This is a noble pursuit—I wish we would civilize the men in my home country on the subcontinent. But the subtext of a German publication extolling a Latin American for trying to make his people more like white Europeans is not lost on me. The attitude of “it sure would be better if they were more like us” isn’t far below the surface.
No, in my latin american country it really is the men who need much more civilizing. I'm done with feeling guilt or fear of being called euro-centric or colonialist, especially when my country ranks fifth in violent homicides against women, in the world (source: UN's ACNUDH). The other countries? Three of them are also in South America (Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala). In Brazil a woman is murdered every 6 hours, 81% of the time by their partners or ex-partners. I won't even list the number of rape cases each year. I have a daughter and I have a wife, and I have two sisters, and I grew up here, I know my own culture, I talk to other men every single day. If you live in Europe or the US, they don't view women the same way you do. And yes, Europe's views on women and on equality is objectively better than ours. Ask 1,000 women here. Ask 10,000. Cultures are not all equal, not equally 'good'. Some aspects of my culture I love. Others, not so much. That's how it is, actually, not some 'every aspect of every culture has equal merit and should never be criticized' fairy tale. I'm very sorry for the readers for sounding so harsh, I really am. But, like I said, I have a daughter and a wife. My wife is scared or at least on high alert any time she is alone. I will criticize this society and this machismo culture until the day my daughter grows up and doesn't have to feel this way. Again, really sorry for the harsh tone, I guess I'm venting more than anything.
Same here. The statement above comes from my mom, who grew up in Bangladesh in the 1950s and 1960. British colonial influence, and the desire for elite Bangladeshis to be more like the British, was why she was one of the tiny fraction of women who graduated college and had a professional career. She doesn’t feel any need to frame that in politically correct terms.
These reactions are primarily a kneejerk because frankly, Western mentality is much too eager to present their methods as 'the cure', presenting women primarily as victims and men primarily as perpetrators, without ever introspecting on the damage they do with their supposed methods.
Your reaction is almost synonymous to this, mainly showing fear women have, statistics for women, etc. Regardless if perpetrators are primarily men, men tend to be victims far more often than women, and far more often than they are perpetrators. For almost every country. Yet the narrative never reveals this, and goes as far as to make it sound like men are predominantly perpetrators (which is a vastly different statement than 'perpetrators are predominantly men').
Even writers who recognize this will quickly dismiss any notion that the West is introducing other problems through the methods used. That statement of 'men need much more civilizing'? That happened, and now boys are walking around thinking they are the problem before they even had a chance to prove themselves while girls are told they can do everything, even get way with (sometimes literal) murder. Western media is arrogant enough to denounce counterculture to boot.
Whether that be better than what is the current state in LA is irrelevant to those preoccupied with looking at the West alone. Doubly so since the situation is LA is generally irrelevant to them and won't ever affect them directly.
> Regardless if perpetrators are primarily men, men tend to be victims far more often than women
But not for the same things
I don’t see the point of saying “men get killed too” - the point is to stop the killing
> and now boys are walking around thinking they are the problem before they even had a chance to prove themselves while girls are told they can do everything, even get way with (sometimes literal) murder
Trying to give you the HN comment benefit of the doubt but that is a very broad generalization that can’t possibly apply to most boys or girls - sounds like BS to me
The man subject in the article is a self-proclaimed victim of toxic masculinity. He didn't die per-se but it doesn't take mental gymnastics to understand that many young men imprisoned for never being taught how to be civilized are as much victims of their circumstance as they are guilty for their behaviors wrought from it.
I think it was Bell Hooks who talked a lot about this, how men are also victims of patriarchy in general, and how overlooking this truth retards the healing progress
Sure it’s not easy to say we act in complete isolation and clear thought - but these type of arguments have sooo many wrinkles to them (nature/nurture/opportunity) that it ends up coming down to free will, etc
At the core of a violent act an individual acts in a way that harms another individual - be it theft, rape or murder. Could be heat of the moment, or cold blooded action. Either way someone gets hurt
In addition to enforcing consequences we should identify the causes and work to continue civilizing individuals
Because they would be. Cultures aren't equal. If you disagree, then how do you feel about death penalty for homosexuality in countries like Saudi Arabia or Iran? It's their culture after all and should be respected?
Same for the Bacha-bazi custom in Afghanistan ("a custom in Afghanistan involving child sexual abuse by older men of young adolescent males or boys, called dancing boys, often involving sexual slavery and child prostitution").
The proper way to evaluate cultural practices is by looking at what society they create. Western culture is by no means perfect, but as a whole package - it's the best there is. So yes, they would be better.
I’m increasingly tired of this myth that we must treat all cultures equally and agree with your point.
Sure - if we’re talking about Finland vs Iceland or something like that where people are 95% on the same page. But other cultures have the abusive practices you mention above - and worse. China used to have foot-binding. FGM is pretty common in Africa right now (no jokes about that in the latest Black Panther though).
A position of radical tolerance is tactically convenient when the view that you hold is unpopular; Moral Majority crusading is convenient when it's popular.
I'd argue that sustainability (and then to a lesser degree, growth) is arguably the single most important value in any culture. Because the best of cultures that can't sustain itself will "lose" to the worst of cultures that can. The ideal of a culture, at least in my mind, is not one of a snapshot of hedonism or liberty, but of a long-term sustained healthy society.
Western culture already has driven fertility rates well below replacement. Alongside that we also have skyrocketing obesity rates, skyrocketing rates of mental illness and drug dependence/abuse, plummeting testosterone levels, the end of the Flynn Effect, governmental approval ratings approaching zero, and more. Our culture, in its current form, is not even remotely close to sustainable.
There has to be some meet in the middle between "Follow the ancient holy book, or die!" and "Let's hedonize ourselves out of existence." As both those extremes mostly feel like two opposite ends of a horse-shoe, to me.
In the 80s Iran had a fertility rate of 6+ and was one of the fastest growing countries in the world. So fast in fact that it scared their political leadership, so they 'pulled a China', a much less well known one. [1] They started putting out massive propaganda against large families, introduced widespread birth control measures (and mandates), and so on.
And, like China, it worked too well. Their birth rate fertility rate dropped from above 6 to below 3 in less than a decade. But then it kept falling, to the point of unsustainability. They realized they'd made a huge mistake so they began efforts to try to reverse it. Yet, like China, that has generally been a complete failure.
This is one of the most insidious things about fertility rates. They're not terribly difficult to send low, even to extinction trajectory low. But getting them back up is something that nobody has yet managed to achieve.
Which apparently isn't all that old. And you know, which the Taliban hates. A lot of the evil things the Taliban did (and do!) were justified in outrage over sexual violence.
It reflects attitudes towards gender roles developed by white europeans and imported into their colonies, and exported worldwide through western influence. Which is not a bad thing!
These days we tend to talk about race and culture in a weird way, where we ascribe bad things to white Europeans, but pretend like aspects of white European culture we think are good (like attitudes on gender norms or sexuality) transcend culture and are universal truths. In a way, that's more condescending than just saying "Europeans have figured out how to do this particular thing better."
I think it's important to be honest. I'm a Bangladeshi who changes diapers and feeds the baby at night because I was raised around people of European descent. Men in my home country overwhelmingly do not do that.
There have been studies showing a positive correlation between temperature and violent crime. [1] It's possible this behavior is just a manifestation of living in a warmer country.
Perhaps if you swapped the populations of Bogotá and Berlin you would find the new Berliners becoming more "chill" and the new Bogotans becoming more "hot-blooded."
“Bogotá has an oceanic climate (Köppen Cfb) bordering on a warm-summer Mediterranean climate (Csb). The average temperature is 14.5 °C (58 °F), varying from 6 to 19 °C (43 to 66 °F) on sunny days to 10 to 18 °C (50 to 64 °F) on rainy days. Dry and rainy seasons alternate throughout the year. The driest months are December, January, July and August. The warmest month is March, bringing a maximum of 19.7 °C (67.5 °F).”
Looking at the chart Bogotá has an annual daily mean of 14.4°C, and is fairly consistent throughout the year. Berlin's is 9.9°C with hotter summers and colder winters. To make a definitive statement we would have to know whether spikes of hot temperatures or consistent warmer temperatures are worse for violence.
But we should also investigate whether living in a city that has an accent in its name is predisposing people to violence? Maybe that’s why Bogotá, Medellín and Cancún are more violent than Berlin or London. Brb, I’m gonna look at the data…
I would say machismo is live and well everywhere, family is just not a "man" thing culturally. Even though it's very normalized taking time parental leave as a dad here, there is still so much things you are supposed to do as a man that are not part of family stuff to be considered manly, hunting, sports, nerdery. When things are about the house it's often the technical aspects that are supposed to be highlighted, not how it benefits the kids, family and feelings. We have had advertisement campaigns about these stuffs since the seventies in Sweden, but you still get flack for wanting to talk about feelings, diapers and cooking. See:
"machismo" is seen at a young age in boys across every human culture studied, boys fight more and play competitive games while girls naturally play more collaborative games.
In theory I guess it makes sense to try and curtail human nature for the benefit of society, but on a fundamental level I have a problem with tax payer money being used to run government pysops on their own civilian population to change behavior
Thank you. My two homeschooled boys act like... boys, and there's nothing wrong with that. That doesn't mean that I teach them to be assholes when they are men, but I have no problem with their true natures.
I find that the article does a fine job talking about machismo. I do not feel that what happens when I am six has to define what I am as a father. I do feel that we need to accept that the machismo learned as a kid is not useful as a tool to judge grown men.
It's both funny and sad to see how framing these problems in PC culture brings more problems: "machismo is bad but pushing cultural norms..."
Take another look at the problems described: physical assault, illegal drug use, theft, robbery, murder, child neglect. These things have nothing to do with cultural norms and they have nothing to do with machismo either. These are crimes against the law and the human rights of the victims. These crimes can have any gender as the criminal or the victim. And they have any number of reasons from mental health to poverty and profit seeking, which again have nothing to do with social norms, toxic masculinity or any other PC concepts.
> Men who want to support women in our struggle for freedom and justice should understand that it is not terrifically important to us that they learn to cry; it is important to us that they stop the crimes of violence against us.
I don't think it helps to put them in the same bag though. The problem is not being man, is being a criminal or any other form of machismo that limits women freedom.
Oh yeah; this is a huge problem especially amongst us Latinos, but probably globally. Noticed this a lot when I was in India, for example, and there's plenty of this in small town USA.
Having grown up in this kind of environment (though not nearly as bad as some of the stories in this article), It definitely affected my ability to emote, though I only learned that after going to therapy for a few months.
Once, many years ago, there came an anthropologist to study a distant mountain village. They were an oddly nervous, twitchy people. If a twig snapped, they would throw themselves to the ground. At night, they went through elaborate rituals of barricading their doors, even though, to the anthropologist's marvel, theft and interpersonal violence was virtually unheard of among them. The anthropologist did not speak the language very well, in particular because in these villagers' dialect temporal clauses were especially odd. But he could get out of them that the reason for these customs was that in the distant past, the village had been plagued with man-eating tigers.
The anthropologist, being a compassionate man, thought long and hard about how he could help these people, make them less timid, since it was clear their customs came with a lot of stress and anguish, as well as ostracism of those deemed to be sloppy in maintaining the old anti-tiger customs. But before he could...
You see where this is going, right?
He was eaten by a tiger.
The lesson I want to suggest by this parable: people aren't stupid. They don't adopt harmful behaviours without some sort of reason. A situation that made the behavior make sense.
If the situation persists for a long time, it may stick to culture, and maybe hang around for a while even after the situation has gone.
If the situation persists for a really long time, maybe the behaviour even sticks to biology.
But that doesn't matter. The first step must still be to consider the present situation. Make sure the tigers are not still around.
Female genital mutilation is common practice in some countries. Let's analyze and study the reasons for this practice that started centuries ago before we can say anything about it. I mean, hey, they burned people at crosses for a long time, they must have had a valid reason too, right? No, not every reason behind a custom is a valid one in the 21st century. If the parable villagers were nervous and twitchy because they feared demons would send the tiger, and they figured out that by sacrificing a baby would please the demons, nobody today should say that throwing a small child off a cliff is still an ethical custom. Of course, changing the custom is another thing, but we today have something called human values, ethical values, and human rights. They do trump a few ethical values that we have carried from the past. I'm not denying others' humanity because I say this, but when you come to a conclusion that an action is not as ethical as another, you should adopt it, and explain why you did it. There's no shame in stating that slavery is wrong, that genital mutilation is wrong, that child labor is wrong. Why is is wrong and racist for me to say that latin american machismo is wrong, especially and it results in so much suffering?
I'm as much against slavery and mutilation as you, but I think that in reaching for this easy explanation, conveniently placing ourselves at the pinnacle of civilisation and ethics, we risk overlooking some important things.
You name child labour as an evil thing. That's a great example of something that could potentially be made even worse if you just tell people to stop doing that evil thing without doing anything about the reason people do the evil thing.
It's true that behaviours can reinforce themselves. "Machismo" could easily be a thing where you are forced to play that game because so many others play that game, and that we could all be better off if we managed to coordinate a break with those practices. I said customs can be sticky.
When I said make sure the tigers are gone, I meant just that. Maybe the tigers ARE gone, and this is just our process of unsticking our bad customs. I just don't want us to take the easy way of assuming we are inherently better than earlier generations/other cultures.
Yeah but in this case it's not an outsider it's someone with firsthand experience of the cost of the mitigations, and the knowledge that the tiger isn't there.
I see your point, and understand the inclination to find a generalizable principal for understanding complex social situations. But there kind of just isn't one, each has its own nuances.
Is it, though? The article is what is commonly called "native advertising", paid for by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. At least they say so at the top.
And the article is also open that this "crusader against machismo" started his crusade when working for an NGO. It doesn't say which, but at the very least one agreeable to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, I'd wager.
That foundation is not at all reluctant about pushing their peculiar cultural perspectives. In particular, they are infamous in certain circles for promoting the American custom of infant circumcision of boys, as a preventive measure against AIDS. The science in support for that is suspicious, to put it mildly (it's worse than mere cultural bias, too).
Does it really work, then, to teach male domestic abusers to change diapers? Was that sort of practical knowledge the thing they were lacking? I'm inclined to be suspicious - and also to be suspicious of the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation's arguments for it.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 95.2 ms ] threadOwO
Your reaction is almost synonymous to this, mainly showing fear women have, statistics for women, etc. Regardless if perpetrators are primarily men, men tend to be victims far more often than women, and far more often than they are perpetrators. For almost every country. Yet the narrative never reveals this, and goes as far as to make it sound like men are predominantly perpetrators (which is a vastly different statement than 'perpetrators are predominantly men').
Even writers who recognize this will quickly dismiss any notion that the West is introducing other problems through the methods used. That statement of 'men need much more civilizing'? That happened, and now boys are walking around thinking they are the problem before they even had a chance to prove themselves while girls are told they can do everything, even get way with (sometimes literal) murder. Western media is arrogant enough to denounce counterculture to boot.
Whether that be better than what is the current state in LA is irrelevant to those preoccupied with looking at the West alone. Doubly so since the situation is LA is generally irrelevant to them and won't ever affect them directly.
But not for the same things
I don’t see the point of saying “men get killed too” - the point is to stop the killing
> and now boys are walking around thinking they are the problem before they even had a chance to prove themselves while girls are told they can do everything, even get way with (sometimes literal) murder
Trying to give you the HN comment benefit of the doubt but that is a very broad generalization that can’t possibly apply to most boys or girls - sounds like BS to me
The man subject in the article is a self-proclaimed victim of toxic masculinity. He didn't die per-se but it doesn't take mental gymnastics to understand that many young men imprisoned for never being taught how to be civilized are as much victims of their circumstance as they are guilty for their behaviors wrought from it.
I think it was Bell Hooks who talked a lot about this, how men are also victims of patriarchy in general, and how overlooking this truth retards the healing progress
At the core of a violent act an individual acts in a way that harms another individual - be it theft, rape or murder. Could be heat of the moment, or cold blooded action. Either way someone gets hurt
In addition to enforcing consequences we should identify the causes and work to continue civilizing individuals
Same for the Bacha-bazi custom in Afghanistan ("a custom in Afghanistan involving child sexual abuse by older men of young adolescent males or boys, called dancing boys, often involving sexual slavery and child prostitution").
The proper way to evaluate cultural practices is by looking at what society they create. Western culture is by no means perfect, but as a whole package - it's the best there is. So yes, they would be better.
Sure - if we’re talking about Finland vs Iceland or something like that where people are 95% on the same page. But other cultures have the abusive practices you mention above - and worse. China used to have foot-binding. FGM is pretty common in Africa right now (no jokes about that in the latest Black Panther though).
Western culture already has driven fertility rates well below replacement. Alongside that we also have skyrocketing obesity rates, skyrocketing rates of mental illness and drug dependence/abuse, plummeting testosterone levels, the end of the Flynn Effect, governmental approval ratings approaching zero, and more. Our culture, in its current form, is not even remotely close to sustainable.
There has to be some meet in the middle between "Follow the ancient holy book, or die!" and "Let's hedonize ourselves out of existence." As both those extremes mostly feel like two opposite ends of a horse-shoe, to me.
Yes but it's clear it's not 'western culture' but 'industrial economy'. It's happening everywhere. Eg. Iranian TFR dropped off a cliff since the 80s.
https://www.tehrantimes.com/news/466445/Fertility-at-below-r...
Kids used to be income generators, now they're a luxury.
And, like China, it worked too well. Their birth rate fertility rate dropped from above 6 to below 3 in less than a decade. But then it kept falling, to the point of unsustainability. They realized they'd made a huge mistake so they began efforts to try to reverse it. Yet, like China, that has generally been a complete failure.
This is one of the most insidious things about fertility rates. They're not terribly difficult to send low, even to extinction trajectory low. But getting them back up is something that nobody has yet managed to achieve.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_planning_in_Iran
Which apparently isn't all that old. And you know, which the Taliban hates. A lot of the evil things the Taliban did (and do!) were justified in outrage over sexual violence.
What’s white about it ?
These days we tend to talk about race and culture in a weird way, where we ascribe bad things to white Europeans, but pretend like aspects of white European culture we think are good (like attitudes on gender norms or sexuality) transcend culture and are universal truths. In a way, that's more condescending than just saying "Europeans have figured out how to do this particular thing better."
I think it's important to be honest. I'm a Bangladeshi who changes diapers and feeds the baby at night because I was raised around people of European descent. Men in my home country overwhelmingly do not do that.
Bangladesh was not an isolated cultural island, where did they import their current gender role attitudes from ?
the real problem of machismo spelled out in the article is not diapers or dishes, but violence against the rights of others
Can someone look at the enlightenment and say “white” ?
Nearly a millennium of rule by Islamic empires.
> Can someone look at the enlightenment and say “white” ?
Yes, and far more so than pretty much anything else commonly ascribed to “white people” these days.
Perhaps if you swapped the populations of Bogotá and Berlin you would find the new Berliners becoming more "chill" and the new Bogotans becoming more "hot-blooded."
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30830288/
“Bogotá has an oceanic climate (Köppen Cfb) bordering on a warm-summer Mediterranean climate (Csb). The average temperature is 14.5 °C (58 °F), varying from 6 to 19 °C (43 to 66 °F) on sunny days to 10 to 18 °C (50 to 64 °F) on rainy days. Dry and rainy seasons alternate throughout the year. The driest months are December, January, July and August. The warmest month is March, bringing a maximum of 19.7 °C (67.5 °F).”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogotá
Berlin is literally a furnace compared to this, with average daily maximums well above 30 °C in the summer.
But we should also investigate whether living in a city that has an accent in its name is predisposing people to violence? Maybe that’s why Bogotá, Medellín and Cancún are more violent than Berlin or London. Brb, I’m gonna look at the data…
https://www.reddit.com/r/sweden/comments/13ojmn/reklam_f%C3%...
Machismo in Latin America is a lot more toxic and hurts the men much more over there, they just don't see it.
In theory I guess it makes sense to try and curtail human nature for the benefit of society, but on a fundamental level I have a problem with tax payer money being used to run government pysops on their own civilian population to change behavior
Take another look at the problems described: physical assault, illegal drug use, theft, robbery, murder, child neglect. These things have nothing to do with cultural norms and they have nothing to do with machismo either. These are crimes against the law and the human rights of the victims. These crimes can have any gender as the criminal or the victim. And they have any number of reasons from mental health to poverty and profit seeking, which again have nothing to do with social norms, toxic masculinity or any other PC concepts.
> Men who want to support women in our struggle for freedom and justice should understand that it is not terrifically important to us that they learn to cry; it is important to us that they stop the crimes of violence against us.
(other here https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Andrea_Dworkin
Having grown up in this kind of environment (though not nearly as bad as some of the stories in this article), It definitely affected my ability to emote, though I only learned that after going to therapy for a few months.
Great article.
Once, many years ago, there came an anthropologist to study a distant mountain village. They were an oddly nervous, twitchy people. If a twig snapped, they would throw themselves to the ground. At night, they went through elaborate rituals of barricading their doors, even though, to the anthropologist's marvel, theft and interpersonal violence was virtually unheard of among them. The anthropologist did not speak the language very well, in particular because in these villagers' dialect temporal clauses were especially odd. But he could get out of them that the reason for these customs was that in the distant past, the village had been plagued with man-eating tigers.
The anthropologist, being a compassionate man, thought long and hard about how he could help these people, make them less timid, since it was clear their customs came with a lot of stress and anguish, as well as ostracism of those deemed to be sloppy in maintaining the old anti-tiger customs. But before he could...
You see where this is going, right?
He was eaten by a tiger.
The lesson I want to suggest by this parable: people aren't stupid. They don't adopt harmful behaviours without some sort of reason. A situation that made the behavior make sense.
If the situation persists for a long time, it may stick to culture, and maybe hang around for a while even after the situation has gone.
If the situation persists for a really long time, maybe the behaviour even sticks to biology.
But that doesn't matter. The first step must still be to consider the present situation. Make sure the tigers are not still around.
You name child labour as an evil thing. That's a great example of something that could potentially be made even worse if you just tell people to stop doing that evil thing without doing anything about the reason people do the evil thing.
It's true that behaviours can reinforce themselves. "Machismo" could easily be a thing where you are forced to play that game because so many others play that game, and that we could all be better off if we managed to coordinate a break with those practices. I said customs can be sticky.
When I said make sure the tigers are gone, I meant just that. Maybe the tigers ARE gone, and this is just our process of unsticking our bad customs. I just don't want us to take the easy way of assuming we are inherently better than earlier generations/other cultures.
I see your point, and understand the inclination to find a generalizable principal for understanding complex social situations. But there kind of just isn't one, each has its own nuances.
And the article is also open that this "crusader against machismo" started his crusade when working for an NGO. It doesn't say which, but at the very least one agreeable to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, I'd wager.
That foundation is not at all reluctant about pushing their peculiar cultural perspectives. In particular, they are infamous in certain circles for promoting the American custom of infant circumcision of boys, as a preventive measure against AIDS. The science in support for that is suspicious, to put it mildly (it's worse than mere cultural bias, too).
Does it really work, then, to teach male domestic abusers to change diapers? Was that sort of practical knowledge the thing they were lacking? I'm inclined to be suspicious - and also to be suspicious of the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation's arguments for it.