Senate Problems with perceptions of masculinity

I see this bandied about in the media but I've never really connected with it. For me, how to "be masculine" never came up as much of a distinct concept. I had lots of positive male role models including my father, uncles, grandfather, and some older community members. I have in some ways consciously and unconsciously shaped my behavior after a mix of these influences. But I haven't found anything in the lives of the most important ones that is just plainly no longer workable--or even controversial--in modern society. I notice that some depictions of males in the media have changed but those always seemed less real or important to me. For instance, the fact that whatever the lady's name is now more prominent on the He-Man cartoon than she was in the original doesn't really change my self-perception because I was never trying to wave around a giant barbarian sword.

Can someone shed some light on what they are feeling? What is this big sense of dislocation?

 

I mean .... Welcome Men of the last 20 years to what it's been like to be a woman for the last 10,000 I guess.

 

I think there is also an inconsistency within society as a whole about what a man should be, which doesn't help.

I've met plenty of women who expect more traditional man behaviour, I've also met plenty that don't want that.
Deciding which one you need to be at any one time is not easy, nor does it help anyone make a clear decision about what is the "right" way to behave.

 

Uh… no. It’s not the same, due to a number of different factors that you wouldn’t be sensitive to even if you understood.

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@Jabba-wocky

I’ll speak from personal experience, since you did. I had no male role models. I was raised by my mother. There are things that my mother would say like “a man is the head of the household and grounds the house.” Men had to be strong, mentally and physically. I had no reference for these.

Then, in the late 2000s, I was told by feminism and society as a whole that not only was that not what women needed, it was something that a woman could do for herself and when a woman did it, it was something to be praised and celebrated, but when a man did it it could be seen as oppressive and toxic. When I first became a progressive feminist, I was very much in agreement with this approach; I thought traditional gender roles were ridiculous and archaic.

It wasn’t until a few years ago that I discarded this thinking and realized, through my own personal growth, that I had to pursue whatever worked for me and my family. My family prospers when I am strong; My role is the protector and provider.

And before someone says “well no one said you can’t do what works for you!!” - when I have expressed this is how my household and family dynamic functions in this thread, I was told that my wife could do as good of a job as I’m doing and that there was nothing unique about my performance as a man as a parent.

So, without a very meticulous internal and personal construction of my masculinity without the noise from society telling me about toxic masculinity and what I shouldn’t be, I would be a very different, less successful, and likely more harmful person.

 

This was part of the podcast. I think this video essentially boils down to “positive masculinity is just being yourself… as long as it’s not these things” which isn’t novel in the discourse.

It’s a roadmap that is essentially universal to both men and women. Not specifically about masculinity. I think itd be a great video for a kid below the age of 10, but having been an adult for a while now, it just comes off as “just be a good person who views things this way and you’ll be a great man.”

 

"Don't be a jerk" is pretty easy life advice.
Though a surprising number of people still don't follow it

 

To give Peterson some credit, he has at least always been openly emotional which is something many men are told they should not be doing.

 

Who the **** said anything about Tate or Peterson?

I’m not going to rehash the conversation from a few months ago with you. I’m going to reiterate what I said earlier: there may be no roadmap going forward, men will have to do some internal work to discover what their own masculinity looks like and how to live in harmony with the world around them.

 

Oh I see is this your "being a man means being condescending to women" part of your message?

You're right, it's not quite the same.. because women still have way less societal power than men, and you're losing it just because men have *slightly* less power in the last 20 years than they used to.

Honestly what it takes to be a good man is the same things it takes to be a good woman or nonbinary person... The nonsense about men needing to be XYZ that you keep propagating here are the reasons for your own insecurities. There are certainly women who subscribe to toxic masculinity, but given that those women are not the power structure, their push still ultimately comes from the toxic men in power. Yet you inevitably find ways to blame all women for it, over and over. Us mean women don't want you to be toxic or a misogynist. How horrible.


Edit: Dude there's no roadmap for being a human, period. You're just describing the process of being an adult.

 

That was…. A lot of responding to things I didn’t say.lol.

So… I’m going to just let you keep responding to…. Whoever champ.

 

Lol ok more condescension. You do you. Keep telling men here they need "aggression" to be men.

 

Trying to learn something only by theory without a real example is incredibly hard. I see your point and can imagine my journey would have been much more difficult if not for the constant, easy access to men I’ve had throughout my life.

Mamas for roadmaps in general, I’ve said this about race as well. Society has defined expectations that will inform how people react to you. A person can be as typical or controversial as they want, but they deserve the ability to make that choice consciously. You can learn what conceptions of gender are without endorsing them, and that has some value. Especially if someone couldn’t pickup ideas about how to navigate these challenges from a father figure, it’s totally fair to ask for some clarity about how to do so. In the same way, a Black kid adopted by a white family might have more struggles figuring out what their race means to them as opposed to one raised in a black family.

It’s a skill to “read the room” and a challenge to be received the way you want to. Part of figuring that out is knowing how other people see you.

 

I thought this was a good video to post for a number of reasons but primarily due to one of the quotes at the beginning:

“Two instruments playing the same note will sound quite different.”

The creator is saying that masculinity and femininity aren’t the same, but can exhibit the same virtues. Thought he put it better than I could.

 

The thing with MOTU:R was that it came out on the heels of the ST, which killed off Luke and replaced him with Rey, "a Mary Sue of epic proportions". They jumped to conclusions as fans often do, and believed the same thing was happening again. It was made worse by the fact that Teela's hair cut has become the subject of scorn with modern feminism and the implied lesbianism applied to the character.

Really, though, it was fans who were gatekeeping because they wanted to be the arbitrators of their favorite franchise. But most people who were upset were millennials who grew up after the fact. People like me, who actually grew up with the franchise in the 80's, weren't fussed about it.

 

I’ll have to listen to all of it at a later date but from what I’m hearing in the first 5-10 minutes, I’m finding pleasantly surprising:

-the fact the left is owning up to having basically ignored issues with men
-the subtle half-explanation of why the wage gap is misleading
-the very surprising (somewhat capitalistic) understanding/acknowledgement that simply paying women more didn’t solve all of the problems it was supposed to solve

Seems dope.

 

Don't worry. I'm certain a different but equally pungent line of bullcrap will be issued in defence of that inequality.

 

Eh… there are actual reasons that don’t all have to do with discrimination or enforced inequality.

The popular myth (or rather misunderstanding) of the gender pay gap for instance states that women make less simply because they are women, as if to exclude the agency of said women and the choices they want to make. So if a woman chooses to be a schoolteacher, because she wants to teach children and that, by effect, means she makes less money, it should be noted that no one forced her to make that decision.

It also presupposes that people make all of their career choices directly because of money and no other factors.

So, and I’d have to do more research into it specifically, but when I hear that white women make more than black men, I’d probably include other factors in addition to race (education, economic background, types of jobs available, etc) before making a determination.