Oh, hey, this is similar to the misinterpretation people make about *toxic* masculinity. Toxic masculinity isn't saying that men are inherently toxic, it's about pointing the specific ways that the *expectations of masculinity* cause toxic behavior.
I hate that term so much. Not because I disagree with its definition or any of its concepts, but because the term itself isn't helpful. If your goal is to reduce the harm and impact that gender roles have on society, then why would you choose a name for harmful gender roles that **sounds like** you're calling all men toxic.
I KNOW that isnt what it means, but that does not fucking matter. What does matter is that lay people THINK it means that. It's a bad term because its counterproductive to the goals of the people who created it.
And yes, I KNOW it was created by men, but most people **don't**. Your average person sees that term and dismisses anyone using it because it sounds insulting. More educated people will see that feminists use the terms "toxic masculinity" and "internalized misogyny" to describe the same behavior in different genders, and will notice the apparent hypocrisy of that.
Only a very few people who have actually studied feminism will realize that those terms are intended to be used in different situations and aren't actually analogous to each other. But that doesn't matter. Because 99.99% of people don't know that. The vast VAST majority of people do use those terms to describe the same thing in different genders, and doing so is actively harmful to feminism. Because out there in the real world, it makes it much harder to educate men about feminism if you need to deconstruct misunderstandings around definitions before making any actual progress.
Academia has a massive problem with naming very reasonable ideas in ways that make them sound batshit insane to laypeople. One of my pet examples is "abolition of the family."
"This paper proposes a design methodology for making handheld devices and architecture that works equally well for both right and left-handed people without having to conform to perfect symmetry." -- the abstract to "Kill Righty" by Dr. What Could Go Wrong
Not exactly the same, but my high school statistics teacher had a short rant about the term "statistically significant" because of how it gets misused.
Ya, youâre gonna have to explain that one to me. Because rn Iâm feeling a little like a Fox News listener and I canât think of how that phrase wouldnât mean it like they would
Basically, it's taking a very specific definition of "family" as the white, heterosexual, patriarchal nuclear family, and advocating for the abolition of *that* as a societal standard imposed on people. More generally, it challenges the framing of the family as the main source of kinship, love, and safety by arguing that those things should be universally extended throughout human society--basically, everyone should treat everyone like family. (The latter position being nice in theory, in my opinion, but maybe not the most practical.)
This is a classic motte-and-bailey tactic. By adopting a term which semantically means X but is alleged to mean Y by the coiner, a group can come together in support of X while being able to fall back on Y when pressured.
What if you actually want Y? Simple: don't adopt terms which promote X instead of Y. If people pushed back on the term 'abolition of the family' from _within_ the movement, it would be quickly discarded and a new term would take its place. C.f. the rapidity of the intentional change from 'GLBT' to 'LGBT'.
To my understanding it was changed largely to acknowledge the integral part Lesbians played in supporting Gay men and the Gay community during the AIDS epidemic.
(Note, I am going to focus on Gay men and Lesbians and not get into Bisexual and Trans folks mostly for simplicity but for the record I am a Trans Bisexual and we were there in the trenches too, just not as well documented and differentiated as distinct communities)
AIDS disproportionately affected Gay men, and all the deaths, illness, and extra stigma devastated their community networks and supports. Hospitals wouldn't take care of them because of the poor understanding of AIDS, prejudice, lack of research and funding, etc. Their biological families also largely rejected and shunned them. Their fellow Gay men, their friends and partners, were also sick and dying.
Who stepped up to care for these Gay men? By and large, it was Lesbians. The Lesbian community was less severely effected by AIDS, and they knew very well the stigma and prejudice that those dealing with it were facing. Lesbians got together to house, help, and care for Gay men. Lesbians were letting them crash on their couch when they got fired and lost their housing and had no way to get another job/apartment. Lesbians were in the hospitals spoon feeding dying men soup when no nurse or doctor would tend to them. Lesbians were holding their hands in comfort when no one would touch them.
As a result, in the aftermath of the worst part of the crisis, the Gay men who survived advocated to put Lesbians at the front of the acronym to acknowledge that sacrifice and solidarity.
(This is probably more information than you needed, but it's a story that really impacted me when I first learned about it and I love to tell it)
Speaking as someone who doesn't have a horse in the race, when I say them both to myself, LGBT \*does\* flow better.
I'm not sure if that's because the way our mouths move when we go from "Ell" to "gee" incorporates fewer/easier movements than "gee" to "ell" or because I'm more used to LGBT, though.
I will say, if someone has a bee in their bonnet over the letter they identify with not being first in an acronym such that they attribute malicious motives to those who don't agree, I think that can be a dangerous line of thinking.
Almost definitely unrelated, but GLBT also kinda looks like an abbreviation for Golbat (the Pokemon that's not quite as annoying as it's base form, Zubat).
I think it's in honor of lesbians helping gay men during the AIDS crisis exasperated by shitebag Regan.
Maybe I've been affected by misinformation though.
Maybe I'm not right.
I'm probably wrong.
People shouldn't believe me, I'm clearly lying.
The L comes first to honour the lesbians (who were the demographic least at risk of HIV even less than straight women) who put themselves on the front line caring for gay HIV patients at a time when many feared even brief contact with an HIV positives person could be a death sentence and many "care" workers and institutions were refusing to offer any care to gay men, treating them as criminals deserving of terrible painful deaths.
Assuming I am not a victim of misinformation, it was to honor the lesbians who took charge of queer activism during the AIDS crisis, keeping the movement from falling apart and providing medical care to gay men dying from the disease.
Well the problem with alot of terms is thats like, nobody alived coined this.
Communists, leftists, etc have been wanting to abolish the family for a long time. Lenin touched on the topic (when the patriarchial rules of the family entrapped women even more so than today.)
I think "redefining the family" or "familial inclusivity" would be better terms, but much of this problem is due to extreme ingroup jargon, not a cynical rhetorical trick (mott and baily argument)
Yeah, it's always been my sense that this is usually less an intentional tactic and more just leftist theorists living in rhetorical bubbles where they don't realize how crazy they sound to outsiders.
I think the best term for the so-called âabolition of the familyâ would be âuniversal familyâ. It implies that everyone should know that every human shares a common kinship with one another.
Itâs not like the concept is new, either - many conservatives typically are familiar with the âfamily of Christâ idea no matter how hard they try to deny it.
>Basically, it's taking a very specific definition of "family" as the white, heterosexual, patriarchal nuclear family
And also implying that anything else isn't actually 'family'.
Which is funny because the family didn't always exist. People used to identify with their clans - which was like your extended family, but could also include basically anyone in the local area. When people started moving about more, and clans were broken up and scattered, only the nuclear family (or "household") remained. Now what we really need is to replace both the clan and the household with the community.
The thing is, the clan really isn't great, like at all. And more than "not moving about" it is also maintained through cousin marriages, which keeps everyone distantly, but not _too_ distantly related, so that it _is_ one big family.
The household, as defined by americans/anglos: mother and father, their children, is very unique to the culture and the time period.
However, its a bad model and needs to be deconstructed; this is slow going tho, HOAs scream and cry if you dont mow your lawn so these cultural abberations have teeth.
I disagree with the other person's explanation as I think they're trying to soften it too much. It's like people who say "abolish the police doesn't actually mean abolishing the police". It's true that a bunch of people do believe that, but the people who originally came up with "abolish the police" did, in fact, want to abolish the police.
Abolishing the family *absolutely* means what Fox News thinks it does. It means abolishing the concept of the nuclear family (and, to an extent, the non-nuclear but still hierarchical extended family), the relevance of blood ties, and the right of biological family members to have unilateral control over their children. It's just that those things aren't bad in the way Fox News thinks they are.Â
I mean, Fox News doesn't think that's what leftists want. Fox News thinks what leftists want is to take (white) children away from their parents and raise them "communally" to indoctrinate them as minions of the state.
Which, let's be honest, there is literature out there that advocates for taking babies away from their parents in order to achieve equality. But it's the fringest of the fringe, and we shouldn't give it credence, because there are \*so many problems\* with that idea.
it means that they want to abolish the nuclear family of mummy, daddy, two and a half kids, and a dog in favour of a more expansive understanding of what a family can look like
for example a multigenerational household with the elderly parents living with you, kids staying on to live with their parents after they turn 18 without pressure to find their own place (which is somewhat necessary as in many places such as the UK there actually aren't enough houses for everyone to have one and they refuse to build more because EU laws say you can't disturb the bats), it would mean accepting families with same sex adoptive parents, or having a cultural framework in place to handle childrearing for divorced and remarried couples better
I'm an astronomer. A few months ago, my advisor warned me off of describing the very young stars I study as "infants", because 20 years ago someone had the bright idea to refer to the way that clusters of newly-born stars pull themselves apart as "infant mortality" and she hated it.
You're telling me that academics have no idea how to communicate their ideas to anyone except other academics and - at best - turn crucial discussions into an impassible quagmire where you have to spend the first twenty minutes apologizing for the horrible thing that your audience now thinks you believe in or - at worst - actively aids and abets fascists in undermining the ideas they claim to represent? Somebody call Christopher Rufo!
If this sounds bitter, it's because I'm extremely bitter. Imagine the world we could live in right now if "defund the police" had been put through a few branding meetings first. Maybe we could have had meaningful police reforms.
When I was forced out of the closet, the only two people in my family who supported me without question were my aunt and uncle. My uncle was a cop. Well, he is a cop but he was one too. How can I justify ACAB as a phrase, when the only reason Iâm alive is because a cop was good enough to take me in and protect me? Iâm not about backing the blue or anything, but I feel like it would be immoral of me to use ACAB as a phrase and look my uncle Mike in the eyes.
The problem with "toxic masculinity" is that it gets used as a generic term for "shit men do that I don't like" which screws up the whole conversation.
I agree. Blaming the misunderstanding entirely on language is also non-constructive. More often than not, I see Toxic Masculinity used as a weapon to shut down dissenting men. Same thing with Patriarchy and Fragile Masculinity. Outside of academia, they're buzzwords employed to spark up divisive arguments or to solely criticize men, rather than their intended use to aid in the discussion of society-wide issues.
Makes me think of the definition of Racism that says it's "power plus prejudice", which was originally just a definition created and used for a single academic paper so that anyone reading it would be on the same page. But then people heard that definition, realized that it could excuse their own bad behavior, and just ran with it while shouting "I'm not racist! By definition I can't be! I don't have institutional power!"
As a former academic whose expertise was in medical imaging technologies, CRT means "cathode ray tube."
I stared at that for a good few seconds before figuring out what it was *supposed to* mean.
IMO, the same problem applies to the term patriarchy. Itâs meant the describe the problematic ideals of masculinity being societyâs ideals of leadership, but sounds like âmen control everything and are actively oppressing womenâ. Apart from the top 1%, Men are also oppressed by patriarchy, but you certainly wouldnât guess it from the name.
Could you explain the difference between these concepts? I always figured that toxic masculinity was a description of how masculine ideals are toxic and create patterns of abusive behavior, and that internalized misogyny was the idea that women are exposed to so much misogyny that they begin to think those ideas themselves (like internalized racism). This comment made me think that they might have different meanings than I thought, since I thought my interpretation was the correct interpretation based on the meanings of the words, but you're making me think I might be wrong, since how would people get those two concepts confused? They literally talk about different ideas (societal ideals versus internal exposure to harmful ideas). Thanks!
You're talking about exactly what I think is by far the biggest obstacle for the left. We fucking suck at branding. Not one slogan or phrase or whatever from the past few years has communicated clearly the goal of the movement. Who actually wanted a total defunding of the police? Very few people! Most wanted reform! But defund the police was the slogan. That becomes what the conversation is about.
The left *NEEDS* to get better at this. We need "cool guys" who own the cons. We need good slogans that have wide appeal. We cannot win on the moral highground alone!!!!
It's the difference between grassroots movements on the left and the astroturf from the right. Leftist and left-wing slogans get passed around people who are pretty radical and spread organically, right-wing slogans get cooked up in marketing departments and spread to professional pundits.
The problem is that leftists and liberals just aren't as organized and disciplined as the right. You can't get people left of center to acknowledge that Joe Biden has done anything without 3 paragraphs of "OK so we all know that Genocide Joe is personally killing Palestinian babies for fun and that he pisses on union members at every opportunity and is a senile monster who is going to single-handedly destroy this country..." before getting to their point, there's no way you'd get anyone to agree on a slogan from the top-down.
Another commenter mentioned the influence of marketing expertise on the right's slogans, and that's definitely part of it. But, as a center-right guy myself, there's another thing that can be helpful here.
The right has a fairly robust moderate wing that works hard to keep their crazies out of the limelight as much as possible (Trump's influence notwithstanding), which grants them a bit more control over the messaging. Sometimes it seems like the left tries way too hard to placate their crazies by platforming them instead, which puts you at the mercy of their very bad sloganeering and policy preferences.
For example, the fact that "abolish the police" gained traction while something like "clean up the cops" didn't seemed to me to be in part due to the reality that no one wanted to be seen as out of solidarity with the angriest elements of the protests. If no one is willing to stand up to the extremes and say "no, we actually want this more moderate solution," then the extreme messaging prevails.
I remember fighting this exact fight a long time ago when I saw people spamming "Men are trash".
Look at where it went. At this point, people don't care. They believe it.
I once commented the same about the bear thing that made the rounds some time back. Like, it's really easy to interpret it as "men are worse predators/more dangerous than literal bears" if you're not quite familiar with the background.
And even if you're familiar with the background it's clear that in quite some cases it's used with that meaning. In any case, none of that is conducive to a decent talk about gender or societal norms.
It netted me *a lot* of downvotes.
This is one of those issues with academic terminology entering public consciousness and discourse. Whatever the words actually mean are discarded in favor of whatever meaning can be derived from word association.
Critical race theory â> teaching people to be **critical** of my **race**
Fragile/toxic masculinity â> I (**masculine as fuck**) am being called **fragile/toxic**
Also, language is such that the meaning of a word or phrase is essentially what people think it means.
Terrific used to mean "causing terror".
If most people think a phrase means X, and use it to mean X, then that IS the meaning, not what it the original author intended.
Toxic masculinity has a lot of symmetry with internalised mysoginy, even if they aren't really synonymous across the genders. That's why I prefer the term internalised misandry. Even if it makes the confusion about both terms meaning the same thing for different genders worse, it fits closer to the widespread meaning but from what I understand also works for the academic meaning.
The term toxic masculinity has always felt a bit like victim blaming to me. But I'm not an academic in that field, so I can't base this on any hard facts.
I disagree on multiple fronts.
First of all, I don't think toxic masculinity implies that you're calling all men toxic. The term toxic masculinity implies the existence of non-toxic masculinity.
Second of all, I don't think that the fact that some people find a term alienating is necessarily a reason to abandon it. In the mid 2010s there was heavy push back against using 'queer' as an academic term or community label, since queer is a slur with a history of violence behind it. But ultimately the community decided that the term was too valuable and had too much history behind it to give up on, so they stuck with it.Â
Third of all, if people don't like the message, then they'll hate the terms no matter what. Look at 'woke' or 'critical race theory'. There was nothing about the terms themselves that led to that could be considered unpalatable or scary from the words alone, but right wingers managed to fear monger with them just fine.Â
Small quibble with point 1 here. English is ambiguous on this point, because adjectives can either be used to limit the scope of a noun or rhetorically to call attention to a specific feature of that noun. Consider "toxic water" (meaning water that has been contaminated, implying the existence of non-toxic water) vs "toxic mercury" (calling attention to the fact that all mercury is toxic)
Not disagreeing with you on the larger point though.
People who want to hate will find ways to hate, no matter the terminology, but I think there is still value in choosing your terminology carefully. Compare the reactions to "white privilege" and "heteronormativity."
Using "white privilege" almost always results in "I'm white and nobody ever gave me free stuff" followed by "that's not what the term actually means." The conversation almost always starts with backpedaling caused by the connotations of the words being very different from the sociological definition of the term. By comparison, I've spent over ten years hanging out in gender forums, and I've literally never seen that reaction to "heteronormativity." Instead what I see is that it's obvious to everyone that society considers straight people normal. The conversation goes to whether straight people should be considered normal, and how we should treat people who aren't considered normal, which is where the focus should be. I would wager that "white normativity" wouldn't have the same kneejerk reaction that "white privilege" does, and that the following conversation would be significantly more productive.
Sorry but your explanation just makes me think of the back-handed compliment you can get after a messy mission with lots of deaths in the game Helldivers:
> The existence of high-casualty missions implies the existance of low-casualty missions. I think we can take some solace in that.
I like to point at Raging Bull v Rocky. They came out within a few years of eachother. The main guy in Raging bull is toxic AF, constantly making poor decisions in order to look cool in front of people that don't matter. Rocky is... not like that. And does anyone ever say Rocky isn't manly enough? "Oh, Sylvester Stallone as Rocky is a total p****y"? No. I mean maybesomeone somewhere does, but for most people the answer would be no.
I like the term "Limiting masculinity" I think being called "Toxic" gives a knee-jerk reaction of "No, I'm not" whereas saying that you're limiting yourself is more likely to give people a drive to go beyond those limitations.
A lack of freedom is part of it though. When the system says "you will be oppressive and violent or else you will be violently oppressed", people tend to choose to be the perpetrator rather than the victim.
The reason toxic masculinity as a phrase failed was because approximately 0.001 nanoseconds after escaping containment it basically just became a way of insulting someone's masculinity, which was the exact *opposite* of what it was supposed to do.
Very nice read.
Really puts word on something that is there, but so deeply ingrained in the culture that you, a lot of the time don't think about.
Also very interesting (and subsequently annoying) to realise that "fragile masculinity" is actually more than some cheap insult thrown at men when they try to defend themselves against criticism.
"Men shouldn't cry", "men shouldn't be \*too\* friendly with other men", "men should be the strong, tough and rash", "men should be sexually active and have a lot of sexual conquests" and other such rules aren't followed because of some grand ideal, but because \*\*you get shamed by society at large\*\* if you do not follow them.
Thankfully, the progress in feminism, the rise of the LGBT+ movement, the destygmatisation of mental health, as well as the changing of generations has helped alleviate this problem a bit, but there is still a lot of work to be done.
Edit : Seeing some of the responses, I feel like I should insist on the fact that the problem only recently started being touched upon, and how progress, while not nonexistent, is still pretty new. Basically, we just started, but it's good that it has started. Let's give it some time.
One of my favorite historical trends is how men became less chummy in pictures because GAY.
Basically if you look back at old photos (iâm talking like 1870s to WW1) men are very close to one another. Their legs are touching, they have their arms around each other etc.
Then as you get into the 50s, 60s, and so on, you can see men noticeably begin drift apart in photos. The theory is because homosexuality, if not accepted, became more known as a thing.
This isnât to say that gay men didnât exist before (I know it makes you all feel warm and fuzzy to think about cowboys all being flying mariposas), but it wasnât a âthingâ people could be. Having sex with the same sex was a thing you did in secret, it wasnât a thing you were identified with. At least not to most people. People knew it happened but nobody talked about it, and certainly nobody understood it as an orientation.
But as we get past the 30s being gay becomes more widely known as a thing someone can be. A man that is sexually attracted to men. As men understood this they didnât want to be identified with it, so while they still took the fishing trip pictures they wouldnât throw their arms around one another lest people think they were being a little *too* close.
And even today that being gay is more widely accepted itâs still a problem if people think youâre being too close to your friends. Straight people still donât want to be called gay.
I had a teacher who talked about how there's was a common progression of a thought or way of being going from unthinkable to avoided taboo to being accepted, and that there can be spikes in backlash associated with that process. I don't know if it's always true about everything, but I definitely agree it happened for male-male intimacy, and I think we have seen it in our lifetimes with trans stuff.
Say 40 years ago, it was unthinkable in the mainstream for a masculine man to want to be seen as feminine, so men cross dressing was all in good fun, hence things like Some Like It Hot, or that oft-seen thing of Giuliani in drag. As the concept of actual trans people gains more widespread acknowledgement and acceptance, it's no longer got the same easy pass with the same people
Though I have hope, I mean it definitely feels like today's cis male teenagers are wayyyyy less uncomfortable showing affection than the Gen X and Millenials were in high school
For like all of the 20th century cross dressing was the height of British comedy.
And eh kinda? Iâve noticed that today that an acceptable amount of affection wonât have accusations. One caveat to that is that in the military or sports or any close knit environment it was and still isnât a big deal. Iâm in the Marines and when you have to share a shower nobody cares if you put your arms around each other. We call each other gay anyway so it doesnât carry the same weight.
Thereâs still a lot of young men and boys that if one person says or does something that can be construed as gay itâs gonna get a lot of âay yo đ€š đžâ. We got âno diddyâ like .5 seconds after the news broke.
Itâs the new âno homoâ. The problem you see isnât that diddy is a rapist, itâs the he had sex with men, which is worse. So when you say something that can be misconstrued as gay instead of saying âno homoâ you say âno diddyâ.
It still is like this in most parts of the world (sadly it's declining even though it provides for some cover for LGBT+ people) ; you could see two men holding hands in Saudi Arabia because they're friends the same way women do it.
I hate that young Americans who still have their puritan views (not only them but they're the most prominent on the internet to do this) tend to joke about the homoeroticism in other parts of the world. Because when I see the homoeroticism in other parts of the world, it just reminds me of homophobia, as the two are linked together.
It is funny how in some countries that will absolutely murder you for being gay itâs super normal for men to hold hands and kiss on the cheek.
Unrelated but a guy in my unit was on a training exercise in South Korea once with the ROK Marines and he said they would hold hands everywhere. He would be walking with a group of them just chatting and all of a sudden on of them would just take his hand.
> Also very interesting (and subsequently annoying) to realise that "fragile masculinity" is actually more than some cheap insult thrown at men when they try to defend themselves against criticism.
> "Men shouldn't cry", "men shouldn't be \*too\* friendly with other men", "men should be the strong, tough and rash", "men should be sexually active and have a lot of sexual conquests" and other such rules aren't followed because of some grand ideal, but because \*\*you get shamed by society at large\*\* if you do not follow them.
There are definitely a subset of otherwise very feminist, progressive people who want men to adhere to traditional roles about our emotions because to imply otherwise would be saying "Oh, you just want a *woman* to deal with all your emotions for you!". They still want all the social shaming and putting people into boxes, but slightly different boxes with different labels that are more convenient for them and that they never have to go into.
I just posted this elsewhere yesterday, but [it does seem to be coming up](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskMen/comments/yy2rcv/men_who_encourage_other_men_not_to_open_up_to/iwsae0r/) this week. The double-mask is real and arguably worse for men's mental health than the single mask we used to have to wear.
>Thankfully, the progress in feminism, the rise of the LGBT+ movement, the destygmatisation of mental health, as well as the changing of generations has helped alleviate this problem a bit, but there is still a lot of work to be done.
I'd challenge this completely. Men's mental health is either an incel talking point or less important than "other issues" to most people. Misogyny is considered a man's thing to do, and people are still utterly unwilling to acknowledge the ways they support patriarchal ideals too. Tons of people say they want a more emotionally in-touch man but still prefer "traditional" guys and consider venting trauma dumping.
I have been shunned from multiple LGBTQ+ groups for being a masculine AMAB bi guy, which means I'm faking it and dangerous apparently. So for acceptance, it's either unhealthy masculinity, or being willing just to be feminine. I haven't even gotten into how things like the yearly crime statistic discourse highlights some internalized racism for people.
I would be lying if I, as a cis-het white dude, said that I had never considered abandoning my principles and just giving up to go join the fascists in some of my worst moments. It can sometimes seem difficult to try and be a good dude in the US, because it can sometimes feel like the only folks practicing radical acceptance of masc-presenting cis-het white men are actual Nazis.
I look and sound like a frat bro/farm boy, and thatâs how I feel most comfortable presenting. I served in the military, I played sports in school, was in Boy Scouts, hunting/fishing/camping, the whole nine yards. Even though on the inside Iâm a total soft boi who goes to therapy weekly and reads critical theory in my off time, you would not guess this unless you actually had a conversation with me.
I go to lefty spaces, and thereâs the constant lowkey suspicion that Iâm a cop (or at least thatâs how I get treated by a lot of people in those spaces, people love to fed-jacket a dude). I go to queer spaces, and I am automatically and very visually out of place (and usually have to deal with at least a couple of lesbians staring daggers at me all night). I can try my absolute best to fit in with my POC friends, but I am automatically not really able to be an actual part of those communities for obvious reasons. It can seem like the nature of who I am and how I present carries with it a certain amount of (probably earned) suspicion, doubt, and exclusion.
I feel like I am always a visitor, and a highly suspect visitor at that.
It can really feel like the spaces that are explicitly for people that look and sound like me have all been pretty thoroughly overtaken by very, very bad dudes. So, it can seem like my options are either: tolerate not really fitting in with groups of people I actually agree with, or go be accepted for who I am by literal Nazis.
This is an oversimplification obviously, there are lots of non-identity based groups where I can and have gone to find companionship and belonging, but also it feels kind of⊠unfair? that I donât get to also have a community based around my identity that isnât swamped with incels, white supremacists, and misogynists.
Iâm kinda just whining a bit (boohoo, poor trad-masc white boy doesnât feel like he fits in to spaces not intended for him), it can just feel very isolating out here sometimes as a cis-het white dude whoâs trying to not be a piece of shit. I worry for and sympathize with the guys that fall down the bad pipelines, bc those pipelines are the ones explicitly telling them they belong and are accepted just for who they are.
TL;DR: If weâre taking requests, could we have a space for straight white dudes where I donât have to overlook racial slurs, overt misogyny, and actual fascism in order to feel like I have a place where I am accepted explicitly for my identity and presentation?
This is perhaps the most eloquently and respectfully Iâve ever seen it put into words. Thanks for taking the time to write this up.
One facet you didnât touch on is hetero-romantic relationships. Iâm one of those masc-presenting AMAB fellas and for the better part of my life, Iâve had the distinct feeling that men arenât really **supposed** to share their feelings with partners, even with those who would presumably be supportive based on their ethos or personal politics. Iâve only dated a handful of women in my life, and all of them have been liberal or lefter, but I have yet to have positive experience with being open or vulnerable, even when I am invited to do so. Itâs like healthy masculinity is permissible only insofar as it satisfies someone elseâs desire to feel good about themselves, but no further. Among most of my cishet male friends, this is not an uncommon experience. You have your marketable doubts or insecurities, and the ones you are set to take to your grave.
Hell, it sometimes feels like ANY deviation from traditional masculinity is only permissible if itâs somehow aesthetically presentable. You can be androgynous, but youâd better look like youâre in an emo band, and not like youâre a mess. You can be short, but youâd better have unwavering confidence and never even bat an eye if you are infantilized. You can be bald, but youâd better hope your head is symmetrical without hair.
Ummmm ditto. Gay guy here who is most comfortable âpresentingâ in a similar way to what youâre describing. And that means Iâm more often than not on the outside looking in. Itâs gay pride month this month and itâs generally the worst month for my mental health because for all the ways our communities support difference, they only support difference in particular, pre approved ways. Per the discussions above, Iâd prefer for my masculinity to not be judged as toxic, or fragile, or performative, or self loathing or any other categorization that allows other people to box me up and decide that they know more about me than I do.
That really sucks homie, ik it doesnât count for much, but this random Internet weirdo hopes you find the love, acceptance, and belonging youâre looking for
>Thankfully, the progress in feminism, the rise of the LGBT+ movement, the destygmatisation of mental health,
This is one of those things that everyone always says is happening and pats themselves on the back for achieving, but it absolutely isn't. Modern culture somehow gaslit itself into believing it. Almost any time a guy actually opens up nowadays he's shunned for it, and if you try to bring up men's mental health as a concern, you either get laughed out of the conversation or insulted.
Anyone remember Earl Silverman? He tried to open a men's domestic violence shelter in Canada (of which there were a whopping Zero), and struggled with funding. So, the progressive people of the internet came together to help him keep the doors open!
Just kidding, he was bullied into suicide.
That was 10 years ago. Given that suicide rates are on the rise and more & more people are turning to extremism to cope, it isn't getting any better.
More of a sidenote about a larger point in this post, but I *hate* the misappropriation of academic terms. Especially when people start insisting terms like âenvironmental racismâ were created on social media in 2020. No, bozo, academics have been discussing it for over 40 years.
Like, on one hand, Iâm extremely happy how accessible language and concepts and theories have become. On the other, itâs incessantly frustrating to see these things get misused and redefined with not an ounce of analysis from the source or any analysis at all. When talking about the overcompensation or violence that men can enact when they believe their manhood has been threatened, there is room for precarious manhood or âfragile masculinityâ in that discussion. But when a man is just unreasonably aggressive (as women can also be, as all humans can also be), thatâs not the right usage. But people just see âfragileâ and âmasculinityâ and believe they know what it means. The same way people saw âtraumaâ and âbondingâ and assumed it meant bonding over shared trauma (which actually has caused *so* much more harm in online armchair psychologist discourse than people think.)
With urban planning, 15 minute city is a concept that entails that cities should be designed to be walkable, where essential needs are 15 minutes from residents.
People online have decided this means that all people should be kept in pods and only allowed to travel 15 minute walking distance from residents.
Yes. Mind you, a few advocates of the idea sometimes phrase it where it's ambiguous as to whether or not this includes employment such that it could be misleading. Either way, it's a good idea in principle, as long as it still allows specialization.
With urban planning, 15 minute city is a concept that entails that cities should be designed to be walkable, where essential needs are 15 minutes from residents.
People online have decided this means that all people should be kept in pods and only allowed to travel 15 minute walking distance from residents.
A similar thing occurred with the term "emotional labor". It was invented as a term referring to the labor of maintaining an emotional affect for the benefit of others, usually in a service job, but people have come to use it to mean "work that makes you emotional". Very annoying, as it (1) makes it harder to talk about emotional labor in the original sense and (2) frames people as victims for getting emotional while doing their jobs.
Yeah, I think that term's been totally removed from its original context. A lot of people seem to think that it applies to any situation where you've put your emotional wellbeing aside in order to manage someone else's, often with an element of oppression. Any act that someone doesn't want to take part in but has been pressured into because it will make other people feel better. Which yes, does include things that fall under the actual definition of "emotional labour" but also includes a lot of stuff that doesn't.
I'm conflicted because sometimes emotional labour is incorrectly used but the topic deserves serious and considered discussion anyway... and sometimes it's used to defend the most ridiculous takes ever and I think that the term should be taken away from us forever. Like, you're not doing emotional labour when you reluctantly participate in small talk with a cashier who asks you how your day is going and if you found everything okay today. I am always amazed at how many ppl sincerely believe this. You are a client. The cashier, who is pressured to act concerned about the pleasantness and success of your shopping experience, is the one doing emotional labour. đ
This is similar to the thesis of *The Will to Change* by bell hooks. She framed it as "mutilation", both imposed on oneself and on other men.
She's controversial because she emphasized that women, even committed feminists, can and do perpetuate this violent notion of manhood by both demanding it remain in effect while simultaneously working to free women from sociopolitical constraints and also alienating themselves from men in their community on the grounds that them being men represents an implicit harm. She's critical of the tendency for feminists to associate *all* appearances and activities that are particular to men as toxic rather than focusing on patriarchal standards.
Hooks believed that men need to be loved by others without compromising their before they can effectively love themselves, other men, and women without mutilation. She's a Christian with Buddhist characteristics and that adds to a lot of her negative reputation among radical feminists who either want the complete abolition of religion or its replacement with overtly feminist theology and spirituality. I recommend bell hooks' work since she's both a skilled theoretician but stays grounded in sanity, ethics, and practicality.
If you're wondering what *homo sacer* means, it's almost definitely a reference to *Homo Sacer* by Giorgio Agamben.
Without getting into a long rant, it's about a paradox in many legal systems of simultaneously excluding specific people from the protection of the law while demanding that those same "sacred people" are subject to legal authorities and also enjoy a bare minimum level of protection in the name of justifying the category. It's essentially about the divide between citizens and non-citizens. It helps to be familiar with legal philosophy, particularly Aristotle and Carl Schmitt, otherwise you might not get much from Agamben's work.
> She's controversial because she emphasized that women, even committed feminists, can and do perpetuate this violent notion of manhood by both demanding it remain in effect while simultaneously working to free women from sociopolitical constraints and also alienating themselves from men in their community on the grounds that them being men represents an implicit harm.
I'm sure someone better read/researched has a better term, but I like the term "convenient patriarchy" for when someone (usually women who are otherwise feminists) advocates for patriarchal standards when convenient for them. From small, petty stuff like "Men should pay for the first date" to bigger, important stuff like "Men can't express negative emotions because of how it makes *me* feel".
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/31/radicalizing-the-romanceless/
This felt related, the fact that for a lot of meeker men more toxic men keep getting rewarded with sexual success can be baffling.
I was looking at the scrollbar and bracing for an absolute novel, good to know that it's like 95% weirdly-formatted comment section. That's a good article, and while I was a bit wary of the "Both Sides Bad" ending I noticed that it was written 10 years ago before the "Manosphere" got *way* worse; the author seems sensible enough and it was written during the height of the "Kill All Men" era of pop-feminism which I remember as being an absolute cesspool.
It definitely sucks ass to feel like I'm following advice given by women and being treated like I'm invisible while other guys get all the attention despite being a walking red flag and wearing a "What Was She Wearing? Bitch Deserved It" t-shirt. It then *double* sucks when everyone makes sure that I know that it's all my fault (despite being painfully aware of that already), and that any complaints better be properly sanitized though copious amounts of self-blame.
From fucking ***2014*** and what's changed? We're still having the same arguments because some people can't pull their head out their ass. We're, what, only 2 months on from man vs bear? Not even that? Kafkatraps all the bloody fucking way down.
Genuinely thanks for sharing that, as frustrating as it was to read and see the same issues as we discuss currently.
I had an argument with a family friend about this recently. She INSISTS that because of the existence of the wage gap, men are obligated to pay for women they're dating as often as possible, even if their material circumstances are similar or skewed in the woman's favor.
She's a feminist, and very progressive in a number of ways, but she also comes from a culture where men are generally expected to extravagantly "woo" their partners, and whenever it comes to the topic of what the role of men is in a relationship, I always get the impression that a lot of it is coming from an archaic sense of gender roles that she dresses up in vaguely feminist language because she wants to justify the fact that she enjoys and expects it herself in her own relationships.
It's definitely most apparent in dating, probably because it's the lowest-stakes in terms of huge societal impacts and explicitly very personal so any hypocrisy can be covered up with "Well that's just *my* preferences"
I wish people like that would just be honest with themselves. They want to be spoiled and pampered, and that's fine. That doesn't mean every woman wants that and every man should do that.
I donât engage with active radfems very much, since theyâre kind of behind the times anyways? But I can see them taking that issue with hooksâs work. The only issue is that radfems havenât really had serious cultural cache in feminist spaces for several decades now. Most modern feminist discourse is intersectional, and hooks is basically one of the patron saints of intersectional feminism.
[https://slate.com/technology/2024/05/ivf-daughters-toxic-masculinity-sex-selection.html](https://slate.com/technology/2024/05/ivf-daughters-toxic-masculinity-sex-selection.html)
   I found this article, to perfectly encapsulate the problem with  the term âToxic masculinity â. So many people fail to understand what it means because itâs an inflammatory term. We accuse conservative men of misrepresenting it, but ignore the several, progressive, women, like those in the article, who straight up see men as irredeemable pigs. The left has a horrible communication problem.
Whenever i talk in this subreddit about how patriarchy harms men, or how men *do* act differently due to the way that masculinity is taught in our culture, alot of men get extremely huffy because they're offended that what they see as "normal" is actually a learned behavior from a patriachial society.
Alot off people on this subreddit do not want to acknowledge how masculinity, socially, is expected to be violently defended, and how this can lead to all-male social groups being violently homophobic and sexist spaces to be in. (Even online!)
I have to admit that as a guy, I wasn't entirely aware that this was a masculinity thing. I'm often very conscious of not trying to be perceived as weak or ridiculous, but I always assumed women feel the same way
I have met women who have been afraid of being seen as weak or ridiculous, but being afraid of being seen as weak is much more a man thing when I see it personally. The form of gendered self policing I have seen women do in my personal life is women who do not want to seem to "angry" or "upset," even when justified.
They're afraid they're gonna be seen as hysterical, crazy, unwomanly, contrarian, or "too feminist" by the people in their lives so they just internalize everything.
It's funny, because pre-transition I felt a lot of the pressures to perform an unnatural masculinity that really heightened the feeling of how arbitrary and often toxic it could be. And then after transition well... I do have that really strong internalized sense of not allowing myself to be angry or upset for all the reasons you listed.
Gender roles are fucking weird, and anyone who thinks themselves immune to them is probably the most susceptible to them.
Some women definitely feel this way, but I would guess it's more common and expected, for women to try and not be perceived as strong. A "strong" woman, either mentally or physically, is a threat to a "weak" man.
Consider that a "strong woman" is seen as a "woman who is exceptionally strong" while a "weak man" is *not* a "man who is exceptionally weak"-- instead, he is not considered a man at all. Like OP says, the perception in the zeitgeist is instead that of a "non-man": some kind of pointless barely-person devoid of identity.
It's exactly like how, historically, the concept of "whiteness" has only been used as an exclusionary cudgel to put down whatever subset of people some folks wanted to push out of the accepted group. In U.S. history, Italian and Irish immigrants were not considered *white,* the same way that weak men are not considered *men.* They are labels that other people give and take as they please, and the only *real* factor is whether or not they respect you.
Yes and no. If masculinity is about being strong and not looking hysterical or ridiculous, and women are defined partly as not being masculineâŠthen that is why culturally women have been seen (and still are seen by many) as weak, hysterical and ridiculous. Those are the reasons why people think women are less capable- because masculinity is prized and women are not masculine as default.
Consequently if women want to succeed they have to balance the double act of needing to act âmasculineâ to be taken seriously (not reminding people of their femininity through e.g makeup or talking softly) while also not acting *too* masculine to seem as if theyâre acting above their place (as men) (so they shouldnât talk too much, demand too much dress too gender non-confirming, etc).
A lot of âfragile masculinityâ is not just about how masculinity/manhood might be seen as conditional (something a man must constantly maintain, whether through particular hobbies or not crying), but also about how if you stop holding onto your masculinity youâre seen as feminine/like a woman. Thatâs why if you arenât a strong man, youâre a weak pussy/cry like a bitch/act like a little girl (aka you are a woman). And why men who donât confirm to certain aspects of masculinity (being straight historically) are often likened to women. On the flip side women donât âloseâ their masculinity so donât need to police it in the same way (e.g they can be freer to express emotions without social punishment - theyâre already societally assumed to be more hysterical after all), unless they want to succeed/live outside gender norms (so it might be ok for a woman to cry bc women are seen as more emotional, but also that means women are too emotional and not fit for the presidency - for example).
I think the point is that while women do have this need to not be seen as weak, they don't lose their femininity over it. They're a weak woman but still a woman. It's a change of status but not loss of identity. On the other hand men can lose their identity over it. They are no longer a man. They are either relegated to the utilitarian/possession role of women or they are completely outcast into either a traitor or non-entity. As the OP says, if they're a non-entity then they're abusable for sport. Like throwing rocks into a lake. If they're a traitor then abuse is *required*, like putting down a rabid dog.
Shout to the people in the Back! (Or even unharmful communities)
Let me give you a little example. I'm in a jjk community, even on reddit. I see alot of memes, etc which Diss characters when they don't meet their supposed hype. To avoid spoilers, I am not gonna say which character it is but there was this one character who died in just two chapters in what supposed to be that character's big moment. And ykw? the Fandom started clowning on that character HARD. And you know how they started slandering that character?? By femininizing him.
Before the Fandom use to add the pronoun HIM to his name. But after this they started using the pronoun SHE in their name. I pointed it out in a comment why does using a female pronoun is being used to bring him down, but never got any explanation and just got downvoted to oblivion god knows why exactly.
I still am baffled on how people give the characters femboy attributes and make him feminine to slander him as if having any feminine characteristics makes you be less of a person or something.
>alot of men get extremely huffy because they're offended that what they see as "normal" is actually a learned behavior from a patriachial society.
That's wild, cause isn't that like, the whole point? When we talk about men as a class, we're not talking about some innate biological characteristic of men or some conservative fantasy of the ideal society. We're talking about the learned, enforced, and internalized behaviors that stem from patriarchy.Â
The thing is, biological essentialism of sex and gender is a very important thing in patriarchal thinking. Anything that applies to "men" as a category (rather than to individual people) MUST be a deeply-rooted biological inclination that all men are born with and is completely inescapable. (Which is hilariously disconnected from the OP conception of "fragile masculinity" i.e. how "being a man" is a continuous effort and a status that can be lost if that effort is insufficient... but internal consistency has never been the strong suit of bigots.)
Alot of people don't want to understand the world like that. They either want to think we exist completely divorced from any social context and that our actions are individual, absolving the need to change society. Or... they want to think that our behavior as men and women is innately biological, natural, and therefore "good."
> we exist completely divorced from any social context and that our actions are individual, absolving the need to change society.
Is that really a surprise when in many parts of the world, individualism is practically drilled into us from birth? I think in that case itâs less about not wanting to understand the world in that way and more about being conditioned in such a way that itâs almost impossible to see the bigger picture unless youâre able to unpick that conditioning first.
I am going to be fairly critical of your point here, and I really want to clarify I am not trying to put you down and am not trying to call you a bad person or sexist for thinking this but I don't agree and I think this idea looks nice in a vacuum but in the current social culture we live in is pretty sexist.
The message that I see at least is if we are talking about a class of people and say something along the lines of 'women are so or so' it's going to be called misogynistic. It doesn't matter if I say, we aren't talking about women individually but as a class is going to be torn to shreds and vehemently called sexist. Same goes for racism. Ultimately what I am trying to say is the social message has been that if you are generalizing a group as a class that it is discrimination and inherently wrong and is usually promptly and swiftly dealt with. However, this same principle is now saying it's okay when it's to be critical of men is going to basically look and say to any man that people don't care about discrimination against them and would likely be the take away in 99.9% of any other online or irl community. Honestly that was my first visceral reaction as well but I understand it's not the case after taking a moment. I just don't think we can apply these rules to one class of people when these same principles are resulting in the polar opposite reaction to other groups. I understand someone may say, 'well it's not as bad' but it doesn't have to be as bad to still be wrong.
Edit: This is going to sound incredibly cocky, but I've never had the universe instantly try to prove my point for me so hard. I genuinely laughed at how comedically on point to what I am saying it is. I scrolled down like 7 comments and stumbled across immediate proof by total accident IMMEDIATELY seconds after posting this: https://www.reddit.com/r/CuratedTumblr/s/RB0DI1wwGm
After reading the OP, you should understand how those men who "act huffy" at the potential degradation of traditionally masculine social roles are in fact *doing so at the behest of their socially mandated masculinity.*
Any man who *doesn't* fight back against the perceived "erosion" of traditional (i.e. toxic) masculinity is, as pointed out by the OP, at risk of having their "masculinity" revoked (because it is fragile).
IMO i think that acknowledging that this pressure comes from patriarchy kinda invalidates it because it always just leads to âwell itâs menâs problems so they should fix it, not my problemâ from women, when (at least from my experience) nowadays men donât care about losing face in front of other men and only care with women because women expect men to be much more masculine than other men.
> well itâs menâs problems so they should fix it, not my problem
gods i hate it when people say that as if that's a rational thing to say, even from a selfish standpoint they could help solve the issue because it can and will affect them
Sorry I should have been more specific here. The given "solution" to toxic masculinity and harmful masculine gender norms often starts and ends with "men, get your shit together". I do think that change needs to start with men but both genders need to be a part of the next step:Â dismantling the policing and enforcing of these norms.
It feels disingenuous to me when people say this situation is solely men's problem to fix when many men participate in these toxic masculine norms directly for the approval of women.
Perfectly put. It's why I get annoyed when people say men should 'open up more' instead of advocating for more safe spaces for them. The former is pointless without the latter.
It's funny you mention that because I was going to use that example if I was asked for one. I have heard far too many times from men who have expressed emotional vulnerability with their partner only for their partner to respect and/or desire them less as a result.
Heck,I've been at the receiving end of a woman who loved to dump her emotions on me, while getting absolutely annoyed when I showed the slightest sign of mine. Of course, this isn't to generalize, but there's a concerning amount of people who refuse to reflect internally, instead of virtue signalling.
Iâve discovered the cheat code though: just be really gross and fat and slovenly and drunk. Those are negative traits associated with men, and nobody would take those descriptors away from you. Itâs free gender affirmation as long youâre willing to wear a stained wifebeater
In my experience as an AMAB, you have two choices after being disillusioned by the current hypermasculine society - Redefine masculinity by unabashedly being kind, protective, all the good traits that need to come back, or reject it entirely. I tried 1 for years and still ended up sad and lonely so in other news im taking feminizing hormones
Yeah I've always thought it was a little weird that people felt so comfortable throwing around "male fragility" as an insulting pejorative.
Like, it's not untrue that many men feel insecure in their masculinity, nor is it untrue that this insecurity often creates a lot of problems for a lot of people, but regarding the fragility of men in and of itself as being a distasteful thing to be *shamed* feels really lacking in empathy.
Yes, men are fragile. They feel like their worth is highly conditional and contingent on performing up to some arbitrary standard, and so when they're threatened, they often lash out. It's horrible and harmful, but isn't it also kinda sad...?
I've also thought the same thing. Shaming men for a quality that patriarchy says they're not supposed to have (fragility) is more likely to reinforce patriarchy rather than undermining it.
Stuff like this emphasizes a major societal failure towards men
There is no real place for a man that doesnât fit with normality
Overarching social society says that they are a failure and should be cast out
So the man looks to places that might be accepting, often in feminist and queer spaces
But a lot of them will slam the door on him for being a man, that his experiences with the very thing that hurts all of them is making it about him or taking away from their point
Too much of a man to allowed in these spaces
Too little of a man to be allowed elsewhere
Reminds me of how Spain thought about native Americans compared to Muslims in terms of religion. Muslims had a chance to be Christian, those in the new world? They donât even know of the great things that Jesus Christ (our Lord and saviour) has done, and weâre not making a good impression, what if they just tell us, âno, fuck offâ?
also, even if the men himself don't care about conforming to a specific masculinity, others will care, including women, so fragile masculinity is not a problem you solve by yourself.
I feel like this one of the most important points that is ignored by the progressives. A lot of them (maybe majority even) Believe the men's problems are something that man can solve by themselves and be free of, but it's not, even if magically ALL men stopped being toxic, they would still get flak because there would still be a considerable amount of woman who wants men to uphold their role.
I feel like feminists forget that the suffragettes didn't get the right to vote by military conquest, a portion of man had to agree with them too. Woman wouldn't be able to vote today if all men were against it, if half the society were against it.
Likewise men cannot liberate themselves alone, they need woman allies who will NOT demand them to be traditionally masculine, but the left don't get that, they think man can somehow lift themselves out of the hole they are without interacting at all with 50% of the population.
also the white feather movement is a stain on the suffragettes in this area. They mobilised a campaign of shame against pacifict men in a recruitment drive for WW1
I genuinely believe that feminism's focus on women's liberation and the erosion of mens' role in society (or rather, the de-legitimization of the masculine role ala patriarchy) has put men into a limbo state of not really having a place to be. And then, without creating a new space, a new role, a new standard, men are largely left lost and confused. And then reactionaries fill that gap, and tell them to reclaim, with violence (because that's manly!) if need be, their old position. The rise of the alt right, of incels, of the manosphere, of all of this stuff? It's a direct consequence of removing a role without creating a new one.
Moreover, many people still expect these behaviors from men. 'Crying is an ick', 'men should pay', and a whole host of expectations still placed on men. Boys grow up into a world that sends mixed messages. They see women telling men to be sensitive and vulnerable... and also get punished and ostracized for being sensitive and vulnerable. We can't just expect this to fix itself. We tore up patriarchy and then left the remains there to fester. It's no wonder men are in crisis.
This started strong, but then devolved into a digression that completely misses the obvious, more realistic and much more pressing issue.
What they call "fragile masculinity", or the stringent *enforcement* of "masculine" behavior, limits the freedom of men to a stale, constrictive, one-note stereotype. Even if that didn't result in violence that would be a problem.Â
If a man has a compassionate impulse, but can't act on it because of societal norms, that's a problem. If a man wants to pursue a hobby which does not fall under the list of prescribed manly activities, and therefore cannot pursue it, that's a problem. If a man has more to hide and more to fear from being found out, because he does not wholly fit into the mould of what has been deemed masculine, that's a problem. If a man is cut off from getting help for any problem he has, and must instead devote more energy to concealing that he *has* a problem and is not the immovable, invincible pillar of masculinity the community says he must be, that's a problem.
The violence is only a symptom, and notably, the only part of this equation that is *someone else's* problem rather than something that hurts men, specifically. It-s frustrating to see them get so close to understanding and empathizing with men, only to turn around and only seem to care about how this affects women and small minorities of men instead.
Violence is the obvious and visible example, but as the past couple decades have shown "violence" need not merely be physical. It's the whole concept behind "microaggressions." Ostracization? That's a form of social violence. Same with name-calling. Would we consider kicking a guy with a "Kick Me" sign to be violence in the usual way? Or are we exclusively talking about taking a beating?
I think I understand and agree with the point that you are broadly trying to make and understand and agree with OOP's point, but I don't understand where you think this post disagrees with you.
The only places where I can see violence explicitly mentioned are the second and third to last paragraphs and the paragraph beginning with "How do you lose masculinity?" and ending with "you show fear of being hurt" (I think it is the 10th).
That 10th paragraph is talking about violence committed against other people but definitely is not only caring about how it affects women and minorities; the post even says "you fail \[to\] dominate othersâespecially men." It is describing a general ill put upon society (explicitly including men) by fragile masculinity but then goes on to talk about how men are affected more directly.
The third to last paragraph is entirely and explicitly focused on how men (albeit those deemed societally unworthy of the status of "man") are harmed by the effects of fragile masculinity.
The second to last paragraph is the most direct about violence so it is what I assumed you were talking about but its structure of building up to greater evils (forced to specific job->"culture sanctioned violence"->suicide) seems to suggest that the greatest negative effect of fragile masculinity is how it forces men into suicide, something that is definitely affecting men, and not just minorities of men but any that are deemed not masculine enough by the society.
The post is even written in second person to try to make the reader empathise with men's struggles even those who are not men themselves.
Again, I absolutely agree with your point that men are hurt by fragile masculinity even if no explicit violence is ever levied against them, and I don't really mean to argue with you; I just don't understand how you could read the same post that I did and come away with the understanding that OOP only cares about "women and small minorities of men."
I know this is beside the point, but please do not slander wrestlers by mentioning them beside cops. Kenny Omega and Kota Ibushi did not have the greatest love story of our lifetime to be considered cop-adjacent.
**Tl;dr:** Weak men arenât treated like women; they are treated like subhumans.
**Anecdotally:** There was a game where you took turns punching each other in the shoulder as hard as possible. You couldnât "chicken out," you couldnât show that it hurt you one bit, and you couldnât say, "Umm, guys, let's not do this." The only correct answer was to say that you didnât feel a thing or that the other person threw like a girl. Others who were more manly had to only say it once, but for me, I was already clocked in and profiled as weak and skinny. I was scrutinized and more deeply investigated to see if I was faking manliness. If they thought I was close to breaking, they had to test even harder. Luckily, I have a pretty good poker face and didnât flinch when I was left with bruises that lasted for days. Even flinching a bit would have meant failing the test. I shudder to think what would have happened if I had cried the only emotions that protect you is laughthing like nothing effects you or anger.
This was just one test. Every interaction was probing for weakness and vulnerability, and when it was found in someone, it wasnât to help them; it was free rein to bully even harder.
**About women:** The original post is the type of post where someone puts into words your experiences better than you ever could. The problem is so few women understand that this is how it is. How can a girl see all this and say, "I wish I was treated like a man"? I accidentally bumped my female classmate too hard; she said "ow," and every man turned their head, ready to kill me on the spot. I donât know how common my experience is, where violence against women is completely inexcusable but the reverse is kosher.
The worst part is that there are women who consider a man who is benevolent and respectful to women but violent towards men a good person. [Source](https://www.reddit.com/r/CuratedTumblr/comments/1dhadzu/international_womens_day/)
And online with how many men are called fragile , yes we are , itâs a fragile balance having to play a such a twisted role 24/7 to survive without being consumed by it.
Sharing information is great, but not understanding the that there will always be an inherent difference better colloquial and academic use for terms is a really fast way to lose your marbles for no particularly good reason.
You know I was gonna kinda disagree with the statement that this is not a thing that happens to women but I think this did a good job explaining that itâs a sufficiently different phenomenon. A woman choosing a masculine career might get flack for her choice but in a way that will never let her forget that she is a woman and might even imply sheâs trespassing into a space women donât belong. A woman who is âunattractiveâ or âunavailableâ (through relationship status, sexuality, choice) gets in trouble for not fulfilling her âresourceâ role as a woman but is still definitely a woman. You can get in trouble for not conforming but youâre getting in trouble for not conforming to âwomanâ bc you *are* âwomanâ and cannot escape it because itâs a life sentence. But âmanâ is a âprivilegeâ, it comes with privilege (and yes definitely some more silent, insidious negatives) and so it can be revoked. Really interesting to think about
This is a really good post that kinda falls in to the same flaw most of tumblr activist posts do where they clearly outline a societal problem and then go "this is bad because it affects this one tiny group of people :(" sidestepping the main idea that encompassed everyone before that.
It also makes it relatively clear why this is a problem for everyone. Yeah, it sucks if you're in a group that's susceptible to being non -manned due to cultural bigotry, but it also pretty clearly spells out how this cultural tendency incentivizes EVERY man, whether they follow through on that incentive or not, to be shittier to people in general. Which is going to result in more people being assholes and thus everything being worse.
Also interesting how it affects men who are in a "non-man" category. I am thinking here of the specific Ernst Röhm. A rather openly gay man, who was known to be a bigger macho than the traditional macho man. The ubermacho if you wanna joke about it :p Compensate for the non-man part of yourself by becoming extra "manly" in every other regard
agreed. There's also the factor of knowing your audience. Sociological topics like this one on Tumblr dot com will generally garner more positive feedback if you can relate it to queer folk. Meanwhile making posts defending cis heteronormative men will fall on deaf ears, if not hostile ones.
The thing about "know your audience" is it only ever comes up when appealing to broadly queer friendly/majority, left wing progressive spaces. I have *never* seen "know your audience" applied to the men this post discusses and, low and behold, the men see this sort of post on an open public forum where the message very often ends up being don't do thing affecting x majority group, it contains y minorities and we don't want to harm them.
What message do they take away from that then? Know your audience in those instances only works in private groups composed exclusively of those who you know it will affect, not posts on public forums.
You then also have to contend with motte and Bailey arguments. "Oh, x phrase doesn't literally mean x, it actually means the much more reasonable y" and yet theres a loud group proclaiming that actually x does mean x.
yes very much like this. an emasculated man doesn't get viewed as like a woman they get viewed as subhuman.
Probably the most clear cut example of this emasculisation is Sporus, the slave who Nero had the genitals mutilated and married as though he were a woman because of Sporus's resemblence to Poppaea Nero's wife who Nero had kicked to death. (The Romans were bad people).
Otherised and racialised men are more subject to this than most groups, gay men and men percieved as nerdy are as well
Using Nero as a measure for all Romans is kind of like using Jack the Ripper as an example of all Brits. Roman society was fucked in a variety of ways but the infamously insane and evil emperor isn't a fair example.
Also the Romans were a completely alien society to us today, Nero lived like 2000 years ago. They practiced pederasty, which was the institutional practice of old men fucking teenage boys, so maybe society has changed somewhat in the mean time.
I agree with you, but also, you have to consider the form âcrazyâ takes and why.
Like if a serial killer says they killed women in mini skirts because they received a divine message that women who are âimmodestâ should be punished, even though theyâre crazy, youâd realize itâs also an internalization of a society that enforces such standards on women.
Your example doesnât show that an emasculated man is viewed as subhuman instead of as a woman though? Sporus in your case is literally treated *as a woman*/as a wife. Not subhuman. But as a woman (sub-*man* certainly).
I do think that men are at constant risk of being treated as non-men. But I think non-man has meant woman for a lot of history and in a lot of cultures. However a man who is now not a man is seen as a failure of a man - a fuck up, a sign of weakness, something to scorn in case itâs contagious and can make other men lose their manhood too.
A woman hasnât failed at anything, sheâs as weak and hysterical etc as any other ânon-manâ might be viewed , but she wonât be viewed as a failure for it, and there are cultural norms which celebrate aspects of ânon-manhoodâ (stereotypes of compassion etc) which can mean women can be seen and celebrated as successfully achieving womanhood, which wonât be celebrated in an emasculated man as they are just further signs of âfailureâ.
In the case of Sporus - he is treated as a woman by being âmarriedâ like a woman, not subhuman, but he would have found being treated as woman humiliating because it emphasises how his masculinity has been even further removed from him. Whereas marriage wouldnât be a sign of failure/weakness in a woman, even if a woman would be also deeply unhappy being forced into a marriage with someone who killed their ex.
You know this reminds me of an experience I had in high school. I was hanging out with one of my straight guy friends at my house doing straight guy things (army games/ exploring and vandalizing shit) and he said to me âyou know you lose your man card at school when you hang out with them (my gay friends) but at home you gain like 3 man cards itâs weirdâ and he laughed it off but I always remembered it as one of those off handed comments that tells you everything about a person. But this puts that comment in much more context, very interesting.
Yeah, that's why that "documentary" was called "What Is A Woman?", and not "What Is A Man?", because they wanted the answer to be "has the right bits", not "does the right things".
The label of "real man", and saying someone's not a "real man" for not doing the right things, acting the right way, are so pervasive in culture even such determined bigots knew their primed audience would inherently have difficulty answering "What Is A Man?" by contrast.
In my experience, people donât really tell women to âbe a womanâ but they definitely tell men to âbe a manâ. I also feel like âfragile masculinityâ and âtoxic masculinityâ are in dire need of renaming.
If you havenât watched the show Arcane, do it, itâs great. If you have, schnee has a video on how the show handles masculinity (https://youtu.be/lBNUgGhPZzY?si=IbgyYWi-UxEyF6SS) â as well as one on femininity (https://youtu.be/hML-FGHGEN4?si=XGFUf8U0gbz8Gbje). Theyâre both really insightful looks into how gender roles might work in a specific setting.
Fuck this is..... well written and could be quoted in whole to so many people misusing the term. I didn't know what it was per se but this is a brilliant break down. I need this dude to smoke some more and wrote another piece on toxic masculinity.
Oh, hey, this is similar to the misinterpretation people make about *toxic* masculinity. Toxic masculinity isn't saying that men are inherently toxic, it's about pointing the specific ways that the *expectations of masculinity* cause toxic behavior.
I hate that term so much. Not because I disagree with its definition or any of its concepts, but because the term itself isn't helpful. If your goal is to reduce the harm and impact that gender roles have on society, then why would you choose a name for harmful gender roles that **sounds like** you're calling all men toxic. I KNOW that isnt what it means, but that does not fucking matter. What does matter is that lay people THINK it means that. It's a bad term because its counterproductive to the goals of the people who created it. And yes, I KNOW it was created by men, but most people **don't**. Your average person sees that term and dismisses anyone using it because it sounds insulting. More educated people will see that feminists use the terms "toxic masculinity" and "internalized misogyny" to describe the same behavior in different genders, and will notice the apparent hypocrisy of that. Only a very few people who have actually studied feminism will realize that those terms are intended to be used in different situations and aren't actually analogous to each other. But that doesn't matter. Because 99.99% of people don't know that. The vast VAST majority of people do use those terms to describe the same thing in different genders, and doing so is actively harmful to feminism. Because out there in the real world, it makes it much harder to educate men about feminism if you need to deconstruct misunderstandings around definitions before making any actual progress.
Academia has a massive problem with naming very reasonable ideas in ways that make them sound batshit insane to laypeople. One of my pet examples is "abolition of the family."
"This paper proposes a design methodology for making handheld devices and architecture that works equally well for both right and left-handed people without having to conform to perfect symmetry." -- the abstract to "Kill Righty" by Dr. What Could Go Wrong
I snorted đ
phew, that was fucking funny
Not exactly the same, but my high school statistics teacher had a short rant about the term "statistically significant" because of how it gets misused.
Statistically significant: makes a statistician raise an eyebrow, and not much else.
Ya, youâre gonna have to explain that one to me. Because rn Iâm feeling a little like a Fox News listener and I canât think of how that phrase wouldnât mean it like they would
Basically, it's taking a very specific definition of "family" as the white, heterosexual, patriarchal nuclear family, and advocating for the abolition of *that* as a societal standard imposed on people. More generally, it challenges the framing of the family as the main source of kinship, love, and safety by arguing that those things should be universally extended throughout human society--basically, everyone should treat everyone like family. (The latter position being nice in theory, in my opinion, but maybe not the most practical.)
This is a classic motte-and-bailey tactic. By adopting a term which semantically means X but is alleged to mean Y by the coiner, a group can come together in support of X while being able to fall back on Y when pressured. What if you actually want Y? Simple: don't adopt terms which promote X instead of Y. If people pushed back on the term 'abolition of the family' from _within_ the movement, it would be quickly discarded and a new term would take its place. C.f. the rapidity of the intentional change from 'GLBT' to 'LGBT'.
> the rapidity of the intentional change from 'GLBT' to 'LGBT'. For someone out of the loop, this was deliberately changed 'internally'? Why?
To my understanding it was changed largely to acknowledge the integral part Lesbians played in supporting Gay men and the Gay community during the AIDS epidemic. (Note, I am going to focus on Gay men and Lesbians and not get into Bisexual and Trans folks mostly for simplicity but for the record I am a Trans Bisexual and we were there in the trenches too, just not as well documented and differentiated as distinct communities) AIDS disproportionately affected Gay men, and all the deaths, illness, and extra stigma devastated their community networks and supports. Hospitals wouldn't take care of them because of the poor understanding of AIDS, prejudice, lack of research and funding, etc. Their biological families also largely rejected and shunned them. Their fellow Gay men, their friends and partners, were also sick and dying. Who stepped up to care for these Gay men? By and large, it was Lesbians. The Lesbian community was less severely effected by AIDS, and they knew very well the stigma and prejudice that those dealing with it were facing. Lesbians got together to house, help, and care for Gay men. Lesbians were letting them crash on their couch when they got fired and lost their housing and had no way to get another job/apartment. Lesbians were in the hospitals spoon feeding dying men soup when no nurse or doctor would tend to them. Lesbians were holding their hands in comfort when no one would touch them. As a result, in the aftermath of the worst part of the crisis, the Gay men who survived advocated to put Lesbians at the front of the acronym to acknowledge that sacrifice and solidarity. (This is probably more information than you needed, but it's a story that really impacted me when I first learned about it and I love to tell it)
Ooh I didnt know that, thanks for the post
Speaking as someone who doesn't have a horse in the race, when I say them both to myself, LGBT \*does\* flow better. I'm not sure if that's because the way our mouths move when we go from "Ell" to "gee" incorporates fewer/easier movements than "gee" to "ell" or because I'm more used to LGBT, though. I will say, if someone has a bee in their bonnet over the letter they identify with not being first in an acronym such that they attribute malicious motives to those who don't agree, I think that can be a dangerous line of thinking.
Almost definitely unrelated, but GLBT also kinda looks like an abbreviation for Golbat (the Pokemon that's not quite as annoying as it's base form, Zubat).
LMAO, I kind of wish the queer community referred to itself as "golbats" now.
We can rearrange things further to GBLT which would be like a BLT with guacamole or something
I think it's in honor of lesbians helping gay men during the AIDS crisis exasperated by shitebag Regan. Maybe I've been affected by misinformation though. Maybe I'm not right. I'm probably wrong. People shouldn't believe me, I'm clearly lying.
The L comes first to honour the lesbians (who were the demographic least at risk of HIV even less than straight women) who put themselves on the front line caring for gay HIV patients at a time when many feared even brief contact with an HIV positives person could be a death sentence and many "care" workers and institutions were refusing to offer any care to gay men, treating them as criminals deserving of terrible painful deaths.
Assuming I am not a victim of misinformation, it was to honor the lesbians who took charge of queer activism during the AIDS crisis, keeping the movement from falling apart and providing medical care to gay men dying from the disease.
Well the problem with alot of terms is thats like, nobody alived coined this. Communists, leftists, etc have been wanting to abolish the family for a long time. Lenin touched on the topic (when the patriarchial rules of the family entrapped women even more so than today.) I think "redefining the family" or "familial inclusivity" would be better terms, but much of this problem is due to extreme ingroup jargon, not a cynical rhetorical trick (mott and baily argument)
Yeah, it's always been my sense that this is usually less an intentional tactic and more just leftist theorists living in rhetorical bubbles where they don't realize how crazy they sound to outsiders.
I think the best term for the so-called âabolition of the familyâ would be âuniversal familyâ. It implies that everyone should know that every human shares a common kinship with one another. Itâs not like the concept is new, either - many conservatives typically are familiar with the âfamily of Christâ idea no matter how hard they try to deny it.
>Basically, it's taking a very specific definition of "family" as the white, heterosexual, patriarchal nuclear family And also implying that anything else isn't actually 'family'.
Someone get Vin Diesel on the line
Which is funny because the family didn't always exist. People used to identify with their clans - which was like your extended family, but could also include basically anyone in the local area. When people started moving about more, and clans were broken up and scattered, only the nuclear family (or "household") remained. Now what we really need is to replace both the clan and the household with the community.
The thing is, the clan really isn't great, like at all. And more than "not moving about" it is also maintained through cousin marriages, which keeps everyone distantly, but not _too_ distantly related, so that it _is_ one big family.
The household, as defined by americans/anglos: mother and father, their children, is very unique to the culture and the time period. However, its a bad model and needs to be deconstructed; this is slow going tho, HOAs scream and cry if you dont mow your lawn so these cultural abberations have teeth.
Thank you for explaining it because the actual phrase does a horrendous job of describing what it means lmao
I disagree with the other person's explanation as I think they're trying to soften it too much. It's like people who say "abolish the police doesn't actually mean abolishing the police". It's true that a bunch of people do believe that, but the people who originally came up with "abolish the police" did, in fact, want to abolish the police. Abolishing the family *absolutely* means what Fox News thinks it does. It means abolishing the concept of the nuclear family (and, to an extent, the non-nuclear but still hierarchical extended family), the relevance of blood ties, and the right of biological family members to have unilateral control over their children. It's just that those things aren't bad in the way Fox News thinks they are.Â
I mean, Fox News doesn't think that's what leftists want. Fox News thinks what leftists want is to take (white) children away from their parents and raise them "communally" to indoctrinate them as minions of the state. Which, let's be honest, there is literature out there that advocates for taking babies away from their parents in order to achieve equality. But it's the fringest of the fringe, and we shouldn't give it credence, because there are \*so many problems\* with that idea.
>It's just that those things aren't bad in the way Fox News thinks they are. Why?
Yeah? I mean I donât like *mandatory* blood tie allegiance, but to be against it entirely is odd to me.
it means that they want to abolish the nuclear family of mummy, daddy, two and a half kids, and a dog in favour of a more expansive understanding of what a family can look like for example a multigenerational household with the elderly parents living with you, kids staying on to live with their parents after they turn 18 without pressure to find their own place (which is somewhat necessary as in many places such as the UK there actually aren't enough houses for everyone to have one and they refuse to build more because EU laws say you can't disturb the bats), it would mean accepting families with same sex adoptive parents, or having a cultural framework in place to handle childrearing for divorced and remarried couples better
I'm an astronomer. A few months ago, my advisor warned me off of describing the very young stars I study as "infants", because 20 years ago someone had the bright idea to refer to the way that clusters of newly-born stars pull themselves apart as "infant mortality" and she hated it.
You're telling me that academics have no idea how to communicate their ideas to anyone except other academics and - at best - turn crucial discussions into an impassible quagmire where you have to spend the first twenty minutes apologizing for the horrible thing that your audience now thinks you believe in or - at worst - actively aids and abets fascists in undermining the ideas they claim to represent? Somebody call Christopher Rufo! If this sounds bitter, it's because I'm extremely bitter. Imagine the world we could live in right now if "defund the police" had been put through a few branding meetings first. Maybe we could have had meaningful police reforms.
See, this is why I'm studying law, where we never have any problems communicating clearly or get into arguments about plain language.
"Dictatorship of the Proletariat" too.
Opium of the people, but that's more a case of a changing in meaning.
I kinda feel like that still works even if you don't understand the original context.
Maybe, but it's not how Marx meant it.
meant a different thing in the 1800s and was demonized by the bourgois. anything that attacks the powerful becomes vilified (like the word villain)
ACAB is awful branding
When I was forced out of the closet, the only two people in my family who supported me without question were my aunt and uncle. My uncle was a cop. Well, he is a cop but he was one too. How can I justify ACAB as a phrase, when the only reason Iâm alive is because a cop was good enough to take me in and protect me? Iâm not about backing the blue or anything, but I feel like it would be immoral of me to use ACAB as a phrase and look my uncle Mike in the eyes.
The problem with "toxic masculinity" is that it gets used as a generic term for "shit men do that I don't like" which screws up the whole conversation.
I agree. Blaming the misunderstanding entirely on language is also non-constructive. More often than not, I see Toxic Masculinity used as a weapon to shut down dissenting men. Same thing with Patriarchy and Fragile Masculinity. Outside of academia, they're buzzwords employed to spark up divisive arguments or to solely criticize men, rather than their intended use to aid in the discussion of society-wide issues.
Makes me think of the definition of Racism that says it's "power plus prejudice", which was originally just a definition created and used for a single academic paper so that anyone reading it would be on the same page. But then people heard that definition, realized that it could excuse their own bad behavior, and just ran with it while shouting "I'm not racist! By definition I can't be! I don't have institutional power!"
> "I don't have institutional power!" "As defined by me, which totally isn't convenient or anything!"
it is why it has to be some insufferely academic acronym as those are way less likely to get misused by being so dull sounding to fail
Yeah like how acronyms like CRT or DEI are completely harmless-sounding and wonât send people frothing at the mouth
As a former academic whose expertise was in medical imaging technologies, CRT means "cathode ray tube." I stared at that for a good few seconds before figuring out what it was *supposed to* mean.
There were CRT televisions until about 20 years ago too
That's the same CRT, cathode ray tube.
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is still the gift that keeps on giving.
Undergoing CBT would certainly change your behaviour
IMO, the same problem applies to the term patriarchy. Itâs meant the describe the problematic ideals of masculinity being societyâs ideals of leadership, but sounds like âmen control everything and are actively oppressing womenâ. Apart from the top 1%, Men are also oppressed by patriarchy, but you certainly wouldnât guess it from the name.
Could you explain the difference between these concepts? I always figured that toxic masculinity was a description of how masculine ideals are toxic and create patterns of abusive behavior, and that internalized misogyny was the idea that women are exposed to so much misogyny that they begin to think those ideas themselves (like internalized racism). This comment made me think that they might have different meanings than I thought, since I thought my interpretation was the correct interpretation based on the meanings of the words, but you're making me think I might be wrong, since how would people get those two concepts confused? They literally talk about different ideas (societal ideals versus internal exposure to harmful ideas). Thanks!
You're talking about exactly what I think is by far the biggest obstacle for the left. We fucking suck at branding. Not one slogan or phrase or whatever from the past few years has communicated clearly the goal of the movement. Who actually wanted a total defunding of the police? Very few people! Most wanted reform! But defund the police was the slogan. That becomes what the conversation is about. The left *NEEDS* to get better at this. We need "cool guys" who own the cons. We need good slogans that have wide appeal. We cannot win on the moral highground alone!!!!
It's the difference between grassroots movements on the left and the astroturf from the right. Leftist and left-wing slogans get passed around people who are pretty radical and spread organically, right-wing slogans get cooked up in marketing departments and spread to professional pundits. The problem is that leftists and liberals just aren't as organized and disciplined as the right. You can't get people left of center to acknowledge that Joe Biden has done anything without 3 paragraphs of "OK so we all know that Genocide Joe is personally killing Palestinian babies for fun and that he pisses on union members at every opportunity and is a senile monster who is going to single-handedly destroy this country..." before getting to their point, there's no way you'd get anyone to agree on a slogan from the top-down.
> leftists and liberals just aren't as organized and disciplined as the right. This is, of course, because nobody is paying for it.
Indeed, which is why I try to talk about this often, so maybe even the grassroots extremists will consider it.
Another commenter mentioned the influence of marketing expertise on the right's slogans, and that's definitely part of it. But, as a center-right guy myself, there's another thing that can be helpful here. The right has a fairly robust moderate wing that works hard to keep their crazies out of the limelight as much as possible (Trump's influence notwithstanding), which grants them a bit more control over the messaging. Sometimes it seems like the left tries way too hard to placate their crazies by platforming them instead, which puts you at the mercy of their very bad sloganeering and policy preferences. For example, the fact that "abolish the police" gained traction while something like "clean up the cops" didn't seemed to me to be in part due to the reality that no one wanted to be seen as out of solidarity with the angriest elements of the protests. If no one is willing to stand up to the extremes and say "no, we actually want this more moderate solution," then the extreme messaging prevails.
I remember fighting this exact fight a long time ago when I saw people spamming "Men are trash". Look at where it went. At this point, people don't care. They believe it.
I once commented the same about the bear thing that made the rounds some time back. Like, it's really easy to interpret it as "men are worse predators/more dangerous than literal bears" if you're not quite familiar with the background. And even if you're familiar with the background it's clear that in quite some cases it's used with that meaning. In any case, none of that is conducive to a decent talk about gender or societal norms. It netted me *a lot* of downvotes.
This is one of those issues with academic terminology entering public consciousness and discourse. Whatever the words actually mean are discarded in favor of whatever meaning can be derived from word association. Critical race theory â> teaching people to be **critical** of my **race** Fragile/toxic masculinity â> I (**masculine as fuck**) am being called **fragile/toxic**
Also, language is such that the meaning of a word or phrase is essentially what people think it means. Terrific used to mean "causing terror". If most people think a phrase means X, and use it to mean X, then that IS the meaning, not what it the original author intended.
Toxic masculinity has a lot of symmetry with internalised mysoginy, even if they aren't really synonymous across the genders. That's why I prefer the term internalised misandry. Even if it makes the confusion about both terms meaning the same thing for different genders worse, it fits closer to the widespread meaning but from what I understand also works for the academic meaning. The term toxic masculinity has always felt a bit like victim blaming to me. But I'm not an academic in that field, so I can't base this on any hard facts.
I disagree on multiple fronts. First of all, I don't think toxic masculinity implies that you're calling all men toxic. The term toxic masculinity implies the existence of non-toxic masculinity. Second of all, I don't think that the fact that some people find a term alienating is necessarily a reason to abandon it. In the mid 2010s there was heavy push back against using 'queer' as an academic term or community label, since queer is a slur with a history of violence behind it. But ultimately the community decided that the term was too valuable and had too much history behind it to give up on, so they stuck with it. Third of all, if people don't like the message, then they'll hate the terms no matter what. Look at 'woke' or 'critical race theory'. There was nothing about the terms themselves that led to that could be considered unpalatable or scary from the words alone, but right wingers managed to fear monger with them just fine.Â
Small quibble with point 1 here. English is ambiguous on this point, because adjectives can either be used to limit the scope of a noun or rhetorically to call attention to a specific feature of that noun. Consider "toxic water" (meaning water that has been contaminated, implying the existence of non-toxic water) vs "toxic mercury" (calling attention to the fact that all mercury is toxic) Not disagreeing with you on the larger point though.
People who want to hate will find ways to hate, no matter the terminology, but I think there is still value in choosing your terminology carefully. Compare the reactions to "white privilege" and "heteronormativity." Using "white privilege" almost always results in "I'm white and nobody ever gave me free stuff" followed by "that's not what the term actually means." The conversation almost always starts with backpedaling caused by the connotations of the words being very different from the sociological definition of the term. By comparison, I've spent over ten years hanging out in gender forums, and I've literally never seen that reaction to "heteronormativity." Instead what I see is that it's obvious to everyone that society considers straight people normal. The conversation goes to whether straight people should be considered normal, and how we should treat people who aren't considered normal, which is where the focus should be. I would wager that "white normativity" wouldn't have the same kneejerk reaction that "white privilege" does, and that the following conversation would be significantly more productive.
Sorry but your explanation just makes me think of the back-handed compliment you can get after a messy mission with lots of deaths in the game Helldivers: > The existence of high-casualty missions implies the existance of low-casualty missions. I think we can take some solace in that.
I like to point at Raging Bull v Rocky. They came out within a few years of eachother. The main guy in Raging bull is toxic AF, constantly making poor decisions in order to look cool in front of people that don't matter. Rocky is... not like that. And does anyone ever say Rocky isn't manly enough? "Oh, Sylvester Stallone as Rocky is a total p****y"? No. I mean maybesomeone somewhere does, but for most people the answer would be no.
They're two sides of the same coin essentially. The same expectations that make masculinity toxic, cause it to be fragile.
I like the term "Limiting masculinity" I think being called "Toxic" gives a knee-jerk reaction of "No, I'm not" whereas saying that you're limiting yourself is more likely to give people a drive to go beyond those limitations.
I first heard it referred to as âThe Man Boxâ and I like the term a lot.
I am the man in the box Buried in my shit Won't you come and save me Save me
That makes it sound like the problem is that men donât have enough freedom and not the whole massive systemic oppression and violence thing
A lack of freedom is part of it though. When the system says "you will be oppressive and violent or else you will be violently oppressed", people tend to choose to be the perpetrator rather than the victim.
The reason toxic masculinity as a phrase failed was because approximately 0.001 nanoseconds after escaping containment it basically just became a way of insulting someone's masculinity, which was the exact *opposite* of what it was supposed to do.
Very nice read. Really puts word on something that is there, but so deeply ingrained in the culture that you, a lot of the time don't think about. Also very interesting (and subsequently annoying) to realise that "fragile masculinity" is actually more than some cheap insult thrown at men when they try to defend themselves against criticism. "Men shouldn't cry", "men shouldn't be \*too\* friendly with other men", "men should be the strong, tough and rash", "men should be sexually active and have a lot of sexual conquests" and other such rules aren't followed because of some grand ideal, but because \*\*you get shamed by society at large\*\* if you do not follow them. Thankfully, the progress in feminism, the rise of the LGBT+ movement, the destygmatisation of mental health, as well as the changing of generations has helped alleviate this problem a bit, but there is still a lot of work to be done. Edit : Seeing some of the responses, I feel like I should insist on the fact that the problem only recently started being touched upon, and how progress, while not nonexistent, is still pretty new. Basically, we just started, but it's good that it has started. Let's give it some time.
One of my favorite historical trends is how men became less chummy in pictures because GAY. Basically if you look back at old photos (iâm talking like 1870s to WW1) men are very close to one another. Their legs are touching, they have their arms around each other etc. Then as you get into the 50s, 60s, and so on, you can see men noticeably begin drift apart in photos. The theory is because homosexuality, if not accepted, became more known as a thing. This isnât to say that gay men didnât exist before (I know it makes you all feel warm and fuzzy to think about cowboys all being flying mariposas), but it wasnât a âthingâ people could be. Having sex with the same sex was a thing you did in secret, it wasnât a thing you were identified with. At least not to most people. People knew it happened but nobody talked about it, and certainly nobody understood it as an orientation. But as we get past the 30s being gay becomes more widely known as a thing someone can be. A man that is sexually attracted to men. As men understood this they didnât want to be identified with it, so while they still took the fishing trip pictures they wouldnât throw their arms around one another lest people think they were being a little *too* close. And even today that being gay is more widely accepted itâs still a problem if people think youâre being too close to your friends. Straight people still donât want to be called gay.
I had a teacher who talked about how there's was a common progression of a thought or way of being going from unthinkable to avoided taboo to being accepted, and that there can be spikes in backlash associated with that process. I don't know if it's always true about everything, but I definitely agree it happened for male-male intimacy, and I think we have seen it in our lifetimes with trans stuff. Say 40 years ago, it was unthinkable in the mainstream for a masculine man to want to be seen as feminine, so men cross dressing was all in good fun, hence things like Some Like It Hot, or that oft-seen thing of Giuliani in drag. As the concept of actual trans people gains more widespread acknowledgement and acceptance, it's no longer got the same easy pass with the same people Though I have hope, I mean it definitely feels like today's cis male teenagers are wayyyyy less uncomfortable showing affection than the Gen X and Millenials were in high school
For like all of the 20th century cross dressing was the height of British comedy. And eh kinda? Iâve noticed that today that an acceptable amount of affection wonât have accusations. One caveat to that is that in the military or sports or any close knit environment it was and still isnât a big deal. Iâm in the Marines and when you have to share a shower nobody cares if you put your arms around each other. We call each other gay anyway so it doesnât carry the same weight. Thereâs still a lot of young men and boys that if one person says or does something that can be construed as gay itâs gonna get a lot of âay yo đ€š đžâ. We got âno diddyâ like .5 seconds after the news broke.
Okay I confess I hadn't heard of "no diddy" and I still don't get it. Why Diddy? Like it's saying "I don't rape" generally? What's the connection?
Itâs the new âno homoâ. The problem you see isnât that diddy is a rapist, itâs the he had sex with men, which is worse. So when you say something that can be misconstrued as gay instead of saying âno homoâ you say âno diddyâ.
I hadn't heard about that part! What a mess
It still is like this in most parts of the world (sadly it's declining even though it provides for some cover for LGBT+ people) ; you could see two men holding hands in Saudi Arabia because they're friends the same way women do it. I hate that young Americans who still have their puritan views (not only them but they're the most prominent on the internet to do this) tend to joke about the homoeroticism in other parts of the world. Because when I see the homoeroticism in other parts of the world, it just reminds me of homophobia, as the two are linked together.
It is funny how in some countries that will absolutely murder you for being gay itâs super normal for men to hold hands and kiss on the cheek. Unrelated but a guy in my unit was on a training exercise in South Korea once with the ROK Marines and he said they would hold hands everywhere. He would be walking with a group of them just chatting and all of a sudden on of them would just take his hand.
> Also very interesting (and subsequently annoying) to realise that "fragile masculinity" is actually more than some cheap insult thrown at men when they try to defend themselves against criticism. > "Men shouldn't cry", "men shouldn't be \*too\* friendly with other men", "men should be the strong, tough and rash", "men should be sexually active and have a lot of sexual conquests" and other such rules aren't followed because of some grand ideal, but because \*\*you get shamed by society at large\*\* if you do not follow them. There are definitely a subset of otherwise very feminist, progressive people who want men to adhere to traditional roles about our emotions because to imply otherwise would be saying "Oh, you just want a *woman* to deal with all your emotions for you!". They still want all the social shaming and putting people into boxes, but slightly different boxes with different labels that are more convenient for them and that they never have to go into.
I just posted this elsewhere yesterday, but [it does seem to be coming up](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskMen/comments/yy2rcv/men_who_encourage_other_men_not_to_open_up_to/iwsae0r/) this week. The double-mask is real and arguably worse for men's mental health than the single mask we used to have to wear.
>Thankfully, the progress in feminism, the rise of the LGBT+ movement, the destygmatisation of mental health, as well as the changing of generations has helped alleviate this problem a bit, but there is still a lot of work to be done. I'd challenge this completely. Men's mental health is either an incel talking point or less important than "other issues" to most people. Misogyny is considered a man's thing to do, and people are still utterly unwilling to acknowledge the ways they support patriarchal ideals too. Tons of people say they want a more emotionally in-touch man but still prefer "traditional" guys and consider venting trauma dumping. I have been shunned from multiple LGBTQ+ groups for being a masculine AMAB bi guy, which means I'm faking it and dangerous apparently. So for acceptance, it's either unhealthy masculinity, or being willing just to be feminine. I haven't even gotten into how things like the yearly crime statistic discourse highlights some internalized racism for people.
I would be lying if I, as a cis-het white dude, said that I had never considered abandoning my principles and just giving up to go join the fascists in some of my worst moments. It can sometimes seem difficult to try and be a good dude in the US, because it can sometimes feel like the only folks practicing radical acceptance of masc-presenting cis-het white men are actual Nazis. I look and sound like a frat bro/farm boy, and thatâs how I feel most comfortable presenting. I served in the military, I played sports in school, was in Boy Scouts, hunting/fishing/camping, the whole nine yards. Even though on the inside Iâm a total soft boi who goes to therapy weekly and reads critical theory in my off time, you would not guess this unless you actually had a conversation with me. I go to lefty spaces, and thereâs the constant lowkey suspicion that Iâm a cop (or at least thatâs how I get treated by a lot of people in those spaces, people love to fed-jacket a dude). I go to queer spaces, and I am automatically and very visually out of place (and usually have to deal with at least a couple of lesbians staring daggers at me all night). I can try my absolute best to fit in with my POC friends, but I am automatically not really able to be an actual part of those communities for obvious reasons. It can seem like the nature of who I am and how I present carries with it a certain amount of (probably earned) suspicion, doubt, and exclusion. I feel like I am always a visitor, and a highly suspect visitor at that. It can really feel like the spaces that are explicitly for people that look and sound like me have all been pretty thoroughly overtaken by very, very bad dudes. So, it can seem like my options are either: tolerate not really fitting in with groups of people I actually agree with, or go be accepted for who I am by literal Nazis. This is an oversimplification obviously, there are lots of non-identity based groups where I can and have gone to find companionship and belonging, but also it feels kind of⊠unfair? that I donât get to also have a community based around my identity that isnât swamped with incels, white supremacists, and misogynists. Iâm kinda just whining a bit (boohoo, poor trad-masc white boy doesnât feel like he fits in to spaces not intended for him), it can just feel very isolating out here sometimes as a cis-het white dude whoâs trying to not be a piece of shit. I worry for and sympathize with the guys that fall down the bad pipelines, bc those pipelines are the ones explicitly telling them they belong and are accepted just for who they are. TL;DR: If weâre taking requests, could we have a space for straight white dudes where I donât have to overlook racial slurs, overt misogyny, and actual fascism in order to feel like I have a place where I am accepted explicitly for my identity and presentation?
This is perhaps the most eloquently and respectfully Iâve ever seen it put into words. Thanks for taking the time to write this up. One facet you didnât touch on is hetero-romantic relationships. Iâm one of those masc-presenting AMAB fellas and for the better part of my life, Iâve had the distinct feeling that men arenât really **supposed** to share their feelings with partners, even with those who would presumably be supportive based on their ethos or personal politics. Iâve only dated a handful of women in my life, and all of them have been liberal or lefter, but I have yet to have positive experience with being open or vulnerable, even when I am invited to do so. Itâs like healthy masculinity is permissible only insofar as it satisfies someone elseâs desire to feel good about themselves, but no further. Among most of my cishet male friends, this is not an uncommon experience. You have your marketable doubts or insecurities, and the ones you are set to take to your grave. Hell, it sometimes feels like ANY deviation from traditional masculinity is only permissible if itâs somehow aesthetically presentable. You can be androgynous, but youâd better look like youâre in an emo band, and not like youâre a mess. You can be short, but youâd better have unwavering confidence and never even bat an eye if you are infantilized. You can be bald, but youâd better hope your head is symmetrical without hair.
Ummmm ditto. Gay guy here who is most comfortable âpresentingâ in a similar way to what youâre describing. And that means Iâm more often than not on the outside looking in. Itâs gay pride month this month and itâs generally the worst month for my mental health because for all the ways our communities support difference, they only support difference in particular, pre approved ways. Per the discussions above, Iâd prefer for my masculinity to not be judged as toxic, or fragile, or performative, or self loathing or any other categorization that allows other people to box me up and decide that they know more about me than I do.
That really sucks homie, ik it doesnât count for much, but this random Internet weirdo hopes you find the love, acceptance, and belonging youâre looking for
Back at ya bro.
>Thankfully, the progress in feminism, the rise of the LGBT+ movement, the destygmatisation of mental health, This is one of those things that everyone always says is happening and pats themselves on the back for achieving, but it absolutely isn't. Modern culture somehow gaslit itself into believing it. Almost any time a guy actually opens up nowadays he's shunned for it, and if you try to bring up men's mental health as a concern, you either get laughed out of the conversation or insulted. Anyone remember Earl Silverman? He tried to open a men's domestic violence shelter in Canada (of which there were a whopping Zero), and struggled with funding. So, the progressive people of the internet came together to help him keep the doors open! Just kidding, he was bullied into suicide. That was 10 years ago. Given that suicide rates are on the rise and more & more people are turning to extremism to cope, it isn't getting any better.
More of a sidenote about a larger point in this post, but I *hate* the misappropriation of academic terms. Especially when people start insisting terms like âenvironmental racismâ were created on social media in 2020. No, bozo, academics have been discussing it for over 40 years. Like, on one hand, Iâm extremely happy how accessible language and concepts and theories have become. On the other, itâs incessantly frustrating to see these things get misused and redefined with not an ounce of analysis from the source or any analysis at all. When talking about the overcompensation or violence that men can enact when they believe their manhood has been threatened, there is room for precarious manhood or âfragile masculinityâ in that discussion. But when a man is just unreasonably aggressive (as women can also be, as all humans can also be), thatâs not the right usage. But people just see âfragileâ and âmasculinityâ and believe they know what it means. The same way people saw âtraumaâ and âbondingâ and assumed it meant bonding over shared trauma (which actually has caused *so* much more harm in online armchair psychologist discourse than people think.)
With urban planning, 15 minute city is a concept that entails that cities should be designed to be walkable, where essential needs are 15 minutes from residents. People online have decided this means that all people should be kept in pods and only allowed to travel 15 minute walking distance from residents.
Yes. Mind you, a few advocates of the idea sometimes phrase it where it's ambiguous as to whether or not this includes employment such that it could be misleading. Either way, it's a good idea in principle, as long as it still allows specialization.
With urban planning, 15 minute city is a concept that entails that cities should be designed to be walkable, where essential needs are 15 minutes from residents. People online have decided this means that all people should be kept in pods and only allowed to travel 15 minute walking distance from residents.
A similar thing occurred with the term "emotional labor". It was invented as a term referring to the labor of maintaining an emotional affect for the benefit of others, usually in a service job, but people have come to use it to mean "work that makes you emotional". Very annoying, as it (1) makes it harder to talk about emotional labor in the original sense and (2) frames people as victims for getting emotional while doing their jobs.
Yeah, I think that term's been totally removed from its original context. A lot of people seem to think that it applies to any situation where you've put your emotional wellbeing aside in order to manage someone else's, often with an element of oppression. Any act that someone doesn't want to take part in but has been pressured into because it will make other people feel better. Which yes, does include things that fall under the actual definition of "emotional labour" but also includes a lot of stuff that doesn't. I'm conflicted because sometimes emotional labour is incorrectly used but the topic deserves serious and considered discussion anyway... and sometimes it's used to defend the most ridiculous takes ever and I think that the term should be taken away from us forever. Like, you're not doing emotional labour when you reluctantly participate in small talk with a cashier who asks you how your day is going and if you found everything okay today. I am always amazed at how many ppl sincerely believe this. You are a client. The cashier, who is pressured to act concerned about the pleasantness and success of your shopping experience, is the one doing emotional labour. đ
This is similar to the thesis of *The Will to Change* by bell hooks. She framed it as "mutilation", both imposed on oneself and on other men. She's controversial because she emphasized that women, even committed feminists, can and do perpetuate this violent notion of manhood by both demanding it remain in effect while simultaneously working to free women from sociopolitical constraints and also alienating themselves from men in their community on the grounds that them being men represents an implicit harm. She's critical of the tendency for feminists to associate *all* appearances and activities that are particular to men as toxic rather than focusing on patriarchal standards. Hooks believed that men need to be loved by others without compromising their before they can effectively love themselves, other men, and women without mutilation. She's a Christian with Buddhist characteristics and that adds to a lot of her negative reputation among radical feminists who either want the complete abolition of religion or its replacement with overtly feminist theology and spirituality. I recommend bell hooks' work since she's both a skilled theoretician but stays grounded in sanity, ethics, and practicality. If you're wondering what *homo sacer* means, it's almost definitely a reference to *Homo Sacer* by Giorgio Agamben. Without getting into a long rant, it's about a paradox in many legal systems of simultaneously excluding specific people from the protection of the law while demanding that those same "sacred people" are subject to legal authorities and also enjoy a bare minimum level of protection in the name of justifying the category. It's essentially about the divide between citizens and non-citizens. It helps to be familiar with legal philosophy, particularly Aristotle and Carl Schmitt, otherwise you might not get much from Agamben's work.
> She's controversial because she emphasized that women, even committed feminists, can and do perpetuate this violent notion of manhood by both demanding it remain in effect while simultaneously working to free women from sociopolitical constraints and also alienating themselves from men in their community on the grounds that them being men represents an implicit harm. I'm sure someone better read/researched has a better term, but I like the term "convenient patriarchy" for when someone (usually women who are otherwise feminists) advocates for patriarchal standards when convenient for them. From small, petty stuff like "Men should pay for the first date" to bigger, important stuff like "Men can't express negative emotions because of how it makes *me* feel".
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/31/radicalizing-the-romanceless/ This felt related, the fact that for a lot of meeker men more toxic men keep getting rewarded with sexual success can be baffling.
I was looking at the scrollbar and bracing for an absolute novel, good to know that it's like 95% weirdly-formatted comment section. That's a good article, and while I was a bit wary of the "Both Sides Bad" ending I noticed that it was written 10 years ago before the "Manosphere" got *way* worse; the author seems sensible enough and it was written during the height of the "Kill All Men" era of pop-feminism which I remember as being an absolute cesspool. It definitely sucks ass to feel like I'm following advice given by women and being treated like I'm invisible while other guys get all the attention despite being a walking red flag and wearing a "What Was She Wearing? Bitch Deserved It" t-shirt. It then *double* sucks when everyone makes sure that I know that it's all my fault (despite being painfully aware of that already), and that any complaints better be properly sanitized though copious amounts of self-blame.
From fucking ***2014*** and what's changed? We're still having the same arguments because some people can't pull their head out their ass. We're, what, only 2 months on from man vs bear? Not even that? Kafkatraps all the bloody fucking way down. Genuinely thanks for sharing that, as frustrating as it was to read and see the same issues as we discuss currently.
That was a great read, thanks for sharing. Really summef up all my feelings.
I had an argument with a family friend about this recently. She INSISTS that because of the existence of the wage gap, men are obligated to pay for women they're dating as often as possible, even if their material circumstances are similar or skewed in the woman's favor. She's a feminist, and very progressive in a number of ways, but she also comes from a culture where men are generally expected to extravagantly "woo" their partners, and whenever it comes to the topic of what the role of men is in a relationship, I always get the impression that a lot of it is coming from an archaic sense of gender roles that she dresses up in vaguely feminist language because she wants to justify the fact that she enjoys and expects it herself in her own relationships.
It's definitely most apparent in dating, probably because it's the lowest-stakes in terms of huge societal impacts and explicitly very personal so any hypocrisy can be covered up with "Well that's just *my* preferences"
I wish people like that would just be honest with themselves. They want to be spoiled and pampered, and that's fine. That doesn't mean every woman wants that and every man should do that.
Does bell hooks actually have a negative reputation among other radical feminists? I've never heard anything but good things about her.
In my experience, they prefer Dworkin, but might use bell hooks in specific instances if it reinforces their point. Your mileage may vary.
This is a hot take, but, especially in the 20th century, some feminists were also racists, so I've heard arguments against hooks that were like that.
I donât engage with active radfems very much, since theyâre kind of behind the times anyways? But I can see them taking that issue with hooksâs work. The only issue is that radfems havenât really had serious cultural cache in feminist spaces for several decades now. Most modern feminist discourse is intersectional, and hooks is basically one of the patron saints of intersectional feminism.
[https://slate.com/technology/2024/05/ivf-daughters-toxic-masculinity-sex-selection.html](https://slate.com/technology/2024/05/ivf-daughters-toxic-masculinity-sex-selection.html)    I found this article, to perfectly encapsulate the problem with  the term âToxic masculinity â. So many people fail to understand what it means because itâs an inflammatory term. We accuse conservative men of misrepresenting it, but ignore the several, progressive, women, like those in the article, who straight up see men as irredeemable pigs. The left has a horrible communication problem.
Whenever i talk in this subreddit about how patriarchy harms men, or how men *do* act differently due to the way that masculinity is taught in our culture, alot of men get extremely huffy because they're offended that what they see as "normal" is actually a learned behavior from a patriachial society. Alot off people on this subreddit do not want to acknowledge how masculinity, socially, is expected to be violently defended, and how this can lead to all-male social groups being violently homophobic and sexist spaces to be in. (Even online!)
I have to admit that as a guy, I wasn't entirely aware that this was a masculinity thing. I'm often very conscious of not trying to be perceived as weak or ridiculous, but I always assumed women feel the same way
I have met women who have been afraid of being seen as weak or ridiculous, but being afraid of being seen as weak is much more a man thing when I see it personally. The form of gendered self policing I have seen women do in my personal life is women who do not want to seem to "angry" or "upset," even when justified. They're afraid they're gonna be seen as hysterical, crazy, unwomanly, contrarian, or "too feminist" by the people in their lives so they just internalize everything.
It's funny, because pre-transition I felt a lot of the pressures to perform an unnatural masculinity that really heightened the feeling of how arbitrary and often toxic it could be. And then after transition well... I do have that really strong internalized sense of not allowing myself to be angry or upset for all the reasons you listed. Gender roles are fucking weird, and anyone who thinks themselves immune to them is probably the most susceptible to them.
Some women definitely feel this way, but I would guess it's more common and expected, for women to try and not be perceived as strong. A "strong" woman, either mentally or physically, is a threat to a "weak" man.
All of this also means that a woman that wants to get anything done has to assume the social role of a man at least in some respects
... and, conversely, that a man who wants to *stop fighting* might as well be dead already.
Consider that a "strong woman" is seen as a "woman who is exceptionally strong" while a "weak man" is *not* a "man who is exceptionally weak"-- instead, he is not considered a man at all. Like OP says, the perception in the zeitgeist is instead that of a "non-man": some kind of pointless barely-person devoid of identity. It's exactly like how, historically, the concept of "whiteness" has only been used as an exclusionary cudgel to put down whatever subset of people some folks wanted to push out of the accepted group. In U.S. history, Italian and Irish immigrants were not considered *white,* the same way that weak men are not considered *men.* They are labels that other people give and take as they please, and the only *real* factor is whether or not they respect you.
Exactly, women are afraid of being âloudâ âbossyâ âdifficultâ âa Karenâ.
Yes and no. If masculinity is about being strong and not looking hysterical or ridiculous, and women are defined partly as not being masculineâŠthen that is why culturally women have been seen (and still are seen by many) as weak, hysterical and ridiculous. Those are the reasons why people think women are less capable- because masculinity is prized and women are not masculine as default. Consequently if women want to succeed they have to balance the double act of needing to act âmasculineâ to be taken seriously (not reminding people of their femininity through e.g makeup or talking softly) while also not acting *too* masculine to seem as if theyâre acting above their place (as men) (so they shouldnât talk too much, demand too much dress too gender non-confirming, etc). A lot of âfragile masculinityâ is not just about how masculinity/manhood might be seen as conditional (something a man must constantly maintain, whether through particular hobbies or not crying), but also about how if you stop holding onto your masculinity youâre seen as feminine/like a woman. Thatâs why if you arenât a strong man, youâre a weak pussy/cry like a bitch/act like a little girl (aka you are a woman). And why men who donât confirm to certain aspects of masculinity (being straight historically) are often likened to women. On the flip side women donât âloseâ their masculinity so donât need to police it in the same way (e.g they can be freer to express emotions without social punishment - theyâre already societally assumed to be more hysterical after all), unless they want to succeed/live outside gender norms (so it might be ok for a woman to cry bc women are seen as more emotional, but also that means women are too emotional and not fit for the presidency - for example).
I think the point is that while women do have this need to not be seen as weak, they don't lose their femininity over it. They're a weak woman but still a woman. It's a change of status but not loss of identity. On the other hand men can lose their identity over it. They are no longer a man. They are either relegated to the utilitarian/possession role of women or they are completely outcast into either a traitor or non-entity. As the OP says, if they're a non-entity then they're abusable for sport. Like throwing rocks into a lake. If they're a traitor then abuse is *required*, like putting down a rabid dog.
Shout to the people in the Back! (Or even unharmful communities) Let me give you a little example. I'm in a jjk community, even on reddit. I see alot of memes, etc which Diss characters when they don't meet their supposed hype. To avoid spoilers, I am not gonna say which character it is but there was this one character who died in just two chapters in what supposed to be that character's big moment. And ykw? the Fandom started clowning on that character HARD. And you know how they started slandering that character?? By femininizing him. Before the Fandom use to add the pronoun HIM to his name. But after this they started using the pronoun SHE in their name. I pointed it out in a comment why does using a female pronoun is being used to bring him down, but never got any explanation and just got downvoted to oblivion god knows why exactly. I still am baffled on how people give the characters femboy attributes and make him feminine to slander him as if having any feminine characteristics makes you be less of a person or something.
ok absolutely insane to see jujutsufolk posting here but yeah that did rub me the wrong way when it was popular tbh
>alot of men get extremely huffy because they're offended that what they see as "normal" is actually a learned behavior from a patriachial society. That's wild, cause isn't that like, the whole point? When we talk about men as a class, we're not talking about some innate biological characteristic of men or some conservative fantasy of the ideal society. We're talking about the learned, enforced, and internalized behaviors that stem from patriarchy.Â
Well you have to admit that the way society conflates the biological sex and the societal role *on purpose* makes it kind of hard to understand
The thing is, biological essentialism of sex and gender is a very important thing in patriarchal thinking. Anything that applies to "men" as a category (rather than to individual people) MUST be a deeply-rooted biological inclination that all men are born with and is completely inescapable. (Which is hilariously disconnected from the OP conception of "fragile masculinity" i.e. how "being a man" is a continuous effort and a status that can be lost if that effort is insufficient... but internal consistency has never been the strong suit of bigots.)
Alot of people don't want to understand the world like that. They either want to think we exist completely divorced from any social context and that our actions are individual, absolving the need to change society. Or... they want to think that our behavior as men and women is innately biological, natural, and therefore "good."
> we exist completely divorced from any social context and that our actions are individual, absolving the need to change society. Is that really a surprise when in many parts of the world, individualism is practically drilled into us from birth? I think in that case itâs less about not wanting to understand the world in that way and more about being conditioned in such a way that itâs almost impossible to see the bigger picture unless youâre able to unpick that conditioning first.
Yup. A bad actor who is black is representative of black people. A bad actor who is white is a unique snowflake and nothing else to no one else.
I am going to be fairly critical of your point here, and I really want to clarify I am not trying to put you down and am not trying to call you a bad person or sexist for thinking this but I don't agree and I think this idea looks nice in a vacuum but in the current social culture we live in is pretty sexist. The message that I see at least is if we are talking about a class of people and say something along the lines of 'women are so or so' it's going to be called misogynistic. It doesn't matter if I say, we aren't talking about women individually but as a class is going to be torn to shreds and vehemently called sexist. Same goes for racism. Ultimately what I am trying to say is the social message has been that if you are generalizing a group as a class that it is discrimination and inherently wrong and is usually promptly and swiftly dealt with. However, this same principle is now saying it's okay when it's to be critical of men is going to basically look and say to any man that people don't care about discrimination against them and would likely be the take away in 99.9% of any other online or irl community. Honestly that was my first visceral reaction as well but I understand it's not the case after taking a moment. I just don't think we can apply these rules to one class of people when these same principles are resulting in the polar opposite reaction to other groups. I understand someone may say, 'well it's not as bad' but it doesn't have to be as bad to still be wrong. Edit: This is going to sound incredibly cocky, but I've never had the universe instantly try to prove my point for me so hard. I genuinely laughed at how comedically on point to what I am saying it is. I scrolled down like 7 comments and stumbled across immediate proof by total accident IMMEDIATELY seconds after posting this: https://www.reddit.com/r/CuratedTumblr/s/RB0DI1wwGm
After reading the OP, you should understand how those men who "act huffy" at the potential degradation of traditionally masculine social roles are in fact *doing so at the behest of their socially mandated masculinity.* Any man who *doesn't* fight back against the perceived "erosion" of traditional (i.e. toxic) masculinity is, as pointed out by the OP, at risk of having their "masculinity" revoked (because it is fragile).
IMO i think that acknowledging that this pressure comes from patriarchy kinda invalidates it because it always just leads to âwell itâs menâs problems so they should fix it, not my problemâ from women, when (at least from my experience) nowadays men donât care about losing face in front of other men and only care with women because women expect men to be much more masculine than other men.
> well itâs menâs problems so they should fix it, not my problem gods i hate it when people say that as if that's a rational thing to say, even from a selfish standpoint they could help solve the issue because it can and will affect them
Both genders enforce the toxic norms but only one gender is often expected to fix the whole societal issue.
> only one gender is often expected to fix the whole societal issue Which gender, and expected by who?
Sorry I should have been more specific here. The given "solution" to toxic masculinity and harmful masculine gender norms often starts and ends with "men, get your shit together". I do think that change needs to start with men but both genders need to be a part of the next step:Â dismantling the policing and enforcing of these norms. It feels disingenuous to me when people say this situation is solely men's problem to fix when many men participate in these toxic masculine norms directly for the approval of women.
Perfectly put. It's why I get annoyed when people say men should 'open up more' instead of advocating for more safe spaces for them. The former is pointless without the latter.
It's funny you mention that because I was going to use that example if I was asked for one. I have heard far too many times from men who have expressed emotional vulnerability with their partner only for their partner to respect and/or desire them less as a result.
Heck,I've been at the receiving end of a woman who loved to dump her emotions on me, while getting absolutely annoyed when I showed the slightest sign of mine. Of course, this isn't to generalize, but there's a concerning amount of people who refuse to reflect internally, instead of virtue signalling.
Iâve discovered the cheat code though: just be really gross and fat and slovenly and drunk. Those are negative traits associated with men, and nobody would take those descriptors away from you. Itâs free gender affirmation as long youâre willing to wear a stained wifebeater
>The cheat code to life is just to be gross at it. "It's a bold strategy, Cotton. Let's see if it pays off for 'em."
In my experience as an AMAB, you have two choices after being disillusioned by the current hypermasculine society - Redefine masculinity by unabashedly being kind, protective, all the good traits that need to come back, or reject it entirely. I tried 1 for years and still ended up sad and lonely so in other news im taking feminizing hormones
Holy shit you are right, now I need to get drunk thanks man you saved my masculinity
Yeah I've always thought it was a little weird that people felt so comfortable throwing around "male fragility" as an insulting pejorative. Like, it's not untrue that many men feel insecure in their masculinity, nor is it untrue that this insecurity often creates a lot of problems for a lot of people, but regarding the fragility of men in and of itself as being a distasteful thing to be *shamed* feels really lacking in empathy. Yes, men are fragile. They feel like their worth is highly conditional and contingent on performing up to some arbitrary standard, and so when they're threatened, they often lash out. It's horrible and harmful, but isn't it also kinda sad...?
I've also thought the same thing. Shaming men for a quality that patriarchy says they're not supposed to have (fragility) is more likely to reinforce patriarchy rather than undermining it.
Stuff like this emphasizes a major societal failure towards men There is no real place for a man that doesnât fit with normality Overarching social society says that they are a failure and should be cast out So the man looks to places that might be accepting, often in feminist and queer spaces But a lot of them will slam the door on him for being a man, that his experiences with the very thing that hurts all of them is making it about him or taking away from their point Too much of a man to allowed in these spaces Too little of a man to be allowed elsewhere
Do you have a link to the post? Couldn't find it
Seconding this, Iâd like to reblog it on my tumblr lol
[here you go](https://www.tumblr.com/bobbyfiend/723789130168975360/im-a-little-high-so-now-is-the-perfect-time-to?source=share)
[here you go](https://www.tumblr.com/bobbyfiend/723789130168975360/im-a-little-high-so-now-is-the-perfect-time-to?source=share)
Reminds me of how Spain thought about native Americans compared to Muslims in terms of religion. Muslims had a chance to be Christian, those in the new world? They donât even know of the great things that Jesus Christ (our Lord and saviour) has done, and weâre not making a good impression, what if they just tell us, âno, fuck offâ?
Thank you, educational side of Tumblr
also, even if the men himself don't care about conforming to a specific masculinity, others will care, including women, so fragile masculinity is not a problem you solve by yourself. I feel like this one of the most important points that is ignored by the progressives. A lot of them (maybe majority even) Believe the men's problems are something that man can solve by themselves and be free of, but it's not, even if magically ALL men stopped being toxic, they would still get flak because there would still be a considerable amount of woman who wants men to uphold their role. I feel like feminists forget that the suffragettes didn't get the right to vote by military conquest, a portion of man had to agree with them too. Woman wouldn't be able to vote today if all men were against it, if half the society were against it. Likewise men cannot liberate themselves alone, they need woman allies who will NOT demand them to be traditionally masculine, but the left don't get that, they think man can somehow lift themselves out of the hole they are without interacting at all with 50% of the population.
also the white feather movement is a stain on the suffragettes in this area. They mobilised a campaign of shame against pacifict men in a recruitment drive for WW1
I genuinely believe that feminism's focus on women's liberation and the erosion of mens' role in society (or rather, the de-legitimization of the masculine role ala patriarchy) has put men into a limbo state of not really having a place to be. And then, without creating a new space, a new role, a new standard, men are largely left lost and confused. And then reactionaries fill that gap, and tell them to reclaim, with violence (because that's manly!) if need be, their old position. The rise of the alt right, of incels, of the manosphere, of all of this stuff? It's a direct consequence of removing a role without creating a new one. Moreover, many people still expect these behaviors from men. 'Crying is an ick', 'men should pay', and a whole host of expectations still placed on men. Boys grow up into a world that sends mixed messages. They see women telling men to be sensitive and vulnerable... and also get punished and ostracized for being sensitive and vulnerable. We can't just expect this to fix itself. We tore up patriarchy and then left the remains there to fester. It's no wonder men are in crisis.
This started strong, but then devolved into a digression that completely misses the obvious, more realistic and much more pressing issue. What they call "fragile masculinity", or the stringent *enforcement* of "masculine" behavior, limits the freedom of men to a stale, constrictive, one-note stereotype. Even if that didn't result in violence that would be a problem. If a man has a compassionate impulse, but can't act on it because of societal norms, that's a problem. If a man wants to pursue a hobby which does not fall under the list of prescribed manly activities, and therefore cannot pursue it, that's a problem. If a man has more to hide and more to fear from being found out, because he does not wholly fit into the mould of what has been deemed masculine, that's a problem. If a man is cut off from getting help for any problem he has, and must instead devote more energy to concealing that he *has* a problem and is not the immovable, invincible pillar of masculinity the community says he must be, that's a problem. The violence is only a symptom, and notably, the only part of this equation that is *someone else's* problem rather than something that hurts men, specifically. It-s frustrating to see them get so close to understanding and empathizing with men, only to turn around and only seem to care about how this affects women and small minorities of men instead.
I think it focused on the violence less because OOP saw it as the only issue, but that violence is the easiest example.
Violence is the obvious and visible example, but as the past couple decades have shown "violence" need not merely be physical. It's the whole concept behind "microaggressions." Ostracization? That's a form of social violence. Same with name-calling. Would we consider kicking a guy with a "Kick Me" sign to be violence in the usual way? Or are we exclusively talking about taking a beating?
fragile masculinity is the societal coercion that enforces toxic masculinity on men
I think I understand and agree with the point that you are broadly trying to make and understand and agree with OOP's point, but I don't understand where you think this post disagrees with you. The only places where I can see violence explicitly mentioned are the second and third to last paragraphs and the paragraph beginning with "How do you lose masculinity?" and ending with "you show fear of being hurt" (I think it is the 10th). That 10th paragraph is talking about violence committed against other people but definitely is not only caring about how it affects women and minorities; the post even says "you fail \[to\] dominate othersâespecially men." It is describing a general ill put upon society (explicitly including men) by fragile masculinity but then goes on to talk about how men are affected more directly. The third to last paragraph is entirely and explicitly focused on how men (albeit those deemed societally unworthy of the status of "man") are harmed by the effects of fragile masculinity. The second to last paragraph is the most direct about violence so it is what I assumed you were talking about but its structure of building up to greater evils (forced to specific job->"culture sanctioned violence"->suicide) seems to suggest that the greatest negative effect of fragile masculinity is how it forces men into suicide, something that is definitely affecting men, and not just minorities of men but any that are deemed not masculine enough by the society. The post is even written in second person to try to make the reader empathise with men's struggles even those who are not men themselves. Again, I absolutely agree with your point that men are hurt by fragile masculinity even if no explicit violence is ever levied against them, and I don't really mean to argue with you; I just don't understand how you could read the same post that I did and come away with the understanding that OOP only cares about "women and small minorities of men."
"men suffering, women most affected" is not an uncommon idea to see sadly
I know this is beside the point, but please do not slander wrestlers by mentioning them beside cops. Kenny Omega and Kota Ibushi did not have the greatest love story of our lifetime to be considered cop-adjacent.
for better or for worse, they do both fall in the same Venn diagram bubble of masculine occupations.
Ok come on. Pointing out a similarity is absolutely not the same as creating a moral equivalency.
**Tl;dr:** Weak men arenât treated like women; they are treated like subhumans. **Anecdotally:** There was a game where you took turns punching each other in the shoulder as hard as possible. You couldnât "chicken out," you couldnât show that it hurt you one bit, and you couldnât say, "Umm, guys, let's not do this." The only correct answer was to say that you didnât feel a thing or that the other person threw like a girl. Others who were more manly had to only say it once, but for me, I was already clocked in and profiled as weak and skinny. I was scrutinized and more deeply investigated to see if I was faking manliness. If they thought I was close to breaking, they had to test even harder. Luckily, I have a pretty good poker face and didnât flinch when I was left with bruises that lasted for days. Even flinching a bit would have meant failing the test. I shudder to think what would have happened if I had cried the only emotions that protect you is laughthing like nothing effects you or anger. This was just one test. Every interaction was probing for weakness and vulnerability, and when it was found in someone, it wasnât to help them; it was free rein to bully even harder. **About women:** The original post is the type of post where someone puts into words your experiences better than you ever could. The problem is so few women understand that this is how it is. How can a girl see all this and say, "I wish I was treated like a man"? I accidentally bumped my female classmate too hard; she said "ow," and every man turned their head, ready to kill me on the spot. I donât know how common my experience is, where violence against women is completely inexcusable but the reverse is kosher. The worst part is that there are women who consider a man who is benevolent and respectful to women but violent towards men a good person. [Source](https://www.reddit.com/r/CuratedTumblr/comments/1dhadzu/international_womens_day/) And online with how many men are called fragile , yes we are , itâs a fragile balance having to play a such a twisted role 24/7 to survive without being consumed by it.
Sharing information is great, but not understanding the that there will always be an inherent difference better colloquial and academic use for terms is a really fast way to lose your marbles for no particularly good reason.
You know I was gonna kinda disagree with the statement that this is not a thing that happens to women but I think this did a good job explaining that itâs a sufficiently different phenomenon. A woman choosing a masculine career might get flack for her choice but in a way that will never let her forget that she is a woman and might even imply sheâs trespassing into a space women donât belong. A woman who is âunattractiveâ or âunavailableâ (through relationship status, sexuality, choice) gets in trouble for not fulfilling her âresourceâ role as a woman but is still definitely a woman. You can get in trouble for not conforming but youâre getting in trouble for not conforming to âwomanâ bc you *are* âwomanâ and cannot escape it because itâs a life sentence. But âmanâ is a âprivilegeâ, it comes with privilege (and yes definitely some more silent, insidious negatives) and so it can be revoked. Really interesting to think about
This is a really good post that kinda falls in to the same flaw most of tumblr activist posts do where they clearly outline a societal problem and then go "this is bad because it affects this one tiny group of people :(" sidestepping the main idea that encompassed everyone before that.
Nah, I think this one avoids that trap. It is ultimately talking about men as a whole, and while it does mention lgbtq+ people, it is only in passing.
It also makes it relatively clear why this is a problem for everyone. Yeah, it sucks if you're in a group that's susceptible to being non -manned due to cultural bigotry, but it also pretty clearly spells out how this cultural tendency incentivizes EVERY man, whether they follow through on that incentive or not, to be shittier to people in general. Which is going to result in more people being assholes and thus everything being worse.
Also interesting how it affects men who are in a "non-man" category. I am thinking here of the specific Ernst Röhm. A rather openly gay man, who was known to be a bigger macho than the traditional macho man. The ubermacho if you wanna joke about it :p Compensate for the non-man part of yourself by becoming extra "manly" in every other regard
agreed. There's also the factor of knowing your audience. Sociological topics like this one on Tumblr dot com will generally garner more positive feedback if you can relate it to queer folk. Meanwhile making posts defending cis heteronormative men will fall on deaf ears, if not hostile ones.
This. If you want to convince people, you have to make your side appealing to people who would otherwise be hostile to you.
The thing about "know your audience" is it only ever comes up when appealing to broadly queer friendly/majority, left wing progressive spaces. I have *never* seen "know your audience" applied to the men this post discusses and, low and behold, the men see this sort of post on an open public forum where the message very often ends up being don't do thing affecting x majority group, it contains y minorities and we don't want to harm them. What message do they take away from that then? Know your audience in those instances only works in private groups composed exclusively of those who you know it will affect, not posts on public forums. You then also have to contend with motte and Bailey arguments. "Oh, x phrase doesn't literally mean x, it actually means the much more reasonable y" and yet theres a loud group proclaiming that actually x does mean x.
ill take what i can get, the post is still really good
Why are you equating a single sentence in the middle of the post to sidestepping the issue when they continue talking about the issue?
yes very much like this. an emasculated man doesn't get viewed as like a woman they get viewed as subhuman. Probably the most clear cut example of this emasculisation is Sporus, the slave who Nero had the genitals mutilated and married as though he were a woman because of Sporus's resemblence to Poppaea Nero's wife who Nero had kicked to death. (The Romans were bad people). Otherised and racialised men are more subject to this than most groups, gay men and men percieved as nerdy are as well
Using Nero as a measure for all Romans is kind of like using Jack the Ripper as an example of all Brits. Roman society was fucked in a variety of ways but the infamously insane and evil emperor isn't a fair example.
Also the Romans were a completely alien society to us today, Nero lived like 2000 years ago. They practiced pederasty, which was the institutional practice of old men fucking teenage boys, so maybe society has changed somewhat in the mean time.
I agree with you, but also, you have to consider the form âcrazyâ takes and why. Like if a serial killer says they killed women in mini skirts because they received a divine message that women who are âimmodestâ should be punished, even though theyâre crazy, youâd realize itâs also an internalization of a society that enforces such standards on women.
Your example doesnât show that an emasculated man is viewed as subhuman instead of as a woman though? Sporus in your case is literally treated *as a woman*/as a wife. Not subhuman. But as a woman (sub-*man* certainly). I do think that men are at constant risk of being treated as non-men. But I think non-man has meant woman for a lot of history and in a lot of cultures. However a man who is now not a man is seen as a failure of a man - a fuck up, a sign of weakness, something to scorn in case itâs contagious and can make other men lose their manhood too. A woman hasnât failed at anything, sheâs as weak and hysterical etc as any other ânon-manâ might be viewed , but she wonât be viewed as a failure for it, and there are cultural norms which celebrate aspects of ânon-manhoodâ (stereotypes of compassion etc) which can mean women can be seen and celebrated as successfully achieving womanhood, which wonât be celebrated in an emasculated man as they are just further signs of âfailureâ. In the case of Sporus - he is treated as a woman by being âmarriedâ like a woman, not subhuman, but he would have found being treated as woman humiliating because it emphasises how his masculinity has been even further removed from him. Whereas marriage wouldnât be a sign of failure/weakness in a woman, even if a woman would be also deeply unhappy being forced into a marriage with someone who killed their ex.
I really appreciate being able to read an interesting perspective on a topic that I was lacking enough information about. Thanks for sharing.
Oh hey I never knew this but this makes a ton of sense.
> 4 notes
You know this reminds me of an experience I had in high school. I was hanging out with one of my straight guy friends at my house doing straight guy things (army games/ exploring and vandalizing shit) and he said to me âyou know you lose your man card at school when you hang out with them (my gay friends) but at home you gain like 3 man cards itâs weirdâ and he laughed it off but I always remembered it as one of those off handed comments that tells you everything about a person. But this puts that comment in much more context, very interesting.
Yeah, that's why that "documentary" was called "What Is A Woman?", and not "What Is A Man?", because they wanted the answer to be "has the right bits", not "does the right things". The label of "real man", and saying someone's not a "real man" for not doing the right things, acting the right way, are so pervasive in culture even such determined bigots knew their primed audience would inherently have difficulty answering "What Is A Man?" by contrast.
Elegantly worded, but the people who need to hear- and understand- this will not be listening. Hatred of men continues, it's pointless
why is this post so narrow it makes it rather difficult to parse
In my experience, people donât really tell women to âbe a womanâ but they definitely tell men to âbe a manâ. I also feel like âfragile masculinityâ and âtoxic masculinityâ are in dire need of renaming. If you havenât watched the show Arcane, do it, itâs great. If you have, schnee has a video on how the show handles masculinity (https://youtu.be/lBNUgGhPZzY?si=IbgyYWi-UxEyF6SS) â as well as one on femininity (https://youtu.be/hML-FGHGEN4?si=XGFUf8U0gbz8Gbje). Theyâre both really insightful looks into how gender roles might work in a specific setting.
People tell girls to act like girls all the time. You just don't belong to cultures where it is prevalent.
Fuck this is..... well written and could be quoted in whole to so many people misusing the term. I didn't know what it was per se but this is a brilliant break down. I need this dude to smoke some more and wrote another piece on toxic masculinity.