Senate Problems with perceptions of masculinity

I think your're onto something there, FID . . . traditionally, the role of an adult man is to provide for himself and his family. He does this by doing something necessary that society values, and they compensate him correspondingly. Now, though, a large proportion of jobs involve doing dubiously necessary things, such as being a cashier at Wal-Mart, ringing up purchases nobody really needs, unless of course the customers choose the U-scan instead of you. This kind of work pays about as well as you'd expect. If you don't feel needed, and your most exhausting efforts still leave you in poverty, you're going to feel like **** even under the best of circumstances. If your whole identity is tied up in notions of career and earning a good living, then you're going to feel even worse.

Guys find themselves in the position of having their traditional roles usurped not only by women, who now can do pretty much anything they can do, but by machines, who can also now do pretty much anything they can do. It's a lousy position to find yourself in.

I'm not really sure what we can do about this, particularly as the rise of working machines strikes at the root of what it means to be human, not just what it means to be a man. I suppose Fuller might be right that we should all undertake study for its own sake. I have a hard time imagining that most people would feel satisfied by a future filled with nothing but Esperanto classes and tennis lessons, though. People need to feel necessary.

 

Double post

 

Tell your friend that he still needs to give it all he's got. It's not about his boss, it's about who and what he himself is. When the opportunity arises to get out of that dead-end job, he needs to be ready, to have developed a solid 100% work ethic, so that he'll be the kind of person who is ready to succeed, and not the one who sits around, doing the bare minimum, wondering why he can't get out of his rut. Success rarely comes without effort, and he has to be in the habit of putting in the effort. If he's in the habit of half-assing things, he won't be ready when opportunity knocks.

 

Vsauce2 had a great video about this problem. Essentially, automation may help us to be more human. We do need to re-frame what it means to be a man these days besides work, do macho idiocy, and bang women. Though I doubt any man ever really lived up to such standards outside of movies. Still, it is in our cultural consciousness that this is how men are or should be. Namely as I said and as the poll said: peer pressure. Hopefully that's going to change eventually. I'm not talking about 'toxic masculinity' so much as just in general. We need to see ourselves differently as a gender...to show that we can do more and be more. To not be a stereotype.

 

It is not healthy to go through life without trusting. To do so is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, the cell of SELF! We all have learned how to distrust early on in life. It might have been a parent who over-promised and under-delivered, or a business partner who did you dirty. Trust can become the casualty of life's battles. But without trust, life becomes only about you, and that is not good. Ponder these words of Solomon this morning: "Trust in the LORD with all your heart; do not depend on your own understanding. Seek his will in all you do, and he will show you which path to take" (Proverbs 3:5-6). Totally trusting God is the first step to finding the courage and strength to trust others. Brothers, we really do need each other!
Steve Sabol
Knights of the 21st Century

 

That looks really cool, Merk! I'll have to check it out.

 

I like this one a lot, and I think it's something that "manly men" tend to forget.

One day I was relaxing on the beach, staring out at the ocean, and thinking about some of the ministry challenges and deadlines that were awaiting me when I returned home from vacation. I was also reading from one of three books I intended to intellectually devour that week; books that were filled with wisdom, that stretched my thinking and challenged my life. Just then I became visually "distracted" by a beautiful little girl who appeared to be about 5 or 6 years old. She seemed to view everything with eyes of awe and wonder. Her task that day was to move the entire beach from point "A" to point "B" using only a little plastic shovel and tiny bucket. I was not about to spoil her fun by telling her it can't be done. But it was also then that I vowed, "I will seek the wisdom of the ages, but look at the world through the eyes of a child." (See Matthew 19:14). Never lose your sense of wonder. Don't be childish, but stay childlike.
Steve Sabol
Knights of the 21st Century

 

^good advice for all genders, I'd say!

A couple of potentially interesting finds to share today:

"Boys to Men: Teaching and Learning About Masculinity in an Age of Change" (April 2018, from the New York Times; seems to be part of an ongoing series for educators)

and a scholarly article from 2013 (from the Canadian Journal of Counselling and Psychotherapy)

"Conceptualiziing Masculinity in Female-to-Male Trans-Identified Individuals: A Qualitative Inquiry" (there is a link to download the full pdf of the article from this page, which appears to be the only way to access the full text)

(the article is of course a longer, denser read since it is academic writing, but I'm about 1/2 way through it and finding it pretty accessible)

 

What does this mean? That even if a trans man plays a convincing Princess Peach, there's a masculinized version of himself that acts a "residual self image" in his mind?

 

I think what they're getting at is that trans men feel like guys no matter whether they've taken hormones and had surgeries or not. As for the "stable and enduring" thing, yes, trans guys, like cis guys, feel male even if they're in a dress pretending to be Princess Peach.

@Pensivia -- I read the "Conceptualizing Masculinity" article. It had a lot of good information in it, although I can't say there was much there I didn't know. Of course, I've talked to a lot more than 6 trans guys, and then there's the fact that I am one 24/7. I was hoping that the article would put forward some theories on what gender identity springs from, since it (correctly) states that it doesn't come from genitalia, a desire to perform a particular sex role, or what society tells people they should be. Unfortunately, the article didn't speculate on this. Still, elimination of incorrect assumptions narrows down the search for the correct ones. It's cool that people are studying trans men at all. Trans people are often left out of conversations on gender, and even when they're included, the focus is often on trans women. Thanks for posting the link!

@Jedi Merkurian -- That YouTube series is awesome! I watched the first two episodes and part of the third, and it has some really, really good stuff. Also, in episode 3 they bring in a trans guy--who they do not explicitly label as "OUR TOKEN TRANS GUY"--which is terrific. It's given me quite a lot to think about. I particularly appreciate the implication that my input on the subject of what it means to be a man is valid, even though I've never been gender-policed into a male role. (Well, almost never. You do occasionally find people who want to tell you you're "not trans enough," but they're morons.)

I spent some time thinking about the question one of the presenters put forward: "What did your dad teach you about being a man?" For me, this is probably best illustrated by a story . . . my preschool was ruled by two five-year-old girls. They were older and bigger than everybody else, and their word was law. Think "Angelica" from Rug Rats, only worse, because there were two of them. Both of them took a strong dislike to me on sight, and as a result, my play options were rather limited. The particular bailiwick of Angelicas I and II was the play kitchen, which is where all the kids currently in their favor went to play house. The Angelicas knew they couldn't get away with openly driving me away, so they resorted to psychological warfare. "You can play," they told me, "But you have to be the dad. Now go to work!" So I did what I figured dads did, which was trudge over to the play office area, which nobody ever used, ever. The "office" had a desk with a drawer in it. In the drawer was a necktie and a grass skirt. I put on the necktie, because dads wore neckties, and I put on the grass skirt, because apparently I had a very interesting job. Then I sat at the desk and pretended to talk on the phone. I did this for about 35 seconds and then gave up, because just like real office jobs, it was soul-crushing. Then I trudged back to the kitchen and said, "Hi honey, I'm home!" My darling wives greeted me with, "No you're not! Go back to work!" This cycle repeated itself 3 or 4 times until I wandered off, dejected, because my "dad" reperatore had been exhausted.

There were reasons why I had no idea what dads did all day. When I was little, my father worked insane hours trying to start a legal career. Sometimes days went by when he went to work before I got up and came home after I was in bed. He's since expressed regret that he wasn't home more, but at the time, he was doing what he felt he needed to do. It's hard to say how much this impacted me, as a small person who was already gravitating toward the male world, whatever that world was about. I can't really say I experienced my dad's absence as a loss, because in order to feel that you've lost something, you have to have had it at some point. Rather, I became fixated on the type of young superhero who was still learning how to be a superhero: Batman's Robin, ANH's Luke, Kimba the orphaned cub King of the Jungle. (Do lions even live in the jungle? I don't think they do. Betrayed by the mainstream media. Again.) All these characters did awesome stuff like fighting villains and running around deliciously unsupervised. But their particular pathos was that they were fatherless boys, struggling to grow up to become cool without quite knowing what they were doing. That really resonated with me, and is probably the reason I preferred Robin to Batman, Luke to Han, and Johnny Sokko to his flying robot.

And really, that feeling never went away. As I got older, I tried attaching myself to various male authority figures, who either wanted little to do with me, or wanted to sleep with me. For obvious reasons, this made me miserable. To this day I remain mystified by why my brain definitely tells me I'm a guy, since I don't really even know what "a guy" is. I really assumed this was just me, an artifact of a development process that didn't go quite as expected. However, what I'm getting as I study the subject is that lots of guys don't have any clue what it means to be a man, other than "dads go to work, and uhhh . . . yeah." I was never punched in the face and called a ****** for acting insufficiently masculine, but apparently that treatment is not as informative as I may have assumed.

I'm really looking forward to watching the rest of that YouTube show, Merk. If nothing else, it's normalizing my complete bafflement, and that's surprisingly validating.

 

Nope, we're just supposed to..... somehow.... know. Even though, no one ever said anything about it.

 

I find that amazing, because I was explicitly, and exhaustively, taught how to be a girl. Not that the information was all that useful most of the time. I was a small kid in the mid-to-late 70's, when it wasn't unusual to hear, "Girls can do anything! Why, you could be president some day!" thirty minutes before, "This is how you iron a man's shirt." (Presumably I'll be ironing between foreign and domestic policy meetings, then?) If I listed all the "helpful hints" I got from adults, peers, and the media about how to live a better version of my life, I'd still be typing tomorrow. And don't even get me started about how people expressly tell women how to look. I just entered "eyebrow threading" into Google, and got 1,700,000 hits. There are close to 2 million people out there, or more than the total population of New Hampshire, who all have public opinions about what women are supposed to do with their eyebrows.

I don't want to get into a "whose life is worse" pissing contest--I'm just bewildered that a world obsessed with policing even what expression women have on their faces ("Smile, pretty lady!") somehow can't manage to give its boys enough direction to keep them from feeling abandoned and lost. What the hell.

@Pensivia -- I broke my "never read the comments" rule when I read "The Boys Are Not All Right," and of course now I wish I hadn't. It's mostly people responding to arguments they're hearing in their own heads about gender equality and who has the most miserable life. I don't think one reply in 10 really addressed any of the points the author made. I feel blessed that so far this thread hasn't gone off the rails. Thank you, everyone, for your thoughtful and intelligent replies.

 

I just watched the first two eps of the series @Jedi Merkurian posted and I found it really interesting. Now I want to get my husband to watch it and then discuss it with me. I'll just leave it there because I already feel like I've been "talking" too much in this thread when the focus should be more on the thoughts and input of male posters, but I will say that as someone who grew up in an all-female household, it was sort of fascinating to have that feeling of "eavesdropping" on male-to-male conversations.

 

@Pensivia -- Eh, lots of guys post in the Feminism thread. You're certainly welcome to post here. I also found it interesting to "eavesdrop" on a bunch of (presumably) cis guys, plus one trans guy. The style of conversation in the videos weren't much different from the kind we have in my FTM support groups, or, for that matter, the women's-group conversations I've been part of. People are people, after all.

I was surprised when I figured out that the guys in the group conversations didn't actually know each other that well, and that some apparently hadn't met before. It takes a lot of guts to be that open when you're around strangers or near-strangers, especially with a camera rolling. Mad props to them.

 

Must be your patriarchal conditioning talking. And/or comparatively low levels of testosterone.

I must meditate on this. not really

Edit: Not sure who to tag, but I thought of a question for the males out there who aim to be manly.

How many times has a female teased you for not smiling enough? You know what I mean. You want to be all grimdark and serious to get that mysterious vibe going on, and then along comes a girl who wants to see if you're capable of more emotional range.

 

Not sure about "aim to be manly", as someone who was taught to be chivalrous 3 centuries past the expiration date, and doesn't really relate to modern standards of "manliness" or understand them ( ), but yes, being teased over not smiling enough has happened on its fair share of occasions - I pull grimdark and serious rather well.

Spoiler alert - when a woman who's teased me in that direction finds out there is quite the emotional torment raging behind the grim facade, 19 times out of 20, their interest in going anywhere fades. My personal experience in that respect is that there isn't actually a real expectation of the male having the more complex emotional range and, ironically, this also regularly results in a lecture about "manning it up".

 

Well, I can't argue with the last line of this one.

There is no such thing as an unimportant day. It's Monday. It's back to work. Blah, blah, blah. I think it is a tragedy and possibly even dangerous to look at any given day as inconsequential. They all matter. They all count. Each day holds the power of life and death in its hands. What we receive from our days is determined by the choices we make in those days. Today is the day to do at least one thing that can help you become a better man. Do it and you will not be disappointed. Don't do it and you will miss an opportunity that can never be reclaimed. Let's determine to heed the wise counsel of the apostle Paul today, "Make the most of your opportunities because these are evil days" (Ephesians 5:16).
Steve Sabol
Knights of the 21st Century

 

Thank you.

If you could say one thing to every woman on the planet, what would it be?

 

Sometimes it's outsiders who see a system most clearly. This is part of a post by a trans woman on another site. Her experience is very similar to my own, only the mirror image:

It's interesting that in her experience, being male is to constantly have to be on guard to avoid attacks from other males. I've heard that from other people, too. She doesn't really say exactly what triggered the attacks she experienced, but my guess is that it had to do with not conforming generally, and seeming too feminine specifically. For a lot of guys, it seems like the worst thing they can be is girly. My own experience is actually that to be female (or at least to be young and female) is to constantly have to be on guard to avoid attacks from both females and males. Women generally only attack verbally, or with subtle forms of social sabotage. Men may attack physically. I found that what triggered attacks was not usually being too masculine per se, but being non-conforming in general, and not trying to look conventionally attractive for a woman. I think the worst thing a woman can be is not manly, but different. Being different means you haven't had all your sharp edges knocked off, and therefore you're not working sufficiently hard at pleasing people. To be feminine is to please, and if you don't please, you're relegated to a status below female, which is very low indeed. Just curious if this is your experience too, @solojones?

If I could say one thing to all women in the world, it would be: "Find yourself sisters and brothers who support you as you live your authentic truth. Don't waste your best years struggling to be a copy of some imaginary 'perfect woman.' That way lies misery."

 

There wouldn't be one thing. Even with regards to female - male interactions, I've come across too many different cultures (sometimes radically so) for there to be the possibility of a common message.

 

^maybe...could also be that I haven't been posting in "content" threads (i.e. non-game or joke threads) here in the JCC all that long, so I don't feel quite as comfortable here (meaning the JCC broadly, not this particular thread) yet as I do in other areas of the boards where I feel more "established." That probably sounds silly to some (many?), but, eh, it's the truth.