Rolling Maleness and Masculinity Discussion Thread

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.

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

― c u (crüt),

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqAOB143KqY

I've never heard a note of slipknot, but they always seemed to attract a more gender-balanced audience than I would expect.
Are there bands that surprised anyone else that way, maybe even just in regional differences in fanbases?

I remember being surprised by the surprisingly gender balanced Insane Clown Posse fandom.

i kinda do like AC/DC but one could probably drive around listening to "Sex Farm" by Spinal Tap and be equally as moved.

i think charting one's personal music journey is pretty interesting, it's just important to always be on that journey and not stagnate. growing up in a rural, exclusively white, very conservative area, i spent so many years just kind of taking in all the shit that was fed me. i eventually just happened to meet others who guided me in other directions, and also had a couple life-changing experiences, culturally speaking. before and after that i wasn't immune to the shitty opinions, holding some and probably embracing some. but i don't think the culture we expose ourselves to is incapable of changing us for the better, and that can often be as simple as art, if we open ourselves up to it. for some, it might be the only way we are able to hear other voices. especially if we have been raised in an area far from those other cultures. i always hope to be better. mostly i'm concerned w/raising my son to be a good person, as far as all that goes. i want him to be better than me. no doubt he already is.

women are more likely to enjoy masculine coded music than men are to enjoy feminine coded music.

most male artists i can think of, even extremely macho and misogynistic ones, have a significant number of women fans

not really on board with the AC/DC dismissal ott tbrr

budo jeru, i like you well enough (maybe it's because you were one of the people who regularly responded to my rolling music thread lol) and i get why... i mean one of the things i think about a lot is shame, the way it's essentializing in the way guilt isn't. thinking and responding is good! your response to omar was... it was pretty harshly critical, i think, in a pretty direct way. there's this idea that i used to kind of buy into of "brutal honesty", and i don't think honesty is improved by brutality.

there's also, like... i mean maybe i want to make music for the purpose of guiding men to "do better"! i don't make music but one of the reasons i do post here, at least, is because i think it's important for men to hear other perspectives that might possibly give them the opportunity for personal growth.

speaking personally the issue of gender in music did affect me. when i was in college i listened to tori amos for a bit but stopped because i felt like i didn't have the right to do that, that by listening to her music i was appropriating "women's experiences". which in retrospect is ridiculous, but that's what i believed, for a long time.

listening to women isn't the be-all and end-all of allyship but i do think it's important, letting women speak for women's experiences, understanding that women have knowledge and experience from their experiences that men don't, that cis men kind of can't. that doesn't mean, like i thought when i was younger, that women are this fundamentally incomprehensible thing to men. that belief, i think, my holding that belief did perpetuate patriarchy.

looking at it now, it seems so simple and obvious, these things that i struggled so hard to understand when i was trying to be a "good man". i just want to be listened to, taken seriously, for people who don't have my experiences to understand that maybe i know something they don't, that what they think about trans people _shouldn't_ carry equal weight to the way i articulate my lived experience as a trans person. it's so hard, to put that trust into someone who's not like you, who doesn't have the same interests and values as you. and men do have a choice whether or not to do that. _i_ had a choice whether or not to do that. women, people who live as women, gender minorities, don't. because men have power that women don't, i _do_ have to rely on them to act in my best interest, to act as allies. men do, a lot of men do. not all men. a lot of men do, and i try not to think about how conditional it all is, how they could at any time decide _not_ to act as allies and they'd face no consequences for that at all. we'd face the consequences. not them.

anyway. it's important for men to listen to women. i believe that. what women any particular man listens to, you know, there are a lot of different women who have a lot of different things to say. we're not all equal by any means. don't listen to lauren boebert, for the love of god, please. but there are a lot of women who have good things to say.

oh, and omar, i didn't take what you said _at all_ in the same way budo did. i thought it was a good post!

most male artists i can think of, even extremely macho and misogynistic ones, have a significant number of women fans

i'm not sure I would cosign this. it's gotten a lot better in recent years but, for the most part, I still see 80-90% male crowds at the smaller club metal and stoner rock shows I see.

I don't want to derail this thread with silly stuff, but ftr I have nothing against AC/DC and I hell I still enjoy LZ (D'yer Maker was playing while I was in the pet store earlier and I was into it). I was just agreeing with Alfred that there are obvious double standards

not really on board with the AC/DC dismissal ott tbrr

― Tracer Hand

I'm not (nor of Def Leppard!) -- I'm tired of validating dudes blasting adolescent boys rock in their F-150s while dissing female music.

good post Kate as usual ty

I am so grateful my mom e.g. subscribed to Ms magazine from the get-go, I grew up in the 70's understanding the sarcasm and point of the "No Comment" page

then ofc my dad was a disaster, so although I had a strong understanding of feminism from a young age (thanks also to Crass in all seriousness), I didn't have very many good male role models but am immensely thankful for the ones I did have (mostly via the gamer/RPG world, ironically)

women are more likely to enjoy masculine coded music than men are to enjoy feminine coded music.

I'd say likely to "listen to" rather than "enjoy" because we have to listen to things first before we even know if we enjoy them — and for most of the recorded music era, the majority of what anyone had available to listen to has been music made by men. That has changed in the last few decades and the landscape is so fractured now that I don't even know how you'd calculate whether a "majority" of recorded music is still produced by men. My guess is probably? But at least we've stopped proclaiming "Year of the Woman" every couple years like it's a novel thing for women to record music.

But yeah, the point about gendered listening habits I think is still true — women are more likely than men to listen to women artists, and also women are more likely to listen to male artists than men are to listen to female artists. (See also Hollywood, where up until last week or whatever it was gospel that women would go to movies about men but not vice versa.)

All of which is the product of a male-dominated society and culture, obviously, the patriarchy at work. Is it changing among younger generations? It would be nice to think so but I get the feeling that teenage boys still mostly listen to male-made music.

xp Alfred - some of them drive Chevys to be fair

i appreciate it, Kate. i did leave some thoughts half-finished in there, it's hard to not make a post like mine sound maybe a bit clumsy in its sentiments, but i was giving it a sincere go.

btw i side-barred with budo and we're cool.

women are more likely to enjoy masculine coded music than men are to enjoy feminine coded music.

― treeship.

i'll take it further and say that a lot of gender coding in music is bullshit! this whole thing about metal being a masculine genre. god, i know so many trans women who just fucking love metal. trans women who _make_ metal. victory over the sun. liturgy. feminazgul. so much more i don't even know about. and hell, i love metal! not to the extent that some of the women i know do, not to the extent where i listen to metal and only metal. i have to be in the mood for it. for me, i think a lot of the reason more women don't listen to metal is, like, the pervasive misogyny in metal culture. i can understand not wanting to be involved in a subculture where you have to deal with all that hostility and prejudice against you.

sleeve, it's interesting, because my mom _wasn't_ a good feminist role model. she was that model of feminist that said "women can do anything men can do!". so i thought of women as being just like men, and i thought that women should be held to the same standards as men (i.e. men's standards). this was, again, not a terribly helpful belief for me to have.

Thinking about the difference in how "boy bands" and "girl groups" have typically been presented. Boy bands are understood as straightforward objects of female (and queer) desire, and we assume they will draw mostly female fans. But girl groups aren't a mirror image of that. They have always been presented as sexual objects, sure, and harassed and leered at etc. But Destiny's Child did not have mostly male fans, or play to venues packed with panting goggle-eyed boys. It would be viewed as unmasculine to have a locker filled with pictures of a girl group rather than Tool or whatever. (I know, kids don't have lockers anymore anyway.)

I guess it's because girls are supposed to look up to male figures, but boys aren't supposed to be in that kind of subservient role thirsting for attention from powerful women.

women should be seen and not heard

Just these numbers alone do not bode well for any progress to be claimed on the popular end.
https://pudding.cool/2023/07/songwriters/

re: metal misogyny, where does slipknot fit in? their fan getups seem somewhat gender-neutral (as opposed to ICP's juggalo/jugglette motifs)

Oof yeah that Pudding breakdown is brutal.

yeah wow

I suppose I'm not surprised, but that is a very effective presentation of data

not really on board with the AC/DC dismissal ott tbrr

every discussion has to ultimately fall back on 70s hard rock vs. 00s teen pop, it's just a cross ilx has to bear

no one dismissed AC/DC though!

fwiw my old boss at the weed farm is the drummer in AC//DShe, the all-female cover band. They’re phenomenal live

awesome

When I was a teen, I listened almost exclusively to male-fronted groups. To listen to women was to invite ridicule. I still remember one of my friends teasing me endlessly about seeing the Pretenders on my 16th birthday. Well, it was the original lineup, and Ray Davies came out to sing "Stop Your Sobbing," so fuck him.

The notable exception to this, at least to me, was Blondie. Debbie was too punk, and to damn cool (not to mention beautiful, which counted for a lot to my adolescent brain), not to listen to.

As I have aged, I have found myself gravitating far more to female-fronted bands. I'd much rather listen to Joni Mitchell than Bob Dylan.

*too damn cool

My son’s first big concert, at his request, was Beyoncé on the Formation tour. He was in middle school at the time and already a little squeamish about going to see a big female pop show — he really wanted to go, but wouldn’t let me post any photos of him there or anything. Anyway, it was of course a GREAT show, and we were surrounded my mostly Black women who thought it was adorable this little white boy was there. Now he’s aged through whatever misgivings he might have had and is proud that that was his first concert.

*by mostly

This article about a now-state senator calling a 13-year old boy a homophobic slur during a public meeting is emblematic of the sort of brutality that I kept referencing above. I know how to fight back now— I have had chairs swung at my head after vocally defending myself and my partner from homophobic invective— but imagine being a young queer kid and this sort of behavior is on display all the time. Shepard’s lifeless body was enough to instill fear into me when I was a kid, but the ambience of homophobia and masculine rage was even more terrifying.

This article about a now-state senator calling a 13-year old boy a homophobic slur during a public meeting is emblematic of the sort of brutality that I kept referencing above. I know how to fight back now— I have had chairs swung at my head after vocally defending myself and my partner from homophobic invective— but imagine being a young queer kid and this sort of behavior is on display all the time. Shepard’s lifeless body was enough to instill fear into me when I was a kid, but the ambience of homophobia and masculine rage was even more terrifying.

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

my relationship to that slur over the past few years, to cis gay men in general, has been interesting. one of the things i've really had to grapple with is my internalized misandry. i thought manhood was categorically inferior to womanhood, i thought all men wanted to be women, because why wouldn't you? it's taken me a while to really internalize that no, that was a me thing, that a lot of men really _like_ being men.

even after that, i was really afraid of people thinking i was a man, that was the biggest slur against trans women, that we were Really Men. being an effeminate man is apparently shameful. being an effeminate woman makes you, uh, a tradwife, i guess. idk. i'd rather be thought of as being an f-slur than as a tradwife. the f-slur is closer to the truth.

it was kind of shocking, last year, when i started seeing my friends being called the f-slur more and more often. (nobody called me that, because i have this ridiculous amount of passing privilege). because my thought was... what's wrong with that?

actually, now that i think about it, it was before that. i was driving down TV Highway in Beaverton (no seriously everyone calls it TV Highway, no i don't ever think "television" when i see those initials) and i got cut off by someone with all kinds of gay bumper stickers and i kind of muttered the f-slur under my breath. that's my generation, that's kind of what i was taught. and then i realized, i said aloud, "wait, i'm a f-slur", and i laughed.

early on it was really important to me that i _wasn't_ an f-slur. like i wanted to carefully explain to bigots that actually, i wasn't at all. yes, i sucked dick, but it was only girl dick, which was a _completely different thing_. i was really confused, early on, when anti-trans legislation would go after drag bars and stuff. like i thought they were making a mistake. drag, by and large, isn't a trans woman thing, it's something that's associated with _gay men_!

of course it wasn't an _accident_. this idea that cis gay men had "made it", that they'd achieved social respectability because of, i don't know, _philadelphia_ or something - that was never true. for a while people had to pretend they didn't hate gay men, and then trans people came along and we get used as a pretext. we get used as a pretext to call anybody and everybody who's the slightest bit queer the f-slur.

so yeah, i'm an f-slur. sure. i'm an f-slur and a t-slur and a dyke and a sissy and all of those words that i wanted so badly not to be, back in the day. whatever. everything they say i am, i am. and i am very proud of myself. like a lot of us keep saying, patriarchy hurts men. i don't know for sure, but i suspect that the men it hurts first and hardest are queer men.

---

but the kids. i mean it seems like everything bad that gets done gets done "for the sake of the children", but when you look at it, it's actually being done against the children. "so yes, i would call that bad game design." - shigeru miyamoto

and when i transitioned... when i started, it was the fear of physical violence that was my biggest fear, but that doesn't happen that often, and when it does happen, well, it pretty much never happens to white queers. it's other stuff that's hard.

what's hard for me is that i'm not personally being threatened by this. i'm a white, cis-passing woman in one of the most trans-friendly cities in the world. i just have to watch. i have to watch what they're _doing_ to children, people who _can't_ defend themselves, and most cishets... _don't even notice_. it's not that they don't care, or that they're ok with it, they don't even fucking _know_ this is happening. when you're not the victim, it's really really easy to not notice, i've learned.

yes— I think that what you mention last is what has gotten me so wound up. I was a child and was made to feel like society’s refuse, and this is still happening today, and this is infuriating to watch.

yes— I think that what you mention last is what has gotten me so wound up. I was a child and was made to feel like society’s refuse, and this is still happening today, and this is infuriating to watch.

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

going from "I WILL NOT LET THIS HAPPEN AGAIN." to "oh it turns out it's not actually up to me, i guess i need to not dwell on it so much or it'll really fuck me up inside" has been a pretty rough transition for me.

there's this meme out there of the big hulking tank protecting the little level one dude from a hail of arrows, and there's a variation of it where both of them have the trans flag colors on them. i've had to find out the hard way that it doesn't really work like that :(

https://wapo.st/3OZDJSS

Gift link, in case you want to read what Christine Emba and 350 Washington Post readers think about masculinity

straight dudes talkin about straight dudes.

350 guys thinkin baout things

straight dudes talkin about straight dudes

it's not a very diverse sample, but at least a few ideas might have emerged that ever-so-slightly nudge the process of defining straight dude masculinity in a better direction, even if only accidentally. you can't create a better society by just trying to erase straight dudes from the face of the earth.

we won’t know unless we try