Rolling Maleness and Masculinity Discussion Thread

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.

sorry for weird itals there

I can imagine you stressing the point with a cig in hand.

For sure. Not liking Taylor Swift or any particular artist is always going to be primarily about personal taste, which is shaped by many things (including but hardly exclusively various kinds of biases). But based mostly on anecdotal data — what I know of other people's listening habits — I think a lot of music-listening dudes mostly listen to music by dudes. A lot of guys will have their counterexamples that they'll offer if you point out how male-dominated their listening is — they love Lucinda Williams, or Lauryn Hill, or Loretta Lynn, or Liz Phair. But their listening habits are still like 90-95 percent male.

So, yeah, it's not prescriptive — you don't have to listen to or like any given artist. I just think a lot of guys (not itt or on ilx in general mind) intentionally or unintentionally limit their listening by both genre and gender.

(lol apparently in my example guys will mostly listen to women whose names start with L)

i also know men who only listen to women whose names start with "L" a weird but true phenomenon.

seriously i wasn't trying to be anything other than expressive of my stabs at self-improvement, sorry for the sensitivity i'm just having a particularly bad week.

It's like in Superman comics how all the women he was attracted to had the initials LL. The ladylike allure.

it also seems strange to me that you're equating masculinity with "aggressive" music and femininity with approachable/freeing/pop music.

as a female musician I also take issue with this! Making music is a way to channel my aggression, and I often prefer other aggressive music. This is not to make this an attack on omar or his post ... just that his post brought up other essentializing issues w/r/t music genre/aesthetic and marginalized identities, such as this ... I liked the "manic pixie" line in yr post, budo... it reminds me of all the cis-dudes who love Joni Mitchell idk.

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.

also table otm

to clarify what i really did mean, it was more along the lines of what the societal expectations can be for what music one is supposed to listen to, often incorrect assumptions about expectations, how one feels tied to them, and how it's less about what music is in fact freeing but more about how having no boundaries can be freeing. i guess it was just stated terribly but i'd just appreciate the benefit of the doubt.

put that way I think it's pretty inarguable. as we all know, the ilm archives are rife with posts where aggro male posters say stuff like "how can grown men listen to this teen girl dreck"

“I liked Abba before it was acceptable.*” is a very charming boast :)

Oh I totally get that!

put that way I think it's pretty inarguable. as we all know, the ilm archives are rife with posts where aggro male posters say stuff like "how can grown men listen to this teen girl dreck"

Nowhere are these middle-aged/aging men asked why the hell they blast AC/DC and Zep as if they were 17 on their way to a kegger.

lol seriously. only mature gentlemen can appreciate the nuances of "Big Balls"

can anyone recommend some teen girl dreck that a person who really likes "overdose" can enjoy

maybe worth explicitly saying that the anti teen girl stuff is rooted in both misogyny and homophobia. apologies if someone already noted that!

which "overdose" crut? there's a few songs with that name

a couple years ago there was an app that examined your spotify streaming habits by gender. it turned out that i listened to mostly women -- it was something like 70 - 30. not sure if that is still true, but at the time i took it as reassurance that i am a good person who doesn't need to do any more self-reflection, unlike all of you bozos. do better.