> many young men don’t seek emotional support when they need it because they fear being perceived as weak and ineffective.
I would be curious to see a study on what happens to those men who do seek it. As in every last case I anecdotally am aware of, that perception quickly became reality and those men regretted it.
Are you saying that (in your experience) young men who seek emotional support become weak and ineffective? Or am I misunderstanding what you've written?
I am saying that young men who are seek emotional support then get treated as and viewed as weak and ineffective by those they have sought support from or those around them who know they have sought support, with all the repercussions of that.
The men are the same, whether they seek emotional support or not. However, seeking emotional support gets them treated very differently verses not seeking it and it is rarely in a compassionate way.
A lot of "problem solving" involving kids means "making the problem go away from the adult's life". E.g. a situation I see played out is kids being told to respond to bullying by acting like they don't care (good advice as far as it goes). If the bullying continues, we hear it isn't a problem because the kids says he doesn't care - which is what we told him to say, true or not. In any case, the problem is solved from the adult's POV - the bullying complaint has disappeared, ticket is moved to resolved. The bullied child now faces his problem alone. Receiving this kind of "support" discourages reaching out for help.
(I'm not saying this is specific to boys, don't read too much into pronouns.)
Right, I think the article would completely agree that society as it is right now is not a broadly accepting place for males to be open about their emotional needs. Which is why the call to action isn't for males to be emotionally open in general, but for fathers to try to have more positive and supportive interactions with their sons about emotional needs.
And why the article's guide point is 'Encourage them to share their struggles — with you, of course, but also with other trusted adults, a therapist or even friends.', not 'Encourage them to share their struggles with all their acquaintances'.
Actually I think a man who doesn't seriously acknowledge their own self as an emotional being is the opposite of adapting and overcoming. There should be nothing weak about acknowledging when you're too upset to handle a situation. My professional life would be vastly improved if the men around me had the emotional intelligence to realize they're getting worked up about a code review or something and to take a walk for 10 min instead of assuming their anger is always logically justified somehow.
Isn't that definition adapt (realize your mind is blocked) and overcome (go for a walk to change your environment)? I think we are saying the same thing. Recognizing your anger has hijacked your reason is exercising resilience over emotion.
What boys need in order to become men are coping skills. I... didn't really get these growing up. I was simply taught that "men don't cry" and there are consequences for having been seen to cry. I started covering up the times I cried, and then I learned there are consequences for lying, too. I had to figure out a lot on my own, and it took longer than it should have.
Sharing your struggles doesn't make you weak. Asking for help doesn't make you weak. You are struggling, and you look for help because you are in a situation where the challenge is beyond your means. Sharing and asking for help can be part of adaption and part of overcoming.
If one man has the resources within themselves to eventually learn to adapt and overcome to any situation, imagine how much stronger and how quickly you can become strong by combining the resources and understanding of many men.
Sharing your struggles and asking for help is NOT the same thing as "standing around crying about their struggles".
> Sharing your struggles doesn't make you weak. Asking for help doesn't make you weak.
In the western paradigm of masculinity it absolutely does. (And if you want to tear down the western paradigm of masculinity, I'd suggest making sure you have a better replacement ready first)
First, I'll give you that western paradigm of masculinity does make it likely that a male asking for help will make you look weak. However, I'd drive in even harder. If you are struggling, are you "already weak". You lack the capability and resources to easily resolve the challenge at hand. All you are doing is hiding your weakness. You are bluffing. You are being the guy who seems all stable on the surface until, SNAP, he's some unreliable flaky shit face who can't take the pressure.
You're not being strong. You're not being helpful. You're being brittle. You're setting yourself, and those who depend on you up for a sudden, surprising failure.
Second, I'd say that the western paradigm of masculinity does actually provide room to maneuver. Actually -asking- for help is yes... a bit dodgy. But complaining (ie, sharing your challenges) is absolutely in the cards. And there's plenty of space for men to be good friends and supporters for other men, to help them through challenges, even if you do not ask for help. The 'unexpected save/help from the initially non-committal friend' is a common trope. Being the guy who helps out is absolutely part of our common western culture.
Finally, I don't want to tear down the western paradigm of masculinity. I hardly thinking adding the attribute "be willing to ask for help when the situation demands it" is tearing down. If anything it's building up.
> If you are struggling, are you "already weak". You lack the capability and resources to easily resolve the challenge at hand. All you are doing is hiding your weakness. You are bluffing. You are being the guy who seems all stable on the surface until, SNAP, he's some unreliable flaky shit face who can't take the pressure.
> You're not being strong. You're not being helpful. You're being brittle. You're setting yourself, and those who depend on you up for a sudden, surprising failure.
Not convinced. "Fake it till you make it" is pretty masculine. So is noble failure against overwhelming odds. Someone who needs help and doesn't ask for it may well be held in higher regard than someone who doesn't need help and ask for it.
> And there's plenty of space for men to be good friends and supporters for other men, to help them through challenges, even if you do not ask for help. The 'unexpected save/help from the initially non-committal friend' is a common trope. Being the guy who helps out is absolutely part of our common western culture.
Sure. So enabling more of that would be a good move. Maybe rebuild some of the male social spaces that have been systematically torn down over the last few decades.
> I hardly thinking adding the attribute "be willing to ask for help when the situation demands it" is tearing down. If anything it's building up.
Culture is tricky and complex. You can't just change one thing and expect it to not have knock-on effects. Coming up with ways to make it safer for men to get help would be a positive change. But just telling men they need to ask for help might well do more harm than good.
I've got no problem helping those who ask for help. I don't see it as weakness.
Then tell me how I, someone who no longer struggles with the topic in question, that it's too tough and not worth trying and just wants to give excuses? Yeah. That's weakness.
Eh, I’m gonna bite the bullet and give a quick answer, based on what’s I’ve seen growing up:
Basically you get answers like:
“Man up”
“Grow a pair”
“Boys don’t cry”
“Life is harsh, get used to it”
Last but not the least: “psychologists are for weak people with mental problems, not for you”.
Two more observations again based on my life experience:
1. Weakness is generally accepted in girls/women, largely acknowledged and supported. Can’t say the same for boys/men.
2. Often times I’ve been said the above phrases either by girls/women of my same age or by people like teachers/educators.
Basically you end up appearing weak, sometimes get mocked, and in general you’re better off shutting up and keeping stuff inside. Over the years I’ve developed quite a cynicism, that I acknowledge and that (sadly?) works fairly well.
I teach my son not cry.
I teach him how to conduct violence.
I teach him to treat people kindly, never equally.
We don't cry because we manage our emotions. We know words cannot physically harm us. If it's truth, acknowledge it. If it's a lie, it can be ignored and the liar pitied.
Teaching violence because it teaches respect, physical limits, and healthy lifestyle. We know how to be gentle because we are strong. We will kill bad guys. We will be good guys. Violence can lead to death. We love life and will protect it.
A child capable of this kind of violence needs to have their emotions in check. He gets hurt? Ask for a hug. Ask for advice how to win.
People aren't equal. We don't pretend. We don't go 100% against smaller or less trained. We don't expect everyone to behave as we do. We don't all value the same things. We can still be friends. We can ignore inequity. Sometimes we have more or can do more than others. We do not boast. Sometimes we have less. We do not whine or envy.
He is a man when he no longer has to obey me when he tells me he can be responsible for himself. Until then I get to discipline him and limit his freedom. We explore freedom along with the responsibility.
> We don't cry because we manage our emotions. We know words cannot physically harm us.
Words can absolutely physically harm you. Have you ever felt your heart beating fast when someone says something that upsets you? At some point that might become a heart attack.
Brene Brown studied it. It does not turn out well for men:
> I was not prepared to hear over and over from men how the women — the mothers, sisters, girlfriends, wives — in their lives are constantly criticizing them for not being open and vulnerable and intimate, all the while they are standing in front of that cramped wizard closet where their men are huddled inside, adjusting the curtain and making sure no one sees in and no one gets out. There was a moment when I was driving home from an interview with a small group of men and thought, Holy shit. I am the patriarchy. Here’s the painful pattern that emerged from my research with men: We ask them to be vulnerable, we beg them to let us in, and we plead with them to tell us when they’re afraid, but the truth is that most women can’t stomach it. In those moments when real vulnerability happens in men, most of us recoil with fear and that fear manifests as everything from disappointment to disgust.
I posted this on HN before, and out of the woodworks came all the anecdotes of bad reactions to male vulnerability. I strongly advise other men to not discuss their feelings in depth with any woman they have romantic interest in, and possibly women in general since I've seen mothers similarly affected.
You've just whittled down your already small dating pool to something even smaller, or you've alienated your girlfriend (or wife) of 3 years. Was it worth it?
If anything I feel like becoming more emotionally mature opened up my dating pool, and made me a better partner. Ultimately you are better off being with someone who you can talk about your emotions with.
I've been in relationships where I couldn't talk about my problems, and being unable to talk about them didn't make those problems disappear.
Yes, very much worth it. As someone who divorced after two decades, living your life behind a mask isn’t worth it for any romantic relationship. Which will lack true intimacy, since you will not be known for who you are. You will never feel chosen just for being you, because she won’t know who that is.
I get open and vulnerable and emotional with my partner, and I have since the beginning. Hasn’t hurt things yet. Maybe that’s still coming, but again, I’d rather be single.
Emotional vulnerability and openness is predicated on trust. If you can't trust your partner to be there when you express yourself, then you have a serious problem. Trust is the cornerstone of any relationship.
Great as a concept - terrible when it comes to the crushing reality that is the dating market as it is.
Average looking men are already dealing with an incredibly challenging dating market. Now you add on that they have higher expectations for their partners behavior - you're going to be completely alone for the rest of your life.
I hate to say it but the reality is - you're better off trying to mold/brainwash/train your partner to become more accepting of men's feelings than looking for some unicorn that already accepts them.
are you sure it's a unicorn? i didn't get that impression. i can't remember having a girlfriend that wasn't open to my feelings. of course everyone's sample size is very small, and being your average introvert meant that there weren't so many opportunities to meet someone, and there also may be the idea that women who are not open to a mans feelings would not even be interested in someone like me in the first place. that is to say, a woman who cares about a mans feeling is looking at other qualities, that potentially raise the chances for an average looking man.
so maybe there was some self selection going on rather than intent from my side. but that also counters the idea that it's a unicorn. but there is also a cultural dimension, as i was traveling the world, most people i met did not come from western countries. so maybe they are a unicorn in the western cultures.
I agree with much of this, but not the takeaway. After my divorce, I decided that I’d rather be single than have to spend any more timing hiding myself. So I’m pretty open and vulnerable with women. If they can’t handle it, I’m not gonna spend my life hiding real shit, that’s insane. And the woman I’ve been seeing for almost two years doesn’t seem phased by it, so they’re out there.
Yes, I had previously mentioned the idea that, if you want a woman to break up with you, you be vulnerable in front of her over something small but reasonable. A moment of weakness.
The disdain and even revulsion makes them think it was their idea. Revulsion is the correct term for it; now trending is women endlessly discussing what gives them "the ick" when it comes to a prospective mate. A tear at anything other than your mother's funeral? You'll get dumped soon.
It's like a dreadful little magic spell and one of the components you use up at each casting is your faith in what society at large tells you.
Yeah, this resonates. The times I have been vulnerable in relationships has always been met with, exactly as you say, recoil and disgust. It's a really shitty feeling to feel clingy and unworthy... in other words, when you actually need someone by your side.
As men, when we need people the most, that is when they are nowhere to be found. A stark contrast with women, who naturally seem to support each other in such times, and aren't hung up on the social stigma that encumber men.
As a teenager in the early 2000s, the times I reached out for help while being suicidally depressed and alone and very distraight, I was met with extreme discomfort from adults, or treated as a wet dog that just managed to run inside and get water everywhere.
There's a reason that men succeed at suicide a lot more frequently than women. Help is often not an option.
In his excellent review [1] of Nostalgia Critic's idiotic, embarrassing and awful review of The Wall, Dan Olson points out that much of the part of the film that Doug makes fun of is specifically the main character being told to hide/suppress emotion and struggling with that and failing.
In other words, the "satire"'s primary take is basically that men showing feelings is being strictly something to be mocked.
FTA: “The manning-up of boys begins in the cradle,” says Tronick. Fathers and mothers use far more emotionally rich language with toddler-aged daughters than sons, for instance. Fathers are also more likely to sing to and soothe their toddler daughters at night when they cry.
And "Praise them when they ask for help. Encourage them to share their struggles — with you, of course, but also with other trusted adults, a therapist or even friends."
- Positive engagement: Involved fathers directly interact with their children in positive ways, including caregiving such as changing diapers and shared activities that involve play.
- Accessibility: Involved fathers are available to their children even when not directly interacting, such as cooking while the child plays nearby.
- Responsibility: Involved fathers take ultimate responsibility for their child’s welfare and care, including participating in decision-making regarding child-rearing and ensuring that children’s needs are met.
The opposite of emotional support is if you're crying, people around you say "don't be a baby."
Actual emotional support can take a lot of different forms. I'd say that it includes someone recognising the emotions you're having, not judging them, not stopping you from expressing them, and talking about the emotions afterwards if you're up for it.
The really hard thing is finding the right balance. “Don’t be a baby” isn’t good, but over-compensating too far in the other direction doesn’t do a kid any favors either. There are times when being a good dad can mean (kindly) pushing kids out of their comfort zones or tempering excessive self-pity.
I’m currently trying to teach my 4 year old daughter to swim, so this is very front-of-mind for me. If it was up to her, she would just splash around in the shallowest part by the steps without trying anything she’s afraid of, and she would never learn to swim. It takes gentle but insistent pushing from me to keep making progress. It’s a fine line—when I do it well, she tries new things and has a great time too. If I overdo it, she shuts down and won’t try anything else.
The emotions that make her hesitant are totally valid and natural, and I try to empathize with her and talk about them, but I also can’t overly indulge those feelings, because she needs to learn to push past them in order to gain an essential life skill. It’s tough.
> If it was up to her, she would just splash around in the shallowest part by the steps without trying anything she’s afraid of, and she would never learn to swim.
It is a very fine line but this part is probably not true. She's 4 years old and doesn't need to learn to swim, unless you really want an Olympic swimmer.
If she keeps going swimming in the shallow end, do you know what will happen? She will get bored and want different things (including deeper water).
I see this kind of thing frequently, kids work at a slower rhythm than parents and parents are still human and have limited time and patience.
I’m curious whether you’ve seen kids learn to swim with that approach? There are definitely some kids that take to the water easily and push forward on their own, but I wouldn’t say it’s the norm. More often it seems like fear of going underwater especially needs a period of steady, concentrated effort to get past.
Maybe it was the phrasing from the comment I was replying to, but yes, I understand the fear. I'd just leave them alone, more or less, for a long time.
If they see their parents swimming, the desire to try will come at some point. That's when the help should kick in, in my opinion.
Take toddlers and small kids swimming and let them do things at their own pace and then have them take professional lessons when they're old enough to really understand the benefits of swimming and why overcoming the fear of drowning is a valuable asset.
Seems like preventing drowning is a key reason to start early. That is why I started early for both of my kids. Too many stories about kids wandering into pools and dying to not take it seriously.
Yep, that's a big part of it for us. We go to the beach often all through the year and usually spend a couple weeks every summer at a lake, so we are around water quite a bit.
Apart from safety, I just know she'll enjoy water so much more in general after getting over the hump. I could be wrong, but my gut feeling is that the fear of going under is only going to get more ingrained if we wait, so it's better to do it now.
I actually wish we had been more consistent with taking her in the water from the time she was a baby. That seems to be the easiest path. Babies aren't aware enough to be afraid (it seems to kick in during early toddler-hood), so if you get them used to going under as a baby, then keep doing it regularly enough, you can avoid that fear ever developing in the first place.
It's unfortunate that you're (willfully?) uninformed to such a degree that you perceive these passages as slighting your identity or something, but what they're saying isn't controversial scientifically.
I'm not a strong male, so it's not slighting anything.
But I don't like it when basic truths are denied. If you look at Ukraine, pretty much all of the assault forces are made of men, the sex this paper considers fragile and vulnerable.
Societies which publish such papers are lucky they are not under attack because they wouldn't last long if they put in front the sex THEY consider stronger.
The assault forces aren't men because they are "stronger" but because society shames men for not fighting. I've had frank discussions with women on this topic and it always comes down to "fuck that I don't want equal rights. I don't want to be drafted in a war" - direct quote from a ex. The shame that comes down on men from women during wartime is intense.
See the White Feather movement in the UK during WW1.
To be fair I've seen quite a few women fight in Ukraine but they are outnumbered by men something like 1:100. Even in Israel where women are drafted and have compulsory service they still are shielded from the real meat grinder operations.
>When an artificial womb is invented that can allow a baby to grow to term the dynamic will be forever changed.
Can you elaborate on this and what impact this artificial womb will have?
I'm not sure what you consider as outmoded, but considering the biology of men and women, it makes perfect sense to send the men off to sacrifice in war while women stay home.
Women can bear children: this is a valuable advantage on the homefront and a huge liability on the front lines. Women get raped in wars, there's no getting around it. Women can stay home to bear children and care for the small ones and foster hope for the future.
While it is plain that fathers are good for children and having them around is a benefit, if a man must go to war, then it is better than a woman going to war. A man can procreate a child with his wife before shipping out. A man is unlikely to be raped or bear children when captured on the front lines. A society that has lost a significant portion of its fighting-age men is more likely to recover than one which has lost many child-bearing women, or both.
Furthermore, if you want to build a cohesive fighting unit (or a department in business or education or industry or whatever), you build it entirely of one sex. It is more efficient that way (no expenses on women's bathrooms or other facilities) and there is less conflict and drama (troops gonna have sex and women gonna get pregnant, and then they're both sent home?)
These are inherent biological factors and they have nothing to do with human rules, they are God-given and unchanging. These factors have been true for millions of years, and they are the basis for human rules on why men fight and women stay home.
The wrong here, it burns! Feminists fight to integrate the military (while developing an critique of militarism), powerful traditionalist men fight to keep them out. Feminists are winning and now the US military is ~18% women and growing. In sexist Ukraine and Russia, the percentages are much lower. So tell me again how women are too weak for combat?
It's not feminists calling for powerful men to send disposable poor men into the grinder. It's not feminists calling for men to "man up" and pretend they don't have emotional needs or fears. That's all on traditionalist men. Sexist men don't get to both enforce such traditional roles while decrying them as unjust.
The quoted paper in the article is from a psychiatrist with a PhD in philosophy debating to himslef whether "maleness is a genetic disorder." He spends the whole article talking about how boys get sick more often than girls, which is only true until puberty at which point the opposite is true. He then shifts to life expectancy and suicide. So if we define being "fragile" as "shorter life excpectany" then "the human male is, on most measures, more vulnerable than the female," as he says. By all sensible messures, however, the claim is otherwise false. For example, "the prevalence of major depressive episode was higher among adult females (10.5%) compared to males (6.2%)"[0]. Of course, males are also stronger than females.
>It contradicts even the most basic of common sense
It doesn't do that at all. The most obvious example of this is unemployment. When men lose jobs, they are at much higher risk to slide into social isolation, drug use and even suicide. Anti-social behavior among women in those situations is much less common.
Young men without perspective likewise are much more likely to turn towards extremism, violence and so on. Most 'incels' or shut-ins are men. Most violent criminals are men, most gang members are men.
Men, especially young men are much more vulnerable to exhibit maladjusted behaviors and that's both backed by common sense and data.
> But that's exactly what I'm referring to. It cherry picks some examples to make men look "fragile", "sensitive", and "vulnerable".
It also ignores that women, generally speaking, have greater support networks than men. Men in America have generally been expected to handle far more things on their own. Plenty of women I know in their 30s and beyond still ask things of their parents whilst I don't know of nearly as many guys in my cohort who rely on their parents in any way.
In a sense, this is all victim blaming. Majority of homeless people are men? I guess they should have been as strong as women! /s
The polar bear is more vulnerable and sensitive than the gazelle literally, that is why they're almost extinct. You seem to be confused about what people are talking about. Nobody is arguing whether polar bears or big hairy men are muscular and STRONG, we're talking about their resilience in the modern world and how well they have adapted. It is actually a good comparison but not in the way you thought it was.
There's nothing cherry picked about this, men do worse these days and are more vulnerable than women on a lot of very substantial metrics. It doesn't get more real and objective than looking at the rate of deaths of despair and the gender disparity there. I don't understand why you apparently perceive this as an attack om men.
This inability to acknowledge the vulnerability of men is, as the article points out as well, one of the reasons why there is comparatively little help for men.
Could you please stop posting to HN in the flamewar style? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for, so we're trying for the opposite.
It reminds me of when I was a 10 year old and all the times my younger sister annoyingly told me things like "I can beat you at [insert sport or game] but I don't in front of you because I don't wanna."
Like, yeah, maybe you could, but the evidence is lacking.
> New research shows that when fathers are present and emotionally invested in children’s lives, they are more likely to develop a stronger sense of self-worth and excel in everything from school to relationships.
Regardless of the debate on how tough (or not) love should be, the absent fathers issue seems like something concrete and impactful that we should be trying to address.
How do you even address something like that? Even if you paid each father $10k to stick around to age 18, that doesn’t guarantee that they wouldn’t become domestic abusers, suicide victims, or would even be good role models. It’s possible that father presence for kids is only so valuable because the only fathers that stick around are the ones that care.
> only so valuable because the only fathers that stick around are the ones that care.
Last time I looked at data about this, it appeared that even a poor father who was present was better than no having a father in the home. If I remember right it was measuring the likeliness of a teenager to end up in prison. If there was a segment of fathers that were worse than not having a father, I don't think it shows up in any study I've seen.
Gilder's Wealth and Poverty book cites a lot of studies and examples showing how society has changed in ways making it harder for dads to stick around with everything from how drug policies are enforced to the way that welfare resources are allocated.
> Last time I looked at data about this, it appeared that even a poor father who was present was better than no having a father in the home. If I remember right it was measuring the likeliness of a teenager to end up in prison. If there was a segment of fathers that were worse than not having a father, I don't think it shows up in any study I've seen.
I think their point is that those bad fathers don't show up, because they don't care about their children.
> It’s possible that father presence for kids is only so valuable because the only fathers that stick around are the ones that care.
Even if this would be the case, we should allow those fathers to spend more time with their kids. For example, it is very difficult for a man to find a part-time job. Most companies take "I also want to spend some time with my kids" as "I don't really care about the work I do". You can care about the work without wanting to devote your entire life to it.
4 day work week, should be more common for this case here. If it were offered, I would take it, even if just for a few years while the kids are little.
You're looking myopically at the issue; absent fathers is less likely to be a choice, but an economic consequences of income inequality, along with the other economies that arise because of this.
You're looking at the drug war, high school graduation rates, ability to find a job, attached to teenage pregnancy, lack of commute options, and below living wage - likely connected to public health issues including water treatment, sewage, inneficient or unsafe homes (hook worms, sceptic, HVAC)
So instead of a 1 time $10k (which is delusional) think marijuana being legal, healthcare and childcare being affordable, public transport - or at least not a food desert in a walkable community, and $15+/hr 30+ hour weeks at a single employer.
It used to be done by promoting marriage and stigmatizing divorce. Now, that has obvious costs for the parents in many cases and certainly isn't always the right approach because of problems like domestic abuse.
But the good of the children is part of why past societies have incentivized keeping parents together to care for their children and maybe we've gone a bit too far in the other direction, away from a happier medium.
> It used to be done by promoting marriage and stigmatizing divorce.
Stigmatizing divorce does absolutely nothing to make fathers emotionally invested in their kids. If anything, it can make them resentful of their kids.
The article was about how boys need emotional support from their father. A father who is present and married but still demands that his son "man up" and bottle up every problem is of no help.
It's really hard to be emotionally invested when you're totally absent from most of their lives, though. It doesn't work the other way, i.e. it won't fix a bad father, but there are plenty of guys who could do better by literally just showing up.
There are plenty of men who have no gross moral fault, who are still excluded from their kids' lives by a wife who divorces him and gets custody. Stigmatizing divorce would help that. In divorces that occur in the US, close to 80% of the time it's by women; close to 90% when the woman is college-educated. The vast majority of divorces are not predicated on a gross moral fault by the man, but on unhappiness by the woman, growing apart, found a new guy, whatever. The woman in those cases is thus putting her own happiness above the wellbeing of her kids. So a stigmatization of divorce by society could work very well. It worked very well historically. Women are not more important than children. In fact, half of children are girls who also need fathers. And a woman-centric view of defining morality is just another demonstration of the problem of society's current disregard for men, boys, and the male experience.
Maybe, as a culture, we should emphasize MORE the health of the family, of the duty and honor it brings to raise kids and less on the "perfect" romantic relationships of the parents? Shouldn't we promote a less Hollywood-like picture of long lasting relationships?
I have the feeling that we are trained too much to think that our "romance" and sex life should last forever. When - in reality - a good relationship transforms to something that is more similar to a good companionship (yes - you should like each other a lot, sure... but be less seeking for the thrill you might have had in the first year).
Kids need stability - not parents living in their own unrealistic world.
I've never understood why there is a dichotomy presented in relationships like that - sure, 10 years into your marriage you might not be going at it like rabbits as you were in the first year, but there isn't any reason why parents can't provide stable environments for children _and_ have strong romantic relationships still. It takes very little to carve off some time for one another, and that continued investment in bonding with another in and of itself long term provides the stability children need.
> It takes very little to carve off some time for one another, and that continued investment in bonding with another in and of itself long term provides the stability children need.
Why is romanticism the only way to "invest in bonding"?
There seems to be a large subset (maybe very large?) of the population where the only way to bond on some level is sex.
I guess you don't have kids yet, emphasis on plural. They chip away bit by bit everything that makes a relationship a good one, sand in the fine gears that made people fall for each other in the first place. By far the biggest stressor in marriages (unless somebody else is actually raising your kids, be it grandparents or nannies).
Sure, you can, and should, keep working on repairs and rebuilding, but that's additional work on top of all additional work on top of actual work of living in modern society. Not everybody, always, has energy for that, and you need 2 for that or it just doesn't work. Hence the difference of what looks nice on paper and how things should be, and how they actually are.
> Maybe, as a culture, we should emphasize MORE the health of the family, of the duty and honor it brings to raise kids and less on the "perfect" romantic relationships of the parents?
That ship has sailed. We live in a culture that not only has doubled down on the idea that the happiness/romance of the marriage is far more important than children, but even tells us that the marriage itself must dissolve when unhappy or this will do damage to those kids.
Imagine going to work and telling a coworker that your marriage is a disaster, but that you and your wife are considering staying together for the sake of your kids. What would your coworkers say? Do any of us know anyone that we believe might tell us "hey, that's a good idea, and I hope it works out that way for you"?
It shows us where our priorities as a society and culture lie.
Even if someone could intellectually admit that this assertion of mine was correct, it has inconvenient implications. The larger culture war around us relies on the idea that children simply aren't important to a marriage.
It's not entirely his decision as to whether that investment or availability is called upon, there is the ex-wife's decisions, and others (e.g. court) that have bearing.
Instead of having parents who regarded each other with something between disdain and seething resentment depending on the day of the week, they were much happier apart and I was able to build better relationships with each.
I also discovered that without my mom screaming at him several times a day, my dad was a much better person, and without my dad having the option of being a lazy sack of shit (to this day he has never changed a diaper), he decided to start actually trying at being a dad. I only wish they had divorced sooner.
Divorce is wonderful. I've known a lot of people who probably shouldn't have gotten married but not one single time have I known people who gotten divorced and though "gee they really should've stayed together".
I'd be hard-pressed to ever find such a person. The ones you're thinking of didn't stay together for the sake of the kids, they stayed together for some other reason... that's just the excuse they used. Maybe they did it to avoid the scorn of their own parents, or the shame of it (mostly gone in the late 20th century but still found in tiny little pockets, Catholic communities, etc.).
People who were doing it for the sake of the children wouldn't admit it to anyone, for fear that their children might overhear whispered gossip, thus defeating the whole purpose.
I think as a culture we need to normalise respect for both men and woman. Currently, in society violence against men is acceptable. You see it through articles like this[1] or in tv shows where it's acceptable for a woman to slap a man. Men in ads and tv shows are shown as helpless and clueless without their wives/girlfriends.
In modern media, woman are nearly always portrayed positively. Woman are always the 'girlboss', who need to show they are equal or superior to men. Practically, every male space has been feminised.
It can be healthy for a family not to be together. Fetishizing stability and the nuclear family over happiness of the people in that family isn't necessarily a good solution to anything much.
Sure, a good relationship might not resemble the hollywood ideal very much, but "duty to the family" leads to misery for a lot of people, and kids don't grow up happy and well adjusted when mom and dad are very unhappy with their lives and each other.
My father attempted to be the opposite of my grandfather and yet still remained very similar to him. Thankfully still an improvement over my grandfather. Not implying this is you too. Just thought the observation was interesting.
My mom and bio dad were divorced when I was 11 months old, and I had basically zero contact with him until age 15 or 16. My mom re-married an alcoholic racist fuck who was on my very short list of people that I genuinely wished he were dead (he is now, so he's no longer on the list). He wasn't physically abusive, but he was certainly hella verbally abusive.
In the nearly 40 years since re-establishing contact with my bio dad, he hasn't exactly proven himself as a role model. He falls into the "woe is me" category of low income people. He always finds excuses.
Brutal. Thank you to share your personal experience. It is hard to see now, but other young men will be reading this post in the future, and it will help. No one controls if you draw a sh-tty ticket in the lottery of life and have a bad family.
Real Question: If your step-father was an "alcoholic racist fuck", why did your mum marry him and stay with him? Please, please, don't read this as an attack on your mum! People enter and stay in relationships for a long list of reasons.
I was so lucky to have great parents, but my dad was mostly commuting during 8-18. I know he cared about me deeply, but his job and commute made it very difficult to spend a lot of time with me.
> absent fathers issue seems like something concrete and impactful
There is a general corruption of the concept of masculinity in American culture. It’s similar to what’s happened to the symbol of the American flag, but more insidious.
When I say masculinity, or masculine values, what do you think of? When you think of someone who values their masculinity, who do you perceive? Now do the same for femininity. Which model is healthier?
Men and women have, on average, physiological differences. These differences are pronounced in puberty. That’s when these frameworks matter the most; they thus must be embedded in childhood. There is no right answer, I think, but there are right questions that boys dealing with a burst of testosterone should ask themselves. That we’ve ignored or even repressed that seems to link both failures in boy and fatherhood.
It also seems to naturally extend to trans and non-binary kids, another situation we are culturally bankrupt in addressing. Boys understanding and speaking to their feminine sides is, ironically, a classically masculine strength in the way women understanding and acting on their masculine sides is, traditionally, a classical sign of motherhood and through that feminine strength. (The linking of feminine strength and motherhood is obviously dated, though as someone who lives in bear and moose country I can see why it was originally embraced.)
I watched my wife (and our lives) before and after children and I disagree. She was always strong, but nothing challenges her, or us, like raising kids. Especially after the toll pregnancy had on her body.
That's not to say it's the only virtuous thing a woman can do, but it's so incredibly selfless to continuously drain your body and mind intentionally for the sake of a child's well-being.
> to continuously drain your body and mind intentionally for the sake of a child's well-being.
This is gonna sound a little facetious, but... aren't you also doing the same?
> it's so incredibly selfless
Perpetuation of one's genes is far from selfless. (Unless perhaps one views one's genes as the important entity, and oneself as their mere vessel. But that's too deep for this post.)
I've heard an emotionally immature would-be mother say that pregnancy and motherhood is basically her license to be selfish. ("From now on I get to only think about myself", were her words. Personally, I'm not OK with anyone raising children while holding such mentality, as I believe they would not be able to empathize healthily with the needs of the child. I strongly advised her to reconsider, and got a response that she "wished she lived in a jurisdiction where abortions are illegal". This is your brain on patriarchy!)
I'm happy that you and your wife find it worthwhile to raise children. More power to you! But I responded to:
> Can you think of anything feminine that takes more strength than motherhood
with: remaining childless. So I think your counterpoint misses the mark.
---
On a related note, the discussion in other subthreads largely focuses on the role of "good" and "bad" father figures in the emotional growth of young men. The loss of good role models is lamented, and the men of the past are idealized as "the men of a a more cohesive society" or smth as if the 20th century was an idyllic utopia lol.
But wasn't the previous generation of men even less in touch with their emotions? And wasn't it more accepted in past generations to solve problems through violence and destruction? So why weep for this cycle being broken, instead of inventing something better? Last time I checked this was Hacker News, not Curmudgeon News ffs
I believe we should more openly consider the possibility that some percentage of males grow up fucked up because it was their mother who was not a decent person. Or perhaps she was a perfectly decent person who made a bad choice in the given circumstances, resulting in a poor environment for an infant to receive initial limbic calibration.
Because hey, nobody is infallible, not even childbearers. Crazy I know. This is a huge blind spot of our culture: being a mother is a tremendous responsibility, and we just sort of decide that there's no way for it to go wrong?
At the same time, virtually everyone means well to mothers and children. Nobody wants to make mothers more anxious, because that might just unleash a self-fulfilling prophecy. Which is the last thing anyone needs in this climate. So it's a really touchy subject - with which I unfortunately have a smidgen of experience - so I'll allow myself to elaborate for diversity's sake.
You know how in some traditional societies, people are considered mature and ready to start a family soon after puberty? While in our hi-tech utopia we remain infantilised throughout our 20s (which are prime reproductive age, biologically speaking), for the sake of an education that may or may not bring the promised benefits?
So there's an ubiquitous mix of vaguely contradictory cultural and biological factors that strongly pressure women into motherhood. Whether they want it or not. Whether they are in fact mature enough to make this decision or not.
This pressure is generally stronger than the willpower of an individual human being. Therefore, it takes considerably more fortitude to resist it, than to go with the default.
It's institutionalized misogyny on the deepest level: our society's self-perpetuation depends on this cycle of morally sanctioned self-delusion, and good luck unrooting that one without conceding ground to even harsher ways of life!
Many (most?) young women have been conditioned throughout their lives that their ultimate "purpose" is to be mothers, and that ...
> This is gonna sound a little facetious, but... aren't you also doing the same?
Yeah, I am. Can I think of something more masculine (in a positive way, given context from thread) and challenging than being a good father and husband through it all? Maybe, but they're same order of magnitude and direction.
> Perpetuation of one's genes is far from selfless. (Unless perhaps one views one's genes as the important entity, and oneself as their mere vessel. But that's too deep for this post.)
My genes are not me. The societal pressures here are not to perpetuate and have children any more. At least not in most non-catholic circles (mostly joking). I should be making money, staying fit, finishing my side projects, kicking off a business, DM'ing sessions with friends, fixing up my house, taking up long-distance running, writing engaging linkedin posts, going for long bike rides, continuing boxing training, getting happy hours with my old buddies, blah blah blah.
I fight those urges every day, effectively sidelining my hopes and dreams because I'm nurturing one new singular hope: That my kids will have what they need to succeed. Just because I signed up for this when I decided to have kids doesn't mean it isn't challenging to keep it up. Just because my DNA moves on, doesn't mean I don't have to practice an order of magnitude more self discipline than I ever had to before. The payoff went from 1-2 years away for most things I'm usually engaged with with, to 20. I'll be near dead by the time they graduate college and start to have a fully functioning executive center. In that time, most my spare money and time will be spent on another human, with the only external
payoff I can think of being that they might pick me a nice nursing home, and I can post cute pics of them on Facebook, if they don't get shot, run over, or OD on something before then.
> Can you think of anything feminine that takes more strength than motherhood
I don't think remaining childless takes more strength than motherhood. I think they're different directions, and that's ok. But my wife agrees, it wasn't hard to not have kids for most her life, she just had a good family that accepted her decisions whatever they were. She built a busy and full life, which took work, but it wasn't harder. Not at all. It may be different for others.
Everything below '---' is a lot of rhetorical questions, but I generally agree with the sentiment.
I think psychologically that’s very difficult. Ignoring biological imperative and suppressing the physiologic desire for children is hard. Anyone in their 30’s and 40’s without children knows this.
But actually having a child and raising it in this silly environment? I don’t even want to imagine. Maybe just do private school and try to ignore the awfulness that is modern western philosophy and “values”.
> Can you think of anything feminine that takes more strength than motherhood?
Sure. Enduring this kind of misogynistic classification of their womanhood when they don't have a child (regardless of the cause). The idea that someone isn't "feminine" or "strong" if they haven't pushed a child through their vagina† is complete and utter horseshit.
† Take note sometime of how much crap women who get c-sections will get from society.
What crap will they get from “society”? Who's “society” exactly? Because I never heard anything bad about C-section vs. natural, so I'm really curious.
Many (mostly to the left of center) increasingly associate it with far-right nationalist groups, Trump supporters, or any group considered undesirable. As a result, the flag is gaining an undeserved negative connotation in the same way that masculinity has.
To be fair, many right of center groups presume liberals can’t be patriots and that any display of the American flag is a tacit endorsement of far right ideals (which is of course nonsense).
That the US flag is routinely desecrated by reactionary conservatives up to and including police departments in the form of thin blue line, punisher flags, Molon labe lapels etc to explicitly advertise anti-American ideals seems at least as likely to be the cause of growing anti-flag feelings as any liberal agenda.
When I think of masculinity, I see positive and negative aspects of it. I also see that tribes tend to zero in on only the positive or negative. I see the same thing happening with femininity. For whatever reason, the people who zero in on the positivity of one tend to zero in on the negativity of the other, at least on social media. I'm not sure why this is.
I think part of the issue is that through our success we erased a lot of the need for the most fundamental male roles.
When it came to handling the things that go bump in the night, a social species with thumbs, a bit of fire and a few sharpened sticks went a hell of a long way.
And after bumping back for long enough, we were the only monsters left standing.
I think that one of the problems with toxic feminity is that it's a quieter and less explosive form of destructive behaviour - but it's very much a real thing.
As a weird little note regarding society's tolerance of the hatred of men, "misandristic" isn't even worth inclusion in the spell checker's dictionary.
We haven't removed the need. You take away a majority of men from the workforce, society would collapse overnight. Same can't be said for women, even if it would be disastrous both short and long term.
What happened was the government has successfully co-opted the social contract between men and women so women now can reap most of its benefits while men carry most of the risks. That doesn't make things all hunky-dory for women, but it certainly doesn't do men a whole lot of good when some of their biggest assets in a relationship are stripped away and redistributed, without accommodating that in some form.
Meanwhile, society has done very little to put men in a positive light or encourage women to accept the 'new man'. If anything, it has done the opposite: women seem to respect men less than before, and men are expected to be more competitive than ever before, even on aspects which are practically immutable. Now society is slowly showing signs of how dysfunctional things become when men aren't incentivized to be men, while women aren't taught to respect the 'new man'. The men quit trying, the boys get stressed out, and the women run around asking the government to fix it somehow. Virtually no one is happy, and Socrates is rolling in his grave.
> we spent our nights waiting around the fire in case of tiger
I think it's the opposite. During the prehistoric times most food was actually gathered by women IIRC, and both sexes could use fire to scare away predators, so men were relevant for breeding nearly exclusively.
Today we have far more risky activities where men dominate, such as high-rise towers construction, firefighting, law enforcement, security, sailing etc etc.
> The simple truth is that men handled the vast majority of situations where combat was required
I think you greatly overestimate how much combat people faced during prehistoric times. Population was distributed sparsely, most food was gathered, not hunted, and was abundant, and you don't fight predators to scare them off.
And I think that you're severely underestimating the impact of infrequent existential threats, and how that interplays with slight improvements to fitness compounded over hundreds of thousands of years.
The most existential threat in pre-industrial times was a bad harvest. It meant starvation. That men used their de-facto monopoly on violence to start dominating their communities is a different story.
It boils down to the same thing. Demand for things men are primarily doing / willing to do / capable of doing hasn't significantly decreased. It has merely been commercialized and subsidized in a way that it isn't at all obvious the need for men is still very much there. Hence, the lack of a need for men, whatever form you imply, is not the cause.
I'm not fighting tigers but the women around me sure are happy when I can carry something alone they struggle to do with three of them. There's a significant difference between a direct display and a bunch of commercialized abstractions. All those abstractions make people forget the value others have. We just so happened to push a lot of those abstractions onto men and the value they tend to bring as men.
It was really interesting to see Season 2 of the Island (men vs women).
The most interesting part was not how much women failed to survive, and how successful men were (which makes sense, as men are designed for survival), but the feeling of how much easier in that world is to show the need for masculanity (which is mostly not needed anymore).
Women live longer than men on average so this line of thinking that men are optimized for survival, as opposed to women, is pretty darn silly. (Neither is more or less optimized.)
Expected lifespan and the ability to survive dangerous situations are two very different things.
If you think for an instant that men and women aren't optimised for very different scenarios, then think harder.
Seriously, you can tell just by looking at us.
Or do you think that child bearing hips and big vulnerable mammaries are useful things to have in situations that call for physical action (other than birthing and feeding infants)?
Among gorillas and baboons, species in which males fight for reproductive opportunities feature males twice as big as females, while among pair- bonded gibbons that fight much less, males are just 10 percent bigger than females.
As I understand it men have greater strength because they are optimized to fight other men for reproductive opportunity. This doesn't increase their opportunities for survival since fighting other men can get you killed. It increases their opportunities to reproduce.
Our advantages in a hostile environmental come from building tools not physical strength. If physical strength was important a male human would not be 5 times weaker than a gorilla.
So no, I would not say men are "designed" to survive on an island better than women, or whatever. They are designed to fight other men in a zero sum game.
You seem hell bent on asserting some false equivalency between the physical prowess of men and women. What possible reason you'd have for making such patently ridiculous claims is truly beyond me.
> So no, I would not say men are "designed" to survive on an island better than women, or whatever. They are designed to fight other men in a zero sum game.
False dichotomy. Also, what fraction of explorers do you think were men? Pretty much fucking all of them.
We don't get pregnant, so having children is not a physical inconvenience and (as I mentioned elsewhere) half of us can die without impacting the next generation's population.
If you think that men and women had the same evolutionary imperative to develop the skills required for navigating strange environments then you're not adequately considering the innumerable trade-offs involved.
> Do explorers survive better than people who migrate to new locations with their families, or something?
No, they die far more often. Because they enter unknown risky situations.
Humans explore in search of new lands and resources, and in search of safe paths.
When they take the more vulnerable members of the tribe, they generally have a better idea of where they're going, what the path is, and what risks are involved.
If a path is too dangerous then they don't tend to take pregnant women and small children.
So because it is primarily adult or adolescent males that go on the more risky adventures, they're the ones that have the costly adaptations required to maximise the likelihood of survival.
> Our advantages in a hostile environmental come from building tools not physical strength. If physical strength was important a male human would not be 5 times weaker than a gorilla.
Have you ever made a tool with your hands? Physical strength--especially grip strength--not just dexterity, is required for tool making. There are no vices or pliers in the Wild.
Men have a huge advantage in grip strength, and hence tool making. This study[1] suggests that elite female athletes in athletic disciplines that require grip strength only rank in the 25th percentile of grip strength when compared to men as a population.
If you look at the series, they took 14 random people for each group and gave them 2 days of survival training and basic helper tools.
Just looking at how the men killed the crocodile in a team work with their bare hands first time in their life without any help from experts looked awesome.
> When I say masculinity, or masculine values, what do you think of? When you think of someone who values their masculinity, who do you perceive? Now do the same for femininity. Which model is healthier?
I don't think of anything aside from obvious physiological differences
> but there are right questions that boys dealing with a burst of testosterone should ask themselves
I mean, everyone's different, different personalities, different trials and tribulations of life. I have no idea how you can generalize across all teenage boys without making a bunch of stuff up
> When I say masculinity, or masculine values, what do you think of? When you think of someone who values their masculinity, who do you perceive? Now do the same for femininity. Which model is healthier?
I really struggle to understand this question. Between masculinity and femininity is there one that is supposed to be obviously healthier?
If we go by what the marketing is pushing it's a toxic tarpit on both sides (see The Rules vs The Game).
How many women are out there with three kids by three different fathers?
Let's turn that around:
How many men are out there with three kids by three different mothers?
Sadly, a lot. And few of them are pulling their weight in term of parenting and financial support. I'm not talking about the Elon Musks of the world.
Custody laws typically place all the power in the hands of the mother
Multiple other posters have noted this is highly location dependent. This may have been true in many places around the highly developed world in the 1990s, but no longer.
most mothers are fine with the father having minimal contact
Ridiculous. Most mothers would like the father to much more involved. Divorce or single parenthood is hard enough.
My post isn't harsh at all. There's a whole world out there that doesn't revolve around middle class nuclear families. I meant every word of what I said, and it's all correct. There are very few mothers who want to share custodial time equally with the fathers of their children because there is an economic incentive for them not to. Most breakups are not amicable and women know that they can punish their former partners in court.
That you don't like it doesn't mean that it isn't reality. In the United States, if the mother wants custody then the mother is getting custody unless there are legal / drug / behavioral issues with the mother that prevent her from doing so. You can just sit around and listen to any radio station for all of the family lawyers who specialize in advocating for men because of how biased the system is. Only 40% of states in the US even seek to grant 50% custody to fathers.
I don't see it that way. You've fallen for a tu quoque fallacy. To say that Cosby was hypocritical doesn't seem to devalue the merits of his message: that men need to step up, that fathers need to stop being absent, take some responsibility for the dignity of women and children.
If anything, it makes it even more poignant. Haven't you ever seen a man in prison, pleading with his son not to turn out like him? Does the father's murder conviction undermine his admonition against violence?
Haven't you ever seen a man in prison, pleading with his son not to turn out like him? Does the father's murder conviction undermine his admonition against violence?
Did bill cosby ever take responsibility for being one of the most prolific serial rapists in history?
I don't see it that way either, but many other people find it very difficult to separate the message from the messenger, just as you've done from my (brief) comment.
>>Haven't you ever seen a man in prison, pleading with his son not to turn out like him? Does the father's murder conviction undermine his admonition against violence?
Except, as others would argue, a more similar analogy would be a man in prison continually protesting his innocence. In that situation, I'm not sure that the man would be telling his son to do anything differently without an admission of guilt, except perhaps to be very cautious in their dealings with women. The point remains that the drama and conviction(s) surrounding Bill Cosby's numerous sexual assaults caused him to be an ineffective messenger even if the underlying message remains sound.
You literally cited his personal experience in your original comment, and thought it relevant enough to take up one of the two sentences in it, so I don't see a problem with the response.
The man is a self confessed serial rapist. Maybe look to almost anyone else's opinion on the importance of father figures.
However, the problem about Cosby, and the general "men need to step up" crowd is that frame the issue of absent father as a moral and character issues. Never going deeper to understand if there were external constraints pushing those men out.
We shouldn't completly alleviate those absent father from any responsibilities for their choice, but we should also look at the cause and condition making those choices so prevalent.
> We shouldn't completly alleviate those absent father from any responsibilities for their choice, but we should also look at the cause and condition making those choices so prevalent.
I'm much more involved in my children's day-to-day lives than my father was in mine.
But I'm a software engineer who has worked from home full-time for the last 7+ years. Yes I lock my office door for several hours a day, but I'll pop out every now and again and say hello, it is easy for me to do school drop-offs/pick-ups sometimes, or take them to appointments. My commute is zero, so as soon as I'm done for the day, I'm there for them.
My father spent most of his career as a manager/executive in the pharmaceutical manufacturing industry. You can't manage a manufacturing line without physically being there to respond when things go wrong. Before that, he also worked as a manager of analytical chemistry laboratories, and you can't really do that remotely either. Even when he got senior enough that he didn't physically have to be there all the time, he told me that if all the people under him had to be there physically, from a workplace politics viewpoint, he had too as well. At one manufacturing plant he was managing a few years ago, the IT staff were demanding to work from home, but he was pushing back against their demand, because he was worried about how it would look to the manufacturing staff for whom that couldn't be an option.
I think the "absentee father" issue would be easy to address: have the courts stop favoring mothers as custodial parents in divorces.
Of the divorced couples I know with children, the mothers were awarded custody in every single case, often over the strenuous objections of the fathers and other family members like grandparents (and in one case, even in the face of documented abuse by the mother).
I feel like studies on the effect of children who grow up with a missing parent need to somehow control for couples who split because of mental health issues. Otherwise, it's studying not the effect of the absent parent, but the effect of the behaviors of the parent who was granted custody, and some of those behaviors may strongly correlate with not being able to maintain a marriage or other partnership.
Too late to edit my comment, but I want to clarify the first sentence of the above: I'm not arguing the courts should automatically favor fathers, either. I meant to say blindly assuming one gender is more suited to raising children than the other is a bad policy, and it should be reformed. (And I do believe some family court jurisdictions have gotten better about this than when I had friends going through it 10-20 years ago.)
In the US it depends heavily on the state, but as I understand it, the stats on the mothers getting custody are misleading. Overwhelmingly, the fathers are giving up custody and not fighting for it. When they do, it is roughly equal, though some studies suggest bias one way or the other.
I think it's probably just very, very unlikely that any individual person individually knows a representative sample of divorced couples, and within what sample there is the original commenter noted that the father contesting custody was a subset.
I think people also maybe aren't primed to think of this in terms of "What percentage of people who contest custody receive custody, by gender?" They're just thinking to themselves "Of the couples I know who are divorced, in what percentage does the woman have custody?", and that is going to be very large because a very small percentage of men contest custody. Anecdotally, almost every divorced couple I know has had child custody with the woman (I am in Australia, for the record). The much smaller subset of "divorced couples where I know the father contested custody" are two father's with custody and one mother. Obviously, those are also the only divorced couples I know where the man has custody - no court is going to give custody for a child to someone who doesn't want it, ideally. I also know a lesbian couple who've gone through a custody dispute but I don't believe that really has any impact here.
From what I’ve read so far, there’s a lot of variation between states. The law used to explicitly prefer the mother, and that may still be the case in some states. Beyond that, n=2 isn’t a great sample, but there’s definitely going to be bias when it’s a friend sharing only their side of the story. Like how anytime someone you know gets into a car accident, it was definitely the other guy’s fault.
> Couldn't that be confirmation bias - if you don't think you are going to win, and it will cost lots of money - why fight?
Confirmation bias is defined as "the tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of one's existing beliefs or theories."
What you're describing is not confirmation bias, because there is no "new evidence" which one could interpret as confirmation of their existing beliefs or theories. If the father doesn't even try to obtain custody then they haven't discovered anything new that would reinforce their existing beliefs.
It's not confirmation bias for the men, it's more for the researchers: Selecting data on who contests custody as a proxy for who wants custody. If there is a gender bias in the courts, that might not be accurate.
Without evidence, I'll suggest that this is an oversimplification. In a model where boys require masculine modeling from older, adult figures, "absent fathers" are most an issue when a boy's regularly-accessible social unit has been whittled down to the nuclear family. That seems to be a crisis in-and-of-itself. When I look at socially-successful men, they often have had multiple older men in their lives to model themselves after - usually grandparents, uncles, teachers, etc., on top of their father (or in lieu of). This is two-fold redundant, in creating fallbacks for both a central father figure and in skills or traits which that figure may lack.
I think this is important because the "absent father" is often used as an excuse, when it rather represents the last breached line in a long list of failures of society, which have ripped boys from the men who would look after them.
(I admit that there's likely some who won't like hearing this, as it cuts against the grievances of those who find pride in specific fatherhood ("I will raise MY child.") and see society's manner, or the dissolving of the nuclear family into a larger community unit, as working against that.)
Joseph Campbell emphasized the idea of the “second father.” A mentor who takes a young man further than his father can.
A father has to love you, but the second fathers love has to be earned. Think NCOs in the military, coaches, sensais in martial arts.
We aren’t just missing fathers, we’re missing second fathers.
Not many people would describe a gunny sergeant, or football coach, or the guy who runs the local Karate America as a second father.
If you include foremen, clergy, and union bosses as second fathers, a man living in 1960 could expect to spend his entire life under the tutelage of second fathers.
Traditionally masculine institutions like the military, workplace, and churches have renounced their “second family” status, and tried desperately to feminize to appeal to women.
What sorts of institutions offer “second fathers” to young men now? Predatory ones, like far-right groups. And some sports.
Edit: there are plenty of institutions that market themselves as second families - tech companies for example. But they tend to eschew masculine gender roles.
> What sorts of institutions offer “second fathers” to young men now?
Must it be institutionalized? Can't this be encouraged without some one-sized-fits-all framework? I learned from a lot of guys in church related groups, yet with so much garbage messaging it made me hate myself. Also encountered some very good guys in school, forums, and LAN gaming, and without the religious strings attached.
I am Gen X, and I think one of the social institutions which has quietly vanished before I could quite get to it was the old Roman concept of "patronage." Without understanding I was doing it until embarrassingly late, I spent a lot of time looking for those second fathers, the mentors, the patrons. What broke it for me was someone who was clearly suited for the role, and had benefited from it himself, but was simply too self-involved to pay it forward, as it were. I realized that the Boomers as a trend just weren't thinking patronage or even the idea of planting trees they wouldn't see grown.
So, no mentors for me. Nor am I, sadly, in the position to be much of one myself. I can at last see myself doing it and cut that off at the pass.
If the "wrong" groups have something to offer in the way of second fathers, maybe their values aren't as bad as expected. Nobody wants to even consider that. If only The Bad Guys are making sense about some issues, what else might they be correct on?
> If the "wrong" groups have something to offer in the way of second fathers, maybe their values aren't as bad as expected. Nobody wants to even consider that. If only The Bad Guys are making sense about some issues, what else might they be correct on?
Some of those “wrong groups” are just flat out scammers and charlatans though - see those “alpha male” influencers hawking their courses or whatever. They are taking advantage of a need in others to enrich themselves without really giving a damn about their charges.
Two examples immediately spring to mind, Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson.
I’m sure both have had some moderately useful things to say at some stage of their life for some folks, but a quick look at their Twitter profile tells you everything you really need to know now.
To be fair, several years ago Jordan Peterson seemed quite genuine and earnest about wanting to do good in the world...and then his Benzos coma happened, and he was out cold for several months in Russia or something bizarre, an it's very, very obvious that he has never recovered from that.
Like, we're talking some amount of genuine brain damage damage which he's just stuck with now.
Twitter was also just not a good place for him at all. Some people just get sucked into that sort of stuff, even though it's terrible for their public image, and even though there is so much more they could be doing. Anyone remember how people made fun of eg. Richard Dawkins and Neil deGrasse Tyson for being obnoxiously atheistic on Twitter? Yeah, it's a bit like that.
I would point out that most of your examples are only allowed to hold significant sway over a boy after they've become a young man, in the teen years and further. I'm also speaking to young childhood through the early teen years, when children are mostly going to be limited to their home and neighborhood. There are cultures where they'll regularly come into contact with "second fathers", who will have discipline privileges over/responsibility for them, over the course of their daily activities. This is not the case in America; the norm is the buck stopping with one's resident parents, and others have little authority or responsibility. So I understand if it's hard to conceptualize; we simply don't have much lived experience with it.
You're thinking institutions, when I mean uncles and grandparents who live down the street, or even with the family; trusted neighbors (perhaps distant relatives); teachers who can afford to live in the same neighborhood; local workers and entrepreneurs who are included in neighborhood life; and so on.
There is no such thing as an extended family unless there are strong nuclear families to begin with. this concept is lost on so many people... But it's simply easier to raise your kids with their grandparents aunts and uncles if grandma and grandpa had a good relationship and aren't divorce to begin with.
Divorce is ultimately at the root of so many social ills but it's verboten to even mention
I find it curious, though, that a number of commenters seem to focus almost entirely on the "present" aspect and not on the crucial emotional investment aspect discussed in the article: "when fathers are present and emotionally invested in children’s lives", the title of which says "what boys really need is emotional support from their dads".
Presence alone is not necessarily helpful, and indeed can be harmful, as demonstrated by countless abusive parents. On the other hand, an emotionally invested parent can make a positive impact regardless of whether they're married.
Anyway, downvoting on HN is not the same thing as "verboten". Downvoting is a feature of HN that is supposed to put higher quality comments higher up and lower quality comments lower down. (I'm not saying it works, but that's the theory.)
I'm not sure it's quite that simple, as some marriages are toxic to children. But the general dissolution of the nuclear family is not a positive trend, and will have grave consequences for future generations.
> There is no such thing as an extended family unless there are strong nuclear families to begin with.
I disagree on that point. It takes a village to raise a child, and a large enough extended family has space for all sorts. Not everyone is called to the married life: I agree that divorce is a problem, but divorce rates would go down quite a bit if those for whom marriage is not compatible with their personality didn't get married in the first place, and there was a space for them to thrive within the family/community.
Again, I grew up in an extended family, being taken care of by grandparents, aunts etc. Singleness is not the problem. Single people are not opposed to a nuclear family. Divorce is. Divorce with children takes a family and breaks it apart. To compare divorce to singleness is disingenuous.
> but divorce rates would go down quite a bit if those for whom marriage is not compatible with their personality didn't get married in the first place, and there was a space for them to thrive within the family/community.
Being single is as socially acceptable as ever (in fact, it is slowly but surely becoming the default) and I see no sign of things improving.
A big part of this in the US is our continued evolution in suburbs: In practice, in person contact with others is a lot more work than historically. This makes children have very little contact with adults other than teachers and their own parents. Even contact in businesses is depersonalized, given this world of chains, large stores and many employees with changing shifts, leading to minimal recurring contact, and interactions that very rarely get personal.
More communal countries, both in Europe in Asia, still have some personal contact: From a pharmacist to an ice cream man, a town or a neighborhood can have community, and with that community come the children seeing those workers as people, and having a relationship with them. When most business is done on foot, people see each other down the street, or in the park, and there's a chance of community. With suburbia an cars, all social contact takes effort: Community get expensive, and few pay the price.
> are most an issue when a boy's regularly-accessible social unit has been whittled down to the nuclear family. That seems to be a crisis in-and-of-itself.
Quite the contrary, it seems that those who would modify and engineer culture have been pushing on everyone the idea that men are fungible. That step-daddy, or mommy's new boyfriend, or all the men in the hippy commune are adequate substitutes... and it seems like that's just never the case (at least not often enough to count on).
It may just be down to math. All those other men who might substitute just have their own lives. Your grandpa likely has other children and other grandchildren. Their focus is diluted. Uncles might be trying to raise their own families. Step-dad just thinks your inconvenient and a competitor for the attention and resources of his own children, either from a previous marriage or after he knocks up mommy.
And if that's not bad enough, think about the circumstances we tend to see in these situations. Mommy (and it's usually her, isn't it?) just doesn't get along with the rest of her extended family. Not only is she demanding extra attention for her own offspring, she's showing them all how bad she is at judging character, at planning her life, etc. It's a high risk investment in a person who doesn't look like a good investment at all, for someone they already have negative feelings for.
Teachers, mentors and friends are of course very important, but I would believe this not to be the case.
There is no society or commune to take care of the immediate needs. There can be large families that offer a very good and secure support network and there are families that form clans. In that it seems to be a very neutral influence.
> I admit that there's likely some who won't like hearing this
You have to advertise this larger community unit a bit because I don't really see it aside from the latter example. The time of the utopia commune parenting with the weird third party uncle was never very popular and most importantly, not very successful.
Father that take pride in parenting will get much better results and to say that is egotism seems like a very sad and reduced perspective.
> Father that take pride in parenting will get much better results
You need both. Fathers that take pride in parenting their own kids, and the random neighbor kids, and their sister's kids, and their friend's kids when they happen to be around. And other parents that support said fathering.
A totally disinterested father cannot be replaced by a broad functional community. A functional community cannot be replaced by a highly invested father. They simply fulfil similar but differing needs.
You could say the village is made up of fathers (and mothers, etc.) who take pride in parenting.
I don't expect something like that to form anywhere aside from very remote villages where people tend to stay for most of their lives. In a modern city interactions are probably too fleeting, people change location too often. Strong relationships need time to form.
So people leave and only the closest family members and friends remain in contact. Even with Facebook. I believe this is a main driver for why you generally don't see large families in the western sphere anymore.
Or are people who are not genetically inclined towards executing monogamy also not genetically inclined towards other “organization and self control” rooted behaviors?
> Regardless of the debate on how tough (or not) love should be, the absent fathers issue seems like something concrete and impactful that we should be trying to address.
Where would we even start? The only circumstances where we could hope to do anything at all are those where it's either not a problem, or is still only a minor one... if daddy's doing 20 for murder or dealing at the kilo level, are we supposed to let him out so he can sing lullabies?
There exists an entire class of problems that people only seem to comprehend the causes of once those same problems have escalated far beyond the capacity for comprehension to allow us to fix them. Perhaps the universe hates us. Or maybe we just deserve it.
A simple answer (the one other developed countries tend towards) would be to emphasize / invest more in rehabilitation than in retribution/deterrence in the criminal justice system.
Another set of approaches would be to fund pro-natal/pro-family initiatives such as child income tax credits, to make it easier for fathers to participate in family life; at the margin economic instability drives families apart among other things. (More paternity leave (and better maternity leave while we’re at it) would help a lot here too).
I think you can look to other countries for examples here, Scandinavian countries for example have much better pro-family programs we could copy if we were really serious about this.
>Your idea of rehabilitation is "hey, we're going to try to be nice to lowlifes, and they'll suddenly become upstanding citizens"
This is a strawman. You have no idea what their idea of rehabilitation is, in fact they only shared that our balance is out of whack.
And it is. What we are doing now, with mass incarceration and barely-humane conditions DOES NOT WORK. In fact, it would be hard to intentionally design the system in a way that does a better job of increasing recidivism and overall human misery.
Forget all this talk of "being nice to lowlifes", how about we stop shooting ourselves in the foot first?
>Do you really believe that would work? Like, how much can you afford?
Our government spends billions and trillions of dollars on things which have less utility. Resources are not what is lacking, prioritization and political will is.
> You have no idea what their idea of rehabilitation is, in fact they only shared that our balance is out of whack.
Either their definition is the same as the popularly known definition, or it is a worthless definition.
The popular definition is "whatever defects of personality caused the person to commit criminal acts have been mitigated entirely or reduced to the point that the risk of recidivism is negligible" or something like that.
Is there another definition any sane person should care about?
> What we are doing now, with mass incarceration and barely-humane conditions DOES NOT WORK.
It's doing exactly what it's supposed to do. It's just that the thing it's supposed to do isn't rehabilitation, and never was. And you'd have to be a seriously naive person to have ever swindled yourself into believing anything else.
1. Punishment of the wicked.
2. Sequestration of the dangerous.
3. Deterrence of the tempted.
> In fact, it would be hard to intentionally design the system in a way that does a better job of increasing recidivism
We could just let them out early, so they'll do it again. It would increase recidivism nicely, since given a (more or less) fixed population of criminals in any given time period, they'd be outside prison for longer periods of time where they have the opportunity to do it again. If in a span of 10 years an armed robber spends 8 years in prison, he only has 2 years in which to commit crime.
Let's just let him out after a weekend, so he has 9.9.
We could even call it rehabilitation, because you know, if we don't make him so miserable surely he will magically transform into some excellent citizen.
> Our government spends billions and trillions of dollars on things which have less utility.
This weakens your case, it doesn't make it stronger. "We're already spending trillions on other things" means there's less available to spend on this. Not more.
> I've had the argument online many times, but people are simply too stupid and/or wishful-thinking to understand how wrong they are.
This is a terrible way to conduct a discussion. Please read the site rules, in particular “be nice”. If you can’t comment without being triggered, don’t.
It is strange that you immediately went the criminal route. I was thinking more about fathers who work too much, which is most in my world. They spend far less time with their children than their wives, maybe 5x to 10x. My father had a grueling commute as a child that was 90 minutes each way. What a waste. I hardly saw him during the week, then he was exhausted on the weekends. I cringe every time I hear senior (_ALWAYS_ male) executives say: "I do it all for my kids." Yeah right; work less and spend more time with your kids -- that is what they really want, not another fancy ski trip.
The start of this was the industrial revolution. Instead of the family and the home being the main workplace and source of income (farming, family trade, etc.) men went off to work, women went off to work, children went off to work. The family was atomized. Basically, corporations are the downfall of civilization.
Today, most people work long hours away from their family (both men and women) not to buy another ski trip but just to keep a roof over their heads and feed their kids. How can all of us find our way back to family business?
Though the statistics speak loudly enough, my anecdotal experience with a bit whose father abandoned him has been harrowing. It’s deeply disturbing to him. Even having a father figure step in to take care of him doesn’t fill that void or resolve much distress. It seems it will be a lifelong issue to some degree.
I didn’t quite believe it at first. Over time it has become abundantly clear. Boys without dads, not even someone to step in to support them, are often swimming upstream at best.
I agree, as a kid I just didn't think about that, but as an adult I see the epidemy all around me. Women without functional father figure have same deep scars that they struggle with for rest of their lives, and so do men. They just manifest very differently since each have their own needs from this father figure that were not met.
And its not just physically absent fathers, those working long hours constantly (under false premise of 'providing for my family'), or for some other messed up reasons are simply not there often enough, physically or emotionally, often cause all this.
Its a vicious circle too, people take this baggage with them into their own relationships which suffer then, and cycle repeats. Lack of trust, running away from solvable issues, sleeping around etc, I've seen it all and some more. Some of my relationships failed exactly due to women on the other side not being able to deal with exactly this baggage, to the point I gave up on trying to fix other people's lives, because you basically can't anyway.
My impression is, men are stuck in a world where they are told not to be men.
Toxic masculinity is perhaps a thing, but boys are told endlessly how they shouldn't behave and how their nature is flawed. Girls on the other hand, all is well.
Yes, all is not well with girls, but I don't think they have to deal with an analog of the condemnation of "toxic masculinity" and messages that "their nature is flawed." I believe their problems are frequently blamed on external actors (e.g. beauty magazines, social media, etc).
Depending on the place and time, girls have to deal with being called too fat, too thin, not caring enough about their appearance, caring too much about their appearance, being too prude, being too slutty, and many other things. There is definitely a facet of "your nature is flawed" in a lot of them.
You might be right that the question of who exactly is sending and spreading these messages has many answers and external (f)actors definitely come into it. But that too could be said about the claims of toxic masculinity.
That's true actually. I put the "toxic masculinity" bit in a different pigeonhole to the whole "what women should be like". I can see an analogy.
One difference is that, I get the impression it's actually women doing a lot of not most of the "too fat/too skinny" bit. Sure, boys/men can be horrible to girls/women but tend not to get hung up on details. The details of "too slutty" etc seems to come from women, peer female friends, women's magazines etc.
In that respect I guess it's different, because it's a narrower critique. And it's, hmm, self-inflicted for lack of better word. Whereas with boys, it seems to come from women all around, and woke men too. Girls won't be told by their teachers (you'd hope!) that they are too fat or too skinny, but it's open season to tell boys they have a flawed nature they will have to spend the rest of their lives fixing.
I think it depends on your culture, but generally women's appearances matter way more than men's appearances and are considered a personal responsibility thing. Simply becoming older and being visibly older is considered a failure of a woman to "age gracefully" or whatever it is that means.
But also, I think most of the HN crowd are men, and I don't think we're broadly the populace to discuss with any serious authority whether or not women are raised to blame themselves in some way lol.
No, women are subject to ridiculous double standards from everything from body shame (too skinny too fat too ugly too pretty too grown too immature) to their clothing, manner of speech, grooming, and on and on.
"Toxic masculinity" is a problem because of cultural standards where it is seen as manly to harm others. I know lots of very manly men, who are secure in their manhood where that isn't the least bit toxic. I don't think that, for example, cat-calling is manly. But I would describe it as toxic.
I think you're gravely misunderstanding the concept of toxic masculinity. It's good that we condemn it, because it directly hurts boys. Toxic masculinity isn't a description of masculinity itself, it's about parts of the social image of masculinity that are toxic. Stuff like "boys shouldn't cry" or "boys should suck up their problems and not talk about them". You don't improve boys' emotional needs by resuming this kind of messaging.
Masculinity itself is a wonderful thing and necessary for men to (at least partially) embrace - but not the parts that stunt their development and keep them alone! Instead it should be aspects like reliability, trustworthiness, empathy, confidence, emotional strength - what comes to mind when you think about what makes a good man.
That may be so, but it is totally not the popular image of "toxic masculinity". That would be more like, boys are aggressive, horrible to women, insensitive and their one mission in life is to not act in accordance with their flawed nature.
Wait, I'm not sure what you're exactly trying to say. The things you've listed:
> boys are aggressive, horrible to women, insensitive
are parts of toxic masculinity, i.e. they are toxic and they are part of the social image of masculinity. Why is it wrong to say that they are toxic, and that boys shouldn't ascribe to those "goals"? The best thing we can do is tell them "society negatively associates these negative traits with masculinity, but you don't have to be like that to be a man".
> I think you're gravely misunderstanding the concept of toxic masculinity. It's good that we condemn it, because it directly hurts boys. Toxic masculinity isn't a description of masculinity itself, it's about parts of the social image of masculinity that are toxic.
Maybe, maybe not. I'm sure you're accurately describing a particular meaning of that term in some jargon, but that jargon doesn't control the meaning of the term.
There are certainly people who view masculinity itself as toxic, and I wouldn't be surprised if "toxic masculinity" has been borrowed to describe that view. It's a pretty straightforward application.
> Maybe, maybe not. I'm sure you're accurately describing a particular meaning of that term in some jargon, but that jargon doesn't control the meaning of the term.
Okay, but how else are we supposed to talk? If we can't agree on common definitions we can stop right here and now, because any further discourse will just end up in misunderstandings. Toxic masculinity has a simple and obvious meaning. The only reason to misunderstand this is to clutch your pearls and not have to deal with the reality that maybe some of your learned behavior is actually negative.
> There are certainly people who view masculinity itself as toxic, and I wouldn't be surprised if "toxic masculinity" has been borrowed to describe that view. It's a pretty straightforward application.
Maybe, but are we then going to also use every other word based on misusage by few people? Or is it just "toxic masculinity" that we have to use wrongly?
> Okay, but how else are we supposed to talk? If we can't agree on common definitions we can stop right here and now, because any further discourse will just end up in misunderstandings.
The same way people have talked for millennia? Talk, pay attention to what other people are saying, and be on the lookout (and open to) new ways words and terms are being used.
> Maybe, but are we then going to also use every other word based on misusage by few people? Or is it just "toxic masculinity" that we have to use wrongly?
Your mistake is to label usages different than your favored one as "misusages." It's not a "misusage" if someone is successfully communicating their meaning to others (but maybe not to you). If you're having trouble communicating because you're getting hung up because you cling to some "official" definition and reject all others, the problem is on your end.
Once some other usage of a term is established or likely, it's a fool's errand to try to lecture it into non-existence.
Another thing to be mindful of is clinging too tightly to an "official" definition (especially a narrow technical one) can be an attempt at gaslighting: some discourse makes an observation and describes it with a particular term, but a competing discourse quibbles with the term as a way of denying the observation.
> The same way people have talked for millennia? Talk, pay attention to what other people are saying, and be on the lookout (and open to) new ways words and terms are being used.
Can you demonstrate that people use toxic masculinity to mean "all masculinity is toxic"?
> Your mistake is to label usages different than your favored one as "misusages." It's not a "misusage" if someone is successfully communicating their meaning to others (but maybe not to you). If you're having trouble communicating because you're getting hung up because you cling to some "official" definition and reject all others, the problem is on your end.
I am having trouble because I'm using a word in the intended way and under the commonly understood definition (as seen in dictionaries etc.), and people are wilfully misunderstanding the word. I don't have trouble communicating, they choose to have trouble understanding. I don't think that anyone really uses "toxic masculinity" in the way you describe some people use it.
If you want to reduce the pressure on boys to do X, then calling X an "(adjective) masculinity" is exactly the wrong way to go.
Things that are bad, just call them collectively "toxic behavior", without reminding the boys that this is the stuff that they are not supposed - but also kinda supposed - to do. You may also include some toxic behaviors stereotypically attributed to women, to make it obvious that we are criticizing bad behavior in general, not just a specific sex.
No. "poisonous tree" does not mean all trees are poisonous. "toxic relationship" does not mean that all relationships are toxic. This is basic grammar.
This misunderstanding comes up because it is not basic grammar. It's ambiguous grammar. In English, [adjective] + [noun] can be used both to specify a subset of [noun]s that are [adjective], but also it can be used to state that [noun] is categorically [adjective]. Both usages are common. If I say "don't eat poisonous plants", it's understood that I'm referring to the subset of plants that are poisonous. But for example, if I say "thank you for the delicious food", it's understood that I am both thanking you and also saying that (all of) the food is delicious. It would be very unusual to interpret the sentence as me thanking you for only a subset of the food that was delicious.
A sentence like "beware of toxic masculinity" can easily be understood in two ways; first, to beware of the subset of masculinity that is toxic, and second, to beware of masculinity because it is toxic. Even if the former meaning is intended, the latter will be an easy mixup, even for native English speakers.
> But for example, if I say "thank you for the delicious food", it's understood that I am both thanking you and also saying that (all of) the food is delicious
The subset is the food you just received. It would be very weird to give thanks to a single person for all food everywhere and label it all delicious.
That specifying is not done by the adjective "delicious". If "delicious" is to be interpreted as narrowing, it would be something like "thank you for the delicious carrots; no-thanks for the yucky peas".
Other examples:
"The scariest thing about a rattlesnake is its deadly venom". (This sentence is not intended to contrast a rattlesnake's other, non-deadly venom, but rather emphasizes that its venom is categorically deadly).
"Our mortal bodies may die, but our immortal souls will live on". (Implies that all bodies are mortal, and all souls immortal; not specifying the subset of bodies that happen to be mortal).
"I'll place my trust in solid steel over empty words". (Implies that the speaker believes words are always empty, and only actions matter).
"Consider the humble pencil". (Implies that a pencil is humble by its nature, not a specific pencil that is humbler than others).
There's no clear rule, but generally, if the adjective describes a property of the noun that is already understood to be intrinsic to that noun, then it is more likely to be interpreted as emphasis rather than as a modifier. (Deadly venom, delicious food, solid steel, immortal soul). "Toxic masculinity" is in a sort of Schrodinger-state, where it can kind of go either way depending on contextual clues, basically, the reader's perception of the speaker's beliefs about masculinity itself. And once you've chosen a reading, even subconsciously, that will reinforce your preconception of what the speaker meant by their grammar. Like the blue-yellow dress illusion, people will read it one way or the other and not understand why others disagree.
So if I say something like "the problem with fraternities is that they are awash in toxic masculinity", and you happen to be from a fraternity that seems to you like a healthily masculine environment and have never seen a toxic one, then you might interpret my criticism of fraternities as coming from a viewpoint that masculinity itself is somehow intrinsically toxic, and interpret my sentence accordingly.
We've changed technical terminology before for similar reasons (eg. global warming -> climate change); it's probably worth finding a different term for this one.
"Social distancing" was a well-defined technical term that every epidemiologist understood. When the pandemic hit and the term went mainstream, epidemiologists quickly learned that lay people were misunderstanding, no matter how many times they explained it.
So the preferred term among epidemiologists is now "physical distancing".
Sometimes when people just keep getting the wrong idea, regardless of the dictionary definition, it's worth changing terminology.
Do you have a suggestion for a better term instead of "toxic masculinity"? I haven't found any replacement that describes the same thing while not falling under the same problem.
I'd suggest replacing "toxic" with a more clinical term to make it obvious that it's technical jargon with a specific meaning, rather than something that sounds like a hashtag trending on social media. For example, "adverse masculinity". That phrase seems better in every way.
But that just replaces one word with another while keeping the same issues. Do you really think the average man is going to hear "adverse masculinity" and not react the same way they do for "toxic masculinity"? Because if they believe toxic masculinity means all masculinity is toxic, I don't see how they'd think different about all masculinity being adverse.
I do think so. As I said, "adverse" being a clinical term suggests the reader should look for a technical definition if they doesn't know it already (unlike "toxic", which one tends to mainly find spammed across twitter in less-technical contexts). Furthermore the word "adverse" carries a strong connotation of an implied contrast against a benign alternative. It's simply too sterile to be interpreted as emphasis.
I don't share your optimism. English isn't my native tongue, yet I have a clear colloquial understanding of adverse. I don't see a reason why the average person would have a kneejerk reaction towards toxic and wouldn't towards adverse.
> Furthermore the word "adverse" carries a strong connotation of an implied contrast against a benign alternative.
Given the sentiment shared by some commenters here I think it's pretty clear they'd take this as a direct attack on masculinity by people who want to promote femininity.
You might be right. I still think adverse is an improvement over toxic but yes, it would be better to find an alternative to "masculinity". Which is pretty ambiguous itself; whether a behaviour is deemed masculine or feminine leans heavily on central vs noncentral examples of men or women, despite the fact that just about any such behaviour (toxic or not) can be expressed in both men and women, just like how both men and women can become bodybuilders or ballet dancers. So the terminology itself paradoxically leans on stereotypes of which toxic behaviours are associated with masculinity, even while encouraging men to move away from those behaviours and stop perceiving them as an essential part of being a man.
Maybe it would be better to call specific behaviours "toxic stoicism", "toxic domineering", "toxic aggression", or things like that.
> Maybe it would be better to call specific behaviours "toxic stoicism", "toxic domineering", "toxic aggression", or things like that.
That might have a better reception, but unfortunately it changes the messaging.
> So the terminology itself paradoxically leans on stereotypes of which toxic behaviours are associated with masculinity, even while encouraging men to move away from those behaviours and stop perceiving them as an essential part of being a man.
It's not paradoxical, because the term is specifically talking about the negative associations with the stereotypes for masculinity. That's why it's so important to keep the messaging. Masculinity as such isn't a biological reality (in so far that "masculine traits" differ between cultures/historical periods and aren't necessarily present), it's a social construct. "Toxic masculinity" refers to the toxic parts of this construct in regards to the culture in which it is used. If the stereotype changes, the meaning of toxic masculinity changes.
"Toxic behavior" isn't a good term because it doesn't mean the same thing as "toxic masculinity". It's like calling poisonous cat food just "poisonous food" - technically you're using a correct superset, but practically you're referring to something different because you're dropping specificity.
Do you have any alternative to "toxic behavior" that doesn't have this problem? If you do I'll gladly switch my choice of terms.
I honestly don't think the term matters. Many people don't want to think about parts of their own behavior potentially being bad, especially when they've been socially taught that those parts should be good. No matter what term I use, somebody will find a way to misinterpret it, because it's much easier than actually thinking about the topic itself.
Do we know that these aspects of masculinity actually hurt men, or are we trying to put a woman-shaped hat on men? Who's to say that men are incapable of dealing with their emotions through sombre silence? Stoicism has to confer some fitness advantage, either evolutionary or socially, otherwise it wouldn't be such a large part of masculinity.
> Who's to say that men are incapable of dealing with their emotions through sombre silence?
The argument generally being made isn't that teaching boys stoicism is wrong. The argument is that it's wrong to teach boys that somber silence is the only acceptable way of dealing with their problems, and that anything else is a sign of weakness (for which they'll face social consequences).
I'd also separately argue that the way we go about teaching this has a tendency to lead to a behavior that more closely resembles avoidance than stoicism.
It appears that studies show stoicism as negatively affecting mental health:
> Ancient philosophy proposed a wide range of possible approaches to life which may enhance well-being. Stoic philosophy has influenced various therapeutic traditions. Individuals today may adopt an approach to life representing a naive Stoic Ideology, which nevertheless reflects a misinterpretation of stoic philosophy. How do these interpretations affect well-being and meaning in life? We examine the differential effects of Stoic Ideology on eudaimonic versus hedonic well-being across three cultural contexts. In this pre-registered study, across samples in New Zealand (N = 636), Norway (N = 290), and the US (N = 381) we found that a) Stoic Ideology can be measured across all three contexts and b) Converging evidence that Stoic Ideology was negatively related to both hedonic well-being and eudaimonic well-being. Focusing on specific relationships, we found especially pronounced effects for Taciturnity (the desire to not express emotions) and Serenity (the desire to feel less emotions). Despite being a misinterpretation of stoic philosophy, these findings highlight the important role of individuals’ orientations to emotional processing for well-being.
> Stoicism has to confer some fitness advantage, either evolutionary or socially, otherwise it wouldn't be such a large part of masculinity.
I'm sorry, but it doesn't have to confer some fitness advantage. Stoicism isn't a generic part of masculinity, it's only part of it in specific cultures. It's entirely possible people made a mistake and socially pressured each other for no good reason.
With shrinking recess time and PE disappearing from some schools, boys with normal needs for physical activities are increasingly labelled as "sick" and medicalized for completely normal behavior by the taxpayer funded school system.
Energy has to go somewhere so it ends up manifesting itself in behaviors that are deemed "disruptive" (really, not sitting still and being unable to concentrate on tasks). That's the beginning of the slippery slope toward "toxic" masculinity traits (such as healthy competition).
Maybe it's something that female administrators and teachers fail to understand. Or rather, willfully ignore trying to push a certain (extremely liberal) agenda on captive boys.
It would also explain the current epidemic of ADHD and especially ADHD medication prescribed to young boys.
I am not a behavioral psychologist, but both the above posters' comments seem more appropriate as a general critique of America's factory schooling model than how it treats young males specifically.
I have a niece and nephew who are being home-schooled (both testing in the top 10% of their respective peer before and after moving to home schooling). While their home schooling encompasses quite a bit more, they cover the traditional material for their age (everything covered by standardized testing), including drills, practice worksheets, and other typical "homework" in about 10% of the time they were previously spending in school.
While there are obviously other aspects to school, including social interaction (which their parents are making certain they do get), watching the whole process as an extended family member has really driven home how much of current American schooling is just kid-warehousing.
The factory schooling is not an exclusively American thing. But I agree that sitting the whole day is not necessary to getting education. You can also discuss things while walking outside, or allow kids to walk from desk to desk and observe what their classmates are doing.
People seem to disregard that a disproportionally large part of autism spectrum is also made up by boys.
Nothing would make me more miserable than shoving PE up my throat on account that I got to 'need' it. It was the worst part of my school and uni days, which in turn was the worst part of my life, period.
The assumption that boys are all extroverted, physically active and agressive is a big part of the problem.
You're going to get people here saying "no, it's the same rate for girls, they just mask better"
Well, that ability to mask is exactly what increases their likelihood to be spared from the worst of the pain of being ASD (the negative treatment from others due to inability to mask).
I think it actually is far deeper than that. I believe our entire school system is setup to offer success to women, and failure to boys.
Take as one point the fact that boys brains develop slower and later into life than women. Should then boys be competing against women of the same age given what we know?
Take as another point the decline in physical activity in schools and the reduction is recess time. Does this negatively impact boys more than girls? I think so, but it hurts then both to be sure.
> Should then boys be competing against women of the same age given what we know?
In a perfect world, education would not be a competition at all. Everyone would proceed at their own pace, differently in different subjects.
And maybe at the end, where would still be a certification of people who mastered something versus people who didn't. But we would not freak out so much about whether someone understood something e.g. at the age of 12, instead of 13 or 14. The important thing should be that at some age they did.
> I believe our entire school system is setup to offer success to women, and failure to boys.
And that's why most entrepreneurs/successful people are men. System was rough to them since the start, putting them down during every occasion and most boys have learnt how to stand up back on their feet again since early age. The system offered them failure and gave them resiliency.
Girls were carried around and when real life come around and they fall down, they now have no idea how to get back up.
Unfortunately, I think they and the people agreeing with him are actually being serious. I wonder if this is something they picked up through their lived experience or if they're just stuck in some sort of bubble.
>"our entire school system is setup to offer success to women, and failure to boys."
And these comments just strike me as strange especially in STEM. It's only recently that girls are being pushed towards this path, after decades of being actively pushed out and consistently told they are worse than their male peers.
If women underperform on something, society has spent and currently does spend a lot of effort trying to fix that. The goal is to make sure that women don't underperform on anything. If we phrase it differently, the issue becomes clear: The goal is to make sure that women perform better or equal in every aspect. Those attempts have been quite successful and here we are.
Now people are slowly waking up to the consequences, and it's clear that the trend is ever so slowly turning around.
I'll conclude by giving two examples to illustrate my point if you think I'm exaggerating. Both are from about 10 years ago. I honestly don't think it would happen the same today anymore. The first was that there was one (like a single) school where boys were somehow outperforming girls. They said in the press that it was weird because everyone knows it's usually the other way around and that it would be investigated what was wrong. The second was that there was a college entrance test (similar to sat) where men outperfomed women, and one of the criteria they had when redesigning it was closing that gap.
So for that second example, what questions were being asked, that men could consistently outperform women on?
And doesn't removing those questions even the playing field?
For example, men watch a lot more sports than women (I don't know if this is true but for the sake of conversation let's just assume it to be the case).
If that exam had questions that had a sports 'setting' then those who are most familiar with the sport would have an edge over those who don't.
This isn't limited to just gender either. People from different cultures would also struggle if the 'common sense' in the question isn't something that they are familiar with.
I'd like to see which questions were removed and hear their justifications for it. This sounds like something that happened but the details got distorted into a simple take to push some form of agenda. "test makers are dumbing down questions so that women look better."
These are the two most popular college entrance exams and have longevity on their side.
I won't even begin to tackle the first point since there is just way too much that is unknown or anecdotal. I honestly do think you're either exaggerating and/or misinformed but if you can provide some sort of evidence to prove your point then I'm all ears.
And I'm not saying this to discount your lived experience. You may truly have felt that the school system or various teachers really did want you to fail. If that's the case then you were done a disservice but the aggregate data just doesn't agree with you.
>The goal is to make sure that women don't underperform on anything.
I'm really trying to be charitable on your intent but comments like these really make it difficult. If you look at the past couple of centuries, women have been treated as second class citizens. Their only duties relegated to being wives, mothers and homemakers. Not allowed to pursue intellectual pursuits despite being more than capable of doing so. The entire system was biased against them from the very beginning. Even when the laws gave them power to go after these new opportunities, culture continued to hold them back.
The goal is and always has been to level the playing field, to reverse centuries of blatant sexism but if that sounds like 'setting up boys to fail'. Then I really don't know what to tell you.
The intentions weren't bad and the 'outcomes we are now observing' aren't bad either. Those changes were a net positive on society. There is still more work that needs to be done so that both boys AND girls have the same opportunities in school and have the freedom to pursue it without judgement. If some boys/men feel that a level playing field is setting them up to fail then I have zero sympathy, society doesn't need more second class citizens.
And the notion that boys are being set up to fail, especially by the school system is just ridiculous. In this day and age, students can post their questions and answers online. Any bias in grading can be quickly found out and if the issue is as broad and systemic as you are claiming then this will be incredibly trivial to prove. There would be millions of students complaining.
Do you think millions of gym rats are thinking something different? I think it's weird that you present this as feminine problem when it's men who on average participate in more sports.
Ummm... If you think men are turning to gym and sports to get some of the male bodies being portrayed in media, then I have news for you.
A large portion of young men are turning to steroids and fake hormones in addition to insane diets to achieve those bodies. Look at pictures of strong men or body builders from the early 20th century. The look nothing like the six packed gym bro we're all supposed to look like.
Honestly, yes. I exercise to have fun, be healthy, and maybe look a bit better. But I know for sure I can succeed in business, in programming, in academia, in comedy, even in pornography with only a few minutes of grooming every day.
Oh I know there are some men who struggle with body image issues. And the tiny proportion of men working as hollywood actors probably care about their looks a great deal. But do you shave your legs or wear make-up? Read beauty magazines? Me neither.
We men have a wealth of role models showing we can succeed regardless of appearance. Nobody gives a shit about Elon Musk's BMI, or how Richard Stallman dresses, or whether Donald Trump has a six pack.
> even in pornography with only a few minutes of grooming every day.
You’re either incredibly blessed or incredibly underestimating the barriers to entry to be successful as a male porn star.
Also Elon Musk and Donald Trump both have a shit ton of memes straight up body shaming both of them. Trump had literal fucking statues made with the sole purpose of showing him as fat and small dicked. People still often post the shirtless picture of Elon or the one of his hairline before the plugs to try to shame and discredit him. It’s absolutely wild and false to say no one gives a shit about it. His fans might not, but his fans don’t even care that he did a bunch of crypto scam shit, so that doesn’t really mean much.
He’s successful despite the body shaming, but women like Lizzo are wildly successful despite the body shaming they receive too.
Literally every men post trying to get help on the internet is met with "hit the gym, eat better" no matter whatever the person does. The default assumption _is_ that there's something wrong with man bodies.
Isn’t the paragon of masculinity in American culture all about “improvise, adapt, overcome”? The idea that men have a fixed nature and can’t thrive outside a particular environment is… not very masculine.
Something I think people miss sometimes is that there’s a big market for messages loudly affirming girls’ identities and choices because things are not, in fact, going that well.
Good point, we (men) might be oblivious to the fact that pressure has ramped up for women too, they now need to be a woman AND a man to get prestige.
It's been an ongoing adventure with my partner, she works very hard for a good salary while I'm the successless indie game dev.
We talk a lot about it and our feelings about it, and I realize how privileged/lucky I am to have found her and that she accepts me.
She's crazy enough to agree with me on the fact that I might get exponentially more useful in case of a war/disaster, and that I'd make a perfect dad when we get to it :p
The reality of the world dictates that men require a smidgen of "toxic masculinity" to power through. Try telling a sewer cleaner to feel more, or share his feelings. He instead should embolden himself and power through it.
Even if the material world didn't require this, it's required by a substantial portion of women, romantically speaking. Many women express their concern that "he never shares his emotions", but when he finally does express his emotions and what truly bothers him she finds herself unusually dry and loses respect for him. Some men never have to learn this the hard way, and they're fortunate. It's common enough that it's not hard to find such stories online.
The funny thing is many women seem to prefer exactly the kind of men everyone is complaining about, and not because they really like them either. Nice guys are always treated like trash.
I can count the number of healthy relationships I've seen in this life on one hand.
I don't know exactly how we ended up here; but unless things get better fast, over population will be the least of our troubles.
I think part of the issue is the misunderstanding men have in terms of what a "nice guy" actually is.
If a man is told by a heterosexual woman he's not in a relationship with that he's a nice guy, he should take that to mean she's not attracted to him. But this is confusing because the majority of men's advice about women comes from women, and the messaging they've received is that they should be a "nice guy." And being nice at a surface level is antithetical to things like assertion, which is a quality many women look for in men. Until the advent of YouTube, my impression and experience is that elder men have failed to teach men anything useful about how to interact with women, including what it means to be nice. I know of no men my age in real life that received any wisdom from their fathers besides "wear a condom."
So called "nice guys" are treated like trash, not because they're nice, but often the opposite. If a man is a pushover, lacks confidence, doesn't seem like he knows what he wants out of life, and is willingly subordinate to women, but he is superficially very nice, that signals that his behavior comes from immaturity or to get laid. Women do actually like guys who are nice, but a scant number of them are into men who lack a spine or need women in order to feel complete. A man can be nice but also be assertive, confident, and not be needy.
And sure, plenty of women are into bad boys, but that's their prerogative, and a man may not want to be with those women anyway.
My experience is that they do not mean it. What they want is for the man to make her feel loved. What they do not want is for the man to express his deepest insecurities and make her feel insecure by proxy because she depends on him.
Style of communication matters. There are different modes of interaction and being a caregiver/care-receiver is one of them that doesn't mix well with being desired sexually. You can, however, switch between modes. This is in fact the basis behind the therapeutic approach of Transactional Analysis:
Personally I've encountered the thing you've described, and think where it went wrong was falling into a persistent parent/child dynamic instead of returning to an adult/adult one. I'm a bit wiser now and can confirm that once you recognise the modes you're falling into, you can shed the (toxic) ideas like "nice guys finish last" and start having deeper relationships.
Not even joking: isn't that was a romantic relationship is? What is this fear of becoming dependent on your partner? If I didn't need a partner then I would remain single. Isn't love a form of dependency?
I think this very modern fear of being dependent on your partner emerged of late because of the way sexual liberalism eroded the security of romantic relationships. Nothing means anything anymore and your partner can leave you at any moment, therefore you have to somehow remain completely independent while leading a relationship.
But at the same time, to truly open yourself and love someone you have to become somewhat dependent on them.
I remember an anecdote by a guy that shared to his family how he was feeling depressed and exhausted, mostly work-related.
It was a "deer in the headlights" experience. His family indifferent if not annoyed by his revelations. He had nervously prepared for the moment but the message was plain and clear: you can't fail.
I think it serves as an example of how cold and loveless men perceive this world to be. You need to deliver without fail for life. Fail and nobody cares or you're cast aside as trash.
So if the messaging is that nobody loves you for you and you're judged by utility only, we shouldn't be surprised by men's growing issues.
I’ve been knee deep in everything people flush down a toilet and more fixing a broke sewage lift station. I deal with human bodily fluids in my work all the time, as do many women in the same field (medical) Shit and piss and puke and pus.
That doesn’t mean I’m a robot without feeling. Doing your job isn’t “toxically masculine”.
Growing up I was raised in all the bullshit about not crying or never appearing “weak”. It turns out bottling all your emotions isn’t a super healthy thing. Even worse when you don’t gain the meaningful perspective of understanding the implications of them because you’re conditioned to pretend to ignore them.
Men are emotional creatures whether some of them want to admit it or not because they’re human.
Cleaning human shit for a living or part of your living doesn’t change that no matter who you are.
As a black guy I don't remember a friend ever saying "black people suck" to my face. But I've heard people I'm close with, both women and men, say that "men suck" countless times. I think a lot of people who don't see themselves as "biased" still carry a lot of bias when it comes to gender, and it has an impact.
Please don't take HN threads into flamewar hell - gender flamewar or any other kind.
That's particularly important when responding to a thoughtful comment like the GP. I know the issue is emotionally difficult but, as the site guidelines say, "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Totally. When my kid was young and I was out with him the other parents (invariably women) treated me as an oddity and assumed I would be incompetent. Yet, many don't like the fact they're saddled with the majority of childrearing.
Dating is much the same: the majority of the hetero/bi female dating pool selects in favour of features that are often red flags for toxic masculinity. This gets better as one gets older, mercifully, but gender is a verb as well as a noun, and men and women alike aggressively gender one another and unwittingly punish people who deviate from the rules.
Still, at least we're talking about it. Previous generations succumbed badly to gender essentialism - "men are from Mars" and that stuff - and as ever, left a mess for the next generations.
>> I think a lot of people who don't see themselves as "biased" still carry a lot of bias when it comes to gender, and it has an impact.
...
> toxic masculinity
Maybe we could make progress by tabooing words that frame being male as a bad thing?
I found the post you replied to very incongruous, because as I read it started with the idea that men are casually discriminated against (responding to the "men suck" thing) and then skewed into something that may be an issue but is completely in a different spirit (men defying stereotypes by being primary child carers) and then committed exactly the same offence the original post was pointing out with "toxic masculinity". It's almost like a weird simultaneous attempt to find victimhood while still toeing the "men bad" line.
The post said "female dating pool selects in favour of features that are often red flags for toxic masculinity". I took that to be a pretty expansive definition, typical "men that women like over me are toxic" vibe, at least that's how it comes out.
Toxic masculinity is absolutely a thing, think things like refusing to admit you're wrong, being overly aggressive and escalating situations, being overly boastful, being reluctant to show emotions other than anger. A lot of people are just triggered by the term for whatever reason. You could just as easily replace "toxic masculinity" with the word "machismo" if it makes you feel less threatened
Well, it's a masculine failure mode of essentially being overly prideful/insecure of maintaining one's sense of masculinity. You don't see a lot of women trying to defend their masculine sense of pride by picking fights
Because people tie these behaviors to their identity as a sense of their masculinity. It isn’t calling masculinity toxic. Identifying these behaviors as inherently masculine is what is toxic.
Because they’ve made their identity the bad behavior. You can’t change behavior when someone has adopted it as their identity. Any criticism is perceived as a personal attack. Thus, the only approach is to point out that being an asshole as your identity is toxic and to be avoided.
Everything you just said is only reinforcing my belief that it's best to separate the behavior from the identity at all times, but especially when criticizing it, so that we don't spread the bad idea of linking bad behavior and identity in the first place.
That's just a return to the status-quo, which led to where we are. Giving advice of "don't be an asshole" didn't work because people made it their identity. Switching the advice to "don't make being an asshole part of your identity" is at least an attempt to change tack and address the weakness of only targeting behavior.
I can respect teaching people not to make it their identity, but the term "toxic masculinity" does nothing to teach people, it just bundles the toxicity to their identity.
You just described a bunch of traits of a narcissist and assigned them to masculinity. But I’m reality plenty of women display the same traits.
> refusing to admit you’re wrong
> escalating situations
> being overly boastful
The reason why people, mostly men, don’t like that term is because it gets thrown around for pretty much anything at this point to mostly put men down. Spreading your legs and holding the door open for someone is considered toxic masculinity.
> Toxic masculinity is absolutely a thing, think things like refusing to admit you're wrong, being overly aggressive and escalating situations, being overly boastful, being reluctant to show emotions other than anger.
In general, women do all of this all of the time except the last. So you see the problem.
The term "toxic masculinity" doesn't imply that masculinity is inherently toxic any more than the term "burnt toast" implies that toast is inherently burnt. Toxic masculinity refers specifically to expressing and enforcing masculinity in a way that's harmful (to men as well as women).
Teaching boys to epxress masculinity through strength, assertiveness, self-reliance, etc. is totally healthy in moderation. Teaching boys to be violent or domineering isn't, nor is teaching them that showing emotion or asking for help is weakness.
Attaching a word for maleness and badness is harmful in and of itself, though. And its not even a good term, because the name is constructed to make it look like being male is what's bad. It's far from the only term like this, see, e.g. manspreading, mainsplaining, etc. which are pointlessly gendered.
This type of recent linguistic addition really sticks out when people are working so hard to make language humane and inclusive elsewhere, while simultaneously going in the exact opposite direction with male-related neologisms.
And the last part of your own post illustrates that bad traits like being violent or domineering can be called out without having to pointlessly gender the terms.
> because the name is constructed to make it look like being male is what's bad
I'm open to this argument because it's clear that many people take it this way, but how else would you state it? Everywhere else in English, an adjective limits the scope of the noun it's attached to. "Toxic chemicals" doesn't imply that chemicals are inherently toxic, "red car" doesn't imply that cars are inherently red. "Toxic" is probably needlessly sensational though, I'll grant that.
> bad traits like being violent or domineering can be called out without having to pointlessly gender the terms.
I agree with this. To clarify I think part of the frustration/misunderstanding with the term comes from it being applied at the wrong level. It's a descriptor of a social/cultural phenomenon, not a trait of an individual. If a man is being violent, it may or may not have anything to do with toxic masculinity, and invoking toxic masculinity to describe his actions would be inappropriate and needlessly gendered.
It really only makes sense to start talking about toxic masculinity when asking higher level sociological questions like, for example, why men are so over-represented in violent crime stats. It's a term to use when exploring causes, not effects, if that makes any sense.
It's like the difference in terminology between an ER nurse and an epidemiologist. The nurse might just say "flu", because at the level they operate that's the issue at hand. For them to speculate about the origins of the specific strain would be inappropriate. For the epidemiologist, however, these questions are exactly the point, because understanding the details of how an outbreak spreads can help us be more prepared in the future.
> I'm open to this argument because it's clear that many people take it this way, but how else would you state it?
I'd frame them in a way that centers on behavior ("domineering", "violent") without gendering them. I think this makes the actual things that are toxic clearer and that lumping them into "masculinity" makes them less clear.
> "Toxic chemicals" doesn't imply that chemicals are inherently toxic
Yet you've probably seen at least a few people who take this as a reason to worry about "chemicals" in general, despite that covering literally everything. Things like this just make me think that if we want to avoid harmful associations, we have to simply not pair up the words at all. If someone is being violent, we can complain about that without bringing their identity into the frame.
> why men are so over-represented in violent crime stats
But the term is bad because it does nothing whatsoever to illuminate which things might actually cause that and there are probably many causes it lumps under a single umbrella wrongly.
I've seen stats that indicate one of the bigger causes is untreated psychosis, which has nothing in particular to do with being male, or any other identity that's over-represented in arrest data for that matter.
And to me that just reinforces the idea that the identity shouldn't be used at all when framing the problem. I'm aware of the correlations, but we have to find actual causes and, e.g. get people mental healthcare to fix the behaviors creating toxicity, rather than accepting a framing that centers on someone's very identity as if that's the thing that's problematic.
And I can say "causes" because causal modeling is a thing now. I've been reading the Book of Why lately and it's interesting how much things have advanced even in just the last couple of decades or so.
> I'm open to this argument because it's clear that many people take it this way, but how else would you state it? Everywhere else in English, an adjective limits the scope of the noun it's attached to. "Toxic chemicals" doesn't imply that chemicals are inherently toxic, "red car" doesn't imply that cars are inherently red. "Toxic" is probably needlessly sensational though, I'll grant that.
I have an idea. Maybe it has nothing to do with the syntax of the term in the abstract and all to do with what a large number of people using it actually mean. If the term had no history of abuse, this wouldn't be a problem, exactly as you say. What we see in the actual world though is what people really mean by the term. The people using it are misandrists (evidenced by things like the other terms mentioned in the GP) and so the term has come to be a sort of slur; they just hate men and genuinely believe that masculinity is toxic tout court and they have a very hard time hiding it despite simultaneously spouting off otherwise reasonable theories. In other words, they don't mean what they claim to mean by it and people can detect this, so the term has become tarnished.
There does not exist a single pejorative or derogatory term which inherently was negative and disrespectful to a demographic. It is always the case that a word get used in a way that turns the word into a pejorative or derogatory term.
toxic masculinity as a descriptor is equally useful when asking higher level sociological questions as female hysteria was in the past when asking higher level sociological questions. Why are women so over-emotional in certain situations. Why were they over-represented in mental institutions. It's was a term they used to exploring causes of those things, and as a by product it was used to justify their conclusions.
It was originally a terminology used by doctors and health experts. It was later used by people and politicians. It was then abandoned by doctors and health experts, and then much later abandoned by people and politicians. It existed for hundreds of years and then abandoned. Neither change how inappropriate and needlessly gendered it was, nor the harm it did.
Frankly there's ubiquitous motte and bailey on this topic. People will claim the term just means "harmful stereotypes that make men feel they need to be macho", but then use the term in an entirely different way to shame any masculine behavior, no matter how harmless. The correct term for that definition would be "internalized misandry". People claim they're being trying to help men while taking brazen delight in bashing them with this "compassionate" term. If men are the victim, why are they being blamed again?
If I started going on about "toxic femininity" (e.g. gossiping and character assassinating rather than confronting people directly, or favoring groupthink over independent thought), then I'd rightly be called a misogynist for clearly trying to blame women for these negative human behaviors. Femininity is seen as a protected and positive trait, while masculinity is so shunned that even saying we shouldn't bash it is seen as suspicious
> majority of the hetero/bi female dating pool selects in favour of features that are often red flags for toxic masculinity
This is so insane. Anyone who's been enough a player of the dating game and treed to optimise your strategy known you will end up becoming or (in my case) pretending to be "toxic masculinity" because it work so much more on girls.
Gee, it's almost as if women were biologically programmed to like powerful men and "toxic masculinity" was just an invention to denigrate men for being men.
Thing is, men are men—can’t help it, really—regardless of what behaviors they display. Being toxic isn’t “being men” because plenty of men aren’t toxic.
I won’t dismiss the part about evolutionary pressure favouring those hypermasculine traits, but toxic masculinity is more about critiquing aspects of masculinity that are improper or inappropriate in a societal setting.
I saw a meme that summed it up nicely:
“You’re not a gladiator or a spartan warrior who needs war, you’re a middle manager who needs therapy”
Let me expand on that: “you’re a middle manager who needs therapy” – because we’ve built a society where you can’t fulfill your innate desires.
I for one am tired of the therapy meme. If everyone needs therapy, it’s society that’s wrong.
You can’t just take a monkey out of the savannah, put it in a cubicle, then say “you need therapy” when it misbehaves.
PS: I’m not saying therapy doesn’t work, just that it feels like we’re using it as a bandaid on a deeper issue. Like, hey, maybe people should lead fulfilling lives instead of using therapy to fit themselves into the box society drew for them.
Not like I’ll ever access it (too masc, heh) but I definitely see therapy as a much more positive way to address your emotions than self destructive or violent behaviour.
Sports and stuff helps too, maybe martial arts are the masculine equivalent to talk therapy.
I for one am tired of the therapy meme. If everyone needs therapy, it’s society that’s wrong.
I don't think that the majority of people need therapy. But I've also never met a manager who acted like they were a Spartan going to war. This may well be one of those social bubble sorting issues, where something that is common in one person's experience is very rare in another person's experience.
It’s that there are a small amount of men in the modern world who need a warrior ethos and the ‘tempering fires of warfare’ and other such cringe imagery employed by those pushing hypermasculine ideology.
The majority of men don’t need to be ‘redeemed through violence’ and, like the proverbial middle manager, probably just need someone to tell them they aren’t alone and things will be OK in due course, or whatever a therapist does.
> The majority of men don’t need to be ‘redeemed through violence
And yet the manufactured adversity industry is booming. Look at all the marathons and triathlons and iron mans and spartan races and ninja warriors and all the other nonsense we’ve invented just to scratch this itch for men and women alike.
Humans _need_ something to fight against. If there’s nothing, they’ll make something up.
Assuming that humans actually need something to fight against. Then it's a good thing that we're making up reasons to do so. It's better than terrorizing innocent people halfway across the globe or even those that are closest to us. If these hyper aggressive people are given a relatively safe outlet to express their emotions then the world is better for it.
I'm curious why you think it's nonsense though. Those activities can be fun, safe and encourage discipline.
Most of the people I know who have done those races are essentially competing against themselves- they want to say they were able to do it.
I haven't met anyone who was actually competitive about it in terms of wanting to be the fastest or whatever. I suspect it is a minority of the group, who in turn are also a minority of society.
If we are making generalizations about what humans need, I wouldn't consider "fighting against something". Perhaps "being right on the internet" would fit more people.
> It’s that there are a small amount of men in the modern world who need a warrior ethos and the ‘tempering fires of warfare’ and other such cringe imagery employed by those pushing hypermasculine ideology.
No one is pushing that, other than those that push that as a strawman.
> The majority of men don’t need to be ‘redeemed through violence’
You are so far off the mark that you're crossing over into speculative fiction at this point.
Ever heard of testosterone? Do you know what the effects are?
Okay, sure, it doesn't result in a bloodlust, but it is largely responsible for active aggression. As a society we channel this aggression into sports where it can be safely bled with limited violence.
> I for one am tired of the therapy meme. If everyone needs therapy, it’s society that’s wrong.
What's wrong with therapy? You go to the doctor from time to time to take care of your physical health, why shouldn't you go to a therapist from time to time to take care of your mental health?
Nothing is wrong with therapy. I’m just saying that if your entire diet consists of ice cream and you’re feeling poorly, maybe try eating some veggies. You don’t need a doctor for that.
When the damage is already done, you need both. You need to address the social problems that cause mental health problems, which, by the way, is not easy, and you need therapy for those who already have mental health problems.
I think the crucial difference to me is whether people say “You need therapy [to change your life]” (good imo) or “You need therapy [to fit into your life]” (bad imo). And it feels like too many people mean the latter.
> You go to the doctor from time to time to take care of your physical health, why shouldn't you go to a therapist from time to time to take care of your mental health?
I don't know about the US, but here in Australia, GPs are supposed to take care of both your physical health and your mental health.
Feel the need to see a psychologist? You go see your GP, and they create a GP mental health care plan, which entitles you to a certain number of government-subsidised psychologist sessions per a year. At a certain point through those sessions, you need to go back to the GP to get the plan reviewed. The psychologist sends your GP status reports on your progress.
Feel the need to see a psychiatrist? You need to go to your GP and get a psychiatry referral, before a psychiatrist will see you. You have to go back to the GP once every 12 months to get the referral renewed. The psychiatrist sends regular reports back to the GP on your progress.
GPs also commonly prescribe antidepressants, anti-anxiety drugs, antipsychotics, etc. Individuals with more serious mental health needs are referred to psychiatry/psychology (sometimes paediatrics for children/adolescents), also those who need prescriptions GPs can't legally write (mostly psycho-stimulants for ADHD).
All this talk of "you need therapy" is very American. One thing the Australian government is concerned about, is people with only mild (or even non-existent) mental health issues consuming mental health resources, causing strain on the availability of those resources for those with more severe mental health issues who really need them, and adding to the burden on the taxpayer – especially when those who seek out professional mental health services for minor issues skew middle-to-upper class, while many lower class people with serious mental health issues aren't getting enough support.
Spoken like someone who lives in a country with a pragmatic healthcare system!
I jest, but I think you are right on the money that this talk of "you need therapy" is very American. The deep irony of someone telling someone else "you need therapy" is that it is spoken with the implication that it should be considered a punishment for a moral failing, rather than resource to live a one's existing life but better. It all feels very Puritan.
Ideally yes. But in my very limited exposure to a therapist, it seems like therapy is far slower and open ended than going to a physician. A physician would not say “I can’t give you an immediate diagnosis, You will have to visit this clinic regularly for an indefinite period to understand what your problem is”. Doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence that I’m going to get anything out of it
> You go to the doctor from time to time to take care of your physical health, why shouldn't you go to a therapist from time to time to take care of your mental health?
You don't "go to the doctor from time to time", unless you're in some dysfunctional medical system where doctors can make more money by doing unnecessary work. You go to the doctor when you have a problem. You don't see a doctor regularly unless you've got something wrong with you (including old age, but old age life is not exactly healthy - it just beats the alternative), and if a lot of people in a certain environment are going to the doctor regularly then there's something wrong with that environment.
> You don't "go to the doctor from time to time", unless you're in some dysfunctional medical system where doctors can make more money by doing unnecessary work.
On the contrary, you should go for regular checkups. Even late-stage capitalist health insurance covers these, because it help detect some problems early, before they become a bigger problem. Generally, this is once a year or so.
> On the contrary, you should go for regular checkups. Even late-stage capitalist health insurance covers these, because it help detect some problems early, before they become a bigger problem. Generally, this is once a year or so.
Nah. They're popular in America because of the corrupt healthcare-industrial complex, there's no health benefit on average.
(OTOH, if and when you notice something unusual, go to the doctor post-haste, don't wait around hoping it'll clear up or put off mentioning it until your scheduled annual medical).
> What's wrong with therapy? You go to the doctor from time to time to take care of your physical health, why shouldn't you go to a therapist from time to time to take care of your mental health?
There's a big difference, though.
Doctors, by and large, diagnose using a body of knowledge acquired from scientific fact backed by intensive peer-reviewed and reproducible studies. They prescribe using a similarly evidence-based foundation of facts.
Therapists (psychologists, not psychiatrists) have no such foundations in science. Much of what they "know" is from non-reproducible studies.
If you need mental health maintenance, there's literally no evidence that going to an actual therapist is any more or less helpful than meditating, religious involvement, sports clubs, homeopathic remedies, diet modification, acupuncture, etc.
I'm not arguing that taking care of one's mental health isn't a good thing, I'm arguing that there's no evidence that therapy with a psychologist is better than the placebo.
>>> What's wrong with therapy? You go to the doctor from time to time to take care of your physical health, why shouldn't you go to a therapist from time to time to take care of your mental health?
You presumably think there's a) an objective thing called "mental health" that can b) be effectively treated by talking to someone called a "therapist". But if either a or b is not correct, then there may be something wrong with going to therapy.
> If everyone needs therapy, it’s society that’s wrong.
This. Pioneering psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, father of character analysis made a similar claim. He was pilloried for suggesting that we should focus on prevention of mental illness over treatment. To do this he said that we should radically reorient our societies so that they meet people's organismic needs. He died in US prison.
The psych establishment now is a tool to rehabilitate workers who have become unproductive, not a way to help humans fulfill their potential. Therapy has been helpful to me, but woefully inadequate. That is by design. It's not about my needs, it's about my employer's needs.
He died in US prison because he was committing large scale fraud, specifically by claiming to be selling a miracle cure for cancer that didn't actually work.
For those curious, the miracle cure was sitting inside a special magic box he claimed would do something with your "orgone energy", which was like that orgasm/organism joke but posited as a real thing his device could help you with.
Reich had been persecuted on two continents long before he went crazy and raved about cloudbusting and orgone. The early psychoanalytic period was a wacky time by modern psychological standards, and his pseudoscience about "bions" didn't help. But what really did him in was his transgression of practitioner neutrality, his advocacy of free sexual expression, his touch-based therapies, and his insistence that a psychiatrist's job is to help reform society to better meet the psycho and the somatic needs of the masses. Only then could we prevent "neurosis" rather than just treat it. Even today the idea of reforming society to prevent mental illness is hugely controversial.
They burned his books, including "The Mass Psychology of Fascism" and his seminal "Character Analysis" in what has been called one of the worst instances of book burning in US history at the time. Looks like the burning times are back, eh?
He was jailed for refusing not to proselytize the Orgone box, but that was really a pretext. Orgone boxes aren't in any way dangerous. He was jailed because his theories and practice were a threat to the status quo.
Selling something to cure cancer that does not cure cancer is fraud and it's normal to go to jail for it - two years is not that long of a sentence for it, either. I would need to see a lot more evidence that his sentence for fraud was a pretext for political imprisonment to believe that.
To be perfectly clear, I'm familiar with multiple political prisoners in the USA and am well aware that the US does imprison people for political reasons. I'm just not convinced that this guy is one of them.
Your point about fake cures is well taken. But I hope you can see there was more involved. Imagine touching clients, working on their sexual expression, and pushing radical, explicitly anti-fascist social change in the USA during the height of "Leave it to Beaver", Behaviorism, and the Red Scare. The knives were out for him with or without the box. He came to the US to escape persecution but it followed him all the way from Europe and led to his untimely death and the utter destruction of his liberatory vision for psychiatry. The ground was scorched and we are still bereft of a comparable vision.
The therapy meme is just another result of monetizing every thing about our lives. There’s a whole industry that benefits from us thinking everyone needs therapy.
Sometime I wish we had a real, secular, replacement for the church that existed off of donations (with basically everyone donating for cultural reasons) and took care of education, medicine, community building and psychiatric support. One that wasn’t the government, obviously, since that has the monopoly on violence as well.
There's always room for society to be improved, but I'll take a society where everyone needs therapy over one where most people die of disease, hunger or violence long before reaching old age.
If these aspects are inappropriate, why does society continue to reinforce them? If these are just individual acts of toxicity, it would be wrong to call it toxic masculinity.
There is a lot of pressure to conform within one's peer group from a very young age. It is possible that "nurture" pushes men and women down these destructive paths rather than nature.
That's pretty rich considering wars are still happening very often. Maybe we should generate a society where a person who has the personality suited for war can live as well as a person who has the personality suited for peace. For one thing is certain, war will come.
Middle managers are some of the nastiest petty tyrants you'll ever meet, and dearly require proper melee combat to teach them that other people are, in fact, human enough to oppose them.
Does therapy help? I see this throwaway line of "needing help" or "getting therapy" quite often, but I'm dubious about whether it does anything. Get help is often suggested in response to depression, but the actual treatment by psychiatrists is to basically pick an antidepressant with the help of a game of darts and hope for the best. Repeat until you've tried various options for a few years.
Is therapy any more effective than that? Or do they just repeat you into submission until you sing the right tune even if you don't believe in it?
Therapy hasn't helped me "break down any walls", but I have found it useful at times sharing my troubles with someone because it makes me feel less alone in it all.
There are a lot of useless therapies. I've been through several garden variety therapists and the cost was simply not worth it. Part of the problem with therapy is you know nothing about your new therapist, and more often than not the therapist has no idea what you're going through. So you lack the connection. The therapist/client relationship is very narrow and neutered and its easy to waste a lot of time.
However -- I did have some breakthroughs with a life coach I found watching youtube vids. It was really helpful for me to go into a therapeutic relationship when I already know I can connect with the coach on a personal level.
Where are these normal people you speak of ? University and highschool dating pools are heavily gendered, as women themselves will profess to dating toxic dudes through college. Once at work, dating apps and bars become the only accepted dating avenues, both of which are heavily gendered. There are other soft-dating venues like Co-Ed sports and workplaces, but non-traditionally attractive people often do not have the "charisma" to read "signs". So they run the risk of being considered creeps.
I will be the first to say #notAllWomen, but every number is heavily skewed in a direction that promotes toxic masculinity.
This doesn't line up with my understanding of human nature. I never really got into pickup culture and have ended up incredibly lucky, so don't read any bitterness in this comment. The pickup game didn't come from nowhere. It culturally evolved because these techniques are extremely effective hacks on the human brain. There are elements of it that you can ethically utilize, but if you go all in on it, you are manipulating people to your own ends. This isn't a game some people play and some don't.
Mm it's not even pick-up really. Pickup is about a bunch of catchy and cheesy lines and hacks as you say and it's not what I was referring to.
I was mostly referring to the general idea tat woman are attracted to dominant, physically strong, confident men (that's for the 'good' traits') but also downright confrontational, insulting, mean and even humiliating with other people.
Since in my opinion women want to avoid being with what they perceive is a "weak" man, they will give a pass to all the bad traits because they see it as 'being a strong dominant man', and if you are nice or just not mean, they will be scared you are being weak
There's another pickup culture that you seem to not have heard about that centers around what you're talking about. Things like nagging.
If anyone reads this and decides to learn about it, go ahead. I'm never going to tell someone else not to educate themselves. But don't treat it as an instruction book, and don't treat anyone like shit.
And davidguetta, if you can figure out how to express the good traits but not the bad ones, you'll find a girl that is not only attracted to you but may actually grow to love you. And what's more, you'll learn to love and respect her and yourself.
What women are looking for is someone confident in their ability to defend themselves and others. You don't need to be toxic to show that.
Nagging is absolutely part of what I was describing, but it's more general. You can also just treat other men in the room as shit and telling to the girl these men are a bunch of pussies and she will love it. Part of it because it's kinda true in some ways... You have to be suble about it tho.
> And davidguetta, if you can figure out how to express the good traits but not the bad ones, you'll find a girl that is not only attracted to you but may actually grow to love you. And what's more, you'll learn to love and respect her and yourself.
Yeah.... well first if you read my message I never said I even WANTED to express bad traits or did it that much beside trying to pick up in bars, nor think it's good. It just works better in the flirting phase, whatever you or I think about.
BTW there's a class of girl where it works particularly well and it's the cliché of the "low self esteem girl"(LSE). It's the kind of girl who thinks / knows she's crazy / stupid and have issues so you can't really NOT be an ass to her because if you treat her as your equal she's going to despise you. ("I suck but he likes me so he must suck too"). I'd recommend running away from these kinda of girls but if you want sex there are a bunch of hot ones among them.
Also I think you should know love and attraction are a lot closer one from the other from what you seem to think...
But once again I'm not particularly interested in having to do that as a man. I'm in a relationship and I explicitly explained to my gf that she should be ambitious, have some fight in her and not take shit from other people or me. I also vaguely explained whole concept of LSE so that she doesn't become one. I have 0 interest in being in a relationship where I can see my gf as someone I respect / vaguely admire. I mean there are women astronauts ffs
> Also I think you should know love and attraction are a lot closer one from the other from what you seem to think...
Or there may be a lot more to it than you think. Attraction will certainly fade.
Anyway, I didn't mean to jump to conclusions about you, but I'm sure you know there are plenty of guys that look for fulfillment through sex, don't care who they hurt doing it, and it's not a great path.
> there are plenty of guys that look for fulfillment through sex, don't care who they hurt doing it, and it's not a great path.
It's not that bad if you are young. To me the good path is you should fuck at least 20 girls to know what you like / how girls work before settling (and girls should do the same). Then after 40+ girls you get tired of it if you are not a retard. The fact that most young people almost don't fuck at all is a bigger problem than the one who fuck too much ^^ (consensually of course)
In general girls who don't go to nightclub are still going to respond to basically the same 'stimuli' / behavior than club girls. It's just in general they are less conscious of it and don't understand it, and sometime blame themseleves (when they are not just at the edge of depression) for despising their "nice" boyfriend and getting horny for the "toxic" guy.
Not really. I've found the opposite: last time I was single I spent a year dating professors, PhD students, professionals of various kinds, scientists etc. It was off the back of a profile that was specifically designed to highlight my mind and interests. I got very few hits from Instagram obsessives and had a truly wild time.
>>When my kid was young and I was out with him the other parents (invariably women) treated me as an oddity and assumed I would be incompetent.
That didn't happen to me but I live in a large city where I've come across (many) other dads who seemed to have more flexible schedules as evidenced by said dads showing up for pickup/dropoff and playdates. I'm not sure if there is/was a greater acceptance for fathers taking care of young children more visibly in metropolitan areas.
>> Previous generations succumbed badly to gender essentialism... and as ever, left a mess for the next generations.
Perhaps previous generations--thousands of them? millions?--realized there's more to gender than blank-slate social constructionism. And the mess is self-created by a younger generation wanting to rebel for want of anything else to rebel against?
See how easy it is to apply ageism in the other direction? /s
Yeah exactly. I let this kind of thing slide because obviously the problems facing minorities/women as groups are far worse than the problems facing men as a group, but just shifting the conversation from "I think group A of people is the problem" to "I think group B of people is the problem" is creating downstream problems. And there are very real issues facing men - suicide rates are dramatic enough to indicate that. I think the goal should be reduce social/economic/criminal expectations based on what group(s) a particular individual is lumped in, because we are all simultaneously part of, victims of, and perpetrators of a system that damages people, though obviously some groups are hurt way more than others.
Public opinion oversimplifies things to good vs bad and works like a pendulum, and I just hope it doesn't swing too much in the opposite direction. If people saying "men suck" is a temporary by-product of addressing systemic gender inequality then that's a price I'm willing to pay. I've benefited plenty from the power of average white male mediocrity.
This is a perilous line of thinking! Let's try it with race - "Black homicide rates are seven to eight times those of whites".
And yet, here in Latin America, there are posters in every major city decrying the crisis of "femicidio" (murder of women). Not because they are disproportionately victims (quite the opposite), but because that's what's interesting to the American NGOs that decide what political issues are trendy and important.
I am not excusing homicides, but can you imagine that perhaps being emotionally illiterate and constantly put down might cause someone to be more likely to become violent?
When they cannot defend themselves in all of the social discussion, bargaining, and gossip that is used for control of their lives, the feeling of helplessness can become overwhelming.
And if a confrontation becomes violent, probabilistically the bigger, stronger one will most likely win. In a male-female dynamic where death is the outcome, the origin of the conflict is rarely considered.
In many countries girls and women still need education for reading and written communication. I think in every country boys and men should receive education for emotional self-understanding and communication.
I really hate to be put in the position of looking like I'm minimizing this, because I made the same point in my post that suicide rates are an obvious indicator that there is something wrong here. But just want to point out that this is not a new thing, and I don't think it was caused by people saying "men suck". https://www.statista.com/statistics/187478/death-rate-from-s...
But I'm with you in the frustration that this isn't talked about.
No, I don't think you've minimized the issue at all. In fact, you've highlighted the fact that men have always struggled with mental health, and if anything we need more support, not people telling us that we should die.
What makes you say the problems facing people other than man are far worse? I'm genuinely curious, because often conversation around these topics will go along the lines of "well, women have to worry about getting beaten up" (or (sexually) assaulted, etc), but men have problems too!
The above attitude I feel like minimises men's problems - the implicit assumption is that everyone else has it worse, whether that attitude was intended or not.
I've done literally no research into the problems these groups face comparatively, but I find it interesting that above case is usually assumed.
I don't wanna get into a whole thing, but if you stop to think for maybe 10 seconds, you'd realize that the problems women face (physically, socially, economically ,etc) are incomparably worse than what men face.
- How about the fact that in some countries women can't even show their hair, have the right to drive or vote?
- How about the fact that women are several times more likely to be sexually assaulted?
- How about the fact that women have to worry about potential unwanted pregnancy?
- How about the fact that abortion laws are being repealed across the United States?
- How about the glass ceiling and the fact that women are paid less for the same jobs across many industries?
That's not to say that men don't have their own challenges as well, but it's borderline delusional if you think that men and women face the same level of challenges.
> How about the fact that in some countries women can't even show their hair, have the right to drive or vote?
I don't want to diminish the experience of people in other countries. But comparing acros so many different variable muddy the water. If you gonna bring up women in muslim/arab countries (many of which support the hijab btw), then i will raise you the men currently dying in ukraine and what ever war you want to talk about.
Let's focus on the average experience in the US... where we have both enough information and cultural understanding to make good commentary.
> - How about the fact that women are several times more likely to be sexually assaulted?
Something, something prison...
And what about the other kind of assaults... like say murder ?
> How about the fact that women have to worry about potential unwanted pregnancy?
Touche on this one. Also i would say that women have more control on when/if they want to be parent as opposed to men. And the 18 year child support can be brutal. (Did you know that child support can't be discharged in bankruptcy court ?)
> How about the fact that abortion laws are being repealed across the United States?
Agree that a travesty.
> How about the glass ceiling and the fact that women are paid less for the same jobs across many industries?
Yeah this one is a rabit hole. But comparing modern data, and normalizing this is much less pronouced.
How about the missing men in univestity etc... etc...
> That's not to say that men don't have their own challenges as well, but it's borderline delusional if you think that men and women face the same level of challenges.
This must be an american thing, the weird need to diminish or reduce the experience of a certain group. Life sucks, and sucks for a lot of people accros so many different variable.
I understand the concept that some issue might be more pressing , but to call someone delusional simply for asking the question is not helful at all...
Also that most problems women face are also part of related issues for men: the construction of femininity in opposition to masculinity has been the basis of an enormous amount of bullying and emotional trauma for men who are perceived to not adequately meet whatever arbitrary standard of "manliness" is allowed.
This should be familiar to most male members of this forum: being the computer nerd was weak, not playing the man's sports was "girly", not meeting body image standards is contrasted to being too feminine.
Men who are raped aren't taken seriously at all because of these problems. But that's never getting fixed so long as your only answer (and it's rife in this thread) is to construct these issues in opposition to femininity.
Instead everyone can remember one person saying "men suck" in some context, and on that basis they're clamoring to tear down decades of progress on equality. Which isn't going to help any man.
I was wrong to use the word "obviously", and would change it to "in my opinion" if I could still edit that post. And definitely did not intend to minimize mens problems - I'm a man myself and have first hand experience. I've had this conversation with a friend who is a outspoken feminist who I felt erased the problems men faced.
I don't have time to show my thoughts with any objective metrics, so I'm just going to lay out how I see things, so this will be touchy-feely. This is merely my opinion and I have no problem with people disagreeing.
I think the biggest impact is in how people can function in modern society - pay gap, positions of power, tokenization - a good book is "Invisible Man" by Ralph Waldo Ellison which is about more than being black in America but about being an individual that everyone wants to put in a box or a particular group - he's invisible because people don't see the individual. It's universal, and everyone feels that to some degree, but the degree I feel it as a white male is much smaller. Basically your ability to project your will on the world is easy mode for white male (btw - me).
Anecdote alert: For example I was literally just talking to an old friend who I've worked with in the past who is a great architect but kept getting the in-the-middle-of-nowhere projects at a very well known and old NYC firm, so she started her own architecture business and is doing quite well.
But not that it makes things easy for men! Because there is also expectation to be a provider, suck up your emotions and be tough. These things, which some point to as "the problem" are harming men as well and should be addressed. And this is where it gets very messy - some of the things that are "evidence" that men are privileged are also things that harm men in non-obvious ways. And as for the "easy to project your will", there is also an expectation that you have to and you're a failure if you don't. Why can't someone live a simple life without feeling like a failure?
Ultimately I think the ideal goal should be to not push gender based expectations - both for male and female.
Thanks for the reply, I get where you're coming from. I think I mostly just wanted to bring up the implicit assumptions that are made about the problems a certain group can have.
I suppose a lot of these issues come down to these subtler problems - Men have fewer problems in some senses (physical capability, professional respect, etc) but more in others (generally emotional and relationships), wheas for women it's often the reverse. These sorts of implicit assumptions that exist on a cultural level can be difficult for people of the opposite gender to see or understand.
> I don't have time to show my thoughts with any objective metrics,
Here's the thing though, there are objective metrics. On almost all of them, women have it better as a group than men.
Victims of violence? Overwhelmingly male. Suicides? The same. Deaths and injuries at work. The bar charts for all of those look pretty much the same.
Other objective metrics reveal females to have the upper hand: education (better for females, worse for males), health (better for females, worse for males), family court (better for females, worse for males), employment (better for females than for males), homelessness (better for females than for males).
So your assertion that there exists objective metrics but that it would take too long to present is, I feel, maybe correct, but there's so few of those metrics and they need to be applied to narrowly, they may as well not exist.
Interestingly, this is a plot point in a very popular Chinese-language sci-fi novel called Death’s End. Humanity is deliberately nudged to take on more feminine qualities to make them a less effective fighting force against a colonizing species.
The author had to run his book by the CCP - you get the sense this hints at an accepted strategy in the Chinese mainland. It’s an interesting read.
> Its use was banned in the European Union in 2004
If so this should be something that's possible to control for in studies. I can't find a lot of data from Europe newer than about that date, even suitable for casual discussion.
The trilogy talks about human society ebbing and flowing between "tough" and "sensitive" over the generations. Mostly, the Trisolarans rely on the Sophon lock. With superior technology, the masculinity of your prey is totally irrelevant. And, in Death's End, everyone's in an Australian penal colony anyway.
> What's surprising is there is no visible response to neutralise that dogma.
Perhaps because your exceedingly-vague conspiracy theory is full of holes? For example:
1. Which foreign governments are you accusing? Do you even know, or are you just assuming somebody must be doing the thing?
2. Exactly what mechanism of foreign "grants" is being used to force the hiring of certain staff or educators, and where are they being hired?
3. What makes those individuals "demoralizing" actors, and why do you believe they have a significant effect on "young men"?
4. On what grounds can it be anything but noise, a tiny droplet in the heaving cultural ocean that is "current gender roles and expectations"?
_____
Truly nefarious foes would probably have much better results (for less money) just pumping out catchy songs with demoralizing subtext and hoping one gets popular. Heck, maybe they even spread a dogma of powerlessness by funding US Christian Radio stations, constantly telling people they are nothing without Jesus.
Hold up, there's a HUGE difference between these two:
A: "Most people consider it an objective fact that Russia is a current geopolitical enemy to the US, it does some wacky shit, therefore if a foreign government is committing shenanigans there's a chance it's Russia."
B: "Most people consider it an objective fact that Russia has been somehow giving educational grants to US institutions with the explicit goal of installing a fifth-column of educators who will demoralize young US men with misandry."
Believing A does not imply B.
The parent-poster isn't being vague because the answer is obvious-and-accepted... they're being vague because they want to push the "foreign enemies in our colleges" meme without giving the audience any handles for critical-thinking.
> A: "Most people consider it an objective fact that Russia is a current geopolitical enemy to the US, it does some wacky shit, therefore if a foreign government is committing shenanigans there's a chance it's Russia."
And that chance is: "probably", where "probably" means it is "basically" a fact. (Specific example: the same historic evidence of Russian trolls/hackers is regularly re-used as proof of new accusations, if any evidence is even provided that is.)
And any challenge to the claim? "Pedantic." (or: silence, highly predictable memes, insults, deflection, etc - ChatGPT would know better than me)
> Believing A does not imply B.
There are (at least) two kinds of imply (and "does not" for that matter):
- the correct, literal, logically perfect interpretation (typically (depends on the claim, of course) "pedantic" and not allowed)
- the colloquial/experiential interpretation (the right way to interpret it, that is probably correct)
> The parent-poster isn't being vague because the answer is obvious-and-accepted... they're being vague because they want to push the "foreign enemies in our colleges" meme without giving the audience any handles for critical-thinking.
What version of "is/isn't" is being used here: literal, or colloquial? :)
That's a shallow understanding of my message. I said that it's the dogma that corrupts minds and makes otherwise reasonable people do wicked things. Who created the dogma is a secondary question, for the US has plenty of enemies. In the near future we'll see how dogmas will become more elaborate, more oppressive, and it's the war of dogmas that will be central to future wars.
This is some next-level orientalism right here. On the assumption you're talking about China or Russia—neither regime is even close to "ancient". Neither has any meaningful organizational continuity going back further than their 20th-century revolutions.
I think he's thinking something else. Ancient enemies planning things that we can't even comprehend in a human lifespan. So some sort of conspiracy involving aliens, demons, Cthulhu, or something else.
Well if you look at China, being that you can change the policy but not the party, they plan for 50 years in the future. Where as the democratic nations can be hamstrung planning for 4 years at a time, with 2 years spent planning how to win the next election.
The USA is just lucky it has a deep state or special interest groups that continues pushing things ahead regardless of who is in in power. Sadly its mostly driven by corporate greed, it just happens to align with furthering US state power. You can see things like the Qatar-Turkey pipeline and Iraq war breaks out of the 4 year cycle cos they are good money makers.
> Well if you look at China, being that you can change the policy but not the party, they plan for 50 years in the future.
This is the theory behind authoritarian regimes, but it doesn't actually play out that way. There's too much internal politicking in order to keep power concentrated, so you end up with a state that on paper should be able to execute faster and more coherently than a democratic state, but in practice is so hobbled by the internal conflicts and power games that it doesn't actually have all that much extra energy to solve real problems. An authoritarian regime's primary concern is maintaining its authority, everything else is secondary.
China grew rapidly as it industrialized not because of any strength in the communist regime, but because that's what happens when you have a lot of babies who suddenly stop dying—your working-age population explodes and your economy booms. Then China established the one child policy to try to cap the growth and prevent famine, took too long to repeal it and failed just to change the culture back toward large families, so now they're facing demographic collapse. Some 50-year plan that turned out to be.
In good faith, can you respond to Terr_'s comment above then?
1. Who is doing the funding?
2. How are they doing the funding?
3. What message are they spreading, and what proof do you have the message has an effect?
Calling it a conspiracy theory does not mean it is instantly wrong, but it is a correct label - the accusation is hidden (or perhaps not, apparently it's obvious) wealthy foreign funders controlling American society. If that doesn't look like a conspiracy theory (which again, does not mean it's wrong immediately!), then I don't know what you expect.
Aside from all the other problems with this that others have pointed out, the most obvious hyper-masculine adversary you might be referencing is currently proving to be embarrassingly inept at actual war. I would have expected western (particularly US) culture conservatives to stop complaining about the masculinity of our armed forces compared to our rivals once one of the rivals in question showed all the performative macho bullshit in the world doesn't make you actually good at fighting.
For some reason there's a comparison that comes to mind regarding Roman Legions fighting Germanic Barbarians. I don't know how true it is or if it's really all that provable anyway, but I remember learning that the Romans were quite effective because of their teamwork and discipline and the tools that they were able to use effectively because of that. While the barbarians liked swinging large swords and individual glory, the Romans had short gladiuses and long shields. They'd form a wall and just slowly advance while stabbing enemies in the guts.
Yuri Besmenov. I think he was being truthful in his descriptions all those years back, seems like it came to fruition quite nicely. I would have loved to have seen more interviews with him, say, each decade, and see how the climate at the time was filtered through his lense.
> By offering its education institutions large grants if they agree to hire the right ideologists.
Are you referring to the "Thousand Currents" program? Now referred to as United Front Work Program?
I use "Muslim", mostly because there's been a lot of negativity and discrimination surrounding Muslims in my own country, but obviously whatever works for you.
Misandry is normalized in society. Whenever you encounter a baseless attack on men just reverse the roles and you'll realize that there'd be pitchforks for treating women as anything other than paragons of virtue.
Entire entertainment genres are built around portraying men as inept fools who can be looked down upon by the opposite sex. Seinfeld is one of the few sitcoms where a female character is as flawed as the men. You couldn't even do that show today.
Interesting, maybe: Are any of those women not white? Aside from Beef, which I'm not sure counts as much since the actor was also the writer and the show doesn't have any main characters that aren't asian.
As a man I've never understood this complaint. Sure, it's a sitcom cliche to always have the bumbling dad and the competent mom who is usually also wildly out of his league, but the reasons why that's the more common case don't strike me as something to get upset about (it is boring writing, but that's a different problem). Humor at the expense of traditionally more powerful groups works better because it can be seen as both a way of balancing the scales a bit and it doesn't come with the uncomfortable connection to examples of people taking the underlying ideas way more seriously. Comedy about my gender is funnier because nobody actually thinks my gender is a weakness.
To that point, culture is absolutely full of baseless attacks on women too, often in a far more damaging context. Lots of people still feel way too comfortable suggesting women are biologically unsuited for high status jobs and really only valuable for making babies. And the vitriol directed at women in the abortion debate, and the actual reduction in rights that rhetoric has led to, sort of puts dumb male sitcom characters in perspective.
> but the reasons why that's the more common case don't strike me as something to get upset about
I would venture to guess that's because you are not in the socio-economical bracket where this is not just something you see on TV but become how people actually treat you.
In my arm-chair and widely unqualified perspective, the life experience of men is very very bi-modal. A select few with whatever the characteristic du-jour are can have such a different experience that it become harder to related to the less fortunate.
> Humor at the expense of traditionally more powerful groups works
About the same remark, traditionally, the most the people with the most power were/are men, doesn't follow that most men have power or that even that the average men have more power than the average women. The distribution of power/social status is usually very skewed for men.
> because it can be seen as both a way of balancing the scales a bit
Two wrong doesn't make a right , and the sin of the father do not belong to the sons. The problem with balancing things like this is that you are punishing people who weren't not involved in a situation...
> it doesn't come with the uncomfortable connection to examples of people taking the underlying ideas way more seriously.
And racist joke were also justified before because they were just joke that nobody take seriously.
> Comedy about my gender is funnier because nobody actually thinks my gender is a weakness.
You would be surprised... Sure not weakness... But things like emotional maturity and basic organization skills that's a different story.
> To that point, culture is absolutely full of baseless attacks on women too, often in a far more damaging context. Lots of people still feel way too comfortable suggesting women are biologically unsuited for high status jobs and really only valuable for making babies. And the vitriol directed at women in the abortion debate, and the actual reduction in rights that rhetoric has led to, sort of puts dumb male sitcom characters in perspective.
This also a big problem every time men/boys problem are brought to the for front. It seems to always been turned into "but what about women... etc..."
I can only speak for myself, as fairly liberal man. We all understand (even if we don't always relate to them) the tribulation that women face. Those things should definitively be addressed and fought for. But we don't need to solve ALL the women problems before we give some attentions to men issues. And certainly shouldn't use that as excuse to continue detrimental societal stereotypes.
Stereotyping an entire gender as dumb, un effective buffoon is wrong and as you mentioned yourself not very funny. Let's just stop it and move on... there is no need for mental gymnastic to find bizare excuses.
The issue is that, at least for me, growing up the only exposure you had to the concept of "normal" on TV was sitcoms. They lived in a block of shows that got shown either before or after The Simpsons (which was obviously meant to be not real, except for literally everything they said about the American healthcare system) and thus even though you knew there was meant to be funny things happening, it was never clear what the subversion of - not to teenagers trying to figure out their identity.
We had a stunning lack of shows which tried to depict well adjusted male characters: i.e. people who could have emotions, who could have flaws and were allowed to work to correct them, but who could also be sources of wisdom or correct. Instead we had "sitcoms" and "drama".
And in Australia at least, our "drama" is...pretty god damn messed up - but at least that was obviously something you didn't want to watch.
It's why show's like Bluey have exploded the way they have: it fills that need for a middle ground of something in media to say "this is what you can be" in a way which isn't playing to stereotypes.
Though I suppose all of that could be summarized as: the death of boomer humor about hating your wife is long-overdue.
Negative stereotypes about men are not okay. Please stop making excuses for negative stereotypes about men.
Yes, men are more privileged than women in many ways. But men are also disadvantaged in many ways -- many individual men are actual quite vulnerable! -- and negative stereotypes about men cause real harm. Yes, society is sometimes quite shitty to women; but that doesn't somehow make it okay to be shitty to men.
Feminism at its best treats both women and men with respect and dignity. Feminism at its worst uses "gender equality" to justify hurting men. Right now you're doing the latter. Please stop.
Because we did Seinfeld. It's done. You can still watch it. It's really popular amongst Millenials and Gen Z. People say "you couldn't do that show today" and I wonder what show they think isn't being done? Because It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia is right there - it's definitely not Seinfeld, because that would be redundant, but it's been happily leaning into similar ideas (while going a different direction).
I don't regularly (if ever) encounter "baseless attacks on men"... excepting situations where "reversing the roles" would result in the perpetrator still being a man and the victim still being a man.
> there'd be pitchforks for treating women as anything other than paragons of virtue.
Wait, are you doing a sarcasm?
Who wields the pitchforks? It's the husbands, right? Those who were wronged when their wives' virtue was called into question?
You just have to look at some of the prominent Karens who are now getting their behavior recorded to see how many have internalized this concept. Both SoHo and Central Park Karen's were quick to don the caul of victimhood to shine a negative light on males and seek special treatment when they were in fact the victimizers.
They were both quick to try to "don the caul of victimhood," but were they actually successful at all? Certainly in my "leftist" circles no one took their side.
Only because they were captured on video. This isn't a new phenomenon. Just like bad cops now being caught doing what they've always been doing. Remember. Believe Them. They'd never lie /s.
You must know my friends and acquaintances very well if you can predict their behavior in a hypothetical situation; even I wouldn't venture to do that!
You're confusing racist attacks with imagined "misandry". Note that the term 'karen' usually refers to a racist white woman, as it does in these cases.
In fact, the sensational coverage of these very incidents you cited demonstrates the misogynistic standards of the society and media cycle. The reason you've heard so much about these "prominent karens"[0] perpetrating racist attacks is because they are women. Women being violent is seen as a scandal and ridiculed by society/media. The fact that it's not an everyday occurrence is (counter-intuitively) why it seems so common. Men are responsible for a much greater share of all violence. It is clearly the violence perpetrated by men, not women, that is normalised.
[0] and that there can be "prominent karens" in the first place
It's not that men are portrayed as fools and women are not. It's more likely that women in the shows you are describing are there as fillers and not as characters of their own right -flawed or not-.
Blondie, Honeymooners, Flintstones, Family Guy, Simpsons, King of the Bronx, Bewitched, Munsters, Jeffersons, All in the Family, Married with Children, etc., are all the same premise:
Oafish bumpkin of a husband, the wise and understanding wife always coming to the rescue.
I don't think that's quite right... Married with Children is more like the husbands and the wives are constantly fighting, and its a battle of the sexes. (Granted I've not seen the whole show.) I Love Lucy also had that formula of men vs women, where Lucy and Ethel are plotting a prank or scheme against Richy and Fred or vice versa.
I don't think the Munsters is about the wife rescuing the husband. The humor is often about the family thinking they are normal, and the reaction they get from interacting with actual normal people. None of the characters are "wise" they all misunderstand the basic nature of what a normal family looks and acts like and fail to realize they are scaring normal people.
Herman was even described as having "the mind of a child" in one of the episodes. The plots often revolved about some childish scheme that Lily tried to put a stop to.
MwC was definitely the oafish husband, again with the childish schemes, much like Ralph in the Honeymooners. It's just a raunchy version of the Honeymooners.
ILL is a rare exception - a reverse Honeymooners.
P.S. I still enjoy watching these shows. Especially the Munsters. Herman always makes me laugh.
To elaborate a little, I watched season 1 of married with children a while ago and it struck me as a more modern I love Lucy. I can't speak to later seasons.
The Munsters... well, I think I've seen a few episodes. I don't recall the wife (Lily) doing much in the episodes I watched, to be honest. I did see the recent Munsters movie, and Herman is both the cause and solution to their problems, Lily doesn't really do much from what I recall, if she has a comedic premise it's the ridiculousness of her falling for Herman.
The Munster movies are unwatchable. They should never have been made. The TV series, though, is nigh perfect. Some nice touches are the mirrors that shatter whenever Herman looks in them, and the trombone accents are inspired.
I don't watch many sitcoms these days. Someone else mention It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. If you really believe the media treats women as paragons of virtue there should be no female villains in sitcoms, right?
Velma and Clone High have women as bad as the men and female villains. Wednesday is pretty removed from it's Adams Family roots and is only occasionally a comedy, but also features at least one female villain.
The recent Beavis and Butthead made for TV movie had a subplot where a female politician is chasing Beavis and Butthead through the country and trying to murder them to cover up a scandal. That's certainly not treating women as "paragons of virtue."
Hey nice hyperbolic strawman you've got there. It's actually the opposite. Transphobes think sex is interchangeable and can be imposed from the outside. The rest of us think gender comes from the inside and simply believe in loving and supporting people regardless of how THEY express their own gender.
People like you want to impose an external concept of gender onto trans people that doesn't comport with their self image. You want to forgo the medical science and drive trans people into depression and suicide because the idea of it makes you feel yucky.
There is some percentage of $x who hate $y for almost any value and combination of $x ad $y. It's not meaningful or constructive to look at the extreme nutjob examples when examining a movement in its entirety.
I completely disagree. As you know, the extreme nut job examples are always the loudest people in the group. It is not meaningless to account for them.
I agree many have an apparent outsized influence, but with some exceptions in most cases I think this is only optics, and they don't really represent all that many people.
"280 character soundbite" social media isn't helping either here, nor is "zomg person X said something ridiculous"-type "journalism".
Well, someone did seriously suggest getting rid of 90% of men, and invented a fairly popular slogan in the process. "The future -- if there is one -- is female" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sally_Miller_Gearhart
>“kill all black people” is a thing the state has tried to do,
No, generally a slave caste are not all murdered. My grandmother's second husband who had a number tattooed on his arm and spent years hiding in a forest, that was an attempt to kill all the X people.
Yeah I'm very left wing and in trans circles and that combination of rhetoric never made sense to me. It's giving in to the same harmful gender essentialism that generates transphobia (especially TERFs, who are basically entirely motivated by second wave radical feminism's silly misandry) so it's just kind of self contradictory, not to mention being unhelpful. Plus it's just... stupid? Like, sure, patriarchy, but one of the crucial parts of third wave feminism was seeing how patriarchy doesn't benefit all men at all, it only benefits a few, and even the mechanisms of their privilege can also harm men a lot. And saying stuff like that really does psychologically harm men even if they still have privilege (especially since they may not actually be in a good life position despite that). It's actually become a point of discussion in online trans spaces bc trans men have begun pointing out how harmful this rhetoric is — being made to feel evil and like "gender traitors" and stuff for being men, or, if they're excludeded from "KAM," being made to feel like men-lite. There's no winning with it.
Speaking of which, I felt [1] was a rather interesting article on that. Multiple people are interviewed and their experiences differ, but stuff like this really stands out, and especially that last paragraph is pretty relevant here:
Prior to my transition, I was an outspoken radical feminist. I spoke up often, loudly and with confidence. I was encouraged to speak up. I was given awards for my efforts, literally — it was like, “Oh, yeah, speak up, speak out.” When I speak up now, I am often given the direct or indirect message that I am “mansplaining,” “taking up too much space” or “asserting my white male heterosexual privilege.” Never mind that I am a first-generation Mexican American, a transsexual man, and married to the same woman I was with prior to my transition.
I find the assertion that I am now unable to speak out on issues I find important offensive and I refuse to allow anyone to silence me. My ability to empathize has grown exponentially, because I now factor men into my thinking and feeling about situations. Prior to my transition, I rarely considered how men experienced life or what they thought, wanted or liked about their lives. I have learned so much about the lives of men through my friendships with men
What continues to strike me is the significant reduction in friendliness and kindness now extended to me in public spaces. It now feels as though I am on my own: No one, outside of family and close friends, is paying any attention to my well-being.
I can recall a moment where this difference hit home. A couple of years into my medical gender transition, I was traveling on a public bus early one weekend morning. There were six people on the bus, including me. One was a woman. She was talking on a mobile phone very loudly and remarked that “men are such a–holes.” I immediately looked up at her and then around at the other men. Not one had lifted his head to look at the woman or anyone else. The woman saw me look at her and then commented to the person she was speaking with about “some a–hole on the bus right now looking at me.” I was stunned, because I recall being in similar situations, but in the reverse, many times: A man would say or do something deemed obnoxious or offensive, and I would find solidarity with the women around me as we made eye contact, rolled our eyes and maybe even commented out loud on the situation. I’m not sure I understand why the men did not respond, but it made a lasting impression on me.
This isn't even new, what is surprising is how society refuses to listen to Men. In 2006 Norah Vincent a woman, pretended to be a man for 12 months and wrote a book about her experience called Self Made Man, see some interviews about the book[1][2]
The mental strain of maintaining a false identity during the making of Self-Made Man ultimately caused a depressive breakdown, leading Vincent to admit herself to a locked psychiatric facility
The dogma among certain groups of feminists is that trans men are "really" confused lesbians, and that those feminists are entitled to their bodies because they "should" be in lesbian relationships as opposed to transitioning.
Claiming those feminists aren't feminists does nothing to stop them from calling themselves feminists.
Yes, the phenomena you're describing is very real, but I guarantee you that that type of person would never graffiti "Trans rights are human rights".
If the story is accurate as conveyed and the separate graffiti instances really were written by the same person (not a given, a lot of stories like this aren't true on the internet, although I think this one probably is), I have a decent idea of the sort of person that would write it - I have known a couple that could have written this while they were teenagers. Someone from the postmodern left or intersectional queer theory milieux, certainly young, not a cisgender man, who is frustrated with the ability of powerful men to continuously escape accountability for the violence they enact against women and queer people. They view "kill all men" as a non-literal rallying cry to demonstrate their seriousness and willingness to fight against the injustices they recognise in the world (and are/were likely subject to in their own lives). I am extremely certain they have never killed a man, and just as certain that if given the choice they would not actually kill all men (or any appreciable quantity thereof). They would probably kill a lot of rapists, if given omniscience and omnipotence. I'm giving all of this characterisation because I think it's very unlikely that most people on HN would have met or known well the sort of people that say these sort of things genuinely, and because most of what I see here on these topics is either genuine confusion or literally misguided anger that doesn't understand the people they are angry at.
For context, I agree with "Trans rights are human rights" as a slogan and disagree with "Kill all men" as a slogan.
> I'm giving all of this characterisation because I think it's very unlikely that most people on HN would have met or known well the sort of people that say these sort of things genuinely, and because most of what I see here on these topics is either genuine confusion or literally misguided anger that doesn't understand the people they are angry at.
Granted. However, even though we can never fully understand another person, we can still demand that nobody in the room calls for the elimination of another group of people, even as a "joke" or "expression of anger" or similar. That's basic defense of human rights, the acknowledgement that nobody deserves to be targeted for things they can't control. Because jokes are used by extremists to gauge the tone of the rest of the group, and, if the group is conducive, they magically aren't jokes anymore.
> For context, I agree with "Trans rights are human rights" as a slogan and disagree with "Kill all men" as a slogan.
>Granted. However, even though we can never fully understand another person, we can still demand that nobody in the room calls for the elimination of another group of people, even as a "joke" or "expression of anger" or similar.
To clarify, I was explaining what the type of person who would write that believes and why they would write it, because that question was asked in the thread. I don't agree with the slogan, I am just able to explain the thought processes and background of those who do.
>Because jokes are used by extremists to gauge the tone of the rest of the group, and, if the group is conducive, they magically aren't jokes anymore.
I'm familiar with the concept you're discussing but I don't think it applies here. For one, it's not a joke - it's insincere, but not humorous. For another, I have known neo-Nazis (I have worked in deradicalisation, specifically exit programs for young men in neo-Nazi groups) who would do the whole "day of the rope" thing and claim they were joking but were actually chomping at the bit to enact it, and I would consider myself well-equipped to judge whether these "kill all men" people were "secretly serious" like those neo-Nazis are. Genuinely, they really weren't.
Or, to put it another way, out of the people I knew who would be willing to say or agree with the slogan "kill all men", if they were in a social situation where they had the opportunity to contribute to the slaughter of a group of men in a socially supported way, they would not contribute and would almost certainly actively resist if they weren't having some sort of nervous breakdown at being in such an unusual situation. The same is not true for neo-Nazis or theocratic Islamists or some other groups that I have interacted with who are calling for the death of people with contingent insincerity - outside of a few of the younger members of those groups, given a social situation which allowed them to act out said social murder they would do it, and they all know it, as does anyone who interacts with them for any length of time. That's why I don't think the analogy is valuable, because in a practical sense these people aren't actually engaging in domestic terrorism and don't have any power to enforce their beliefs even if they were sincere, and also because I am familiar with the dynamics of the phrase and the sort of people that say it and they would not actually support mass murder even in an imaginary social context which was specifically supportive of that.
> I would consider myself well-equipped to judge whether these "kill all men" people were "secretly serious" like those neo-Nazis are. Genuinely, they really weren't.
I know you have said you don't agree with it, so please don't take the following as me accusing you of excusing the slogan or agreeing with it, I'm trying to further conversation and am interested in your thoughts and really don't want to come off as accusatory.
Even if it is 100% definitely, totally, absolutely, meant as a joke should we be making allowances for that? Lately we have culturally been moving away from jokes that are about genders/races/identities being considered acceptable... or at least we have been for all identities other than "white" and "men", such as in this case where this whole group of people will listen to someone saying "kill all men" and just understand it is a joke and let it go by.
I actually do understand why someone who feels frustrated by certain things might make a joke like that, and I have nuance enough to understand that context and audience matters, and that often things said in jest are a way to emotionally deal with something without any desire to cause any sort of hurt (emotionally or physically) to the people being joked about.
For me at least though that sort of joke is frustrating and hurtful when I have had to listen to years to (an often overlapping set of) people talking about how men have a responsibility to speak up when their male friends make those sorts of jokes and tell them to stop. "Silence is Violence" and all that sort of thing.
I guess what I'm getting at is you may say that people upset about people saying it don't understand the people saying it, but I do. I do hang around these sorts of people, some of my good friends belong to the local socialist party and their social circles include these sorts of people. And it still does upset me, not so much because of what they are saying - although it isn't a great thing to say - it's the hypocrisy of it that upsets me. I have legitimately heard the exact same person have a little rant about how misogynistic the phrase "bi--- be crazy" and also make jokes about how "the straights aren't ok", etc.
I think people in general, and myself especially, would be a lot more receptive to "oh it's just a joke" if those people hadn't spent a bunch of time policing what was said as part of comedy shows and stuff because as of right now it feels like a lot of people have decided that certain groups I am in are the only acceptable targets for this sort of thing, which is just... incredibly frustrating.
>I know you have said you don't agree with it, so please don't take the following as me accusing you of excusing the slogan or agreeing with it, I'm trying to further conversation and am interested in your thoughts and really don't want to come off as accusatory.
No problems, thank you for clarifying.
>Even if it is 100% definitely, totally, absolutely, meant as a joke should we be making allowances for that?
It is not a joke, I think you may have missed me saying that earlier. It is insincere, but not a joke. I think maybe you're conceiving of every statement that someone doesn't literally mean as being only okay if it's a joke (assuming it's a harmful thing to say in the first place, like "kill all men"). Have you ever talked with a co-worker and said (or heard them say) something like "I wish I could punt my boss into the sun"? It's not a joke, the person expressing it really does hate their boss and it's not intended to get a laugh, but it is insincere. By "insincere", I mean that the person does not have any intent to follow through with the literal specific thing they actually said. People just don't always talk literally, without there being a requirement that it's for humourous purposes. People can say these things as jokes and expect a laugh, but that isn't most of the use. It is definitely not the use when it's being graffitied onto a wall.
>such as in this case where this whole group of people will listen to someone saying "kill all men" and just understand it is a joke and let it go by.
I don't think that's true unless you're in a very strong filter bubble. In population-representative company "kill all men" will always get pushback, it's never going to be just accepted. I mean, just think about it being said in a group that's half men, it would be incredibly uncommon and would definitely receive pushback if someone did say it. It's not like society has agreed that "kill all men" is a cool thing to say, that just hasn't happened. It's also worth noting that "kill all men" is way, way, way less common than either "kill your local rapist" or "all men are bad" or "men suck", all much less controversial and much more common. "Kill all men" is a super fringe thing. My professional experience is in Australia and maybe it's different where you are, I can't comment on that. But I am familiar with the phrase and know where it comes from, and that it's not some common thing that goes unremarked in company.
>For me at least though that sort of joke is frustrating and hurtful when I have had to listen to years to (an often overlapping set of) people talking about how men have a responsibility to speak up when their male friends make those sorts of jokes and tell them to stop. "Silence is Violence" and all that sort of thing.
Yeah I'm very familiar with those campaigns, and I understand the facial similarity you're drawing. Those campaigns exist because domestic violence against women exists with a social and cultural support structure that normalises that violence, and the theory behind the campaigns is that intercepting the support structure earlier might stop some amount of domestic violence against women before it ever happens, by stopping its justification in culture.
It's not the same thing as the "kill all men" example because while some women definitely have killed some men, broadly speaking almost no men are being killed by women, and the number isn't spiking or any other observation that should make us concerned that that may change.
The reason those domestic violence campaigns got approved isn't because governments decided that the hurt feelings of women were worth spending a lot of money to prevent - it wasn't about the jokes and frankly at the time basically no government would have cared about th...
> Those campaigns exist because domestic violence against women exists with a social and cultural support structure that normalises that violence, and the theory behind the campaigns is that intercepting the support structure earlier might stop some amount of domestic violence against women before it ever happens, by stopping its justification in culture.
Yes I'm aware of the motivation, I am skeptical of the efficacy personally and I say that as someone who grew up a victim of domestic violence. In Australia in particular we also invest no resources in domestic violence against men, which has women perpetrators more than most people expect, but also doesn't help victims of DV who are in MLM relationships.
> It's not the same thing as the "kill all men" example because while some women definitely have killed some men, broadly speaking almost no men are being killed by women, and the number isn't spiking or any other observation that should make us concerned that that may change.
Look, "bit-- be crazy" is definitely not a call to violence. It's a form of commiseration and some venting. This is actually the hypocrisy - the assumption that everything said is coded hatred when said by or about certain people but not others. I'm not and never have claimed that the people saying "kill all men" meant it literally.
>Yes I'm aware of the motivation, I am skeptical of the efficacy personally and I say that as someone who grew up a victim of domestic violence. In Australia in particular we also invest no resources in domestic violence against men, which has women perpetrators more than most people expect, but also doesn't help victims of DV who are in MLM relationships.
I'm really sorry to hear you're a victim of domestic violence, and I appreciate you sharing that, I know that is an extremely difficult thing to do. It's actually not just Australia (I am also in Australia), in basically every country on Earth there is an absurdly small amount of resources dedicated to helping male victims of domestic violence, including both male victims of domestic violence by women and by men, when compared to the prevalence of that violence. Domestic violence against men, depending on the specific statistics used, is around half to a third as common as domestic violence against women - meanwhile, resources for male victims of domestic violence are more like 1/20th or less of the resources spent addressing domestic violence in general (which also need to be increased for women, as they're currently inadequate). It's a very important issue that does not receive enough attention, and unfortunately gets marred by associated with men who never mention it or care about the issue unless it's deployed in an argument to detract from the concerns of women. For what it's worth, I am a woman and care deeply about the issue, and have personally advocated to get DV support resources opened up to men as well, as well as including men on some of the poster campaigns we've done around domestic violence. It's an issue I find deeply frustrating to deal with because I generally encounter apathy from people in power.
I'm not sure how I feel about the efficacy of the specific campaigns around reducing "jokes". I certainly often feel like rates of domestic violence have not decreased, but there's obviously been a decrease in the "jokes" which is a self-evident good. I believe there is some research on this, but I'm not sure if there have been follow-up or efficacy studies since the campaigns. I'd be interested to know those results.
>Look, "bit-- be crazy" is definitely not a call to violence. It's a form of commiseration and some venting.
That's not true, it is misogyny. It's a reframing of a very old and violent trope that women are basically mentally unsound and don't need to be listened to. This attitude is the reason why many women suffered and suffer abuse in psychiatric care facilities, why fake medical conditions like hysteria were invented to pathologise normal reactions to oppressive conditions (and class as mental illnesses many physical illnesses which men refused to recognise). It is used that way today - "b*tches be crazy" as a saying means "Don't worry man, women are just like that [crazy]. Don't let it bother you." That is misogynistic.
>This is actually the hypocrisy - the assumption that everything said is coded hatred when said by or about certain people but not others. I'm not and never have claimed that the people saying "kill all men" meant it literally.
Someone who says "kill all men" definitely hates men. I've never claimed otherwise, and neither would the person saying "kill all men". There's no hypocrisy there - the issue people have with men saying misogynistic things isn't just that they hate women, many women hate men right back and are very capable of articulating what that means. The issue is that men have oppressed women and still do, and the misogynistic ideas they use to convey their positive feelings about that are important and valuable for the purpose of organising and normalising that oppression. Ideas are an important part of any group who believes anything, and men who believe in the inferiority of wom...
>make jokes about how "the straights aren't ok", etc.
I think you may be misunderstanding what that means, although in this case you have correctly identified that this is a joke. It doesn't mean "not okay" as in they're not acceptable or they're bad, it means they're "not okay" in the same way you might say to someone "The situation in Russia is not okay" or "Thank you for your concern, I'm not okay at the moment". It's an expression that someone needs to check in on them, not that they're bad. You'll find it said when straight people are doing something really weird for frivolous reasons related to their sexuality, like starting wildfires using a gender reveal party. It's sort of like concern trolling (not really, but explaining actual jokes is not my strong suit), in that it's a ~false expression of concern. If it bothers you a lot, I'd advise you to laugh at it and do some thorough research to learn what sort of weird things queer people are doing (as in actually doing, not the fake nonsense propaganda like grooming children or whatever - go to queer sources and find what they're complaining about queer people doing). I guess something like "At least straight people aren't declaring a national crisis over the top shortage when they could go outside and find one by literally just talking" or "I think the degree of drama involved in your average lesbian break-up definitely means they need a check-in". Just make sure you're always approaching the topic with the understanding that the people you're talking to and joking about are currently having their children taken away from them in America or being beaten up by fascists around the world or being mass murdered in Chechnya etc for being queer, and for that reason it would once again be a very bad idea to use the hypocrisy argument, because it's very easy for them to dismiss it (and you) by pointing out that these situations are not actually the same and therefore there's no obligation to talk about or treat them the same way.
>if those people hadn't spent a bunch of time policing what was said as part of comedy shows and stuff because as of right now it feels like a lot of people have decided that certain groups I am in are the only acceptable targets for this sort of thing, which is just... incredibly frustrating.
Just because of statistics, I know there's at least one group of acceptable targets for comedy that you're not in, which is the capitalist class. You can make jokes about Beyonce running sweatshops or Barack Obama drone striking weddings and the people you're talking about aren't going to have an issue with it unless they're the sort of identity opportunists/morefemalecampguards people I don't have any time for (and I don't think anyone should have any time for).
More generally, good comedy is about punching up. It might make you laugh (I don't know you) to hear that really funny one about how feeding disabled homeless women into a wood chipper is cool, but most sane people are going to view it as mean-spirited. It's a lord having a big old laugh about how the peasants look like scarecrows during the famine - true, and very funny for the court, but unlikely to get a laugh from the peasants for really obvious reasons. You still have things in common with the people making jokes that punch up though, and there are people above both of you that you can both joke about. If it's too personally distressing to deal with jokes about you being white or straight or a man or cisgender or abled, you almost always have the option not to listen to them. Even if you're a diehard comedy fan, the vast majority of standup comics are not making jokes about how "straight cisgender white abled men suck amiright?" Guarantee it.
> It's an expression that someone needs to check in on them, not that they're bad
Trust me, in context it was an implication they are bad. I understand that it isn't always used that way, but in this case it definitely was an implication they are bad.
> it means they're "not okay" in the same way you might say to someone "The situation in Russia is not okay" or "Thank you for your concern, I'm not okay at the moment". It's an expression that someone needs to check in on them
I understand it is often used this way, but trust me in the group of people I know in real life it isn't always. Plus frankly even that usage could be seen as kind of patronizing, though again I want to stress that I am not personally offended by the joke itself
> If it's too personally distressing to deal with jokes about you being white or straight or a man or cisgender or abled, you almost always have the option not to listen to them. Even if you're a diehard comedy fan, the vast majority of standup comics are not making jokes about how "straight cisgender white abled men suck amiright?" Guarantee it.
I feel like you've really missed my point. I don't mind the jokes, they are (mostly) not a reflection of any genuine ill will, many of them are funny to me, etc. What is frustrating is how quickly people will assume ill will when jokes are made about certain groups of people and not others. The jokes themselves are fine.
>Trust me, in context it was an implication they are bad. I understand that it isn't always used that way, but in this case it definitely was an implication they are bad.
As you noted, we're both in Australia, so there's no language or cultural differences here, so I know you're incorrect. The "not okay" in that phrase is the version of "not okay" in "I just got admitted to the psych ward, I'm not okay", it is not the version of "not okay" in "Terrorism is not okay". They are two different meanings, only one of them is the correct one for that saying.
>I understand it is often used this way, but trust me in the group of people I know in real life it isn't always. Plus frankly even that usage could be seen as kind of patronizing, though again I want to stress that I am not personally offended by the joke itself
It is insulting, patronising is exactly the right word. It's intended meaning is something like "There's something so wrong in straight culture, they need an intervention, look at this example" - it's faux concern. I wasn't explaining why it wasn't insulting, I was explaining why the meaning you were ascribing to it wasn't grammatically correct.
>I feel like you've really missed my point. I don't mind the jokes, they are (mostly) not a reflection of any genuine ill will, many of them are funny to me, etc. What is frustrating is how quickly people will assume ill will when jokes are made about certain groups of people and not others. The jokes themselves are fine.
Okay, so if I'm understanding you correctly the jokes don't cause any harm to you, but similar jokes do cause harm to marginalised people. Your contention is because the grammatical format of the joke is the same and you're not offended by it when you're the object of it, marginalised people should not be offended when they are the object of it. I don't agree with that contention, it's a false equivalency (grammatical equality does not equal semantic equality), but I think I would just like to understand how you're thinking of it. You remember the lord joking about how the peasants look like scarecrows during the famine, and how that is an objectively true observation that the lord and the court find funny but the peasants don't find funny? Do you understand why even though it's true and clearly funny to the lord and his coterie, the peasants wouldn't find it funny? If the peasants joked about the lord looking like a tomato, would you consider that to be hypocritical?
> As you noted, we're both in Australia, so there's no language or cultural differences here, so I know you're incorrect. The "not okay" in that phrase is the version of "not okay" in "I just got admitted to the psych ward, I'm not okay", it is not the version of "not okay" in "Terrorism is not okay". They are two different meanings, only one of them is the correct one for that saying.
So two things. One "not okay" as in psych ward can still imply negative things, but secondly I am aware of the useage of it as a saying, I am referring to jokes people have made using the saying in such a way as to imply the other meaning of not OK, which in part are funny precisely because of the typical saying. I am getting very frustrated you refuse to believe that anyone may play on the standard meaning and that I must be mistaken.
> Your contention is because the grammatical format of the joke is the same and you're not offended by it when you're the object of it, marginalised people should not be offended when they are the object of it.
No that isn't my contention. My contention is that offense doesn't equate to harm. I find some of the jokes I am talking about offensive, but I also am capable of understanding the context in which many of them are said and that the people saying them aren't actually terrible prejudiced people. Some of them absolutely are, I've met some people who are definitely actively prejudiced but they are a minority.
> You remember the lord joking about how the peasants look like scarecrows during the famine, and how that is an objectively true observation that the lord and the court find funny but the peasants don't find funny? Do you understand why even though it's true and clearly funny to the lord and his coterie, the peasants wouldn't find it funny? If the peasants joked about the lord looking like a tomato, would you consider that to be hypocritical?
I feel like this is a false equivalency. The lord and his court are why the peasants look like scarecrows in the first place, because they will have taxed them and taken a large part of their crops and left them with little to eat. This is laughing at the misfortune of people while being the cause of the misfortune.
I also think there is a big difference between making a joke about the suffering that people actively are going through than there is about say, making a joke that references the stereotype that lesbian couples move in together quickly.
I can't flag yet, but you were flagged because your comment included a lie insinuating that queer people are predators, specifically that they "indoctrinate and neuter children". Most people would recognise that as hate speech, and older people would remember that the exact same hate speech was used against homosexuals (and still is, by many of the most fervent spreaders of the idea today).
I am not interested in debating the hate speech with you and I don't know why you thought I would be, obviously I am not going to believe your nonsense, I'm a normal person. I was just answering the complaining at the end of your comment about why your comment was flagged.
You're using feelings rather than reason to argue, which generally doesn't find much traction on Hacker News.
The increasing politicisation of the flag button, and its pernicious use as a surrogate for strong disagreement is a disturbing trend.
And you still have not come even remotely close to justifying the assertion that I'm engaging in hate speech - and the reason for that is not your unwillingness to engage, it's that there exists no argument in support of your case.
The distinction is that Jews can and indeed repeatedly have been rounded up and slaughtered. Not something that will ever happen to 'men' as a whole class (who would do it? Women?)
So violence is fine because it's not as bad as some other horrific events in the past? The barometer shouldn't be the frequency of violence reaching a certain threshold. It's should be zero for everyone.
You should genuinely be embarrassed at this remarkably stupid and pathetic distinction.
The point is that the threat cannot be real (to the class as a whole). Indeed, it is hard to consider it real to an individual, unless you think there are gangs of women going around beating up men just for being men.
Surely you can see the distinction between a real and possible threat, that might genuinely put fear into the object class, and words that can never be actioned? "Kill all men" might as well say "beware of the vicious rabbit"
> The juror stated that he found that Depp and Heard "were both abusive to each other" but that Heard's team failed to prove that Depp's abuse was physical.
Not sure how any of that substantiates whatever point it is you are trying to make. Unless making allegations of violence is now considered violence itself?
Ummm what? This is maybe the dumbest thing I've ever read.
The Massacre of the Bani Qurayza (627 AD): According to Islamic sources, during the siege of Medina in the aftermath of the Battle of the Trench, the Jewish tribe of Bani Qurayza was accused of conspiring with the attacking Meccans against the Muslim community. After the Meccans retreated, Prophet Muhammad's followers turned against the Bani Qurayza. The men were executed en masse, while the women and children were enslaved.
The Sack of Isfahan (1387): Timur, the Turko-Mongol conqueror, laid siege to the city of Isfahan, which was then part of the Jalayirid Sultanate. When the city finally fell, Timur reportedly ordered that every soldier in his army should return with at least two severed human heads. The total number of people killed is estimated to have been about 200,000. Women and children were often spared to be taken as slaves.
The Massacre of Nanking (1937): Also known as the Nanking Massacre or the Rape of Nanking, this atrocity was committed during the Sino-Japanese War when the Imperial Japanese Army captured the city of Nanking. Over a period of six weeks, mass killings, rapes, and looting were perpetrated against the city's residents. While not every man was killed, the death toll was incredibly high, with estimates ranging from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands. Many women were raped, and some were killed or taken away.
Srebrenica Massacre (1995): This was the largest mass murder in Europe since World War II, perpetrated during the Bosnian War. Over 8,000 Bosniak men and boys were systematically executed by units of the Bosnian Serb Army. Women, children, and some elderly men were forcibly transferred and deported, making it an example of ethnic cleansing.
The Assyrian Empire: The Assyrians, who built a powerful empire in ancient Mesopotamia, were notorious for their brutal military tactics. Their treatment of conquered peoples often included mass killings, forced deportations, and enslavement. However, it's important to note that not every city they conquered was subjected to this treatment; it was often employed as a form of psychological warfare, to intimidate other cities into surrendering without a fight.
The Mongol Empire: While not exactly "ancient" by some definitions, the Mongols under Genghis Khan and his successors in the 13th and 14th centuries were known for their ruthless conquests. Cities that resisted Mongol rule could expect no mercy; the men would often be killed and the women taken as slaves or wives. This strategy was also a form of psychological warfare, encouraging other cities to surrender without a fight to avoid a similar fate.
The Roman Empire: The Romans are known for their tactic of "decimation", which involved killing one in every ten men in a unit as punishment for serious infractions, like desertion or cowardice. But when it came to conquered peoples, the Romans were sometimes ruthlessly thorough. For example, after the Third Punic War, the Romans reportedly killed or enslaved the entire population of Carthage.
Right, but not men as a whole class simply for being men. They were killed for being men from the opposing side (perhaps killing women and children was considered too barbaric, or women were considered useful for some reason). With the exception of your last example, where decimation was used as punishment for serious infractions, again not simply for being men.
I trust you can appreciate the distinction, if you think this through a little.
But should it be assumed that you can appreciate that distinction? What it is to be a man is /rooted/ in being killed for being men from the opposing side for millions of years. There is no biological purpose for low status man, which is in stark contrast to women of all status.
They were conscripted for being men, and then sent into battle to die, or be decimated, or what have you.
> They were killed for being men from the opposing side (perhaps killing women and children was considered too barbaric, or women were considered useful for some reason).
Or because they were men and thus seen as being future potential combatants where women and children were not. Men were seen as potentially future detriments and thus were killed.
The distinction is thin to the point of being indistinguishable.
Under that logic, eugenics isn't genocide either. The intent isn't to eliminate a specific group, it's to get rid of some trait they attribute to that group.
I'm not aware of any instances where Jewish people were rounded up purely for being Jewish. There was always some misguided and wrong justification, like a belief that the plague was caused by Jewish people poisoning wells, or that their numbers were enough to threaten the Christian institutions, or that they sabotaged the war effort. In other words, they were perceived as "the opposing side" in one misguided way or another.
I can't recall any sort of -cide where the cause is purely because of membership in some group. In purely practical terms, it's too expensive and too large an undertaking to randomly decide to do. There's always some kind of twisted logic underneath it.
> I'm not aware of any instances where Jewish people were rounded up purely for being Jewish. There was always some misguided and wrong justification, like a belief that the plague was caused by Jewish people poisoning wells
At that point though, those Jewish people were in fact persecuted and murdered purely because of their ethnicity. It matters not that the persecution was justified with stories of poisoned wells. What matters is that those stories pertained directly to a specific ethnical group, and that group was subsequently hunted.
Sure, and I'd agree with that. My point is that under GP's argument of "it wasn't because they were men, it's because they were from the other side" the same thing applies to other instances of persecution.
Flimsy excuses either matter or they don't, and the application is universal.
Longtime lurker here. I am taken aback by the suggestion that Jews have never been rounded up purely for being Jewish. I find this notion historically unfounded and antisemitic.
Your comment broadly argues that killing of one group by another is never done with purity of intention. I submit almost nothing people do is for its own sake, but rather woven within individual and collective stories. To think otherwise is to deny the role narrative plays in human consciousness.
A cursory glance through a list like this one:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pogrom shows numerous examples of massacres of Jews (and others, but mostly Jews). The attackers always claim justifications--again, no group attacks any other group without somehow justifying it to itself, either initially or post-hoc.
1. What about the many massacres of the Jews for rejecting Christianity? Surely those are examples of being rounded up for the sake of being Jewish, since the Jewish religion is incompatible with, for example, the concept of the divinity of Jesus. A key point here is that Judaism is a tribal and not universal religion. Thus, it is hard to divorce attacks on the Jewish religion from attacks on the Jewish people.
2. What about the massacres justified by absurd pretenses, such as (As you mentioned) poisoning wells, corrupting the host (Communion), or the blood libel (That Jews kill Christian children and use their blood to bake Matzo). These justifications, which do not hold up to scrutiny, only work for a population that wants to believe them in the first place. The sheer number of nonsensical justifications points to the underlying fact--there is no justification at all.
3. Need I mention the Holocaust, in which the stated aim of the Nazis was to eliminate the Jewish race? Even those with Jewish ancestry but with no religious practices (and who were not considered Jews by themselves or other Jews) were nonetheless sent to the death camps.
By the way, I have focused on historical violence from the Christian world, but this is not to the exclusion of violence from the Islamic world, of which there has been much as well.
In sum, if there was ever an example of a group persecuted for purely "being themselves", it is the Jews.
I appear to have struck a nerve, and I apologize for the offense. My intent wasn't to imply or argue that Jewish people have never been persecuted. I would agree that Jewish people have certainly been persecuted for their faith.
My point was primarily that in a world view where flimsy excuses like the side of a combatant makes something not a gendered massacre, those same flimsy excuses would also apply to other instances of mass killings. I'm essentially arguing that if a mass killing predominantly or solely impacts a certain group of people, then it counts as a targeted killing of that group. The justification is largely irrelevant.
Given the 2 responses, I apparently did a poor job of conveying that and should have been more clear.
Thank you for clarifying. I'm interested in your argument, but confess I don't understand it.
Killing an enemy combatant in war is justified--after all, he or she is coming to kill you. That isn't a flimsy excuse at all. And the fact that men were conscripted into armies as opposed to women is no accident. It is attributable to human sexual dimorphism. But when many men die during war, that doesn't seem to me to be a targeted killing of men, since wouldn't women be killed as well if they were soldiers? And I don't quite get the analogy to mass killings, which seem to me to have an entirely different moral valence altogether.
Apologies for the delay, life has been busy the past couple of days.
> Killing an enemy combatant in war is justified--after all, he or she is coming to kill you. That isn't a flimsy excuse at all.
Certainly, but I don't think those actions are the troubling part. The troubling parts come before and after. The decision to only conscript men (that part'll be below), and the decisions to conduct massacres after combat had ceased. It wasn't uncommon to massacre the male civilian population once a city had been seized or an army subdued. The strongest counter argument there to me is that women weren't killed, but rape may have been prevalent. I don't know what the occurrence would have been in those situations, and I don't want to hazard an uneducated guess.
> And the fact that men were conscripted into armies as opposed to women is no accident. It is attributable to human sexual dimorphism.
To some degree. The minimum age for Roman conscription was 16, and I think that gap is a lot closer when you're comparing fully grown women against boys. In other words, if conscription was gated by some kind of "minimum strength requirement" where the lower bound was set by 16 year old boys, I think the sexual dimorphism claim loses some weight.
Even then, some of these events happened after the invention of the firearm where raw strength became almost entirely removed from the "who wins a fight" question.
> But when many men die during war, that doesn't seem to me to be a targeted killing of men, since wouldn't women be killed as well if they were soldiers?
Sure, but they weren't. To turn it around a little bit, would it not seem problematic to forcibly place solely a particular group of people into an incredibly dangerous job? If only Native Americans were eligible for conscription, I don't think "but other races would be killed too, they just aren't soldiers" would be an acceptable excuse.
> And I don't quite get the analogy to mass killings, which seem to me to have an entirely different moral valence altogether.
The likeness, to me, is that they have the same end result, but with different mechanisms. A mass killing is hunting down people with the intent to kill them. Conscription is hunting down people with the intent of repeatedly exposing them to events with a high probability of killing them.
I do think the moral valences are divergent. Genocides seem to be an act of outright hate to me, where conscription largely strikes me as the result of indifference. They both end with a lot of deaths of a somewhat homogenous group of people, though.
If only the men are killed because women are considered useful, is that really so different from men being killed simply for being men?
As for the whole whether "Kill all <historically persecuted/minority group>" should be considered equivalent to "Kill all men", I suppose one way to justify treating them differently is the likelihood of anyone actually taking such a suggestion seriously. We know there's been at least one massive-scale attempt to kill (virtually) all Jews, and we know there are still people around today who admire the ideology behind that and could potentially develop the capability to carry out such an attempt - I don't think, despite the list of examples just given, you could seriously suggest there's a group of people with sufficient admiration of an ideology that says "all men should die" and a capability to attempt carrying it out.
Plenty (in fact the majority) of Jews murdered in the Holocaust were not German.
They were murdered because they were Jews. In your examples the men were murdered for being on the opposing side, and so a possible threat (unlike the women and children).
This comment presumes a modern understanding of citizenship. Jews living in Germany were seen as Jews, not Germans (just as Jews in Russia were not seen as Russians). This humorous quote by Einstein is based on this notion: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/93643-if-my-theory-of-relat...
I admit I used the word "citizenship" in an inaccurate manner. Please allow me to clarify and correct myself.
In terms of technical, legal citizenship, that (presumably) became available to Jews in Germany upon their emancipation in 1871. This opportunity was revoked a mere 64 years later in 1935 with the introduction of the Nuremberg Laws. Citizenship in this sense is a modern invention.
What I meant above was citizenship in the sense of belonging to a particular group. A person could be a German in a legal or social sense, and I meant it in a social sense. The Jews were never seen as being "authentically" German. They were seen as a foreign people living on German land. This certainly contributed to the ease at which their legal status was stripped.
Thus, not a single Jew who was a German (in either sense) was murdered in the Holocaust, since that is an empty category.
By the way, this attitude wasn't particular to Germany, but all over Europe, from Russia to France.
Well you see, war rape is actually not a women's rights issue. After all, women aren't raped because they're women, they're raped because they're women from the opposing side. It's completely different!
(Before anyone takes it seriously: this is a parody of how stupid the parent sounds.)
Your problem here is that if you look black, many racists and bigots won't say what they actually think to your face. (Or they justify it as 'oh, he's one of the good ones')
They are often more than happy to confide in what they think of ------------ when they feel they are in a safe space. A friend of mine, who is half-black, but passes as a white guy gets way more of that than he should in North Carolina [1].
[1] It really helps that he's working in a profession that is majority-team-red. Some people really can't help but run their mouth when they think they are preaching to the choir.
I’ve heard people of any sex say that phrase plenty of times but that’s hardly the quintessential case of male “oppression”, if you can call it that. The scenario described in the article makes more sense, is more common, and has more serious consequences—-ignoring the feeling of boys precisely because they are culturally being forced into a certain toxic mode of masculinity—-and even then, I don’t see why you need to pitch this problem against women as if it’s supposed to be a battle for which gender has experienced oppression worse and historically so. The way that Americans have begun to frame their discussions around gender politics has honestly just gotten derailed and even more stupid since around 2016 or so.
"Punching up" is still punching. While men are on average more privileged than women, being a man also has disadvantages, and many individual men are actually quite vulnerable. "Punching up" at men causes real harm. Please don't make excuses for misandry.
It's not even punching up. For every one woman who commits suicide, four men will follow her to the grave the same way. More women claim to be lonely than men... my hypothesis is that women actually talk about being lonely while men just kill themselves at a certain point.
I don't think it has anything to do with a fear of being considered feminine. Speaking as a man, I think we are just more inclined to talk about things such as ongoing projects, or things that we saw that interest us, such as an MMA fight or a sci-fi movie.
I believe we are simply less inclined to talk about our feelings. Why? Well, first of all it's just burdensome. It's not fun, and more importantly, it's not exactly productive talking about feelings. That is a reoccurring point of contention between men and women, yes? Feeling vs doing. If a lady says that she is thirsty, a man's first response will be to get that woman some water. It would be much less common for a man to forgo finding water, and instead query the lady on her current emotional state.
"My queen, your thirst is mine. Let us suffer together."
> A row has broken out at York University after plans to mark International Men’s Day on Thursday were cancelled following an outcry from staff and students.
There is a big rift in feminism which feminists seem loath to acknowledge, preferring instead to claim that it isn't real, it's made up by anti-feminists, and it isn't important even if you can point to actual evidence. Well, it's real, it's important, and despite the posturing, we aren't all ignoring it.
> Just in the past few days, many feminist commentators have taken great umbrage at suggestions that soccer star Hope Solo, currently facing charges for assaulting her sister and teenage nephew, deserves similar censure to football player Ray Rice, who was caught on video striking his fiancée. Their argument boils down to the assertion that violence by men toward their female partners should be singled out because it’s a bigger problem than female violence toward family members. Meanwhile, in Watson’s native England, activists from women’s organizations recently blamed the shortage of services for abused women on efforts to accommodate abused men (despite the fact that, as Guardian columnist and blogger Ally Fogg demonstrated, even the lowest estimates of the prevalence of domestic violence against men suggest that male victims are far less likely than women to get help).
Its interesting how in Ukraine and Russia and countries which really need soldiers and heavy security how males are treated. It seems in Western comfortable countries there isn't any advantage in being male, women can do everything just fine. Until someone invades, then everyone wants the thugs to come out and do their thing.
Men have a place. They’re necessary for the continuing existence of Ukrainian society, and the nation itself. Women know what a good man is, and search it out — and so if you are a good man, you will be fine on that front. You can be terribly un-ideal by modern sensibilities, but if you are a reliable man that can provide for his woman, and the family — you have done your job.
The corollary is that if you do not fit into the men “mold,” you will not prosper. Most men in the Western countries would not have a place in Ukraine or any slavic country (except as an ATM) — because the values needed to be internalized are at odds with more polite societies.
This is true in much of Russia outside Moscow, St. Petersburg, etc. (the more metropolitan and “Western decadent” parts of Russia).
In the nineties I joined a men's group retreat where we circled up and listened to each other's struggles, gave lots of support, and lots of hugs. Then we did some consciousness raising around circumcision and it's barbarity. We took our cue from the Feminist movement. They were getting their shit together and so could we. Gary Snyder read his gorgeous nature poetry, Peter Berg sold us on a green cities concept that would make our urban areas more livable.
Later, the monstrosity called the "manosphere" completely gutted our movement and turned it into a grievance fest against feminism. They stole our issues but instead of working on them, they weaponized them against feminists, especially against us feminist men. Domestic violence by and against men, paternal rights, genital mutilation, psych support, male fragility and toxic aspects of traditional masculinity, etc. But then they never did anything about any of these problems but bitch and bash feminists with them. As if it's womens' job to clean up our mess.
Step one to improving the situation for men is to destroy the right-wing MRM. "Let men be men again!" is the cry of the regressive who sees the problems and plugs his hears screaming "Naaaaaah!" No progress is possible from that position. If you bother to look, the MRM does absolutely nothing to confront the problems men face in this world. Why? They don't want to. They do not care about men's problems, they only care about protecting men's ability to rape, dominate, and abuse.
Take a look at this thread. For so many commenters their problem is with acknowledging the problems. Pointing out the toxic aspects of traditional masculinity is seen as an attack rather than an attempt at resolving the issues. How the hell are things supposed to improve if we can't acknowledge problems or ally with the movement [feminism] that did the first work to outline such problems? Feminists have been pointing out toxicity of the "man up" attitude for decades. So have queers. Feminists and queer men are natural allies in this struggle to improve men's lives. But we've let proto-fascists hijack the conversation.
My greatest fear is that reactionary men join across class and race lines to form a united front for fascism. That's certainly the goal of the MRM. We must stop them. Let's go back to a Men's movement that forms alliances, rather than buries heads in the sand.
If we did that, we could have men's domestic violence shelters, an ACLU for paternal rights, education policy makers that tackle bullying and lack of emotional support for men, and so much more. But we don't because too many are lured in by propagandists who would gladly destroy democracy to protect the status quo.
Before this comment gets downvoted to hell by the shitshow that invariably characterizes HN discussion of men's issues, just to say I appreciate the historical context here in particular, and the confirmation that just because the fascist right owns the topic today doesn't mean it was ever thus - or that it needs to stay that way.
Thank you. The history of the feminist men's movement was the first target of the MRM. They are very good propagandists. Even the name Men's Rights Movement sets up the opposition with feminism perfectly. But let's never forget that we were and can be allies.
> But let's never forget that we were and can be allies.
Can you share some examples? Honest question, I've never seen this happen in modern day America (it's usually just one side taking and taking instead of give and take).
Based on what you wrote the men's circles you talk about were probably influenced by Sterling Institute, Mankind Project, and the mythopoetic men's movement. I've attended related events in the distant past but I was much too young to "get it" (and honestly still don't get some of it coming from an immigrant family viewpoint).
Men's rights have been denigrated to the point my younger male (Western) friends are Andrew Tate fans because there isn't anything else left.
> Men's rights have been denigrated to the point my younger male (Western) friends are Andrew Tate fans because there isn't anything else left.
OMG, yes. The MRM has successfully redefined the men's movement to be regressive not productive. Any discussion of men's issues has to refer back to this body of worthless propaganda. But you know, we don't actually have to take the bait. Just as that scientist doesn't actually have to debate vaccines with jackass Joe Rogan. If he wants to learn something he can read a book like a normal person.
I don't pretend to have all the answers, but here's a few points off the top of my head.
* Intersectional feminism is a powerful frame. When we look at the places where sexism and classism intersect, for example, then we can begin to explain the fact that the vast majority of homeless people are men. We can see ways that careerist academic feminism fails those who don't have such constraints. And we can see how popular working class feminist movements can benefit from the research that more privileged feminists have had the freedom to do.
* Men who are open to feminist critiques don't often do the research. We don't read feminist authors. We don't know the history of the struggle, nor of men's role in feminism. Second-wave feminism started with consciousness raising groups. Maybe we men could do some self-educating and soul searching.
* First world feminists need to accept leadership from feminists in poorer countries. There is so much right going on with feminism in places like Mexico. These men and women are confronting millennia of machismo. How do they do it? We should know.
* Men need our own organizations. Who are the groups working on paternal rights? I don't know. Are there any? Can we start one? If the MRM is about whining about feminism. A real men's movement could be about actual organizing. We used to hand out anti-circumcision flyers at 24th and mission. We got some weird looks, but even the MRM has carried on the work we started in their ineffective pissy way.
* Feminist men need a popular social media presence. We have ceeded the space to reprobates and literal criminals. Rather than engaging in tit-for-tat with MRM people, we should address regular, reasonable men who might be open to us if we made a reasonable effort. We need to accept that we have dropped the ball and that that the growth of the MRM is significantly our fault. We were too quiet.
* That said, what I don't think we need are sites like "We Hunted the Mammoth" which are about ridiculing the MRM. This is an example of stooping to their level. When we engage with the MRM, we neglect our organizing. They know this, which is why they constantly bait us into making it all about them. Similarly democrats fail by harping on all the stupid things republicans do. We should be focused on our own failures and solutions. Let the idiots argue amongst themselves.
* Feminist men need to be able to critique other feminists. The movement gets plenty wrong. We need to feel free to call that out even when doing so invites blowback from other sectors of the movement. In the past, feminist men were too afraid to confront bullshit in the movement. We deferred too much to women. That needs to stop.
When MRM people bring up straw men like "Why are there no domestic violence shelters for men? See? Feminists hate men." Feminists often respond, "Feel free to get to work cleaning up your own mess." So let's do that. Let's get to work. We're way behind, but there's no time like the present.
> Intersectional feminism is a powerful frame. When we look at the places where sexism and classism intersect, for example, then we can begin to explain the fact that the vast majority of homeless people are men.
Maybe I don't have the background needed, but I don't follow. How does intersectional feminism explain that the vast majority of homeless people are men?
Out of my ass opinion is 'the patriarchy' views low status men as completely disposable.
Also in any unfair exploitive system you'll see victimized groups attack other victimized groups instead of going after the system and those that directly benefit from it.
That doesn't explain anything. The same should be true about women, in fact more so. What we see here though is it would seem women are privileged in that domain.
Under traditional patriarchal gender roles, men are seen as self-sufficient, and women as dependent. When men fail to be self-sufficient, they do not tend given the same level of support as women who are expected to need help. Add class relationships into this mess and low-class men are left to rot on the street. Our oligarchs see all poor people as disposable tools. So it's the intersection of gender and class that results in more homeless men. This is an example of a negative result for men under patriarchy.
Keep in mind, that women at the same level of risk may not be on the street, but that doesn't mean they are safe. Women at risk are often preyed on by exploitative men and take refuge from the street in unsafe housing where survival sex and abuse is common. That may be a step up, but perhaps not by a lot.
Intersectionality is also informative when understanding the reaction many poor men have to the line that "men have privilege over women". Poor men don't feel privileged, even if they do enjoy higher privilege than women in the same economic class. But compare Joe Schmoe to Sheryl Sandburg, and it's the CEO lady who has the relative privilege, even if she's much lower status than the Zuckerbergs of the world.
Intersectionality is also the basis for critiques of "White feminism" where relatively privileged women dominate the discussion for women as a whole.
I've read with an open mind through all your line of replies. In the end though it summed up to making it about women and feminism. You forgot this entire thing was supposed to be about men.
Right wing MRM a la Andrew Tate is for sure a scam and toxic extreme. But you can easily find such examples in feminist circles as well. Exaggerating in one direction does not justify exaggerating in the other.
You've derailed the conversation about boys and men needs and made it about women, feminism, intersectionality, etc. That is the reason I am down-voting all you replies.
> When men fail to be self-sufficient, they do not tend given the same level of support as women who are expected to need help. Add class relationships into this mess and low-class men are left to rot on the street. Our oligarchs see all poor people as disposable tools. So it's the intersection of gender and class that results in more homeless men. This is an example of a negative result for men under patriarchy.
and interpret it to be "about women and feminism".
You've cherry-picked one thing out of many replies. I do not want to see feminism, intersectionality, patriarchy, class, women, etc in a discussion about boys' emotional needs. Take your philosophy and politics in topics about these issues, there's plenty of them.
Intersectionism, patriarchy and class absolutely have a part to play in boys' emotional needs. I believe trabant00 explained this pretty well. It reads a little like you've seen some words that you instinctively disapprove of and dismissed the whole argument as a result. That attitude is troubling, as it disregards various social pressures on boys.
It disregards the fact that, as long as most men and women remain heterosexual, there's no divorcing social pressures on one from social pressures on the other, because these will at some point become indistinguishable from the same thing.
Feminism has trod this ground before, with political lesbianism and lesbian separatism. The results of these experiments are not such as to suggest they are worth repeating, which hasn't stopped that from happening in the form of last decade's unsurprisingly abortive "MGTOW" movement.
I'm really struggling to parse your first sentence as it's too convoluted. Are you predicting that men and women will have the same social pressures in future? How does this challenge the idea that feminism may overlap with men's issues today?
Perhaps it would help if I gave a tangible example of how e.g. the patriarchy links to male emotional troubles. Patriarchal norms include the stereotype of the male as a strong, unemotional provider type. As a consequence, parents discourage boys from showing emotion. Thus, boys do not learn to accept, validate and maturely process their emotions.
I'm agreeing with the claim that there can be no serious distinction drawn such that the concerns addressed by feminism are disjoint from those which should be addressed by a masculist movement constituted on grounds of actually addressing men's problems rather than nucleating around a festering contempt for women, and supporting that claim on the grounds that so long as most men and most women remain heterosexual their concerns are necessarily and intimately intermingled - what affects men affects women and vice versa, by virtue of women and men spending their lives together. The implicit conclusion is that it is therefore absurd to imagine that a men's movement which constitutes itself in opposition to feminism can ever be capable of materially improving the condition of men overall.
Thanks. That was still pretty convoluted but I think I'm with you. I agree on a conceptual level but only partly agree on a practical level.
On a conceptual level, the fundamental problem is harmful gender norms. Both movements must challenge that.
On a practical level, the way these norms manifest is very different. Women face more sexual and domestic violence and expectations around care-giving. Men face more emotional suppression and expectations around career.
There are some policies which I believe would dramatically benefit both genders. Equalising maternity and paternity leave, for example. It's absolutely bonkers that men may only be able to take a week or two, given that they might want to spend more time bonding with and caring for their newborn, and their partner might have had a C-section and be house-bound for weeks to come.
There are other policies which target one gender more than another, but I believe are still needed. Women-ony refugees, or workshops for building boys' emotional intelligence, for example. I think I would have benefited as a teenager from messaging that it's ok to accept and explore my emotions. I didn't really get that from home.
Yes of course, my attitude is "problematic", says your intersectional feminist neo marxist ideas. Because I can't have a conversation about men without all that shit popping up.
The patriarchy is successfully being attacked from all directions. Intersectionality is stronger than ever. Class is as fluid as it's ever been in the history of man kind. How do you explain that men issues are getting worse and worse in these conditions? It looks like feminism is not helping the gender it is not about. But that can't be, right? Feminism is for everybody, hence the gender neutral name and constant praise and support for men. Ooooh, that's it, I got it now. I'm the problem. Silly me.
And if all of the above is too wordy for you: get off my gender problems lawn with that toxic shit. Go eat it on a feminist topic and call it strawberry vanilla tasting for all I care. Just don't get too close to me cause your mouth stinks.
I appreciate you feel strongly about this but there's no need to resort to insults. I've never suggested that you're the problem, just that I'm troubled by the offhanded way you dismissed a whole avenue of exploration.
One thing I will say is that whilst some social attitudes are improving, society hasn't come very far in fundamentally challenging the norms and prejudices it hoists on men and women. In England and Wales, 1 in 4 women have been raped or sexually assaulted. Literally a quarter. I know that as men we our own unique set of issues, such as high rates of suicide and substance abuse. But I look at that statistic and am concerned at what it says about the safety of women in society.
> am concerned at what it says about the safety of women in society
HN, being text only, makes it difficult for some people to understand the topic. It's men. The bigger, uglier sex, with a penis and two testicles between their legs. Try to imagine the picture.
See, if I dismiss a post because it's off-topic then it's "troubling". If I address it head on you start with "arguments" and bring the discussion to women. The point here is not to argue, it's clear that the topic is men's problems. There is no room here for women and feminism. And if you wonder why some men to go to MRM it's because of people like you. They can't have a discussion in peace without feminism intruding, so fuck feminism and everybody who pushes it everywhere. It's not exactly rocket science.
After multiple interactions I personally think the extremes deserve each other. Bash your heads in, cancel each other, get each other fired, kill, maim, the worse the better. After the massacre is over the rest of us can finally have dialogue in peace.
Again, please avoid insulting and wishing violence on others. It certainly doesn't help you look like the less extreme, if anything it's what risks derailing the debate.
How I would describe what's happened here:
* corinroyal explains how some concepts which overlap with feminism has helped him understand men's issues
* You dismiss his comments because of the mere mention of feminism
* I point out that this is unfair and argue the case for the overlap being worth considering.
* You repeatedly dismiss any mention of feminism and make various unfounded claims as well as aggressive and violent comments towards me.
With all due respect and love, I think you'd find it helpful to think about why any mention of feminism is threatening to you. I'm not interested in pursuing this if you make any further aggressive remarks.
Feminism is the movement that seeks to free both men and women from traditional gender relations. Feminism isn't the term for the women's side of a war between the sexes. It's an intellectual framework that offers tools and analysis to understand and dismantle the patriarchal system that harms us all.
If you read my post from that perspective, you'll see I'm very much talking about men. Perhaps this is easier for me as a gay man to understand since the harms of patriarchy are VERY clear to me.
I'm a man who's currently deeply lonely, depressed, and struggling with poor self-esteem. I hear feminists talking about "toxic masculinity". But none of what they say feels applicable to me. I've never been violent; I'm currently trying therapy for the third time; and I can't remember even a single time when someone told me to "man up". So, while I'm sure toxic masculinity is a real problem for some men, I don't feel like it's the issue that's hurting me personally.
The issues that do feel like they're hurting me personally are things like:
* Negative stereotypes of men as incompetent, boorish, etc.
* The widespread attitude that "men suck"
* The stereotypes of socially awkward men (like me) as gross/creepy/neckbeards/etc.
* Difficulty navigating expectations around how dating and relationships are supposed to work, especially as a socially awkward man
The feminist movement does a great job of addressing the issue of toxic masculinity. But when it comes to the issues I listed above, many feminists don't take them seriously, and some feminists are actually making them worse:
Now, I'm definitely not trying to say that "feminism is terrible" or anything like that. Feminists are fighting the good fight on many gender-equality issues. Feminism arguably deserves credit for why I never had to struggle with toxic masculinity, and I'm grateful for that. But at the same time, there are unfortunately some really shitty people in the feminist movement, and they're are causing real harm to people like me. And my experience has been that the feminist movement defends and enables those people, rather than letting them be held accountable.
So my reaction to the article is: I know toxic masculinity is a real problem, and I'm glad feminists are fighting against that problem. But the problems that are hurting me personally are different from toxic masculinity, and unfortunately some feminists are actually exacerbating my problems. So, when I hear feminists blaming most/all of mens' problems on toxic masculinity, that actually feels to me like it's derailing the conversation from the issues that are most important to me.
I hope my perspective helps you see another side of the issue.
I appreciate your thoughtful and heartfelt reply. I can relate so much to what you're saying. I too am depressed, deeply lonely, and struggling with poor self-esteem. I've dealt with chronic illness, PTSD from watching a few people die badly and one living death [worse], poverty, and frequent homelessness.
On "Men suck!"
I can understand how hurtful could be, but it never personally bothered me. Oppressed people let off steam in all sorts of ways and some of those ways are unfair. But compare "Men suck" to "Billionaires suck", "Cops suck", "White people suck" etc. Do all of those bother you equally? The fact is that waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too many men do suck in so many ways while being perfectly lovely in so many other ways. Rapey, dominating, violent, criminal, oligarchic, etc. People who have been harmed by such men have an absolute right to vent. I've got friends who regularly bitch about White people in front of me. It does not bother me. White people do suck in so many ways. And even though I don't have an "All Lives Matter" sticker on my truck, I know that even I exhibit some racist thinking and behavior my self and that I benefit from a racist system.
My only recommendation is to seek understand the hurt behind the speaker's statements. Empathy with their suffering may help explain why they are acting out.
On Popular Feminism
I would never suggest that popular feminism isn't feminism. We are what we do. And yet, not all who identify as feminists are particularly good at it. WitchesvsPatriarchy, for example, strikes me as a rather immature expression for young women who are just beginning to work out their relationship to the world. This is valuable for them and us. People need a playpen where they can develop. Just as we expect college students to express the dumbest, most strident, and self-defeating version of whatever political philosophy they have adopted, we must recognize that newbies are stupid in every discipline.
There are, of course, terrible people who are feminists. There are those who simply use feminism as a cudgel to gain status.
And there is a Imperial shit ton of anti-feminists who parody feminist positions in memes. I am ogen accused of supporting a "feminism" which I do not recognize.
One of the rules for good debate is to argue against the best possible version of your opponent's argument. This is hard to do in the context of a well that has been poisoned by those who spew falsehood so hard and fast that it's difficult to sort the true from the false. And yet, there are plenty of coherent and internally-consistent feminisms to be found for those who can put the effort in to find them. I wish we were doing a better job to make things easier for those trying to make sense of things.
On Negative Stereotypes
The stereotypes are too often true. I have never raped or abducted a child, but when a parent gets nervous around me for being too close to a child, I just have to swallow my indignation and realize that the actions of others have ruined things for me.
The men loudest about "Not all men!" are those who never made an effort to understand the critiques in the first place.
And yet, these stereotypes are hurtful. Especially to men already struggling. The only advice I have is to do your part to build a world where these stereotypes have no basis in reality. In the mean time, thicken your skin. If you're not the creepy type, then realize that such unfair statements do not apply to you.
On Navigating Relationships
I'm gay and can't imagine how hard this must be. Straight people have such overwhelming and conflicting social expectations laid on them, that I don't know how they even function. We queers are used to making things up as we go along. There's a freedom to being a hated outsider.
So I guess my advice would be to make things up as you go along. Ignore all the advice you've ever heard about what women want. And l...
> The fact is that waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too many men do suck... Rapey, dominating, violent, criminal, oligarchic, etc. People who have been harmed by such men have an absolute right to vent.
It's true that some men are rapey, dominating, etc. Those men have deeply hurt many people. This is a real problem. The victims of those men have a right to vent about those things, and society needs to listen and hold the those bad men accountable.
But the vast majority of men are decent people who aren't rapey, dominating, violent, criminal, or oligarchic. (Many men aren't even particularly sexist! Every man internalizes some amount of sexism, but that's true of every woman too.) So the victims of bad men don't have a right to make generalizations like "men suck". In fact, that's misandrist hate speech.
Analogy: Many socially awkward nerds have been deeply hurt in their lives. They have a right to vent about the pain they've experienced, and society should listen, and should hold accountable the people who are hurting them. But that doesn't give the victims a right to become hateful incels who make generalizations like "women suck".
The key is to distinguish the good men from the bad men: treat the good men with respect and decency, while holding the bad men accountable.
And society does hold many of the bad men accountable. Every single day, society sends men to prison for rape, violence, and crime. And men regularly get censured or fired for sexism. It's true that society doesn't always hold bad men accountable, and this is a real problem; but society really does hold many of the bad men accountable.
> One of the rules for good debate is to argue against the best possible version of your opponent's argument. ... And yet, there are plenty of coherent and internally-consistent feminisms
I agree there are many good feminists out there, and I support them. But there are also many bad feminists out there, and they've hurt me deeply.
By analogy to above: Some feminists are misandrists. Those misandrists have deeply hurt many men (including me). Men like me have a right to vent about those misandrists, and society needs to listen and hold the misandrists accountable. At the same time, I know that most feminists are decent people, which is why I'm careful not to make generalizations like "feminists suck".
The key is to distinguish the good feminists from the bad feminists: support the good feminists, while holding the bad feminists accountable.
Unfortunately, what I've seen is that most feminists make excuses for the bad feminists, rather than holding them accountable. For example, you just now made excuses for the feminists who say "men suck"! Throughout your post, you put the onus on me to tolerate being hurt, instead of putting the onus on the bad feminists to stop hurting me! And this is a pattern throughout the feminist movement: Most feminists, even otherwise-good feminists, are unwilling to acknowledge that the bad feminists are causing real harm, and that men have a right to be upset that the bad feminists are hurting them.
> So if you feel like feminism isn't focused on you, you are absolutely correct.
It's fine that feminism isn't focused on me. The problem is that bad feminists are actively hurting people like me; and the broader feminist movement is enabling that behavior.
Did you read the link I posted above? https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=2091#comment-326664 Scott Aaronson wrote a very thoughtful and introspective post about the issues facing socially awkward men, while also being careful to respect women. His post resonated with me deeply; he put into words many of the things I had been struggling with. This is exactly the kind of thing we need more men to do. And yet, he received some extremely toxic r...
Thanks for the great links. I've just read Aaronson's piece, Penny's response, and Marcotte's diatribe.
I do not see the misandry you suggest is here. Penny's response is remarkably compassionate to Aaronson. ["Hi there, shy, nerdy boys. Your suffering was and is real."] Marcotte's, while brutal and snarky, makes some insightful points. It is not misandry to be unkindly criticized for your ideas, even when you're being honest and confessional about a traumatic time in your life.
Like Aaronson and Penny, I was also a nerd who took refuge in nerdy pursuits as a way to deal with social and sexual awkwardness. I too grew up terrified that someone might find out I might be attracted to them. But this wasn't because I was afraid to be called a "creep" but because I was afraid they might become physically violent. This isn't an idle fear, since I've been gay bashed a few times, once that required hospitalization, each time contributed to my crippling PTSD.
Laurie Penny suffered nerd sexual anxiety like me and Aaronson did. But her fear was being called "crazy" and "slut". She says, "we were terrified, just like you, and ashamed, just like you, and waiting for someone to take pity on our lonely abject pubescence, hungry to be touched. But you did not see us there."
On top of nerd sexual anxiety, Penny had to deal with misogyny, while I had to deal with murderous homophobia. And yet Aaronson claims, without a hint of irony, "But I suspect the thought that being a nerdy [straight] male might not make me “privileged”—that it might even have put me into one of society’s least privileged classes..." LOL, Wut!? Hello Scott, we're right here. He doesn't see that we're dealing with the same shit PLUS an Imperial Fuckload that is SO extra. But unlike Aaronson, I do not blame my problems on feminism. I'm as shocked as Marcotte that this dude literally thinks he's at the bottom of society's totem pole because he has to figure out how to talk to women in a time of changing social mores.
Aaronson states that his nerdy anxiety was so severe that, "My recurring fantasy, through this period, was to have been born a woman, or a gay man, or best of all, completely asexual..." This statement is mindblowing in it's failure of solidarity and imagination. He so fervently craves the empathy he denies to people like me and Penny. He acts like it's only straight male nerds who have ever feared rejection. WTHF!? It must have been nice ONLY to have feared being rejected or being called a creep and not say, rape, gay bashing, or racially-motivated violence. Aaronson suffered a common experience of fear of rejection, and since the objects of his affection were women, he twisted his anxiety into an indictment of feminism as a way to protect his privileged-as-fuck male ego. This would never have occurred to me to do, since the targets of my affection were men. I never had any problem figuring out what feminists meant by consent. It was the same as my own. I never had any trouble figuring out that Dworkin was a dismissable reactionary. I get the feeling that Aaronson read feminist writers with the intent of cherry picking whatever confirmed his fears.
It's hard to imagine anyone labeling Penny's piece as misandrist, so I assume you're referring to Marcotte. But while uncompromising and uncharitable, her critique of Aaronson's letter matches my own. She writes:
"There are many women out there who are also crippled by social anxieties who would prefer to hide in their hobbies and interests. The difference is a) they can’t blame the entire opposite sex instead of themselves for their mental health issues and b) when they actually try to turn those interests and hobbies into professions, they are told by various social forces, both explicitly and implicitly, that their femaleness means they will always be second-rate at best. Being able to hide in mathemat...
The way that you were treated -- the gay-bashing, homelessness, poverty, trauma, etc -- was absolutely awful. Nobody should ever be treated like that. I agree you've been hurt much worse than either me or Aaronson.
You're right that when people say "men suck", that's not as bad as homelessness, poverty, trauma, gay-bashing, etc. But, compare: when people say "women suck" or "gay people suck", that's not as bad as homelessness, poverty, trauma, gay-bashing, etc. either! That doesn't make it OK to say "women suck" or "gay people suck". Hateful words like "men suck" and "women suck" and "gay people suck" are still bad even though they're not as bad as the problems you experienced.
Also, I don't think your experience is typical for someone in my generation (born in the 90s). Women and gay man in my generation certainly faces disadvantages, but nowhere near what you did on average.
And social awkwardness is a real disadvantage too. Historically, nerds were even the target of physical violence. You were unfortunate enough to be both gay and socially awkward, which must have been doubly difficult. But straight socially awkward people are still disadvantaged even though they're straight; just like gay people with normal social skills are still disadvantaged even though they have normal social skills.
The net effect is that even though I'm a straight man, I've still been significantly hurt, to the point of developing depression. I certainly haven't been hurt as badly as you were, but my pain is still real. (Imagine a gay man who never experiences gay-bashing, homelessness, or poverty. But suppose they're regularly exposed to homophobia, causing them to develop depression. They haven't been hurt as badly as you were, but their pain is still real!)
Everyone deserves to be treated with respect and dignity: man, woman, straight, gay, nerdy or not. Your pain is worse than mine or Aaronson's, but that doesn't invalidate our pain, nor does it excuse the people who are causing our pain. It's not OK to use the existence of misogyny or homophobia as an excuse for misandry or nerdphobia.
You sent me all these great texts and then ignore them when they don't show what you said they would. Being a straight nerd does not in fact put Aaronson in one of the least privileged classes in society. It's not actually misandry for men to be criticized for common bad behaviors justified by an ancient system. I'm sorry that it's hard on men to internalize the lessons of the anti-racism, anti-sexism, and queer liberation movements. Imagine being a rich person hearing "billionaires suck" while you're writing a check to charity on your private jet. That must feel like a slap in the face.
When you say it hurts to hear "men suck" my flippant response is "Have you tried not sucking?" If you have and were successful, then feel free to ignore any men-sucks coming your way. That's what I do. I don't know what else you're asking then that men's behavior just not be critiqued, or only ever be critiqued in a completely dispassionate way that ignores the dynamics of women's suffering and recovery. Do you get upset when an abused dog acts skittish or barks around you? Do you think the dog is being anti-human for not immediately realizing you're one of the good ones? How is trust regained once broken?
Why are we comparing being socially awkward to being gay or a woman? Because we're each lower-status in society? Because nerds defy certain social expectations for manliness like gay men do? Ok. But one can get over being social awkward, one can gain confidence, and put work into building skills for reciprocal relationships; but you can't get over being a woman or a fag. Refactoring unworkable notions of manliness sounds like it would be of benefit to nerds, women, and queers.
If you're suggesting we need a movement to help men figure out their way in a changing society, then I'm all for it. I was member of one myself back in the nineties. There are many ways men suffer under patriarchy and much work that has already been outlined. Paternity rights, anti-circumcision, domestic violence and sexual assault resources for men... If you were to start a men's organization, what would it look like and what would you work on?
Same happened to "incels". Support forum overtaken by toxic desperate people, then grifters. And, to be honest, similar is happening to conservatism. I personally don't care much for traditional values and such, but I see the point of at least arguing for them. But now, you can't really do that, as populist politicians effectively highjacked it.
According to this article[1] from mother jones Warren Farrell is considered to be the founder back in the 80s:
"Farrell is widely considered to be the father of the men’s rights movement. In a series of books published since the 1980s, he has made the case that the primary victims of gender-based discrimination are men—casualties of a society that relies on their sacrifices while ignoring their suffering. He blames this phenomenon for a litany of woes, from the plight of blue-collar workers to the state of veterans’ health care and rising suicide rates among young men. Many of today’s men’s rights activists view Farrell’s 1993 book, The Myth of Male Power: Why Men Are the Disposable Sex, as their touchstone, and the online forums where they congregate are steeped in Farrell’s ideas"
> In the nineties I joined a men's group retreat where we circled up and listened to each other's struggles, gave lots of support, and lots of hugs. Then we did some consciousness raising around circumcision and it's barbarity. We took our cue from the Feminist movement. They were getting their shit together and so could we. Gary Snyder read his gorgeous nature poetry, Peter Berg sold us on a green cities concept that would make our urban areas more livable.
I remember this. I wasn't old enough to join up, but I'd not have.
It was widely ridiculed at the time, and most folks didn't really respect it.
It wasn't the MRM that killed your movement; it just never took off, and was never really positively received by wider society.
This is true enough. We didn't get very far before the backlash set in. We were seen by some as feminized men who were traitors to our gender, which I take as a great honor. There were so many obstacles to overcome:
* Straight and gay men talking about emotions and hugging
* Men confronting unearned privileges
* Men confronting their own unjustified anger and aggression
* Men trying to gain emotional intelligence to understand and control their moods and triggers
* Men grappling with women invading traditionally men-only spaces
So it was absolutely a hard sell. But so is every other anti-oppression movement. No one expected to eliminate a millennia-old system overnight. The thing is, when you're right, you're right. Regressives can't keep a good idea down forever. The progress I've seen in my short lifetime confirms this.
Even if anti-feminists succeed in their efforts to overthrowing democracy and bringing about a patriarchal authoritarian state the gain will be temporary and we will return in force. After denial, anger, bargaining, and depression, comes acceptance.
> Step one to improving the situation for men is to destroy the right-wing MRM.
Step one is building the future you want to see. Step one isn't waging a cultural battle.
A well articulated alternative might even sap the wind from it's sails. But if you want to wage war without anything else to offer them... you'll just be entrenching the status quo.
Connecting to men might require discussing sore cultural subjects with a bit of impropriety. The problem for you, is that all the people willing to say "fuck good taste" aren't following it up with the message you want.
We don't need a critical theory of boyhood, we just need to stop institutionally empowering people who hate their dads. I know many good men, and the defining characteristic of every single one of them is that regardless of who their father was, they accept him, and by extension they accept themselves. If you are still mad at him or have contempt for him, I recommend considering how it's manifesting in your beliefs about the world before even thinking about problematizing boyhood.
Obviously I'm quite suspicious of adults talking about how to raise boys, but only because the only problem they should be trying to solve at all is how to be a worthy example, and anything else is a substitute for that essential element. But the "concern" about boys is just another form aggression against them, imo.
Provocative notion, but I agree. n = 1 : no father, but had some stabilizing male influences in my formative years.
People without good enough “father figures” turn out emotionally volatile. I see it in myself, and I see it in others. Sometimes, emotions should be observed and not yielded to. “Toxic masculinity” is just taking this to the extreme of disregarding all emotions. “Toxic femininity” is just yielding to all of one’s emotions. It mirrors the narcissist:BPD relationships (absent, cold, and self-absorbed man; next to the hysterical, ever-present, and needy woman).
A healthy person has cultivated both aspects of themselves in moderation (learning to listen to and identify one’s emotions, and having the good judgement to know when they should and shouldn’t be allowed to continue) — this is usually best done by emulating others with this healthy outlook, most commonly with a healthy mother and father (but with the dissolution of gender norms, gender doesn’t matter on the surface, so long as the people involved have nurtured both parts well).
The best way to raise boys is in a village with all sorts of people to learn from. The worst way is to neglect them and let them figure out life for themselves.
"Toxic mascilinity" is a canard, and unless that father figure was an actual man respected by other men, they were probably just in search of a hit of narcissistic supply (or worse) from a child in need. Some agony aunt of whatever sex that's always around when the chips are down because it makes them feel needed is a just another predator.
The best way to raise boys is to become a good man.
That's not at all what GP said. They said "accept". For example, that could mean accepting that your father was a piece of shit and sloughing him off, out of your life. At some point, one has to stop letting the damages of the past continue to damage ones self.
I would agree with you. The most important person I hurt when holding a grudge is myself.
Much better to do my best to forgive, maybe forget, and move on with my life (with or without that person).
This is a lot easier said than done. I say this from first hand experience. I've been screwed a few times so far and generally managed to make my piece with most of those experiences except the abuse and apathy from my parents
Right. Just as some people who were abused by their parents will never be 100% physically well as adults, some will never be 100% mentally well. (And of course in neither case is that something they should be blamed for).
Forgiveness is all about detachment. Forgiveness is not only good for the forgiven, it is good for you, too. If you let hate fester in you, it will incline you toward wrath. Hate the sin and not the sinner. Love and pray for your enemy.
Now, that doesn't mean you should just act as if nothing happened. Actions have consequences, and those consequences should be determined by the gravity of the actions.
"Abuse" is a vague term and often people mean very different things by it. Some people call their father throwing a fit of anger or cussing their kids out about something every now and then "abuse". And then other people use the same term to refer to really diabolical stuff, like child-buggering. With the less serious and more understandable stuff, you should also take into consideration what your father was going through at the time, and how that might have influenced his actions and his judgment. When I got older and began to understand what my father has had to deal with (including me lol), it really made me not care at all about some of the rough-ups we had. So I mean whether or not you should want to patch up the relationship with your father should really be determined by the character of the abuse, the extent of it, the circumstances, et cetera. This should also determine what exactly "patching up" that relationship means - like what kinds of boundaries you set, and so on.
Dad murdered mom when I was 15, so I have some experience here. I haven't seen him since I testified against him.
But... I don't let that define my life. I miss mom, and I always will, but I made peace with it and have moved on. You can't just spend your life sobbing into a pillow or grinding my teeth in rage, at some point you have to go back to just living again.
> I know many good men, and the defining characteristic of every single one of them is
That would stand if you considered every guy talking shit about their father as "bad" men, regardless of how they behave otherwise.
I agree having a settle relationship with one's father is better, but people with legitimate grief against their father and having objective disgust about what they did as human beings shouldn't be a disqualifying situation.
I'm also a bit perplexed by the opposition between hating someone and accepting them. You can acknowledge what someone did for you, see where they come from and accept they are who they are, while hating their guts.
Someone who hates how their father behaved and treated them, and put their soul into being better as a human being would still fit that "resistance" theme. That resistance could totally manifest in them not engaging in aggressive or corrosive behavior toward other men, if that's part of what they hated in their father.
As someone who fully supports ejecting toxic relatives - including fathers and mothers - from their adult lives, no, they should not feel bad if they can't or won't accept their parents' toxicity.
Keeping toxic people in your life, regardless of their gender, is not something that somehow makes you a better or stronger person. And most psychologists with licenses agree.
Often we hold on too long because we cannot accept that there will never be a "normal", healthy future for the relationship. Letting go, and cutting them off can be an expression of acceptance.
And it's important to accept those things we cannot change, lest they torment us.
Their children feel bad about themselves because they can't accept who their fathers were. In these offspring, that hate is always there somewhere and comes out in other ways, directed at other things, often outgroups. An antidote is Blaise Pascal's observation that, "To understand is to forgive," which has a lot of depth to it.
The animus in the culture right now is divided between those who have some acceptance of their fathers, and those who don't. It's not just a right/left thing either, as that animus decides whether someone chooses to be an unworthy person who blames, betrays, and justifies their own cruelty to others because of what they imagine they suffered themselves - or not. Understand who he was and consider that a lot of the anger at "The World," was really just pent up anger at him. Personally, I think a key role of a father is to moderate the urges for cruelty, vanity, conceit, self pity, and other vices that mothers often overlook and forgive, and mainly by example.
Their children feel bad about themselves because they can't accept who their fathers were.
I get the moral point you're trying to make. But otherwise this statement simply is not factually tenable.
Granted, some children who don't "accept who their fathers were" fall into the borderline spectrum that you're referring to. Or are needlessly resentful of their parents due to simple human failings, such as a single lapse of judgement at some key moment. Of course.
But a very significant portion have perfectly valid reasons for "not accepting who their fathers were". And it would be psychologically unhealthy for them to try to force themselves to do so.
Any more than any other victim of violent (or comparable) crime needs to "accept their attacker for who they were". Or force themselves to "understand" their attacker's motives. Let alone forgive them for anything.
Maybe the people who had dads worth hating don't turn out well, and those with dads worth accepting have good outcomes -- exactly part of what the linked article suggests!
I'm late to the party on this, but the first thing that comes to mind with your comment is a comedian by the name of Taylor Tomlinson. She used to be a great balance of young, self-deprecating humor while mixing a healthy amount of family drama in. Her recent tour, however, was just depressing. Constant beratement of her dad in joke after joke. Much of the audience laughs because they feel the same.
I won't pretend to know her family struggles, but the public lynching of present fathers is becoming a strong dark theme.
At 5yo, he threatened to take me to the sheriff's and adopt me out because I was "horrible".
Was told constantly to "man up", and ignore any sort of emotions I was having.
He also beat me. Naturally, that was perfectly acceptable in the 80's, even in public. Instead, it was called "spanking".
He would buy toys, then take them away to take a hammer to them, or otherwise destroy them in front of me.
Told me that I'd never amount to anything and that I should just join the military cause thats where stupid people go.
Anything bad that happened to me was always my fault. Didn't matter what it was. My fault.
It also didn't work out that my mother was/is an enabler and a narcissist (and, well, abused by him too).
I don't care what people call this. Patriarchy, etc. Those're just labels. But did they hurt me until I figured out how to undo the damage of childhood? Damn straight they did. And I wont perpetuate these abuses on any other.
And I've met people like you, motohagiography , that defend these sorts of abuses as the general mantra "man up". I find defending obvious assaults and child abuses to be disgusting.
And, well, burying my dad did finally put a nail in that coffin, so to speak.
This plays out at all levels. I felt extremely insulted just a few days ago when my youngest’s preschool held a gathering to celebrate their “graduation” to pre-school.
At least 4 times mothers were called on to step forward— once to have a song sung to them, another to receive a flower, etc. Fathers were not mentioned at all.
This prompted me to look around, get a rough sense of the distribution… Counting the kids & counting the male attendees, I can’t say for sure that all were fathers but it roughly balanced the # of kids.
So would you say that the commenter you’re replying to needs to stop complaining and just fix his own problems? And that in general men need to quit talking about feelings of sadness and disappointment (aka throwing a pity party)? Because, my guy, lol. The irony is absolutely impeccable.
> didn’t participate in the planning and therefore surrendered all agency
>
> Only thing left is complain why they didn’t think of him when he wasn’t around
Which is a totally valid complaint man. That’s what the whole fuckin article is about. That’s what all this is about. A man is allowed to feel disappointed people didn’t think of him when he wasn’t around, and he’s allowed to express that disappointment out loud. You’re literally perpetuating the cycle by enforcing toxic ideas of masculinity, this idea that you either fix your own problems or shut the fuck up about them.
It’s a self-defeating way to live.
Edit: your comment is god-tier irony because “not being thought of when you’re not around” is like the core of a lot of men’s emotional wounds. As in, a child’s experience of emotional neglect is the caregiver not thinking of the child when they’re not around, so the fact you are holding up the idea of complaining about that for ridicule is so on-the-nose it is actually hurting my soul on your behalf.
As stated in my other reply, there was no parent participation in the planning of this. It was a done by the preschool in its entirety. No parents, mothers, fathers, or other legal guardians had a part in planning things.
The problem with confrontation is people tend to start acting as if they’re playing a role that they don’t know how to leave. As though they’ve seen in movies and places where two sides get ramped up, confront one another, but there’s usually not an equally powerful resolution to model. It’s just: get angry and be blatant/audacious. Notably in movies violent resolutions are much more common as the ultimate resolution, too, and that doesn’t leave much as a compromise or alternative-so just stay pissed/audacious/etc.
I don’t know if I have a suggestion to OP. One option would be to offer to contribute to buying the flowers next time. That’s a soft way to engage and remind there’s others in the audience not being celebrated. Personally, I’d probably be put off by the whole thing and just let them have their moments. Or bring dark chocolate. Chocolate because theobromine acts a little like a happy “everything’s good” buzz for people and men might tend towards dark chocolate over milk. But bring some milk chocolate too-shows you’re being inclusive.
After decades of fathers spending their lives at work, and leaving the household and childcare to the mothers, I guess the solution might be easy enough to figure out.
I’m not sure if it’s intended, but this makes it sound as though the solution is an individual one that easy to uncover.
Apologies if I’m misinterpreting that. If I’m right though, I’d say that it isn’t easy at all, and there are many systemic pressures which make the solution difficult for individuals.
The easy, as in dads can do the se job when it comes to staying home and caring for children as moms can. There are two things standing in the way, the pay gap and social pressure.
The latter so, is completely up to the individual to ignore.
My daughter's teacher this year just straight blanks me at the parent consultations. Like, it's uncomfortable. Speaking to some other fathers it's not just me. But I am still undecided over whether it's worth complaining as her holding her hands up and saying mea culpa seems somewhat unlikely and I feel I would quickly become the bad guy.
You're not wrong but at the same time she otherwise seems to do a good job with my daughter which I'm keen not to in any way get in the way of by making this about me.
It's not about you, though; it's about all of the fathers that will follow you. Does your partner see this dynamic as well? Will she support you by redirecting conversations to force your inclusion? That's where I would start, if you don't want to throw her under the bus with her admin.
Your point is correct of course and I have considered that. Where my partner stands is complicated because I share parents evenings with my ex, whose support I can not rely on to put it mildly.
From things like "my son left his math book in school, can someone send a picture of page 23 so we can prepare for the test" to "my daughter didn't write down the homework assignments; can someone send them" to organizing the class outing, discussing general issues with teachers or the schools organization.
Doesn't this just delay learning about responsibility and consequences until later, when the consequences might actually be real? Parents getting this involved in the children's learning seems really, really weird to me.
We are talking primary school, when kids don't have their own phone/computer and it is unrelated to taking responsibility and consequences. If my daughter ask me to relay a question/message because she didn't wrote well / forgot a detail, she is actually taking responsibility for it.
This is the content I've seen so far, limited to primary school children.
I'm German so my view may not be the prevailing one in the US, but I see my role as including making sure that the kids get a proper education. This includes making sure they are doing their homework and are revising for tests.
The consequence of forgetting (or "forgetting" ;) ) to write down their homework assignments or their books is not a work-free afternoon, an inconsequential negative remark by their teacher or a slightly worse test score (I'd argue that at primary school age consequences have to follow directly; a delayed test score does not register).
The first time it happened, they got a friendly expansion of the expectations. The second time an expression of disappointment. There hasn't been a third time.
Also I was glad they could ask for anything they missed when my girls were still learning the language and were spending most of their class time trying to grasp what they were told in class.
There are loads of reasons its useful for parents to communicate which have no bearing whatsoever on the long term psychological health of the child. I feel you might be reading a little too much into the implications of having that channel that simply aren't founded.
Like: My son loses his sun hat. I could make a point about personal responsibility and let him get sunburnt for a few weeks until he saves up his non-existent pocket money to pay for a replacement, or I could just ask if anyone has it and find out that Joe accidentally took it home and that Joe's mum is going to leave it on the fence post at drop-off.
Why is this weird? I can make sure my child faces consequences for this myself. If I don’t get the learning material on time, the consequence is that my child doesn’t learn what they need to, has a slightly harder time keeping up in the next day’s lesson. I don’t want my child’s punishment to be “insert obstacles to learning”.
Also that might not even be an very unpleasant experience for them. In my kid’s school the teacher has plenty of other things to deal with so their practice is generally to have kids do the missed work quickly in the classroom and move on. I’m not sure my child is going to learn much about responsibility that way.
Instead, I take the time to make sure my child is able to get their work done on time. But that costs me time. This is where the consequences and learning responsibility comes in. Because I value my time, and the ways I make my children compensate me for my time when they have been irresponsible is much more memorable what they’d experience being unprepared in school.
Well it is useful at primary school when kids don't have phones. If they miss one day of school or didn't record correctly an information from the teacher parents can ask others about homework tasks, missed lessons, etc.
Also the parents delegate can relay useful info from the teacher's as the only one who has direct immediate (without taking an appointment) through that channel. State is maintaining an app/website where teachers can send messages to parents but while some do it correctly, other teachers ignore it completely.
It is also interesting when some parents find out they have an issue with a specific teacher. Like this year one of my daughter had one lazy one and parents expressed their concerns to the delegate and debated on a common message to send to school.
It is annoying ( effectively being excluded ), but do we need social validation to do our job ( raising kids )? Now, if the teacher is withholding information, that is a different story.
It’s not only about how the father feels in a situation like this. It’s also about the message that sends to the child, who has now seen (and will continue to see throughout their childhood) subtle messaging about the role and responsibilities that each parent takes on, and the perceived value of each parent in caring for them. A message that is heavily imbalanced, yet will influence their own view on things as they grow up.
Granted, I absolutely hear what you are saying. Not to search very far, I have cousins, who managed to get bamboozled their father was an absent father, because he was a trucker and clearly did not love them enough ( apart from ,naturally, securing their future several times over, but as kids they could not understand it -- and their mother certainly was keen to capitalize on it ).
This sounds like they're not really taking into account boys needs, with the idea that we shouldn't be "gendered" when relating to them.
This made me think of Andrew Tate, who is a douchebag, but has a huge following with young men, apparently because he has found a way to appeal to them emotionally. Anyone who is looking at how to push boys in the right direction should look at what appeals to them and meet them where they are, not try to push some idea of emotional help that will only preach to the choir, which is what I see society doing. I definitely agree this role is best filled by fathers.
AFAICT there is nothing good in Tate's message, except perhaps that one doesn't have to be ashamed of strength.
Yet Tate seems to promote strength, power, and confidence as silver bullets for all ones problems -- mixed with a lot of get-rich-quick BS that boils down to "pay me to teach you to selling teaching to others". And this from a guy who got rich pressuring women into camming and taking a huge cut.
Boys and men need nuanced male role models (even modestly flawed), not one dimensional grifters.
> This sounds like they're not really taking into account boys needs, with the idea that we shouldn't be "gendered" when relating to them.
I'm not really sure how you got that from the article, practically the entire piece is citations of how boys are different from girls, just not in the way that we think they are culturally.
Tate has a following because anybody more mild or less delusional will just get shouted down by vocal radicals who have no concept of why lost men gravitate toward people like Tate in the first place. Anybody that exists in the space he does will be called an incel-adjacent far-right radical regardless of how reasonable what they're saying is, and the only winning move there is to just say that detractors are agents of the NWO that want to destroy them for telling the truth.
If the terminally online people that lose sleep over Tate could stop equating somebody disagreeing with them with that person being a piece of irredeemable human dogshit, he would be a nobody.
It is, but part of being a man (and more importantly, a good person) is understanding that there's a limit to how much you should be looking up to somebody. At some point, the sense of right and wrong you have developed in your life needs to override the mental influence somebody has over you, at which point you can appreciate and continue doing the good that they do without perpetuating the bad. Somebody who has developed as a man probably first experiences this with their parents (or parent figures), and continues experiencing it multiple times throughout their life. There's no reason somebody can't do it first with Peterson. It's a valuable lesson.
Peterson is a perfect example of how being reasonable doesn't work. His ideology/commentary had nowhere near the delusion and woe-is-me gnashing of teeth that Tate's grift revolves around, it is nowhere near as destructive to its target audience and society, and it caught the dude so much shit that he basically self-destructed. There was a $35 million film made where the villain was based on him, with the director having this to say:
"We based that character on this insane man, Jordan Peterson, who is this pseudo-intellectual hero to the incel community. You know the incels? They’re basically disenfranchised, mostly white men, who believe they are entitled to sex from women. And they believe that society has now robbed them—that the idea of feminism is working against nature, and that we must be put back into the correct place. Yeah, they’re actually succeeding in many different ways. But this guy Jordan Peterson is someone that legitimizes certain aspects of their movement because he’s a former professor, he’s an author, he wears a suit, so they feel like this is a real philosophy that should be taken seriously."
If you're integrated into the modern US corporate society and media landscape, and think that some portion of Peterson's outlook is potentially helpful, keep that shit to yourself. That you will even humor his ideas is grounds for people with brain worms to attack your moral character. If it starts to make noise, your employer may not want to deal with it. Your friends and family may not want to deal with it. Mum's the word; you are only going to hurt yourself.
I would say that one of the few people in this specific media market that stands any chance of telling people that are looking to Tate and Peterson for advice something that may actually help them is Sam Hyde. Outside of his inflammatory comedy, his commentary on how to deal with being lost is hard to hear for somebody that's there, but ultimately as close as some talking head on the internet will ever get to helping somebody like that. He has pretty much completely checked out of "normal" society, so lost people looking integrate with "normal" society aren't going to find him. They'll find Tate instead, who has a relatively easy "answer" and is trying as hard as he can to change the world to fit it. Reasonable people commentating on this are doomed to fail in the current environment.
Couldn't agree more, and I've spent a lot of time looking at this particular strain of culture from both sides and talking to high up figures inside of it. I'm surprised by the commentary here in other threads, and it does make me imagine how much time people have spent investigating this world versus strongly articulating "is-ought" fallacies.
Haven't kept up with Sam Hyde after MDE got the axe. I saw a youtube vid where he answers a stream question about sleeping around. How does he communicate to his following nowadays?
> I think Jordan Peterson is doing a decent job at this though
Is he? Nuking a prolific academic career to write terrible self help books, that you yourself ignore and giving yourself brain damage while you endlessly rant on twitter about mostly made up terminally online nonsense seems like the complete opposite of "doing a decent job" to me...
Is his academic past bad because it is highfaluting? Or is the outcome justify the means and helping people is ok even if you also cause a lot of problems along the way?
Also, giving advice through books is indirectly helping them, he is not making your bed, he is telling you to do it. Directly is going the way of literally to just mean emphasis
There's a segment who function with the idea that the emotional needs of boys, teen guys, and men can go unmet and that they will just somehow crumble and be okay with it. This is not true. People with unmet needs will seek to meet those needs; if something healthy is not provided, it ought to be no surprise when unhealthy means are found as a substitute.
Instead, boys are discriminated against academically, emotionally, in terms of support and scholarships and these people who are in charge of starvation are shocked, shocked! when a guy like that appears to meet their needs.
If someone asked me an obscure sin, something that went unrecognized but was none the less heinous, I would say that attempting to inculcate the innocent with self-loathing, to saddle them with Original Sin, and to more or less attempt to have that hatred internalized, that would be a mortal sin, if for no other reason than there's simply a finite capacity you can find in humanity for that self-abnegation and past that point, one or more will snap, will turn on you, and it will always be in a way you most dread. Most dread because these ground-down types will have an endless flood of hearing the particulars of what another would like that they can simply do the opposite.
>If someone asked me an obscure sin, something that went unrecognized but was none the less heinous, I would say that attempting to inculcate the innocent with self-loathing, to saddle them with Original Sin, and to more or less attempt to have that hatred internalized, that would be a mortal sin, if for no other reason than there's simply a finite capacity you can find in humanity for that self-abnegation and past that point, one or more will snap, will turn on you, and it will always be in a way you most dread.
As someone raised in a hardline Calvinist worldview I couldn't agree with this more, claiming someone is fundamentally disgusting and contaminated on a basic level simply for existing can do awful things to them whether the beliefs stick or not.
On my reading, the article is explicitly taking into account boys' specific needs. It cites research showing that infant boys are more sensitive. need greater emotional scaffolding, and are more vulnerable to the effects of bullying.
Perhaps you're referring to the line
> Fathers and mothers use far more emotionally rich language with toddler-aged daughters than sons, for instance. Fathers are also more likely to sing to and soothe their toddler daughters at night when they cry.
I interpret this as a call to resist specific gendered parenting behaviours that propagate harmful norms. Not that gender should be excluded from consideration.
If you look past the surface and pomp, a lot of Tate’s takes have a degree of sensibility in the absurd culture we exist in. For example, his take on how hookup culture is damaging & the motivations of men & women differ was very insightful. He noted, men feel honor in their wives being chaste, and women feel happy in being protected & provided for by men, but culture distorts these underlying biological realities. Many of his ideas are presented in an inflammatory manner but dig deeper and more insight wells.
I think this nails the heart of the problem. We've empowered women and assumed men would be able to continue an as we always have. The issue is that the world has changed but none of the education has. No one is sitting down young boys and teaching them to be better. I only developed emotionally because my parents were smart and got me therapy. When we focus on teaching girls since we've been neglecting them that we've failed to extend that to boys.
Just as society has historically dissuaded women from pursuing stem it has historically dissuaded men from growing emotionally. We've started to tackle that first element but I truly believe that the second one is the next breakthrough. As it is, men like Andrew Tate are trying to fill that void. I think this is because we as a society have failed to lift up boys and give them healthy role models
tbh its not just ignoring their emotional needs, painting this as an emotional needs problems just characterizes them as women and basically claims that men need to be treated like women, which is not true. its ignoring their developmental needs
you need some kind of expertise to feel like you can make even the most basic of professions out of
you need responsibility
you need role models that you can choose and can talk with, and practice having complex and sophisticated conversations with
you need a meritocratic environment
you need physical development, and to embed the need for building physical and mental habits that guide you through your life in a sane and stable way
you need an environment that encourages kindness, hard work, and neither babies nor feminizes you. you need to, specifically, avoid idiotic environments that promote violence as part of the social hierarchy of peers.
Were you expecting this 1000 word piece to address all social, emotional, mental, and physical needs of a child? I don't see anything in the piece that contradicts the developmental needs you list, except of course treating the need for emotional support as inherently a feminine trait, which is very well addressed by the piece.
Men have a need to feel like men, which means different from women. As emotional support is considered a feminine thing it might be better to use a different framing without necessarily changing much of the substance.
Thank you for the reference. I had not read about this before. The rapid cancelling leaves me wondering whether it's because people think it's irrelevant to the topic at hand or just don't accept that not only men's behavior needs discussion.
The world crushed my spirit, and erased the remnants with SSRIs.
I'm frequently told that I have no right to treat my own depression with mushrooms, with my depression and its consequences held as proof that I don't know what I'm talking about and should have no decision making autonomy.
The long term destruction of self that resulted from only three months of that is difficult to comprehend if you haven't been there.
> I'm frequently told that I have no right to treat my own depression with mushrooms
What a bizarre thing for them to say. In my experience, psilocybin mushrooms are absolutely amazing for mental health. I think that everyone should take mushrooms at least once a year to clear out the cobwebs.
They saved my life, I'm still depressed, but I don't want to die (still don't care too much if I do, but little steps).
There's not a single conversation that I've had where my subjective experience has been relevant to the other person's opinion or position, both with family members and medical professionals.
Casually discounting my internal understanding and experience in conversations pertaining to the internal emotional state of my mind. It's fucking infuriating.
One of the weirdest parts has been the way that mental health practitioners react whenever I bring up mushrooms. They don't say anything - just look at me and wait for the topic to change.
This has happened several times, and with several different people.
The most ridiculous example was a woman who dismissed my need for mushrooms and then chastised me for refusing to slip back into SSRI induced asexuality.
Wouldn't it be better?
Well it wasn't for the first twenty years, so I'm gonna run with no.
I hear you. SSRI side effects are frustrating. Don't let anyone give you flack for medicating with mushrooms. Don't even bother explaining it to them if they don't just get it.
The abundance of very attractive people in Texas might give you second thoughts about that. If you're a single guy, going from Texas to Colorado would be like going from heaven to Earth.
I was recently wondering about who was typically in the delivery room 50+ years ago. So when I saw my elderly grandmother last week, I asked her whether my grandfather was there when my father was born in the late 50s.
She was a little offended by the question (itself interesting), but said it was just her and the medical staff. No other support people. She thought my grandfather was at the hospital, but wasn’t sure.
The concept of the delivery room is a historical aberration. For most of history women would give birth at home accompanied by female friends and family.
That is mostly due to the development of germ theory, and before that was developed, hospitals had worse outcomes than midwives, who due to 'tradition' would do things like sanitize their hands before touching the laboring mother.
In the TV Show "I Love Lucy", there's an episode called "Lucy Goes to the Hospital" which aired January 19, 1953. It depicts the father-to-be waiting in the hospital waiting room while Lucy gives birth to their son. The waiting room permits smoking and Lucy's husband smokes a cigarette nervously while waiting.
What utter rubbish... Where did you read this? Or get this impression?
My grandfather was the epitome of "manliness". Blue collar worker. Hunter. Army service. My mother and her sisters have vivid memories of him singing to them.
Something is honestly sick with so many families in this country. Men have been caring for their children for millennia. It's what separates humans from the lesser beasts.
If this matters, its effect in society is going depend on the number of fathers who behave like this. If that number were much smaller 100 years ago then it is now, etc.
Based on my own familial experience (hard to get many others), my grandfather was not an aberration. Actually, if we look at cultural products of various times (songs, poems, etc), it seems quite clear that it was expected that a good father would be playful and intimate with his children.
Thats a very, post-industrial revolution view of history.
By comparison in my wife's "backwards" country, the female relatives of the woman in labor are traditionally not allowed to attend labor. Sure, the men weren't allowed to see the baby for forty days, but thats to protect the newborn from dirty ruffians who'd spent all day wrestling hogs and ploughing fields. All the men of this society - regressively conservative to a tee - Ive met are far more involved with kids than your average modern day phone addicted westerner.
Nor are fathers, generally, cold and uncaring for their children in classical literature outside very militaristic societies. Curiously enough, you mention "100 years ago". Those fathers were literally shell shocked.
It is absolutely true that boys have been neglected. But the contempt of men is a recent phenomenon. Feminism has a great deal to do with it, demonizing masculinity by construing all men as brutes and promoting the false doctrine that men are unnecessary, that women are self-sufficient, that the patriarchy is some kind of evil oppressive thing. All of that is false. Men and women are complementary, which is to say they differ in ways that complete the other in some way. They need each other to help realize and become who they are. This doesn't necessarily mean every man and woman will marry or can marry or must marry, only that in the great social scheme of things, men and women have their unique genius to offer and range of roles to play in service of the other and the common good, even if it is remote.
Boys have different needs than girls. Treating boys like girls will not do them any good. All children need fathers, but boys are perhaps especially sensitive in this regard as men help model for boys what masculinity means. We see how the absence of a father translates into higher rates of various pathologies and delinquency in single mother households. Father also have an authority no mother can have, an authority that helps boys, and children in general, achieve the kind of moral formation need for adulthood.
There's a reason virtually every culture is patriarchal. Patriarchy exists in service of the common good, beginning with the family unit. It provides the structure and order that enables everyone to flourish. Can things go wrong? Sure. But that's true of every social order or arrangement. You don't abolish something because it can go wrong or goes wrong sometimes. This is like solving poverty by exterminating the poor, or cutting everyone's hands off to "solve" theft. A healthy masculinity, the via media between effeminacy and brutishness, is sacrificial and it is good not only for men, but all of society, including women. The common good depends on it.
I don't think it's that simple. The fact that women give birth, have periods, and have a hormonal cycle that has wide ranging impact upon their psyche and decision making processes also has probably had a major impact on most cultures trending patriarchal.
What do you mean by 'impact on their psyche and decision making processes'? They are less mentally capable in some sense? I'd like you to spell it out.
If you plot human height by sex, it's roughly a normal distribution for each sex, and the women are a few inches shorter than the men.
Women are, indeed, physically different from men. They are shorter. What's often forgotten is how much the two populations overlap. In other words, a man who is the height of an average woman is unremarkable. A woman who is the height of an average man is also unremarkable. If there's any innate psych or cognitive differences -- an idea I'm not fully opposed to -- it's likely a distribution like that. But probably even more overlap. Not really something that would allow you to predict something about the person. No more than knowing someone is 5'8" would allow you to guess their sex with confidence.
This comment doesn't make the point that you think. Yes, people in physical pain tend to be more emotional than they otherwise would, but there is no comparison across sexes that is relevant here. It is possible that women are generally more aware of their emotional state and remain better able to deal with it than men, even with hormonal fluctuation. Men also experience emotional cycles powered by hormones.
A woman’s mental state is altered by their hormonal fluctuations during their menstrual cycle. This is documented scientific fact. Sorry that it’s not politically correct or convenient to the current narratives. There are biological differences between men and women associated with their ability to give birth to children.
Men also experience hormones that affect their mental state, including periodicity. Men’s primary hormone is also associated with aggressiveness and risk taking. Given that, I would say (as a man) men are at least as emotionally affected by their hormones as women are! We just don’t have an obvious and painful reminder the same way women do.
Maybe in a society where leadership is based on challenges of physical strength (i.e. 1v1 combat for the right to rule). But that hasn’t been true of most cultures for millennia. It goes deeper than that.
Against my better judgment, I'll comment in this thread.
I think the mistake in the post above is saying that physical strength has not been an issue for a millennia.
The strong have been using the threat of physical violence to take power right up to and including today. In the home, at work, and in society at large.
That’s not what’s being said here at all. As has been said in multiple comments pregnancy and everything associated with it physically and biologically is the most likely factor. It’s not bigoted to point out that women are biologically different in ways that make them unlikely to be rulers.
To put it bluntly, men are dumber. They're wired for task-to-task thinking, and their purposes are heavily motivated by challenges.
Women, by contrast, are wired for safety, which is a far more holistic approach to purpose because they consider connections men wouldn't even _consider_.
The downside of being smarter, though, is more unease about things you see that may present as a risk. It keeps females away from the bottom of the performance bell curve (men rank lowest in most metrics), but also from the top (men rank highest as well).
All of it is reprogrammable by operant conditioning (a large part of it often happening within marriage), but those are the biological primitives.
We need to lay to rest the idea that patriarchal societies arise just because men are physically stronger. There are known quite a number of matriarchal tribal societies where inter-tribal warfare was a significant focus of their society, so physical violence was strongly tied to social status. I"m thinking of pre-contact North America in particular.
It’s probably less the strength and more the fact that before contraception women would be pregnant a substantial amount of the time. Hard to be engaged in the world when you’re having to do a bunch of pre-scientific rituals to try and ensure a safe and healthy birth a lot of the time.
But that doesn’t really mean they weren’t involved in decision making, it just means they aren’t involved in the sorts of places where people will write any of it down for posterity.
Every study I've seen on the subject has said that children of same sex parents, including having two mothers, do as well or better than their peers across any metric of wellbeing or success.
The 1st comment said boys need fathers to model masculinity. And there is no advantage to say children need a father and mother if the truth is children need 2 parents. 2 parents covers more cases in fewer words.
I've seen multiple women wearing shirts in San Francisco that said something about 'mediocre white men'. I was kind of blown away as I have always been pretty hard left, but it was shocking how blatant racism/sexism if it's targeted at one particular group is almost fashionable.
Yeah, I'm going call bullshit on this. Almost every society is historically patriarchal because for thousands of years, human attributes tied to testosterone (strength, endurance, athleticism, aggression) were extremely valuable. The world is changing, and we need to change with it by developing a new, healthy society, not retreating into traditional structures and patterns that no longer serve us as a species.
I disagree. Things are the same today as they were thousand of years ago, and they'll be the same for the next thousands of years.
Believing this period of unusual prosperity and extended peace in human history will last for long is delusional. The only thing that matters is that we're still biologically the same.
It's embarrassing for Hacker News that this is the top-rated comment.
> All children need fathers
> Father[s] have an authority no mother can have
> There's a reason virtually every culture is patriarchal. Patriarchy exists in service of the common good
Really?? Where's the research that supports any of this? If you're going to make charged statements like this, you better at least bring some research to the table.
Let's all take a good long hard look at ourselves. Just because we might feel frustrated, or displaced, or ignored, doesn't mean that we (and I'm talking to the men on this site who upvoted this comment) need to abandon the truth-seeking parts of us that desire the gold standard of logical, evidence-supported arguments. If you blindly support any statement in favor of "your side" just because it feels good to you emotionally, regardless of how speculative or questionable the reasoning is, then you have little right to criticize the "other side" for doing the same.
With respect, there are some errors in your thesis. Specifically, you're attacking some strawmen.
Here's the steelmanned version of the ideas you're saying are causing issues:
- Instead of defining men / women, think of each human as a person. There are no strong men, sensitive boys, intelligent women, vulnerable girls - there are only strong people, weak people, hard people, soft people. Our job as society is to compassionately accept people as they are and encourage them to be their best authentic selves, instead of arguing there is some role they must force themselves to fulfill because they were born with a set of genitalia, because this promotes individual happiness and is the kind thing to do.
- People's virtues are learned, not innate. Independent people can learn to accept help. People who are unsure of themselves can gain confidence. People are allowed to be vulnerable, but also to have the space to find roots, solidarity, strength and growth. Roles that traditionally would have gone to someone with a penis - head of household, soldier, provider - are achievable and manageable by anyone, because the virtues needed to hold those positions are learnable and not rooted in biology. The same holds in reverse - roles that would traditionally have been held by women are open to everyone.
- People should be given freedom to flourish as they best see fit. They have rights to their bodily autonomy, securing their financial futures, achieving scholastic pursuits, respect and equality for their contributions, and more. Historically, this has not been the case, and this does not just apply to women's rights here - it applies to anyone who has had these opportunities denied.
- Some human but deleterious attributes we should all grow beyond. Brutishness is an excellent example - as is shallowness, closed-mindedness, entitlement, ignorance, greed, dishonesty, and more. Some attributes are contextually awful - being stoic, for example, is a boon when you need to handle stressful situations, but it can also manifest as a lack of empathy for other's emotional lives.
Note that none of these are attacking masculinity - if anything, point two contradicts exactly that, literally anyone can learn the virtues associated with masculinity and is why trans men are supported even conceptually. Rather, point four holds - there are a subset of awful virtues that are unacceptable or contextually awful from anyone that have been attached to being a man, such as entitlement to sex, resorting to anger in lieu of healthy expressiveness, and assuming they must shoulder all burdens instead of being allowed to seek help. In other words, mainstream movements are attempting to abolish toxic masculinity, not masculinity itself.
You discuss the emotional needs of boys and girls as being different (which may or may not be valid, depending on the best available evidence), but then you argue that treating boys like girls is not the right thing to do, which is not what anyone is proposing at all. Again, the idea is that people are people, not their bodies. Girls and boys are people, capable of feeling, wanting and expressing the full range of emotions. People want to treat children in ways that allow them to be emotionally expressive and mature adults.
Further, when you talk about the patriarchy, you are again not taking point one and two into account. Nobody wants authority, strength, boldness, vitality, etc. to go away - these are all great virtues. Rather, they want the idea that these qualities are somehow gendered to go away. If you want strong leaders, find them in both genders. Additionally, historically, the patriarchy you are discussing has tended to enshrine point four virtues rather than eliminated it - it's the same system that inflicted foot binding tortures, made Indian women throw themselves into funeral pyres when their husband passed, allowed female infanticide to flourish, and so on. These are all terrible things and bundled into a parcel of ideas about what men "...
But these qualities are gendered. Women are in general not wanting to be leaders in the same fields as men, and these fields are generally in prominent prestige (think roles like banking, lawyers, leadership, etc). In fields like medicine where there is more gender balance and even more women at the lower roles (like Nurses), we see these fields have more qualities of care imbued as well as the leadership that a physician need demonstrate. But even it was controversial for women to be doctors in the times that physicians had a lot more authority... now when the field has curtailed physician autonomy and become more about shared decision making, it is interesting to see that more women are entering the doctor role.
Still when it comes to leadership, it suits a man by his qualities to be a leader, while a woman is suited for other roles. You can just see this by the role mothers play in their families versus fathers. If you have an imbalance or the women starts taking control or leadership in the family when the men are still present, then you get a lot of wonky results.
Here's one. When people collect datapoints and observe a difference in one case not present in the other, they sometimes fall into the trap of thinking that their dataset is exhaustive - that it captures all the variables that matter.
In other words, it's easy to start with the observation "women tend to be more represented in fields that exhibit qualities of care and less represented in leadership roles" and conclude that the absence of the variable "has leadership" makes up the core difference.
But this is a conceit that you, the observer, made. Your choice of variables to look at influenced your observations of what is different and therefore important.
Here's a counterpoint that contradicts your observed conclusion. Female heads of state and politicians have been increasing in number throughout the last century, and have done remarkably well in those roles. Has the nature and autonomy of executive power changed like medicine (according to you) has? It has not. It is a sign that you have not taken all variables into account.
Here's another error in your reasoning. Why those variables specifically? How do you know those are the variables your subjects are thinking about? When women sign up to be doctors and nurses and not CEOs, are they expressly telling you the shared decision making are the important variables? Or is it because you inferred that those variables are important because you can measure them?
In the interest of correct methodology, here are some other variables that people have suggested to explain the same data: women are conditioned or socialized into early expectations of caregiving roles; women are rewarded for pursuing caregiving roles in a way men aren't; there are more barriers for women than for men, and so on.
Now are these variables the correct answer? We don't know. It is a complex topic, because humans are complex. It is possible biology and perceptions of role play a part, as does socialization and others.
But what we can do is go a little meta and ask the likelihood that a biological variable is a good explanation in the first place. Consider what a good explanation has to do: it has to provide a causal mechanism, and be able to explain how the cause led to the effect you see. The trouble with every single biological explanation that's been proposed in this area is that they don't provide this causal mechanism. What exactly is it that makes women gravitate towards submissive roles? Is it estrogen levels? Hormones? Menstrual cycles? But then people on hormone therapy, people born with extra chromosomes, people with hermaphroditic parts, and so on should all display manifestly different behaviour and choices, which they don't. To explain these differences, you need to invoke more and more factors, until you end up with epicycles all over again.
More generally, the history of biological explanations simply don't fare all that well in comparison to sociological explanations. A reasonable prior is to assume that it may play a small part, but that larger effects are driven by how society treats and works with people.
Thanks for your reply. I would like to see social factors put to a similar rigor of analysis then, since it seems to me that you are proposing socialization is (1) a major factor and (2) that the socialization of women towards non-leadership roles is incorrect from a normative standpoint.
My counterpoint is that motherhood, pregnancy, chastity, fertility, these are tied up in the biologic of a woman, and these fulfill important roles that can’t be explained by social factors. We are not at the stage where we can replace women with mass artificial wombs and then no child has a “mother” they know and grow with. Rather we know from studies that a nurturing mother is incredibly important for a child at the epigenetic level all the way to the social level.
So much of a social role is devised around motherhood and so much of male mating and paternity is focused on not wanting the woman to have children who are not his.
This is why it is said polygamy is a natural choice for people, women are more likely to accept and be ok with having one husband even if he has multiple wives, compared to the inverse. From a biological paternity standpoint, this makes a lot of sense.
I also challenge your notion that scientific studies conducted in a research study fashion are the preferred criterion for evidence. A study without context and understanding is dangerous. And there are many truths we know without putting them to the now industrialized scientific process of producing studies —- many of which suffer political and ideological pressures in terms of what they can study when it comes to the relationship between human behavior and controversial social issues.
So when you say women are pushed into caregiver roles… this is obvious if you understand the concept of motherhood. As for a rise in women leaders of countries, I will say overwhelmingly the political and business class is male, and generally women are not suited for leadership of a country. We saw a rising “feminization” of society in terms of corporate interactions and corporate decorum now being a default in many respects for how society operates; there are also ideological reasons to elevate “women leaders”; all of these are reasons I suggest you see a rise in women leaders of countries. If you look at societies where ostensible crude military control and authority are important to display, or even in war situations, we see that men are by far the ones involved in combat.
A big question to ask, why so few women in the military roles then, if they have been open to women now? If you look at women’s physical performance it becomes obvious. We aren’t at the stage of all robot armies yet; and the militaries of today are still by far men.
> I would like to see social factors put to a similar rigor of analysis then, since it seems to me that you are proposing socialization is (1) a major factor and (2) that the socialization of women towards non-leadership roles is incorrect from a normative standpoint.
This is accurate, though, to be clear re: (1), I am saying that socialization of both men and women plays a role in these disparate distributions. Men are also socialized, to a great extent.
> My counterpoint is that motherhood, pregnancy, chastity, fertility, these are tied up in the biologic of a woman, and these fulfill important roles that can’t be explained by social factors. We are not at the stage where we can replace women with mass artificial wombs and then no child has a “mother” they know and grow with. Rather we know from studies that a nurturing mother is incredibly important for a child at the epigenetic level all the way to the social level.
I think you are blurring an important distinction here: motherhood during pregnancy and parenthood of a child. Yes, you clearly need women for the first, but that doesn't have anything to do with the latter - a nurturing parental figure is needed, but not necessarily women. Surrogate children, for example, thrive despite their biological mothers being absent in their developmental lives, as do adoptive children from early ages.
If you think about it, children have a variety of developmental needs, but none that are conditioned on requiring their parents to be of a specific gender. Children raised by successful gay male couples are simply not developmentally harmed in any way by any study, metric or measure, though neither parental figure is a woman.
The narrative that you need a nurturing, attentive and competent parental figure is certainly valid - but the idea that only a woman can fulfill that role isn't, because there's practical and ample evidence otherwise.
> So much of a social role is devised around motherhood and so much of male mating and paternity is focused on not wanting the woman to have children who are not his
But what about this is biological, exactly?
The trouble with the biological explanation is it doesn't explain exceptions very well. There are women who don't want children, men who don't want children, asexual people who don't care about sex but love the idea of raising a family, hikikomori who don't want any social contact, and more. That these people exist, are rational thoughtful individuals with full lives, and don't conform with the expectations biology supposedly places on them suggests biology can't be that strong a force in the first place. (You could claim these people are defective, of course, but that's circular and motivated reasoning - if biology is infallible except when it isn't, then we should just accept it's fallible instead of demonizing the exceptions).
The other trouble is that the biological explanation is very selective. As a species, we do a great deal of unnatural things. We eat cooked food, we wear clothes, we have manners, we employ language, use toilets, and more. Yet, somehow, when it comes to the topic of finding a mate, we somehow argue that our instincts, rather than our society, has shaped us into who we are, despite having shaped almost everything else.
Take one example where socialization has overridden this supposed base instinct: beauty standards. Small feet are not correlated with reproductive success, yet at some point in history foot binding was introduced. There are tribes that engage in neck elongation and other forks of bodily mutation that people learn to find attractive. Yet it would be foolish to argue that this is somehow a biological imperative - after all, we no longer include small feet as an index of beauty. Why does sexual reproduction get the special treatment?
To bring this idea back to the original talking point, the idea that motherhood is something you need to aspire to can't be something innate because th...
I'm mid 30s now and my childhood is full of instances of me being treated with contempt for being a boy by my teachers and female peers. Like, outright mocking in ways by teachers that in retrospect I would consider nearly traumatic and abusive.
I worked in a place a long while ago, being the only male in that department.
Everyone was nice and we did our jobs.
Over time I discovered 'rumors' about me from people outside the department. I'll call these people, the observers. They had no interactions with our team, aside from seeing who worked in our office as they walked past.
It was quite concerning that people would assume the situation meant anything but myself working with a team of peers.
I didn’t experience this in my childhood in the 80s (I’m 47) in Los Angeles.
The only shocking moment I had was taking a Women Studies course in my sophomore year of college… as I felt my childhood lacked this tension, it would be helpful to uncover blind spots. In particular I remember we had a 2 day discussion on the harmful impact of the Cosby Show on society (both race and gender relations) and the other male member of the course piped in with what I felt was a well reasoned comment. He was eviscerated in such a manner that it was apparent our presence was not welcome. I kept my mouth shut the rest of the course. It was certainly educational.
The basic thrust of the argument is that it was so successful because it made white America feel validated about low-key racism...as long as there's a certain level of success portrayed, as long as they act white, as long as the women are light skinned and pretty, etc. There is arguably some merit there. The tie-in to 3rd wave feminism as the conversation progressed went off course and is hazy.
I live in a small EU country, and at our largest universitey, there are ~50 more women enrolled than men (60-40 ratio). Does it bother anyone? Of course not... they are more worried why in a few colleges (engineering mostly) ther are still more men than women and try to encourage more women to go there.
Education (and a lot of other parts of society) has(ve) left men behind, and it starts in the childhood and never stops.
It's become clear to me in my mid 30s that I was very emotionally neglected as a child. I had literally no idea because I had nothing to compare it to, and the behavior of my parents feels relatively normal for when I was growing up.
It's my belief that this neglect has had a big role in the insecurity, lack of vulnerability, lack of self-esteem, and lack of honesty throughout my entire life. I don't blame my parents and I own my mistakes. But it's freaking wild to me that it's only now in my 30s that I'm going through emotional development that I can look back on and see people I knew in high school who had already done this sort of growth. After having read Running on Empty I started asking people about the dynamics with their parents growing up, and it really solidified how uncaring my childhood was in many ways.
My childhood conditioning was also something which recently unraveled for me.
The first time I had a heart-to-heart with my father, the center of my chest felt viscerally tender.
Mother stole a car and sold it to pay for a cocaine addiction. Father was such a workaholic that he simply marked her behaviors as "strange"... like her taking phone calls into a closet.
After the divorce my father had custody and remarried to continue his absence. (Normally left before I awoke, and I went to bed before he returned. He was even normally late for family dinners on holidays. When he was home, he was sleeping or watching TV)
Sometimes stepmother would return from work and vomit anger onto me and my stepsister. (Only about 2 years ago I realized it was Verbal Abuse)
Re-encoding memories was crucial for my awareness, and mental-emotional progress.
It's challenging at first, but after processing a few traumas, now when a deeper layer surfaces, I know I can immediately bring it to a therapeutic resolution.
I have a similar experience. I went to some counselling in my early 40s and we talked a lot about my childhood and family dynamics. It was one of the best things I've ever done in terms of my capacity for happiness (and the happiness of those around me).
I have near 0 emotional intelligence because of that. Only small part I have it is due to my wife efforts on teaching me how to feel about others and my own feelings.
I’m 45 and only realized this a few years ago and I think about when my dad was 45 and it’s obvious he had no clue. He was all work, work, work, don’t complain, no crying, no weakness. I know he tried his best but man what a screw up…I’m thankful for my wife and friends who put up with my complete and total lack of maturity for so long. Like wow, what a heavy lift I threw at them and still do because I’m still not caught up and not sure I ever will be?
It is not a father's job to be the person a child goes to for emotional support. A father is indeed supposed to pass down masculinity and how to manage it and how to become a socially functional and acceptable man.
Mothers on the other hand are supposed to be the primary person that provides emotional support and care. But, the immediate community is supposed to provide that support as well.
This is how human society has functioned through history. This is how we naturally function.
Fathers being emotional support, mothers being distant and the community being a cold and harsh distant group of people does not work.
Teachers and social workers are not "the community". Children don't need psychoanalysis and being taught to think of themsleves as victims if their parents are too busy to attend their school presentations and sports activities and all that, because you have the community right there embracing you and supporting you.
"It takes a village to raise a child" not paid employees of schools and governments and psychoanalysts helping politicians draft policies.
The entire context of how this question is even being asked is wrong imo.
"A child that is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth"
Asking masculine fathers to be emotional or telling children the entire burden of their successful upbringing is on the shoulders of their parents is not only incorrect, it reminds me of the proverb "don't grade a fish on its ability to climb a tree". If it is unnatural for a father to support a child a certain way and it is natural for a mother, what is wrong with that?
Be careful not to confuse nature with nurture. Naturally humans have a high degree of variation. The traditionalist system you refer to is a construction, if a long-standing one. We can critique the success of this system like any other human construct.
To argue that stoic fathers tend to produce better sons requires evidence. We might ask, "Better for what?" Better to be a disposable cog in a rich man's machine, perhaps? There's quite a bit of evidence that stoic fathers produce sons with emotional problems. There is quite a bit of evidence that expecting fathers not to express intimacy with their sons is destructive for both. There's quite a bit of evidence that men who don't understand their emotions and have not been supported in expressing them safely tend to act out in dangerous ways.
Yours is a recipe for an exploitative, dangerous world. Intersectional feminism offers a path toward a safe, loving, and moral world.
That's not what I am saying. I am saying someone has to play the role of a father. As a boy, someone needs to teach that boy how to become a strong man but also a man who lives correctly and fulfills his duties. If it was me, I would teach my son to be honest, honorable, to defend the weak and to understand different types of strengths (including intellectual), to treat his romantaic partner right and to learn how to make male friends and make others be comfortable around him and most importantly to understand his place in society and how to succeed as a man. Only a father can do that because a father understands what it is like to be a man and only a father understands the hardships a male child will encounter specifically because he is male. The same applies to mothers and daughters.
Being stoic is not what I mentioned but being strong and masculine, except in certain modern western societies is not optional. To put it differently, I wouldn't want my child to be violent in any way but I would also want him to be strong enough so that he wouldn't become prey to bullies and anyone trying to take advantage of him. But also to be strong enough to defend the weak and if the time comes, to serve in the military to defend his homeland and people.
Think of it as a job opening. Someone has to be masculine and someone has to be feminine . If your argument is that a boy should not have to be masculine, although horomones and generics disagree, I say that's a different topic because my argument is that both masculinity and femininity are required and for parents who wish to raise a masculine child, unless the mother is masculine and knows what growing up as a boy and becoming a man is like, the father is the only person that can do that.
> There's quite a bit of evidence that men who don't understand their emotions and have not been supported in expressing them safely
I did not suggest that. What I said was that it is not a father's job or rather, if a mother is available then she is best suited for that job. Boys want their mothers to comfort and emotionally support them and their fathers to teach them how to be a man and to be proud of their progress. I did not support toxic masculinity, just masculinity.
> We might ask, "Better for what?" Better to be a disposable cog in a rich man's machine, perhaps
Better equiped to succeed in life and be able to care for themselves and others. To live a long and likely happy life and find their place in society.
America's prisons are filled with men who never had a father model. Mothers, hard as they may try, at some point their inability to understand what their boys are going through makes it impossible for the child to trust them with emotional support.
A well rounded upbringing with all emotional, social and psychilogical needs met is all I advocated.
> A well rounded upbringing with all emotional, social and psychilogical needs met is all I advocated.
Fair enough, but then:
> What I said was that it is not a father's job or rather, if a mother is available then she is best suited for that job.
Who says that she is? Plenty of women suck at nurturing. Plenty of men are good at it. Why not have both parents capable of providing emotional support and guidance? What about single dads? Why assume that dad is better than mom at training a kid for fitness and to stand up for themselves. There are a lot of women jocks and soldiers. Have you ever seen the arms on a bread baker? She could punch you through a wall and go back to kneading without missing a beat. Why assume that girls don't need to throw a punch? They deal with both bullies and rapists. You are falling into the trap of gender essentialism. There are sex differences, but they are not the straightjacket traditionalists say they are. Did you think Neanderthal women laid around on fainting couches waiting for some dude to hand them a hankie?
If you want to know what men and women can actually do, don't look at traditionalists, look for us iconoclasts. The fags, the dykes, women athletes, men that stay at home with the kids. We are living examples that essentialism is dangerous bullshit. If you want to see true bravery watch a drag queen walk down a city street past all the people who want to kill her. Balls of fucking steel. Talk to the girl coder in a room full of coder bros trying to either fuck her or drive her off. Imagine being Madeline Albright in a situation room full of generals. That's bravery.
My grandmother was a pioneer in computing and women's liberation. When her husband was off in the merchant marines under the constant threat of U boats, she wanted to do something for the war effort. She saw a sign for engineering classes. When she went to sign up the man told her, "Sorry honey, engineering is for men." The instructor happened to overhear and replied, "Let her take it Harry. Then she'll learn her place." Of course, my grandmother took the class, did better than all the other guys, and went on to a long career designing nuclear torpedo circuitry and keeping the mainframe running, while raising four kids alone, and dealing with a constant stream of sexist men. Pure bravery. On the flip side, she couldn't cook to save her own life, thought Sanka in tepid tap water was coffee, and was hopeless at nurturing her kids, who have the emotional scars to prove it.
My father is an example of a boy who was never taught emotional intelligence. He simply doesn't understand his emotions or why they change. If I say, "Dad, it seems like driving is making you anxious. Do you want to switch?" He doesn't recognize the category of "anxious". All he knows is that something is wrong, it could not be him, so it must be mom's fault. On the flip side, dad is one of the best people in the country at programming cultural events for college campuses and single-handedly transformed student life for generations of students and is one of the funniest guys you'll ever meet.
Humans have evolved to be flexible and resilient. A big brain frees us from the monorail of instinct. Men and women can be whatever we need to be. This period of reaction to progress will pass like so many others have. You can't stop a good idea forever. And we who know freedom will NEVER go back.
> Who says that she is? Plenty of women suck at nurturing. Plenty of men are good at it. Why not have both parents capable of providing emotional support and guidance?
You talked about a lot of things but I don't think this forum is best to discuss most of it, but let me reply to that statement.
I did not imply that all women are excellent nurturers or all men are great at being masculine. But whether you believe it is nature or society, parenting is many jobs packed into one. One person has to teach a child how to be masculine or feminine or if you are one of those people inventing thingd the whatever non-masculine/non-feminist thing I guess? But a father teaches his son how to be man, now you take that and make it about some ideologicial/political culture war and that isn't right. What's wrong with a mother providing emotional support? If a father is providing that then is that father also teaching the boy how to be a man? What is the woman doing then? Someone needs to do both jobs. If the mother can do the father's job then so be it. I don't get this obsession with reducing everything into politics or whataboutism. As a child I needed both types of support, to be understood as a male and thaught how to handle myself as well as to be taught how to be kind, caring and intouch with my emotions, to avoid burying them. Women don't have testestrome and society has it such that if you are feminine, you spend most of your life being emotional and being in touch with your feelings, so you're an expert at that.
You talk about what can be and hypotheticals. Ok, if you work hard enough, maybe a woman can teach a boy how to be man and a man can learn how to provide what a mother provides? But why are you talking about that? Why are you insisting that men who only know how to be men and have no interest in becoming women pretend to be something they are not? And if a woman is not great at providing motherly love and support, I say she should talk about it with her spouse and let them figure out the best way to meet the needs of their children. I hope we can at least agree that whatever socio-political winds may prevail, the needs of children should not be neglected.
> The traditionalist system you refer to is a construction, if a long-standing one.
All social systems are constructions, and yes you are correct, we can observe and critique them. The sky is also blue. I like oranges. Snails are slow.
> To argue that stoic fathers tend to produce better sons requires evidence.
Likewise, to argue the opposite also requires more evidence than saying that "there is quite a bit of evidence" for your point. Saying that there is evidence is not evidence.
> Fathers should absolutely be there for emotional support, especially for small kids.
A CEO should know about corporate finance but that doesn't mean he should also be the CFO. Both roles are important enough to have separate execs. Parenting is similar. I did not advocate for an emotionally shutoff and cold father, but rather the responsible person and the person the child runs to for emotional support is the feminine parent which is the mother (usually at least). Similarly, boys need to be taught how to be men. Women have their own unique perspective and as such, mothers should take part in this but ultimately, the parent who should be responsible for masculinity education is the masculine parent, who knows how to handle a testestrome filled body and the specific society's expectation of men and how to address or confront that, and the father (usually) is the right person for this due to biology.
You and others are saying both parents can do this. I am saying, the parent with the most experience and qualifications should be the responsible parent without excluding the other parent entirely. You can blame the CEO for being ignorant about the company's financial state but you can't hold him/her responsible for mismanging finances without making sure the CFO did his/her job right.
> Also, distant mothers are not a modern creation, there have always been distant mothers.
100% agree with this. But so are fathers that teach boys weakness, cruelty and cowardice or who themselves don't know how to be a man (like abuse their wives). Parents who suck at their roles exist and that sort of is my point. If a mother is cold and distant then should the father take on the role of an emotional support primary parent as well as masculinity training? What is the mother doing? Neglecting the child? Is that really ok for the father to be expected do both things or maybe should the mother teach the boy to shave and to fight off bullies and succeed in the sport of the boy's choice? No problem with that so long as you are not saying one parent is responsible for everything. That's the root cause, you and others are caught up in politics and appearances and avoid holding both parents responsible. Neither fatherhood nor motherhood is a shared duty, parenthood is. These terms are not some patriarchal social construct that you must rebel against. They simply mean children have specific needs that need to be met and parents need to choose which role to take on and be an expert in that role who will meet that need. If a father doesn't know how to take on the role of emotional support for the child because the mother is distant and cold, then why are you blaming the father for not being two parents when you should be asking what could be done to help both parents figure out a way to share parenthood and decide who will take on what role?
> It is not a father's job to be the person a child goes to for emotional support. A father is indeed supposed to pass down masculinity and how to manage it and how to become a socially functional and acceptable man.
Mothers on the other hand are supposed to be the primary person that provides emotional support and care.
This reads like satire. "ChatGPT, please write a paragraph that embodies the concept of toxic masculinity."
I'm becoming a father in a few months, so I've spent this entire year reflecting on the fathers I know - strengths, weaknesses, things to emulate and things to avoid. Every one of the "good fathers" in that reflection is someone whose child would go to him for emotional support.
It's astounding to me that anyone could believe it's possible to be truly masculine while neutering one's experience of human emotion. Being too afraid of emotion to ever express it, and making your child suffer for your fear, is cowardice, not masculinity.
> It's astounding to me that anyone could believe it's possible to be truly masculine while neutering one's experience of human emotion. Being too afraid of emotion to ever express it, and making your child suffer for your fear, is cowardice, not masculinity.
I did not claim that fathers should be devoid of emotion or neuter their emotion. You added that strawman on your own. This is the 3rd or 4th comment in this thread where someone made a similar claim.
Clearly even in your quote I said "the person a child goes to" as in the person responsible for that. Just because your child does not come to you first for emotional support, does that mean you have to be cold and unapproachable to your child? When did I claim that or why would you assume one extreme or the other?
Why do you people insist that parents should not have specific responsibilities based on their abilities. If you honestly believe you can support your child better than their mother emotionally then take on that role. No problem there. So long as the mother is able to exchange masculine responsibilities with you.
Why do you insist that fathers should be responsible for everything and mothers should do whatever they feel like doing? It sounds to me like 80% of parenting is done by the father according to you.
A son needs someone to teach them how to be strong and manly as well as gentle and kind and intouch with their emotions. Why so you insist thr father should do all these things? Why do you resist havig to share the responsibility with the mother?
This is basic human organizational structure. You can't have the CEO and CFO have the same exact job. You can't have two commanding officers responsible for the same subordinates in the military. Lookup "tyranny of the structureless".
In your attempt to do everything on your own, you rob your child the opportunity to get close to both parents bot worse than that, you rob them of structure and clarity which are essential to healthy development.
> This is the 3rd or 4th comment in this thread where someone made a similar claim.
If you believe that 4 different readers are "misunderstanding" you, perhaps the failure to communicate exists on the writer's side.
> This is basic human organizational structure. You can't have the CEO and CFO have the same exact job. You can't have two commanding officers responsible for the same subordinates in the military. Lookup "tyranny of the structureless".
Based on the frequency with which you compare parenting to hierarchical corporate or military structures, I sincerely hope you aren't a parent. It's intensely creepy and I would never want you around my kid.
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 193 ms ] threadI would be curious to see a study on what happens to those men who do seek it. As in every last case I anecdotally am aware of, that perception quickly became reality and those men regretted it.
The men are the same, whether they seek emotional support or not. However, seeking emotional support gets them treated very differently verses not seeking it and it is rarely in a compassionate way.
(I'm not saying this is specific to boys, don't read too much into pronouns.)
And why the article's guide point is 'Encourage them to share their struggles — with you, of course, but also with other trusted adults, a therapist or even friends.', not 'Encourage them to share their struggles with all their acquaintances'.
If one man has the resources within themselves to eventually learn to adapt and overcome to any situation, imagine how much stronger and how quickly you can become strong by combining the resources and understanding of many men.
Sharing your struggles and asking for help is NOT the same thing as "standing around crying about their struggles".
Asking == crying.
In the western paradigm of masculinity it absolutely does. (And if you want to tear down the western paradigm of masculinity, I'd suggest making sure you have a better replacement ready first)
First, I'll give you that western paradigm of masculinity does make it likely that a male asking for help will make you look weak. However, I'd drive in even harder. If you are struggling, are you "already weak". You lack the capability and resources to easily resolve the challenge at hand. All you are doing is hiding your weakness. You are bluffing. You are being the guy who seems all stable on the surface until, SNAP, he's some unreliable flaky shit face who can't take the pressure.
You're not being strong. You're not being helpful. You're being brittle. You're setting yourself, and those who depend on you up for a sudden, surprising failure.
Second, I'd say that the western paradigm of masculinity does actually provide room to maneuver. Actually -asking- for help is yes... a bit dodgy. But complaining (ie, sharing your challenges) is absolutely in the cards. And there's plenty of space for men to be good friends and supporters for other men, to help them through challenges, even if you do not ask for help. The 'unexpected save/help from the initially non-committal friend' is a common trope. Being the guy who helps out is absolutely part of our common western culture.
Finally, I don't want to tear down the western paradigm of masculinity. I hardly thinking adding the attribute "be willing to ask for help when the situation demands it" is tearing down. If anything it's building up.
> You're not being strong. You're not being helpful. You're being brittle. You're setting yourself, and those who depend on you up for a sudden, surprising failure.
Not convinced. "Fake it till you make it" is pretty masculine. So is noble failure against overwhelming odds. Someone who needs help and doesn't ask for it may well be held in higher regard than someone who doesn't need help and ask for it.
> And there's plenty of space for men to be good friends and supporters for other men, to help them through challenges, even if you do not ask for help. The 'unexpected save/help from the initially non-committal friend' is a common trope. Being the guy who helps out is absolutely part of our common western culture.
Sure. So enabling more of that would be a good move. Maybe rebuild some of the male social spaces that have been systematically torn down over the last few decades.
> I hardly thinking adding the attribute "be willing to ask for help when the situation demands it" is tearing down. If anything it's building up.
Culture is tricky and complex. You can't just change one thing and expect it to not have knock-on effects. Coming up with ways to make it safer for men to get help would be a positive change. But just telling men they need to ask for help might well do more harm than good.
Then tell me how I, someone who no longer struggles with the topic in question, that it's too tough and not worth trying and just wants to give excuses? Yeah. That's weakness.
Basically you get answers like:
“Man up”
“Grow a pair”
“Boys don’t cry”
“Life is harsh, get used to it”
Last but not the least: “psychologists are for weak people with mental problems, not for you”.
Two more observations again based on my life experience:
1. Weakness is generally accepted in girls/women, largely acknowledged and supported. Can’t say the same for boys/men.
2. Often times I’ve been said the above phrases either by girls/women of my same age or by people like teachers/educators.
Basically you end up appearing weak, sometimes get mocked, and in general you’re better off shutting up and keeping stuff inside. Over the years I’ve developed quite a cynicism, that I acknowledge and that (sadly?) works fairly well.
We don't cry because we manage our emotions. We know words cannot physically harm us. If it's truth, acknowledge it. If it's a lie, it can be ignored and the liar pitied.
Teaching violence because it teaches respect, physical limits, and healthy lifestyle. We know how to be gentle because we are strong. We will kill bad guys. We will be good guys. Violence can lead to death. We love life and will protect it.
A child capable of this kind of violence needs to have their emotions in check. He gets hurt? Ask for a hug. Ask for advice how to win.
People aren't equal. We don't pretend. We don't go 100% against smaller or less trained. We don't expect everyone to behave as we do. We don't all value the same things. We can still be friends. We can ignore inequity. Sometimes we have more or can do more than others. We do not boast. Sometimes we have less. We do not whine or envy.
He is a man when he no longer has to obey me when he tells me he can be responsible for himself. Until then I get to discipline him and limit his freedom. We explore freedom along with the responsibility.
Life is harsh and wonderful.
Words can absolutely physically harm you. Have you ever felt your heart beating fast when someone says something that upsets you? At some point that might become a heart attack.
> I was not prepared to hear over and over from men how the women — the mothers, sisters, girlfriends, wives — in their lives are constantly criticizing them for not being open and vulnerable and intimate, all the while they are standing in front of that cramped wizard closet where their men are huddled inside, adjusting the curtain and making sure no one sees in and no one gets out. There was a moment when I was driving home from an interview with a small group of men and thought, Holy shit. I am the patriarchy. Here’s the painful pattern that emerged from my research with men: We ask them to be vulnerable, we beg them to let us in, and we plead with them to tell us when they’re afraid, but the truth is that most women can’t stomach it. In those moments when real vulnerability happens in men, most of us recoil with fear and that fear manifests as everything from disappointment to disgust.
I posted this on HN before, and out of the woodworks came all the anecdotes of bad reactions to male vulnerability. I strongly advise other men to not discuss their feelings in depth with any woman they have romantic interest in, and possibly women in general since I've seen mothers similarly affected.
I've been in relationships where I couldn't talk about my problems, and being unable to talk about them didn't make those problems disappear.
I get open and vulnerable and emotional with my partner, and I have since the beginning. Hasn’t hurt things yet. Maybe that’s still coming, but again, I’d rather be single.
Emotional vulnerability and openness is predicated on trust. If you can't trust your partner to be there when you express yourself, then you have a serious problem. Trust is the cornerstone of any relationship.
Average looking men are already dealing with an incredibly challenging dating market. Now you add on that they have higher expectations for their partners behavior - you're going to be completely alone for the rest of your life.
I hate to say it but the reality is - you're better off trying to mold/brainwash/train your partner to become more accepting of men's feelings than looking for some unicorn that already accepts them.
so maybe there was some self selection going on rather than intent from my side. but that also counters the idea that it's a unicorn. but there is also a cultural dimension, as i was traveling the world, most people i met did not come from western countries. so maybe they are a unicorn in the western cultures.
The disdain and even revulsion makes them think it was their idea. Revulsion is the correct term for it; now trending is women endlessly discussing what gives them "the ick" when it comes to a prospective mate. A tear at anything other than your mother's funeral? You'll get dumped soon.
It's like a dreadful little magic spell and one of the components you use up at each casting is your faith in what society at large tells you.
As men, when we need people the most, that is when they are nowhere to be found. A stark contrast with women, who naturally seem to support each other in such times, and aren't hung up on the social stigma that encumber men.
In his excellent review [1] of Nostalgia Critic's idiotic, embarrassing and awful review of The Wall, Dan Olson points out that much of the part of the film that Doug makes fun of is specifically the main character being told to hide/suppress emotion and struggling with that and failing.
In other words, the "satire"'s primary take is basically that men showing feelings is being strictly something to be mocked.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rokAtlFGa7Y
From reading the article I would say men might need mentors who give them good advice and wisdom. That is what I felt I needed at times, anyway.
Mentorship and emotional support can have significant overlap.
And "Praise them when they ask for help. Encourage them to share their struggles — with you, of course, but also with other trusted adults, a therapist or even friends."
And the article is full of links like this: https://www.irp.wisc.edu/resource/involved-fathers-play-an-i...
which suggests:
- Positive engagement: Involved fathers directly interact with their children in positive ways, including caregiving such as changing diapers and shared activities that involve play.
- Accessibility: Involved fathers are available to their children even when not directly interacting, such as cooking while the child plays nearby.
- Responsibility: Involved fathers take ultimate responsibility for their child’s welfare and care, including participating in decision-making regarding child-rearing and ensuring that children’s needs are met.
Actual emotional support can take a lot of different forms. I'd say that it includes someone recognising the emotions you're having, not judging them, not stopping you from expressing them, and talking about the emotions afterwards if you're up for it.
I’m currently trying to teach my 4 year old daughter to swim, so this is very front-of-mind for me. If it was up to her, she would just splash around in the shallowest part by the steps without trying anything she’s afraid of, and she would never learn to swim. It takes gentle but insistent pushing from me to keep making progress. It’s a fine line—when I do it well, she tries new things and has a great time too. If I overdo it, she shuts down and won’t try anything else.
The emotions that make her hesitant are totally valid and natural, and I try to empathize with her and talk about them, but I also can’t overly indulge those feelings, because she needs to learn to push past them in order to gain an essential life skill. It’s tough.
There's not much space between emotional support and indulgence. Parents' anxieties fill that space tho :)
It is a very fine line but this part is probably not true. She's 4 years old and doesn't need to learn to swim, unless you really want an Olympic swimmer.
If she keeps going swimming in the shallow end, do you know what will happen? She will get bored and want different things (including deeper water).
I see this kind of thing frequently, kids work at a slower rhythm than parents and parents are still human and have limited time and patience.
If they see their parents swimming, the desire to try will come at some point. That's when the help should kick in, in my opinion.
Take toddlers and small kids swimming and let them do things at their own pace and then have them take professional lessons when they're old enough to really understand the benefits of swimming and why overcoming the fear of drowning is a valuable asset.
Apart from safety, I just know she'll enjoy water so much more in general after getting over the hump. I could be wrong, but my gut feeling is that the fear of going under is only going to get more ingrained if we wait, so it's better to do it now.
I actually wish we had been more consistent with taking her in the water from the time she was a baby. That seems to be the easiest path. Babies aren't aware enough to be afraid (it seems to kick in during early toddler-hood), so if you get them used to going under as a baby, then keep doing it regularly enough, you can avoid that fear ever developing in the first place.
I'm not a strong male, so it's not slighting anything.
But I don't like it when basic truths are denied. If you look at Ukraine, pretty much all of the assault forces are made of men, the sex this paper considers fragile and vulnerable.
Societies which publish such papers are lucky they are not under attack because they wouldn't last long if they put in front the sex THEY consider stronger.
See the White Feather movement in the UK during WW1.
To be fair I've seen quite a few women fight in Ukraine but they are outnumbered by men something like 1:100. Even in Israel where women are drafted and have compulsory service they still are shielded from the real meat grinder operations.
When an artificial womb is invented that can allow a baby to grow to term the dynamic will be forever changed.
Women can bear children: this is a valuable advantage on the homefront and a huge liability on the front lines. Women get raped in wars, there's no getting around it. Women can stay home to bear children and care for the small ones and foster hope for the future.
While it is plain that fathers are good for children and having them around is a benefit, if a man must go to war, then it is better than a woman going to war. A man can procreate a child with his wife before shipping out. A man is unlikely to be raped or bear children when captured on the front lines. A society that has lost a significant portion of its fighting-age men is more likely to recover than one which has lost many child-bearing women, or both.
Furthermore, if you want to build a cohesive fighting unit (or a department in business or education or industry or whatever), you build it entirely of one sex. It is more efficient that way (no expenses on women's bathrooms or other facilities) and there is less conflict and drama (troops gonna have sex and women gonna get pregnant, and then they're both sent home?)
These are inherent biological factors and they have nothing to do with human rules, they are God-given and unchanging. These factors have been true for millions of years, and they are the basis for human rules on why men fight and women stay home.
If you think men aren't, or even worse, you haven't been following what russians do a lot.
It's not feminists calling for powerful men to send disposable poor men into the grinder. It's not feminists calling for men to "man up" and pretend they don't have emotional needs or fears. That's all on traditionalist men. Sexist men don't get to both enforce such traditional roles while decrying them as unjust.
[0]https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/major-depression
It doesn't do that at all. The most obvious example of this is unemployment. When men lose jobs, they are at much higher risk to slide into social isolation, drug use and even suicide. Anti-social behavior among women in those situations is much less common.
Young men without perspective likewise are much more likely to turn towards extremism, violence and so on. Most 'incels' or shut-ins are men. Most violent criminals are men, most gang members are men.
Men, especially young men are much more vulnerable to exhibit maladjusted behaviors and that's both backed by common sense and data.
It also ignores that women, generally speaking, have greater support networks than men. Men in America have generally been expected to handle far more things on their own. Plenty of women I know in their 30s and beyond still ask things of their parents whilst I don't know of nearly as many guys in my cohort who rely on their parents in any way.
In a sense, this is all victim blaming. Majority of homeless people are men? I guess they should have been as strong as women! /s
There's nothing cherry picked about this, men do worse these days and are more vulnerable than women on a lot of very substantial metrics. It doesn't get more real and objective than looking at the rate of deaths of despair and the gender disparity there. I don't understand why you apparently perceive this as an attack om men.
This inability to acknowledge the vulnerability of men is, as the article points out as well, one of the reasons why there is comparatively little help for men.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Like, yeah, maybe you could, but the evidence is lacking.
Regardless of the debate on how tough (or not) love should be, the absent fathers issue seems like something concrete and impactful that we should be trying to address.
Are you doing something other than assuming that 'caring' is the primary factor?
Last time I looked at data about this, it appeared that even a poor father who was present was better than no having a father in the home. If I remember right it was measuring the likeliness of a teenager to end up in prison. If there was a segment of fathers that were worse than not having a father, I don't think it shows up in any study I've seen.
Gilder's Wealth and Poverty book cites a lot of studies and examples showing how society has changed in ways making it harder for dads to stick around with everything from how drug policies are enforced to the way that welfare resources are allocated.
I think their point is that those bad fathers don't show up, because they don't care about their children.
Even if this would be the case, we should allow those fathers to spend more time with their kids. For example, it is very difficult for a man to find a part-time job. Most companies take "I also want to spend some time with my kids" as "I don't really care about the work I do". You can care about the work without wanting to devote your entire life to it.
You're looking at the drug war, high school graduation rates, ability to find a job, attached to teenage pregnancy, lack of commute options, and below living wage - likely connected to public health issues including water treatment, sewage, inneficient or unsafe homes (hook worms, sceptic, HVAC)
So instead of a 1 time $10k (which is delusional) think marijuana being legal, healthcare and childcare being affordable, public transport - or at least not a food desert in a walkable community, and $15+/hr 30+ hour weeks at a single employer.
But the good of the children is part of why past societies have incentivized keeping parents together to care for their children and maybe we've gone a bit too far in the other direction, away from a happier medium.
Stigmatizing divorce does absolutely nothing to make fathers emotionally invested in their kids. If anything, it can make them resentful of their kids.
The article was about how boys need emotional support from their father. A father who is present and married but still demands that his son "man up" and bottle up every problem is of no help.
Why would you be totally absent from most of their lives?
A parent doesn't need to be around all the time. In fact, they shouldn't be around all the time, otherwise they're "helicoptering".
Why is romanticism the only way to "invest in bonding"?
There seems to be a large subset (maybe very large?) of the population where the only way to bond on some level is sex.
Sure, you can, and should, keep working on repairs and rebuilding, but that's additional work on top of all additional work on top of actual work of living in modern society. Not everybody, always, has energy for that, and you need 2 for that or it just doesn't work. Hence the difference of what looks nice on paper and how things should be, and how they actually are.
That ship has sailed. We live in a culture that not only has doubled down on the idea that the happiness/romance of the marriage is far more important than children, but even tells us that the marriage itself must dissolve when unhappy or this will do damage to those kids.
Imagine going to work and telling a coworker that your marriage is a disaster, but that you and your wife are considering staying together for the sake of your kids. What would your coworkers say? Do any of us know anyone that we believe might tell us "hey, that's a good idea, and I hope it works out that way for you"?
It shows us where our priorities as a society and culture lie.
Even if someone could intellectually admit that this assertion of mine was correct, it has inconvenient implications. The larger culture war around us relies on the idea that children simply aren't important to a marriage.
I also discovered that without my mom screaming at him several times a day, my dad was a much better person, and without my dad having the option of being a lazy sack of shit (to this day he has never changed a diaper), he decided to start actually trying at being a dad. I only wish they had divorced sooner.
Divorce is wonderful. I've known a lot of people who probably shouldn't have gotten married but not one single time have I known people who gotten divorced and though "gee they really should've stayed together".
People who were doing it for the sake of the children wouldn't admit it to anyone, for fear that their children might overhear whispered gossip, thus defeating the whole purpose.
In modern media, woman are nearly always portrayed positively. Woman are always the 'girlboss', who need to show they are equal or superior to men. Practically, every male space has been feminised.
Current culture doesn't really respect Men.
[1] http://jezebel.com/294383/have-you-ever-beat-up-a-boyfriend-...
Can you give some examples? I'm really struggling to understand this point.
Sure, a good relationship might not resemble the hollywood ideal very much, but "duty to the family" leads to misery for a lot of people, and kids don't grow up happy and well adjusted when mom and dad are very unhappy with their lives and each other.
Was your dad mostly absent, over-working, or what? Or emotionally invisible?
In the nearly 40 years since re-establishing contact with my bio dad, he hasn't exactly proven himself as a role model. He falls into the "woe is me" category of low income people. He always finds excuses.
Real Question: If your step-father was an "alcoholic racist fuck", why did your mum marry him and stay with him? Please, please, don't read this as an attack on your mum! People enter and stay in relationships for a long list of reasons.
I was so lucky to have great parents, but my dad was mostly commuting during 8-18. I know he cared about me deeply, but his job and commute made it very difficult to spend a lot of time with me.
There is a general corruption of the concept of masculinity in American culture. It’s similar to what’s happened to the symbol of the American flag, but more insidious.
When I say masculinity, or masculine values, what do you think of? When you think of someone who values their masculinity, who do you perceive? Now do the same for femininity. Which model is healthier?
Men and women have, on average, physiological differences. These differences are pronounced in puberty. That’s when these frameworks matter the most; they thus must be embedded in childhood. There is no right answer, I think, but there are right questions that boys dealing with a burst of testosterone should ask themselves. That we’ve ignored or even repressed that seems to link both failures in boy and fatherhood.
It also seems to naturally extend to trans and non-binary kids, another situation we are culturally bankrupt in addressing. Boys understanding and speaking to their feminine sides is, ironically, a classically masculine strength in the way women understanding and acting on their masculine sides is, traditionally, a classical sign of motherhood and through that feminine strength. (The linking of feminine strength and motherhood is obviously dated, though as someone who lives in bear and moose country I can see why it was originally embraced.)
That's not to say it's the only virtuous thing a woman can do, but it's so incredibly selfless to continuously drain your body and mind intentionally for the sake of a child's well-being.
This is gonna sound a little facetious, but... aren't you also doing the same?
> it's so incredibly selfless
Perpetuation of one's genes is far from selfless. (Unless perhaps one views one's genes as the important entity, and oneself as their mere vessel. But that's too deep for this post.)
I've heard an emotionally immature would-be mother say that pregnancy and motherhood is basically her license to be selfish. ("From now on I get to only think about myself", were her words. Personally, I'm not OK with anyone raising children while holding such mentality, as I believe they would not be able to empathize healthily with the needs of the child. I strongly advised her to reconsider, and got a response that she "wished she lived in a jurisdiction where abortions are illegal". This is your brain on patriarchy!)
I'm happy that you and your wife find it worthwhile to raise children. More power to you! But I responded to:
> Can you think of anything feminine that takes more strength than motherhood
with: remaining childless. So I think your counterpoint misses the mark.
---
On a related note, the discussion in other subthreads largely focuses on the role of "good" and "bad" father figures in the emotional growth of young men. The loss of good role models is lamented, and the men of the past are idealized as "the men of a a more cohesive society" or smth as if the 20th century was an idyllic utopia lol.
But wasn't the previous generation of men even less in touch with their emotions? And wasn't it more accepted in past generations to solve problems through violence and destruction? So why weep for this cycle being broken, instead of inventing something better? Last time I checked this was Hacker News, not Curmudgeon News ffs
I believe we should more openly consider the possibility that some percentage of males grow up fucked up because it was their mother who was not a decent person. Or perhaps she was a perfectly decent person who made a bad choice in the given circumstances, resulting in a poor environment for an infant to receive initial limbic calibration.
Because hey, nobody is infallible, not even childbearers. Crazy I know. This is a huge blind spot of our culture: being a mother is a tremendous responsibility, and we just sort of decide that there's no way for it to go wrong?
At the same time, virtually everyone means well to mothers and children. Nobody wants to make mothers more anxious, because that might just unleash a self-fulfilling prophecy. Which is the last thing anyone needs in this climate. So it's a really touchy subject - with which I unfortunately have a smidgen of experience - so I'll allow myself to elaborate for diversity's sake.
You know how in some traditional societies, people are considered mature and ready to start a family soon after puberty? While in our hi-tech utopia we remain infantilised throughout our 20s (which are prime reproductive age, biologically speaking), for the sake of an education that may or may not bring the promised benefits?
So there's an ubiquitous mix of vaguely contradictory cultural and biological factors that strongly pressure women into motherhood. Whether they want it or not. Whether they are in fact mature enough to make this decision or not.
This pressure is generally stronger than the willpower of an individual human being. Therefore, it takes considerably more fortitude to resist it, than to go with the default.
It's institutionalized misogyny on the deepest level: our society's self-perpetuation depends on this cycle of morally sanctioned self-delusion, and good luck unrooting that one without conceding ground to even harsher ways of life!
Many (most?) young women have been conditioned throughout their lives that their ultimate "purpose" is to be mothers, and that ...
Yeah, I am. Can I think of something more masculine (in a positive way, given context from thread) and challenging than being a good father and husband through it all? Maybe, but they're same order of magnitude and direction.
> Perpetuation of one's genes is far from selfless. (Unless perhaps one views one's genes as the important entity, and oneself as their mere vessel. But that's too deep for this post.)
My genes are not me. The societal pressures here are not to perpetuate and have children any more. At least not in most non-catholic circles (mostly joking). I should be making money, staying fit, finishing my side projects, kicking off a business, DM'ing sessions with friends, fixing up my house, taking up long-distance running, writing engaging linkedin posts, going for long bike rides, continuing boxing training, getting happy hours with my old buddies, blah blah blah.
I fight those urges every day, effectively sidelining my hopes and dreams because I'm nurturing one new singular hope: That my kids will have what they need to succeed. Just because I signed up for this when I decided to have kids doesn't mean it isn't challenging to keep it up. Just because my DNA moves on, doesn't mean I don't have to practice an order of magnitude more self discipline than I ever had to before. The payoff went from 1-2 years away for most things I'm usually engaged with with, to 20. I'll be near dead by the time they graduate college and start to have a fully functioning executive center. In that time, most my spare money and time will be spent on another human, with the only external payoff I can think of being that they might pick me a nice nursing home, and I can post cute pics of them on Facebook, if they don't get shot, run over, or OD on something before then.
> Can you think of anything feminine that takes more strength than motherhood
I don't think remaining childless takes more strength than motherhood. I think they're different directions, and that's ok. But my wife agrees, it wasn't hard to not have kids for most her life, she just had a good family that accepted her decisions whatever they were. She built a busy and full life, which took work, but it wasn't harder. Not at all. It may be different for others.
Everything below '---' is a lot of rhetorical questions, but I generally agree with the sentiment.
But actually having a child and raising it in this silly environment? I don’t even want to imagine. Maybe just do private school and try to ignore the awfulness that is modern western philosophy and “values”.
Sure. Enduring this kind of misogynistic classification of their womanhood when they don't have a child (regardless of the cause). The idea that someone isn't "feminine" or "strong" if they haven't pushed a child through their vagina† is complete and utter horseshit.
† Take note sometime of how much crap women who get c-sections will get from society.
That the US flag is routinely desecrated by reactionary conservatives up to and including police departments in the form of thin blue line, punisher flags, Molon labe lapels etc to explicitly advertise anti-American ideals seems at least as likely to be the cause of growing anti-flag feelings as any liberal agenda.
Masculinity can be wholesome or toxic.
Femininity can be wholesome or toxic.
Which one is discussed more, by a literal order of magnitude? [1]
[1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=Toxic%20ma...
When it came to handling the things that go bump in the night, a social species with thumbs, a bit of fire and a few sharpened sticks went a hell of a long way.
And after bumping back for long enough, we were the only monsters left standing.
I think that one of the problems with toxic feminity is that it's a quieter and less explosive form of destructive behaviour - but it's very much a real thing.
As a weird little note regarding society's tolerance of the hatred of men, "misandristic" isn't even worth inclusion in the spell checker's dictionary.
What happened was the government has successfully co-opted the social contract between men and women so women now can reap most of its benefits while men carry most of the risks. That doesn't make things all hunky-dory for women, but it certainly doesn't do men a whole lot of good when some of their biggest assets in a relationship are stripped away and redistributed, without accommodating that in some form.
Meanwhile, society has done very little to put men in a positive light or encourage women to accept the 'new man'. If anything, it has done the opposite: women seem to respect men less than before, and men are expected to be more competitive than ever before, even on aspects which are practically immutable. Now society is slowly showing signs of how dysfunctional things become when men aren't incentivized to be men, while women aren't taught to respect the 'new man'. The men quit trying, the boys get stressed out, and the women run around asking the government to fix it somehow. Virtually no one is happy, and Socrates is rolling in his grave.
Not what I said; men are still needed - but it's been a damned long time since we spent our nights waiting around the fire in case of tiger.
I think it's the opposite. During the prehistoric times most food was actually gathered by women IIRC, and both sexes could use fire to scare away predators, so men were relevant for breeding nearly exclusively.
Today we have far more risky activities where men dominate, such as high-rise towers construction, firefighting, law enforcement, security, sailing etc etc.
The simple truth is that men handled the vast majority of situations where combat was required - we're bigger, stronger, faster, more aggressive.
Our aim is better, and (best of all) if half of us die it doesn't severely impact intergenerational population levels.
Women may have gone gathering, but men went hunting.
Fire fighting is some scary shit - but our ancestors took on short faced bears with sticks.
I think you greatly overestimate how much combat people faced during prehistoric times. Population was distributed sparsely, most food was gathered, not hunted, and was abundant, and you don't fight predators to scare them off.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistoric_warfare#Paleolithi...
In fact, I'm damned near certain of it.
~Modern humans have been around 30 times longer than that.
I'm not fighting tigers but the women around me sure are happy when I can carry something alone they struggle to do with three of them. There's a significant difference between a direct display and a bunch of commercialized abstractions. All those abstractions make people forget the value others have. We just so happened to push a lot of those abstractions onto men and the value they tend to bring as men.
The most interesting part was not how much women failed to survive, and how successful men were (which makes sense, as men are designed for survival), but the feeling of how much easier in that world is to show the need for masculanity (which is mostly not needed anymore).
Evolution doesn't only "design" a single sex for survival. (With the possible, arguable exception of some insect species.)
Women are structured as a compromise between their own needs and the needs of their children.
If you think for an instant that men and women aren't optimised for very different scenarios, then think harder.
Seriously, you can tell just by looking at us.
Or do you think that child bearing hips and big vulnerable mammaries are useful things to have in situations that call for physical action (other than birthing and feeding infants)?
As I understand it men have greater strength because they are optimized to fight other men for reproductive opportunity. This doesn't increase their opportunities for survival since fighting other men can get you killed. It increases their opportunities to reproduce.
Our advantages in a hostile environmental come from building tools not physical strength. If physical strength was important a male human would not be 5 times weaker than a gorilla.
So no, I would not say men are "designed" to survive on an island better than women, or whatever. They are designed to fight other men in a zero sum game.
> So no, I would not say men are "designed" to survive on an island better than women, or whatever. They are designed to fight other men in a zero sum game.
False dichotomy. Also, what fraction of explorers do you think were men? Pretty much fucking all of them.
We don't get pregnant, so having children is not a physical inconvenience and (as I mentioned elsewhere) half of us can die without impacting the next generation's population.
If you think that men and women had the same evolutionary imperative to develop the skills required for navigating strange environments then you're not adequately considering the innumerable trade-offs involved.
No, they die far more often. Because they enter unknown risky situations.
Humans explore in search of new lands and resources, and in search of safe paths.
When they take the more vulnerable members of the tribe, they generally have a better idea of where they're going, what the path is, and what risks are involved.
If a path is too dangerous then they don't tend to take pregnant women and small children.
So because it is primarily adult or adolescent males that go on the more risky adventures, they're the ones that have the costly adaptations required to maximise the likelihood of survival.
Have you ever made a tool with your hands? Physical strength--especially grip strength--not just dexterity, is required for tool making. There are no vices or pliers in the Wild.
Men have a huge advantage in grip strength, and hence tool making. This study[1] suggests that elite female athletes in athletic disciplines that require grip strength only rank in the 25th percentile of grip strength when compared to men as a population.
[1]https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17186303/
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-30500591
I suspect any of the western desert women would merrily laugh and wiggle their little finger were they to hear you speak.
If you look at the series, they took 14 random people for each group and gave them 2 days of survival training and basic helper tools.
Just looking at how the men killed the crocodile in a team work with their bare hands first time in their life without any help from experts looked awesome.
I don't think of anything aside from obvious physiological differences
> but there are right questions that boys dealing with a burst of testosterone should ask themselves
I mean, everyone's different, different personalities, different trials and tribulations of life. I have no idea how you can generalize across all teenage boys without making a bunch of stuff up
I really struggle to understand this question. Between masculinity and femininity is there one that is supposed to be obviously healthier?
If we go by what the marketing is pushing it's a toxic tarpit on both sides (see The Rules vs The Game).
Then:
Let's turn that around: Sadly, a lot. And few of them are pulling their weight in term of parenting and financial support. I'm not talking about the Elon Musks of the world. Multiple other posters have noted this is highly location dependent. This may have been true in many places around the highly developed world in the 1990s, but no longer. Ridiculous. Most mothers would like the father to much more involved. Divorce or single parenthood is hard enough.That you don't like it doesn't mean that it isn't reality. In the United States, if the mother wants custody then the mother is getting custody unless there are legal / drug / behavioral issues with the mother that prevent her from doing so. You can just sit around and listen to any radio station for all of the family lawyers who specialize in advocating for men because of how biased the system is. Only 40% of states in the US even seek to grant 50% custody to fathers.
Interestingly, only a few years ago, Bill Cosby himself made an impassioned plea to address these issues. He saw it a lot.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Cosby_sexual_assault_case...
If anything, it makes it even more poignant. Haven't you ever seen a man in prison, pleading with his son not to turn out like him? Does the father's murder conviction undermine his admonition against violence?
Did bill cosby ever take responsibility for being one of the most prolific serial rapists in history?
>>Haven't you ever seen a man in prison, pleading with his son not to turn out like him? Does the father's murder conviction undermine his admonition against violence?
Except, as others would argue, a more similar analogy would be a man in prison continually protesting his innocence. In that situation, I'm not sure that the man would be telling his son to do anything differently without an admission of guilt, except perhaps to be very cautious in their dealings with women. The point remains that the drama and conviction(s) surrounding Bill Cosby's numerous sexual assaults caused him to be an ineffective messenger even if the underlying message remains sound.
You literally cited his personal experience in your original comment, and thought it relevant enough to take up one of the two sentences in it, so I don't see a problem with the response.
The man is a self confessed serial rapist. Maybe look to almost anyone else's opinion on the importance of father figures.
However, the problem about Cosby, and the general "men need to step up" crowd is that frame the issue of absent father as a moral and character issues. Never going deeper to understand if there were external constraints pushing those men out.
We shouldn't completly alleviate those absent father from any responsibilities for their choice, but we should also look at the cause and condition making those choices so prevalent.
I'm much more involved in my children's day-to-day lives than my father was in mine.
But I'm a software engineer who has worked from home full-time for the last 7+ years. Yes I lock my office door for several hours a day, but I'll pop out every now and again and say hello, it is easy for me to do school drop-offs/pick-ups sometimes, or take them to appointments. My commute is zero, so as soon as I'm done for the day, I'm there for them.
My father spent most of his career as a manager/executive in the pharmaceutical manufacturing industry. You can't manage a manufacturing line without physically being there to respond when things go wrong. Before that, he also worked as a manager of analytical chemistry laboratories, and you can't really do that remotely either. Even when he got senior enough that he didn't physically have to be there all the time, he told me that if all the people under him had to be there physically, from a workplace politics viewpoint, he had too as well. At one manufacturing plant he was managing a few years ago, the IT staff were demanding to work from home, but he was pushing back against their demand, because he was worried about how it would look to the manufacturing staff for whom that couldn't be an option.
Of the divorced couples I know with children, the mothers were awarded custody in every single case, often over the strenuous objections of the fathers and other family members like grandparents (and in one case, even in the face of documented abuse by the mother).
I feel like studies on the effect of children who grow up with a missing parent need to somehow control for couples who split because of mental health issues. Otherwise, it's studying not the effect of the absent parent, but the effect of the behaviors of the parent who was granted custody, and some of those behaviors may strongly correlate with not being able to maintain a marriage or other partnership.
I’m not finding great primary sources, but here’s some articles on it https://legaljobs.io/blog/child-custody-statistics/ https://www.liveabout.com/child-custody-there-is-no-gender-b...
I think people also maybe aren't primed to think of this in terms of "What percentage of people who contest custody receive custody, by gender?" They're just thinking to themselves "Of the couples I know who are divorced, in what percentage does the woman have custody?", and that is going to be very large because a very small percentage of men contest custody. Anecdotally, almost every divorced couple I know has had child custody with the woman (I am in Australia, for the record). The much smaller subset of "divorced couples where I know the father contested custody" are two father's with custody and one mother. Obviously, those are also the only divorced couples I know where the man has custody - no court is going to give custody for a child to someone who doesn't want it, ideally. I also know a lesbian couple who've gone through a custody dispute but I don't believe that really has any impact here.
Couldn't that be confirmation bias - if you don't think you are going to win, and it will cost lots of money - why fight?
Which is why when fathers fight for custody they may win more - because they have a stronger case.
Confirmation bias is defined as "the tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of one's existing beliefs or theories."
What you're describing is not confirmation bias, because there is no "new evidence" which one could interpret as confirmation of their existing beliefs or theories. If the father doesn't even try to obtain custody then they haven't discovered anything new that would reinforce their existing beliefs.
I think this is important because the "absent father" is often used as an excuse, when it rather represents the last breached line in a long list of failures of society, which have ripped boys from the men who would look after them.
(I admit that there's likely some who won't like hearing this, as it cuts against the grievances of those who find pride in specific fatherhood ("I will raise MY child.") and see society's manner, or the dissolving of the nuclear family into a larger community unit, as working against that.)
Joseph Campbell emphasized the idea of the “second father.” A mentor who takes a young man further than his father can.
A father has to love you, but the second fathers love has to be earned. Think NCOs in the military, coaches, sensais in martial arts.
We aren’t just missing fathers, we’re missing second fathers.
Not many people would describe a gunny sergeant, or football coach, or the guy who runs the local Karate America as a second father.
If you include foremen, clergy, and union bosses as second fathers, a man living in 1960 could expect to spend his entire life under the tutelage of second fathers.
Traditionally masculine institutions like the military, workplace, and churches have renounced their “second family” status, and tried desperately to feminize to appeal to women.
What sorts of institutions offer “second fathers” to young men now? Predatory ones, like far-right groups. And some sports.
Edit: there are plenty of institutions that market themselves as second families - tech companies for example. But they tend to eschew masculine gender roles.
Must it be institutionalized? Can't this be encouraged without some one-sized-fits-all framework? I learned from a lot of guys in church related groups, yet with so much garbage messaging it made me hate myself. Also encountered some very good guys in school, forums, and LAN gaming, and without the religious strings attached.
Institutions encourage “second fatherhood” as a means of passing in the patterns of behavior.
That behavior might be killing opposing militaries, educating future generations, or religious worship.
So I think there’s a strong obvious link between institutions and second fathers.
I am Gen X, and I think one of the social institutions which has quietly vanished before I could quite get to it was the old Roman concept of "patronage." Without understanding I was doing it until embarrassingly late, I spent a lot of time looking for those second fathers, the mentors, the patrons. What broke it for me was someone who was clearly suited for the role, and had benefited from it himself, but was simply too self-involved to pay it forward, as it were. I realized that the Boomers as a trend just weren't thinking patronage or even the idea of planting trees they wouldn't see grown.
So, no mentors for me. Nor am I, sadly, in the position to be much of one myself. I can at last see myself doing it and cut that off at the pass.
If the "wrong" groups have something to offer in the way of second fathers, maybe their values aren't as bad as expected. Nobody wants to even consider that. If only The Bad Guys are making sense about some issues, what else might they be correct on?
Some of those “wrong groups” are just flat out scammers and charlatans though - see those “alpha male” influencers hawking their courses or whatever. They are taking advantage of a need in others to enrich themselves without really giving a damn about their charges.
I’m sure both have had some moderately useful things to say at some stage of their life for some folks, but a quick look at their Twitter profile tells you everything you really need to know now.
Like, we're talking some amount of genuine brain damage damage which he's just stuck with now.
Twitter was also just not a good place for him at all. Some people just get sucked into that sort of stuff, even though it's terrible for their public image, and even though there is so much more they could be doing. Anyone remember how people made fun of eg. Richard Dawkins and Neil deGrasse Tyson for being obnoxiously atheistic on Twitter? Yeah, it's a bit like that.
This is an in person relationship.
You're thinking institutions, when I mean uncles and grandparents who live down the street, or even with the family; trusted neighbors (perhaps distant relatives); teachers who can afford to live in the same neighborhood; local workers and entrepreneurs who are included in neighborhood life; and so on.
Divorce is ultimately at the root of so many social ills but it's verboten to even mention
You just did.
I find it curious, though, that a number of commenters seem to focus almost entirely on the "present" aspect and not on the crucial emotional investment aspect discussed in the article: "when fathers are present and emotionally invested in children’s lives", the title of which says "what boys really need is emotional support from their dads".
Presence alone is not necessarily helpful, and indeed can be harmful, as demonstrated by countless abusive parents. On the other hand, an emotionally invested parent can make a positive impact regardless of whether they're married.
>You just did.
And now his comment is grey.
It's not, as far as I see now.
Anyway, downvoting on HN is not the same thing as "verboten". Downvoting is a feature of HN that is supposed to put higher quality comments higher up and lower quality comments lower down. (I'm not saying it works, but that's the theory.)
Some marriages are, certainly, but all divorces are.
Divorce is frequently mentioned but as usual life is a compromise.
I was reading recently about suicide and depression numbers for women, especially, going down significantly when divorce became socially acceptable.
I disagree on that point. It takes a village to raise a child, and a large enough extended family has space for all sorts. Not everyone is called to the married life: I agree that divorce is a problem, but divorce rates would go down quite a bit if those for whom marriage is not compatible with their personality didn't get married in the first place, and there was a space for them to thrive within the family/community.
> but divorce rates would go down quite a bit if those for whom marriage is not compatible with their personality didn't get married in the first place, and there was a space for them to thrive within the family/community.
Being single is as socially acceptable as ever (in fact, it is slowly but surely becoming the default) and I see no sign of things improving.
More communal countries, both in Europe in Asia, still have some personal contact: From a pharmacist to an ice cream man, a town or a neighborhood can have community, and with that community come the children seeing those workers as people, and having a relationship with them. When most business is done on foot, people see each other down the street, or in the park, and there's a chance of community. With suburbia an cars, all social contact takes effort: Community get expensive, and few pay the price.
But those third place institutions have been gradually replaced by the internet.
Quite the contrary, it seems that those who would modify and engineer culture have been pushing on everyone the idea that men are fungible. That step-daddy, or mommy's new boyfriend, or all the men in the hippy commune are adequate substitutes... and it seems like that's just never the case (at least not often enough to count on).
It may just be down to math. All those other men who might substitute just have their own lives. Your grandpa likely has other children and other grandchildren. Their focus is diluted. Uncles might be trying to raise their own families. Step-dad just thinks your inconvenient and a competitor for the attention and resources of his own children, either from a previous marriage or after he knocks up mommy.
And if that's not bad enough, think about the circumstances we tend to see in these situations. Mommy (and it's usually her, isn't it?) just doesn't get along with the rest of her extended family. Not only is she demanding extra attention for her own offspring, she's showing them all how bad she is at judging character, at planning her life, etc. It's a high risk investment in a person who doesn't look like a good investment at all, for someone they already have negative feelings for.
There is no society or commune to take care of the immediate needs. There can be large families that offer a very good and secure support network and there are families that form clans. In that it seems to be a very neutral influence.
> I admit that there's likely some who won't like hearing this
You have to advertise this larger community unit a bit because I don't really see it aside from the latter example. The time of the utopia commune parenting with the weird third party uncle was never very popular and most importantly, not very successful.
Father that take pride in parenting will get much better results and to say that is egotism seems like a very sad and reduced perspective.
You need both. Fathers that take pride in parenting their own kids, and the random neighbor kids, and their sister's kids, and their friend's kids when they happen to be around. And other parents that support said fathering.
A totally disinterested father cannot be replaced by a broad functional community. A functional community cannot be replaced by a highly invested father. They simply fulfil similar but differing needs.
You could say the village is made up of fathers (and mothers, etc.) who take pride in parenting.
So people leave and only the closest family members and friends remain in contact. Even with Facebook. I believe this is a main driver for why you generally don't see large families in the western sphere anymore.
Where would we even start? The only circumstances where we could hope to do anything at all are those where it's either not a problem, or is still only a minor one... if daddy's doing 20 for murder or dealing at the kilo level, are we supposed to let him out so he can sing lullabies?
There exists an entire class of problems that people only seem to comprehend the causes of once those same problems have escalated far beyond the capacity for comprehension to allow us to fix them. Perhaps the universe hates us. Or maybe we just deserve it.
Another set of approaches would be to fund pro-natal/pro-family initiatives such as child income tax credits, to make it easier for fathers to participate in family life; at the margin economic instability drives families apart among other things. (More paternity leave (and better maternity leave while we’re at it) would help a lot here too).
I think you can look to other countries for examples here, Scandinavian countries for example have much better pro-family programs we could copy if we were really serious about this.
This is a strawman. You have no idea what their idea of rehabilitation is, in fact they only shared that our balance is out of whack.
And it is. What we are doing now, with mass incarceration and barely-humane conditions DOES NOT WORK. In fact, it would be hard to intentionally design the system in a way that does a better job of increasing recidivism and overall human misery.
Forget all this talk of "being nice to lowlifes", how about we stop shooting ourselves in the foot first?
>Do you really believe that would work? Like, how much can you afford?
Our government spends billions and trillions of dollars on things which have less utility. Resources are not what is lacking, prioritization and political will is.
Either their definition is the same as the popularly known definition, or it is a worthless definition.
The popular definition is "whatever defects of personality caused the person to commit criminal acts have been mitigated entirely or reduced to the point that the risk of recidivism is negligible" or something like that.
Is there another definition any sane person should care about?
> What we are doing now, with mass incarceration and barely-humane conditions DOES NOT WORK.
It's doing exactly what it's supposed to do. It's just that the thing it's supposed to do isn't rehabilitation, and never was. And you'd have to be a seriously naive person to have ever swindled yourself into believing anything else.
1. Punishment of the wicked.
2. Sequestration of the dangerous.
3. Deterrence of the tempted.
> In fact, it would be hard to intentionally design the system in a way that does a better job of increasing recidivism
We could just let them out early, so they'll do it again. It would increase recidivism nicely, since given a (more or less) fixed population of criminals in any given time period, they'd be outside prison for longer periods of time where they have the opportunity to do it again. If in a span of 10 years an armed robber spends 8 years in prison, he only has 2 years in which to commit crime.
Let's just let him out after a weekend, so he has 9.9.
We could even call it rehabilitation, because you know, if we don't make him so miserable surely he will magically transform into some excellent citizen.
> Our government spends billions and trillions of dollars on things which have less utility.
This weakens your case, it doesn't make it stronger. "We're already spending trillions on other things" means there's less available to spend on this. Not more.
This is a terrible way to conduct a discussion. Please read the site rules, in particular “be nice”. If you can’t comment without being triggered, don’t.
Society itself doesn’t prioritize upbringings of children
Today, most people work long hours away from their family (both men and women) not to buy another ski trip but just to keep a roof over their heads and feed their kids. How can all of us find our way back to family business?
I didn’t quite believe it at first. Over time it has become abundantly clear. Boys without dads, not even someone to step in to support them, are often swimming upstream at best.
And its not just physically absent fathers, those working long hours constantly (under false premise of 'providing for my family'), or for some other messed up reasons are simply not there often enough, physically or emotionally, often cause all this.
Its a vicious circle too, people take this baggage with them into their own relationships which suffer then, and cycle repeats. Lack of trust, running away from solvable issues, sleeping around etc, I've seen it all and some more. Some of my relationships failed exactly due to women on the other side not being able to deal with exactly this baggage, to the point I gave up on trying to fix other people's lives, because you basically can't anyway.
Toxic masculinity is perhaps a thing, but boys are told endlessly how they shouldn't behave and how their nature is flawed. Girls on the other hand, all is well.
This is also far from the case.
> This is also far from the case.
Yes, all is not well with girls, but I don't think they have to deal with an analog of the condemnation of "toxic masculinity" and messages that "their nature is flawed." I believe their problems are frequently blamed on external actors (e.g. beauty magazines, social media, etc).
You might be right that the question of who exactly is sending and spreading these messages has many answers and external (f)actors definitely come into it. But that too could be said about the claims of toxic masculinity.
One difference is that, I get the impression it's actually women doing a lot of not most of the "too fat/too skinny" bit. Sure, boys/men can be horrible to girls/women but tend not to get hung up on details. The details of "too slutty" etc seems to come from women, peer female friends, women's magazines etc.
In that respect I guess it's different, because it's a narrower critique. And it's, hmm, self-inflicted for lack of better word. Whereas with boys, it seems to come from women all around, and woke men too. Girls won't be told by their teachers (you'd hope!) that they are too fat or too skinny, but it's open season to tell boys they have a flawed nature they will have to spend the rest of their lives fixing.
But also, I think most of the HN crowd are men, and I don't think we're broadly the populace to discuss with any serious authority whether or not women are raised to blame themselves in some way lol.
"Toxic masculinity" is a problem because of cultural standards where it is seen as manly to harm others. I know lots of very manly men, who are secure in their manhood where that isn't the least bit toxic. I don't think that, for example, cat-calling is manly. But I would describe it as toxic.
Masculinity itself is a wonderful thing and necessary for men to (at least partially) embrace - but not the parts that stunt their development and keep them alone! Instead it should be aspects like reliability, trustworthiness, empathy, confidence, emotional strength - what comes to mind when you think about what makes a good man.
> boys are aggressive, horrible to women, insensitive
are parts of toxic masculinity, i.e. they are toxic and they are part of the social image of masculinity. Why is it wrong to say that they are toxic, and that boys shouldn't ascribe to those "goals"? The best thing we can do is tell them "society negatively associates these negative traits with masculinity, but you don't have to be like that to be a man".
Maybe, maybe not. I'm sure you're accurately describing a particular meaning of that term in some jargon, but that jargon doesn't control the meaning of the term.
There are certainly people who view masculinity itself as toxic, and I wouldn't be surprised if "toxic masculinity" has been borrowed to describe that view. It's a pretty straightforward application.
Okay, but how else are we supposed to talk? If we can't agree on common definitions we can stop right here and now, because any further discourse will just end up in misunderstandings. Toxic masculinity has a simple and obvious meaning. The only reason to misunderstand this is to clutch your pearls and not have to deal with the reality that maybe some of your learned behavior is actually negative.
> There are certainly people who view masculinity itself as toxic, and I wouldn't be surprised if "toxic masculinity" has been borrowed to describe that view. It's a pretty straightforward application.
Maybe, but are we then going to also use every other word based on misusage by few people? Or is it just "toxic masculinity" that we have to use wrongly?
The same way people have talked for millennia? Talk, pay attention to what other people are saying, and be on the lookout (and open to) new ways words and terms are being used.
> Maybe, but are we then going to also use every other word based on misusage by few people? Or is it just "toxic masculinity" that we have to use wrongly?
Your mistake is to label usages different than your favored one as "misusages." It's not a "misusage" if someone is successfully communicating their meaning to others (but maybe not to you). If you're having trouble communicating because you're getting hung up because you cling to some "official" definition and reject all others, the problem is on your end.
Once some other usage of a term is established or likely, it's a fool's errand to try to lecture it into non-existence.
Another thing to be mindful of is clinging too tightly to an "official" definition (especially a narrow technical one) can be an attempt at gaslighting: some discourse makes an observation and describes it with a particular term, but a competing discourse quibbles with the term as a way of denying the observation.
Can you demonstrate that people use toxic masculinity to mean "all masculinity is toxic"?
> Your mistake is to label usages different than your favored one as "misusages." It's not a "misusage" if someone is successfully communicating their meaning to others (but maybe not to you). If you're having trouble communicating because you're getting hung up because you cling to some "official" definition and reject all others, the problem is on your end.
I am having trouble because I'm using a word in the intended way and under the commonly understood definition (as seen in dictionaries etc.), and people are wilfully misunderstanding the word. I don't have trouble communicating, they choose to have trouble understanding. I don't think that anyone really uses "toxic masculinity" in the way you describe some people use it.
Things that are bad, just call them collectively "toxic behavior", without reminding the boys that this is the stuff that they are not supposed - but also kinda supposed - to do. You may also include some toxic behaviors stereotypically attributed to women, to make it obvious that we are criticizing bad behavior in general, not just a specific sex.
A sentence like "beware of toxic masculinity" can easily be understood in two ways; first, to beware of the subset of masculinity that is toxic, and second, to beware of masculinity because it is toxic. Even if the former meaning is intended, the latter will be an easy mixup, even for native English speakers.
The subset is the food you just received. It would be very weird to give thanks to a single person for all food everywhere and label it all delicious.
Other examples:
"The scariest thing about a rattlesnake is its deadly venom". (This sentence is not intended to contrast a rattlesnake's other, non-deadly venom, but rather emphasizes that its venom is categorically deadly).
"Our mortal bodies may die, but our immortal souls will live on". (Implies that all bodies are mortal, and all souls immortal; not specifying the subset of bodies that happen to be mortal).
"I'll place my trust in solid steel over empty words". (Implies that the speaker believes words are always empty, and only actions matter).
"Consider the humble pencil". (Implies that a pencil is humble by its nature, not a specific pencil that is humbler than others).
There's no clear rule, but generally, if the adjective describes a property of the noun that is already understood to be intrinsic to that noun, then it is more likely to be interpreted as emphasis rather than as a modifier. (Deadly venom, delicious food, solid steel, immortal soul). "Toxic masculinity" is in a sort of Schrodinger-state, where it can kind of go either way depending on contextual clues, basically, the reader's perception of the speaker's beliefs about masculinity itself. And once you've chosen a reading, even subconsciously, that will reinforce your preconception of what the speaker meant by their grammar. Like the blue-yellow dress illusion, people will read it one way or the other and not understand why others disagree.
So if I say something like "the problem with fraternities is that they are awash in toxic masculinity", and you happen to be from a fraternity that seems to you like a healthily masculine environment and have never seen a toxic one, then you might interpret my criticism of fraternities as coming from a viewpoint that masculinity itself is somehow intrinsically toxic, and interpret my sentence accordingly.
We've changed technical terminology before for similar reasons (eg. global warming -> climate change); it's probably worth finding a different term for this one.
"ideas about the way that men should behave that are seen as harmful, for example the idea that men should not cry or admit weakness"
So the preferred term among epidemiologists is now "physical distancing".
Sometimes when people just keep getting the wrong idea, regardless of the dictionary definition, it's worth changing terminology.
> Furthermore the word "adverse" carries a strong connotation of an implied contrast against a benign alternative.
Given the sentiment shared by some commenters here I think it's pretty clear they'd take this as a direct attack on masculinity by people who want to promote femininity.
Maybe it would be better to call specific behaviours "toxic stoicism", "toxic domineering", "toxic aggression", or things like that.
That might have a better reception, but unfortunately it changes the messaging.
> So the terminology itself paradoxically leans on stereotypes of which toxic behaviours are associated with masculinity, even while encouraging men to move away from those behaviours and stop perceiving them as an essential part of being a man.
It's not paradoxical, because the term is specifically talking about the negative associations with the stereotypes for masculinity. That's why it's so important to keep the messaging. Masculinity as such isn't a biological reality (in so far that "masculine traits" differ between cultures/historical periods and aren't necessarily present), it's a social construct. "Toxic masculinity" refers to the toxic parts of this construct in regards to the culture in which it is used. If the stereotype changes, the meaning of toxic masculinity changes.
Do you have any alternative to "toxic behavior" that doesn't have this problem? If you do I'll gladly switch my choice of terms.
I honestly don't think the term matters. Many people don't want to think about parts of their own behavior potentially being bad, especially when they've been socially taught that those parts should be good. No matter what term I use, somebody will find a way to misinterpret it, because it's much easier than actually thinking about the topic itself.
The argument generally being made isn't that teaching boys stoicism is wrong. The argument is that it's wrong to teach boys that somber silence is the only acceptable way of dealing with their problems, and that anything else is a sign of weakness (for which they'll face social consequences).
I'd also separately argue that the way we go about teaching this has a tendency to lead to a behavior that more closely resembles avoidance than stoicism.
> Ancient philosophy proposed a wide range of possible approaches to life which may enhance well-being. Stoic philosophy has influenced various therapeutic traditions. Individuals today may adopt an approach to life representing a naive Stoic Ideology, which nevertheless reflects a misinterpretation of stoic philosophy. How do these interpretations affect well-being and meaning in life? We examine the differential effects of Stoic Ideology on eudaimonic versus hedonic well-being across three cultural contexts. In this pre-registered study, across samples in New Zealand (N = 636), Norway (N = 290), and the US (N = 381) we found that a) Stoic Ideology can be measured across all three contexts and b) Converging evidence that Stoic Ideology was negatively related to both hedonic well-being and eudaimonic well-being. Focusing on specific relationships, we found especially pronounced effects for Taciturnity (the desire to not express emotions) and Serenity (the desire to feel less emotions). Despite being a misinterpretation of stoic philosophy, these findings highlight the important role of individuals’ orientations to emotional processing for well-being.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10902-022-00563-w
> Stoicism has to confer some fitness advantage, either evolutionary or socially, otherwise it wouldn't be such a large part of masculinity.
I'm sorry, but it doesn't have to confer some fitness advantage. Stoicism isn't a generic part of masculinity, it's only part of it in specific cultures. It's entirely possible people made a mistake and socially pressured each other for no good reason.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxic_masculinity
Maybe it's something that female administrators and teachers fail to understand. Or rather, willfully ignore trying to push a certain (extremely liberal) agenda on captive boys.
It would also explain the current epidemic of ADHD and especially ADHD medication prescribed to young boys.
I have a niece and nephew who are being home-schooled (both testing in the top 10% of their respective peer before and after moving to home schooling). While their home schooling encompasses quite a bit more, they cover the traditional material for their age (everything covered by standardized testing), including drills, practice worksheets, and other typical "homework" in about 10% of the time they were previously spending in school.
While there are obviously other aspects to school, including social interaction (which their parents are making certain they do get), watching the whole process as an extended family member has really driven home how much of current American schooling is just kid-warehousing.
Nothing would make me more miserable than shoving PE up my throat on account that I got to 'need' it. It was the worst part of my school and uni days, which in turn was the worst part of my life, period.
The assumption that boys are all extroverted, physically active and agressive is a big part of the problem.
Well, that ability to mask is exactly what increases their likelihood to be spared from the worst of the pain of being ASD (the negative treatment from others due to inability to mask).
Autism really does hit men harder
Take as one point the fact that boys brains develop slower and later into life than women. Should then boys be competing against women of the same age given what we know?
Take as another point the decline in physical activity in schools and the reduction is recess time. Does this negatively impact boys more than girls? I think so, but it hurts then both to be sure.
In a perfect world, education would not be a competition at all. Everyone would proceed at their own pace, differently in different subjects.
And maybe at the end, where would still be a certification of people who mastered something versus people who didn't. But we would not freak out so much about whether someone understood something e.g. at the age of 12, instead of 13 or 14. The important thing should be that at some age they did.
And that's why most entrepreneurs/successful people are men. System was rough to them since the start, putting them down during every occasion and most boys have learnt how to stand up back on their feet again since early age. The system offered them failure and gave them resiliency.
Girls were carried around and when real life come around and they fall down, they now have no idea how to get back up.
>"our entire school system is setup to offer success to women, and failure to boys." And these comments just strike me as strange especially in STEM. It's only recently that girls are being pushed towards this path, after decades of being actively pushed out and consistently told they are worse than their male peers.
Now people are slowly waking up to the consequences, and it's clear that the trend is ever so slowly turning around.
I'll conclude by giving two examples to illustrate my point if you think I'm exaggerating. Both are from about 10 years ago. I honestly don't think it would happen the same today anymore. The first was that there was one (like a single) school where boys were somehow outperforming girls. They said in the press that it was weird because everyone knows it's usually the other way around and that it would be investigated what was wrong. The second was that there was a college entrance test (similar to sat) where men outperfomed women, and one of the criteria they had when redesigning it was closing that gap.
For example, men watch a lot more sports than women (I don't know if this is true but for the sake of conversation let's just assume it to be the case). If that exam had questions that had a sports 'setting' then those who are most familiar with the sport would have an edge over those who don't. This isn't limited to just gender either. People from different cultures would also struggle if the 'common sense' in the question isn't something that they are familiar with.
I'd like to see which questions were removed and hear their justifications for it. This sounds like something that happened but the details got distorted into a simple take to push some form of agenda. "test makers are dumbing down questions so that women look better."
Do you happen to have historicals of the test you were looking at? The SAT results look pretty even from 2017-2022 https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d22/tables/dt22_226.10.a...
ACT point difference is even closer (~1 point difference each year) their site sucks but that data is from 1995-2010 https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d10/tables/dt10_155.asp
These are the two most popular college entrance exams and have longevity on their side.
I won't even begin to tackle the first point since there is just way too much that is unknown or anecdotal. I honestly do think you're either exaggerating and/or misinformed but if you can provide some sort of evidence to prove your point then I'm all ears. And I'm not saying this to discount your lived experience. You may truly have felt that the school system or various teachers really did want you to fail. If that's the case then you were done a disservice but the aggregate data just doesn't agree with you.
And the notion that boys are being set up to fail, especially by the school system is just ridiculous. In this day and age, students can post their questions and answers online. Any bias in grading can be quickly found out and if the issue is as broad and systemic as you are claiming then this will be incredibly trivial to prove. There would be millions of students complaining.
I really doubt this describes the experience of 90% of people on this planet.
Girls, on the other hand, get told their body is flawed. Gotta constantly be on a diet, and spend like an hour a day on beauty stuff.
We are all victims of society.
That said, gym and sports (typically recommended to men) seem healthier to me than starving (typically recommended to women).
A large portion of young men are turning to steroids and fake hormones in addition to insane diets to achieve those bodies. Look at pictures of strong men or body builders from the early 20th century. The look nothing like the six packed gym bro we're all supposed to look like.
Oh I know there are some men who struggle with body image issues. And the tiny proportion of men working as hollywood actors probably care about their looks a great deal. But do you shave your legs or wear make-up? Read beauty magazines? Me neither.
We men have a wealth of role models showing we can succeed regardless of appearance. Nobody gives a shit about Elon Musk's BMI, or how Richard Stallman dresses, or whether Donald Trump has a six pack.
You’re either incredibly blessed or incredibly underestimating the barriers to entry to be successful as a male porn star.
Also Elon Musk and Donald Trump both have a shit ton of memes straight up body shaming both of them. Trump had literal fucking statues made with the sole purpose of showing him as fat and small dicked. People still often post the shirtless picture of Elon or the one of his hairline before the plugs to try to shame and discredit him. It’s absolutely wild and false to say no one gives a shit about it. His fans might not, but his fans don’t even care that he did a bunch of crypto scam shit, so that doesn’t really mean much.
He’s successful despite the body shaming, but women like Lizzo are wildly successful despite the body shaming they receive too.
Something I think people miss sometimes is that there’s a big market for messages loudly affirming girls’ identities and choices because things are not, in fact, going that well.
It's been an ongoing adventure with my partner, she works very hard for a good salary while I'm the successless indie game dev. We talk a lot about it and our feelings about it, and I realize how privileged/lucky I am to have found her and that she accepts me.
She's crazy enough to agree with me on the fact that I might get exponentially more useful in case of a war/disaster, and that I'd make a perfect dad when we get to it :p
I can count the number of healthy relationships I've seen in this life on one hand.
I don't know exactly how we ended up here; but unless things get better fast, over population will be the least of our troubles.
If a man is told by a heterosexual woman he's not in a relationship with that he's a nice guy, he should take that to mean she's not attracted to him. But this is confusing because the majority of men's advice about women comes from women, and the messaging they've received is that they should be a "nice guy." And being nice at a surface level is antithetical to things like assertion, which is a quality many women look for in men. Until the advent of YouTube, my impression and experience is that elder men have failed to teach men anything useful about how to interact with women, including what it means to be nice. I know of no men my age in real life that received any wisdom from their fathers besides "wear a condom."
So called "nice guys" are treated like trash, not because they're nice, but often the opposite. If a man is a pushover, lacks confidence, doesn't seem like he knows what he wants out of life, and is willingly subordinate to women, but he is superficially very nice, that signals that his behavior comes from immaturity or to get laid. Women do actually like guys who are nice, but a scant number of them are into men who lack a spine or need women in order to feel complete. A man can be nice but also be assertive, confident, and not be needy.
And sure, plenty of women are into bad boys, but that's their prerogative, and a man may not want to be with those women anyway.
I'm telling you, something's off; most women don't even want what they're looking for when they get it.
It's quite possibly a similar story for men, but I don't have the experience to judge.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transactional_analysis
Personally I've encountered the thing you've described, and think where it went wrong was falling into a persistent parent/child dynamic instead of returning to an adult/adult one. I'm a bit wiser now and can confirm that once you recognise the modes you're falling into, you can shed the (toxic) ideas like "nice guys finish last" and start having deeper relationships.
I think this very modern fear of being dependent on your partner emerged of late because of the way sexual liberalism eroded the security of romantic relationships. Nothing means anything anymore and your partner can leave you at any moment, therefore you have to somehow remain completely independent while leading a relationship.
But at the same time, to truly open yourself and love someone you have to become somewhat dependent on them.
It was a "deer in the headlights" experience. His family indifferent if not annoyed by his revelations. He had nervously prepared for the moment but the message was plain and clear: you can't fail.
I think it serves as an example of how cold and loveless men perceive this world to be. You need to deliver without fail for life. Fail and nobody cares or you're cast aside as trash.
So if the messaging is that nobody loves you for you and you're judged by utility only, we shouldn't be surprised by men's growing issues.
If so, then we're in trouble.
That doesn’t mean I’m a robot without feeling. Doing your job isn’t “toxically masculine”.
Growing up I was raised in all the bullshit about not crying or never appearing “weak”. It turns out bottling all your emotions isn’t a super healthy thing. Even worse when you don’t gain the meaningful perspective of understanding the implications of them because you’re conditioned to pretend to ignore them.
Men are emotional creatures whether some of them want to admit it or not because they’re human.
Cleaning human shit for a living or part of your living doesn’t change that no matter who you are.
That's particularly important when responding to a thoughtful comment like the GP. I know the issue is emotionally difficult but, as the site guidelines say, "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Dating is much the same: the majority of the hetero/bi female dating pool selects in favour of features that are often red flags for toxic masculinity. This gets better as one gets older, mercifully, but gender is a verb as well as a noun, and men and women alike aggressively gender one another and unwittingly punish people who deviate from the rules.
Still, at least we're talking about it. Previous generations succumbed badly to gender essentialism - "men are from Mars" and that stuff - and as ever, left a mess for the next generations.
Maybe we could make progress by tabooing words that frame being male as a bad thing?
I don't think it's fair to equate that to "men bad".
Then again, how would a similar "Toxic Blackness" concept fly?
Negative elements of traditional black American culture seem well discussed by the community itself, perhaps to a fault.
Why not just describe it as "being an asshole", or "stubbornness", or "aggressiveness", or "being disagreeable", "being antisocial", etc?
Why limit this only to "masculine" pride? You absolutely see women picking fights to defend their pride.
We just call that behavior "being a Karen" (or "catfights"). Which, being fair, both come with their own misogynistic problems.
> refusing to admit you’re wrong > escalating situations > being overly boastful
The reason why people, mostly men, don’t like that term is because it gets thrown around for pretty much anything at this point to mostly put men down. Spreading your legs and holding the door open for someone is considered toxic masculinity.
trigger warnings for whatever reason
it's a blanket statement, it gets thrown around way too often without apparent reason, that's why
Toxic femininity might not be as visible, but in many ways it's more harmful for society because it hinders collaboration on every level
In general, women do all of this all of the time except the last. So you see the problem.
Teaching boys to epxress masculinity through strength, assertiveness, self-reliance, etc. is totally healthy in moderation. Teaching boys to be violent or domineering isn't, nor is teaching them that showing emotion or asking for help is weakness.
This type of recent linguistic addition really sticks out when people are working so hard to make language humane and inclusive elsewhere, while simultaneously going in the exact opposite direction with male-related neologisms.
And the last part of your own post illustrates that bad traits like being violent or domineering can be called out without having to pointlessly gender the terms.
I'm open to this argument because it's clear that many people take it this way, but how else would you state it? Everywhere else in English, an adjective limits the scope of the noun it's attached to. "Toxic chemicals" doesn't imply that chemicals are inherently toxic, "red car" doesn't imply that cars are inherently red. "Toxic" is probably needlessly sensational though, I'll grant that.
> bad traits like being violent or domineering can be called out without having to pointlessly gender the terms.
I agree with this. To clarify I think part of the frustration/misunderstanding with the term comes from it being applied at the wrong level. It's a descriptor of a social/cultural phenomenon, not a trait of an individual. If a man is being violent, it may or may not have anything to do with toxic masculinity, and invoking toxic masculinity to describe his actions would be inappropriate and needlessly gendered.
It really only makes sense to start talking about toxic masculinity when asking higher level sociological questions like, for example, why men are so over-represented in violent crime stats. It's a term to use when exploring causes, not effects, if that makes any sense.
It's like the difference in terminology between an ER nurse and an epidemiologist. The nurse might just say "flu", because at the level they operate that's the issue at hand. For them to speculate about the origins of the specific strain would be inappropriate. For the epidemiologist, however, these questions are exactly the point, because understanding the details of how an outbreak spreads can help us be more prepared in the future.
I'd frame them in a way that centers on behavior ("domineering", "violent") without gendering them. I think this makes the actual things that are toxic clearer and that lumping them into "masculinity" makes them less clear.
> "Toxic chemicals" doesn't imply that chemicals are inherently toxic
Yet you've probably seen at least a few people who take this as a reason to worry about "chemicals" in general, despite that covering literally everything. Things like this just make me think that if we want to avoid harmful associations, we have to simply not pair up the words at all. If someone is being violent, we can complain about that without bringing their identity into the frame.
> why men are so over-represented in violent crime stats
But the term is bad because it does nothing whatsoever to illuminate which things might actually cause that and there are probably many causes it lumps under a single umbrella wrongly.
I've seen stats that indicate one of the bigger causes is untreated psychosis, which has nothing in particular to do with being male, or any other identity that's over-represented in arrest data for that matter.
And to me that just reinforces the idea that the identity shouldn't be used at all when framing the problem. I'm aware of the correlations, but we have to find actual causes and, e.g. get people mental healthcare to fix the behaviors creating toxicity, rather than accepting a framing that centers on someone's very identity as if that's the thing that's problematic.
And I can say "causes" because causal modeling is a thing now. I've been reading the Book of Why lately and it's interesting how much things have advanced even in just the last couple of decades or so.
I have an idea. Maybe it has nothing to do with the syntax of the term in the abstract and all to do with what a large number of people using it actually mean. If the term had no history of abuse, this wouldn't be a problem, exactly as you say. What we see in the actual world though is what people really mean by the term. The people using it are misandrists (evidenced by things like the other terms mentioned in the GP) and so the term has come to be a sort of slur; they just hate men and genuinely believe that masculinity is toxic tout court and they have a very hard time hiding it despite simultaneously spouting off otherwise reasonable theories. In other words, they don't mean what they claim to mean by it and people can detect this, so the term has become tarnished.
toxic masculinity as a descriptor is equally useful when asking higher level sociological questions as female hysteria was in the past when asking higher level sociological questions. Why are women so over-emotional in certain situations. Why were they over-represented in mental institutions. It's was a term they used to exploring causes of those things, and as a by product it was used to justify their conclusions.
It was originally a terminology used by doctors and health experts. It was later used by people and politicians. It was then abandoned by doctors and health experts, and then much later abandoned by people and politicians. It existed for hundreds of years and then abandoned. Neither change how inappropriate and needlessly gendered it was, nor the harm it did.
If I started going on about "toxic femininity" (e.g. gossiping and character assassinating rather than confronting people directly, or favoring groupthink over independent thought), then I'd rightly be called a misogynist for clearly trying to blame women for these negative human behaviors. Femininity is seen as a protected and positive trait, while masculinity is so shunned that even saying we shouldn't bash it is seen as suspicious
This is so insane. Anyone who's been enough a player of the dating game and treed to optimise your strategy known you will end up becoming or (in my case) pretending to be "toxic masculinity" because it work so much more on girls.
I saw a meme that summed it up nicely:
“You’re not a gladiator or a spartan warrior who needs war, you’re a middle manager who needs therapy”
Let me expand on that: “you’re a middle manager who needs therapy” – because we’ve built a society where you can’t fulfill your innate desires.
I for one am tired of the therapy meme. If everyone needs therapy, it’s society that’s wrong.
You can’t just take a monkey out of the savannah, put it in a cubicle, then say “you need therapy” when it misbehaves.
PS: I’m not saying therapy doesn’t work, just that it feels like we’re using it as a bandaid on a deeper issue. Like, hey, maybe people should lead fulfilling lives instead of using therapy to fit themselves into the box society drew for them.
Not like I’ll ever access it (too masc, heh) but I definitely see therapy as a much more positive way to address your emotions than self destructive or violent behaviour.
Sports and stuff helps too, maybe martial arts are the masculine equivalent to talk therapy.
I don't think that the majority of people need therapy. But I've also never met a manager who acted like they were a Spartan going to war. This may well be one of those social bubble sorting issues, where something that is common in one person's experience is very rare in another person's experience.
It’s that there are a small amount of men in the modern world who need a warrior ethos and the ‘tempering fires of warfare’ and other such cringe imagery employed by those pushing hypermasculine ideology.
The majority of men don’t need to be ‘redeemed through violence’ and, like the proverbial middle manager, probably just need someone to tell them they aren’t alone and things will be OK in due course, or whatever a therapist does.
And yet the manufactured adversity industry is booming. Look at all the marathons and triathlons and iron mans and spartan races and ninja warriors and all the other nonsense we’ve invented just to scratch this itch for men and women alike.
Humans _need_ something to fight against. If there’s nothing, they’ll make something up.
I'm curious why you think it's nonsense though. Those activities can be fun, safe and encourage discipline.
I haven't met anyone who was actually competitive about it in terms of wanting to be the fastest or whatever. I suspect it is a minority of the group, who in turn are also a minority of society.
If we are making generalizations about what humans need, I wouldn't consider "fighting against something". Perhaps "being right on the internet" would fit more people.
No one is pushing that, other than those that push that as a strawman.
> The majority of men don’t need to be ‘redeemed through violence’
You are so far off the mark that you're crossing over into speculative fiction at this point.
Ever heard of testosterone? Do you know what the effects are?
Okay, sure, it doesn't result in a bloodlust, but it is largely responsible for active aggression. As a society we channel this aggression into sports where it can be safely bled with limited violence.
What's wrong with therapy? You go to the doctor from time to time to take care of your physical health, why shouldn't you go to a therapist from time to time to take care of your mental health?
Nothing is wrong with therapy. I’m just saying that if your entire diet consists of ice cream and you’re feeling poorly, maybe try eating some veggies. You don’t need a doctor for that.
I think the crucial difference to me is whether people say “You need therapy [to change your life]” (good imo) or “You need therapy [to fit into your life]” (bad imo). And it feels like too many people mean the latter.
I don't know about the US, but here in Australia, GPs are supposed to take care of both your physical health and your mental health.
Feel the need to see a psychologist? You go see your GP, and they create a GP mental health care plan, which entitles you to a certain number of government-subsidised psychologist sessions per a year. At a certain point through those sessions, you need to go back to the GP to get the plan reviewed. The psychologist sends your GP status reports on your progress.
Feel the need to see a psychiatrist? You need to go to your GP and get a psychiatry referral, before a psychiatrist will see you. You have to go back to the GP once every 12 months to get the referral renewed. The psychiatrist sends regular reports back to the GP on your progress.
GPs also commonly prescribe antidepressants, anti-anxiety drugs, antipsychotics, etc. Individuals with more serious mental health needs are referred to psychiatry/psychology (sometimes paediatrics for children/adolescents), also those who need prescriptions GPs can't legally write (mostly psycho-stimulants for ADHD).
All this talk of "you need therapy" is very American. One thing the Australian government is concerned about, is people with only mild (or even non-existent) mental health issues consuming mental health resources, causing strain on the availability of those resources for those with more severe mental health issues who really need them, and adding to the burden on the taxpayer – especially when those who seek out professional mental health services for minor issues skew middle-to-upper class, while many lower class people with serious mental health issues aren't getting enough support.
I jest, but I think you are right on the money that this talk of "you need therapy" is very American. The deep irony of someone telling someone else "you need therapy" is that it is spoken with the implication that it should be considered a punishment for a moral failing, rather than resource to live a one's existing life but better. It all feels very Puritan.
You don't "go to the doctor from time to time", unless you're in some dysfunctional medical system where doctors can make more money by doing unnecessary work. You go to the doctor when you have a problem. You don't see a doctor regularly unless you've got something wrong with you (including old age, but old age life is not exactly healthy - it just beats the alternative), and if a lot of people in a certain environment are going to the doctor regularly then there's something wrong with that environment.
On the contrary, you should go for regular checkups. Even late-stage capitalist health insurance covers these, because it help detect some problems early, before they become a bigger problem. Generally, this is once a year or so.
Nah. They're popular in America because of the corrupt healthcare-industrial complex, there's no health benefit on average.
(OTOH, if and when you notice something unusual, go to the doctor post-haste, don't wait around hoping it'll clear up or put off mentioning it until your scheduled annual medical).
There's a big difference, though.
Doctors, by and large, diagnose using a body of knowledge acquired from scientific fact backed by intensive peer-reviewed and reproducible studies. They prescribe using a similarly evidence-based foundation of facts.
Therapists (psychologists, not psychiatrists) have no such foundations in science. Much of what they "know" is from non-reproducible studies.
If you need mental health maintenance, there's literally no evidence that going to an actual therapist is any more or less helpful than meditating, religious involvement, sports clubs, homeopathic remedies, diet modification, acupuncture, etc.
I'm not arguing that taking care of one's mental health isn't a good thing, I'm arguing that there's no evidence that therapy with a psychologist is better than the placebo.
You presumably think there's a) an objective thing called "mental health" that can b) be effectively treated by talking to someone called a "therapist". But if either a or b is not correct, then there may be something wrong with going to therapy.
This. Pioneering psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, father of character analysis made a similar claim. He was pilloried for suggesting that we should focus on prevention of mental illness over treatment. To do this he said that we should radically reorient our societies so that they meet people's organismic needs. He died in US prison.
The psych establishment now is a tool to rehabilitate workers who have become unproductive, not a way to help humans fulfill their potential. Therapy has been helpful to me, but woefully inadequate. That is by design. It's not about my needs, it's about my employer's needs.
For those curious, the miracle cure was sitting inside a special magic box he claimed would do something with your "orgone energy", which was like that orgasm/organism joke but posited as a real thing his device could help you with.
They burned his books, including "The Mass Psychology of Fascism" and his seminal "Character Analysis" in what has been called one of the worst instances of book burning in US history at the time. Looks like the burning times are back, eh?
He was jailed for refusing not to proselytize the Orgone box, but that was really a pretext. Orgone boxes aren't in any way dangerous. He was jailed because his theories and practice were a threat to the status quo.
To be perfectly clear, I'm familiar with multiple political prisoners in the USA and am well aware that the US does imprison people for political reasons. I'm just not convinced that this guy is one of them.
Sometime I wish we had a real, secular, replacement for the church that existed off of donations (with basically everyone donating for cultural reasons) and took care of education, medicine, community building and psychiatric support. One that wasn’t the government, obviously, since that has the monopoly on violence as well.
Society is one abstraction, reproduction is another, and they don’t always mesh nicely.
Maybe the perfect society for reproduction is one of polyamorous warlord harems or something (this is a hypothetical)
Men optimizing for that status quo would be absolutely lethal in our peaceful monogamous society.
On the male side, prisoners' dilemma. On the female side, tragedy of the commons.
Is therapy any more effective than that? Or do they just repeat you into submission until you sing the right tune even if you don't believe in it?
I'll say it: it was completely useless, a total waste of time. I wouldn't consider speaking to a therapist about anything ever again.
However -- I did have some breakthroughs with a life coach I found watching youtube vids. It was really helpful for me to go into a therapeutic relationship when I already know I can connect with the coach on a personal level.
insert meme about selection bias here
There's a whole world out there of fairly normal people who don't play those games. They are not in nightclubs. Try to live an actual life.
I will be the first to say #notAllWomen, but every number is heavily skewed in a direction that promotes toxic masculinity.
I was mostly referring to the general idea tat woman are attracted to dominant, physically strong, confident men (that's for the 'good' traits') but also downright confrontational, insulting, mean and even humiliating with other people.
Since in my opinion women want to avoid being with what they perceive is a "weak" man, they will give a pass to all the bad traits because they see it as 'being a strong dominant man', and if you are nice or just not mean, they will be scared you are being weak
If anyone reads this and decides to learn about it, go ahead. I'm never going to tell someone else not to educate themselves. But don't treat it as an instruction book, and don't treat anyone like shit.
And davidguetta, if you can figure out how to express the good traits but not the bad ones, you'll find a girl that is not only attracted to you but may actually grow to love you. And what's more, you'll learn to love and respect her and yourself.
What women are looking for is someone confident in their ability to defend themselves and others. You don't need to be toxic to show that.
> And davidguetta, if you can figure out how to express the good traits but not the bad ones, you'll find a girl that is not only attracted to you but may actually grow to love you. And what's more, you'll learn to love and respect her and yourself.
Yeah.... well first if you read my message I never said I even WANTED to express bad traits or did it that much beside trying to pick up in bars, nor think it's good. It just works better in the flirting phase, whatever you or I think about.
BTW there's a class of girl where it works particularly well and it's the cliché of the "low self esteem girl"(LSE). It's the kind of girl who thinks / knows she's crazy / stupid and have issues so you can't really NOT be an ass to her because if you treat her as your equal she's going to despise you. ("I suck but he likes me so he must suck too"). I'd recommend running away from these kinda of girls but if you want sex there are a bunch of hot ones among them.
Also I think you should know love and attraction are a lot closer one from the other from what you seem to think...
But once again I'm not particularly interested in having to do that as a man. I'm in a relationship and I explicitly explained to my gf that she should be ambitious, have some fight in her and not take shit from other people or me. I also vaguely explained whole concept of LSE so that she doesn't become one. I have 0 interest in being in a relationship where I can see my gf as someone I respect / vaguely admire. I mean there are women astronauts ffs
Or there may be a lot more to it than you think. Attraction will certainly fade.
Anyway, I didn't mean to jump to conclusions about you, but I'm sure you know there are plenty of guys that look for fulfillment through sex, don't care who they hurt doing it, and it's not a great path.
It's not that bad if you are young. To me the good path is you should fuck at least 20 girls to know what you like / how girls work before settling (and girls should do the same). Then after 40+ girls you get tired of it if you are not a retard. The fact that most young people almost don't fuck at all is a bigger problem than the one who fuck too much ^^ (consensually of course)
You live in a toxic culture, why wouldn't women be also toxic?
In general girls who don't go to nightclub are still going to respond to basically the same 'stimuli' / behavior than club girls. It's just in general they are less conscious of it and don't understand it, and sometime blame themseleves (when they are not just at the edge of depression) for despising their "nice" boyfriend and getting horny for the "toxic" guy.
That didn't happen to me but I live in a large city where I've come across (many) other dads who seemed to have more flexible schedules as evidenced by said dads showing up for pickup/dropoff and playdates. I'm not sure if there is/was a greater acceptance for fathers taking care of young children more visibly in metropolitan areas.
>> Previous generations succumbed badly to gender essentialism... and as ever, left a mess for the next generations.
Perhaps previous generations--thousands of them? millions?--realized there's more to gender than blank-slate social constructionism. And the mess is self-created by a younger generation wanting to rebel for want of anything else to rebel against?
See how easy it is to apply ageism in the other direction? /s
Public opinion oversimplifies things to good vs bad and works like a pendulum, and I just hope it doesn't swing too much in the opposite direction. If people saying "men suck" is a temporary by-product of addressing systemic gender inequality then that's a price I'm willing to pay. I've benefited plenty from the power of average white male mediocrity.
And yet, here in Latin America, there are posters in every major city decrying the crisis of "femicidio" (murder of women). Not because they are disproportionately victims (quite the opposite), but because that's what's interesting to the American NGOs that decide what political issues are trendy and important.
When they cannot defend themselves in all of the social discussion, bargaining, and gossip that is used for control of their lives, the feeling of helplessness can become overwhelming.
And if a confrontation becomes violent, probabilistically the bigger, stronger one will most likely win. In a male-female dynamic where death is the outcome, the origin of the conflict is rarely considered.
In many countries girls and women still need education for reading and written communication. I think in every country boys and men should receive education for emotional self-understanding and communication.
But I'm with you in the frustration that this isn't talked about.
The above attitude I feel like minimises men's problems - the implicit assumption is that everyone else has it worse, whether that attitude was intended or not.
I've done literally no research into the problems these groups face comparatively, but I find it interesting that above case is usually assumed.
- How about the fact that in some countries women can't even show their hair, have the right to drive or vote?
- How about the fact that women are several times more likely to be sexually assaulted?
- How about the fact that women have to worry about potential unwanted pregnancy?
- How about the fact that abortion laws are being repealed across the United States?
- How about the glass ceiling and the fact that women are paid less for the same jobs across many industries?
That's not to say that men don't have their own challenges as well, but it's borderline delusional if you think that men and women face the same level of challenges.
Hummm well i guess i am taking the bait.
> How about the fact that in some countries women can't even show their hair, have the right to drive or vote?
I don't want to diminish the experience of people in other countries. But comparing acros so many different variable muddy the water. If you gonna bring up women in muslim/arab countries (many of which support the hijab btw), then i will raise you the men currently dying in ukraine and what ever war you want to talk about.
Let's focus on the average experience in the US... where we have both enough information and cultural understanding to make good commentary.
> - How about the fact that women are several times more likely to be sexually assaulted?
Something, something prison... And what about the other kind of assaults... like say murder ?
> How about the fact that women have to worry about potential unwanted pregnancy?
Touche on this one. Also i would say that women have more control on when/if they want to be parent as opposed to men. And the 18 year child support can be brutal. (Did you know that child support can't be discharged in bankruptcy court ?)
> How about the fact that abortion laws are being repealed across the United States?
Agree that a travesty.
> How about the glass ceiling and the fact that women are paid less for the same jobs across many industries?
Yeah this one is a rabit hole. But comparing modern data, and normalizing this is much less pronouced. How about the missing men in univestity etc... etc...
> That's not to say that men don't have their own challenges as well, but it's borderline delusional if you think that men and women face the same level of challenges.
This must be an american thing, the weird need to diminish or reduce the experience of a certain group. Life sucks, and sucks for a lot of people accros so many different variable.
I understand the concept that some issue might be more pressing , but to call someone delusional simply for asking the question is not helful at all...
- How about the fact that men commit suicide at greater rates than women
- How about the fact that men are 10 times more likely to be killed on the job
- How about the fact that men are several times more likely to be physically assaulted
- How about the fact that men are more likely to die of covid
- How about the fact that 3 in 4 homeless people are men
We could go on and on like this in an all day pity party if you want?
> I don't wanna get into a whole thing
Proceeds to get into the whole thing.
This should be familiar to most male members of this forum: being the computer nerd was weak, not playing the man's sports was "girly", not meeting body image standards is contrasted to being too feminine.
Men who are raped aren't taken seriously at all because of these problems. But that's never getting fixed so long as your only answer (and it's rife in this thread) is to construct these issues in opposition to femininity.
Instead everyone can remember one person saying "men suck" in some context, and on that basis they're clamoring to tear down decades of progress on equality. Which isn't going to help any man.
I don't have time to show my thoughts with any objective metrics, so I'm just going to lay out how I see things, so this will be touchy-feely. This is merely my opinion and I have no problem with people disagreeing.
I think the biggest impact is in how people can function in modern society - pay gap, positions of power, tokenization - a good book is "Invisible Man" by Ralph Waldo Ellison which is about more than being black in America but about being an individual that everyone wants to put in a box or a particular group - he's invisible because people don't see the individual. It's universal, and everyone feels that to some degree, but the degree I feel it as a white male is much smaller. Basically your ability to project your will on the world is easy mode for white male (btw - me).
Anecdote alert: For example I was literally just talking to an old friend who I've worked with in the past who is a great architect but kept getting the in-the-middle-of-nowhere projects at a very well known and old NYC firm, so she started her own architecture business and is doing quite well.
But not that it makes things easy for men! Because there is also expectation to be a provider, suck up your emotions and be tough. These things, which some point to as "the problem" are harming men as well and should be addressed. And this is where it gets very messy - some of the things that are "evidence" that men are privileged are also things that harm men in non-obvious ways. And as for the "easy to project your will", there is also an expectation that you have to and you're a failure if you don't. Why can't someone live a simple life without feeling like a failure?
Ultimately I think the ideal goal should be to not push gender based expectations - both for male and female.
I suppose a lot of these issues come down to these subtler problems - Men have fewer problems in some senses (physical capability, professional respect, etc) but more in others (generally emotional and relationships), wheas for women it's often the reverse. These sorts of implicit assumptions that exist on a cultural level can be difficult for people of the opposite gender to see or understand.
Here's the thing though, there are objective metrics. On almost all of them, women have it better as a group than men.
Victims of violence? Overwhelmingly male. Suicides? The same. Deaths and injuries at work. The bar charts for all of those look pretty much the same.
Other objective metrics reveal females to have the upper hand: education (better for females, worse for males), health (better for females, worse for males), family court (better for females, worse for males), employment (better for females than for males), homelessness (better for females than for males).
So your assertion that there exists objective metrics but that it would take too long to present is, I feel, maybe correct, but there's so few of those metrics and they need to be applied to narrowly, they may as well not exist.
The author had to run his book by the CCP - you get the sense this hints at an accepted strategy in the Chinese mainland. It’s an interesting read.
Also it's complete nonsense because if anything, the CPC is afraid of those trends happening:
https://www.npr.org/2021/09/02/1033687586/china-ban-effemina...
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-55926248
I think you misunderstood something here. The links you posted affirm the premise of the book.
It’s no one’s plan but we do need to find the cause and deal with it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atrazine
I’ve been reading is a potential candidate. Any opinions?
> Its use was banned in the European Union in 2004
If so this should be something that's possible to control for in studies. I can't find a lot of data from Europe newer than about that date, even suitable for casual discussion.
I read Death's End, and I don't remember that.
The trilogy talks about human society ebbing and flowing between "tough" and "sensitive" over the generations. Mostly, the Trisolarans rely on the Sophon lock. With superior technology, the masculinity of your prey is totally irrelevant. And, in Death's End, everyone's in an Australian penal colony anyway.
Perhaps because your exceedingly-vague conspiracy theory is full of holes? For example:
1. Which foreign governments are you accusing? Do you even know, or are you just assuming somebody must be doing the thing?
2. Exactly what mechanism of foreign "grants" is being used to force the hiring of certain staff or educators, and where are they being hired?
3. What makes those individuals "demoralizing" actors, and why do you believe they have a significant effect on "young men"?
4. On what grounds can it be anything but noise, a tiny droplet in the heaving cultural ocean that is "current gender roles and expectations"?
_____
Truly nefarious foes would probably have much better results (for less money) just pumping out catchy songs with demoralizing subtext and hoping one gets popular. Heck, maybe they even spread a dogma of powerlessness by funding US Christian Radio stations, constantly telling people they are nothing without Jesus.
I've yet to encounter a scenario in the last year where filling in that blank with "Russia" wasn't considered an objective fact by most.
Hold up, there's a HUGE difference between these two:
A: "Most people consider it an objective fact that Russia is a current geopolitical enemy to the US, it does some wacky shit, therefore if a foreign government is committing shenanigans there's a chance it's Russia."
B: "Most people consider it an objective fact that Russia has been somehow giving educational grants to US institutions with the explicit goal of installing a fifth-column of educators who will demoralize young US men with misandry."
Believing A does not imply B.
The parent-poster isn't being vague because the answer is obvious-and-accepted... they're being vague because they want to push the "foreign enemies in our colleges" meme without giving the audience any handles for critical-thinking.
And that chance is: "probably", where "probably" means it is "basically" a fact. (Specific example: the same historic evidence of Russian trolls/hackers is regularly re-used as proof of new accusations, if any evidence is even provided that is.)
And any challenge to the claim? "Pedantic." (or: silence, highly predictable memes, insults, deflection, etc - ChatGPT would know better than me)
> Believing A does not imply B.
There are (at least) two kinds of imply (and "does not" for that matter):
- the correct, literal, logically perfect interpretation (typically (depends on the claim, of course) "pedantic" and not allowed)
- the colloquial/experiential interpretation (the right way to interpret it, that is probably correct)
> The parent-poster isn't being vague because the answer is obvious-and-accepted... they're being vague because they want to push the "foreign enemies in our colleges" meme without giving the audience any handles for critical-thinking.
What version of "is/isn't" is being used here: literal, or colloquial? :)
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/09/magazine/the-unbelievable...
The USA is just lucky it has a deep state or special interest groups that continues pushing things ahead regardless of who is in in power. Sadly its mostly driven by corporate greed, it just happens to align with furthering US state power. You can see things like the Qatar-Turkey pipeline and Iraq war breaks out of the 4 year cycle cos they are good money makers.
This is the theory behind authoritarian regimes, but it doesn't actually play out that way. There's too much internal politicking in order to keep power concentrated, so you end up with a state that on paper should be able to execute faster and more coherently than a democratic state, but in practice is so hobbled by the internal conflicts and power games that it doesn't actually have all that much extra energy to solve real problems. An authoritarian regime's primary concern is maintaining its authority, everything else is secondary.
China grew rapidly as it industrialized not because of any strength in the communist regime, but because that's what happens when you have a lot of babies who suddenly stop dying—your working-age population explodes and your economy booms. Then China established the one child policy to try to cap the growth and prevent famine, took too long to repeal it and failed just to change the culture back toward large families, so now they're facing demographic collapse. Some 50-year plan that turned out to be.
1. Who is doing the funding?
2. How are they doing the funding?
3. What message are they spreading, and what proof do you have the message has an effect?
Calling it a conspiracy theory does not mean it is instantly wrong, but it is a correct label - the accusation is hidden (or perhaps not, apparently it's obvious) wealthy foreign funders controlling American society. If that doesn't look like a conspiracy theory (which again, does not mean it's wrong immediately!), then I don't know what you expect.
> By offering its education institutions large grants if they agree to hire the right ideologists.
Are you referring to the "Thousand Currents" program? Now referred to as United Front Work Program?
I use "Muslim", mostly because there's been a lot of negativity and discrimination surrounding Muslims in my own country, but obviously whatever works for you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I
No, it's not like the Holocaust, but it's an example of how men are treated as expendable.
Entire entertainment genres are built around portraying men as inept fools who can be looked down upon by the opposite sex. Seinfeld is one of the few sitcoms where a female character is as flawed as the men. You couldn't even do that show today.
So you observed a whole bunch of modern shows and judged that none met the same standard... Which one of them did you watch that was closest?
It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia? Succession? Yellow Jackets? The Righteous Gemstones? Beef? White Lotus? House of The Dragon?
You could argue about percentages but it is in fact extremely easy to do a show with flawed female characters today.
To that point, culture is absolutely full of baseless attacks on women too, often in a far more damaging context. Lots of people still feel way too comfortable suggesting women are biologically unsuited for high status jobs and really only valuable for making babies. And the vitriol directed at women in the abortion debate, and the actual reduction in rights that rhetoric has led to, sort of puts dumb male sitcom characters in perspective.
I would venture to guess that's because you are not in the socio-economical bracket where this is not just something you see on TV but become how people actually treat you.
In my arm-chair and widely unqualified perspective, the life experience of men is very very bi-modal. A select few with whatever the characteristic du-jour are can have such a different experience that it become harder to related to the less fortunate.
> Humor at the expense of traditionally more powerful groups works
About the same remark, traditionally, the most the people with the most power were/are men, doesn't follow that most men have power or that even that the average men have more power than the average women. The distribution of power/social status is usually very skewed for men.
> because it can be seen as both a way of balancing the scales a bit
Two wrong doesn't make a right , and the sin of the father do not belong to the sons. The problem with balancing things like this is that you are punishing people who weren't not involved in a situation...
> it doesn't come with the uncomfortable connection to examples of people taking the underlying ideas way more seriously.
And racist joke were also justified before because they were just joke that nobody take seriously.
> Comedy about my gender is funnier because nobody actually thinks my gender is a weakness.
You would be surprised... Sure not weakness... But things like emotional maturity and basic organization skills that's a different story.
> To that point, culture is absolutely full of baseless attacks on women too, often in a far more damaging context. Lots of people still feel way too comfortable suggesting women are biologically unsuited for high status jobs and really only valuable for making babies. And the vitriol directed at women in the abortion debate, and the actual reduction in rights that rhetoric has led to, sort of puts dumb male sitcom characters in perspective.
This also a big problem every time men/boys problem are brought to the for front. It seems to always been turned into "but what about women... etc..."
I can only speak for myself, as fairly liberal man. We all understand (even if we don't always relate to them) the tribulation that women face. Those things should definitively be addressed and fought for. But we don't need to solve ALL the women problems before we give some attentions to men issues. And certainly shouldn't use that as excuse to continue detrimental societal stereotypes.
Stereotyping an entire gender as dumb, un effective buffoon is wrong and as you mentioned yourself not very funny. Let's just stop it and move on... there is no need for mental gymnastic to find bizare excuses.
We had a stunning lack of shows which tried to depict well adjusted male characters: i.e. people who could have emotions, who could have flaws and were allowed to work to correct them, but who could also be sources of wisdom or correct. Instead we had "sitcoms" and "drama".
And in Australia at least, our "drama" is...pretty god damn messed up - but at least that was obviously something you didn't want to watch.
It's why show's like Bluey have exploded the way they have: it fills that need for a middle ground of something in media to say "this is what you can be" in a way which isn't playing to stereotypes.
Though I suppose all of that could be summarized as: the death of boomer humor about hating your wife is long-overdue.
Yes, men are more privileged than women in many ways. But men are also disadvantaged in many ways -- many individual men are actual quite vulnerable! -- and negative stereotypes about men cause real harm. Yes, society is sometimes quite shitty to women; but that doesn't somehow make it okay to be shitty to men.
Feminism at its best treats both women and men with respect and dignity. Feminism at its worst uses "gender equality" to justify hurting men. Right now you're doing the latter. Please stop.
> Misandry is normalized in society.
Is it?
I don't regularly (if ever) encounter "baseless attacks on men"... excepting situations where "reversing the roles" would result in the perpetrator still being a man and the victim still being a man.
> there'd be pitchforks for treating women as anything other than paragons of virtue.
Wait, are you doing a sarcasm?
Who wields the pitchforks? It's the husbands, right? Those who were wronged when their wives' virtue was called into question?
In fact, the sensational coverage of these very incidents you cited demonstrates the misogynistic standards of the society and media cycle. The reason you've heard so much about these "prominent karens"[0] perpetrating racist attacks is because they are women. Women being violent is seen as a scandal and ridiculed by society/media. The fact that it's not an everyday occurrence is (counter-intuitively) why it seems so common. Men are responsible for a much greater share of all violence. It is clearly the violence perpetrated by men, not women, that is normalised.
[0] and that there can be "prominent karens" in the first place
Oafish bumpkin of a husband, the wise and understanding wife always coming to the rescue.
I don't think the Munsters is about the wife rescuing the husband. The humor is often about the family thinking they are normal, and the reaction they get from interacting with actual normal people. None of the characters are "wise" they all misunderstand the basic nature of what a normal family looks and acts like and fail to realize they are scaring normal people.
MwC was definitely the oafish husband, again with the childish schemes, much like Ralph in the Honeymooners. It's just a raunchy version of the Honeymooners.
ILL is a rare exception - a reverse Honeymooners.
P.S. I still enjoy watching these shows. Especially the Munsters. Herman always makes me laugh.
The Munsters... well, I think I've seen a few episodes. I don't recall the wife (Lily) doing much in the episodes I watched, to be honest. I did see the recent Munsters movie, and Herman is both the cause and solution to their problems, Lily doesn't really do much from what I recall, if she has a comedic premise it's the ridiculousness of her falling for Herman.
Velma and Clone High have women as bad as the men and female villains. Wednesday is pretty removed from it's Adams Family roots and is only occasionally a comedy, but also features at least one female villain.
The recent Beavis and Butthead made for TV movie had a subplot where a female politician is chasing Beavis and Butthead through the country and trying to murder them to cover up a scandal. That's certainly not treating women as "paragons of virtue."
"Trans rights are human rights!"
Okay, fair enough. Then a few metres later, in the same colour and obviously by the same person:
"Kill all men!"
People will say "yes, but it doesn't mean literally kill all men", and of course it doesn't. But it's not exactly positive, is it?
edit: radicalism is a real thing
As an honest question: why “of course it doesn’t”?
And yet somehow we've reached the point where if you acknowledge human sexual dimorphism, you're a fascist.
It's a damned weird ideology, and if it doesn't go away it should at least be acknowledged as a religion.
People like you want to impose an external concept of gender onto trans people that doesn't comport with their self image. You want to forgo the medical science and drive trans people into depression and suicide because the idea of it makes you feel yucky.
There is some percentage of “feminists” who don’t love women but simply hate men.
"280 character soundbite" social media isn't helping either here, nor is "zomg person X said something ridiculous"-type "journalism".
Wait, which law is that?
No, generally a slave caste are not all murdered. My grandmother's second husband who had a number tattooed on his arm and spent years hiding in a forest, that was an attempt to kill all the X people.
Prior to my transition, I was an outspoken radical feminist. I spoke up often, loudly and with confidence. I was encouraged to speak up. I was given awards for my efforts, literally — it was like, “Oh, yeah, speak up, speak out.” When I speak up now, I am often given the direct or indirect message that I am “mansplaining,” “taking up too much space” or “asserting my white male heterosexual privilege.” Never mind that I am a first-generation Mexican American, a transsexual man, and married to the same woman I was with prior to my transition.
I find the assertion that I am now unable to speak out on issues I find important offensive and I refuse to allow anyone to silence me. My ability to empathize has grown exponentially, because I now factor men into my thinking and feeling about situations. Prior to my transition, I rarely considered how men experienced life or what they thought, wanted or liked about their lives. I have learned so much about the lives of men through my friendships with men
What continues to strike me is the significant reduction in friendliness and kindness now extended to me in public spaces. It now feels as though I am on my own: No one, outside of family and close friends, is paying any attention to my well-being.
I can recall a moment where this difference hit home. A couple of years into my medical gender transition, I was traveling on a public bus early one weekend morning. There were six people on the bus, including me. One was a woman. She was talking on a mobile phone very loudly and remarked that “men are such a–holes.” I immediately looked up at her and then around at the other men. Not one had lifted his head to look at the woman or anyone else. The woman saw me look at her and then commented to the person she was speaking with about “some a–hole on the bus right now looking at me.” I was stunned, because I recall being in similar situations, but in the reverse, many times: A man would say or do something deemed obnoxious or offensive, and I would find solidarity with the women around me as we made eye contact, rolled our eyes and maybe even commented out loud on the situation. I’m not sure I understand why the men did not respond, but it made a lasting impression on me.
[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2018/07/20/feat...
Because male intra-gender solidarity is viewed as the first step to neo-Nazism, so we grin and bear it in mixed company.
The mental strain of maintaining a false identity during the making of Self-Made Man ultimately caused a depressive breakdown, leading Vincent to admit herself to a locked psychiatric facility
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-uv8gT9Kxw
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWkgCEPFmXo
Robert Sapolsky studies baboons, and I heard him describe this same behavior.
Males would were in constant competition, and if one tripped up in any way, the others jumped him.
Females would protect each other, form a group to help each other. If one tripped up, the others would come to their aid.
Claiming those feminists aren't feminists does nothing to stop them from calling themselves feminists.
If the story is accurate as conveyed and the separate graffiti instances really were written by the same person (not a given, a lot of stories like this aren't true on the internet, although I think this one probably is), I have a decent idea of the sort of person that would write it - I have known a couple that could have written this while they were teenagers. Someone from the postmodern left or intersectional queer theory milieux, certainly young, not a cisgender man, who is frustrated with the ability of powerful men to continuously escape accountability for the violence they enact against women and queer people. They view "kill all men" as a non-literal rallying cry to demonstrate their seriousness and willingness to fight against the injustices they recognise in the world (and are/were likely subject to in their own lives). I am extremely certain they have never killed a man, and just as certain that if given the choice they would not actually kill all men (or any appreciable quantity thereof). They would probably kill a lot of rapists, if given omniscience and omnipotence. I'm giving all of this characterisation because I think it's very unlikely that most people on HN would have met or known well the sort of people that say these sort of things genuinely, and because most of what I see here on these topics is either genuine confusion or literally misguided anger that doesn't understand the people they are angry at.
For context, I agree with "Trans rights are human rights" as a slogan and disagree with "Kill all men" as a slogan.
Granted. However, even though we can never fully understand another person, we can still demand that nobody in the room calls for the elimination of another group of people, even as a "joke" or "expression of anger" or similar. That's basic defense of human rights, the acknowledgement that nobody deserves to be targeted for things they can't control. Because jokes are used by extremists to gauge the tone of the rest of the group, and, if the group is conducive, they magically aren't jokes anymore.
> For context, I agree with "Trans rights are human rights" as a slogan and disagree with "Kill all men" as a slogan.
Yes, I fully agree with this.
To clarify, I was explaining what the type of person who would write that believes and why they would write it, because that question was asked in the thread. I don't agree with the slogan, I am just able to explain the thought processes and background of those who do.
>Because jokes are used by extremists to gauge the tone of the rest of the group, and, if the group is conducive, they magically aren't jokes anymore.
I'm familiar with the concept you're discussing but I don't think it applies here. For one, it's not a joke - it's insincere, but not humorous. For another, I have known neo-Nazis (I have worked in deradicalisation, specifically exit programs for young men in neo-Nazi groups) who would do the whole "day of the rope" thing and claim they were joking but were actually chomping at the bit to enact it, and I would consider myself well-equipped to judge whether these "kill all men" people were "secretly serious" like those neo-Nazis are. Genuinely, they really weren't.
Or, to put it another way, out of the people I knew who would be willing to say or agree with the slogan "kill all men", if they were in a social situation where they had the opportunity to contribute to the slaughter of a group of men in a socially supported way, they would not contribute and would almost certainly actively resist if they weren't having some sort of nervous breakdown at being in such an unusual situation. The same is not true for neo-Nazis or theocratic Islamists or some other groups that I have interacted with who are calling for the death of people with contingent insincerity - outside of a few of the younger members of those groups, given a social situation which allowed them to act out said social murder they would do it, and they all know it, as does anyone who interacts with them for any length of time. That's why I don't think the analogy is valuable, because in a practical sense these people aren't actually engaging in domestic terrorism and don't have any power to enforce their beliefs even if they were sincere, and also because I am familiar with the dynamics of the phrase and the sort of people that say it and they would not actually support mass murder even in an imaginary social context which was specifically supportive of that.
I know you have said you don't agree with it, so please don't take the following as me accusing you of excusing the slogan or agreeing with it, I'm trying to further conversation and am interested in your thoughts and really don't want to come off as accusatory.
Even if it is 100% definitely, totally, absolutely, meant as a joke should we be making allowances for that? Lately we have culturally been moving away from jokes that are about genders/races/identities being considered acceptable... or at least we have been for all identities other than "white" and "men", such as in this case where this whole group of people will listen to someone saying "kill all men" and just understand it is a joke and let it go by.
I actually do understand why someone who feels frustrated by certain things might make a joke like that, and I have nuance enough to understand that context and audience matters, and that often things said in jest are a way to emotionally deal with something without any desire to cause any sort of hurt (emotionally or physically) to the people being joked about.
For me at least though that sort of joke is frustrating and hurtful when I have had to listen to years to (an often overlapping set of) people talking about how men have a responsibility to speak up when their male friends make those sorts of jokes and tell them to stop. "Silence is Violence" and all that sort of thing.
I guess what I'm getting at is you may say that people upset about people saying it don't understand the people saying it, but I do. I do hang around these sorts of people, some of my good friends belong to the local socialist party and their social circles include these sorts of people. And it still does upset me, not so much because of what they are saying - although it isn't a great thing to say - it's the hypocrisy of it that upsets me. I have legitimately heard the exact same person have a little rant about how misogynistic the phrase "bi--- be crazy" and also make jokes about how "the straights aren't ok", etc.
I think people in general, and myself especially, would be a lot more receptive to "oh it's just a joke" if those people hadn't spent a bunch of time policing what was said as part of comedy shows and stuff because as of right now it feels like a lot of people have decided that certain groups I am in are the only acceptable targets for this sort of thing, which is just... incredibly frustrating.
No problems, thank you for clarifying.
>Even if it is 100% definitely, totally, absolutely, meant as a joke should we be making allowances for that?
It is not a joke, I think you may have missed me saying that earlier. It is insincere, but not a joke. I think maybe you're conceiving of every statement that someone doesn't literally mean as being only okay if it's a joke (assuming it's a harmful thing to say in the first place, like "kill all men"). Have you ever talked with a co-worker and said (or heard them say) something like "I wish I could punt my boss into the sun"? It's not a joke, the person expressing it really does hate their boss and it's not intended to get a laugh, but it is insincere. By "insincere", I mean that the person does not have any intent to follow through with the literal specific thing they actually said. People just don't always talk literally, without there being a requirement that it's for humourous purposes. People can say these things as jokes and expect a laugh, but that isn't most of the use. It is definitely not the use when it's being graffitied onto a wall.
>such as in this case where this whole group of people will listen to someone saying "kill all men" and just understand it is a joke and let it go by.
I don't think that's true unless you're in a very strong filter bubble. In population-representative company "kill all men" will always get pushback, it's never going to be just accepted. I mean, just think about it being said in a group that's half men, it would be incredibly uncommon and would definitely receive pushback if someone did say it. It's not like society has agreed that "kill all men" is a cool thing to say, that just hasn't happened. It's also worth noting that "kill all men" is way, way, way less common than either "kill your local rapist" or "all men are bad" or "men suck", all much less controversial and much more common. "Kill all men" is a super fringe thing. My professional experience is in Australia and maybe it's different where you are, I can't comment on that. But I am familiar with the phrase and know where it comes from, and that it's not some common thing that goes unremarked in company.
>For me at least though that sort of joke is frustrating and hurtful when I have had to listen to years to (an often overlapping set of) people talking about how men have a responsibility to speak up when their male friends make those sorts of jokes and tell them to stop. "Silence is Violence" and all that sort of thing.
Yeah I'm very familiar with those campaigns, and I understand the facial similarity you're drawing. Those campaigns exist because domestic violence against women exists with a social and cultural support structure that normalises that violence, and the theory behind the campaigns is that intercepting the support structure earlier might stop some amount of domestic violence against women before it ever happens, by stopping its justification in culture.
It's not the same thing as the "kill all men" example because while some women definitely have killed some men, broadly speaking almost no men are being killed by women, and the number isn't spiking or any other observation that should make us concerned that that may change.
The reason those domestic violence campaigns got approved isn't because governments decided that the hurt feelings of women were worth spending a lot of money to prevent - it wasn't about the jokes and frankly at the time basically no government would have cared about th...
Yes I'm aware of the motivation, I am skeptical of the efficacy personally and I say that as someone who grew up a victim of domestic violence. In Australia in particular we also invest no resources in domestic violence against men, which has women perpetrators more than most people expect, but also doesn't help victims of DV who are in MLM relationships.
> It's not the same thing as the "kill all men" example because while some women definitely have killed some men, broadly speaking almost no men are being killed by women, and the number isn't spiking or any other observation that should make us concerned that that may change.
Look, "bit-- be crazy" is definitely not a call to violence. It's a form of commiseration and some venting. This is actually the hypocrisy - the assumption that everything said is coded hatred when said by or about certain people but not others. I'm not and never have claimed that the people saying "kill all men" meant it literally.
I'm really sorry to hear you're a victim of domestic violence, and I appreciate you sharing that, I know that is an extremely difficult thing to do. It's actually not just Australia (I am also in Australia), in basically every country on Earth there is an absurdly small amount of resources dedicated to helping male victims of domestic violence, including both male victims of domestic violence by women and by men, when compared to the prevalence of that violence. Domestic violence against men, depending on the specific statistics used, is around half to a third as common as domestic violence against women - meanwhile, resources for male victims of domestic violence are more like 1/20th or less of the resources spent addressing domestic violence in general (which also need to be increased for women, as they're currently inadequate). It's a very important issue that does not receive enough attention, and unfortunately gets marred by associated with men who never mention it or care about the issue unless it's deployed in an argument to detract from the concerns of women. For what it's worth, I am a woman and care deeply about the issue, and have personally advocated to get DV support resources opened up to men as well, as well as including men on some of the poster campaigns we've done around domestic violence. It's an issue I find deeply frustrating to deal with because I generally encounter apathy from people in power.
I'm not sure how I feel about the efficacy of the specific campaigns around reducing "jokes". I certainly often feel like rates of domestic violence have not decreased, but there's obviously been a decrease in the "jokes" which is a self-evident good. I believe there is some research on this, but I'm not sure if there have been follow-up or efficacy studies since the campaigns. I'd be interested to know those results.
>Look, "bit-- be crazy" is definitely not a call to violence. It's a form of commiseration and some venting.
That's not true, it is misogyny. It's a reframing of a very old and violent trope that women are basically mentally unsound and don't need to be listened to. This attitude is the reason why many women suffered and suffer abuse in psychiatric care facilities, why fake medical conditions like hysteria were invented to pathologise normal reactions to oppressive conditions (and class as mental illnesses many physical illnesses which men refused to recognise). It is used that way today - "b*tches be crazy" as a saying means "Don't worry man, women are just like that [crazy]. Don't let it bother you." That is misogynistic.
>This is actually the hypocrisy - the assumption that everything said is coded hatred when said by or about certain people but not others. I'm not and never have claimed that the people saying "kill all men" meant it literally.
Someone who says "kill all men" definitely hates men. I've never claimed otherwise, and neither would the person saying "kill all men". There's no hypocrisy there - the issue people have with men saying misogynistic things isn't just that they hate women, many women hate men right back and are very capable of articulating what that means. The issue is that men have oppressed women and still do, and the misogynistic ideas they use to convey their positive feelings about that are important and valuable for the purpose of organising and normalising that oppression. Ideas are an important part of any group who believes anything, and men who believe in the inferiority of wom...
>make jokes about how "the straights aren't ok", etc.
I think you may be misunderstanding what that means, although in this case you have correctly identified that this is a joke. It doesn't mean "not okay" as in they're not acceptable or they're bad, it means they're "not okay" in the same way you might say to someone "The situation in Russia is not okay" or "Thank you for your concern, I'm not okay at the moment". It's an expression that someone needs to check in on them, not that they're bad. You'll find it said when straight people are doing something really weird for frivolous reasons related to their sexuality, like starting wildfires using a gender reveal party. It's sort of like concern trolling (not really, but explaining actual jokes is not my strong suit), in that it's a ~false expression of concern. If it bothers you a lot, I'd advise you to laugh at it and do some thorough research to learn what sort of weird things queer people are doing (as in actually doing, not the fake nonsense propaganda like grooming children or whatever - go to queer sources and find what they're complaining about queer people doing). I guess something like "At least straight people aren't declaring a national crisis over the top shortage when they could go outside and find one by literally just talking" or "I think the degree of drama involved in your average lesbian break-up definitely means they need a check-in". Just make sure you're always approaching the topic with the understanding that the people you're talking to and joking about are currently having their children taken away from them in America or being beaten up by fascists around the world or being mass murdered in Chechnya etc for being queer, and for that reason it would once again be a very bad idea to use the hypocrisy argument, because it's very easy for them to dismiss it (and you) by pointing out that these situations are not actually the same and therefore there's no obligation to talk about or treat them the same way.
>if those people hadn't spent a bunch of time policing what was said as part of comedy shows and stuff because as of right now it feels like a lot of people have decided that certain groups I am in are the only acceptable targets for this sort of thing, which is just... incredibly frustrating.
Just because of statistics, I know there's at least one group of acceptable targets for comedy that you're not in, which is the capitalist class. You can make jokes about Beyonce running sweatshops or Barack Obama drone striking weddings and the people you're talking about aren't going to have an issue with it unless they're the sort of identity opportunists/morefemalecampguards people I don't have any time for (and I don't think anyone should have any time for).
More generally, good comedy is about punching up. It might make you laugh (I don't know you) to hear that really funny one about how feeding disabled homeless women into a wood chipper is cool, but most sane people are going to view it as mean-spirited. It's a lord having a big old laugh about how the peasants look like scarecrows during the famine - true, and very funny for the court, but unlikely to get a laugh from the peasants for really obvious reasons. You still have things in common with the people making jokes that punch up though, and there are people above both of you that you can both joke about. If it's too personally distressing to deal with jokes about you being white or straight or a man or cisgender or abled, you almost always have the option not to listen to them. Even if you're a diehard comedy fan, the vast majority of standup comics are not making jokes about how "straight cisgender white abled men suck amiright?" Guarantee it.
Trust me, in context it was an implication they are bad. I understand that it isn't always used that way, but in this case it definitely was an implication they are bad.
> it means they're "not okay" in the same way you might say to someone "The situation in Russia is not okay" or "Thank you for your concern, I'm not okay at the moment". It's an expression that someone needs to check in on them
I understand it is often used this way, but trust me in the group of people I know in real life it isn't always. Plus frankly even that usage could be seen as kind of patronizing, though again I want to stress that I am not personally offended by the joke itself
> If it's too personally distressing to deal with jokes about you being white or straight or a man or cisgender or abled, you almost always have the option not to listen to them. Even if you're a diehard comedy fan, the vast majority of standup comics are not making jokes about how "straight cisgender white abled men suck amiright?" Guarantee it.
I feel like you've really missed my point. I don't mind the jokes, they are (mostly) not a reflection of any genuine ill will, many of them are funny to me, etc. What is frustrating is how quickly people will assume ill will when jokes are made about certain groups of people and not others. The jokes themselves are fine.
As you noted, we're both in Australia, so there's no language or cultural differences here, so I know you're incorrect. The "not okay" in that phrase is the version of "not okay" in "I just got admitted to the psych ward, I'm not okay", it is not the version of "not okay" in "Terrorism is not okay". They are two different meanings, only one of them is the correct one for that saying.
>I understand it is often used this way, but trust me in the group of people I know in real life it isn't always. Plus frankly even that usage could be seen as kind of patronizing, though again I want to stress that I am not personally offended by the joke itself
It is insulting, patronising is exactly the right word. It's intended meaning is something like "There's something so wrong in straight culture, they need an intervention, look at this example" - it's faux concern. I wasn't explaining why it wasn't insulting, I was explaining why the meaning you were ascribing to it wasn't grammatically correct.
>I feel like you've really missed my point. I don't mind the jokes, they are (mostly) not a reflection of any genuine ill will, many of them are funny to me, etc. What is frustrating is how quickly people will assume ill will when jokes are made about certain groups of people and not others. The jokes themselves are fine.
Okay, so if I'm understanding you correctly the jokes don't cause any harm to you, but similar jokes do cause harm to marginalised people. Your contention is because the grammatical format of the joke is the same and you're not offended by it when you're the object of it, marginalised people should not be offended when they are the object of it. I don't agree with that contention, it's a false equivalency (grammatical equality does not equal semantic equality), but I think I would just like to understand how you're thinking of it. You remember the lord joking about how the peasants look like scarecrows during the famine, and how that is an objectively true observation that the lord and the court find funny but the peasants don't find funny? Do you understand why even though it's true and clearly funny to the lord and his coterie, the peasants wouldn't find it funny? If the peasants joked about the lord looking like a tomato, would you consider that to be hypocritical?
So two things. One "not okay" as in psych ward can still imply negative things, but secondly I am aware of the useage of it as a saying, I am referring to jokes people have made using the saying in such a way as to imply the other meaning of not OK, which in part are funny precisely because of the typical saying. I am getting very frustrated you refuse to believe that anyone may play on the standard meaning and that I must be mistaken.
> Your contention is because the grammatical format of the joke is the same and you're not offended by it when you're the object of it, marginalised people should not be offended when they are the object of it.
No that isn't my contention. My contention is that offense doesn't equate to harm. I find some of the jokes I am talking about offensive, but I also am capable of understanding the context in which many of them are said and that the people saying them aren't actually terrible prejudiced people. Some of them absolutely are, I've met some people who are definitely actively prejudiced but they are a minority.
> You remember the lord joking about how the peasants look like scarecrows during the famine, and how that is an objectively true observation that the lord and the court find funny but the peasants don't find funny? Do you understand why even though it's true and clearly funny to the lord and his coterie, the peasants wouldn't find it funny? If the peasants joked about the lord looking like a tomato, would you consider that to be hypocritical?
I feel like this is a false equivalency. The lord and his court are why the peasants look like scarecrows in the first place, because they will have taxed them and taken a large part of their crops and left them with little to eat. This is laughing at the misfortune of people while being the cause of the misfortune.
I also think there is a big difference between making a joke about the suffering that people actively are going through than there is about say, making a joke that references the stereotype that lesbian couples move in together quickly.
The increasing politicisation of the flag button, and its pernicious use as a surrogate for strong disagreement is a disturbing trend.
And you still have not come even remotely close to justifying the assertion that I'm engaging in hate speech - and the reason for that is not your unwillingness to engage, it's that there exists no argument in support of your case.
Doesn’t seem ok now does it? Because no matter what it’s not ok to call for the death of any group. JFC why is this is hard?
So violence is fine because it's not as bad as some other horrific events in the past? The barometer shouldn't be the frequency of violence reaching a certain threshold. It's should be zero for everyone.
You should genuinely be embarrassed at this remarkably stupid and pathetic distinction.
Surely you can see the distinction between a real and possible threat, that might genuinely put fear into the object class, and words that can never be actioned? "Kill all men" might as well say "beware of the vicious rabbit"
Not sure how any of that substantiates whatever point it is you are trying to make. Unless making allegations of violence is now considered violence itself?
I trust you can appreciate the distinction, if you think this through a little.
> They were killed for being men from the opposing side (perhaps killing women and children was considered too barbaric, or women were considered useful for some reason).
Or because they were men and thus seen as being future potential combatants where women and children were not. Men were seen as potentially future detriments and thus were killed.
The distinction is thin to the point of being indistinguishable.
Under that logic, eugenics isn't genocide either. The intent isn't to eliminate a specific group, it's to get rid of some trait they attribute to that group.
I'm not aware of any instances where Jewish people were rounded up purely for being Jewish. There was always some misguided and wrong justification, like a belief that the plague was caused by Jewish people poisoning wells, or that their numbers were enough to threaten the Christian institutions, or that they sabotaged the war effort. In other words, they were perceived as "the opposing side" in one misguided way or another.
I can't recall any sort of -cide where the cause is purely because of membership in some group. In purely practical terms, it's too expensive and too large an undertaking to randomly decide to do. There's always some kind of twisted logic underneath it.
At that point though, those Jewish people were in fact persecuted and murdered purely because of their ethnicity. It matters not that the persecution was justified with stories of poisoned wells. What matters is that those stories pertained directly to a specific ethnical group, and that group was subsequently hunted.
Flimsy excuses either matter or they don't, and the application is universal.
Your comment broadly argues that killing of one group by another is never done with purity of intention. I submit almost nothing people do is for its own sake, but rather woven within individual and collective stories. To think otherwise is to deny the role narrative plays in human consciousness.
A cursory glance through a list like this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pogrom shows numerous examples of massacres of Jews (and others, but mostly Jews). The attackers always claim justifications--again, no group attacks any other group without somehow justifying it to itself, either initially or post-hoc.
1. What about the many massacres of the Jews for rejecting Christianity? Surely those are examples of being rounded up for the sake of being Jewish, since the Jewish religion is incompatible with, for example, the concept of the divinity of Jesus. A key point here is that Judaism is a tribal and not universal religion. Thus, it is hard to divorce attacks on the Jewish religion from attacks on the Jewish people.
2. What about the massacres justified by absurd pretenses, such as (As you mentioned) poisoning wells, corrupting the host (Communion), or the blood libel (That Jews kill Christian children and use their blood to bake Matzo). These justifications, which do not hold up to scrutiny, only work for a population that wants to believe them in the first place. The sheer number of nonsensical justifications points to the underlying fact--there is no justification at all.
3. Need I mention the Holocaust, in which the stated aim of the Nazis was to eliminate the Jewish race? Even those with Jewish ancestry but with no religious practices (and who were not considered Jews by themselves or other Jews) were nonetheless sent to the death camps.
By the way, I have focused on historical violence from the Christian world, but this is not to the exclusion of violence from the Islamic world, of which there has been much as well.
In sum, if there was ever an example of a group persecuted for purely "being themselves", it is the Jews.
My point was primarily that in a world view where flimsy excuses like the side of a combatant makes something not a gendered massacre, those same flimsy excuses would also apply to other instances of mass killings. I'm essentially arguing that if a mass killing predominantly or solely impacts a certain group of people, then it counts as a targeted killing of that group. The justification is largely irrelevant.
Given the 2 responses, I apparently did a poor job of conveying that and should have been more clear.
Killing an enemy combatant in war is justified--after all, he or she is coming to kill you. That isn't a flimsy excuse at all. And the fact that men were conscripted into armies as opposed to women is no accident. It is attributable to human sexual dimorphism. But when many men die during war, that doesn't seem to me to be a targeted killing of men, since wouldn't women be killed as well if they were soldiers? And I don't quite get the analogy to mass killings, which seem to me to have an entirely different moral valence altogether.
> Killing an enemy combatant in war is justified--after all, he or she is coming to kill you. That isn't a flimsy excuse at all.
Certainly, but I don't think those actions are the troubling part. The troubling parts come before and after. The decision to only conscript men (that part'll be below), and the decisions to conduct massacres after combat had ceased. It wasn't uncommon to massacre the male civilian population once a city had been seized or an army subdued. The strongest counter argument there to me is that women weren't killed, but rape may have been prevalent. I don't know what the occurrence would have been in those situations, and I don't want to hazard an uneducated guess.
> And the fact that men were conscripted into armies as opposed to women is no accident. It is attributable to human sexual dimorphism.
To some degree. The minimum age for Roman conscription was 16, and I think that gap is a lot closer when you're comparing fully grown women against boys. In other words, if conscription was gated by some kind of "minimum strength requirement" where the lower bound was set by 16 year old boys, I think the sexual dimorphism claim loses some weight.
Even then, some of these events happened after the invention of the firearm where raw strength became almost entirely removed from the "who wins a fight" question.
> But when many men die during war, that doesn't seem to me to be a targeted killing of men, since wouldn't women be killed as well if they were soldiers?
Sure, but they weren't. To turn it around a little bit, would it not seem problematic to forcibly place solely a particular group of people into an incredibly dangerous job? If only Native Americans were eligible for conscription, I don't think "but other races would be killed too, they just aren't soldiers" would be an acceptable excuse.
> And I don't quite get the analogy to mass killings, which seem to me to have an entirely different moral valence altogether.
The likeness, to me, is that they have the same end result, but with different mechanisms. A mass killing is hunting down people with the intent to kill them. Conscription is hunting down people with the intent of repeatedly exposing them to events with a high probability of killing them.
I do think the moral valences are divergent. Genocides seem to be an act of outright hate to me, where conscription largely strikes me as the result of indifference. They both end with a lot of deaths of a somewhat homogenous group of people, though.
As for the whole whether "Kill all <historically persecuted/minority group>" should be considered equivalent to "Kill all men", I suppose one way to justify treating them differently is the likelihood of anyone actually taking such a suggestion seriously. We know there's been at least one massive-scale attempt to kill (virtually) all Jews, and we know there are still people around today who admire the ideology behind that and could potentially develop the capability to carry out such an attempt - I don't think, despite the list of examples just given, you could seriously suggest there's a group of people with sufficient admiration of an ideology that says "all men should die" and a capability to attempt carrying it out.
They were murdered because they were Jews. In your examples the men were murdered for being on the opposing side, and so a possible threat (unlike the women and children).
nope
In terms of technical, legal citizenship, that (presumably) became available to Jews in Germany upon their emancipation in 1871. This opportunity was revoked a mere 64 years later in 1935 with the introduction of the Nuremberg Laws. Citizenship in this sense is a modern invention.
What I meant above was citizenship in the sense of belonging to a particular group. A person could be a German in a legal or social sense, and I meant it in a social sense. The Jews were never seen as being "authentically" German. They were seen as a foreign people living on German land. This certainly contributed to the ease at which their legal status was stripped.
Thus, not a single Jew who was a German (in either sense) was murdered in the Holocaust, since that is an empty category.
By the way, this attitude wasn't particular to Germany, but all over Europe, from Russia to France.
(Before anyone takes it seriously: this is a parody of how stupid the parent sounds.)
They are often more than happy to confide in what they think of ------------ when they feel they are in a safe space. A friend of mine, who is half-black, but passes as a white guy gets way more of that than he should in North Carolina [1].
[1] It really helps that he's working in a profession that is majority-team-red. Some people really can't help but run their mouth when they think they are preaching to the choir.
I believe we are simply less inclined to talk about our feelings. Why? Well, first of all it's just burdensome. It's not fun, and more importantly, it's not exactly productive talking about feelings. That is a reoccurring point of contention between men and women, yes? Feeling vs doing. If a lady says that she is thirsty, a man's first response will be to get that woman some water. It would be much less common for a man to forgo finding water, and instead query the lady on her current emotional state.
"My queen, your thirst is mine. Let us suffer together."
No! We're going to get that lady some damn water.
I disagree that normalizing violence and hate against a large and non-homogenous group is okay.
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/nov/17/row-after-...
> A row has broken out at York University after plans to mark International Men’s Day on Thursday were cancelled following an outcry from staff and students.
There is a big rift in feminism which feminists seem loath to acknowledge, preferring instead to claim that it isn't real, it's made up by anti-feminists, and it isn't important even if you can point to actual evidence. Well, it's real, it's important, and despite the posturing, we aren't all ignoring it.
More:
https://time.com/3432838/emma-watson-feminism-men-women/
> Just in the past few days, many feminist commentators have taken great umbrage at suggestions that soccer star Hope Solo, currently facing charges for assaulting her sister and teenage nephew, deserves similar censure to football player Ray Rice, who was caught on video striking his fiancée. Their argument boils down to the assertion that violence by men toward their female partners should be singled out because it’s a bigger problem than female violence toward family members. Meanwhile, in Watson’s native England, activists from women’s organizations recently blamed the shortage of services for abused women on efforts to accommodate abused men (despite the fact that, as Guardian columnist and blogger Ally Fogg demonstrated, even the lowest estimates of the prevalence of domestic violence against men suggest that male victims are far less likely than women to get help).
Have you been to Ukraine?
The corollary is that if you do not fit into the men “mold,” you will not prosper. Most men in the Western countries would not have a place in Ukraine or any slavic country (except as an ATM) — because the values needed to be internalized are at odds with more polite societies.
This is true in much of Russia outside Moscow, St. Petersburg, etc. (the more metropolitan and “Western decadent” parts of Russia).
Later, the monstrosity called the "manosphere" completely gutted our movement and turned it into a grievance fest against feminism. They stole our issues but instead of working on them, they weaponized them against feminists, especially against us feminist men. Domestic violence by and against men, paternal rights, genital mutilation, psych support, male fragility and toxic aspects of traditional masculinity, etc. But then they never did anything about any of these problems but bitch and bash feminists with them. As if it's womens' job to clean up our mess.
Step one to improving the situation for men is to destroy the right-wing MRM. "Let men be men again!" is the cry of the regressive who sees the problems and plugs his hears screaming "Naaaaaah!" No progress is possible from that position. If you bother to look, the MRM does absolutely nothing to confront the problems men face in this world. Why? They don't want to. They do not care about men's problems, they only care about protecting men's ability to rape, dominate, and abuse.
Take a look at this thread. For so many commenters their problem is with acknowledging the problems. Pointing out the toxic aspects of traditional masculinity is seen as an attack rather than an attempt at resolving the issues. How the hell are things supposed to improve if we can't acknowledge problems or ally with the movement [feminism] that did the first work to outline such problems? Feminists have been pointing out toxicity of the "man up" attitude for decades. So have queers. Feminists and queer men are natural allies in this struggle to improve men's lives. But we've let proto-fascists hijack the conversation.
My greatest fear is that reactionary men join across class and race lines to form a united front for fascism. That's certainly the goal of the MRM. We must stop them. Let's go back to a Men's movement that forms alliances, rather than buries heads in the sand.
If we did that, we could have men's domestic violence shelters, an ACLU for paternal rights, education policy makers that tackle bullying and lack of emotional support for men, and so much more. But we don't because too many are lured in by propagandists who would gladly destroy democracy to protect the status quo.
Can you share some examples? Honest question, I've never seen this happen in modern day America (it's usually just one side taking and taking instead of give and take).
Based on what you wrote the men's circles you talk about were probably influenced by Sterling Institute, Mankind Project, and the mythopoetic men's movement. I've attended related events in the distant past but I was much too young to "get it" (and honestly still don't get some of it coming from an immigrant family viewpoint).
Men's rights have been denigrated to the point my younger male (Western) friends are Andrew Tate fans because there isn't anything else left.
> Men's rights have been denigrated to the point my younger male (Western) friends are Andrew Tate fans because there isn't anything else left.
OMG, yes. The MRM has successfully redefined the men's movement to be regressive not productive. Any discussion of men's issues has to refer back to this body of worthless propaganda. But you know, we don't actually have to take the bait. Just as that scientist doesn't actually have to debate vaccines with jackass Joe Rogan. If he wants to learn something he can read a book like a normal person.
I don't pretend to have all the answers, but here's a few points off the top of my head.
* Intersectional feminism is a powerful frame. When we look at the places where sexism and classism intersect, for example, then we can begin to explain the fact that the vast majority of homeless people are men. We can see ways that careerist academic feminism fails those who don't have such constraints. And we can see how popular working class feminist movements can benefit from the research that more privileged feminists have had the freedom to do.
* Men who are open to feminist critiques don't often do the research. We don't read feminist authors. We don't know the history of the struggle, nor of men's role in feminism. Second-wave feminism started with consciousness raising groups. Maybe we men could do some self-educating and soul searching.
* First world feminists need to accept leadership from feminists in poorer countries. There is so much right going on with feminism in places like Mexico. These men and women are confronting millennia of machismo. How do they do it? We should know.
* Men need our own organizations. Who are the groups working on paternal rights? I don't know. Are there any? Can we start one? If the MRM is about whining about feminism. A real men's movement could be about actual organizing. We used to hand out anti-circumcision flyers at 24th and mission. We got some weird looks, but even the MRM has carried on the work we started in their ineffective pissy way.
* Feminist men need a popular social media presence. We have ceeded the space to reprobates and literal criminals. Rather than engaging in tit-for-tat with MRM people, we should address regular, reasonable men who might be open to us if we made a reasonable effort. We need to accept that we have dropped the ball and that that the growth of the MRM is significantly our fault. We were too quiet.
* That said, what I don't think we need are sites like "We Hunted the Mammoth" which are about ridiculing the MRM. This is an example of stooping to their level. When we engage with the MRM, we neglect our organizing. They know this, which is why they constantly bait us into making it all about them. Similarly democrats fail by harping on all the stupid things republicans do. We should be focused on our own failures and solutions. Let the idiots argue amongst themselves.
* Feminist men need to be able to critique other feminists. The movement gets plenty wrong. We need to feel free to call that out even when doing so invites blowback from other sectors of the movement. In the past, feminist men were too afraid to confront bullshit in the movement. We deferred too much to women. That needs to stop.
When MRM people bring up straw men like "Why are there no domestic violence shelters for men? See? Feminists hate men." Feminists often respond, "Feel free to get to work cleaning up your own mess." So let's do that. Let's get to work. We're way behind, but there's no time like the present.
Maybe I don't have the background needed, but I don't follow. How does intersectional feminism explain that the vast majority of homeless people are men?
Also in any unfair exploitive system you'll see victimized groups attack other victimized groups instead of going after the system and those that directly benefit from it.
Keep in mind, that women at the same level of risk may not be on the street, but that doesn't mean they are safe. Women at risk are often preyed on by exploitative men and take refuge from the street in unsafe housing where survival sex and abuse is common. That may be a step up, but perhaps not by a lot.
Intersectionality is also informative when understanding the reaction many poor men have to the line that "men have privilege over women". Poor men don't feel privileged, even if they do enjoy higher privilege than women in the same economic class. But compare Joe Schmoe to Sheryl Sandburg, and it's the CEO lady who has the relative privilege, even if she's much lower status than the Zuckerbergs of the world.
Intersectionality is also the basis for critiques of "White feminism" where relatively privileged women dominate the discussion for women as a whole.
Right wing MRM a la Andrew Tate is for sure a scam and toxic extreme. But you can easily find such examples in feminist circles as well. Exaggerating in one direction does not justify exaggerating in the other.
You've derailed the conversation about boys and men needs and made it about women, feminism, intersectionality, etc. That is the reason I am down-voting all you replies.
> When men fail to be self-sufficient, they do not tend given the same level of support as women who are expected to need help. Add class relationships into this mess and low-class men are left to rot on the street. Our oligarchs see all poor people as disposable tools. So it's the intersection of gender and class that results in more homeless men. This is an example of a negative result for men under patriarchy.
and interpret it to be "about women and feminism".
Feminism has trod this ground before, with political lesbianism and lesbian separatism. The results of these experiments are not such as to suggest they are worth repeating, which hasn't stopped that from happening in the form of last decade's unsurprisingly abortive "MGTOW" movement.
Perhaps it would help if I gave a tangible example of how e.g. the patriarchy links to male emotional troubles. Patriarchal norms include the stereotype of the male as a strong, unemotional provider type. As a consequence, parents discourage boys from showing emotion. Thus, boys do not learn to accept, validate and maturely process their emotions.
On a conceptual level, the fundamental problem is harmful gender norms. Both movements must challenge that.
On a practical level, the way these norms manifest is very different. Women face more sexual and domestic violence and expectations around care-giving. Men face more emotional suppression and expectations around career.
There are some policies which I believe would dramatically benefit both genders. Equalising maternity and paternity leave, for example. It's absolutely bonkers that men may only be able to take a week or two, given that they might want to spend more time bonding with and caring for their newborn, and their partner might have had a C-section and be house-bound for weeks to come.
There are other policies which target one gender more than another, but I believe are still needed. Women-ony refugees, or workshops for building boys' emotional intelligence, for example. I think I would have benefited as a teenager from messaging that it's ok to accept and explore my emotions. I didn't really get that from home.
The patriarchy is successfully being attacked from all directions. Intersectionality is stronger than ever. Class is as fluid as it's ever been in the history of man kind. How do you explain that men issues are getting worse and worse in these conditions? It looks like feminism is not helping the gender it is not about. But that can't be, right? Feminism is for everybody, hence the gender neutral name and constant praise and support for men. Ooooh, that's it, I got it now. I'm the problem. Silly me.
And if all of the above is too wordy for you: get off my gender problems lawn with that toxic shit. Go eat it on a feminist topic and call it strawberry vanilla tasting for all I care. Just don't get too close to me cause your mouth stinks.
One thing I will say is that whilst some social attitudes are improving, society hasn't come very far in fundamentally challenging the norms and prejudices it hoists on men and women. In England and Wales, 1 in 4 women have been raped or sexually assaulted. Literally a quarter. I know that as men we our own unique set of issues, such as high rates of suicide and substance abuse. But I look at that statistic and am concerned at what it says about the safety of women in society.
HN, being text only, makes it difficult for some people to understand the topic. It's men. The bigger, uglier sex, with a penis and two testicles between their legs. Try to imagine the picture.
After multiple interactions I personally think the extremes deserve each other. Bash your heads in, cancel each other, get each other fired, kill, maim, the worse the better. After the massacre is over the rest of us can finally have dialogue in peace.
How I would describe what's happened here:
* corinroyal explains how some concepts which overlap with feminism has helped him understand men's issues
* You dismiss his comments because of the mere mention of feminism
* I point out that this is unfair and argue the case for the overlap being worth considering.
* You repeatedly dismiss any mention of feminism and make various unfounded claims as well as aggressive and violent comments towards me.
With all due respect and love, I think you'd find it helpful to think about why any mention of feminism is threatening to you. I'm not interested in pursuing this if you make any further aggressive remarks.
If you read my post from that perspective, you'll see I'm very much talking about men. Perhaps this is easier for me as a gay man to understand since the harms of patriarchy are VERY clear to me.
I'm a man who's currently deeply lonely, depressed, and struggling with poor self-esteem. I hear feminists talking about "toxic masculinity". But none of what they say feels applicable to me. I've never been violent; I'm currently trying therapy for the third time; and I can't remember even a single time when someone told me to "man up". So, while I'm sure toxic masculinity is a real problem for some men, I don't feel like it's the issue that's hurting me personally.
The issues that do feel like they're hurting me personally are things like:
* Negative stereotypes of men as incompetent, boorish, etc.
* The widespread attitude that "men suck"
* The stereotypes of socially awkward men (like me) as gross/creepy/neckbeards/etc.
* Difficulty navigating expectations around how dating and relationships are supposed to work, especially as a socially awkward man
The feminist movement does a great job of addressing the issue of toxic masculinity. But when it comes to the issues I listed above, many feminists don't take them seriously, and some feminists are actually making them worse:
* A feminist in this thread making excuses for the "incompetent, boorish dad" stereotype in media: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36473710
* A feminist in this thread making excuses for saying "men suck": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36474484
* That time when a socially awkward man talked about his feelings (https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=2091#comment-326664) and a feminist said some extremely toxic things in response (https://web.archive.org/web/20150113081455/http://www.rawsto...) (Yes, that controversy was eight years ago, but it's really stuck with me)
Now, I'm definitely not trying to say that "feminism is terrible" or anything like that. Feminists are fighting the good fight on many gender-equality issues. Feminism arguably deserves credit for why I never had to struggle with toxic masculinity, and I'm grateful for that. But at the same time, there are unfortunately some really shitty people in the feminist movement, and they're are causing real harm to people like me. And my experience has been that the feminist movement defends and enables those people, rather than letting them be held accountable.
So my reaction to the article is: I know toxic masculinity is a real problem, and I'm glad feminists are fighting against that problem. But the problems that are hurting me personally are different from toxic masculinity, and unfortunately some feminists are actually exacerbating my problems. So, when I hear feminists blaming most/all of mens' problems on toxic masculinity, that actually feels to me like it's derailing the conversation from the issues that are most important to me.
I hope my perspective helps you see another side of the issue.
On "Men suck!"
I can understand how hurtful could be, but it never personally bothered me. Oppressed people let off steam in all sorts of ways and some of those ways are unfair. But compare "Men suck" to "Billionaires suck", "Cops suck", "White people suck" etc. Do all of those bother you equally? The fact is that waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too many men do suck in so many ways while being perfectly lovely in so many other ways. Rapey, dominating, violent, criminal, oligarchic, etc. People who have been harmed by such men have an absolute right to vent. I've got friends who regularly bitch about White people in front of me. It does not bother me. White people do suck in so many ways. And even though I don't have an "All Lives Matter" sticker on my truck, I know that even I exhibit some racist thinking and behavior my self and that I benefit from a racist system.
My only recommendation is to seek understand the hurt behind the speaker's statements. Empathy with their suffering may help explain why they are acting out.
On Popular Feminism
I would never suggest that popular feminism isn't feminism. We are what we do. And yet, not all who identify as feminists are particularly good at it. WitchesvsPatriarchy, for example, strikes me as a rather immature expression for young women who are just beginning to work out their relationship to the world. This is valuable for them and us. People need a playpen where they can develop. Just as we expect college students to express the dumbest, most strident, and self-defeating version of whatever political philosophy they have adopted, we must recognize that newbies are stupid in every discipline.
There are, of course, terrible people who are feminists. There are those who simply use feminism as a cudgel to gain status.
And there is a Imperial shit ton of anti-feminists who parody feminist positions in memes. I am ogen accused of supporting a "feminism" which I do not recognize.
One of the rules for good debate is to argue against the best possible version of your opponent's argument. This is hard to do in the context of a well that has been poisoned by those who spew falsehood so hard and fast that it's difficult to sort the true from the false. And yet, there are plenty of coherent and internally-consistent feminisms to be found for those who can put the effort in to find them. I wish we were doing a better job to make things easier for those trying to make sense of things.
On Negative Stereotypes
The stereotypes are too often true. I have never raped or abducted a child, but when a parent gets nervous around me for being too close to a child, I just have to swallow my indignation and realize that the actions of others have ruined things for me.
The men loudest about "Not all men!" are those who never made an effort to understand the critiques in the first place.
And yet, these stereotypes are hurtful. Especially to men already struggling. The only advice I have is to do your part to build a world where these stereotypes have no basis in reality. In the mean time, thicken your skin. If you're not the creepy type, then realize that such unfair statements do not apply to you.
On Navigating Relationships
I'm gay and can't imagine how hard this must be. Straight people have such overwhelming and conflicting social expectations laid on them, that I don't know how they even function. We queers are used to making things up as we go along. There's a freedom to being a hated outsider.
So I guess my advice would be to make things up as you go along. Ignore all the advice you've ever heard about what women want. And l...
It's true that some men are rapey, dominating, etc. Those men have deeply hurt many people. This is a real problem. The victims of those men have a right to vent about those things, and society needs to listen and hold the those bad men accountable.
But the vast majority of men are decent people who aren't rapey, dominating, violent, criminal, or oligarchic. (Many men aren't even particularly sexist! Every man internalizes some amount of sexism, but that's true of every woman too.) So the victims of bad men don't have a right to make generalizations like "men suck". In fact, that's misandrist hate speech.
Analogy: Many socially awkward nerds have been deeply hurt in their lives. They have a right to vent about the pain they've experienced, and society should listen, and should hold accountable the people who are hurting them. But that doesn't give the victims a right to become hateful incels who make generalizations like "women suck".
The key is to distinguish the good men from the bad men: treat the good men with respect and decency, while holding the bad men accountable.
And society does hold many of the bad men accountable. Every single day, society sends men to prison for rape, violence, and crime. And men regularly get censured or fired for sexism. It's true that society doesn't always hold bad men accountable, and this is a real problem; but society really does hold many of the bad men accountable.
> One of the rules for good debate is to argue against the best possible version of your opponent's argument. ... And yet, there are plenty of coherent and internally-consistent feminisms
I agree there are many good feminists out there, and I support them. But there are also many bad feminists out there, and they've hurt me deeply.
By analogy to above: Some feminists are misandrists. Those misandrists have deeply hurt many men (including me). Men like me have a right to vent about those misandrists, and society needs to listen and hold the misandrists accountable. At the same time, I know that most feminists are decent people, which is why I'm careful not to make generalizations like "feminists suck".
The key is to distinguish the good feminists from the bad feminists: support the good feminists, while holding the bad feminists accountable.
Unfortunately, what I've seen is that most feminists make excuses for the bad feminists, rather than holding them accountable. For example, you just now made excuses for the feminists who say "men suck"! Throughout your post, you put the onus on me to tolerate being hurt, instead of putting the onus on the bad feminists to stop hurting me! And this is a pattern throughout the feminist movement: Most feminists, even otherwise-good feminists, are unwilling to acknowledge that the bad feminists are causing real harm, and that men have a right to be upset that the bad feminists are hurting them.
> So if you feel like feminism isn't focused on you, you are absolutely correct.
It's fine that feminism isn't focused on me. The problem is that bad feminists are actively hurting people like me; and the broader feminist movement is enabling that behavior.
Did you read the link I posted above? https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=2091#comment-326664 Scott Aaronson wrote a very thoughtful and introspective post about the issues facing socially awkward men, while also being careful to respect women. His post resonated with me deeply; he put into words many of the things I had been struggling with. This is exactly the kind of thing we need more men to do. And yet, he received some extremely toxic r...
I do not see the misandry you suggest is here. Penny's response is remarkably compassionate to Aaronson. ["Hi there, shy, nerdy boys. Your suffering was and is real."] Marcotte's, while brutal and snarky, makes some insightful points. It is not misandry to be unkindly criticized for your ideas, even when you're being honest and confessional about a traumatic time in your life.
Like Aaronson and Penny, I was also a nerd who took refuge in nerdy pursuits as a way to deal with social and sexual awkwardness. I too grew up terrified that someone might find out I might be attracted to them. But this wasn't because I was afraid to be called a "creep" but because I was afraid they might become physically violent. This isn't an idle fear, since I've been gay bashed a few times, once that required hospitalization, each time contributed to my crippling PTSD.
Laurie Penny suffered nerd sexual anxiety like me and Aaronson did. But her fear was being called "crazy" and "slut". She says, "we were terrified, just like you, and ashamed, just like you, and waiting for someone to take pity on our lonely abject pubescence, hungry to be touched. But you did not see us there."
On top of nerd sexual anxiety, Penny had to deal with misogyny, while I had to deal with murderous homophobia. And yet Aaronson claims, without a hint of irony, "But I suspect the thought that being a nerdy [straight] male might not make me “privileged”—that it might even have put me into one of society’s least privileged classes..." LOL, Wut!? Hello Scott, we're right here. He doesn't see that we're dealing with the same shit PLUS an Imperial Fuckload that is SO extra. But unlike Aaronson, I do not blame my problems on feminism. I'm as shocked as Marcotte that this dude literally thinks he's at the bottom of society's totem pole because he has to figure out how to talk to women in a time of changing social mores.
Aaronson states that his nerdy anxiety was so severe that, "My recurring fantasy, through this period, was to have been born a woman, or a gay man, or best of all, completely asexual..." This statement is mindblowing in it's failure of solidarity and imagination. He so fervently craves the empathy he denies to people like me and Penny. He acts like it's only straight male nerds who have ever feared rejection. WTHF!? It must have been nice ONLY to have feared being rejected or being called a creep and not say, rape, gay bashing, or racially-motivated violence. Aaronson suffered a common experience of fear of rejection, and since the objects of his affection were women, he twisted his anxiety into an indictment of feminism as a way to protect his privileged-as-fuck male ego. This would never have occurred to me to do, since the targets of my affection were men. I never had any problem figuring out what feminists meant by consent. It was the same as my own. I never had any trouble figuring out that Dworkin was a dismissable reactionary. I get the feeling that Aaronson read feminist writers with the intent of cherry picking whatever confirmed his fears.
It's hard to imagine anyone labeling Penny's piece as misandrist, so I assume you're referring to Marcotte. But while uncompromising and uncharitable, her critique of Aaronson's letter matches my own. She writes:
"There are many women out there who are also crippled by social anxieties who would prefer to hide in their hobbies and interests. The difference is a) they can’t blame the entire opposite sex instead of themselves for their mental health issues and b) when they actually try to turn those interests and hobbies into professions, they are told by various social forces, both explicitly and implicitly, that their femaleness means they will always be second-rate at best. Being able to hide in mathemat...
You're right that when people say "men suck", that's not as bad as homelessness, poverty, trauma, gay-bashing, etc. But, compare: when people say "women suck" or "gay people suck", that's not as bad as homelessness, poverty, trauma, gay-bashing, etc. either! That doesn't make it OK to say "women suck" or "gay people suck". Hateful words like "men suck" and "women suck" and "gay people suck" are still bad even though they're not as bad as the problems you experienced.
Also, I don't think your experience is typical for someone in my generation (born in the 90s). Women and gay man in my generation certainly faces disadvantages, but nowhere near what you did on average.
And social awkwardness is a real disadvantage too. Historically, nerds were even the target of physical violence. You were unfortunate enough to be both gay and socially awkward, which must have been doubly difficult. But straight socially awkward people are still disadvantaged even though they're straight; just like gay people with normal social skills are still disadvantaged even though they have normal social skills.
The net effect is that even though I'm a straight man, I've still been significantly hurt, to the point of developing depression. I certainly haven't been hurt as badly as you were, but my pain is still real. (Imagine a gay man who never experiences gay-bashing, homelessness, or poverty. But suppose they're regularly exposed to homophobia, causing them to develop depression. They haven't been hurt as badly as you were, but their pain is still real!)
Everyone deserves to be treated with respect and dignity: man, woman, straight, gay, nerdy or not. Your pain is worse than mine or Aaronson's, but that doesn't invalidate our pain, nor does it excuse the people who are causing our pain. It's not OK to use the existence of misogyny or homophobia as an excuse for misandry or nerdphobia.
When you say it hurts to hear "men suck" my flippant response is "Have you tried not sucking?" If you have and were successful, then feel free to ignore any men-sucks coming your way. That's what I do. I don't know what else you're asking then that men's behavior just not be critiqued, or only ever be critiqued in a completely dispassionate way that ignores the dynamics of women's suffering and recovery. Do you get upset when an abused dog acts skittish or barks around you? Do you think the dog is being anti-human for not immediately realizing you're one of the good ones? How is trust regained once broken?
Why are we comparing being socially awkward to being gay or a woman? Because we're each lower-status in society? Because nerds defy certain social expectations for manliness like gay men do? Ok. But one can get over being social awkward, one can gain confidence, and put work into building skills for reciprocal relationships; but you can't get over being a woman or a fag. Refactoring unworkable notions of manliness sounds like it would be of benefit to nerds, women, and queers.
If you're suggesting we need a movement to help men figure out their way in a changing society, then I'm all for it. I was member of one myself back in the nineties. There are many ways men suffer under patriarchy and much work that has already been outlined. Paternity rights, anti-circumcision, domestic violence and sexual assault resources for men... If you were to start a men's organization, what would it look like and what would you work on?
"Farrell is widely considered to be the father of the men’s rights movement. In a series of books published since the 1980s, he has made the case that the primary victims of gender-based discrimination are men—casualties of a society that relies on their sacrifices while ignoring their suffering. He blames this phenomenon for a litany of woes, from the plight of blue-collar workers to the state of veterans’ health care and rising suicide rates among young men. Many of today’s men’s rights activists view Farrell’s 1993 book, The Myth of Male Power: Why Men Are the Disposable Sex, as their touchstone, and the online forums where they congregate are steeped in Farrell’s ideas"
[1] https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/01/warren-farrell-...
I remember this. I wasn't old enough to join up, but I'd not have.
It was widely ridiculed at the time, and most folks didn't really respect it.
It wasn't the MRM that killed your movement; it just never took off, and was never really positively received by wider society.
* Straight and gay men talking about emotions and hugging * Men confronting unearned privileges * Men confronting their own unjustified anger and aggression * Men trying to gain emotional intelligence to understand and control their moods and triggers * Men grappling with women invading traditionally men-only spaces
So it was absolutely a hard sell. But so is every other anti-oppression movement. No one expected to eliminate a millennia-old system overnight. The thing is, when you're right, you're right. Regressives can't keep a good idea down forever. The progress I've seen in my short lifetime confirms this.
Even if anti-feminists succeed in their efforts to overthrowing democracy and bringing about a patriarchal authoritarian state the gain will be temporary and we will return in force. After denial, anger, bargaining, and depression, comes acceptance.
Step one is building the future you want to see. Step one isn't waging a cultural battle.
A well articulated alternative might even sap the wind from it's sails. But if you want to wage war without anything else to offer them... you'll just be entrenching the status quo.
Connecting to men might require discussing sore cultural subjects with a bit of impropriety. The problem for you, is that all the people willing to say "fuck good taste" aren't following it up with the message you want.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Obviously I'm quite suspicious of adults talking about how to raise boys, but only because the only problem they should be trying to solve at all is how to be a worthy example, and anything else is a substitute for that essential element. But the "concern" about boys is just another form aggression against them, imo.
People without good enough “father figures” turn out emotionally volatile. I see it in myself, and I see it in others. Sometimes, emotions should be observed and not yielded to. “Toxic masculinity” is just taking this to the extreme of disregarding all emotions. “Toxic femininity” is just yielding to all of one’s emotions. It mirrors the narcissist:BPD relationships (absent, cold, and self-absorbed man; next to the hysterical, ever-present, and needy woman).
A healthy person has cultivated both aspects of themselves in moderation (learning to listen to and identify one’s emotions, and having the good judgement to know when they should and shouldn’t be allowed to continue) — this is usually best done by emulating others with this healthy outlook, most commonly with a healthy mother and father (but with the dissolution of gender norms, gender doesn’t matter on the surface, so long as the people involved have nurtured both parts well).
The best way to raise boys is in a village with all sorts of people to learn from. The worst way is to neglect them and let them figure out life for themselves.
The best way to raise boys is to become a good man.
They said "accept him", as a direct object.
Not "accept the fact that he had negative qualities", which is something entirely different.
Now, that doesn't mean you should just act as if nothing happened. Actions have consequences, and those consequences should be determined by the gravity of the actions.
"Abuse" is a vague term and often people mean very different things by it. Some people call their father throwing a fit of anger or cussing their kids out about something every now and then "abuse". And then other people use the same term to refer to really diabolical stuff, like child-buggering. With the less serious and more understandable stuff, you should also take into consideration what your father was going through at the time, and how that might have influenced his actions and his judgment. When I got older and began to understand what my father has had to deal with (including me lol), it really made me not care at all about some of the rough-ups we had. So I mean whether or not you should want to patch up the relationship with your father should really be determined by the character of the abuse, the extent of it, the circumstances, et cetera. This should also determine what exactly "patching up" that relationship means - like what kinds of boundaries you set, and so on.
But... I don't let that define my life. I miss mom, and I always will, but I made peace with it and have moved on. You can't just spend your life sobbing into a pillow or grinding my teeth in rage, at some point you have to go back to just living again.
That would stand if you considered every guy talking shit about their father as "bad" men, regardless of how they behave otherwise.
I agree having a settle relationship with one's father is better, but people with legitimate grief against their father and having objective disgust about what they did as human beings shouldn't be a disqualifying situation.
I'm also a bit perplexed by the opposition between hating someone and accepting them. You can acknowledge what someone did for you, see where they come from and accept they are who they are, while hating their guts.
Are their children supposed to "accept" him regardless, and feel bad about themselves if they can't?
Keeping toxic people in your life, regardless of their gender, is not something that somehow makes you a better or stronger person. And most psychologists with licenses agree.
And it's important to accept those things we cannot change, lest they torment us.
The animus in the culture right now is divided between those who have some acceptance of their fathers, and those who don't. It's not just a right/left thing either, as that animus decides whether someone chooses to be an unworthy person who blames, betrays, and justifies their own cruelty to others because of what they imagine they suffered themselves - or not. Understand who he was and consider that a lot of the anger at "The World," was really just pent up anger at him. Personally, I think a key role of a father is to moderate the urges for cruelty, vanity, conceit, self pity, and other vices that mothers often overlook and forgive, and mainly by example.
I get the moral point you're trying to make. But otherwise this statement simply is not factually tenable.
Granted, some children who don't "accept who their fathers were" fall into the borderline spectrum that you're referring to. Or are needlessly resentful of their parents due to simple human failings, such as a single lapse of judgement at some key moment. Of course.
But a very significant portion have perfectly valid reasons for "not accepting who their fathers were". And it would be psychologically unhealthy for them to try to force themselves to do so.
Any more than any other victim of violent (or comparable) crime needs to "accept their attacker for who they were". Or force themselves to "understand" their attacker's motives. Let alone forgive them for anything.
I won't pretend to know her family struggles, but the public lynching of present fathers is becoming a strong dark theme.
At 5yo, he threatened to take me to the sheriff's and adopt me out because I was "horrible".
Was told constantly to "man up", and ignore any sort of emotions I was having.
He also beat me. Naturally, that was perfectly acceptable in the 80's, even in public. Instead, it was called "spanking".
He would buy toys, then take them away to take a hammer to them, or otherwise destroy them in front of me.
Told me that I'd never amount to anything and that I should just join the military cause thats where stupid people go.
Anything bad that happened to me was always my fault. Didn't matter what it was. My fault.
It also didn't work out that my mother was/is an enabler and a narcissist (and, well, abused by him too).
I don't care what people call this. Patriarchy, etc. Those're just labels. But did they hurt me until I figured out how to undo the damage of childhood? Damn straight they did. And I wont perpetuate these abuses on any other.
And I've met people like you, motohagiography , that defend these sorts of abuses as the general mantra "man up". I find defending obvious assaults and child abuses to be disgusting.
And, well, burying my dad did finally put a nail in that coffin, so to speak.
At least 4 times mothers were called on to step forward— once to have a song sung to them, another to receive a flower, etc. Fathers were not mentioned at all.
This prompted me to look around, get a rough sense of the distribution… Counting the kids & counting the male attendees, I can’t say for sure that all were fathers but it roughly balanced the # of kids.
Only thing left is complain why they didn’t think of him when he wasn’t around
>
> Only thing left is complain why they didn’t think of him when he wasn’t around
Which is a totally valid complaint man. That’s what the whole fuckin article is about. That’s what all this is about. A man is allowed to feel disappointed people didn’t think of him when he wasn’t around, and he’s allowed to express that disappointment out loud. You’re literally perpetuating the cycle by enforcing toxic ideas of masculinity, this idea that you either fix your own problems or shut the fuck up about them.
It’s a self-defeating way to live.
Edit: your comment is god-tier irony because “not being thought of when you’re not around” is like the core of a lot of men’s emotional wounds. As in, a child’s experience of emotional neglect is the caregiver not thinking of the child when they’re not around, so the fact you are holding up the idea of complaining about that for ridicule is so on-the-nose it is actually hurting my soul on your behalf.
He noted only that the fathers were not recognized during the assembly. We know nothing about who was invited to participate in the planning.
In modern society we're normally conditioned to avoid confrontation, but it's the best way to initiate a proactive solution.
I don’t know if I have a suggestion to OP. One option would be to offer to contribute to buying the flowers next time. That’s a soft way to engage and remind there’s others in the audience not being celebrated. Personally, I’d probably be put off by the whole thing and just let them have their moments. Or bring dark chocolate. Chocolate because theobromine acts a little like a happy “everything’s good” buzz for people and men might tend towards dark chocolate over milk. But bring some milk chocolate too-shows you’re being inclusive.
Men are secondary parents in a lot of households, and it’s not okay. Both for dads themselves and their kids.
Apologies if I’m misinterpreting that. If I’m right though, I’d say that it isn’t easy at all, and there are many systemic pressures which make the solution difficult for individuals.
The latter so, is completely up to the individual to ignore.
Maybe it was just her though. I'd talk to the school director over this.
And I doubt I was the only divorced father with shared custody.
I'm German so my view may not be the prevailing one in the US, but I see my role as including making sure that the kids get a proper education. This includes making sure they are doing their homework and are revising for tests.
The consequence of forgetting (or "forgetting" ;) ) to write down their homework assignments or their books is not a work-free afternoon, an inconsequential negative remark by their teacher or a slightly worse test score (I'd argue that at primary school age consequences have to follow directly; a delayed test score does not register).
The first time it happened, they got a friendly expansion of the expectations. The second time an expression of disappointment. There hasn't been a third time.
Like: My son loses his sun hat. I could make a point about personal responsibility and let him get sunburnt for a few weeks until he saves up his non-existent pocket money to pay for a replacement, or I could just ask if anyone has it and find out that Joe accidentally took it home and that Joe's mum is going to leave it on the fence post at drop-off.
Also that might not even be an very unpleasant experience for them. In my kid’s school the teacher has plenty of other things to deal with so their practice is generally to have kids do the missed work quickly in the classroom and move on. I’m not sure my child is going to learn much about responsibility that way.
Instead, I take the time to make sure my child is able to get their work done on time. But that costs me time. This is where the consequences and learning responsibility comes in. Because I value my time, and the ways I make my children compensate me for my time when they have been irresponsible is much more memorable what they’d experience being unprepared in school.
Also the parents delegate can relay useful info from the teacher's as the only one who has direct immediate (without taking an appointment) through that channel. State is maintaining an app/website where teachers can send messages to parents but while some do it correctly, other teachers ignore it completely.
It is also interesting when some parents find out they have an issue with a specific teacher. Like this year one of my daughter had one lazy one and parents expressed their concerns to the delegate and debated on a common message to send to school.
Granted, I absolutely hear what you are saying. Not to search very far, I have cousins, who managed to get bamboozled their father was an absent father, because he was a trucker and clearly did not love them enough ( apart from ,naturally, securing their future several times over, but as kids they could not understand it -- and their mother certainly was keen to capitalize on it ).
This made me think of Andrew Tate, who is a douchebag, but has a huge following with young men, apparently because he has found a way to appeal to them emotionally. Anyone who is looking at how to push boys in the right direction should look at what appeals to them and meet them where they are, not try to push some idea of emotional help that will only preach to the choir, which is what I see society doing. I definitely agree this role is best filled by fathers.
Yet Tate seems to promote strength, power, and confidence as silver bullets for all ones problems -- mixed with a lot of get-rich-quick BS that boils down to "pay me to teach you to selling teaching to others". And this from a guy who got rich pressuring women into camming and taking a huge cut.
Boys and men need nuanced male role models (even modestly flawed), not one dimensional grifters.
All individual people are nuanced and flawed people when you interact with them one on one (even Tate I imagine).
What's toxic is social media and it's ability to portray a life that doesn't exist.
I'm not really sure how you got that from the article, practically the entire piece is citations of how boys are different from girls, just not in the way that we think they are culturally.
If the terminally online people that lose sleep over Tate could stop equating somebody disagreeing with them with that person being a piece of irredeemable human dogshit, he would be a nobody.
"We based that character on this insane man, Jordan Peterson, who is this pseudo-intellectual hero to the incel community. You know the incels? They’re basically disenfranchised, mostly white men, who believe they are entitled to sex from women. And they believe that society has now robbed them—that the idea of feminism is working against nature, and that we must be put back into the correct place. Yeah, they’re actually succeeding in many different ways. But this guy Jordan Peterson is someone that legitimizes certain aspects of their movement because he’s a former professor, he’s an author, he wears a suit, so they feel like this is a real philosophy that should be taken seriously."
If you're integrated into the modern US corporate society and media landscape, and think that some portion of Peterson's outlook is potentially helpful, keep that shit to yourself. That you will even humor his ideas is grounds for people with brain worms to attack your moral character. If it starts to make noise, your employer may not want to deal with it. Your friends and family may not want to deal with it. Mum's the word; you are only going to hurt yourself.
I would say that one of the few people in this specific media market that stands any chance of telling people that are looking to Tate and Peterson for advice something that may actually help them is Sam Hyde. Outside of his inflammatory comedy, his commentary on how to deal with being lost is hard to hear for somebody that's there, but ultimately as close as some talking head on the internet will ever get to helping somebody like that. He has pretty much completely checked out of "normal" society, so lost people looking integrate with "normal" society aren't going to find him. They'll find Tate instead, who has a relatively easy "answer" and is trying as hard as he can to change the world to fit it. Reasonable people commentating on this are doomed to fail in the current environment.
Is he? Nuking a prolific academic career to write terrible self help books, that you yourself ignore and giving yourself brain damage while you endlessly rant on twitter about mostly made up terminally online nonsense seems like the complete opposite of "doing a decent job" to me...
Is his academic past bad because it is highfaluting? Or is the outcome justify the means and helping people is ok even if you also cause a lot of problems along the way?
Also, giving advice through books is indirectly helping them, he is not making your bed, he is telling you to do it. Directly is going the way of literally to just mean emphasis
Most of what I've seen is him motivating and trying to help young/lost men, which seems like an admirable cause.
Instead, boys are discriminated against academically, emotionally, in terms of support and scholarships and these people who are in charge of starvation are shocked, shocked! when a guy like that appears to meet their needs.
If someone asked me an obscure sin, something that went unrecognized but was none the less heinous, I would say that attempting to inculcate the innocent with self-loathing, to saddle them with Original Sin, and to more or less attempt to have that hatred internalized, that would be a mortal sin, if for no other reason than there's simply a finite capacity you can find in humanity for that self-abnegation and past that point, one or more will snap, will turn on you, and it will always be in a way you most dread. Most dread because these ground-down types will have an endless flood of hearing the particulars of what another would like that they can simply do the opposite.
As someone raised in a hardline Calvinist worldview I couldn't agree with this more, claiming someone is fundamentally disgusting and contaminated on a basic level simply for existing can do awful things to them whether the beliefs stick or not.
Perhaps you're referring to the line
> Fathers and mothers use far more emotionally rich language with toddler-aged daughters than sons, for instance. Fathers are also more likely to sing to and soothe their toddler daughters at night when they cry.
I interpret this as a call to resist specific gendered parenting behaviours that propagate harmful norms. Not that gender should be excluded from consideration.
Just as society has historically dissuaded women from pursuing stem it has historically dissuaded men from growing emotionally. We've started to tackle that first element but I truly believe that the second one is the next breakthrough. As it is, men like Andrew Tate are trying to fill that void. I think this is because we as a society have failed to lift up boys and give them healthy role models
you need some kind of expertise to feel like you can make even the most basic of professions out of
you need responsibility
you need role models that you can choose and can talk with, and practice having complex and sophisticated conversations with
you need a meritocratic environment
you need physical development, and to embed the need for building physical and mental habits that guide you through your life in a sane and stable way
you need an environment that encourages kindness, hard work, and neither babies nor feminizes you. you need to, specifically, avoid idiotic environments that promote violence as part of the social hierarchy of peers.
How are they (the boys?) being characterised as women?
Who is claiming that men need to be treated like women?
Why are you so concerned by femininity?
I'm frequently told that I have no right to treat my own depression with mushrooms, with my depression and its consequences held as proof that I don't know what I'm talking about and should have no decision making autonomy.
The long term destruction of self that resulted from only three months of that is difficult to comprehend if you haven't been there.
What a bizarre thing for them to say. In my experience, psilocybin mushrooms are absolutely amazing for mental health. I think that everyone should take mushrooms at least once a year to clear out the cobwebs.
There's not a single conversation that I've had where my subjective experience has been relevant to the other person's opinion or position, both with family members and medical professionals.
Casually discounting my internal understanding and experience in conversations pertaining to the internal emotional state of my mind. It's fucking infuriating.
One of the weirdest parts has been the way that mental health practitioners react whenever I bring up mushrooms. They don't say anything - just look at me and wait for the topic to change.
This has happened several times, and with several different people.
The most ridiculous example was a woman who dismissed my need for mushrooms and then chastised me for refusing to slip back into SSRI induced asexuality.
Wouldn't it be better?
Well it wasn't for the first twenty years, so I'm gonna run with no.
But depending on illegal seasonal mushrooms is far from ideal (even if a single dose is three to four months worth of treatment).
100 years ago father’s wouldn’t even talk to their kids. I don’t think dads even went into the delivery room
Dad’s didn’t get time off from work to be with their wives when the baby was born or get bonding time
Things are definitely getting better on this front
She was a little offended by the question (itself interesting), but said it was just her and the medical staff. No other support people. She thought my grandfather was at the hospital, but wasn’t sure.
Heck, I had similar expectations a few years ago and then I was set straight about modern reality :-))
My grandfather was the epitome of "manliness". Blue collar worker. Hunter. Army service. My mother and her sisters have vivid memories of him singing to them.
Something is honestly sick with so many families in this country. Men have been caring for their children for millennia. It's what separates humans from the lesser beasts.
By comparison in my wife's "backwards" country, the female relatives of the woman in labor are traditionally not allowed to attend labor. Sure, the men weren't allowed to see the baby for forty days, but thats to protect the newborn from dirty ruffians who'd spent all day wrestling hogs and ploughing fields. All the men of this society - regressively conservative to a tee - Ive met are far more involved with kids than your average modern day phone addicted westerner.
Nor are fathers, generally, cold and uncaring for their children in classical literature outside very militaristic societies. Curiously enough, you mention "100 years ago". Those fathers were literally shell shocked.
Boys have different needs than girls. Treating boys like girls will not do them any good. All children need fathers, but boys are perhaps especially sensitive in this regard as men help model for boys what masculinity means. We see how the absence of a father translates into higher rates of various pathologies and delinquency in single mother households. Father also have an authority no mother can have, an authority that helps boys, and children in general, achieve the kind of moral formation need for adulthood.
There's a reason virtually every culture is patriarchal. Patriarchy exists in service of the common good, beginning with the family unit. It provides the structure and order that enables everyone to flourish. Can things go wrong? Sure. But that's true of every social order or arrangement. You don't abolish something because it can go wrong or goes wrong sometimes. This is like solving poverty by exterminating the poor, or cutting everyone's hands off to "solve" theft. A healthy masculinity, the via media between effeminacy and brutishness, is sacrificial and it is good not only for men, but all of society, including women. The common good depends on it.
It's because men are physically stronger than women. That's it. That's all it is.
(Followed extremely closely by which were relevant but are no longer relevant?)
Women are, indeed, physically different from men. They are shorter. What's often forgotten is how much the two populations overlap. In other words, a man who is the height of an average woman is unremarkable. A woman who is the height of an average man is also unremarkable. If there's any innate psych or cognitive differences -- an idea I'm not fully opposed to -- it's likely a distribution like that. But probably even more overlap. Not really something that would allow you to predict something about the person. No more than knowing someone is 5'8" would allow you to guess their sex with confidence.
I think the mistake in the post above is saying that physical strength has not been an issue for a millennia.
The strong have been using the threat of physical violence to take power right up to and including today. In the home, at work, and in society at large.
Women, by contrast, are wired for safety, which is a far more holistic approach to purpose because they consider connections men wouldn't even _consider_.
The downside of being smarter, though, is more unease about things you see that may present as a risk. It keeps females away from the bottom of the performance bell curve (men rank lowest in most metrics), but also from the top (men rank highest as well).
All of it is reprogrammable by operant conditioning (a large part of it often happening within marriage), but those are the biological primitives.
But I second that is a weird take or point to throw in.
But that doesn’t really mean they weren’t involved in decision making, it just means they aren’t involved in the sorts of places where people will write any of it down for posterity.
From a long time ago, we were the aggressive hunters, warmongers, protectors of everything that “belonged” to us, including women and children.
To this day, we’ll often be the protectors (and usually aggressors) in a violent situation, for the reasons above.
Every study I've seen on the subject has said that children of same sex parents, including having two mothers, do as well or better than their peers across any metric of wellbeing or success.
If so, given that most children are born of conventional couples, it makes sense to say they should have their father in their life.
> All children need fathers
> Father[s] have an authority no mother can have
> There's a reason virtually every culture is patriarchal. Patriarchy exists in service of the common good
Really?? Where's the research that supports any of this? If you're going to make charged statements like this, you better at least bring some research to the table.
Let's all take a good long hard look at ourselves. Just because we might feel frustrated, or displaced, or ignored, doesn't mean that we (and I'm talking to the men on this site who upvoted this comment) need to abandon the truth-seeking parts of us that desire the gold standard of logical, evidence-supported arguments. If you blindly support any statement in favor of "your side" just because it feels good to you emotionally, regardless of how speculative or questionable the reasoning is, then you have little right to criticize the "other side" for doing the same.
The Americas has strong, persistent matriarchies. And even Sparta had a politically-active group of heiresses who rivalled the Kings for power.
Here's the steelmanned version of the ideas you're saying are causing issues:
- Instead of defining men / women, think of each human as a person. There are no strong men, sensitive boys, intelligent women, vulnerable girls - there are only strong people, weak people, hard people, soft people. Our job as society is to compassionately accept people as they are and encourage them to be their best authentic selves, instead of arguing there is some role they must force themselves to fulfill because they were born with a set of genitalia, because this promotes individual happiness and is the kind thing to do.
- People's virtues are learned, not innate. Independent people can learn to accept help. People who are unsure of themselves can gain confidence. People are allowed to be vulnerable, but also to have the space to find roots, solidarity, strength and growth. Roles that traditionally would have gone to someone with a penis - head of household, soldier, provider - are achievable and manageable by anyone, because the virtues needed to hold those positions are learnable and not rooted in biology. The same holds in reverse - roles that would traditionally have been held by women are open to everyone.
- People should be given freedom to flourish as they best see fit. They have rights to their bodily autonomy, securing their financial futures, achieving scholastic pursuits, respect and equality for their contributions, and more. Historically, this has not been the case, and this does not just apply to women's rights here - it applies to anyone who has had these opportunities denied.
- Some human but deleterious attributes we should all grow beyond. Brutishness is an excellent example - as is shallowness, closed-mindedness, entitlement, ignorance, greed, dishonesty, and more. Some attributes are contextually awful - being stoic, for example, is a boon when you need to handle stressful situations, but it can also manifest as a lack of empathy for other's emotional lives.
Note that none of these are attacking masculinity - if anything, point two contradicts exactly that, literally anyone can learn the virtues associated with masculinity and is why trans men are supported even conceptually. Rather, point four holds - there are a subset of awful virtues that are unacceptable or contextually awful from anyone that have been attached to being a man, such as entitlement to sex, resorting to anger in lieu of healthy expressiveness, and assuming they must shoulder all burdens instead of being allowed to seek help. In other words, mainstream movements are attempting to abolish toxic masculinity, not masculinity itself.
You discuss the emotional needs of boys and girls as being different (which may or may not be valid, depending on the best available evidence), but then you argue that treating boys like girls is not the right thing to do, which is not what anyone is proposing at all. Again, the idea is that people are people, not their bodies. Girls and boys are people, capable of feeling, wanting and expressing the full range of emotions. People want to treat children in ways that allow them to be emotionally expressive and mature adults.
Further, when you talk about the patriarchy, you are again not taking point one and two into account. Nobody wants authority, strength, boldness, vitality, etc. to go away - these are all great virtues. Rather, they want the idea that these qualities are somehow gendered to go away. If you want strong leaders, find them in both genders. Additionally, historically, the patriarchy you are discussing has tended to enshrine point four virtues rather than eliminated it - it's the same system that inflicted foot binding tortures, made Indian women throw themselves into funeral pyres when their husband passed, allowed female infanticide to flourish, and so on. These are all terrible things and bundled into a parcel of ideas about what men "...
Still when it comes to leadership, it suits a man by his qualities to be a leader, while a woman is suited for other roles. You can just see this by the role mothers play in their families versus fathers. If you have an imbalance or the women starts taking control or leadership in the family when the men are still present, then you get a lot of wonky results.
Here's one. When people collect datapoints and observe a difference in one case not present in the other, they sometimes fall into the trap of thinking that their dataset is exhaustive - that it captures all the variables that matter.
In other words, it's easy to start with the observation "women tend to be more represented in fields that exhibit qualities of care and less represented in leadership roles" and conclude that the absence of the variable "has leadership" makes up the core difference.
But this is a conceit that you, the observer, made. Your choice of variables to look at influenced your observations of what is different and therefore important.
Here's a counterpoint that contradicts your observed conclusion. Female heads of state and politicians have been increasing in number throughout the last century, and have done remarkably well in those roles. Has the nature and autonomy of executive power changed like medicine (according to you) has? It has not. It is a sign that you have not taken all variables into account.
Here's another error in your reasoning. Why those variables specifically? How do you know those are the variables your subjects are thinking about? When women sign up to be doctors and nurses and not CEOs, are they expressly telling you the shared decision making are the important variables? Or is it because you inferred that those variables are important because you can measure them?
In the interest of correct methodology, here are some other variables that people have suggested to explain the same data: women are conditioned or socialized into early expectations of caregiving roles; women are rewarded for pursuing caregiving roles in a way men aren't; there are more barriers for women than for men, and so on.
Now are these variables the correct answer? We don't know. It is a complex topic, because humans are complex. It is possible biology and perceptions of role play a part, as does socialization and others.
But what we can do is go a little meta and ask the likelihood that a biological variable is a good explanation in the first place. Consider what a good explanation has to do: it has to provide a causal mechanism, and be able to explain how the cause led to the effect you see. The trouble with every single biological explanation that's been proposed in this area is that they don't provide this causal mechanism. What exactly is it that makes women gravitate towards submissive roles? Is it estrogen levels? Hormones? Menstrual cycles? But then people on hormone therapy, people born with extra chromosomes, people with hermaphroditic parts, and so on should all display manifestly different behaviour and choices, which they don't. To explain these differences, you need to invoke more and more factors, until you end up with epicycles all over again.
More generally, the history of biological explanations simply don't fare all that well in comparison to sociological explanations. A reasonable prior is to assume that it may play a small part, but that larger effects are driven by how society treats and works with people.
My counterpoint is that motherhood, pregnancy, chastity, fertility, these are tied up in the biologic of a woman, and these fulfill important roles that can’t be explained by social factors. We are not at the stage where we can replace women with mass artificial wombs and then no child has a “mother” they know and grow with. Rather we know from studies that a nurturing mother is incredibly important for a child at the epigenetic level all the way to the social level.
So much of a social role is devised around motherhood and so much of male mating and paternity is focused on not wanting the woman to have children who are not his.
This is why it is said polygamy is a natural choice for people, women are more likely to accept and be ok with having one husband even if he has multiple wives, compared to the inverse. From a biological paternity standpoint, this makes a lot of sense.
I also challenge your notion that scientific studies conducted in a research study fashion are the preferred criterion for evidence. A study without context and understanding is dangerous. And there are many truths we know without putting them to the now industrialized scientific process of producing studies —- many of which suffer political and ideological pressures in terms of what they can study when it comes to the relationship between human behavior and controversial social issues.
So when you say women are pushed into caregiver roles… this is obvious if you understand the concept of motherhood. As for a rise in women leaders of countries, I will say overwhelmingly the political and business class is male, and generally women are not suited for leadership of a country. We saw a rising “feminization” of society in terms of corporate interactions and corporate decorum now being a default in many respects for how society operates; there are also ideological reasons to elevate “women leaders”; all of these are reasons I suggest you see a rise in women leaders of countries. If you look at societies where ostensible crude military control and authority are important to display, or even in war situations, we see that men are by far the ones involved in combat.
A big question to ask, why so few women in the military roles then, if they have been open to women now? If you look at women’s physical performance it becomes obvious. We aren’t at the stage of all robot armies yet; and the militaries of today are still by far men.
This is accurate, though, to be clear re: (1), I am saying that socialization of both men and women plays a role in these disparate distributions. Men are also socialized, to a great extent.
> My counterpoint is that motherhood, pregnancy, chastity, fertility, these are tied up in the biologic of a woman, and these fulfill important roles that can’t be explained by social factors. We are not at the stage where we can replace women with mass artificial wombs and then no child has a “mother” they know and grow with. Rather we know from studies that a nurturing mother is incredibly important for a child at the epigenetic level all the way to the social level.
I think you are blurring an important distinction here: motherhood during pregnancy and parenthood of a child. Yes, you clearly need women for the first, but that doesn't have anything to do with the latter - a nurturing parental figure is needed, but not necessarily women. Surrogate children, for example, thrive despite their biological mothers being absent in their developmental lives, as do adoptive children from early ages.
If you think about it, children have a variety of developmental needs, but none that are conditioned on requiring their parents to be of a specific gender. Children raised by successful gay male couples are simply not developmentally harmed in any way by any study, metric or measure, though neither parental figure is a woman.
The narrative that you need a nurturing, attentive and competent parental figure is certainly valid - but the idea that only a woman can fulfill that role isn't, because there's practical and ample evidence otherwise.
> So much of a social role is devised around motherhood and so much of male mating and paternity is focused on not wanting the woman to have children who are not his
But what about this is biological, exactly?
The trouble with the biological explanation is it doesn't explain exceptions very well. There are women who don't want children, men who don't want children, asexual people who don't care about sex but love the idea of raising a family, hikikomori who don't want any social contact, and more. That these people exist, are rational thoughtful individuals with full lives, and don't conform with the expectations biology supposedly places on them suggests biology can't be that strong a force in the first place. (You could claim these people are defective, of course, but that's circular and motivated reasoning - if biology is infallible except when it isn't, then we should just accept it's fallible instead of demonizing the exceptions).
The other trouble is that the biological explanation is very selective. As a species, we do a great deal of unnatural things. We eat cooked food, we wear clothes, we have manners, we employ language, use toilets, and more. Yet, somehow, when it comes to the topic of finding a mate, we somehow argue that our instincts, rather than our society, has shaped us into who we are, despite having shaped almost everything else.
Take one example where socialization has overridden this supposed base instinct: beauty standards. Small feet are not correlated with reproductive success, yet at some point in history foot binding was introduced. There are tribes that engage in neck elongation and other forks of bodily mutation that people learn to find attractive. Yet it would be foolish to argue that this is somehow a biological imperative - after all, we no longer include small feet as an index of beauty. Why does sexual reproduction get the special treatment?
To bring this idea back to the original talking point, the idea that motherhood is something you need to aspire to can't be something innate because th...
Maybe public, unashamed contempt is more recent?
I worked in a place a long while ago, being the only male in that department.
Everyone was nice and we did our jobs.
Over time I discovered 'rumors' about me from people outside the department. I'll call these people, the observers. They had no interactions with our team, aside from seeing who worked in our office as they walked past.
It was quite concerning that people would assume the situation meant anything but myself working with a team of peers.
The only shocking moment I had was taking a Women Studies course in my sophomore year of college… as I felt my childhood lacked this tension, it would be helpful to uncover blind spots. In particular I remember we had a 2 day discussion on the harmful impact of the Cosby Show on society (both race and gender relations) and the other male member of the course piped in with what I felt was a well reasoned comment. He was eviscerated in such a manner that it was apparent our presence was not welcome. I kept my mouth shut the rest of the course. It was certainly educational.
Could you expand on this?
Education (and a lot of other parts of society) has(ve) left men behind, and it starts in the childhood and never stops.
just saw the error now
It's my belief that this neglect has had a big role in the insecurity, lack of vulnerability, lack of self-esteem, and lack of honesty throughout my entire life. I don't blame my parents and I own my mistakes. But it's freaking wild to me that it's only now in my 30s that I'm going through emotional development that I can look back on and see people I knew in high school who had already done this sort of growth. After having read Running on Empty I started asking people about the dynamics with their parents growing up, and it really solidified how uncaring my childhood was in many ways.
The first time I had a heart-to-heart with my father, the center of my chest felt viscerally tender.
Mother stole a car and sold it to pay for a cocaine addiction. Father was such a workaholic that he simply marked her behaviors as "strange"... like her taking phone calls into a closet.
After the divorce my father had custody and remarried to continue his absence. (Normally left before I awoke, and I went to bed before he returned. He was even normally late for family dinners on holidays. When he was home, he was sleeping or watching TV)
Sometimes stepmother would return from work and vomit anger onto me and my stepsister. (Only about 2 years ago I realized it was Verbal Abuse)
Re-encoding memories was crucial for my awareness, and mental-emotional progress.
It's challenging at first, but after processing a few traumas, now when a deeper layer surfaces, I know I can immediately bring it to a therapeutic resolution.
"It's never too late to have a happy childhood."
Mothers on the other hand are supposed to be the primary person that provides emotional support and care. But, the immediate community is supposed to provide that support as well.
This is how human society has functioned through history. This is how we naturally function.
Fathers being emotional support, mothers being distant and the community being a cold and harsh distant group of people does not work.
Teachers and social workers are not "the community". Children don't need psychoanalysis and being taught to think of themsleves as victims if their parents are too busy to attend their school presentations and sports activities and all that, because you have the community right there embracing you and supporting you.
"It takes a village to raise a child" not paid employees of schools and governments and psychoanalysts helping politicians draft policies.
The entire context of how this question is even being asked is wrong imo.
"A child that is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth"
Asking masculine fathers to be emotional or telling children the entire burden of their successful upbringing is on the shoulders of their parents is not only incorrect, it reminds me of the proverb "don't grade a fish on its ability to climb a tree". If it is unnatural for a father to support a child a certain way and it is natural for a mother, what is wrong with that?
To argue that stoic fathers tend to produce better sons requires evidence. We might ask, "Better for what?" Better to be a disposable cog in a rich man's machine, perhaps? There's quite a bit of evidence that stoic fathers produce sons with emotional problems. There is quite a bit of evidence that expecting fathers not to express intimacy with their sons is destructive for both. There's quite a bit of evidence that men who don't understand their emotions and have not been supported in expressing them safely tend to act out in dangerous ways.
Yours is a recipe for an exploitative, dangerous world. Intersectional feminism offers a path toward a safe, loving, and moral world.
Being stoic is not what I mentioned but being strong and masculine, except in certain modern western societies is not optional. To put it differently, I wouldn't want my child to be violent in any way but I would also want him to be strong enough so that he wouldn't become prey to bullies and anyone trying to take advantage of him. But also to be strong enough to defend the weak and if the time comes, to serve in the military to defend his homeland and people.
Think of it as a job opening. Someone has to be masculine and someone has to be feminine . If your argument is that a boy should not have to be masculine, although horomones and generics disagree, I say that's a different topic because my argument is that both masculinity and femininity are required and for parents who wish to raise a masculine child, unless the mother is masculine and knows what growing up as a boy and becoming a man is like, the father is the only person that can do that.
> There's quite a bit of evidence that men who don't understand their emotions and have not been supported in expressing them safely
I did not suggest that. What I said was that it is not a father's job or rather, if a mother is available then she is best suited for that job. Boys want their mothers to comfort and emotionally support them and their fathers to teach them how to be a man and to be proud of their progress. I did not support toxic masculinity, just masculinity.
> We might ask, "Better for what?" Better to be a disposable cog in a rich man's machine, perhaps
Better equiped to succeed in life and be able to care for themselves and others. To live a long and likely happy life and find their place in society.
America's prisons are filled with men who never had a father model. Mothers, hard as they may try, at some point their inability to understand what their boys are going through makes it impossible for the child to trust them with emotional support.
A well rounded upbringing with all emotional, social and psychilogical needs met is all I advocated.
Fair enough, but then:
> What I said was that it is not a father's job or rather, if a mother is available then she is best suited for that job.
Who says that she is? Plenty of women suck at nurturing. Plenty of men are good at it. Why not have both parents capable of providing emotional support and guidance? What about single dads? Why assume that dad is better than mom at training a kid for fitness and to stand up for themselves. There are a lot of women jocks and soldiers. Have you ever seen the arms on a bread baker? She could punch you through a wall and go back to kneading without missing a beat. Why assume that girls don't need to throw a punch? They deal with both bullies and rapists. You are falling into the trap of gender essentialism. There are sex differences, but they are not the straightjacket traditionalists say they are. Did you think Neanderthal women laid around on fainting couches waiting for some dude to hand them a hankie?
If you want to know what men and women can actually do, don't look at traditionalists, look for us iconoclasts. The fags, the dykes, women athletes, men that stay at home with the kids. We are living examples that essentialism is dangerous bullshit. If you want to see true bravery watch a drag queen walk down a city street past all the people who want to kill her. Balls of fucking steel. Talk to the girl coder in a room full of coder bros trying to either fuck her or drive her off. Imagine being Madeline Albright in a situation room full of generals. That's bravery.
My grandmother was a pioneer in computing and women's liberation. When her husband was off in the merchant marines under the constant threat of U boats, she wanted to do something for the war effort. She saw a sign for engineering classes. When she went to sign up the man told her, "Sorry honey, engineering is for men." The instructor happened to overhear and replied, "Let her take it Harry. Then she'll learn her place." Of course, my grandmother took the class, did better than all the other guys, and went on to a long career designing nuclear torpedo circuitry and keeping the mainframe running, while raising four kids alone, and dealing with a constant stream of sexist men. Pure bravery. On the flip side, she couldn't cook to save her own life, thought Sanka in tepid tap water was coffee, and was hopeless at nurturing her kids, who have the emotional scars to prove it.
My father is an example of a boy who was never taught emotional intelligence. He simply doesn't understand his emotions or why they change. If I say, "Dad, it seems like driving is making you anxious. Do you want to switch?" He doesn't recognize the category of "anxious". All he knows is that something is wrong, it could not be him, so it must be mom's fault. On the flip side, dad is one of the best people in the country at programming cultural events for college campuses and single-handedly transformed student life for generations of students and is one of the funniest guys you'll ever meet.
Humans have evolved to be flexible and resilient. A big brain frees us from the monorail of instinct. Men and women can be whatever we need to be. This period of reaction to progress will pass like so many others have. You can't stop a good idea forever. And we who know freedom will NEVER go back.
You talked about a lot of things but I don't think this forum is best to discuss most of it, but let me reply to that statement.
I did not imply that all women are excellent nurturers or all men are great at being masculine. But whether you believe it is nature or society, parenting is many jobs packed into one. One person has to teach a child how to be masculine or feminine or if you are one of those people inventing thingd the whatever non-masculine/non-feminist thing I guess? But a father teaches his son how to be man, now you take that and make it about some ideologicial/political culture war and that isn't right. What's wrong with a mother providing emotional support? If a father is providing that then is that father also teaching the boy how to be a man? What is the woman doing then? Someone needs to do both jobs. If the mother can do the father's job then so be it. I don't get this obsession with reducing everything into politics or whataboutism. As a child I needed both types of support, to be understood as a male and thaught how to handle myself as well as to be taught how to be kind, caring and intouch with my emotions, to avoid burying them. Women don't have testestrome and society has it such that if you are feminine, you spend most of your life being emotional and being in touch with your feelings, so you're an expert at that.
You talk about what can be and hypotheticals. Ok, if you work hard enough, maybe a woman can teach a boy how to be man and a man can learn how to provide what a mother provides? But why are you talking about that? Why are you insisting that men who only know how to be men and have no interest in becoming women pretend to be something they are not? And if a woman is not great at providing motherly love and support, I say she should talk about it with her spouse and let them figure out the best way to meet the needs of their children. I hope we can at least agree that whatever socio-political winds may prevail, the needs of children should not be neglected.
Absolutely. Have a great night.
All social systems are constructions, and yes you are correct, we can observe and critique them. The sky is also blue. I like oranges. Snails are slow.
> To argue that stoic fathers tend to produce better sons requires evidence.
Likewise, to argue the opposite also requires more evidence than saying that "there is quite a bit of evidence" for your point. Saying that there is evidence is not evidence.
Fathers should absolutely be there for emotional support, especially for small kids.
Also, distant mothers are not a modern creation, there have always been distant mothers.
A CEO should know about corporate finance but that doesn't mean he should also be the CFO. Both roles are important enough to have separate execs. Parenting is similar. I did not advocate for an emotionally shutoff and cold father, but rather the responsible person and the person the child runs to for emotional support is the feminine parent which is the mother (usually at least). Similarly, boys need to be taught how to be men. Women have their own unique perspective and as such, mothers should take part in this but ultimately, the parent who should be responsible for masculinity education is the masculine parent, who knows how to handle a testestrome filled body and the specific society's expectation of men and how to address or confront that, and the father (usually) is the right person for this due to biology.
You and others are saying both parents can do this. I am saying, the parent with the most experience and qualifications should be the responsible parent without excluding the other parent entirely. You can blame the CEO for being ignorant about the company's financial state but you can't hold him/her responsible for mismanging finances without making sure the CFO did his/her job right.
> Also, distant mothers are not a modern creation, there have always been distant mothers.
100% agree with this. But so are fathers that teach boys weakness, cruelty and cowardice or who themselves don't know how to be a man (like abuse their wives). Parents who suck at their roles exist and that sort of is my point. If a mother is cold and distant then should the father take on the role of an emotional support primary parent as well as masculinity training? What is the mother doing? Neglecting the child? Is that really ok for the father to be expected do both things or maybe should the mother teach the boy to shave and to fight off bullies and succeed in the sport of the boy's choice? No problem with that so long as you are not saying one parent is responsible for everything. That's the root cause, you and others are caught up in politics and appearances and avoid holding both parents responsible. Neither fatherhood nor motherhood is a shared duty, parenthood is. These terms are not some patriarchal social construct that you must rebel against. They simply mean children have specific needs that need to be met and parents need to choose which role to take on and be an expert in that role who will meet that need. If a father doesn't know how to take on the role of emotional support for the child because the mother is distant and cold, then why are you blaming the father for not being two parents when you should be asking what could be done to help both parents figure out a way to share parenthood and decide who will take on what role?
And yes, I'd expect the father to do both things if that happens, for the sake of the child. The inverse is also true.
I don't think you can force a distant mother (or father) to be more involved but knock yourself out if you think otherwise.
Force? No. Help/educate? Maybe.
This reads like satire. "ChatGPT, please write a paragraph that embodies the concept of toxic masculinity."
I'm becoming a father in a few months, so I've spent this entire year reflecting on the fathers I know - strengths, weaknesses, things to emulate and things to avoid. Every one of the "good fathers" in that reflection is someone whose child would go to him for emotional support.
It's astounding to me that anyone could believe it's possible to be truly masculine while neutering one's experience of human emotion. Being too afraid of emotion to ever express it, and making your child suffer for your fear, is cowardice, not masculinity.
I did not claim that fathers should be devoid of emotion or neuter their emotion. You added that strawman on your own. This is the 3rd or 4th comment in this thread where someone made a similar claim.
Clearly even in your quote I said "the person a child goes to" as in the person responsible for that. Just because your child does not come to you first for emotional support, does that mean you have to be cold and unapproachable to your child? When did I claim that or why would you assume one extreme or the other?
Why do you people insist that parents should not have specific responsibilities based on their abilities. If you honestly believe you can support your child better than their mother emotionally then take on that role. No problem there. So long as the mother is able to exchange masculine responsibilities with you.
Why do you insist that fathers should be responsible for everything and mothers should do whatever they feel like doing? It sounds to me like 80% of parenting is done by the father according to you.
A son needs someone to teach them how to be strong and manly as well as gentle and kind and intouch with their emotions. Why so you insist thr father should do all these things? Why do you resist havig to share the responsibility with the mother?
This is basic human organizational structure. You can't have the CEO and CFO have the same exact job. You can't have two commanding officers responsible for the same subordinates in the military. Lookup "tyranny of the structureless".
In your attempt to do everything on your own, you rob your child the opportunity to get close to both parents bot worse than that, you rob them of structure and clarity which are essential to healthy development.
If you believe that 4 different readers are "misunderstanding" you, perhaps the failure to communicate exists on the writer's side.
> This is basic human organizational structure. You can't have the CEO and CFO have the same exact job. You can't have two commanding officers responsible for the same subordinates in the military. Lookup "tyranny of the structureless".
Based on the frequency with which you compare parenting to hierarchical corporate or military structures, I sincerely hope you aren't a parent. It's intensely creepy and I would never want you around my kid.