I want to state up first I get it, I'm on the right side, most of these men are awful, and every man-o-sphere influence is awful. Andrew Tate belongs in a 6 foot deep hole, or a hole in the back of his head. Joe Rogan should be sent to the Hague.
But when dudes complain, even about genuine issues, we have a tendency to just attack them for it. If a guy complains that being short can kinda suck (and it can. More so than just getting girls, it can hurt your career and everything.) People, even leftists, tend to just call them a sad manlet or something. Same thing with dudes complaining they can't get a girlfriend, are they not alienated under capitalism? I'm not saying we have to coddle the incels, but we could do better at presenting a future, a better one, maybe?
The discourse about height, and dick size, are both stupid but here (in this safe space) can I admit that there's a point to both? They affect people, it's a real thing.
And back to the Joe Rogan's, I feel bad that men and boys get sucked into that. I have some pity for them, these desperate losers.
Anyways, Im sure I'm going to think this is dumb, but I just can't help but feel like there's a gigantic community of extremely disaffected people that while I mostly loathe, I also really feel bad for. I don't think it would've taken much to push me there, I grew up in a good environment with some good role models, but without that, left to the wolves, I'm as susceptible to the grifters as everyone is.
My brother was in a group chat of twitter people and tried to explain his issues and was then told his issues don't matter because he is a man. This chat was a bunch of teenagers, but it has fucked him and still impacts him.
This was honestly an invaluable lesson. Nobody gives a shit about men when we have real problems. Most of the women in our lives weaponize the slightest hint of weakness against us. Man loses their job? Divorced. It's fucking rough out here, which is why we're killing ourselves. Because if we say anything all we get is either crickets, or a full ration of shit about everyone else having it harder.
This isn't like my issue or anything, but from afar it does seem frustrating that there are legitimate grievances in the men's rights community that are interesting and very compatible with feminism, but because the community has so many toxic dildos in it discussing any of those grievances serves as a red flag for being an MRA psycho.
I imagine it is like being a serious academic who happens to have good historical evidence that there was actually only 9 million people who died in the Holocaust, not 12 but you could never actually share your research with anyone because they would just lump you in as a Holocaust denier.
this is why conceiving of 'men's rights' as dichotomous or separate from feminism (which is not 'women's rights') is so harmful. legitimate complaints about the standards patriarchy imposes on men are folded into reaction against femmes instead of against patriarchy, the actual instigator
I think they just used kind of weird example but I always like more holocaust facts? I guess?
Yeah a lot of short guys still do fine look at [insert list of famous guys or anecdote about one friend]
Good post. Patriarchy hurts us all, cis men (and even tall, packing, white cis men) included. Even those who largely benefit from it still have legitimate grievances, and the reason that so many cis men gravitate rightwards is that the rightist platform actually addresses those grievances (terribly of course). Many spaces on the left ignore or belittle the legitimate grievances of men in order to center the discussion around their advantages under patriarchy. That's technically having your priorities straight, but if men have brushes with leftist discourse and are made to feel lesser over their patriarchy-built insecurities, they will absolutely not be drawn in.
Discourse about how patriarchy largely benefits men is still necessary, but the time to bring it up is not when a human being is expressing vulnerability about how they have been made to feel lesser by the impacts of patriarchy. This is true whether you're trying to recruit for a platform, or just trying to be a decent human being. Dick size and height are two classic examples.
As always when any remotely related discussion comes up, I'm gonna plug The Will to Change by Bell Hooks.
Seconding The Will to Change, it’s a really wonderful read. It nicely articulates why the patriarchy is harmful to men without talking down to anyone.
I have said repeatedly that there is much need in the left for a healthy version of machismo (as Che would have put it) to return. One that acts as a role model for men while also not carrying patriarchal or anti-lgbt attitudes. What we seem to lack however are examples to elevate as these machismo leftist role models, besides :gigachad: that is.
Such role models would then work on a healthy leftist masculinity, undercutting the right-influencer manosphere influencers with a healthy leftist equivalent.
Che is absolutely an icon we should all try to look like him.
take me down to the femboy Hooters where the grass is dank and the girls ride scooters!
Maybe but he's focused on non-male issues. What's needed is a set of leftists who do "machismo" alongside a focus on what the alienated crowd of young men/boys care about to compete with and undercut the manosphere. Generally I think of this as a sort of leftist ladbible style of influencer group, where the main focus is a "dudes rock" sort of thing with leftism being incidentally injected wherever necessary and manosphere influencers being heavily denounced but not to a point of whiny internet drama because that wouldn't be machismo and anyone with real machismo ought to be well above that kind of shit and it screams insecurity. The balance that's required is pretty delicate.
I don't know, as you rightly point out the problem the left has is where we're going to get the funding we need from to expand. I'm actually with Richard Wolff on this one, we need more coops and we need those coops to enter into a dialectical struggle against non-coops where they then start pouring money into leftist causes as a matter of competition. We don't have things like bank robbing as an option anymore.
An alternative here is figuring out how to create more class traitors who pour their wealth into the left, I've been thinking about that topic for a while. A few truly dedicated class traitors pouring millions into the left would be game changing.
100% correct and based. I get annoyed sometimes because I see female presenting(or perhaps just appearing) people say things like "it's not my job to help emotionally stunted men." Which yeah, I guess technically it isn't, it is unfair that a lot of women have been used as crutches for men and that isn't good, and you don't always have the energy for it. That's all fair, but it was someone's job, and that person failed. This is a hard problem to fix alone, you cannot get better at relating to other people and seeing them as human without other people being present. And are they going to talk to other men about it? The people that in many cases berated and hurt them to instill this belief, this emotional weakness? It's not any one person's job to fix a broken man they are around, but it is all of our jobs to help each other. If you saw someone bleeding out in the streets, would your first thought be "it's not my job to get them to the hospital"? I'm not expecting every woman or female presenting person to out themselves in harms way to help every man they meet that isn't perfect, I get lack of emotional space, personal trauma or just general distaste for the work, and genuinely valuing their own time, but the smugness some people post about this with is disgusting. You should never be proud you saw someone hurt and didn't help them.
And the doubling down on sexist language towards men. It's not okay to make fun of a guy for being short, or not being muscular, or being shy or nervous, or any of the other things which it is just mean to mock people for. It doesn't break down gender walls, it reinforces them. It also reinforces transphobic rhetoric. If being a short man is bad, or not having facial hair, or not being muscular, and so on, for men but not for women, seems like anyone with those traits who wants to live as a man would feel like garbage all the time. It also breeds the idea men are stronger and more brutish than woman, and deserve more abuse because they can take it. The fact that I, living as a man, have been called sexist because when a woman insulted me I insisted her back is absurd. She is not porcelain and I am not steel. Anyone who disagrees with that is not a feminist.
I'm lucky to have had supportive men and women growing up, and now have people of all genders around me who encourage emotional vulnerability and openness, and don't expect stock masculinity from me. I wish everyone had this opportunity. Until they do, it's my job to try and provide it for them, so they don't fall to the manosphere. Because it is tempting, it's easy to blame all your problems on others if they seem adversarial to you, and society blame your problems on them, or their problems on you when you're still growing. The solution is the same as it always is to us as leftists: we reach out, educate, and build solidarity.
If being a short man is bad, or not having facial hair, or not being muscular, and so on, for men but not for women, seems like anyone with those traits who wants to live as a man would feel like garbage all the time. It also breeds the idea men are stronger and more brutish than woman, and deserve more abuse because they can take it. The fact that I, living as a man, have been called sexist because when a woman insulted me I insisted her back is absurd. She is not porcelain and I am not steel. Anyone who disagrees with that is not a feminist.
I feel this on a deep level. I lost a lot of "friends" years ago over it. I'd been putting on some weight because of depression and age catching up to me, and somebody I hadn't seen for a while showed up and said:
"Whoa, damn dude, you're really packing on the pounds!"
To which I responded:
"Thanks! Your moustache is coming in great! Hitting menopause already?"
Probably not my most gracious moment, in retrospect. But they're all still friends and I'm not after that incident.
I think what you did was perfect for the situation, and you're better off without them.
I didn't realize how much had been bubbling up inside me about this.
I didnt even touch on race but Im glad you did because it is a deep well that deserves light.
You're right. I'm white, don't have good dating app profiles, and my received "likes" are disproportionately nonwhite compared to the profiles I see. Reason #99 the apps are bad: they take nascent social racial hierarchy for attraction, make it explicit, and reinforce it. Won't write out all the nasty stereotypes this implies.
Sorry to derail this great post but this comm is a space for men and masculine of center enbies so if that doesn't apply to you please consider the space.
Also this comm could use a moderator and if you Re interested please reach out.
The correct take is "Men and women are both suffering"
Men have some serious problems, like being more likely to be victims of violence and getting harsher prison sentences for the same crimes.
When stats show blacks get harsher prison sentences or suffer more violence, we'd rightly call it an injustice.
I mean men and women both have specific problems. Don't accept the attempts to dismiss men's problems.
Yeah, for sure. I think men simply don't get taught or given the tools to express the pain put on them by alienation without turning to the worst scape goats, women understand how patriarchy hurts them but men don't. Men get that the height thing is hurtful but they don't really band together to change results.
Real men organize the working class across all international and intersectional lines, to unite to overthrow the dictatorship of capital, establish the dictatorship of the proletariat, and begin building Communism.
Yeah, this has been an ongoing struggle at least as long as I've been in feminist spaces (one would assume much longer). I remember it getting rehashed many times back on ShitRedditSays, back when that was a relevant place. And I agree, Hexbear is kind of shitty about men's issues - not the worst by far, but also worse than SRS was ten years ago, so nothing to be proud of.
Body shaming isn't good, no matter how many people are about to jump out of the woodwork to tell me they only do it to acceptable targets (fuck off with that bully logic).
Men should be able to wear colorful clothing without society judging them. "just be queer" isn't actual advice (some unfortunate sods just aren't born that way). Telling people "ignore what society thinks" is ignoring the problem in the first place.
Societal expectations that men are stoic islands with no emotions or needs are, indeed, really fucked up and damaging.
You don't have to have a solution to these problems, and if you don't, the best thing to say is "yeah that sucks," or "I've been there," not "not a real problem" (fuck off), or "women have it worse" (yeah we know).
There's a big obvious difference between MRA types and just men talking honestly about how the patriarchy affects them negatively - MRAs don't actually want to fix these things, but instead to use them as a cudgel to tell GSMs their problems are fake. If the conclusion someone is pushing isn't "uppity women should know their place" then it's probably genuine. And yes, you can tell MRA types to fuck off, if they show up.
It is a shame that we don't have a leftist, feminist, positive example of masculinity to point people at. I agree with folks here that it'd be a worthwhile project. We also talked about it back on SRS 10 years ago and nobody has gotten it off the ground. Do it if you think you can. If it helps, I think the most obvious starting point for that is some dudes running a fitness youtube channel.
One simple thing that SRS did that Hexbear doesn't is to call out gender policing (:gender-policing:). Dropping instances of gender policing in the dunk tank would probably help people internalize that this is a bad thing that should be called out.
It is a shame that we don’t have a leftist, feminist, positive example of masculinity to point people at.
Abdullah Öcalan?
Fred Rogers?
idk i feel like there's nothing besides the aesthetic to gender, all the positive traits of masculinity or femininity are just human things that any human can embody and we have no cultural baggage in the west for other genders. There's some aesthetic norms for androgyny i guess, but the established norms of masculinity are temporal and culturally contingent like westerners used to think pink was manly because it's a shade of red, and 100 years ago we used to dress little boys in dresses because of convenience.
You guys might like The Art of Manliness blog, it's packed with a lot of information on useful skills and it explicitly tells anyone who thinks that all they need to do to get laid is to be mean-spirited and physically attractive to go fuck themselves.
If you're on reddit you might like checking out r/MensLib. One of the few bright spots on that hell site.
I try to avoid Reddit like the plague.... Except for the circle jerk boards
a non-chuddy city subreddit? that's crazy. is it not just another car-centric suburban hell?
Yeah personally I'm not a big fan of dick shaming. It just feels like an extension of body shaming in general and something we should be above as leftists. Though I will say it's ridiculous how men today who are 5'9", my own height, now think that's somehow short and not the norm for north american men. Hollywood, porn, capitalism in general have skewed the fuck out of people's perception of reality.
There is a wider discrepancy of power amongst men than there is within any other gender. If you average it out and compare it, it's almost ubiquitously higher than the others, but the intra-gender spread is incredibly wide and this causes a cascade of problems.
That's about as far as I'd take my analysis.
I think this is a solid analysis and it adds to the conversation.
yeah, men being the vast majority of CEOs and senators didn't help me get a job when i was 18 and still identified etc
Contralib made at least one good 8 hour or so video essay about this. The fact is that it's NOT easy to be a man, things like dating are hard on guys these days.
I have to trust that you're not an mra because you're going to be making a lot of the same points up to a point.
A lot of this is trust. Please all of hexbear go off on how it's not easy to be a guy these days because I trust you to have these convos.
I mean functionally the reason people get sucked into fascism is because they point out real problems that exist, so theres going to be some overlap. Luckily We have hexbear and we should all have a baseline level of trust that someone here is, you know, a comrade.
