Rolling Maleness and Masculinity Discussion Thread

me and the boys after the vaccine drops

pic.twitter.com/3vrHZotrkS

— good and bad idiot (@focra) December 18, 2020

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Va5T077Kbro

BuzzFeed: This Is What It's Like For Men With Eating Disorders

Kyle was trying to be honest about when his body image issues started, but he also wanted to be polite. “My mom is in the room, so I don’t want to say anything offensive,” the 16-year-old California high schooler told me in an interview in January. “But I don’t know a single member of my family over 40 who hasn’t been on Weight Watchers.”

Early on — at about 12 years old — Kyle became anxious about his weight. “With this history of diabetes and hereditary obesity, I was pretty certain that I needed to eat healthy,” he said. That’s when he started to jog every morning. For lunch, he had a salad without dressing every day.

By 15, he was cramming hours of physical activity into each day, without eating much. “I would leave the house at about 5:50 a.m., then run to the gym, work out for an hour, go to school for eight hours. Then I would go to dance rehearsals for four hours, and not make it home until about 10 p.m.,” Kyle said. “Not only was I overtaxing my body and mind and everything, but I didn’t eat any carbs. I was vegan. Pretty much tofu and lettuce, that’s all I ate.”

Kyle attributed some of his body insecurity to what he was reading and seeing in culture, notably in Harry Potter. “Teenagers are supposed to ‘shoot straight up,’ especially teenage boys. I mean, in Harry Potter, they talk about how without any work, Harry just shot up. And it made me realize a lot of my friends were that stereotypical teenage boy who had just grown 6 inches over the summer. And that wasn’t happening with me,” Kyle said. “And that was very disappointing when I was getting messages from real life and the media that my body didn't fit into any of those ideal paradigms.”

Kyle’s parents noticed that he had lost a significant amount of weight rapidly, and started researching whether this could be a problem. Meanwhile, the teen thought the weight loss was evidence that he was on the right path. “I thought losing weight was just a sign of a healthy diet and exercise,” he said. So when he sat across from a panel of specialists — a doctor, a dietitian, and a psychotherapist — and was given an atypical anorexia diagnosis, he was taken aback.

He was only half listening when the specialists said he had to go to the hospital. “I was like, ‘OK, that’s cool. I have a couple of tests this week. Can I go to the hospital next week or next month or something?’” No, they told him. “They said, ‘You have about an hour to pack, and we want you at the hospital by dinner.’”

I lost 70 lbs in about a year during my freshman and sophomore years of high school, around the time that my parents first rejected my coming out as gay.

When they rejected my coming out the second time, when I was 17, I had stopped restricting calories and overexercising, but instead went headlong into the world of alcohol and drugs and other substances.

I finally came out to them successfully at the age of 23.

But all of that has left lasting problems, least of which is imagining what my life could have been like if I hadn't spent so many years in a haze of semi-closeted substance abuse.

Anyway, I'm fine with talking about all of this pretty openly, obviously.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E42fo_9XIAE5Y31?format=jpg&name=large

Whatever happened to just blasting your stereo at 3 am until your downstairs neighbor came up and knocked your front teeth out, I ask you

Lol

There's a homeless guy on my FB feed who was challenging people to fistfights for cash until fairly recently.

https://sports.cbslocal.com/2015/11/10/rumblr-is-actually-just-a-hoax/

some toxic male energy here, but mainly of the tech bro variety

Masculinity is truly a moving target

pic.twitter.com/L87f5WtrUv

— Hot Masculinity Takes (@MasculineTakes) September 12, 2021

that guy is obviously taking the piss, come on now

Feel free to scroll through his posts. If it's a bit, he's absurdly committed to it.

really beautiful essay

https://thebaffler.com/latest/dicks-pics-dark-rooms-nathan

Yeah it is, thanks map

i cosign everything in that essay

I successfully installed new doorknobs and deadbolts on my apartment's front and back doors this week. Fuck yeah, man stuff!

My wife does all that stuff in our house.

There is something deeply satisfying (for me) in fixing stuff in my own house. I have my limits, though: if it involves cutting water, power or gas to the house, I won't touch it.

On the other hand, I despise yard work and gardening.

Think that fits more in this thread, unperson: repairing things

I despise yard work and gardening.

This is the #1 reason I'm going to be a renter/apartment dweller for the rest of my life. I grew up in the suburbs, oldest son of a single mom, and all that shit fell to me as a teenager; when I moved out at 18, I told myself, I have mowed my last lawn, I have raked my last leaf.

Yes! My old man thought making his kids use a hand mower was a good way to build character.

lawns are dumb but gardening is pretty awesome

lawns and mowing them are one of those things that just seem custom built to make any self-thinking male kid hate arbitrary authority for the rest of their lives

gardening can be lovely but weeding is no fucking joke, that is hard work.

Last weekend, my youngest son and I joined a school "service day" to help tend to the neighborhood park. We cleaned the place up, weeded and spread mulch for the young trees. Stuff like that is really engaging for me and a chance to bond with my kid. I just have no interest in maintaining my own garden.

I just replaced our old, clunky, gas-guzzling mower with a little Ryobi electric mower and it has been great. Very lightweight, so quiet I could probably get away with it at 5 in the morning, no spilling petrochemicals down my arm. If it holds up for a few years, I can't see a downside.

If I inherit my mom’s house and manage to keep it I’m ripping out the grass and xeriscaping. St. Augustine doesn’t belong in Texas.

She’d let me do it for her now but she’s afraid her neighbors would be mad.

xeriscaping otmfm

i went to a battery-powered mower last spring and it has been a delight, mowing will never be my favorite thing to do but getting rid of the gas mower has made it a million times better.

my back yard is so small i have a mower with an electrical cord lol

We have a lawn service, my lawn is sloped and has terraces/retaining walls in the back and it would be a pretty crazy one-man job. My wife actually does 90% of the gardening and she really likes it - she has been on a kick of restoring native plants, pollinator plants etc. and it has had amazing payoff - we have tons of birds and are starting to get butterflies. Also a good number of bees but not in any way that creates a nuisance.

I do occasionally fix stuff around the house, and I enjoy it, but it's a matter of time as much as anything. When we first moved in I was proud that I figured out how to fix our dryer - it was the middle of COVID and hard to find repair people, and I was also just kind of mannishly stubborn about it. The roller went bad, and I took the drum and the belt out and everything. But having never done it before it took me way longer than it would have taken a pro, including two trips to home depot, and I had to muscle off a completely rusted bolt. I also briefly panicked thinking "what if I did something wrong and the dryer catches on fire?" First time I ran it I just sat there for like 30 minutes making sure it didn't. Then it only worked for like two months before the belt went bad too, and we said fuck it and just bought a new dryer.

Other than that I have done basic stuff like replacing light switches, hanging floating shelves, assembling furniture, very minimal plumbing repairs like replacing a section of pvc pipe under a sink or a washer, but beyond that I rely on others. We have a great handyman who we've kind of become friends with so I usually just call him.

I think if I was retired I'd be into doing my own yardwork, home repairs etc. Definitely something soothing about getting into that zone and using an entirely different part of the brain, as well as your body, when you work on a computer all day.

This is the #1 reason I'm going to be a renter/apartment dweller for the rest of my life. I grew up in the suburbs, oldest son of a single mom, and all that shit fell to me as a teenager; when I moved out at 18, I told myself, I have mowed my last lawn, I have raked my last leaf.

― but also fuck you (unperson), Tuesday, August 30, 2022 3:35 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Yes! My old man thought making his kids use a hand mower was a good way to build character.

― immodesty blaise (jimbeaux), Tuesday, August 30, 2022 3:37 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

lawns are dumb but gardening is pretty awesome

― brimstead, Tuesday, August 30, 2022 3:51 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

lawns and mowing them are one of those things that just seem custom built to make any self-thinking male kid hate arbitrary authority for the rest of their lives

― (grim) pump track (wales) (map), Tuesday, August 30, 2022 4:00 PM (yesterday) bookmarkf

Agree with all this -- also, Dad forcing me to vacuum cars every Saturday morning.

Lawns are dumb and bad in general, but I have to say that mowing was one of my favorite teenage chores. I'd put on my walkman and know that nobody was going to bother me for the duration. Plus I liked the immediate sense of accomplishment, I could see the progress of my work. It was not gendered work in our household tho — both my parents mowed as did my sister, we had a rotation.

I have done basic stuff like replacing light switches, hanging floating shelves, assembling furniture, very minimal plumbing repairs like replacing a section of pvc pipe under a sink or a washer,

See, I just let this stuff remain undone, thereby striking a blow against suffocating norms of masculinity

🤝

I use a push mower. I like noise in my music but can't stand it in the garden.

Another fan here of battery electric mowers (and snow/leaf blowers) - I bought mine specifically for its quietness so I could mow the lawn at nighttime or early in the morning without bothering neighbors and escape the suffocating heat and humidity in the afternoons. It's no noisier than an electric box fan (which is essentially what it is), and even has bright LED headlamps to help out. Only after I bought it did I learn about the environmental benefits, as gasoline mowers don't have any of the pollution controls that cars have been fitted with for the last half century.

Some folks around here are ditching grass lawns altogether and installing artificial turf; it's not just for football fields anymore. They aren't completely no-maintenance though since crud of various sorts accumulates and needs washing away occasionally.

I love my battery-powered mower and snow blower, but this is an incredibly boring thread derail (which maybe is appropriate?)

I don't know, I was somehow raised to think of this kind of work as "manly." Before we hired a lawn service, I would always object to my wife mowing the lawn. Much as I hated to do it, I hated even more the idea of the neighbors seeing my wife doing it.

there is something very comforting about extremely boring conversations among guys imo.

i bought one of those electric (plug-in) ryobi mowers from a friend who was moving in the spring, with the intent of keeping the tiny back patch of lawn behind our trailer trim. i haven't used it once. said patch is a mess. half-dried weeds up to the fence, 8 ft tall weed tree sprouts, overgrown bushes. i'm a little embarrassed but honestly no one can see it and i just don't gaf lol.

weeds are all in the mind iirc

100% agree!

thanks for the validation lmao

Mowing the lawn was 100% my least favorite chore growing up. We had around half an acre too. The smell of cut grass still bothers me!

Slightly more thread relevant: my older brother and I had to mow, but my younger sister did not. However, my mom sometimes did it too, so idk how my sister pulled that off in retrospect (hats off to her really, no surprise she's a super smart lawyer now)

I don’t mind mowing but it’s the next level that I refuse - edging and weedeating. Also bagging leaves, just run them over with the mower.

I always mowed our lawn while growing up. I guess I hated it at first but got more OK with it after working all summer one year with a friend and his older brother. They had a bunch of customers - well-off types with big yards and high standards. Had we not moved, I would have definitely gone back the next year - it was good money for a 13 year old and the fact that the older brother drove us around in a truck made it fun.

I continued mowing lawns of family friends and acquaintances for extra money through my early high school years, but had to use their mowers and get rides.

Though I am probably an urban renter for life, and am now generally opposed to the concept of lawns, I can’t deny my love of the smell of freshly cut grass.

I have a rider so it's fun to mow. raking up the grass because you waited too long, on the other hand = total dud

Riding mowers remind me of my grandpa and George Jones, not necessarily in that order.

My grandfather had a Craftsman riding mower he got off the curb - the only way to get it to stop was to depress the clutch and coast so it was fun to try and time it right to not run into shit.

This was it ~12 years ago in the back of my mom's yard, now it's completely invisible

https://live.staticflickr.com/3045/2601423981_1a635a80f7_c.jpgElephant Graveyard by Matt, on Flickr

Er Montgomery Ward not Craftsman, his tools were all Crafstman