Over time I've completely lost what it means to be a man. Every "manly" quality I could agree on - I'd appreciate in a woman too.
Sure, I may have a beard and I'm trying to grow some muscle, but that seems... superficial. I'm ok with my role as a husband and dad, but I'm wondering if any of you actually get any comfort from your gender roles (and what they are to you) or is everyone moving in the same direction of ignoring that.
Posts
Walking with headphones in, only having my competency questioned when I'm actively being incompetent, that kind of thing
about the importance of male role models and suchlike
Fuck the haters
To me, when I think of positive masculinity, what comes to mind is:
- reliability/dependability
- integrity/honor/trustworthiness
- accountability/responsibility
- protectiveness (as a shield mostly but also a sword when needed)
- consistency/constancy
- stability, steadiness
- dignity
- pursuer of knowledge (curiosity, exploratory)
- ingenuity/innovation
- goal-orientedness
- warmth
- loyalty
- self-awareness
- self-assuredness (the good version)
- introspection
- humility in achievement
- actions over words
- bravery/courage
- mentorship
I mean feel free to disagree but I more or less described my husband and some of our closest friends so…
Screenshots seem gauche so I’ll go and find what I wrote and see if I can translate them into something that fits this setting
Whether you are a dad, husband, uncle, brother, nephew, friend, colleague, or even an online connection, we need all men to step up and show everyone what it means to be a good man.
Everyone has a role to play in modeling, talking about, and promoting positive masculinity while shutting down toxic masculinity. Whether you’re an influencer with millions of followers or just a dude picking his kids up from school.
Just existing and moving through the world to be observed by younger men and women you don’t even know contributes to this. Be a walking green flag all the time and demand your bros do the same. Online and off, regardless of connection, even if you’re not sure anyone is watching.
Don’t forget also that girls benefit from seeing positive male role models, too, in the wild as well as in their own lives. If they get to see and learn and understand what good and safe relationships and interactions with men look like, it can assist in inoculating them from seeking relationships with toxic men.
It’s arguably when we women aren’t in the room that we need men to stand on business the most. But unfortunately, many men will just go “oh it doesn’t matter cuz no woman heard that so no one is getting hurt” when it’s just the boys around and welllllll look it’s yes all men ok
Anyway, there was a painting at work the other day that I liked, and it seems vaguely on topic
Manfulness, Angelshaug
Both of my grandfathers were gentle men in a time and place that didn’t necessarily value that, and faced adversity in their lives with quiet dignity and a sense of responsibility that kept them vigilant against making their problems and insecurities those of their families.
My paternal grandfather was a poor farmer and mechanic who never had much, but gave all of it away at every chance. Despite growing up in the rural South, I never once heard him say a bigoted word against anyone. He raised two children on a single income, and when his brother’s wife died young of cancer, took in his brother’s three kids, too. He worked hard everyday and still died a pauper, but five-hundred people came to his funeral. Back when I still had contact with my family, older relatives were fond of telling me how much I reminded them of him in spirit, and I can think of no higher compliment.
My maternal grandfather is still kicking in his nineties, still doing his thing, which is mostly loving the outdoors and experiencing the world. He still loves traveling and music and learning new things, but his true joy (outside my grandmother) has always been horticulture and botany; my whole life, no matter where he lived he installed a hothouse so he could raise his banana plants and orchids. And despite being a blue-collar Southerner, he always wanted my mom to have any and every opportunity she could ever want, their only conflict coming when he thought she wasn’t aspiring to her full potential.
I got saddled with a real bad guy for a dad. A violent narcissistic bigot who went his whole life feeling cheated and angry, deeply insecure over his own perceived failings and shortcomings. He loathed both of these older men and frequently made it known, even to their face, and took every opportunity he could to run them down to my brother and I as kids; his own father, for being poor and unconcerned with wealth, and his father-in-law, for openly appreciating beauty and intellect and softness.
Not that I could have done much about it as a child, but I do find myself wishing I had grown up in a home that appreciated the type of masculinity my grandfathers modeled, instead of it taking over two decades to see that truth for myself, well after one of them had already passed.
I wish I had the confidence in my twenties that I have today because I am ashamed for not speaking up about my friends' behavior when I was younger.
Or, to quote A Blast From the Past, "The short and simple definition of a lady or a gentleman is someone who always tries to make sure the people around him or her are as comfortable as possible."
3DS Friend Code: 0216-0898-6512
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catch myself leering
So we flip the script a lot. But still, what does that mean, and what's different about being a man vs being a person? Lots of the qualities I want to have are ones I admire in anybody, but I think we have to define ourselves within and against the culture in order to get at a good answer. American male culture has some features and we have "traditional" gender roles that we pick from or work with or just unthinkingly take on... I think what it means to be a man here in the US is to look at what being a man is mostly like across our society, and showcase the good parts while rejecting the bad ones. Toxic masculinity is bad because it's toxic, not because it's masculine. Being a man, for me, is about cutting away the rotten parts of male culture and showing how you can be masculine, as we define it, without being toxic. And it's about modeling that for younger generations, because they'll also have to define themselves within and against the culture so it's on me, us, to make that less poisonous to the extent we can manage it.
And that's okay as a strategy to socialize ourselves, but ultimately aren't categories like "masculine" and "feminine" just empty containers?
Real classic this one
Celeste [Switch] - She'll be wrestling with inner demons when she comes...
Super Mario Wonder - Wowie Zowie!
idk man why is anything?
I think questions about how we got here are distinct from questions about what here is and how to live there for our 80ish years. Both interesting, but mostly separate.
I remember writing for his funeral a decade ago that he had the gift to know when to be serious and when to enjoy himself. I want to be 75 years old and still happy to hear a certain bird, or excited to talk about something I read.
And I'm really wary about the impact social media has on male stereotype, all these gymbros on juice who promote get rich quick schemes and treating women like dirt. It's mostly hitting non-college males, who get set up to fail monetarily and for life in general, on top of the extremely worrying political and socio-economical situation (especially the endless housing crisis, which prevent people from building up a normal lifepath)
I think its true but also we cant cede it or itll get filled by something worse
Competing with toxic masculinity in earnest and people needing to have it is a task that makes me feel like humans are so tedious
But I guess lets workshop it and all
A man:
Is a good person
*mission accomplished banner catches fire*
This is really all it though. It's whether gender is real, or not.
It's probably not the case that whatever is referred to by 'masculine' is something naturally occurring. Masculinity isn't like coastal erosion, a naturally occurring phenomenon. But there's also not any such thing as "baseball" in nature either. We made it up. But it is real, it's just invented. Not everything we've made up is real though, like Narnia. Narnia isn't real, not even in the same way that baseball is.
So is gender more like Narnia, or more like baseball? I think that for the most part we treat it as more like baseball, that there are some rules and there is something to it. I mean, in most of the literature that I'm aware of, even the most out there kind of stuff you tend to get the idea that gender is real, though artificial.
I'm not so sure. I find myself more and more believing that gender is like Narnia. It's a fiction that we participate in, but ultimately there isn't anything going on there. We pretend that gender is real, but it isn't. However, this is not without it's problems. I mean, conceivably one can opt in and out of engaging with Narnia, but we can't do that with gender. It also doesn't really seem like we are pretending. It does seem like there's something there, or at least that there ought to be something there. Otherwise a lot of our connected concepts don't end up making a ton of sense.
On the other hand, with something that is a social construct and artificial like baseball, we can outline the rules. Baseball isn't a mystery. Gender does seem to be somewhat mysterious though, we can't actually give a real solid set of necessary and sufficient conditions for being a man or a woman or neither. At least, we can't give any conditions that aren't circular. Gender doesn't seem to follow any sort of consistent form or rules.
I find myself at a loss. I always feel the pull of a sort of philosophically fictionalist account of gender (cartoon version: gender is like Narnia, when we are doing a gender we are pretending it's real when it isn't)), but I don't know if it actually works.
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
It becomes harmful when it is then used to label others and dismiss their feelings in regards to our current set of created genders.
Gender isn't really a set of rigidly-defined boundaries where you're in or you're out and that's all there is to it. Gender is more like a set of shared mythologies, and our gender identities are (in part) the way we define ourselves in relation to the stories and archetypes within those mythologies. (Gender identity is a lot more complicated than just a social construct, but this is the element that feels most relevant to the current topic.)
So, let's take an attribute that a lot of people might associate with masculinity: having strength, and using it to protect others. Can a woman have that attribute as well? Yes, of course. Is that attribute virtuous in the same ways regardless of whether a man or a woman is expressing it? Yes, of course. But the mythology surrounding the attribute tends to be different for men and women.
A man embodying that attribute might come by it by way of stories about men being given this responsibility and then rising to meet and exceed the expectation.
One woman embodying that attribute might come by it by way of stories about women who, despite being traditionally disempowered and relying on the protection of others, showed exceptional strength by claiming power for themselves and then sharing it with others who were similarly denied it.
Another woman embodying that attribute might come by it by way of stories about motherhood, and mothers showing exceptional strength to protect their children when the need is greatest, and extending that to other aspects of life.
The attributes and end behaviors are similar, but the stories surrounding them, and the specific ways in which we relate to those stories, are different. This is part of what makes different gender identities distinct even when some (or many) aspects of them overlap.
So I guess my advice to you would be to try thinking less in terms of "which qualities are uniquely masculine", and think more in terms of, what are the stories about men and masculinity that you're immersed in in your culture, and how do you relate to them? Which stories describe something positive that you want to embrace? Which stories describe something negative that you want to oppose? Which stories describe some attribute that is meaningful to you, but that you want or need to go about in a way that's different from the norm? All of these feelings, even the nominally gender-non-conforming ones, are aspects of your masculine identity, because they're all feelings that you're having as a man in relation to the cultural mythos surrounding masculinity (assuming that is what your gender identity actually is, of course). Other genders have their own networks of stories that they're working through. You don't usually have to worry too much about, like, taking a quality away from other genders by claiming it for yourself through a masculine lens. There are multiple paths to the same place, but the specific path that feels like "yours" has meaning.
I could talk about this kind stuff in more depth, but if I do it'll pretty quickly start getting into the weeds of my personal experiences as a trans woman, so I'll probably leave it at this for now. Hopefully it helps?
Positive manlyness is leaving them half full.
I mean I didn't and I admitted some things to myself and I'm much happier now not being a man.
I will also point out what most of society considers masculinity is fucked bro and not worth trying to cling to.
I said it was true alpha behavior
I know the idea of “alpha wolves” is fucked but in general leaders of wolf packs tend to take care of their packs, rather than mercilessly dominate and neg them
It was observed in wolves in captivity, and only later was it realized that it was actually stress behavior of too many wolves being in too small a space, which made them snippy and snarly. In a 'normal' wolf pack it's usually just a parent who leads a pack, and adolescent wolves peel off at some point, but here they couldn't so they became a nightmare.
The biologist that wrote the original paper spent much of his later life trying to bust this myth but it remains an incredibly powerful meme because certain people want to believe it's true, that the 'best' and 'natural' way to lead is by being a asshole that constantly tries to keep others in line.
We are having our first kid soon and this entire self replicating body design is tbh dogshit
A few months ago, one of them had a tire go flat in the parking lot. I grabbed the portable compressor and tire gauge from my own car, showed them where to find the PSI for their tires on the frame of the driver's side door, pumped the tire up, and checked it after half an hour to make sure it was holding enough air for them to make it to the tire shop up the road.
None of this was strictly masculine versus feminine in terms of virtue, but it certainly made me feel Dad as hell, as a man who does not intend to create any old-fashioned artisanal small-batch children myself.
Just to say, the badness is trying to be isolating. All the pipelines to the right want us alone and easy to pick off. We can't let it.
A long-running vein of patriarchal ideation has been ever-present in nearly every major culture in the planet for the last several thousand years, and while specifics within those cultures have differed and evolved, the most consistent mores held to in those societies center around highly restrictive and oppressive values.
What we might describe as “positive masculinity” today is often little more than just being the kind of mature, emotionally-intelligent, even-tempered person we would want to be around regardless of their sex or gender, and the rest exists largely as a reactionary response to the patriarchal insistences that seek to justify dynamics of oppressive performative gender.
Because that’s all that toxic masculinity is: just ignorance and narcissistic insecurity given a name and mandate and free pass to hurt people simply because enough men want it in the same way.
Being a good man is as simple as being a good person. Being a toxic man is as simple as being someone who is afraid in the same way we all are, but wants a complete absolution of accountability and responsibility to the people they hurt with their behavior. I’ll let Noah Hawley fill in the rest:
A guy on one of the podcasts I listen to referred to "Alpha" types as "sad zoo wolves in a prison of their own making"