reason" and then there's "learning how to become one of the assholes so you fit in" and that distinction is a part of the contest around performing masculinity

― a very powerful woman in the dog world (Noodle Vague), Wednesday, December 18, 2019 12:36 PM (three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I think it was more like "learning to deal with someone who is trying to slash you with a knife" or "learning to knock out one of the other guys with a brick and run when you are surrounded by 8 guys who might otherwise beat you near death"

yeah i realise i was playing it as gently as possible :D

but y'know, same applies - the ability to physically and mentally defend yourself is a virtue, sure, but there's this fine line in most cultures about where defending yourself begins and ends, and i think i streak of "necessary" cruelty is often considered a masculine virtue, not always openly

I really don't think it was a fine line at all in the situations he was put in -- the Italian kids in Chicago hated the Jewish kids and if you were on the wrong block you'd get beaten and had to defend yourself. I don't think my grandpa bullied anyone, but he may never have told me.

no of course, i was abstracting, not thinking of anybody's individual experience.

mordy posts reminds me of the contempt in the part of ulysses' "here is my son, mine own Telemachus", it's a good observation.

growing up in a rural/fishing society, the aura of masculine mystery thats given to guys in these (or any) primary industries needs piercing, for sure.

but a society that seems to always pit these guys against eg academic achievers if theyre put into a shared space needs examining rather than simply accepting that this animosity is natural and inescapable.

as with a lot of these questions, i find myself wondering if a small community was a serious advantage in this and other facets. theres wasnt space for people to fall into cliched roles, and nobody was a stranger that could fit into a neat 2d role in your worldview (and vice versa)

like, half the farmers/fishermen i know write poetry, and most of the honours class lads still go home to play in the parish cups

i think there's something in that, tho of course the Irish acceptance and appreciation of poetry is hardly a universal

I wonder if the problem in our culture is that it's too Esav focused.

The problem is that it's too Simeon and Levi focused! Yes those two fucking maniacs get their comeuppance when dad dies but the idea that "yes I murdered every man in Shechem but what was I supposed to do.... NOTHING?" is a normal male thought process is bizarrely still present in the contemporary world

Also as someone raising two boys in the UK I wonder what the culture is like here, and if it has changed since I was a teenager. We don't have jocks really, but we certainly still have the lads.

I suspect we might have jocks if rugby was the national sport and not football.

I didn't need another reason to hate rugby, but I'll take it.

in the US rugby is the official sport of lesbians

there's also a lesbian rugby following in the uk

while at the same time it is the sport of the uk equivalent of the preppy country club date rapist in an 80s US film

in the US rugby is the official sport of lesbians

Instead of printing that article they should just have printed that sentence.

ime the rugby society are the worst people in any university, ours was led by a man called "keemo" which was a nickname they'd given him because he didn't have any hair.