Rolling Maleness and Masculinity Discussion Thread

it's about time dudes abjured the vacuum cleaner and returned to beating their rugs in the yard

if men are anything like their supporters say they are they're just monsters who we'd best be rid of

Men Are Not Cost-Effective : Male Crime in America (1991)

(Disclaimer: I have not read this; I don't know if it is any good or if the title claim has been challenged.)

If there was a toilet cleaning droid on the market.... fuck yeah!

I vaguely remember proposals for public restrooms that supposedly clean themselves after each use. Could this technology be adapted for residential bathrooms?

it's about time dudes abjured the vacuum cleaner and returned to beating their rugs in the yard

Try pitching this as the new Crossfit?

it's about time dudes abjured the vacuum cleaner and returned to beating their rugs in the yard

― fetter

you can get arrested for this

Many xps but I am a man who has lived 53 years in seven cities. The only time I've encountered even potential violence was in an elementary school in 1980something, when somebody decided it was very important to be shoved into lockers (and, once, a trashcan).

The open-carry tactical-gear camo weirdos who think their trip to Dunkin Donuts might suddenly become a bloodbath are very, very, very broken.

There’s been a lot written about that point from The Gift of Fear to Schroedinger’s rapist etc. I find these writings useful to illuminate the thinking behind female behaviour in public, but neither really address the main problem with male-on-female violence: you are far more likely to be assaulted by someone you know, most likely a family member or a partner. I know numerous people, including me, who have experienced violence from loved ones.

The question then, to treat that crackhead tweet with semi-seriousness, is how women should respond. Sure we are vigilant about strange men who might be violent in public if we don’t respond correctly, but how to go through life when 1 in 3 of us will experience violence from a partner? Which isn’t to say stalkers or stranger violence don’t matter, but it’s the tip of the iceberg ito lived experience.

xp to j.lu’s first point

Yeah the incel talking point that women sail through life with no responsibilities, while men are engaged in battles for survival, is just that: an incel talking point. And gets it exactly backwards. As one would expect from people who live in a parallel world of their own creation.

is how far along the molyneux trajectory is adams now?

I'm glad these men don't seem to be enjoying themselves much - they've made their own hell - but I wish they'd just go their own way already instead of trying to bring everyone else down with them. why don't they start a fight club or something

Certainly my behaviour has been conditioned through my entire life by both external and internal forces.

Don’t tell the taxi driver exactly where you live.
Carry your keys in your hand.
Make sure someone knows where you are if you’re going home by yourself.
Check in with people regularly.
Text your friend when she gets home to make sure she got in ok.
If someone is following you or menacing you on public transport, get off and wait for the next one.

And some specific to just me:

Keep proof of everything.
Are you sure? Are you really really sure? No really, are you sure?
Qualify your statements so there’s nothing objectionable. - obviously I have long ago decided I don’t feel like doing this anymore.

Is there non-Twitter evidence that men and women react differently to threats ? In a fundamental way ? For example if someone physically assaults you, you're likely to fall in either of three broad categories (fight off, fold over, run away). If you're insulted, I assume the internal emotional experience is similar. Etc. Then obviously we have different resources that may or may not align with sex (confidence, strength, education), the threats will be different, the circumstances, the type and level of violence etc. But the way we react ?

― Nabozo

I mean not _biologically_, there's no fucking biological difference. Gender isn't binary, it's not "men are like this and women are like this". People face perceived threats and based on what resources we have available to us, that determines how we respond to perceived threats. Hell, maybe there is... I hate to bring this up, but I do think "male socialization" does affect how I respond to perceived threats. Like, for the past five years I've been pretty continuously getting the message cis women (any AFABs, really) get all their lives, that they're inferior to men, that men are smarter than them, more competent than them, _know_ more than them, that women need to shut up and know their place or they're a bitch. It's not true, but tell somebody that enough and it has an effect. Not three times, or thirty, but just... always and forever. Justine is completely on the mark here:

If anyone is vigilant about violence 24/7 it’s more likely to be women, not men. We are very very aware of potential threats of violence. Nabozo, you left off the fawning response - trying to placate a potential threat. Women smile, laugh, nod their head in agreement, because men we don’t know are unpredictable. A man says something creepy or weird and we’d love to tell him to go fuck himself but what if he responds violently?

― just1n3

I actually agree with a lot of what Scott Adams says here, just from a slightly different perspective. When I look at Scott Adams, I see someone who legitimately believes that I am a threat to his existence. That I want to eradicate him and everyone like him. It's kind of an old story. The "Clash of Civilizations" theory. People who subscribe to that theory, you know... people don't tend to think of themselves as the aggressors. It's just _pre-emptive self-defense_.

Does Adams himself live in a continual state of violence? Is he continually hypervigilant against threats real and perceived? Yes. I also get the impression that he isn't necessarily great on the fact-checking part of it. And the thing is, because of, like, systemic power imbalance, he doesn't _have_ to be. Cis white men don't have to be. If they make mistakes, if they get it wrong, if they perceive women as a threat when we aren't, we're the ones who suffer. That's where the "fawning" comes in. If men hurt us, we're the ones who are held responsible, we're the ones who are blamed.

When Scott Adams says this:

We size up every threat and have a tentative plan to kill it first.

I mean, that's literal actual genocide, is what that is. To me, he makes that pretty clear:

The battle to defend Texas and the homeland is already in full…

Like I said, I do agree with Scott Adams that... like, I personally do live in a state of war. What Adams and people who agree with him are doing, to my mind, that falls under the umbrella of "pre-emptive self-defense". We're a threat to Texas, to the homeland, and the only way to keep Texas and the homeland is to kill us first. Where I disagree with Adams is in his statement that the plan is "tentative". Every week more trans refugees arrive here in Portland from Texas. A lot of the people I know are people in Texas or Florida or Indiana who are trying to find some way out while they still can.

It's not just about trans people, of course. We're just one of the more visible targets right now. I believe just1n3 is just as much a target as I am. It could be any woman everywhere. It's pretty obvious, honestly, to a lot of women, and what surprises me is how much men don't see it. But also not really? Because I didn't see it, before I transitioned. So I don't think it's necessarily a man thing, because I didn't see it, and I wasn't ever really a man.

I don't think that's necessarily a _man_ thing, what Scott Adams says, but I do think a lot of people genuinely believe what he says, and those are the people who are trying to kill us. I would urge anybody reading this thread to take what Scott Adams says very seriously. I don't see those words as being silly or ridiculous or empty. Those words are being put into practice right now by people with the power to do so.

why don't they start a fight club or something

― Left

IDK, fight club is pretty gay.

I'm not being sarcastic on that. Chuck Palahniuk's homosexuality very much informs Fight Club.

OK, I know I'm being very talky here, blame "male socialization" lol, but re: gyac's post... again, to me the difference for me isn't between "male" and "female" but my life pre-transition and post-transition. I'm just genuinely shocked sometimes at how ignorant I was about women's lived experiences. The sorts of precautions women typically take, I absolutely take them _now_. Pre-transition? I wasn't even aware of them. I didn't notice all of the little things women do to keep ourselves safe. Partly that's on purpose, I guess, because if men notice we're doing that kind of stuff, they get defensive and uncomfortable and like #notallmen, and if a man is uncomfortable, we're the ones responsible for that.

There's this difference between perceived fear, perceived threat, and actual threat. I had a lot of anxieties and worries and fear pre-transition and they were mostly, like, not reality-based. (The ones about being trans tended to be the more reality-based anxieties.) You ever look up the lifetime likelihood a trans woman will be sexually assaulted? OK, now take that and factor into that the extent to which sexual assault is underreported. SA went from being something I literally did not think about or worry about at all, like I would absolutely walk down a dark alley at night alone, to something I look at from a standpoint of, well, this is something I want to happen to me as _seldom_ as possible.

The fucked thing is, it's _not_ just something that happens to women. The fucked thing is, men often _genuinely don't know what abuse looks like_. It's not a man thing, not even an AMAB thing, but my gut is that it disproportionately affects AMABs. I've literally had to explain to other trans women that the reason they feel bad is because they were sexually assaulted. At the same time, I'm still really resistent to the idea that I, personally, was sexually assaulted. It's absolutely a double standard. Anybody else told me about the experience I had, I'd tell them unambiguously that they'd been sexually assaulted, but it just... I have this idea in my head of what sexual assault is supposed to _feel_ like, and it doesn't feel like that. And what does it matter, anyway? When women get sexually assaulted, everyone says it's our fault. Why be a victim if you can choose to say you're not, no matter what actually happened?

Now, the people I know are trans women and not men, but I don't believe for a second that this doesn't happen to cis men. I think cis men just are in less of a position to recognize and acknowledge abuse and assault when it happens. I'd say that this is a way in which patriarchy hurts men, like we all keep saying. There are a lot of people, _particularly_ men, who suffer from abuse and are unable or unwilling to recognize that, in ways that put them at risk of perpetuating the cycle of abuse.

trying to placate a potential threat. Women smile, laugh, nod their head in agreement, because men we don’t know are unpredictable. A man says something creepy or weird and we’d love to tell him to go fuck himself but what if he responds violently?

Don’t tell the taxi driver exactly where you live.
Carry your keys in your hand.
Make sure someone knows where you are if you’re going home by yourself.
Check in with people regularly.
Text your friend when she gets home to make sure she got in ok.
If someone is following you or menacing you on public transport, get off and wait for the next one.

And some specific to just me:

Keep proof of everything.
Are you sure? Are you really really sure? No really, are you sure?
Qualify your statements so there’s nothing objectionable.

wow i relate to this so much
i'm a biological male but this is 100% how i think and act.

it’s just like, another dude who isn’t interested in learning anything and thinks he already knows all the answers, great, awesome

if I'm making some bechamel sauce I have a bottle of hot soapy water ready to pour straight into the pot after it is poured out, being a hotsteeper means always getting ahead of stuff that is going to cake up and be an absolute shit to wash off.

― vodkaitamin effrtvescent (calzino), Friday, January 26, 2024 6:55 AM (six hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

cal passed the bechamel test

When Scott Adams says incredibly stupid things that demonstrate his complete social ineptitude with a dose of misbegotten machismo he is hardly worth refuting. He has been wandering in a world of delusions for more than a decade now and his cartoon strip has been widely dropped by the dwindling remnant of the major daily newspapers. Even Ben Garrison's cartoons are funnier than Dilbert these days.

Even Ben Garrison's cartoons are funnier than Dilbert these days.

Ow, draw back a nub.

Fuck you Scott Adams.

My best friend still sends me the address she's at when she goes places with people she doesn't know (i.e. apartment/house rental hunting), in case she goes silent so I can know her last location and call the cops.

Gee Dilbert I wonder why she feels like she has to do that. Maybe I'll text her and let her know only men are really impacted and governed by violence

cal passed the bechamel test

lathered out loud at this

Men live in a continuous state of violence. We size up every threat and have a tentative plan to kill it first. We live that war and it never stops.

I'm a straight man, I am not like this, my dad is not like this, my son is not like this and if he were I'd be up all night wondering what I did wrong

one thing I will say is I have never seen or even heard of a woman open carrying before. I know one who did concealed carry and I think it was because she had a real bad experience on a date once. but the people buying those giant assault rifles and winging them around...that's gotta be like 99% men and 1% women running for Congress

one thing I will say is I have never seen or even heard of a woman open carrying before. I know one who did concealed carry and I think it was because she had a real bad experience on a date once.

― frogbs, Friday, January 26, 2024 2:00 PM (nine minutes ago)

can i make the joke? am i allowed to make the joke?

...ok, fine, i won't make the joke. i mean it's not a funny joke. i just like when i get to make awful transphobic jokes. that's all.

https://pasteboard.co/slEfx2AfzsVf.png

https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/25894368/inside-taboo-bizarre-revealing-world-stadium-bathrooms-super-bowl-liii-nfl-2018

yeah i can't figure out where to put images where i can embed on ilx :(

lol the @'s

OK, truth telling here. Has anybody actually ever looked at another guy’s dick at a urinal? I never have, on purpose anyway. Sometimes out of the corner of your eye, you can tell that yes there is a penis there. But is this a thing that some men do?

Even if penises turn you on, that doesn’t seem like the best setting for them.

(I realize it's dumb to ask if it's a thing some men do, because there are some men who do just about anything. Just guessing it's not a common phenomenon.)

Men, even queer ones, have been conditioned since birth NOT to glance at peepees.

....in urinals

The cultural conservative fixation on bathrooms — who can use which ones, what might happen in them — is so strange imo. Like 99.999 percent of people who go into bathrooms are there for straightforward purposes.(Republican senators excepted, obviously.)

99.999 percent of people who go into bathrooms are there for straightforward purposes.

Or slightly to the left

OK, truth telling here. Has anybody actually ever looked at another guy’s dick at a urinal? I never have, on purpose anyway. Sometimes out of the corner of your eye, you can tell that yes there is a penis there. But is this a thing that some men do?

Even if penises turn you on, that doesn’t seem like the best setting for them.

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

honestly that's something i'm curious about too... what gay bathroom sex is _like_. there was that republican senator or something, and i was reading about this sort of elaborate code they engage in. i mean some guys will go to any lengths to avoid having to talk to each other, i guess that's kind of a turn-off? the stuff i hear about male homosexuality seems to reflect cishet men's anxieties about homosexuality than homosexuality in practice, and thinking about it, i honestly know surprisingly little about gay sex. can someone like me _really_ have claim to call herself an f-slur? (that's an imposter syndrome joke, fwiw.)

gay bathroom sex is like being suffocated by a conservative milieu, horny, and desperate. those things combine to make the actual experience weirdly inaccessible. ime.

the only looking at dicks i've ever done in a bathroom has been at the open trough in the eagle. regular bathrooms i pretend like no one else exists. agree that no one does this and for anyone who thinks we need to police bathrooms, that is pure repression and projection.

The cultural conservative fixation on bathrooms — who can use which ones, what might happen in them — is so strange imo. Like 99.999 percent of people who go into bathrooms are there for straightforward purposes.(Republican senators excepted, obviously.)

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

lindsay ellis (which reminds me that i really need to get a nebula subscription, since she's got a new video about yoko ono. it's a topic that interests me and i'm super happy to see her making another video after the way she got treated...) argues in "the pop culture roots of transphobia" that trans bathroom anxiety dates back to "psycho" (worth noting that there's no evidence that ed gein, the model for the "trans serial killer" trope, wanted to be a girl or had an interest in gender non-conformity).

i gotta be honest one of the biggest differences between women's restrooms and men's restrooms that i know is that men's restrooms don't have information on how to report abuse

nobody ever seems to bring that up when talking about anxieties about gender in public restrooms, though! honestly if i was gonna have any anxieties about "men in women's rooms" it would be the possibility of an intimate partner who was actively abusing me coming into that space

that said i'm a lesbian so, uh, it's not like excluding men from women's rooms is gonna do me any good on that front...

i mean for that matter i don't see why they wouldn't have information about how to report abuse in men's rooms. i feel like men are really vulnerable to abuse simply because men aren't taught what abuse _looks_ like.

gay bathroom sex is like being suffocated by a conservative milieu, horny, and desperate. those things combine to make the actual experience weirdly inaccessible. ime.

― ꙮ (map)

that makes sense to me, over on the trans politics thread there was some discussion about deeply conservative forms of queerness... the general vibe i get from public restroom sex is one of guilt and shame, like, you want to have gay sex, but you can't afford to be seen at a _gay bar_. it also makes me think of robert fripp's anecdote about how they took off the doors on the stalls at the Zoom Club to discourage people from shooting up in the stalls. that kind of colors my view of bathroom sex. that said it's not anything i have firsthand experience with, just a lot of assumptions :)

The other day on Twitter someone replied to a tweet about one of the New York baseball stadia with a very insistent demand that they put partitions between the urinals so no one could see anyone else's dick, and all I could think was that the real message of that tweet was PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE SOMEONE LOOK AT MY DICK.

Thought cottaging was for closeted dads

i remember a big, awkward, hapsburg jaw cokebottle glasses lad pissing beside me one night in the jacks at the castlecourt- in the glance we are conditioned to limit ourselves to (above the hips please gentlemen, simple check do i know you for banter purposes or not) i noted id spotted him lurching awkwardly across the dancefloor that evening neither "dancing" nor napoleon dynamiting but something inbetween, swaying enough to determine he noted he knew he was meant to be moving with the music, but not quite anything close enough to coordinated and in particular not with any one individual or group to sway with or at. solitary and as i said awkward.

as i also said, ive pissed beside enough fellas to know the rules. dont look dont ask dont tell, this is a trough of necessary function and its bad enough without we make it worse.

but.

i should make clear im a five sense only kind of guy, btw.

but.

i swear to fuck something in stance or focus in this fella kinda told me something was /off/

even allowing for the cokebottle lenses and the way he held himself, there was something about the way he, well, held himself

i dont to this day believe i snuck a peak, to be clear, but id drink taken. to this day i still recall that more than any action of my own it became clear that regardless of my own line of vision, the thing this buck was wrangling was not just in my periphery but was as inarguably in my line of sight as would be the column of a pillar one was leaning against while looking at ones phone. i could no more not be aware of it than i could ignore a fireman fighting solitary the hose of an engine a foot to my left.

he shook, i was shook, he fought it back into his pants and went on his way. i spotted him again that night, out there casting shapes into the foggy strobes, and with the knowledge i now had i thought the (relatively, always relatively) straightforward path between first fleeting impression to "well theres my dick" never seemed as tragic and wasted

as it happens im back in that same town tonight staying about five mins away from that same line of urinals, and id already thought of him twice today before this thread.

i hope hes out there somewhere making someone very happy, theres always someone will take a chance and give a chance.

if not, i hope he at least saved some schoolchildren from a leak in a dam or something. life's strange.

happy anniversary!

ill keep one eye out for him around town tomorrow

i will say more than once i have seen a girldick and said to god "god, that is an absolutely magnificent cock. why couldn't you have given it to someone who could at least appreciate it?" (that's not to say that _no_ trans women appreciate our cocks, it's just more the exception than the rule).

similar to map, other than the trough urinal at the eagle or folsom street fair, i don’t check dicks out at urinals. i do remember looking when i was younger though, like a tiny child in Vet Stadium peeing next to a guy named Tony from Bella Vista there to root for the Phils and drink 20 Bud Lights

similar to map, other than the trough urinal at the eagle or folsom street fair, i don’t check dicks out at urinals. i do remember looking when i was younger though, like a tiny child in Vet Stadium peeing next to a guy named Tony from Bella Vista there to root for the Phils and drink 20 Bud Lights

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

my one memory of checking out guys' penises was when i had just joined boy scouts - i was probably 11 and still prepubescent, and we did some kind of swimming thing at the local Y. i'd never been to a YMCA before, and overall i found it completely failed to live up to its reputation for homosexual vice. it did have a communal shower, though, and i remember observing in horror my 17-year-old senior patrol leader's extremely hairy body. that's what i remember more than his dick - all that hair. to be completely clear there was nothing untoward or sexually inappropriate happening. i do recall him saying to me once "kate, don't go through puberty if you can possibly avoid it." this probably was a different time from the Y event, but i've conflated the two. he didn't actually call me "kate" at the time either, but that's what's in my memory now.

it's probably the best advice i ever got when i was young. i have turned out to be extraordinarily bad at following his advice, even taking into account that it was not very practical in the first place. not only did i go through puberty, i've done it _twice_ so far. i don't anticipate doing it again, but i didn't anticipate the second time, either. i'm starting to understand why people think of me as "oppositionally defiant".

as for the senior patrol leader, last i heard he went to prison for dealing cocaine and they took away his eagle scout badge. i get the impression his family was poorer than mine, which was unusual in that town. there was a lot of demand for cocaine in the suburban new jersey town we grew up in. a lot of the rich kids i was in boy scouts with were probably his customers. haven't heard anything about them being banned from the boy scouts, but in fairness none of them worked hard enough to make eagle, either.

i gotta be honest one of the biggest differences between women's restrooms and men's restrooms that i know is that men's restrooms don't have information on how to report abuse

On a lighter note, when I worked at a low-rent country club in high school and had to clean the bathrooms, I was charmed and envious to discover that the women's room had a whole lounge area with a couch and coffee table and chairs. Like they could just hang out there and leave their husbands out at the bar.

sounds like a lactorium, v. nice

I don't know if this is the place for this, but I find it truly weird the way a certain population of online right-wing masculinity people has adopted the idea that people enjoying looking at Sydney Sweeney is some kind of rebuke of "wokeness" or a revival of "allowed to be male" -- are there really highly online 18-year-olds who are going to be convinced that just prior to 2024 there was a whole era where men didn't find pretty young women with large breasts attractive & were formally or informally forbidden from watching movies starring pretty young women with large breasts or from trying to date pretty young women with large breasts in their social circles? Who's going to believe that Sydney Sweeney represents a breakthrough of a "type" that was barred from the airwaves by the woke prudes until the day before yesterday?

a certain population of online right-wing masculinity people has adopted is pushing (for rageclicks) the idea that people enjoying looking at Sydney Sweeney is some kind of rebuke of "wokeness" or a revival of "allowed to be male"

i feel like there would be a way to frame that argument that would be more accurate, something around mainstream movies getting a lot more sexless, audiences getting more puritanical, and sweeney's popularity being a rebuke to that, but obviously that argument doesn't allow you to dunk on the libs or promote classical aryan beauty or whatever, and it's still not a particularly interesting or good argument