Rolling Maleness and Masculinity Discussion Thread

maybe it's just hard for me to imagine not feeling guilty and neurotic and paranoid about power and social hierarchies but the closest I come to understanding the emotional appeal of right wing politics is the false promise of relief from all that - if you're not uncertain about where you stand why do you need to be so angry and violent about it all the time?

Oh I think they do feel under attack and under threat, but they think all of those attacks and threats are deeply unfair, dishonest and malignant. (All very much stoked by steady diets of right-wing media of course).

I guess you can get into epistemological debates about what people "know" on some level, but in my experience the daily existence of your average white conservative American male who spends most of their time in mostly white mostly conservative spaces is quite sunny and untroubled by nagging doubts or secret guilts. A lot of this is tied to the conservative/evangelical focus on "individual responsibility." They can't see how they could possibly be responsible for anything happening to anyone else, because people are responsible for themselves and rise or fail or rise on their own merits. Which is a very easy thing to believe if you happen to find yourself on the good side of an unequal system or society.

So yeah they get angry when people suggest even implicitly that maybe they don't "deserve" everything they have, but I think that anger comes more from a deep belief that someone's trying to take things from them than from trying to cover up for their own self-awareness of their complicity in an unjust system.

Not that it's excusable or defensible either way! I just think it's easy to imagine other people "know" things and are dissembling, when often they are just plain ignorant and happily so.

I hate babies; I also want a baby.

Babies is a really complicated thing to me. For a long time not wanting babies was kind of a proxy judgement. I was afraid of being the kind of parent my mom was, I was afraid of being the kind of parent my dad was. I didn't think I could be a "good enough parent". And at that time, I was probably right.

Also, for a long time I resented having been born. I wished I'd never been born. I felt like it would be... morally wrong to bring another life into this world. I don't believe that now.

Since I transitioned... I have lots of problems, but I do think I have the skills now to be a good enough parent. It's a bittersweet realization. That ship has sailed. Nobody was going to pay to cryogenically freeze my sperm. Even if I could have... my dysphoria made it really difficult for me to, uh. You know. So it was never much of an option on a practical level.

Anyway, starting to understand myself, that made a difference, and starting progesterone, that also made a difference. Expecting men to want children the way women want children is kind of unfair because to a certain extent there are hormonal factors.

A lot of trans women really want, to varying degrees, to conceive and bear a child. As far back as Lili Elbe, the first woman to get GRS. She wanted to conceive and bear a child so much she died just so she could have the chance. I don't want to conceive and bear a child that much. I radically accept that I won't ever have a child.

I don't resent people who can have children and don't want to, though. I feel like some people do, and I mean. I don't think of things in those terms. I don't see the point in being _jealous_ like that. People get to feel however they feel, though. It's just how people act on those feelings that's important to me. Someone who loves children so much they want to ban abortion for everyone... that's fucked. That's toxic love.

Re: “the game”. I have always held that one of the unspoken greatest privileges of being male, or straight, or white, or able, or cis, or North American, et cetera, is the obliviousness that accompanies existing within that privilege. To exist without self-criticality, to have one’s being be the accepted “norm”: that state of “not having to think about it” is really, for me, what best defines a privileged existence. Perhaps this is somewhat related to “the game” of which you type?

― Premises, Premises (flamboyant goon tie included)

Sort of. For me, that sort of privilege was always a double-edged sword. I'm not cis or male or straight or neurotypical or... abled? I was treated as all those things, though, I was given the _privilege_ of ignorance. It wasn't just a privilege, though, it was an _expectation_. I wasn't visibly marked... well, not in the ways that were recognized at the time. I look at old videos of me and I was _incredibly_ marked, marked enough to get bullied. I guess that's the challenge, right? The pressure to not deviate in _any way_ from what's considered "normal". To not stim. To not do queer shit. To not, this is the most important thing, right? To NOT ACKNOWLEDGE ONE'S LIMITATIONS. You can do anything, I was told. Anything I could set my mind to. I could be an ASTRONAUT.

I couldn't be an astronaut. And people who could be astronauts... Sally Ride got to be an astronaut, but she had to pretend to be straight, all her life. I mean even aside from all the other considerations, the training facilities are in Texas. In my line of work, they hold professional conventions, and they hold them, a lot of times, in like Texas, and Florida. And if I don't feel safe going to those conferences... at least I have the choice. I have friends who don't have a choice, who have to go to those places for work. Privilege is not having to _think_ about those considerations.

I gave up that privilege, I walked away from it. And I traded up. I gained more than I lost. And it's reaching the point, I think... "Normal" masculinity is so constricted, so fragile, so _brittle_, that even if someone is a man, there's benefit to walking away. For more and more people there's less and less choice. The more patriarchy tightens its grip, the more of us slip through its fingers.

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I was kind of surprised by... of all the things I said _that_ was what people grabbed onto, but reading my post back, I can see it. like I said, I try to be careful about how I express myself... I thought about clarifying that my last question was a rhetorical question, that it's...

Like one, it doesn't matter, two, there's nothing actually _wrong_ with "guys like that". Not fundamentally. When someone's a fascist, their decisions negatively affect me and I have to deal with it on that level. They have power, I don't. But "what the fuck is wrong with guys like that?", the answer to that one is "Mu", "nothing", in the Buddhist sense, in the "that's not the right question" sense.

It's interesting to me, though, that of all the things to question about my assumption, the thing people are questioning most is that the person is a fascist. I mean thinking about it I guess I get that too. Any of these other things someone could or couldn't be... the only thing that's really a _problem_ is the fascism.

I don't want to overgeneralize. I think people here are all acting in good faith, it's not a personal thing, but I do know that there's this tendency to...

I mean, I have context here that I haven't shared. It's a situation where we have asymmetrical access to information. You only know what I tell you. Yeah, "88" can mean a lot of things, it's not _necessarily_ fascist. It's the context that led me to that conclusion. And I didn't give y'all that context, I didn't meticulously document every bumper sticker on the car. I didn't talk about the Gadsden Flag or any of the other stuff. I didn't make it clear that of all the bumper stickers on the car, the "Obey" bumper sticker was the one that stood out. Just... just talking about things subjectively, I feel like I'm held to a higher standard, a higher burden of proof, than I was before I transitioned. I don't think that's intentional. I don't think that's even _conscious_. That's kind of the insidious thing about patriarchy. We've internalized all this stuff and often aren't even consciously aware of it. And when it's pointed out, there's this natural defensiveness. Like, it is in some sense... disrespectful, the assumption is that people know themselves, so for me to say, here's something I noticed about a person that they didn't notice about themselves... it undermines one's sense of, I guess... belief in their own power of self-determination. People want to say "I'm not misogynist" or "I'm not racist" or "I'm not transphobic" and have it be true, and because it's a structural thing, it's not true. At the same time it's not a matter for moral judgement, it's just actions and consequences.

Like, whenever I see a big burly bearded dude covered with tattoos, I just assume somewhere on his body is something offensive. On the other hand, maybe he's just a guy that likes tattoos. I know lots of guys covered with tattoos.

― Josh in Chicago

I mean I think that's part of the challenge of being a man, that if you're a big burly bearded person covered with tattoos one assumes that there's something offensive on there. When I think of the big burly bearded person I know... like, not only do people assume they're a man, even if they're wearing a dress, there's this idea that there's something offensive on there. They do have, by accident, two separate tattoos of Flea on their body, but that's the most offensive tattoo they have.

It's interesting that you bring up The Game. I was thinking last night about the concept of having game, in the context of being a smooth-talker with women. In particular, I remembered an instance from high school, when I was around a group of female friends, and being told that I had no game. I was so frustrated at that. I didn't want there to be a game. I had not been previously told that there was a game and once I heard about it, it was something that no one was interested in explaining to me. That conversation definitely put me on the verge of some thoughts that we would now call incel-ish, at the time.

― meatster of puppets (peace, man)

I didn't really understand how to talk to women either. Well now... I mean, I'm #notallwomen, but the whole idea of being a "smooth talker"... it's kind of a distortion. The people who I'm impressed by the most are people who are smooth _listeners_. I was taught to talk a lot, and obviously, I still do talk a lot, when I talk. Plus the autism means that I have a natural tendency to communicate by infodumping and explaining. Learning to listen is something I've had to work really hard on learning. I'm still working on it.

I wouldn't say I was ever "incel-ish", but I was frustrated. I was frustrated at my inability to, like, _understand_ women. Which is kind of funny in retrospect. The more I understood women, the more I understood the ways women are often different from men, the more I understood that I was different from men in very similar ways. The more I understood that oh, wait, maybe I'm a woman. Once that became conceptually possible, which for a long time it wasn't for me.

I'd say that if someone's transphobic than they kind of necessarily don't understand women. If someone doesn't recognize that I'm a woman, that to me belies a certain ignorance about womanhood. I don't know what being a woman is. I know I'm a woman. I don't understand what possible reason anybody would have to not accept that. No reason for it, just blind, ignorant bigotry.

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Definitely. That's why things like diversity training sessions, talking about things like unconscious bias — which most of us here would probably roll our eyes at in a corporate training setting, understanding it as mostly box-checking performance — can be actually enraging to some white people and white MEN in particular. For an hour, they are supposed to "think about it." They are expected, even if on a superficial level, to exhibit some awareness of their own privileged place in a system. But not being aware of that is exactly the nature and reward of that privilege, and so in a certain way to even contemplate the privilege at all is to give up a little of it.

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

They're being asked to put on the glasses. And they fight that. Because they know what happens if they do. They know what they'll see. And they're afraid of that.

You think it's weird that a guy with an 88 sticker would like a movie where a secret conspiracy of aliens rules society and controls what messages go out on the media?

― Guayaquil (eephus!)

Yeah. Yeah, I think it's weird. Just like I'd find it weird if a guy with an 88 sticker was really into Battleship Potemkin. _They Live_ explicitly disavows Communism, it's not, like, "communist propaganda", and I get that fascists can't tell the difference between "RESPECT THE EXISTENCE OF PEOPLE WHO AREN'T LIKE YOU" and "OBEY", but, like. "Consume"? "Reproduce"? I have never heard _anybody_ claim that's the future the Woke Left wants. Anybody who thinks They Live is fascist propaganda is completely misconstruing the message of the film.

Out of all the things that piss me off most about the fascists, it's the conspiracy theories that piss me off the most. It's the dramatic crossroads thing again. I was a Subgenius in 1998. I was an edgelord conspiracy theorist. I put on the sunglasses. I see the billboards. I see what they say. Consume. Reproduce. Obey. "REAL MEN LOVE BABIES." I mean you don't even have to put on glasses to see that one. It's right there, right in front of everyone's face. The patriarchy is putting up literal fucking billboards and these dumb motherfuckers keep thinking it's the "woke left" who's keeping them down.

I have not watched this show, but like the writer of this piece it was mentioned to me and I’m interested. The reaction, I think, is apt for this thread because it gets into a certain aspect of masculinity and the expectations and validation of being seen as a man contingent on sexual activity:

https://decider.com/2024/03/27/im-glad-supersex-triggered-me/

I watched the first two episodes and gave up. I think I posted about it on the Netflix thread. I was sort of fascinated by Rocco 20 years ago — at one point, I pitched a book on him to Taschen, but it was rejected. I agree with the reviewer that the show does a pretty good job of showing what a cocktail of traumas — molestation, Catholic guilt, childhood poverty — he must be, and the actor who plays him as an adult conveys that really well, especially with his eyes. I just didn't feel like watching the whole thing, but maybe I'll go back to it.

I don't know if I'm interested in the show, but that's a great (traumatic) essay about it.

Thank you for posting that essay mh -- it's refreshing to read such honest writing from a man about that topic. I haven't even heard of the show and don't think I will watch it. i disagree with him about trigger warnings also, though I am glad he found the experience of being triggered useful in some way.

i prefer the term content warning, so if you choose to avoid certain types of content (SA) you can.

I'm glad Collins was able to talk about his experience, about how it affected him as a man. One of the big challenges of masculinity for me is, I have this perspective. I've seen a lot of the ways people I know got treated. People who aren't men. The way they, or maybe we, got treated... We were treated _as if_ we were men. It wasn't wrong because we aren't men. It's wrong to treat anybody that way. And it's hard for men to talk about. So it's really good to see Collins talk about it. He really expresses well something similar a lot of the experiences I've seen in... people who were abused _under the assumption_ that they were boys or men.

One of the things that struck me most about Collins' piece was this bit:

Sexually abused before being fully sexually formed, both Rocco and I decided, on some level, that our bullies were right — that our penises were, in fact, an important indicator of who we are as people.

That's _so much_ of my experience of... of the way manhood is treated in this world.

One of the hardest things for me personally to talk about is... talking about having my penis surgically removed. It's not something I really want to talk about or enjoy talking about. It's really personal and intimate and it's nobody's business. At the same time, I believe that it's really _important_ to me to talk about. I have these experiences, and they cut so hard against the assumptions I had about penises, the assumptions I see other people making about penises... even if people don't understand, even if people don't _listen_, I feel like it's important for me to talk about.

This idea, the idea that _penises are an important part of who we are as people_. It's not just men who are defined by the penis, but everyone. I think a lot about Dave Sim, when he went off on that first misogynist manifesto. He defined man as light and woman as "void". We get defined by what we _don't_ have, by what's perceived as a _lack_. I lack _nothing_. I was terrified, going in for GRS, terrified of what I could lose, and I lost nothing. That's why I talk about my GRS. Because from birth that was what I was taught, that the most important thing was for me to protect my dick, to keep it at all costs. That's the main reason I didn't see myself as trans, for years. Because I didn't "want my dick cut off".

Then I went ahead and did it anyway. Things change. People change. One of the things that changed most was this idea that... people who had GRS _hated_ their penises, couldn't stand them. I didn't. Still don't. When I say I "got my penis cut off" that's a deliberately provocative framing. That's me being directly challenging of the unspoken assumptions I was taught about penises. That's not actually what I did at all. That's now what I _wanted_ to do. It was never _about_ my penis. It was about this other thing that I wanted _more_.

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And mostly the reason I talk about this is because people have these assumptions about trans people but I also just... these bullshit assumptions don't just hurt _trans people_. My impression is that it's _routine_ for AMABs to be taught that our penises are, in fact, an important indicator of who we are as people. God, people still think I'm a man for, as far as I can tell, no reason but that I _used to_ have an anatomically normal penis and testicles. They really think penises are that important. My lived experience is that they aren't. At all. My experience is that a penis signifies _nothing_ but a few inches of spongy tissue. Based on what I've seen, I believe treating a penis as anything more than that...

I don't think that benefits men. I mean men are taught all their lives that they're, like, categorically better than women, on the basis of _that_? A man is supposed to base his entire sense of self-worth, of value, on _that_? I mean, penises are great and all, but let's be reasonable here.