Rolling Maleness and Masculinity Discussion Thread

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

i went through my dad's dresser once when i was a kid and on top of a men's mag there was a note from my mom that said "You are sick!".

tipsy's experience sounds very similar to mine except my dad is an extroverted ex-beatnik turned liberal capitalist

neither one of my parents believed in god but i learned sex-ed in a unitarian church sunday school. i was bored. i just wanted to go home and watch abbott & costello.

i love my dad a lot but he has always been totally sexist and homophobic. i don't think he is even capable of saying the word woman. everyone is a girl. the girl at the bank. his favorite girl singers. that's probably where he got it from. the swing era. everyone was a girl singer back then.

tipsy's experience sounds very similar to mine except my dad is an extroverted ex-beatnik turned liberal capitalist

Definitely some of those in my parents' social circles.

US aggro fundieism is so alien to me that i wouldn't presume to think about it, but i've got enough experience of my own upbringing to believe that a lot of the church stuff is a secondary excuse to cover reactionary politics in a way that feels honourable and socially normie?

i definitely knew what not to do and say when i had kids though. all that stuff my dad said that made me cringe. oof. (though i make them cringe in my own special 21st dumb dad ways.)

to be fair, and somewhat strangely, i don't remember any racism coming from him. though he does say he'll treat us to dinner at the Chinaman's restaurant sometimes...

and he's completely xenophobic in a generic way in that he distrusts travel to other countries and doesn't understand why anyone would go to another country and needless to say he has never been to another country. but there isn't a specific people that he is afraid of. he is leery of "exotic" food.

but other than that...

and i did grow up in a house where i ONLY heard people of color blasting from his stereo unless he was playing one of the beloved white big bands of his youth. so, hats off to dad for that. black art was alive and well at our house. that was the foundation of my music love.

"21st century"

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.

My parents had a copy of How Babies Are Made which I read — or had read to me, I can't remember now — as a kid, and years later I found a copy of Andrea Dworkin's Pornography on the main living room bookshelf (right next to a novel called Mom Kills Kids And Self; I think my mom may have been Going Through Some Shit), and since our house had an "if you can reach it, you can read it" policy, I read a bunch of it and became somewhat confused about what constituted sex and what constituted pornography (I remember a lot of excerpts from Bataille's The Story of the Eye were in there). Some years later, my dad caught me watching porn on VHS late at night and his response was to tell me, basically, "You know, that's not what real life is like. Women won't just have sex with you, just like that." He also told me that there was no reason to ever sexually assault someone, because you could always just jerk off.

"He also told me that there was no reason to ever sexually assault someone, because you could always just jerk off."

words to live by!

they should embroider that on the american flag.

my parents didn't care what i read. i read their copies of breakfast of champions and fear of flying when i was a kid. i don't think they really paid any attention to what i did though. so, books weren't going to be a problem.

one of my kids actually brought that up not that long ago. that we didn't care what they read or what movies they saw and that their friends had much stricter parents when it came to that stuff. i had no idea. apparently i didn't care what my kids did either. just like mom & dad!

there is a thread for everything these days:

Movies My Dad Took Me To When I Was A Kid - The Poll!

My parents got divorced when I was 11 or 12, so my dad took my brother and me to see so much inappropriate shit — Walter Hill's Extreme Prejudice, the 3D horror movie Parasite (my brother and I were so scared we actually left after the titular alien slug burst out of someone's face and shot right at the camera; my dad was laughing all the way to the car), Surf Nazis Must Die and Near Dark and Prince of Darkness back to back to back at a theater that never threw anybody out, The Road Warrior, so many more. Even before my parents split up, I remember them taking us to a drive-in for Up In Smoke, with Reefer Madness running before it.

Unitarian sex ed in my youth (circa 1982) was so frank that it was, in fact, pornographic.

My Unitarian Sunday school class got to vote on what movie to go see as our last outing. There was one vote for Terms of Endearment and ten votes for Risky Business. We went to see Risky Business, and got ice cream afterwards.

"You know, that's not what real life is like."

I got this talk but not after seeing porn, it was after a somewhat awkward family viewing of The Man Who Fell to Earth with the whole gun-as-sex-toy scene. The movie did not, thankfully, fuel a firearms fetish for me.

That Washington Post article is very frustrating. I realize part of this was quoted above already, and I'm at least partially repeating other posters' sentiments, but I want to get this off my chest. The crux of it all is here:

There is something appealing, too, in the idea of gender neutrality — or at least rejecting gender essentialism — as a social ethos. After all, attaching specific traits to men will redound to women, too. If we say “real” men are strong, does that mean real women must be weak? If men are leaders, are women destined to follow?

I’m convinced that men are in a crisis. And I strongly suspect that ending it will require a positive vision of what masculinity entails that is particular — that is, neither neutral nor interchangeable with femininity. Still, I find myself reluctant to fully articulate one.

This gets perilously close to acknowledging the central problem: a "vision of what masculinity entails" that is

1. An aspirational model, rather than just a neutral description of what men are generally like
2. Particular to men, i.e. not just a collection of positive traits that women can have too
3. Not sexist against women, implicitly or otherwise

...is impossible. I don't mean that it's too politically sensitive to be feasible--I mean literally, conceptually impossible.

What people like Emba are saying (maybe without realizing it) is that if we don't give men a social script that presents them as naturally superior to women in some way just by virtue of being male, then a crisis-level number of them will drop out of society, lash out violently, or kill themselves. And I wish they would just accept that they believe this, admit it, and defend it, rather than dancing around it at excruciating length.

good discussion upthread.

i had weird views of sex, myself, as my folks simultaneously felt that sex ed should be up to the parents (though they didn't stop me from learning it in school), while also bristling at the idea of doing it.

so one day, my friend David tells me how sex works and they found out, and thought they had just gotten out of having to do the uncomfortable job.

so my dad brings me into his room and said "so David told you, huh?", and i say yes, and he asks "he tell you what goes where?" and I nodded, and he said "ok cool".

problem is David had told me that pregnancy occurs when a man sticks his finger in a woman's vagina

THEN wound up in a fundie church which basically said sex was worse than murder so I was prepared to be a virgin until age 33, and felt scared of ever having it to the point where the first time I did have it it was hilariously bad

What people like Emba are saying (maybe without realizing it) is that if we don't give men a social script that presents them as naturally superior to women in some way just by virtue of being male, then a crisis-level number of them will drop out of society, lash out violently, or kill themselves.

I think what Emba is talking about is a vision of masculinity that isn't "superior" to anything, just healthy on its own. But I agree with you that (as I said somewhere above) this kind of talk very easily slides into "well actually we WANT men to be strong silent resilient types!" or other similar clearly destructive stereotypes.

I mean, we're not going to have a revolution and all stop thinking about being "men" and "women" all at once, what we're working on is an evolution, right? Expanding the boundaries of what both of those things can mean, and who can belong to them. And also — as our nonbinary friends remind us — understanding that you don't have to belong to either of them. But as long as we have a social/cultural category called "male," then it's worth talking and thinking about how to make that category as broad and healthy as possible.

I mean, we're not going to have a revolution and all stop thinking about being "men" and "women" all at once

― a man often referred to in the news media as the Duke of Saxony (tipsy mothra)

wait we're not? that's what it says on my copy of the Trans Agenda. yep. item 4A. Abolish gender. Right after "attack and dethrone God".

Oh. Wait. Wait. No, you're right, that's the old version. Let me see, I have a huge pile of unopened mail on my coffee table (yay ADHD)... oh, right. Here it is. "Replace gender with Pokemon". Well that's all right then.

I mean, we're not going to have a revolution and all stop thinking about being "men" and "women" all at once, what we're working on is an evolution, right? Expanding the boundaries of what both of those things can mean, and who can belong to them. And also — as our nonbinary friends remind us — understanding that you don't have to belong to either of them. But as long as we have a social/cultural category called "male," then it's worth talking and thinking about how to make that category as broad and healthy as possible.

I have days where I think a lot of people who are ready and willing to talk about the shittiness of men at a moment's notice don't actually want to find solutions, because having an enemy is more useful to them. Like how charities set up to battle this or that disease never actually eradicate the disease, because if they do, how do you justify the CEO's salary? And "evolution" (like "raising awareness") is very useful from that standpoint.

I have days where I think a lot of people who are ready and willing to talk about the shittiness of men at a moment's notice don't actually want to find solutions, because having an enemy is more useful to them. Like how charities set up to battle this or that disease never actually eradicate the disease, because if they do, how do you justify the CEO's salary? And "evolution" (like "raising awareness") is very useful from that standpoint.

― but also fuck you (unperson)

when i talk about the shittiness of toxic (which is to say normative) masculinity, i'm not _trying_ to find solutions. i'm bitching about the way guys who follow western masculine norms keep making themselves and the rest of us miserable. it's really fucking exhausting to deal with.

the solution is abolishing capitalism. obviously. it's something the Trans Agenda is working on (item 5C) but we're having a hell of a time getting funding.

xxp lol.

one thing kate said upthread that's been stuck in my head is that so much of masculinity is "wanting to stick one's dick in someone". i feel like being hung up on that desire and having it be sublimated in all the wrong places is what masculinty is. penetrative desire that's "put in the wrong place" so to speak. i think penetration can be really awesome, of course you have to do it with someone who wants to be penetrated. go hog wild, explore it, take it to the max. it can get boring if your imagination and sensitivity aren't brought in for the ride. being the aggressive one doesn't mean the rest of yourself gets disconnected. i approach it as - mascuilinity is a fun and exciting "tool in my toolbelt" haha, it gets to be used in contexts where it's desired, where it can bring some healing through that lens, but to make it some kind of overarching code or identity that dictates the angle and frame of all of your relations, hobbies, attitudes, etc, is to, at the bare minimum, lose out on the richness of life, and potentially risk losing your soul entirely imho.

1. An aspirational model, rather than just a neutral description of what men are generally like
2. Particular to men, i.e. not just a collection of positive traits that women can have too
3. Not sexist against women, implicitly or otherwise

...is impossible. I don't mean that it's too politically sensitive to be feasible--I mean literally, conceptually impossible.

Truth bomb.

Any model of masculinity that you might draft on a "not superior but healthy on its own" basis will inevitably include characteristics that women and non binary ppl exhibit too. It's a dead end.

map so otm in this thread!

Any model of masculinity that you might draft on a "not superior but healthy on its own" basis will inevitably include characteristics that women and non binary ppl exhibit too. It's a dead end.

― Daniel_Rf, Wednesday, July 12, 2023 11:43 PM (eleven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

to this point, i think seeing masculinty as a social force that anyone can draw upon instead of a rigid identity is very helpful.