Rolling Maleness and Masculinity Discussion Thread

I'm personally pretty resistant to "crisis of masculinity" framings because they so often end up as a yearning for a lot of the exact stuff we're trying to evolve our way out of, socially and politically. But I accept that the definition of "a man," a sense of what it means to be one, is important to us on some level, at least in our current circumstances. And so of course I want that definition to be broad enough to include me, for a start. And one that gives my sons a lot of agency and options in finding and defining themselves.

I think I find non-toxic masculinity in my friendships. I have a lot of male friends who are thoughtful and analytical about their feelings and experiences of things, but also like to just shoot the shit about the NBA. We have an all-male poker game (although the same circle also has periodic couples poker nights), and a group of us all go out together for each other's birthdays. We've taken some road trips together. It's all very guys-being-guys stuff, we listen to a lot of Rolling Stones and drink whiskey. But besides arguing about music and sports the conversations are also about aging parents and dealing with kids, checking in on each other and our spouses, there is an inherent caring energy about our relationships.

first off +1 to weightlifting. if someone's strong and well-built that's attractive. the thing is, a lot of the narrative and culture around weightlifting is toxic as fuck. Swolesome, who I know I mention a lot, is a fitness coach and does a good job talking about this. He's built and is a _super_ hot guy, but "fitness" in masculine culture isn't emblematized by guys like him, it's people like the Liver King, who fucking juice.

ok i'm gonna do it, i'm the living embodiment of the meme of the guy pouring a giant bottle of olive oil on a salad and the olive oil is labeled "the problem is capitalism"

the problem is capitalism

everybody talks about "creating good male role models" but the truth is there are _plenty_ of good male role models. boys don't see those role models. boys and men don't see these role models. they see andrew tate and jordan peterson. none of us should fucking have to know who jordan peterson is. none of us should fucking have to know who andrew tate is. but all the capitalist media outlets promote this shit and profit from this shit and deny any sort of accountability for platforming toxic bullshit, oh it's not my fault, oh it's not my fault, just like the bbc says it's "not their fault" for writing an article on trans people where their literal only source is someone who calls for the genocide of trans people.

and this is capitalism because it insists on ignoring systemic factors, "there's no such thing as society" don't you know, except when something you don't like happens and then we live in a society. i'm corrupting the morals of the youth, i'm an agent of the "trans agenda", there is no "cis agenda", "cis" is a slur, actually.

“The average hoodie made these days is weak, flimsy … ” growled a YouTube ad for a “tactical hoodie.” “You’re not a child. You’re a man. So stop wearing so many layers to go outside.”

that's the sort of shit that's normative. that's what boys and men are taught. the solution to bad speech isn't more speech, it's to _stop fucking blasting out the bad speech over every loudspeaker in the fucking world_.

and the people controlling capitalist systems of power are never, ever, ever going to do this of their own free will. ever.

ok, there, i said the thing, i had to say that, i feel better now.

to be clear, fgti is right, not having to engage with one's own gender _is_ a privilege. absolutely. current norms of masculinity, though, are so ludicrous, so disconnected from reality. if any man, anywhere, feels shame for _wearing a hoodie_, that's, to me, that's a textbook example of how patriarchy hurts men, and the only way i know for individual men to stop suffering, to free themselves from that shame, is to, well, choose to engage with one's own gender. at some point the costs outweigh the benefits.

i started off on this whole rant about how silly it is that men get all their advice on what women want from _men_ rather than _women_ and then i realized, wait, come on, i'm not wholly ignorant of why this might be. i wasn't ever a man but i was taught to think like one, to view the world like one. and i was afraid to talk to women. i was afraid to talk to women because i was never taught how to do it appropriately. i was so, so afraid that i might wind up accidentally abusing someone. and looking back i do think there are times when i... treated women in a way that, if somebody treated me like that today, i'd call that really inappropriate, because i wasn't born knowing this stuff, and the stuff i was taught, the stuff i was taught was bullshit.

this, ok, to me this is the single biggest problem with masculinity and whenever anyone starts talking about it there's this instant "#notallmen" defensiveness. and i will say - _there is an actual fucking problem here_. and it's not women, it's patriarchy, but having said that, i think there are a lot of forms of feminism that promote patriarchy. trans-exclusionary feminism, just to go for the low-hanging fruit. i'd definitely argue that trans-exclusionary feminism promotes patriarchy.

and something else i'd argue promotes patriarchy is the duluth model. to me it's really linked a lot to these essentializing gendered ideas. the idea that IPV is something that _men_ perpetrate against _women_ is, to me, this is a variation on what to me is the most horrifying statement i've ever heard a feminist make, which is that "only men rape". i'm just appalled that anybody would say that.

i know why i'm so upset about this today. i'm upset about this because last weekend i talked to a friend of mine, a trans woman who finally, after a year of us hoping for her to do it, left her spouse. cw ipv she told me about that this weekend, about how her ex railed against "men" all the time, and even after she transitioned, even though my friend's ex used her name and pronouns and everything, when it came to abuse? when it came to abuse, she was a "man", and everything her ex did to her was "self-defense". against her "violence". like, she would raise her voice sometimes. that was violence. and the physical violence her ex repeatedly perpetrated against her, that was "self-defense".

and honestly, i've been through that too. i've seen that same bias. my ex abused me and we saw a therapist and the therapist wouldn't listen when i tried to talk about it. because, i think, she saw me as the "man" in the relationship. and it's taken me so, so long and so many people telling me that what she did to me was abuse to even start to accept it. because that therapist was the _professional_. and the people who were telling me i was abused, sure, most of them were women, but we were all _socialized male_, so really, what did any of _us_ know?

that's a side rant, though, again, feminism _isn't_ the problem, feminism isn't _a_ problem. the problem is that _men are not taught consent_. they're frustrated because a lot of women, you know, tend to view men as threats, and that's not fair to them. and that perception men have, that perception _i_ had pre-transition, for me, it's true. i'm attracted to men, i like men, but i have a hard time trusting men. i'm afraid to even admit in public that i do, in fact, like men, because of the _kind of men_ that will attract, because of how those men will treat me, how they will come after me, and because for them to do that is _acceptable_.

what makes for healthy masculinity? i don't know for sure, but for me, part of it is _holding toxic masculinity accountable_. not _women_ holding _men_ accountable. men holding _other men_ accountable. in ways small and big. i was a spy, you know, i was secret agent in their midst. i know how men talk about women when we're not around. i've heard it. and there was so much pressure to not stand up, to not challenge it, and a lot of the time i _didn't_. because it's me and ten men and wow i know what _that_ sounds like and i was afraid, you know, i was afraid that if i spoke up _they'd know_. i'd blow my cover.

i wish i had spoken up more, but at the same time, i don't feel guilty, i don't feel ashamed for not doing it. guilt and shame aren't going to "fix" masculinity (i don't like that framing, i don't like the "broken/fixed" framing). men do need to be empowered, but they don't need to be empowered to... well, ok, they _do_ need to be empowered to clean their rooms, but they _also_ need to be empowered to _speak up against other men_. none of this "bros before hoes" shit. i mean you want to stop being an "incel"? stop calling us "hoes" behind our backs and stop putting your "bros" before our basic fucking rights. like, how fucking hard is that?

i mean, seriously, i'm gonna get real here, what do you think, i'm frigid here? you think women, we're all frigid, we're not _attracted_ to men, we don't _thirst_? guys, i am a _complete slutbag_, and it's not "because i'm trans". you want to talk toxic masculinity, how about we talk about the _complete erasure of female sexual desire_? you want to talk about the ways consent is fucked up, i know what i was taught, that i had to be the _aggressor_, that sex was a _thing of value_ that i had to coerce women into reluctantly parting with. that just fundamentally is _not how sex works_. patriarchy makes fun of negotiation, they say it's not _spontaneous_, they say it's not _sexy_. oh, do you not think negotiation is "sexy"? too fucking bad.

i wasn't taught any of this shit either. i've had to learn this shit too. i've had to learn that consent isn't just about making sure the other person doesn't say "no", that "oh god, yes, please" is a possibility and it is a _good one_. i'm really glad to have had the opportunity to learn that lesson. and the way you get there is by _listening_ to us, by _respecting us as equals_ - until and unless _we negotiate otherwise_.

or, i guess, a man can choose to make fun of these ideas as "woke" or "P.C." or whatever term of derision the patriarchy is employing this week to distract men from noticing the way they're slowly grinding us all down into nothingness. personally i think the first option is probably the better one for us _collectively_, but me personally? i'd much rather be with the girls.

"tactical hoodies". he can't be a man 'cause he doesn't smoke the same cigarettes as me, right?

Caitlin is coming to save us lads: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/jul/01/caitlin-moran-whats-gone-wrong-for-men-and-the-thing-that-can-fix-them

― Stars of the Lidl (Chinaski), Saturday, 1 July 2023 bookmarkflaglink

The high rates of middle aged male suicide place a dark note on this ridiculous all-over-the-place piece.

I think a big part of the male privilege is the feedback that men readily get from women. I heard a psychologist say that men benefit from marriage a lot more than women, and that sounded harsh, but that comes from studies and I'm ready to admit that men have a harder time finding their emotional balance and can easily feel lost. While women are largely educated to openly provide counsel, adjustments, compliments. That's the first thing I think of when we say that men don't know their luck.

At least it's probably the biggest factor I had in constructing my gender identity. As a younger teenager I was hanging out with guys by default. Male games and sports, driving dangerously, playing airsoft in the forest, conversations around beer, fallout with a best friend. Realizing that I could hang out with, befriend, tease girls was such a confidence boost, so I "switched" and started looking to be valued by the other sex. I observed that male friends who couldn't make themselves comfortable around women were hindered and stayed immature. To this day I need to do a conscious effort to value, listen to, and befriend men. And it's not so easy when you often don't have this immediate intimacy or sensitivity. And when I hear women comment about their catfights, while being a fountain of gentleness, I feel spoiled (I mean, not so much me, but in a general sense).

That probably could sound basic and naive, "oh hey girls give me attention", but I think it's about independence and openness, that moment when you realize your identity is maniable, what you make it, it's in the way you act and communicate, there's freedom. Until you're broadly happy with the way people perceive you.

I hadn't read Kate's post because TLDR but now I see she mentionned "not talking to women" as a problem nearly as big as capitalism :)

i always find the broad strokes used in these conversations completely alien to my experience (of myself and of "men") and i guess im pushed back by that in topics like this

are we really still "men are like _this_" or is it just shorthand- even if understood as so i think the implied universality of it is a problem, this holds true across any number of topics and the solution is v likely "don't read it" which is fair enough

Not quite the same point but perhaps related...in that piece discussed itt, when the kid comes to the professor and asks what "good masculinity" looks like, on a purely pragmatic level couldn't the answer just be "focus on being a good person instead and you'll be all right"?

Feels like a better way forward than all these twisting-yrself-into-a-pretzel defintion of non-toxic masculinity which will always end up exclusionary and essentialist on some level imo.

But I do realise this is the perspective of someone who's not had to struggle with gender identity much, I've never felt "not a dude" but also feel like my dudeness is probably the least interesting thing about me.

While women are largely educated to openly provide counsel, adjustments, compliments. That's the first thing I think of when we say that men don't know their luck.

yeah, the only men I know socialized into thinking of others first are non-toxic Christians.

Although 90% of my local male friends are thoughtful bros who read and listen to good music and vote correctly, I sometimes balk at these exclusively het spaces. None of these guys are obviously machista yet the presence of so much het maleness annoys me enough that I have to push back by being more camp. Maybe I'm wrong by connecting to a small degree masculinity + sexuality. If I feel the love, what's the problem?

It’s slightly more accurate to say that women are socialised into thinking of others first. This goes in personal relationships and the workplace. Don’t be too assertive, don’t push yourself forward, be nice, hold your tongue, all that shit comes from centuries of women being told to be non threatening and to make themselves less.
― (who is an amazing ice cream maker by the way) (gyac), Tuesday, July 11, 2023 2:07 PM (six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I don't disagree but I think women are now largely using this in their favor: in feminist discourse, as marketable qualities, as key to a society based on empathy and justice. Men are supposed to learn.
There's the corporate twist about how to offer gentle and constructive criticism about your boss and organization, but I've never seen a female colleague fall for that.

I observed that male friends who couldn't make themselves comfortable around women were hindered and stayed immature.

This is a good point and I can't emphasize enough the importance of my women friends over the years to making me feel comfortable as a guy. I've been lucky in that regard, had a close mostly-platonic circle of guy/girl friends in high school, then in college on a semester abroad I shared a house with my girlfriend and four other women — that was educational in lots of ways. In my current life, while my closest friends are male, I have a broad and diverse universe of women I rely on and can turn to for all kinds of insights. Most of my favorite bosses I've had have been women, I'm very comfortable working for and with women. During my own first stint as a boss it was a few women who worked for me who gave me valuable feedback about consensus-building and making sure everyone felt heard. (Which of course shouldn't be a "female" trait but is valuable for dealing with people in general and yes women are socialized to be more aware of it.)

So many of my early insecurities as angsty het adolescent had to with winning attention/approval from girls that once I realized you could just, like, be friends and talk to them as actual people, it relaxed me a whole lot about my sense of myself as a male.

I can see how generalisations can be helpful, otherwise it can be hard to talk things through but it still needs some work to be done, otherwise you end where Moran is at.

Does anyone have any serious writing on male suicide rates that go over trends and so on?

(Sorry if it's been posted here, not a thread I look at very often)

This is only looking at American men (with their easy access to guns), but alcohol + poor impulse control is a factor.

https://bigthink.com/health/why-american-men-suicide/

Greater investment and focus on mental health is undeniably needed in the U.S., but to make a dent in the tragic number of American male suicides, reducing firearm access, advocating responsible alcohol use, lowering poverty, and teaching males healthy coping methods to deal with acutely stressful situations might save a lot more lives.

advocating responsible alcohol use....teaching males healthy coping methods to deal with acutely stressful situations

Is this not part of mental health?

I think the point is that even many men who might not otherwise present with mental health issues don't have healthy stress-coping mechanisms.

Tipsy - thanks, will take a look.

i have always thought of poor impulse control - meaning quick/thoughtless/violent/destructive/stupid behavior - as being essential to biological maleness in a way. i don't know if this made me an essential biologist or a bio essentialist. i am not a scientist but i had always assumed it was the result of adrenaline created by testosterone. i don't know what i believe anymore. i don't really think anything is essential anymore. people are too varied. i like to think that i have been, for the most part, a quiet bookish person who keeps to themselves and doesn't like to exert power over others or be aggressive toward others and yet stupid impulsive actions and behavior was something that i struggled with MIGHTILY when i was younger. i have never really read about this aspect of manhood or young manhood unless it has to do with the consequences of this random stupid behavior. these are things that happen in a split second. throwing a bottle at a car. pulling a fire alarm. grabbing someone in a bar. whatever it is. and its great if you are a man and have never struggled with blind stupidness or obsessive/compulsive anti-social acts. or been a problem drinker for that matter. but i would totally read a book on the psychology of stupid behavior. (you folks probably know all about it.) (for that matter, i would read a book about the trauma of seeing what young men do to each other and say to each other. it can be so brutal and sadistic. my entire life has been affected by violence inflicted upon me as a male child by other male children and nobody ever knew/saw/or read about it and they wouldn't have cared if they had known about it because it was normalized behavior.)
i would say for the first year or more after i quit smoking five years ago i would wake up in bed in the morning and fantasize about getting into fights. violent fights. and my adrenaline would go crazy just lying there in bed! EVERY MORNING! for the record, i have never been in a fight. also related to that: i went on two anti-depressants when i quit and the lexapro i took took away all sexual feeling in me and i have to admit it was a relief for awhile. it was so nice not to think about sex for the first time since i was a kid. then that got old and kinda depressing. but for a minute there i saw a new way of living! they should really give that stuff to priests.
anyway, in a nutshell, i hung out with girls in high school because i knew that if i was walking down the street with them that they wouldn't jump up and smash a stop sign with their hand. okay, that wasn't consciously why i hung out with girls. but i hated the boy stuff. i never understood it in other boys or in myself. i spent exactly one night in the 9th grade riding around in a car while boys i knew knocked over mailboxes with a baseball bat and that was all i needed to know that i really needed some friends who wouldn't do that. girlfriends! and one boy who was gay. and also a fun boy three fan.
i just don't know if you can solve a problem like men until you figure out the thoughtless violence thing. everything rotten is rooted in that.

It’s slightly more accurate to say that women are socialised into thinking of others first. This goes in personal relationships and the workplace. Don’t be too assertive, don’t push yourself forward, be nice, hold your tongue, all that shit comes from centuries of women being told to be non threatening and to make themselves less.

― (who is an amazing ice cream maker by the way) (gyac)

hmmm. i think that men just like women are given mixed messages. women get all these messages of "girl power" and are told to be more assertive and so forth, but at the same time we're told to be subservient and not challenge men too much or bad things will happen and it will be our fault for stepping out of line.

anyway, men are told the opposite, they're told to stand up for themselves and push back and "fortune favors the bold" and all that stuff, but men have to do it in a _certain way_. and if men don't uphold these increasingly rigid forms of masculinity, if they wear the wrong hoodie or, i guess in 1965 if they smoked the wrong cigarette, they're not really men. and if bad things happen to these "beta males", well, it's their fault for not being Really Men. you gotta be alpha. you gotta...

You gotta be crazy, you gotta have a real need
You gotta sleep on your toes, and when you're on the street
You gotta be able to pick out the easy meat with your eyes closed
And then moving in silently, down wind and out of sight
You gotta strike when the moment is right without thinking

that's being a man.

(by the way that's a good contrast above, for caesar, "fortune favors the bold", but caesar's wife must be above suspicion.)

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so even though i was supposedly "socialized male", i was also socialized into prioritizing other people's expectations of me. i learned to value others first, and myself not at all. a lot of this toxic behavior, at the root of it is self-loathing. people who exhibit narcissistic behavior hate and are ashamed of themselves. people who exhibit bpd behavior hate and are ashamed of themselves. incels? incels, beyond their mask of entitlement and rage, hate and are ashamed of themselves. they blame other people as a way of lashing out against what they were told, which is that they are really "betas" who don't deserve love from _anybody_.

you know who's socialized into thinking of others first? abuse victims. i hear it all the time, i mean, i heard it just last night from one of my friends. other people don't deserve to be abused, but i do. i deserve it, i have to deserve it. that's what she tells me. and patriarchy? patriarchy is an institutionalized form of abuse.

the male privilege i had, it was _contingent_, contingent on me not violating norms of maleness. i did have a lot of freedom. i didn't have to dress well. i could wear ill-fitting clothes that looked terrible on me, i could be fat, i could do all these things and nobody would even notice. i could go a long way, but if i crossed that line - by, for instance, wearing a dress in public - all the forces of hell would be unleashed on me. that's the thing that... i think particularly men face. everything is fine and you deserve _everything_ or, if you cross a line, you're bad and evil and you deserve _nothing_.

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Although 90% of my local male friends are thoughtful bros who read and listen to good music and vote correctly, I sometimes balk at these exclusively het spaces. None of these guys are obviously machista yet the presence of so much het maleness annoys me enough that I have to push back by being more camp. Maybe I'm wrong by connecting to a small degree masculinity + sexuality. If I feel the love, what's the problem?

― the dreaded dependent claus (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn)

no i get where you're coming from, i feel that hard, and for me it's that phrase fgti uses, "the privilege of non-engagement". cishets can mean well, but while you and i, we _have_ to be aware of the cishet male experience, there's so much... i mean it's not just a matter of being a "good man" or voting the right way, that's what weinstein said at the end, right? that he voted D, and that exculpated him. it's so hard for someone who doesn't have that experience to be _able_ to look at the world the way we see it.

like, here's an example of "the privilege of non-engagement".

yesterday morning i went into the lab to get my blood drawn. it's a long line and even though i sat by myself people got up and sat down and at some point i had a guy sitting on each side of me. and i was _very aware_ of this, and i was _very aware_ that i was a woman, and before transition, i wouldn't have been, wouldn't have assigned any special significance or meaning to that. they were older white guys, both of them, it's mostly seniors who go in for labs. i doubt that either of those guys assigned any special meaning to their being seated next to a woman. if they'd clocked me it would have been different, probably, but it also probably would have been _very obvious_ to me if either of them had clocked me.

that's a privilege i _did_ have, and that's a privilege i gave up when i transitioned.

---

so here's some random stuff i wrote last night when i couldn't sleep. i really... i have really strong opinions about gender and masculinity and i'm really afraid to express them, because i'm afraid i won't do it in the Right Way and people will go on the attack, which they do. that's a systemic bias that people don't acknowledge, women get held to a much higher standard than men across the board. and trans women get held to a higher standard than cis women. it's not a universal standard, it's fucking difficult to statistically measure, but i've seen it, all my transfem friends have seen it. i don't have direct experience, but i think it does also affect transmascs, that transmascs, their transness means they have _less_ privilege, so even if their being men gives them _more_ privilege than a woman would have, their transness kind of works against that.

i don't have any like intrinsic knowledge about gender or any of that stuff but the past four years in particular i've had the exact opposite of the "privilege of non-engagement". i've thought about this stuff, a lot. i don't know what it means to be a man. i know, though, that people are taught a lot of bullshit about what it means to be a man, how to behave as a man, and since i'm not a man i know that it's bullshit. it's a "god of the gaps" approach, except that there's very little dispute over whether or not men _exist_.

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for instance, i was taught that the entirety of the way i interacted with any given woman needed to be centered around the extent to which i wanted to stick my dick in them. which was really frustrating to me because i didn't want to stick my dick in _anyone_, although there were certain women i found _very attractive_, and it was just my terrible luck that they all turned out to be lesbians. there were, as we say, no signs.

---

i was watching "the big lebowski" with my girlfriend recently. she'd never seen it. and there's this scene where jeffrey lebowski is all "what makes a man? is it the willingness to do what's right at any cost?" and the dude quips, "that and a pair of testicles". the joke is that the dude is puncturing jeffrey lebowski's self-serving bullshit, this idea that manhood is this lofty, elevated thing, like women _aren't_ willing to do what's right? manhood isn't about that, i was taught. it's about _literal testicles_. balls. all you need are balls. to succeed are balls. here, kitty kitty kitty.

when i came out to my department at work, one of my co-workers, steve, he came up to me afterwards and said that he was proud of me, because "it takes a strong man to do what you're doing". that man, that poor man, he genuinely had no idea what he was saying. it's "getting an orchi takes balls" but with no sense whatsoever of _irony_. i'm not a fan of irony, but i don't know of a better way to describe that experience.

there are so many people, so many people who, when they learn i'm trans, conclude that i'm "really" a man. and that's so fucked up. but it's also just... i mean it's not just people who _conclude_ that, it's because we're taught _so much_ to believe that. it's not a logical conclusion, it's an _instinctive reaction_. trans woman = penis & testicles = man. anybody over the age of 30, and probably most people under the age of 30, has had that association drilled into us so hard that wasn't intentional but i know what it implies, i'm leaving it. to have a healthy idea of what needs to be a man, one needs to let go of _unhealthy_ ideas, and that's _work_, and _everyone_ has to do, or has had to do, that work.

but at the same time we're told to be subservient and not challenge men too much or bad things will happen and it will be our fault for stepping out of line.

i have always thought of poor impulse control - meaning quick/thoughtless/violent/destructive/stupid behavior - as being essential to biological maleness in a way. i don't know if this made me an essential biologist or a bio essentialist. i am not a scientist but i had always assumed it was the result of adrenaline created by testosterone.

― scott seward

oh, hi! i can talk about this!

not from a scientific perspective, of course, just anecdotally, from my own experience and what i've heard from friends, _particularly_ transmasc friends.

for me, going from a T-based to an E-based endocrine system, there are some positive changes. when I was on T, I _needed_ to nut. not nutting... you know how "hangry" is a thing? i get real hangry to this day. but i used to also get the equivalent from not nutting. having to do that sucked and i hated it because dysphoria. it was the sense of relief, from not having to think about it for a little while, like thank god i can just be a normal person again.

a lot of stuff gets essentialized that to my mind isn't. testosterone is associated with rage and violence. the only emotion men are allowed to express is anger - more than _allowed_ they're openly _encouraged_ to express it. it's part of aggression. it's something i struggle with a lot because i am a woman and i am _extremely_ angry. that's why susan stryker's article on "performing transgender rage" resonated so hard. the ways in which i can express the level of rage i have in a healthy manner are really limited, and they're limited for guys, too - it's just that expressing rage in an _unhealthy_ manner is socially accepted. boys will be boys.

anyway, transmasc guys, i've heard transmasc guys talk about when they start guy puberty. they're adults and have the wisdom and maturity of adults but dealing with that rush of testosterone is challenging. there is more anger, more aggression, and it's difficult to deal with. trans men really aren't any different from cis men, and that means they can behave in ways... ways they didn't before the testosterone, ways that aren't necessarily healthy.

but of course, they don't have the privileges that teenage cis boys do. if they manifest _maleness_ in any way that's deemed to be unhealthy, it's instead attributed to their _transness_, used as an argument against allowing trans people to start hormones. well of course hormones are bad, i heard of this one person who started T and then they started hitting their partner... that was how it was portrayed on The L Word at least, back in the day.

and transfems, sometimes without meaning to we do perpetrate that myth. we talk about the Evil T, because for us, it _is_ like that. for transmascs it's not like that. it's good. it makes them better, healthier people. and those experiences are ignored, overlooked, it's way easier for me to get E than it is for trans guys to get T, because as always, the cis male experience is prioritized. T gets seen as dangerous, gets seen as being a drug of abuse. what's most important is not that they get gender affirming care, but making sure that guys can't juice.

T does change you, does change a person's feelings, but if you give guys the tools and the skills to manage it in a healthy manner, they can. Boys just don't get that.

I’m extremely aware of that, and have posted about it a number of times.

― (who is an amazing ice cream maker by the way) (gyac)

oh yeah to clarify this is something... most women are pretty acutely aware of it. most guys aren't. they're the audience for that comment.

that was very helpful info. thank you, kate. and i totally agree that boys aren't given the tools and skills that they need. its like the war on drugs. with kids its all about stamping out the bad behavior without really looking at the causes. and this just makes things worse. (or, to be fair, not having the time to care about the causes if you are a teacher or a cop because you are so overworked.)

Weird to characterize the resurgence of explicitly masculinist and avowedly male-supremacist thought as a crisis of masculinity and not as a crisis of misogyny.

— Moira Donegan (@MoiraDonegan) July 11, 2023

If there's no such thing as a positive masculinity then explain this? pic.twitter.com/11NnNXYZxX

— Isaac_kh (@isaac_kh) July 11, 2023

Just leaving this here because it deserves to be seen.

A stunning late 70s advert for Jovan Sex Appeal aftershave, animated by the late Richard Williams, was based on the Frank Frazetta painting 'Against the Gods'. They don't make 'em like this anymore. pic.twitter.com/lQlkDzraIQ

— Scarred for Life (@ScarredForLife2) July 12, 2023

omg, i have been watching the original Equalizer t.v. show - yes i own the complete dvd box - and aside from realizing that it is the best musical work that stewart copeland did BY FAR - holy crap it is just a treasure trove of cliches about manhood on the gritty streets of new york in the early 80s. in one the equalizer stares at this terrified woman and tells her I WILL SAVE YOU AND PROTECT YOU AND I WON'T LET ANYTHING HAPPEN TO YOU in a really creepy way and then she falls in love with him of course. and then in one of the very next episodes the equalizer has to tell a father whose daughter was kidnapped by adam ant (to be sold to a very SWARTHY AND EVIL MIDDLE EASTERN LOOKING MAN of course) how to be a strong man and....its just nuts. but that spurs the dad on to action of course. DEADLY action! the equalizer is like the ultimate benevolent right wing dad who can do no wrong. i wonder if that's why my father loves Blue Bloods so much.

i mean i'm sure its not anywhere near as bad as some shows. a show like starsky and hutch will make your hair stand on end its so wrong. i saw all this stuff as a kid and i don't even know what i thought at the time. i know that i loved how the equalizer would stand up for the little guy by murdering people and i don't know what that says. revenge against bullies. its an easy sell to a kid.

(mostly fun now to play that game of hey that's david allan grier! hey, that's melissa leo as the russian ballerina! that kind of thing. hey thats richie from the sopranos!)

i've never seen the equalizer but i have seen _callan_, the pilot episode stars joseph furst who was so incredibly amazingly camp in as professor zaroff in "the underwater menace" and it's pretty great

all i know about starsky and hutch is that they were one of the most popular slash pairings in the '70s. and also that there was an episode set in a gay bar that was not totally unrealistic (unlike the murder she wrote episode set in a drag bar where everybody was inexplicably heterosexual, because reagan)

like don't get me wrong drag is not indicative of any particular gender or sexuality, you _can_ be a heterosexual man who does drag, there _are_ heterosexual men who do drag, but an entire drag bar where every single person there is heterosexual strains credulity a bit.

maybe it was virginia prince's drag bar (and no i don't expect anybody here to get that joke)

Callan is amazing

sorry i don't have much further thoughts right now but yeah

there's more thoughts to be honest i was just

i was introduced to that show by my dad and his admiration of what Woodward representd as actor and character, and what he represented to my dad was, i see now, something important in his eyes as masculinity

dad who very deliberately kept me focused on depictions of his idea of masculinity and aslo on his idea of how to look at women - i found the porn mags hidden in my bedroom closet before i hit puberty ffs - i track back, recall the conversations and the encouragements, was a long time later i thought about this as being a (subconscious?) plan to make sure i was straight, in the way that ogling objectification was his concept of straight

later, later, shit was weird, it builds a portrait of terror of not being a boy tho

drunken cross-referenced two things - all things being equal, Callan and my other 70s boy-models weren't evil in themselves

only just seen the positive vision alongside the page 3 push tho

oh god don't get my started on my dad's porn. he tried to be discreet but after he left my mom had no such compunctions, she'd take the spartacus catalogs he got in the mail and show them to all us kids and point and laugh at them. _lotta_ force fem stuff in there, which was a totally cool and fine and healthy way for young me to have gender incongruence modeled

of course if you ask the transphobes that's just SOCIAL CONTAGION and clearly seeing that _made_ me trans, because that's _totally_ how gender works.

i hear you boo

a certain flavour of men are FUCKED UP

lol that insight will never stop me questioning my own fuckery

Rewinding about about "talking to women" - lots of men talk to (or at) women. If there's a deficit, the deficit is not in talking but in listening.

mmmmm. see, it's not that simple. like, first off, there's nothing wrong with force fem, if someone's into it that's fine. i was never into force fem, because i could never get behind the idea that femininity was somehow shameful or humiliating. to me, womanhood was something to aspire to. i _wished_ i could have been a woman! (there were no signs.)

second off, while _plenty_ of cis men are into force fem, there are a lot of people into force fem who eventually figure out that wait actually they're just trans women, including some who are pretty well-known today. there were only certain paths available for gender exploration when i was young, and none of them were what i'd personally consider "healthy". like, yeah, i do have tons of trauma about the way gender incongruence was modeled when i was young.

anyway, a lot of us have stories about our dad or grandfather or uncle, that's what casey plett's novel _little fish_ (which i still haven't read) is about. "trans ghosts", i've heard it called. people who aren't trans, because they aren't, it's self-identified, and if you don't identify as trans you're not, but also, you know, didn't exactly have the opportunities that people today have.

sorry if i wasn't clear there, i don't feel that my dad's paranoid propaganda did change me and i'm damn sure it wasn't fully planned thru, i'm just talking about how weird it was, looking back now, that he had this inarticulate fear that his oldest prepubescent son needed to have his hetness reinforced

i can't imagine how that nonsense would feel from a place where that wasn't my experience

I hated my dad and then finally was completely indifferent to him, but at least he was too Catholicly repressed + uptight for any of that foisting porno mags on kid stuff. Fucking dads, man.

like, since i was never into it i can't say for sure, but in theory it makes sense. if it's not something you're free to choose, the only way it's ok is if somebody _makes_ you, right? that way it's not your _fault_.

is it crass of me to say that the only time you really question that indoctrination is if you don't end up indoctrinated?

my parents dislike TV, gambling, and pornography. when they found my stash of XY mags and my lone issue of Drummer, they flipped their fucking lids, which of course sent me back in the closet for five more years

My parents didn't have porn but they left The Joy of Sex and Our Bodies Ourselves in the family bookcase, correctly assuming we would avail ourselves. Even tho the OG Joy of Sex had some dubious stuff in it, it was still progressive for the time, lots of talk about women's pleasure, orgasms etc. And I read pretty much ALL of Our Bodies Ourselves looking for anything about sex (of which there was at least some, including detailed anatomical depictions), which indoctrinated me as a '70s granola feminist along the way. Also I entered adolescence with at least a general idea of where the clitoris was lol.

My dad meanwhile was/is an outright pacifist — he was granted CO status when he was drafted for Vietnam — plus also a Buddhist vegetarian, so not a whole lot of macho posturing around the house. I think the most butch thing about our relationship was baseball, which he loved and made me a fan too. I played baseball every summer from when I was about 7 to 16, which was sort of just enough male athleticism to make me feel like "a guy" without any big hangups about it I guess.

In retrospect though my dad also bought into and evinced this basic idea of the taciturn masculine loner. He was self-employed and ran his own business (a pottery studio) and came into the house from the pottery every night with his clothes and arms streaked with clay, definitely a real workingman vibe (especially for a guy with a history degree from Stanford). So I think he did very much have his own ideas and models of masculinity, and he also assumed that my mom would be cool with being the potter's wife, taking care of the kids, etc. The biggest stress they had in my growing-up years was when my mom asserted herself and went and finished her college degree and then went to work as a teacher. I don't think he'd really banked on that, he still carried a lot of unconscious assumptions about male and female roles.

is it crass of me to say that the only time you really question that indoctrination is if you don't end up indoctrinated?

― orcas who sign their posts like it's a freaking email (Noodle Vague)

oh we're all indoctrinated, cis, trans, all of us. that's why most queer people have imposter syndrome, because we were told, over and over and over again, that we were imposters (cis queers too, most people don't remember "the other martin loring" but it wasn't a lone outlier by any means). it takes a _long_ time to be able to let go of that belief.

i mean you want to know what i was taught about sex? my parents got me a book and showed it to me when i was ten and they were like "when a man and woman love each other very much" and it was a bunch of diagrams of fallopian tubes. that was "the birds and the bees". when i went to school they did have sex ed, when i was a freshman in high school, and they brought the gym teacher in to do it because, you know, it's a sensitive and delicate subject so you definitely want to get the guy whose specialty is showing people how to do squats right to teach it.

honestly the only thing i remember about it is that one of the kids - not me, i wouldn't have _dared_ - kept asking the gym teacher how transsexuals have sex. maybe he was just trying to get the teacher's goat or maybe he was genuinely curious. i don't know. all i remember is that the gym teacher eventually got fed up and said "why can't you ask any _normal_ questions?"

and the assumption was that you were just supposed to know all this stuff naturally, "let nature take its course". and i just _didn't_, it never made sense to me, i never had any idea what the fuck people were talking about. i didn't want the things boys were supposed to want. i didn't know _what_ i wanted.

good points

i have vivid memories of lying in bed listening to my mom shouting at my dad about why the fuck he needed to keep those magazines in our bedroom, and this is one of the few experiences i have of my mom calling my dad on anything