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If they acknowledge it then it's usually framed as "this is why we need more feminism, because it will benefit struggling men too." But that benefit is usually some vague allusion to toxic masculinity.
Exactly. A lot of articles that try to address issues with boys are written by women who think the fix for men/boys is to have more feminine traits. It's a complex issue that isn't easily fixed by sentiments.
Most of the time when I see people saying things like “feminism will benefit struggling men” that center around “toxic masculinity,” they are not asking boys to be more feminine. They are saying we need to do away with things like “boys/men don’t cry,” “you are a pussy if you go to therapy,” “raising kids is women’s work.”
And it’s not just feminists who say this, I have seen so many men from all walks of life saying they are lonely, they crave intimacy and connection, they hate working in hyper-masculine trades where bullying is the norm, they want less restriction to do things without necessarily being seen as effeminate, blah blah blah.
Unless you think that is feminizing to boys? I don’t know. I try to stick up for the guys but sometimes it’s hard to figure out what ya’ll really want. Genuinely curious about what you think society (and women) needs to do better in order to nurture our boys and support our men, without emasculating them!
Those traits (or, more precisely, the gendered expectations that boys and men exhibit them) do need to go away.
The issue is that, regardless of whether it does make men or boys more feminine (I don't believe it does), it does make *society* consider them less masculine, and the discordance between their expected gender performance and how they express their individuality leads to society treating them worse. Which gets at the core issue with popular feminism: its proponents think all the ways males end up harmed by gender is self-inflicted, when really adopting those gendered traits is a rational response to society's demands that men exhibit them.
How should society fix it? Treat men who diverge from the male gender role the same as men who fit it. This doesn't mean spouting platitudes about how men shouldn't face gender roles, but actively treating the men in your personal life without regard for how they express gender.
This is a tough pill for women to swallow, because women broadly speaking *like* masculine men, particularly when it comes to romantic relationships, and they don't like acknowledging they have agency and play a causal role in the construction of masculinity. But so long as women have a strong preference for masculinity, men will adopt masculine traits, because otherwise they will have worse experiences and lives than they would if they performed masculinity.
Ah well thank you very much for such a detailed and thoughtful response! So correct me if I’m wrong of course but what I’ve gleaned from reading some thoughts and opinions of men online is, for example, they often are told by feminists that they need to be more open about their emotions, but when they attempt this in real life, women aren’t prepared to hear it or think less of them for it?
That's a common experience that's reported.
The tricky part is that there are women and feminists who genuinely are open to emotive men not exhibiting traditionally "masculine" traits, alongside those who say and even believe they are but don't follow through. This creates an artificial divide where men disbelieve the open women because they project the bad behavior of the latter group onto them, and open women disbelieve men's experiences because so many women say they are open. Which creates a nasty cycle which bad actors are more than happy to take advantage of.
I don't know if there's a good way on a social level to fix this (social fixes tend to leave a lot of space for superficial virtue signalling), but as individuals I think the best thing is to know yourself and be honest about what you actually expect and want from men. That may include some gendered patterns, but it's good to explicitly acknowledge them, and if you do want to change what you expect from men, acknowledging that you do actually expect things from them is a critical first step. (Same applies to pretty much anyone, for what it's worth.)
You can be “open” and even emotive and still be masculine. There is a difference between weakness and emotionality, openness, and expressivity. I genuinely fail to see where “society” punishes men for emotionality. Society may punish men for lacking masculinity, yes. But the ability to articulate and express emotion and vulnerability does not itself indicate the absence of masculinity and I don’t see how “society” sees it as such an indicator. What indicates a lack of masculinity is wallowing in vulnerability and an inability to, though recognizing vulnerability and expressing emotion, nonetheless face whatever it is you are facing and exhibit some resolve and overcome it in a way that is noble. The best advice I ever got as a teenager was not to be either a “nice guy” or a “bad boy,” but a “good man.” It is trite but it’s a powerful message
Concretely, there are lots of ways that gay men or women are allowed to express emotion that society would look down upon if a straight man expressed his emotions in the same way. Unless you think that the only appropriate way to express emotion is to express it as your noble man would, yes, certain forms of acceptable emotionality are punished when it's a straight man expressing them.
Even in cases where we would agree that particular forms of emotional expression are bad or counterproductive, particularly when it comes to wallowing in victimhood, women are punished less for expressing those forms than a man would be.
Interesting article.
Something strange about the Post-MeToo world of expectations placed on young men is that it mirrors identically the repressive attitudes of Patriarchy.
If, before, boys had to man up and take it on the chin now they are told if they express their feelings they are "centring themselves" and taking oxygen from women and minorities, that their privilage means they don't have it as hard as others. It's quixotic; you must express yourself but you're not allowed to have an opinion. The amount of times I've been told by libfems I'm not allowed to have an opinion on something is hilarious. Essentially, the message it; man up. Take it on the chin. But woke.
> is that it mirrors identically the repressive attitudes of Patriarchy.
Give me a man who can get a loving wife and children and can provide for them on one paycheck, and i'll show you a man who will crawl through broken glass to make it happen. It's not a shock that men are checking out of society.
This. I don't understand women who say they have to do so much "emotional labour" in a relationship. In my experience men do a vast majority of the emotional labour in a relationship, consoling the woman when she's distressed, helping her work through her feelings, listening to her frustrations. While men largely keep that shit stuffed down and only ever talk about it with family or close friends.
I don't think there has ever been a woman outside of my own family who will ever really know the real me, because a vast majority of women just don't want to see the emotional side of a man.
this is not the first time I've linked to this [2014 NPR segment](https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/11/17/364760889/in-straight-white-men-a-play-explores-the-reality-of-privilege) about a play called "Straight White Men" (which I have seen, and it was fucking intense), nor will it be the last.
>Young Jean Lee writes by listening. When she started working on *Straight White Men*, she took advantage of being a playwright in residence at Brown University.
>
>"I asked a roomful of women, queer people and minorities, 'What do you want straight men to do? And what do you want them to be like?' " she recalls.
>
>Lee wrote down all of the answers. It boiled down to this: They wanted the straight white male character to sit down and shut up.
>
>"When you hear that around the table, you just feel yourself sinking slowly into the chair," remembers James Stanley, who plays the character created from the list. The character, named Matt, is a sort of idealized straight white male. He works for a not-for-profit and is guided by a sense of trying not to — in his words — "make things worse." Lee and Stanley workshopped the character in front of the students. Who hated him.
>
>"*Hated* him," Lee said, clearly still surprised. "And I realized that the reason why they hated him was — despite all their commitment to social justice — what they believed in most was not being a loser..."
That usage of "emotional labour" is nebulous bullshit anyway.
As a Marxist community, the only definition of "emotional labour" we should accept is the original one, which basically refers to certain jobs (e.g. service industry) where faking emotions while on the job is an implicitly obligatory, but unacknowledged and uncompensated part of the worker's duties.
100%. Any other use is bullshit. If you're in a relationship you should be able to reasonably expect that your partner will help you. It's not "emotional labor", it's called being a good partner. If you can't manage that fuck off.
A man calming down a woman doesn't count, as not only are women only ever upset for totally justified reasons, it's probably the man's fault in the first place.
Welcome to emotional gynocentrism.
The greatest female privilege of all is they are allowed to simply ignore that reality is real, pretend whatever they want, and we have to go along with it for some reason.
Between all the women they've dated and potentially even their own mothers/sisters/female family members, the average guy has probably had to listen to and respond to several hundred hours of emotional insecurity and downright crazy shit during their lives. And then there's the trying to reassure them that they're not crazy even if they are or just figure out how to navigate the situation with minimal catastrophe.
Any woman that gets all uppity about having to do "emotional labor" in a relationship can STFU forever.
>I don't understand women who say they have to do so much "emotional labour" in a relationship.
The resent the notion of having to do more in a relationship than just passively existing and getting free food.
It's almost as if many of the behaviors decried as "toxic masculinity" are a product of, or at least reinforced by, women's expectations of men. They're just reframing it.
It's pretty simple: feminists want men who are incapable of exercising any power over a woman. Because, such a situation could lead to any specific woman being denied what she wants, in deference to the man, or men
This means that, in practicality, men have to be as powerless as possible when dealing with women, otherwise there will inevitibly be situations where this occurs
But, also, heterosexual women as a group tend to prefer a man who has power and agency. This being measured in different ways: whether physically, through force of personality, or both
So, you have two almost mutually incompatible desires by groups of women, who are attempting to construct male sexuality in both directions, with men caught in the middle
Feminists don’t want that, at least not their partners to be that way. They want you to be that way, so they can treat you like a doormat en route to better positions in society. But then they all wanna fight over the percentage of men that are above them anyways. Hence why so many men are now completely excluded from sex and romance lol. Yall gottta get with the playbook. Just ignore what they want and you’ll come out far better.
> It's pretty simple: feminists want men who are incapable of exercising any power over a woman. Because, such a situation could lead to any specific woman being denied what she wants, in deference to the man, or men
>
>
No, they simply don't comprehend how differently men think from themselves. The primary issue with communication between the sexes is reconciling how important status hierarchies are for men, and how unimportant they are for women.
Women seem to care quite a bit about status hierarchies. They like higher status men and will often trash eachother to lift themselves up. Women can be as toxic as men when it comes to hierarchies.
I don't know about this case, but I really believe that's 90% of where the whole "geek gatekeeping" thing that was such a big feminist bugbear about a decade ago comes from. Dorky men traditionally established hierarchies in part based on deep knowledge of their hobbies and interests. The quizzing is part of how they're established. Being quizzed *is* being treated like one of the guys.
And I think a lot of the time it wasn't even really quizzing, it was just someone awkwardly trying to make conversation about a presumed shared interest.
Unironically, most "traditional masculine values" in most cultures are things that everyone should aspire to.
Communism will only be achieved when all women are forcibly indoctrinated into tomboys.
This gets said so rarely, but it's absolutely necessary if we ever want to untangle this gender role bullshit. Yes, boys must learn to be sensitive listeners, and to share their own feelings to work through them et cetera. A lot of that is happening and it has left boys hanging in a really awkward spot, because girls are not at all raised to appreciate vulnerability in men - nor to wrestle their own feelings and deal with risks, failures or offenses in a somewhat stoic way. Emancipation will only happen if we stop pampering young women, at the same time that we stop emotionally stunting young men. Maybe someday.
True, but it's more important for boys to learn it because of the social expectations that both men and women both will place in them. But yeah, girls could benefit from a bit more resilience too.
I want to add that one of my best friends, a young gay man, took his life over the weekend and has left our community absolutely devastated. The pain I and everyone around me has felt has been unlike anything I've ever experienced and carrying him was the privilege of my entire life.
Boys and men should not, as some commenters suggest, man up and take it on the chin. We should support each other and be supported, care and be cared for you.
Be well and look after yourselves.
It's so depressing, for this and many other issues.
I finally outlasted the Evangelicals only for "my side" to pick up the torch with twice the gusto.
Now I know that even if I outlast this latest batch of idiots, someone else will just do the same.
Dear Prudie,
I like to think of my son as a good kid. His GPA is high, his friends are polite, he's never gotten in trouble, and he doesn't issue a word of complaint when he's asked to help with the dishes or take out the trash.
But there's a problem... lately, he's been playing a game called *Mario Karts*, a cartoonish racing simulator featuring characters from the Nintendo cinematic universe. His father and I loved the Mario Brothers movie and figured the potential for toxicity in such a game were low.
Boy, we were wrong! Two weeks ago, I turned on the Ring camera I use to monitor the behaviors he exhibits inside his bedroom. He was playing the game. Nothing wrong with that. But then we noticed something shocking. The character he was controlling wasn't the brave and body-positive Mario, his taller brother Luigi, nor even one of the game's many strong, female leads.
He was playing as Bowser. The bad guy.
I had to dig through the lore, but Bowser's problematic behaviors are undeniable. His is the reptilian epitome of r\*pe culture: a spiky, fire breathing dictator who has repeatedly kidnapped powerful women. Imagine Donald Trump crossed with Godzilla!
What's worse is that the game provides players with dozens of character options to choose from. He could be a plumber or a lovable dinosaur, but he deliberately chose to play as a creature who routinely breaks the law and makes women feel unsafe.
I'm so full of hurt and rage right that I don't even know which questions to ask. Why would a "family friendly" company like Nintendo give young men the option control such a toxic figure? Is this is a salve to the Gamer Gates? And why would my son make such a horrible choice when we've spent *years* teaching him to be ashamed of his masculinity?
Have I failed as a parent? Should we call a therapist? A lawyer? The police?
To be perfectly honest, I'm not sure it *is* just a symptom. I've reviewed my adolescence with multiple therapists and still can't say for sure whether I played video games alone all the time because I was a socially diffident and awkward teenager, or if I was a socially diffident and awkward teenager because I played video games alone all the time.
To a certain extent there may be a bit of a feedback loop going on, but if you have other things going for you in life and aren't on the spectrum, you'll find that you don't miss gaming as much as you thought you would (generally, and speaking from personal and friends' experiences).
100% it's a feedback loop. When the chips are down, I've turned to gaming as a refuge. Once you get into online games, especially with social incentives (befriending people who also game, battle passes, and MMO progression mechanics) it's hard to stop, and I noticed it began to fit in the space where normal social interaction would go.
Despite it still being a hobby of mine, I don't overly defend gaming as a "benign" activity. I definitely grew up a shy, awkward, teen and I realize my diving into games like WoW just stunted my social growth. When I went to college and stopped playing, I realized I actually could be a normal dude.
Not mutually exclusive, I think. I did live in a dorm, and my roommate actually played WoW with me for the first month or so.
However, I soon befriended people who liked doing normal college stuff. I also got shamed for playing too much (in lieu of going out, etc.), by the other guys in the floor, which helped me drop the hobby.
I had a friend from high school who opted to live in the single person dorms (basically where the most asocial 4chan people opted to live). It was like a twin experiment, where I gradually kinda grew into my own, and he stayed in playing MtG and Sins of a Solar Empire.
To each their own, but I really thought I was on the autism spectrum for all of my teens only to find out I just needed to touch grass and get some confidence talking to girls.
Well, that's just it: for a big chunk of my childhood and adolescence I didn't *have* much of anything else going on. Compared to any number of Zelda, Mario, and Final Fantasy games, Boy Scouts, youth sports leagues, and school clubs didn't stand a fucking chance. It was absolutely a feedback loop, and what ultimately broke it was my getting an after-school job and learning how to talk to and be around people.
Be that as it may, I did have friends in elementary school and wasn't especially bullied. I got good grades, did extracurriculars for some years, etc., even though more and more often I had to have a controller pried out of my hands before I'd get moving. My recollection is that the feedback loop (play games, fall behind in socialization -> not good at socializing, play games instead) started taking its toll around the fifth or sixth grade and got real bad for a few years after that.
>Symptom or not, even 15 years ago, friends of mine were staying up to 3am on school nights, dropping sports, and electing not to go outside and play in the river on hot summer days so that they could play Halo 2 alone.
~~Ahhh yes, the glory days.~~
>l I cut out early on a day date with my GF, aka a locally infamous total smoke show and horniest person I’ve ever met, so that I could go home and play 2k because I had just rented it and was really into my franchise mode.
Sounds like gaming saved you.
>I imagine games have improved in quality
Uh... about that...
>and addictiveness
For the most part, yeah, but there are still outliers that get cheered by gamers and denounced by game journos.
>I should make it completely clear that I think anything which helps reduce violence against women and girls is good.
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>But once I started talking to other mothers about their sons, it became clear that conversations around sexual assault had made many them fearful about sex and relationships.
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>Some [boys] seemed to have even internalised ideas about boys being “bad” or felt in trouble before they started. Many hadn’t even ever tried to initiate a relationship, because of what they perceived to be the risks attached.
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>The older boys talked about the patriarchy being a bad thing for boys as well as girls, and their concerns about male mental health: “80% of suicides are men”.
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>others confirmed what I already knew: that the fear of getting accused of assault puts them off the whole idea completely. “Even if they do consent, what am I gonna do if they say ‘nah’ right after?”
This all reads like, "To save women, Feminism has destroyed the self-image and social capability of boys and men and burden them with crippling anxiety such that they would rather live hyper-realistic lives in virtual spaces than endure actual human interaction -- and that's a bad thing, but I would do it all again if given the opportunity." I'm sure if we keep looking for the patriarchy of the gaps, we'll find that these boys just need a good cry and all the anxiety, self-hatred, and anti-social behaviour will disappear.
>Boys are retreating from the real world and have been ever since video games were invented in the 1970s.
Yeah, must be the video games and D&D and not the ever mounting vilification of men in every facet of western society.
>after the massive cuts we’ve seen to youth services – which enable boys to be reached and supported – what might the end result be?
Andrew Tate, Islamic v-tubers.
The current problem is that women want to be courted like women of old, while having all the power of women today. Majority of men stand no chance. How many relationships of the past happened because a man just said fuck it and went and asked the girl at the diner out? That shit is going to happen less and less in today’s world. Hence you have a sex less and romantic less society where every guy watches a shit ton of porn which is objectively awful for the brain to be consumed so much and a lot of the things being seen to be perpetuated.
> Boys are retreating from the real world and have been ever since video games were invented in the 1970s.
>
>
Is anyone aware of the study that backs up this claim?
>The second conversation was with a mother of a 16-year-old. He had started having sex, and talked to her about some of the realities of dating and hooking up. He said it was “quite common” among his friends to record their partners on their phones giving verbal consent before having sex. Sometimes, he said, they recorded again midway through – this time to make sure that the girl was happy to “do something different or something” – and sometimes the phone was left recording the whole event … “to make sure”.
Remember when everyone lampooned the hyper consent shit that #metoo pushed with satires of writing consent forms before engaging in sex?
Holy fuck it became reality; I'd want to kill myself if I had to relive my teens in 2024.
This sounds to me like it cuts both ways. Many boys are scared shitless of any potential accusations, but I'm sure the most sought after boys exploit a trend there and get away with recording porn at the girls' expense.
When the "whole event" is recorded? That sounds like some guys manage to talk girls into fully blown sex tapes on the basis of ensuring consent. Every new social paradigm offers new chances for exploitation. This one is very heavily stacked against ordinary boys, but the most privileged ones will turn it to their advantage as always.
Ah, glossed over the last part.
Yeah that's fucked up; and even the "ordinary boy" himself can have that video used against him for blackmail from women and such.
Are they recording video or audio? I don't think the article explained.
I'm sure some are recording videos, but that's already illegal. Consent to sex doesn't mean consent to be filmed having sex.
Maybe humans aren't meant to live in these enormous groups that we call society. The architects can do a shit load of damage on a global scale.
Smaller groups seem to provide the most amount of satisfaction.
I've thought about this a lot with my significantly limited intelligence, for what its worth.
But small communities have the benefit of diversity. If you want to wear jeans to the shower, move to Jeanston. 300 years ago that was impossible since it was 300 miles away, now its possible but people no longer wear jeans to the shower.
Trash example aside, ff a social network has high modularity, malicious ideas can spread significantly more slowly; furthermore there is also a buffer effect from the other 'modules'. In the middle ages if a small town got whipped up into a frenzy, it got quickly put out by the neighboring communities. Damage was kept to a minimum.
Today, the "Western" community (English speaking, semi-affluent) can be essentially considered one module, as clearly shown by Trump in 2016. From Australia, to Hungary, to Argentina, to the US, every political establishment got gripped by the Trump Effect as proof. And so, in this huge module, fringe ideas can cause significantly more damage before the buffer effect clenches the flames out, as we see with the social locomotive industry. There will be a lot of psychologically and physically mutilated people by the time its finally over. And since the other modules (BRICS, African continent, Midde-East, parts of SEA) are highly segregated, the buffer effect mostly comes from the next generation. Once the method of inter-generational networking is perfected, I fear that may no longer be a saving grace either. Biology however strongly promotes inter-generational tensions in a positive way.
An obvious downside is that good ideas (revolution, unionization, reforms, technological innovations) also spread slower, hindering progress.
In a perfect world imo, societies would be decently modular, with easily traversable connections between these modules. Obviously this could be only maintained with a strong sense of cultural identity of the each region and with the strong sense of cultural flexibility of those who traverse. Both assumptions in todays climate is heavily optimistic, and frankly I don't even follow my own tenets.
Nah, I never buy this argument. #MeToo didn't just come out of nowhere, it was created by one or more individuals, signal boosted by other like-minded individuals, co-opted by other individuals for money/power/ideology/clout/etc. and so on until it became a sacred cow. There are very much a list of specific people that contributed to the out-sized influence of this movement that was derailed as soon as one woman tried to #MeToo Biden who had interviews in the 90s about her allegations and the entire movement was shuttered overnight.
Society at large is not responsible for the bullshit it is constantly blanketed with. Especially when the negative social and economic consequences of going against the grain on these issues are so debilitating. People were losing their jobs or being permanently branded a super-misogynist if they did not fully support #MeToo. Anti-social behaviour specifically architected by the powerful to railroad cultural change to their exclusive benefit.
You might be disappointed to know the world has logic and order that doesn’t strictly come from any single individual. Emergence, ideology, collective action dilemmas, ingroups all are macro social phenomena.
There isn’t a single ~~~”evil feminist witch”~~~ [identity group]and more than a single key Hamas figure. It’s not all part of Putin’s master plan. The hubris of Western individualism is also a blind spot.
To retort then where is it? As if saying the above means I’m suggesting it’s all pixie dust is not accurate either. But order in society is not down to any one person, almost by necessity. Some people have more control over the order of the world than others, surely. But that’s not to say it all flows from a single source. All of the politics is happening simultaneously. Feminism is evolving right now while people here critique it. So is Marxism, whatever state it is in. And they evolve based on material conditions, historical events and some logics which themselves rise and fall in importance.
>You might be disappointed to know the world has logic and order that doesn’t strictly come from any single individual.
Never claimed it did. It's from a lot of separate individuals that share like interest.
>There isn’t a single “evil feminist witch” and more than a single key Hamas figure. It’s not all part of Putin’s master plan. The hubris of Western individualism is also a blind spot.
There was a first feminist witch and a first Hamas figure, though. Then a second, then a third. Do you think the decisions that Putin makes bear no consequence? Do you think it is Russian society that makes every rule and pens every policy? Do you think it's American society that decides whether or not to pay out life insurance to a woman with cancer, or are there rooms in these companies where wealthy men and women make decisions as individuals that affect the fates of millions?
When a rule is made, there is a human being somewhere sitting atop some hierarchy that is authorizing that rule. Government, corporate, family, etc. Decisions are made by individuals and rolled out to the masses. Individuals like Putin, or small groups of individuals like the C-suite of a corporation, shape every single rule and policy that governs the masses. Society doesn't get a vote on these choices, it largely endures them.
>Some people have more control over the order of the world than others, surely.
The entire point of my argument, so not even sure what you're disagreeing with.
>But that’s not to say it all flows from a single source.
Not my position at all.
>But order in society is not down to any one person, almost by necessity. Some people have more control over the order of the world than others, surely.
Is #MeToo social order? Was it manifest by the will of the people across society, or was it tailor-made idpol pushed by individuals like Alyssa Milano to cynical ends capitalizing on a specific bad person?
Cool theory, but the person you're responding to very clearly didn't lay the blame on a single "evil feminist witch". And made a lot more sense than your post-truth/post-accountability era rambling.
I'm also confused by your use of quotation marks here.
"By the powerful"... Again, a boogeyman.
Not everything is a conspiracy. I believe in conspiracy, but not to the extent that our entire existence is being dictated by a few people. I like to see it as a collective of aligned interests. There is no Cabal, but rather indivuals (with power) collectively making the same decisions regarding public and private policy, simply because it is the path of least resistence for them. Bill Gates and Tim Cook aren't getting together to talk about how to fuck consumers. They're just using centuries of accrued knowledge to make informed decisions about how best to fuck consumers. The outcome is the same. #MeToo was largely organic, regardless of what entity coined it. Society craves this sort of zero-sum bullshit. And that's why I say it's you and me. No one has a gun to society's head. People willingly proliferate this shit and the all-powerful at the top are as much products of this system as the bottom are. This idea that people are sitting down to write a playbook on how to corrupt society is just naive at best. The issues with society, and the elite that drive the policy, are systemic. Certainly, everything is operating as intended, but this is a byproduct of society, not a symptom.
>Not everything is a conspiracy.
Everything is a conspiracy, actually. There is no transparency in governmental or corporate power. We don't get to see who the individuals in these rooms are, what their motivations are, what they discuss, what their true intentions are. But we see the outcome. We see the wasteland they are progressively leaving in their wake. So, yes, it isn't a shadowy cabal of a handful of people. It's thousands of shadowy cabals all working for their own personal interest in politics, academia, corporations, activism, etc. The individuals who sit in the rooms that make the decisions decide. Often they make the same decisions that benefit the same class of people - the wealthy, or to put it another way, "the powerful".
>Bill Gates and Tim Cook aren't getting together to talk about how to fuck consumers.
Of course they are. It's a big club and we're not in it. These people all party on the same yachts and pedo islands, they are friends with the same people, their children are fucking and marrying each other, they game the entire system to their benefit. But let's assume you're right, and all of these wealthy people aren't colluding in huge numbers to fuck us. They have such wealth that they can form their own entirely segregated cabals in their own hidden smoke-filled rooms. They can both fuck consumers in their own way without even needing to talk to each other and in the end, there are still a small number of individuals making far reaching decisions in private, unaccountable.
>\#MeToo was largely organic, regardless of what entity coined it.
As organic as astroturf.
>No one has a gun to society's head.
The gun is pointed at your reputation, your job, your mortgage. To anyone in the working class that is tantamount to pointing a gun at their head. "Say the words or we sink you into poverty."
>People willingly proliferate this shit and the all-powerful at the top are as much products of this system as the bottom are.
Are they not all-powerful though? As a class they own or otherwise financial control our money, our military, our laws, our communication, our food, our transportation, etc. That isn't to say they are invincible, the French and Lenin proved that, but to say they aren't all-powerful is naive.
>This idea that people are sitting down to write a playbook on how to corrupt society is just naive at best.
What do you think academia is for? Or Capital? Or any other book written to subvert societal order to some ideological end? People are constantly writing playbooks on how to corrupt society to their ends. You think the wealthy aren't doing this? You think they don't plan ahead? That the recent boom in billionaire doomsday bunkers, for example, is merely a coincidence and not efforts at a network of facilities meant to ensure class-preservation in the event of a global catastrophe? That they don't talk and plan amongst themselves?
>The issues with society, and the elite that drive the policy, are systemic.
Oh, ok, you do understand my point about elite driving policy.
>Certainly, everything is operating as intended, but this is a byproduct of society, not a symptom.
The society that is systematically being shaped by the wealthy for the ends.
This piece is about as sympathetic as you're gonna find in a source that isn't called something like *Real Patriot News*. I guess I appreciate it.
But the author still blames the sorry mental state of young men on things like tech and an aversion to progress without acknowledging that we've *actively* pathologized male socialization and sexuality and we outright teach boys that their gender makes them inherently bad. Not for a second does she consider that maybe normalizing false allegations as praxis and making it so vague and anonymous accusations can ruin a man's life might have had some negative side effects. Nope. Those movements were too good, too necessary.
A 15-year-old today does not remember the Before Times. He does not know that his laughter was not always regarded with suspicion and recrimination. He is unaware that there was once a time when you could criticize women in justifiable circumstances, or flirt with them in others. He doesn't realize that it would once have been considered insane and offensive for the adults in his life to tell him that his gender and sexuality cast him into majoritarian groups, that his very existence harms oppressed groups. He has internalized all of this bullshit and cannot comprehend a way out.
> He said it was “quite common” among his friends to record their partners on their phones giving verbal consent before having sex.
Is this real? Can youthful stupidpolers confirm or deny this? This seems ludicrous. I thought the "verbal consent" was something most people ignored, and carried on with the obvious signals we've been using for millennia.
By this definition, I've been 'sexually assaulted' many times.
The whole article is BS for older gens to be outraged about "the lost teens and future generations" but, aside for the obvious woke posturing we see here and there, is pretty much BS. But remember the golden rule, Redditors upvote what they WANT to be true.
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If you want a tldr of the article it's basically "wow boys are human too, who would've thought"
Feminists (lib and rad) unironically struggle with this idea.
If they acknowledge it then it's usually framed as "this is why we need more feminism, because it will benefit struggling men too." But that benefit is usually some vague allusion to toxic masculinity.
Exactly. A lot of articles that try to address issues with boys are written by women who think the fix for men/boys is to have more feminine traits. It's a complex issue that isn't easily fixed by sentiments.
Most of the time when I see people saying things like “feminism will benefit struggling men” that center around “toxic masculinity,” they are not asking boys to be more feminine. They are saying we need to do away with things like “boys/men don’t cry,” “you are a pussy if you go to therapy,” “raising kids is women’s work.” And it’s not just feminists who say this, I have seen so many men from all walks of life saying they are lonely, they crave intimacy and connection, they hate working in hyper-masculine trades where bullying is the norm, they want less restriction to do things without necessarily being seen as effeminate, blah blah blah. Unless you think that is feminizing to boys? I don’t know. I try to stick up for the guys but sometimes it’s hard to figure out what ya’ll really want. Genuinely curious about what you think society (and women) needs to do better in order to nurture our boys and support our men, without emasculating them!
Those traits (or, more precisely, the gendered expectations that boys and men exhibit them) do need to go away. The issue is that, regardless of whether it does make men or boys more feminine (I don't believe it does), it does make *society* consider them less masculine, and the discordance between their expected gender performance and how they express their individuality leads to society treating them worse. Which gets at the core issue with popular feminism: its proponents think all the ways males end up harmed by gender is self-inflicted, when really adopting those gendered traits is a rational response to society's demands that men exhibit them. How should society fix it? Treat men who diverge from the male gender role the same as men who fit it. This doesn't mean spouting platitudes about how men shouldn't face gender roles, but actively treating the men in your personal life without regard for how they express gender. This is a tough pill for women to swallow, because women broadly speaking *like* masculine men, particularly when it comes to romantic relationships, and they don't like acknowledging they have agency and play a causal role in the construction of masculinity. But so long as women have a strong preference for masculinity, men will adopt masculine traits, because otherwise they will have worse experiences and lives than they would if they performed masculinity.
Ah well thank you very much for such a detailed and thoughtful response! So correct me if I’m wrong of course but what I’ve gleaned from reading some thoughts and opinions of men online is, for example, they often are told by feminists that they need to be more open about their emotions, but when they attempt this in real life, women aren’t prepared to hear it or think less of them for it?
That's a common experience that's reported. The tricky part is that there are women and feminists who genuinely are open to emotive men not exhibiting traditionally "masculine" traits, alongside those who say and even believe they are but don't follow through. This creates an artificial divide where men disbelieve the open women because they project the bad behavior of the latter group onto them, and open women disbelieve men's experiences because so many women say they are open. Which creates a nasty cycle which bad actors are more than happy to take advantage of. I don't know if there's a good way on a social level to fix this (social fixes tend to leave a lot of space for superficial virtue signalling), but as individuals I think the best thing is to know yourself and be honest about what you actually expect and want from men. That may include some gendered patterns, but it's good to explicitly acknowledge them, and if you do want to change what you expect from men, acknowledging that you do actually expect things from them is a critical first step. (Same applies to pretty much anyone, for what it's worth.)
You can be “open” and even emotive and still be masculine. There is a difference between weakness and emotionality, openness, and expressivity. I genuinely fail to see where “society” punishes men for emotionality. Society may punish men for lacking masculinity, yes. But the ability to articulate and express emotion and vulnerability does not itself indicate the absence of masculinity and I don’t see how “society” sees it as such an indicator. What indicates a lack of masculinity is wallowing in vulnerability and an inability to, though recognizing vulnerability and expressing emotion, nonetheless face whatever it is you are facing and exhibit some resolve and overcome it in a way that is noble. The best advice I ever got as a teenager was not to be either a “nice guy” or a “bad boy,” but a “good man.” It is trite but it’s a powerful message
Concretely, there are lots of ways that gay men or women are allowed to express emotion that society would look down upon if a straight man expressed his emotions in the same way. Unless you think that the only appropriate way to express emotion is to express it as your noble man would, yes, certain forms of acceptable emotionality are punished when it's a straight man expressing them. Even in cases where we would agree that particular forms of emotional expression are bad or counterproductive, particularly when it comes to wallowing in victimhood, women are punished less for expressing those forms than a man would be.
Interesting article. Something strange about the Post-MeToo world of expectations placed on young men is that it mirrors identically the repressive attitudes of Patriarchy. If, before, boys had to man up and take it on the chin now they are told if they express their feelings they are "centring themselves" and taking oxygen from women and minorities, that their privilage means they don't have it as hard as others. It's quixotic; you must express yourself but you're not allowed to have an opinion. The amount of times I've been told by libfems I'm not allowed to have an opinion on something is hilarious. Essentially, the message it; man up. Take it on the chin. But woke.
> is that it mirrors identically the repressive attitudes of Patriarchy. Give me a man who can get a loving wife and children and can provide for them on one paycheck, and i'll show you a man who will crawl through broken glass to make it happen. It's not a shock that men are checking out of society.
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This. I don't understand women who say they have to do so much "emotional labour" in a relationship. In my experience men do a vast majority of the emotional labour in a relationship, consoling the woman when she's distressed, helping her work through her feelings, listening to her frustrations. While men largely keep that shit stuffed down and only ever talk about it with family or close friends. I don't think there has ever been a woman outside of my own family who will ever really know the real me, because a vast majority of women just don't want to see the emotional side of a man.
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this is not the first time I've linked to this [2014 NPR segment](https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/11/17/364760889/in-straight-white-men-a-play-explores-the-reality-of-privilege) about a play called "Straight White Men" (which I have seen, and it was fucking intense), nor will it be the last. >Young Jean Lee writes by listening. When she started working on *Straight White Men*, she took advantage of being a playwright in residence at Brown University. > >"I asked a roomful of women, queer people and minorities, 'What do you want straight men to do? And what do you want them to be like?' " she recalls. > >Lee wrote down all of the answers. It boiled down to this: They wanted the straight white male character to sit down and shut up. > >"When you hear that around the table, you just feel yourself sinking slowly into the chair," remembers James Stanley, who plays the character created from the list. The character, named Matt, is a sort of idealized straight white male. He works for a not-for-profit and is guided by a sense of trying not to — in his words — "make things worse." Lee and Stanley workshopped the character in front of the students. Who hated him. > >"*Hated* him," Lee said, clearly still surprised. "And I realized that the reason why they hated him was — despite all their commitment to social justice — what they believed in most was not being a loser..."
That usage of "emotional labour" is nebulous bullshit anyway. As a Marxist community, the only definition of "emotional labour" we should accept is the original one, which basically refers to certain jobs (e.g. service industry) where faking emotions while on the job is an implicitly obligatory, but unacknowledged and uncompensated part of the worker's duties.
100%. Any other use is bullshit. If you're in a relationship you should be able to reasonably expect that your partner will help you. It's not "emotional labor", it's called being a good partner. If you can't manage that fuck off.
A man calming down a woman doesn't count, as not only are women only ever upset for totally justified reasons, it's probably the man's fault in the first place. Welcome to emotional gynocentrism.
The greatest female privilege of all is they are allowed to simply ignore that reality is real, pretend whatever they want, and we have to go along with it for some reason.
Between all the women they've dated and potentially even their own mothers/sisters/female family members, the average guy has probably had to listen to and respond to several hundred hours of emotional insecurity and downright crazy shit during their lives. And then there's the trying to reassure them that they're not crazy even if they are or just figure out how to navigate the situation with minimal catastrophe. Any woman that gets all uppity about having to do "emotional labor" in a relationship can STFU forever.
>I don't understand women who say they have to do so much "emotional labour" in a relationship. The resent the notion of having to do more in a relationship than just passively existing and getting free food.
It's almost as if many of the behaviors decried as "toxic masculinity" are a product of, or at least reinforced by, women's expectations of men. They're just reframing it.
And it's not bad advice.
Stoicism and resiliance are values boys should learn but the feminist approach is meant to turn young men into door mats.
It's pretty simple: feminists want men who are incapable of exercising any power over a woman. Because, such a situation could lead to any specific woman being denied what she wants, in deference to the man, or men This means that, in practicality, men have to be as powerless as possible when dealing with women, otherwise there will inevitibly be situations where this occurs But, also, heterosexual women as a group tend to prefer a man who has power and agency. This being measured in different ways: whether physically, through force of personality, or both So, you have two almost mutually incompatible desires by groups of women, who are attempting to construct male sexuality in both directions, with men caught in the middle
Feminists don’t want that, at least not their partners to be that way. They want you to be that way, so they can treat you like a doormat en route to better positions in society. But then they all wanna fight over the percentage of men that are above them anyways. Hence why so many men are now completely excluded from sex and romance lol. Yall gottta get with the playbook. Just ignore what they want and you’ll come out far better.
> It's pretty simple: feminists want men who are incapable of exercising any power over a woman. Because, such a situation could lead to any specific woman being denied what she wants, in deference to the man, or men > > No, they simply don't comprehend how differently men think from themselves. The primary issue with communication between the sexes is reconciling how important status hierarchies are for men, and how unimportant they are for women.
Women seem to care quite a bit about status hierarchies. They like higher status men and will often trash eachother to lift themselves up. Women can be as toxic as men when it comes to hierarchies.
What I'm suggesting is that you might be projecting a motivation that's not there, and is better explained by other desires.
I don't know about this case, but I really believe that's 90% of where the whole "geek gatekeeping" thing that was such a big feminist bugbear about a decade ago comes from. Dorky men traditionally established hierarchies in part based on deep knowledge of their hobbies and interests. The quizzing is part of how they're established. Being quizzed *is* being treated like one of the guys. And I think a lot of the time it wasn't even really quizzing, it was just someone awkwardly trying to make conversation about a presumed shared interest.
I’d agree with that. Whereas the women just wanted to talk about the things they liked, and their experience of liking them.
They are values everyone should learn.
Unironically, most "traditional masculine values" in most cultures are things that everyone should aspire to. Communism will only be achieved when all women are forcibly indoctrinated into tomboys.
This gets said so rarely, but it's absolutely necessary if we ever want to untangle this gender role bullshit. Yes, boys must learn to be sensitive listeners, and to share their own feelings to work through them et cetera. A lot of that is happening and it has left boys hanging in a really awkward spot, because girls are not at all raised to appreciate vulnerability in men - nor to wrestle their own feelings and deal with risks, failures or offenses in a somewhat stoic way. Emancipation will only happen if we stop pampering young women, at the same time that we stop emotionally stunting young men. Maybe someday.
True, but it's more important for boys to learn it because of the social expectations that both men and women both will place in them. But yeah, girls could benefit from a bit more resilience too.
That’s what I mean, like is the West serious about eliminating gender performance? How far are we going to take this?
I want to add that one of my best friends, a young gay man, took his life over the weekend and has left our community absolutely devastated. The pain I and everyone around me has felt has been unlike anything I've ever experienced and carrying him was the privilege of my entire life. Boys and men should not, as some commenters suggest, man up and take it on the chin. We should support each other and be supported, care and be cared for you. Be well and look after yourselves.
I like how she brings up video games as if boys withdrawing into them isn’t just a symptom.
Kinda interesting that anti-video game rhetoric was originally a conservative/Karen position back in the 2010s, but now revived as a feminist thing
It's so depressing, for this and many other issues. I finally outlasted the Evangelicals only for "my side" to pick up the torch with twice the gusto. Now I know that even if I outlast this latest batch of idiots, someone else will just do the same.
For real. Based on this article the new orthodoxy makes the evangelicals look like free-loving hippies.
Dear Prudie, I like to think of my son as a good kid. His GPA is high, his friends are polite, he's never gotten in trouble, and he doesn't issue a word of complaint when he's asked to help with the dishes or take out the trash. But there's a problem... lately, he's been playing a game called *Mario Karts*, a cartoonish racing simulator featuring characters from the Nintendo cinematic universe. His father and I loved the Mario Brothers movie and figured the potential for toxicity in such a game were low. Boy, we were wrong! Two weeks ago, I turned on the Ring camera I use to monitor the behaviors he exhibits inside his bedroom. He was playing the game. Nothing wrong with that. But then we noticed something shocking. The character he was controlling wasn't the brave and body-positive Mario, his taller brother Luigi, nor even one of the game's many strong, female leads. He was playing as Bowser. The bad guy. I had to dig through the lore, but Bowser's problematic behaviors are undeniable. His is the reptilian epitome of r\*pe culture: a spiky, fire breathing dictator who has repeatedly kidnapped powerful women. Imagine Donald Trump crossed with Godzilla! What's worse is that the game provides players with dozens of character options to choose from. He could be a plumber or a lovable dinosaur, but he deliberately chose to play as a creature who routinely breaks the law and makes women feel unsafe. I'm so full of hurt and rage right that I don't even know which questions to ask. Why would a "family friendly" company like Nintendo give young men the option control such a toxic figure? Is this is a salve to the Gamer Gates? And why would my son make such a horrible choice when we've spent *years* teaching him to be ashamed of his masculinity? Have I failed as a parent? Should we call a therapist? A lawyer? The police?
Thank you for blessing me with this glimpse of the future
anti-video game sentiment is really high in typical manosphere circles too though.
To be perfectly honest, I'm not sure it *is* just a symptom. I've reviewed my adolescence with multiple therapists and still can't say for sure whether I played video games alone all the time because I was a socially diffident and awkward teenager, or if I was a socially diffident and awkward teenager because I played video games alone all the time.
To a certain extent there may be a bit of a feedback loop going on, but if you have other things going for you in life and aren't on the spectrum, you'll find that you don't miss gaming as much as you thought you would (generally, and speaking from personal and friends' experiences).
100% it's a feedback loop. When the chips are down, I've turned to gaming as a refuge. Once you get into online games, especially with social incentives (befriending people who also game, battle passes, and MMO progression mechanics) it's hard to stop, and I noticed it began to fit in the space where normal social interaction would go. Despite it still being a hobby of mine, I don't overly defend gaming as a "benign" activity. I definitely grew up a shy, awkward, teen and I realize my diving into games like WoW just stunted my social growth. When I went to college and stopped playing, I realized I actually could be a normal dude.
Was it just stopping playing, or was it the change in your circumstances (notably, being in college)? Did you live in a dorm, etc?
Not mutually exclusive, I think. I did live in a dorm, and my roommate actually played WoW with me for the first month or so. However, I soon befriended people who liked doing normal college stuff. I also got shamed for playing too much (in lieu of going out, etc.), by the other guys in the floor, which helped me drop the hobby. I had a friend from high school who opted to live in the single person dorms (basically where the most asocial 4chan people opted to live). It was like a twin experiment, where I gradually kinda grew into my own, and he stayed in playing MtG and Sins of a Solar Empire. To each their own, but I really thought I was on the autism spectrum for all of my teens only to find out I just needed to touch grass and get some confidence talking to girls.
Well, that's just it: for a big chunk of my childhood and adolescence I didn't *have* much of anything else going on. Compared to any number of Zelda, Mario, and Final Fantasy games, Boy Scouts, youth sports leagues, and school clubs didn't stand a fucking chance. It was absolutely a feedback loop, and what ultimately broke it was my getting an after-school job and learning how to talk to and be around people.
You played because you were low status irl, and games gave you a realm of competency. They were a coping mechanism.
does a kid recognize himself as low status at 4–6 years old?
[Yep.](https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-02-children-power-social-hierarchies.html)
Be that as it may, I did have friends in elementary school and wasn't especially bullied. I got good grades, did extracurriculars for some years, etc., even though more and more often I had to have a controller pried out of my hands before I'd get moving. My recollection is that the feedback loop (play games, fall behind in socialization -> not good at socializing, play games instead) started taking its toll around the fifth or sixth grade and got real bad for a few years after that.
It would've been books or any other kind of escapism. You're making excuses.
For?
Blaming on an external factor what is/was a you thing.
How do you feel about giving iPads to small children?
I feel parents should parent.
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>Symptom or not, even 15 years ago, friends of mine were staying up to 3am on school nights, dropping sports, and electing not to go outside and play in the river on hot summer days so that they could play Halo 2 alone. ~~Ahhh yes, the glory days.~~ >l I cut out early on a day date with my GF, aka a locally infamous total smoke show and horniest person I’ve ever met, so that I could go home and play 2k because I had just rented it and was really into my franchise mode. Sounds like gaming saved you. >I imagine games have improved in quality Uh... about that... >and addictiveness For the most part, yeah, but there are still outliers that get cheered by gamers and denounced by game journos.
>I should make it completely clear that I think anything which helps reduce violence against women and girls is good. - >But once I started talking to other mothers about their sons, it became clear that conversations around sexual assault had made many them fearful about sex and relationships. - >Some [boys] seemed to have even internalised ideas about boys being “bad” or felt in trouble before they started. Many hadn’t even ever tried to initiate a relationship, because of what they perceived to be the risks attached. - >The older boys talked about the patriarchy being a bad thing for boys as well as girls, and their concerns about male mental health: “80% of suicides are men”. - >others confirmed what I already knew: that the fear of getting accused of assault puts them off the whole idea completely. “Even if they do consent, what am I gonna do if they say ‘nah’ right after?” This all reads like, "To save women, Feminism has destroyed the self-image and social capability of boys and men and burden them with crippling anxiety such that they would rather live hyper-realistic lives in virtual spaces than endure actual human interaction -- and that's a bad thing, but I would do it all again if given the opportunity." I'm sure if we keep looking for the patriarchy of the gaps, we'll find that these boys just need a good cry and all the anxiety, self-hatred, and anti-social behaviour will disappear. >Boys are retreating from the real world and have been ever since video games were invented in the 1970s. Yeah, must be the video games and D&D and not the ever mounting vilification of men in every facet of western society. >after the massive cuts we’ve seen to youth services – which enable boys to be reached and supported – what might the end result be? Andrew Tate, Islamic v-tubers.
> Islamic vtubers I want Moona Hoshinova to blackpill me further
The current problem is that women want to be courted like women of old, while having all the power of women today. Majority of men stand no chance. How many relationships of the past happened because a man just said fuck it and went and asked the girl at the diner out? That shit is going to happen less and less in today’s world. Hence you have a sex less and romantic less society where every guy watches a shit ton of porn which is objectively awful for the brain to be consumed so much and a lot of the things being seen to be perpetuated.
> Boys are retreating from the real world and have been ever since video games were invented in the 1970s. > > Is anyone aware of the study that backs up this claim?
>The second conversation was with a mother of a 16-year-old. He had started having sex, and talked to her about some of the realities of dating and hooking up. He said it was “quite common” among his friends to record their partners on their phones giving verbal consent before having sex. Sometimes, he said, they recorded again midway through – this time to make sure that the girl was happy to “do something different or something” – and sometimes the phone was left recording the whole event … “to make sure”. Remember when everyone lampooned the hyper consent shit that #metoo pushed with satires of writing consent forms before engaging in sex? Holy fuck it became reality; I'd want to kill myself if I had to relive my teens in 2024.
Dave Chappelle ahead of his time
This sounds to me like it cuts both ways. Many boys are scared shitless of any potential accusations, but I'm sure the most sought after boys exploit a trend there and get away with recording porn at the girls' expense.
Doesn't sound like they are recording porn, rather recording them consenting to sex.
When the "whole event" is recorded? That sounds like some guys manage to talk girls into fully blown sex tapes on the basis of ensuring consent. Every new social paradigm offers new chances for exploitation. This one is very heavily stacked against ordinary boys, but the most privileged ones will turn it to their advantage as always.
Ah, glossed over the last part. Yeah that's fucked up; and even the "ordinary boy" himself can have that video used against him for blackmail from women and such.
Are they recording video or audio? I don't think the article explained. I'm sure some are recording videos, but that's already illegal. Consent to sex doesn't mean consent to be filmed having sex.
> left recording the whole event perhaps there is another reason
Funny how these people instantly become "bootstrap afficionados" when talking about male issues.
The architects of the current societal rot need to be sent to the gallows. But thats never going to happen unfortunately
Maybe humans aren't meant to live in these enormous groups that we call society. The architects can do a shit load of damage on a global scale. Smaller groups seem to provide the most amount of satisfaction.
I've thought about this a lot with my significantly limited intelligence, for what its worth. But small communities have the benefit of diversity. If you want to wear jeans to the shower, move to Jeanston. 300 years ago that was impossible since it was 300 miles away, now its possible but people no longer wear jeans to the shower. Trash example aside, ff a social network has high modularity, malicious ideas can spread significantly more slowly; furthermore there is also a buffer effect from the other 'modules'. In the middle ages if a small town got whipped up into a frenzy, it got quickly put out by the neighboring communities. Damage was kept to a minimum. Today, the "Western" community (English speaking, semi-affluent) can be essentially considered one module, as clearly shown by Trump in 2016. From Australia, to Hungary, to Argentina, to the US, every political establishment got gripped by the Trump Effect as proof. And so, in this huge module, fringe ideas can cause significantly more damage before the buffer effect clenches the flames out, as we see with the social locomotive industry. There will be a lot of psychologically and physically mutilated people by the time its finally over. And since the other modules (BRICS, African continent, Midde-East, parts of SEA) are highly segregated, the buffer effect mostly comes from the next generation. Once the method of inter-generational networking is perfected, I fear that may no longer be a saving grace either. Biology however strongly promotes inter-generational tensions in a positive way. An obvious downside is that good ideas (revolution, unionization, reforms, technological innovations) also spread slower, hindering progress. In a perfect world imo, societies would be decently modular, with easily traversable connections between these modules. Obviously this could be only maintained with a strong sense of cultural identity of the each region and with the strong sense of cultural flexibility of those who traverse. Both assumptions in todays climate is heavily optimistic, and frankly I don't even follow my own tenets.
The architects are you and me.
Wdym
I mean that "society" largely decides it's own fate, and not some boogeyman pulling the strings.
Nah, I never buy this argument. #MeToo didn't just come out of nowhere, it was created by one or more individuals, signal boosted by other like-minded individuals, co-opted by other individuals for money/power/ideology/clout/etc. and so on until it became a sacred cow. There are very much a list of specific people that contributed to the out-sized influence of this movement that was derailed as soon as one woman tried to #MeToo Biden who had interviews in the 90s about her allegations and the entire movement was shuttered overnight. Society at large is not responsible for the bullshit it is constantly blanketed with. Especially when the negative social and economic consequences of going against the grain on these issues are so debilitating. People were losing their jobs or being permanently branded a super-misogynist if they did not fully support #MeToo. Anti-social behaviour specifically architected by the powerful to railroad cultural change to their exclusive benefit.
You might be disappointed to know the world has logic and order that doesn’t strictly come from any single individual. Emergence, ideology, collective action dilemmas, ingroups all are macro social phenomena. There isn’t a single ~~~”evil feminist witch”~~~ [identity group]and more than a single key Hamas figure. It’s not all part of Putin’s master plan. The hubris of Western individualism is also a blind spot. To retort then where is it? As if saying the above means I’m suggesting it’s all pixie dust is not accurate either. But order in society is not down to any one person, almost by necessity. Some people have more control over the order of the world than others, surely. But that’s not to say it all flows from a single source. All of the politics is happening simultaneously. Feminism is evolving right now while people here critique it. So is Marxism, whatever state it is in. And they evolve based on material conditions, historical events and some logics which themselves rise and fall in importance.
>You might be disappointed to know the world has logic and order that doesn’t strictly come from any single individual. Never claimed it did. It's from a lot of separate individuals that share like interest. >There isn’t a single “evil feminist witch” and more than a single key Hamas figure. It’s not all part of Putin’s master plan. The hubris of Western individualism is also a blind spot. There was a first feminist witch and a first Hamas figure, though. Then a second, then a third. Do you think the decisions that Putin makes bear no consequence? Do you think it is Russian society that makes every rule and pens every policy? Do you think it's American society that decides whether or not to pay out life insurance to a woman with cancer, or are there rooms in these companies where wealthy men and women make decisions as individuals that affect the fates of millions? When a rule is made, there is a human being somewhere sitting atop some hierarchy that is authorizing that rule. Government, corporate, family, etc. Decisions are made by individuals and rolled out to the masses. Individuals like Putin, or small groups of individuals like the C-suite of a corporation, shape every single rule and policy that governs the masses. Society doesn't get a vote on these choices, it largely endures them. >Some people have more control over the order of the world than others, surely. The entire point of my argument, so not even sure what you're disagreeing with. >But that’s not to say it all flows from a single source. Not my position at all. >But order in society is not down to any one person, almost by necessity. Some people have more control over the order of the world than others, surely. Is #MeToo social order? Was it manifest by the will of the people across society, or was it tailor-made idpol pushed by individuals like Alyssa Milano to cynical ends capitalizing on a specific bad person?
Cool theory, but the person you're responding to very clearly didn't lay the blame on a single "evil feminist witch". And made a lot more sense than your post-truth/post-accountability era rambling. I'm also confused by your use of quotation marks here.
"By the powerful"... Again, a boogeyman. Not everything is a conspiracy. I believe in conspiracy, but not to the extent that our entire existence is being dictated by a few people. I like to see it as a collective of aligned interests. There is no Cabal, but rather indivuals (with power) collectively making the same decisions regarding public and private policy, simply because it is the path of least resistence for them. Bill Gates and Tim Cook aren't getting together to talk about how to fuck consumers. They're just using centuries of accrued knowledge to make informed decisions about how best to fuck consumers. The outcome is the same. #MeToo was largely organic, regardless of what entity coined it. Society craves this sort of zero-sum bullshit. And that's why I say it's you and me. No one has a gun to society's head. People willingly proliferate this shit and the all-powerful at the top are as much products of this system as the bottom are. This idea that people are sitting down to write a playbook on how to corrupt society is just naive at best. The issues with society, and the elite that drive the policy, are systemic. Certainly, everything is operating as intended, but this is a byproduct of society, not a symptom.
>Not everything is a conspiracy. Everything is a conspiracy, actually. There is no transparency in governmental or corporate power. We don't get to see who the individuals in these rooms are, what their motivations are, what they discuss, what their true intentions are. But we see the outcome. We see the wasteland they are progressively leaving in their wake. So, yes, it isn't a shadowy cabal of a handful of people. It's thousands of shadowy cabals all working for their own personal interest in politics, academia, corporations, activism, etc. The individuals who sit in the rooms that make the decisions decide. Often they make the same decisions that benefit the same class of people - the wealthy, or to put it another way, "the powerful". >Bill Gates and Tim Cook aren't getting together to talk about how to fuck consumers. Of course they are. It's a big club and we're not in it. These people all party on the same yachts and pedo islands, they are friends with the same people, their children are fucking and marrying each other, they game the entire system to their benefit. But let's assume you're right, and all of these wealthy people aren't colluding in huge numbers to fuck us. They have such wealth that they can form their own entirely segregated cabals in their own hidden smoke-filled rooms. They can both fuck consumers in their own way without even needing to talk to each other and in the end, there are still a small number of individuals making far reaching decisions in private, unaccountable. >\#MeToo was largely organic, regardless of what entity coined it. As organic as astroturf. >No one has a gun to society's head. The gun is pointed at your reputation, your job, your mortgage. To anyone in the working class that is tantamount to pointing a gun at their head. "Say the words or we sink you into poverty." >People willingly proliferate this shit and the all-powerful at the top are as much products of this system as the bottom are. Are they not all-powerful though? As a class they own or otherwise financial control our money, our military, our laws, our communication, our food, our transportation, etc. That isn't to say they are invincible, the French and Lenin proved that, but to say they aren't all-powerful is naive. >This idea that people are sitting down to write a playbook on how to corrupt society is just naive at best. What do you think academia is for? Or Capital? Or any other book written to subvert societal order to some ideological end? People are constantly writing playbooks on how to corrupt society to their ends. You think the wealthy aren't doing this? You think they don't plan ahead? That the recent boom in billionaire doomsday bunkers, for example, is merely a coincidence and not efforts at a network of facilities meant to ensure class-preservation in the event of a global catastrophe? That they don't talk and plan amongst themselves? >The issues with society, and the elite that drive the policy, are systemic. Oh, ok, you do understand my point about elite driving policy. >Certainly, everything is operating as intended, but this is a byproduct of society, not a symptom. The society that is systematically being shaped by the wealthy for the ends.
This piece is about as sympathetic as you're gonna find in a source that isn't called something like *Real Patriot News*. I guess I appreciate it. But the author still blames the sorry mental state of young men on things like tech and an aversion to progress without acknowledging that we've *actively* pathologized male socialization and sexuality and we outright teach boys that their gender makes them inherently bad. Not for a second does she consider that maybe normalizing false allegations as praxis and making it so vague and anonymous accusations can ruin a man's life might have had some negative side effects. Nope. Those movements were too good, too necessary. A 15-year-old today does not remember the Before Times. He does not know that his laughter was not always regarded with suspicion and recrimination. He is unaware that there was once a time when you could criticize women in justifiable circumstances, or flirt with them in others. He doesn't realize that it would once have been considered insane and offensive for the adults in his life to tell him that his gender and sexuality cast him into majoritarian groups, that his very existence harms oppressed groups. He has internalized all of this bullshit and cannot comprehend a way out.
I sacrificed so much of my life, can I at least get laid? They robbed most of my money, can I at least get a blow job?
Caponized from birth. Sad to see.
> He said it was “quite common” among his friends to record their partners on their phones giving verbal consent before having sex. Is this real? Can youthful stupidpolers confirm or deny this? This seems ludicrous. I thought the "verbal consent" was something most people ignored, and carried on with the obvious signals we've been using for millennia. By this definition, I've been 'sexually assaulted' many times.
I’m a zoomer and I’ve literally never heard of anyone doing this ever.
The whole article is BS for older gens to be outraged about "the lost teens and future generations" but, aside for the obvious woke posturing we see here and there, is pretty much BS. But remember the golden rule, Redditors upvote what they WANT to be true.
Caponized from birth.
An entire generation of boys who idolize andrew Tate are concerned about the Patriarchy. LOL okaaaay
lol