Rolling Maleness and Masculinity Discussion Thread

lol unperson so your perspective as a straight dude is "complete"? I'm not sure how it ever could be when you dismiss other people so easily

No, of course not. Standing where I am, I see things you can't see. Standing where you are, you see things I can't see. What part of that is unclear? Take a step to the left or right, maybe it'll help.

just a tip, whenever you start a sentence "Not to be (x)" you are in fact being (x) so you should have a lil' think before continuing down that road

Thanks; professional writer for more than 25 years, when I do things I do them on purpose. It was a rhetorical flourish.

how many threads will unperson express something kinda vile on this year? it's been like once a month lately

hmmm. i think this is actually a great opportunity to compare and contrast!

when i started talking about a movie i hadn't seen in a thread where people who _had_ seen that movie were talking about it, table gently and sensitivity pointed out that i was perhaps projecting my own experiences onto that movie (which, again, i hadn't actually seen). table then followed up by explicitly thanking me for my message of support.

this was a case in which i was, really, pretty clearly wrong. i was exhibiting a behavior pattern i've exhibited in the past, and it's not really a good behavior pattern. when table spoke up, though, it was in an extremely gentle manner.

-

there's an argument to be made that this was the behavior i was engaging in when i talked about my experiences with manhood, certainly. i do think it's maybe a little more complicated than that. i would say that i was overgeneralizing - maybe even universalizing - my personal, subjective experience. your response was to give your own personal, subjective experience (some of which turns out to overlap with mine - as it happens, i, too, loaded trucks on third shift for UPS). i think it's... understandable that you might have a little bit of hostility towards what i'm saying. (i'm not meaning to be too pointedly critical of your post in that. i just don't know of any other way to interpret the emotional component of your response.)

and then you follow that up with:

And not to be overly crude or essentializing, but I don't know if I fully trust a trans person's perspective on straight manhood? Like, to quote Suicidal Tendencies, "if you're not now, you never were."

i do deliberately continue to read and post to the maleness and masculinity thread. you're right, i'm not a man, and having thought about it a great deal, i have conclude, at least for now, that i never was a man.

i think there is something that some men, maybe even a lot of men, don't seem to really process. people who are members of non-normative groups _have_ to be knowledgeable about the lives and experiences of normative groups. we don't have a choice. i'm not a man, i am a women, but i've learned that _all women_ have to know men, and manhood, _extremely_ well. men, on the other hand, can be totally ignorant of women's lives and experiences, and often are.

i would argue that any non-patriarchal conception of manhood _needs_ to listen to and take into account the experiences of people who aren't men, since the primary people who are hurt and affected by patriarchy _are_ non-men. to deny the right of non-men to speak on men's issues is to deny the idea that patriarchy is a bad thing that needs to change.

further than that, i do believe that trans people, as a whole, have particular insight and wisdom into gender, and particularly into masculinity, that cisgender men don't have. no, i never was a man, but i lived as a heterosexual man for 43 years, and i do think that experience is _relevant_ - _more_ than that of a cisgender man, because i, like most trans people, have the ability to look at multiple categories of gendered experiences, and evaluate them comparatively, from the position of lived experience.

your focus seems to be on your _particular experience_, which is one of healthy and socially appropriate functioning as a man. this is, again, a problem a lot of men seem to have - difficulty distinguishing between their _personal experience_ as a man and patriarchy as a structural force. it's _extremely frustrating_ to experience. even though my criticisms of normative masculinity are arguable overgeneralized, they're _not criticisms of you personally_, unperson, and my subjective perception is that you're acting like they _are_ personal criticisms.

what's the benefit, unperson? what's the benefit to you of not trusting trans people's perspectives on straight manhood? what do you get out of it?

anyway it is fully possible to "understand" something you're not 100 percent "inside" of if you're fucking steeped in it for crucial decades of your development

i think that kate's points are well taken, and furthermore / in addition it's fine to introduce anecdotal data from Straight White Guy that complicates the theoretical framework of Masculinity. if we don't look at the raw data, how can we refine our theory? they work together to help us see the whole picture.

i think at the end of the day, unperson was responding to what he perceived as somebody speaking for his own experience. so he chimed in with his experience -- and just his experience. i think that's ok on the maleness thread.

we can also take into consideration's table's and Alfred's points, and use this as an opportunity to explore the unspoken ways in which masculine spaces exclude or hurt. but that doesn't mean that unperson can't share what it's like for him as an individual example.

or did i miss something?

i mean fine we can totally cede this thread to the men who really know what straight male spaces are like

(ffs)

i posted before i saw kate's most recent post but just want to say i like her post very much, and i hope unperson takes it to heart. specifically about her trans-ness informing her perspective on heteronormativity.

you have rejected masculinity, therefore i can't completely trust your perspective on it because you must have some bias against it, that causes you to not apprehend how wonderful these spaces are, how we can read books around each other and refrain from calling each other f*gs, it's beautiful

i think at the end of the day, unperson was responding to what he perceived as somebody speaking for his own experience. so he chimed in with his experience -- and just his experience. i think that's ok on the maleness thread.

This is it. I read kate's post (obviously) and responded with "that's your perspective, which I think is off-base; here's why. And here's my perspective."

to deny the right of non-men to speak on men's issues is to deny the idea that patriarchy is a bad thing that needs to change.

Who's denying your right to speak? I'm hearing you and responding. It's a discussion. I consider your perspective valuable. I hope mine is as well. Perhaps the end goal is a kind of triangulation — you tell me what you see from your angle, I tell you what I see from my angle, and maybe we arrive at a guess about what's in the blind spot between.

i would argue that any non-patriarchal conception of manhood _needs_ to listen to and take into account the experiences of people who aren't men, since the primary people who are hurt and affected by patriarchy _are_ non-men. to deny the right of non-men to speak on men's issues is to deny the idea that patriarchy is a bad thing that needs to change.

awkward and clumsy phrasing here, i think - reading it over again i think i'd say people who aren't cis men here instead

Just a quick humorous diversion...you know that billionaire who's spending millions and engaging in radical diet 'n' exercise regimes (and literally injecting himself with his 18-year-old son's blood) to try and look "young"? Take a look at what he looked like five years ago:

If you're gonna go from this to this for $2m a year, some of it should at least have been spent on heroin pic.twitter.com/nobKyvEg1c

— Dave Mc 🇨🇦🇺🇾🇳🇱🇹🇳🇪🇦 (@davemc99) August 14, 2023

This is a person with a very twisted vision of masculinity.

Who's denying your right to speak? I'm hearing you and responding. It's a discussion. I consider your perspective valuable. I hope mine is as well. Perhaps the end goal is a kind of triangulation — you tell me what you see from your angle, I tell you what I see from my angle, and maybe we arrive at a guess about what's in the blind spot between.

― but also fuck you (unperson)

i feel like you're misreading what's going on here. i'm not viewing this as some sort of discourse where we both air our views and come to a common understanding. there's no Both Sides here. what you said was wrong and i was trying, as gently and respectfully as possible, to communicate to you why and where you were wrong. of course i've gone and blown that now, but other cis men here seem to have read and appreciated what i said, so it was still worth doing imo.

Just a quick humorous diversion...you know that billionaire who's spending millions and engaging in radical diet 'n' exercise regimes (and literally injecting himself with his 18-year-old son's blood) to try and look "young"? Take a look at what he looked like five years ago:

― but also fuck you (unperson)

dude would've gotten way better results from estrogen, just sayin'

I think he's not chasing masculinity so much as some equally twisted vision of "youth" or "vitality" or something.

Anyway, I think some of the tangle in this thread is the ever-present danger of totalization — that maleness or men or men's spaces or sense of community or relationships are or should be this or this. Which I don't think anyone is really actually saying, but there's a tendency to read things as declarations or flag-planting rather than partial or conditional perspectives on complex questions. (Which doesn't mean people can't be wrong or shouldn't be challenged, obv.)

Straw men suck.

i feel like you're misreading what's going on here. i'm not viewing this as some sort of discourse where we both air our views and come to a common understanding. there's no Both Sides here. what you said was wrong and i was trying, as gently and respectfully as possible, to communicate to you why and where you were wrong. of course i've gone and blown that now, but other cis men here seem to have read and appreciated what i said, so it was still worth doing imo.

― Kate (rushomancy)

wow, that was unnecessary of me. apparently i'm an asshole today, sorry about that.

No worries. I am either a gaping asshole or a much worse writer than I like to think I am, because I seem incapable of making a point anyone gets.

stick to jazz

i think if you can see how this

I don't know if I fully trust a trans person's perspective on straight manhood

doesn't equate to this

I consider your perspective valuable.

then most of the conflict would cease to be a mystery? you did eventually seem to admit the totality of patriarchy can't be fully grasped by one perspective alone, so i'm not even sure where the former statement came from.

sorry, i think i'm injecting myself where i don't belong and will stop posting

going back to Close - for what it’s worth it was only Lukas Dhont’s second film. I think he is an amazing emerging filmmaker

I can understand the criticism from David Ehrlich: “Once again [a reference to Dhont’s first film Girl], a vividly affecting vision of adolescent identity is upended by a sudden trauma so intense that it bleeds into every other scene of the film”. The trauma in the middle of the film was intense, but Ehrlich wrote about it as if it was only about that trauma.

It seemed to me that it was about something much bigger - the bond that mothers and sons have, and more broadly the power of redemption that parents can offer to children, even other peoples’ children. It was also speaking directly to people who have gone through any kind of childhood trauma, about relinquishing the guilt they have been burdened with.

Yeah, I think that Leo’s gaze and engagement with Remi’s mother was the most significant element of the film’s second half, for me, and I don’t think it was just about guilt— it was about fear, love for her as the person who cared for Remi, who cared for him.

I will never forget the mothers of my friends who took care of me when I was a kid and my parents were both ill— they exist always in my head as my mother, too, with their love and their flaws

Absolution is not just about guilt— but about love and acceptance

yes

Absolution is not just about guilt— but about love and acceptance

― butt dumb tight my boners got boners (the table is the table),

When I remember the scraps of my former Catholicism, I think this is what the Church's teaching had in mind when it didn't mean succumbing enough guilt for a priest to take advantage of you.

TO enough guilt

No worries. I am either a gaping asshole or a much worse writer than I like to think I am, because I seem incapable of making a point anyone gets.

― but also fuck you (unperson), Monday, 14 August 2023 bookmarkflaglink

stick to jazz

― butt dumb tight my boners got boners (the table is the table), Monday, 14 August 2023 bookmarkflaglink

Jazz deserves better.

Re-reading Hocquenghem’s Homosexual Desire for the first time in a while this morning, and surprise! Much of what he wrote in the 70s still holds true!

For example: “homosexuality: an abstract division of desire which allows even those who escape to be dominated, inscribing within the law what is outside the law.” Or, put more plainly in his quoting of Sartre on Genet: “If every man is all of man, this black sheep must only be a pebble or must be me.”

My experience of patriarchal and traditional masculine culture has been that the prime motivating factors for prohibitions on homosociality are this paranoid fear of “contamination,” the masculine and straight fear of being homosexual which seems to pervade so many social interactions. That so much of this fear is inculcated in pre-teen and adolescent boys to this day and is a primary factor in the fascist right’s drive to ban LGBTQ books and representation goes without saying.

Sometimes I think we should all stick to music

this conversation started from table talking about a film, so I don't know that that would work! certainly jazz, for one, isn't separate from maleness and masculinity

Sometimes I think we should all stick to music

table absolutely otm - thanks for mentioning the book itt, i'll have to check it out. i think that there is this necessary hinge on sexual awakening and desire that keeps society operating for better or worse. it takes many forms but there's always violence of some kind included & some people get a lot more hurt than others do but everyone gets wounded to some extent. lately i've been feeling like it's a necessary part of being human. doesn't mean we can't do trauma work related to it and become better, more loving people in the end.

ah i missed the rest of this revive. fuck you unperson, i wish you would stop posting here.

recent thread making me again want to discuss how men should approach art made by women, and how maybe some men are simply not capable of coming to an empathetic understanding of art made by women. i think i touched on it way back when, talking about the importance of engaging w/that kind of art, but it goes deeper than merely that. i think it's interesting in a *steeples fingers under chin* kind of way to read posts which have an undercurrent of hostility towards the women, even when they're not outwardly saying anything particularly demeaning. i'm absolutely certain i've done that too, but i've also let go of certain restrictive notions about what a guy like me should enjoy as far as art goes. i used to be strictly a jazz/blues/aggressive punk and garage rock/mainstream rock kinda guy, probably ruled by some bullshit High Fidelity-esque notion of what was authentic and what was not, but i had a breakthrough at some point probably around age thirty, when i engaged more w/pop. it probably started earlier, listening to the indie version in Saint Etienne, but then i became much to my own surprise a superfan of Kylie Minogue, and it was eye-opening. i find something to be freeing and effervescent about certain types of music. this isn't a true journey really, it's such a low-level and insignificant thing compared to what others talk about, and i guess it's more about not particularly caring anymore. it does fall under the larger umbrella where one feels as if the strongest move one can make is to not be restricted in the sense of idk moving past the ropes of the swimming area you're supposed to remain in. not being afraid of what others might think. again it seems minor compared to what others go through in life, but i think for men it can still be a major thing.

unedited, probably rambling.

idk to me it's really icky and patronizing when people assign moral value to their taste in music, film, etc. i definitely think that the aesthetic and political are intertwined, but for me doing a 1:1 "i center __ voices by listening to __" is just kind of a facile NPR-brain operation

it also seems strange to me that you're equating masculinity with "aggressive" music and femininity with approachable/freeing/pop music. it's even a bit manic pixie. women don't make music for the purpose of guiding men to "do better"

it's a clumsy post maybe. it's not an either/or. i don't personally equate masculinity with anything, it's more that many other people do i guess.

i don't think i was trying to say everything you're suggesting i was saying, sorry if it came off that way. i was trying to be a bit positive but i'll just drop it.

you don't have to be sorry, i definitely wasn't attacking you or your post, just thinking and responding

Omar’s post makes sense to me from the opposite perspective. It’s like that Cement Garden bit Madonna sampled: it’s ok for girls to like “masculine” things, but there still remains some stigma at liking things that are seen as “feminine”. Is that what you’re getting at?

I grew up with a dad who would play whatever music he liked regardless of what people thought about it and people absolutely do and did assign values to absolute bullshit for all the deeper reasons. My dad was probably my biggest influence on my taste in terms of “Just like whatever you like”, and to this day, whenever he sees an ad for a musical or something on TV he’ll still say “I liked Abba before it was acceptable.*”

*he is a product of rural Ireland and it’s just an anecdote but it absolutely travels from the way I’ve heard men talk about having certain tastes in music/film/etc.

something along those lines, gyac

anyway i get tired of posting things on this board and worrying that someone is going to reframe what i say in a somewhat disingenuous way that'll make me look like an asshole.

or putting words/thoughts in my mouth. whatever it's fine. it's online culture. i should accept it at this point. i'm a veteran now.

i think the problem with this thread, for me, is that you need a certain amount of vulnerability and trust to be able to work through some of this shit, and the truth is i kind of barely know people here, so i think i'm going to stop posting in this thread

my thinking on this topic is kind of messy and informed by all different strains of queer theory and post-marxism and my own life experiences and my friends' and it's just sort of a confusing journey and i definitely feel like a certain amount of risk-taking is involved, but i don't want to stumble through that publicly and inadvertently give the impression that it think X instead of Y, or make certain posters feel unheard or un-valued

<3 same

I like your post, Omar. At a certain point in my 20s, I realized that I was increasingly listening to and preferring music made by women. Partly that was just availability — in the '90s, there started to be a lot more rock/indie/hip-hop by women. For the last several decades, while I can list plenty of music-by-white-guys I like and listen to, my favorites in pretty much any genre have been by women and/or nonwhite men. Like, all of my Pazz Jop ballots in that period were mostly non-white-dudes. I've thought about this some — like, "Am I woke poser? Am I overcorrecting for my mostly-white-dudes teenage listening habits?" But I'm really just listening to what I like, what I find interesting. (I mean, the shit I got from a lot of male friends as an early Taylor Swift champion. Of course, a lot of them have since come around.)

I think in a lot of ways I got tired of hearing from/about straight white dudes. I find us kind of tiresome!

I credit my dad a lot for that too. Although his record collection still skewed white-guy, he loved girl groups — we always had the Shirelles on — and a lot of women folk and country artists. Tons of Linda Ronstadt, Emmylou Harris, Dolly Parton, etc.

i just don't think anything i said in my post deserved being called icky, patronizing, facile NPR...i don't think women are here to make men be better. i'm not trying to artificially center anyone's voices. it's just a personal take, unedited. sorry but it just sort of bummed me out. it felt like being targeted for a takedown to score points. maybe it's a straw breaking a back after years of pandemic hell and friends and family dying crashing down on me, or knowing what i do actually feel, but there you have it.

"i center __ voices by listening to __" is just kind of a facile NPR-brain operation

Yes and no? On one hand, sure, taste and politics often don't align. But also I think a thoughtful and deliberate appreciator/consumer of arts, music, literature — which describes most of ilx — will push beyond boundaries of things they know and voices they're familiar with. That's part of the fun of it, right? It's how you find new things, or new-to-you things.

I think straight dudes in particular absolutely should listen to and seek out art by people who aren't straight dudes. (As should everybody seek out perspectives beyond their own, but extra important for the privileged demographics.)

I think the aesthetics question is complicated. Many of my favorite musicians are women, and this has been true for as long as I’ve been an active music listener, but I am not a fan of most of Taylor Swift’s music, as one example. The way that liking/disliking something has been weaponized into ideological signalling is really unfortunate in a lot of ways— not liking or liking a certain artist with a certain subjectivity (gender, orientation, race) can have little to do with bias, or it can have a lot to do with bias. But this zero-sum way such aesthetic differences are treated can make it seem as if it always has to do with bias, and frankly, that doesn’t really make sense.