Also, literally who cares. This isn't politics. Zoomers and millenials are very left-wing and that hasn't changer significantly in recent years. This isn't happening at scales that are shifting the political landscape. Idk why there is an obsession with this shit.
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what if instead of books about working out and hating women, we made books about working out and not hating women?? anyone ever had this idea before?
Fr the suggestions I see for creating a "positive masculinity" always make me groan, because they always go on to describe behaviors and values that aren't specifically masculine. the only reason a man or boy would need to view them as masculine to pursue them is if he felt his masculinity was under threat. The right affirms this position and the left necessarily rejects it. Our self-help, such that it is, is concerned with how to become a better person, which is distinct from how to become a better man.
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Advice on how to overcome toxic masculinity does indeed make one a better person, not a better man. It is still a gender specific problem, though. And when we want to adress it and do something about it, we can't do that without men.
Unfortunately the best advice i have to offer in that regard is "just stop wanting to be a dude, this shit crumbles immediately when you realize you've been a girl all along". That obviously doesn't help cis dudes, even though it was a complete game changer for me and how i relate to people, how i take care of my friendships, how i access and regulate my emotions, if and how i seek help when i'm in trouble, how other people treat me and also how i talk to women i want to date (or at least write smut with). And i can say with 100% certainty that being molded into an emotionally dead, constantly guarded shell of a human being constantly fighting for control is literally killing men. It's just very difficult to adress that when the same molding also makes men kill women before they kill themselves. This is the central contradiction of the left's ability to tackle men's issues: We recognize the privilege men have, and they do, cismasculinity is the default gender in our society and on top of nearly all hierarchies. But we struggle to address the fact that this privilege comes with a price for them because capitalism gives you nothing for free. Boys get broken until they can become the oppressors that capital needs to manage its institutions, let its political power grow out of the barrel of the gun and stratify society in ways that are conducive to the egotistical nightmare worldview of eternal oneupmanship that is the ideological backbone of the capitalist hustle. This is on purpose. And we cannot fight patriarchy, and by extension capitalism, if we do not heal men from this hellish mindset.
Men want to get the girl, not be the girl.
Silly boys, why not both?
Yoda voice: "and this is why you fail"
Well yeah, this probably wouldn't work as well for guys as it does for me. Like i said, i can't really help people who are men and need to maintain some kind of male gender role. I can just relate to how being expected to perform as a man fucks people up.
I guess my corollary to this, being somebody that is deeply entrenched within exactly the kind of personal hell that you're describing, is that I don't really think that you're going to fix or solve the mindset issue without first solving the material issue.
The fact is, or at least my experience is that the reason men adopt the mindset that they do is because it's required of them to actually compete, to keep themselves "alive", and to meet their needs within society as it is presently constituted. Unless you can directly prove that they can still achieve all those things, that they can still sustain themselves & exist as a meaningful member of society right now without having to compete in the ways that they do, then you don't have any real basis by which to argue against it other than acknowledging the fact that it's a fuckin' miserable existence that hurts themselves & others. Which yes it is, but the alternative is material squalor & total social disenfranchisement, you in fact might as well just fucking kill yourself in that scenario because you're going to die early, wretched, alone & unremarked upon anyways.
And like no you can't reasonably expect most people to be willing to take that option; that is IMO the problem with, and to some extent the paucity of the critique of Toxic Masculinity. It refuses to acknowledge that there are real material reasons why it exists; and it's not just some kind of bizarre cognitohazard that propagates completely independent of the social or material reality of the moment.
Because some people (not me) actually like being male and want to continue doing so and still be seen as a good person. "Alpha Chad" mindset says toxicity is inherent to men and to be toxic. Some women (typically terfs) treat being male as if it makes you a rape demon. Under both these systems you can not be a decent human and a man simultaneously. Is it not wrong for someone to want both masculinity and humanity as part of themselves?
well here's how i do it: if someone hates me for being a man, i ignore them.
i'm not sayin it feels good when people are mean online, but there are solutions available.
Exactly. I've worked through this shit myself. Also good on you for being an emotionally mature and well adjusted human being. These are not things that teenage boys and young men who hear right wing propaganda are.
They exist irl too
I doubt people who say the left is mistreating men could point to any specific thing. Or any evidence that men are leaving the left. It's just a general vibe made entirely by online echochambers.
Men aren't leaving the left over this, but men who are unhappy with their material conditions, who might otherwise get pipelined left, are getting pipelined right by this shit instead. It's not a loss, but a lost opportunity.
And you're right that the left isn't mistreating these guys, we're just giving them nothing. If a guy starts googling around about how to find a girlfriend, he gets either bland platitudes or a fast track to the alt right. There is no purpose-built "how to talk to women" equivalent on the left.
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The problem is that social media algorithms will only boost the simplistic and hateful right wing content and won’t boost good l ft wing self help stuff.
It is mostly an internet thing. Are there feminists who hate men, and think them to be nothing but rapacious orcs and demons, incapable of human emotions? Yes. Is this what feminism is? No. Do both the aforementioned feminists and fascists portray them as the face of leftist ideology? Yes. Just talk to actual people who have actual political opinions and not brain worms.
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When men post their defeated takes online there is always a contingent of ghouls there to delight in the suffering and toast with their "I drink male tears" coffee cups.
Divorced dads get a lot of abuse on this site too.
Yeah, that's a thing. Is it oppression? No. Does it fucking suck to know you are considered subhuman by people even if you will never meet them? Yes. Saying "men are oppressed because angry feminists on Twitter" or "get over it because you're not oppressed, it's men's fault anyway" misses the point. Shit can suck without being oppression, and a lot of left discourse misses that.
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I don't think you understand the right. They don't hit you with that stuff until much later. They always offer community first. Food, a place to hang out, and friends are very hard to turn down for younger people. Just look at the hillel movement on college campuses. They're all about a big tent approach, and then they brainwash you later.
And that hasn't been my experience with the left at all. Every time I have ever tried to join a left community in meatspace it's a bunch of snarky, judgmental, dysfunctional assholes that do nothing but infight with a side of love triangles and polycules. I'm substantially older than most of the people here and there were two earlier periods in my life when I would have realized I was a communist but was driven away by so called leftists that expect you to meet them on their level, with their language, on day one. This is a pretty common experience for people my age.
The big thing that isn't talked about is learning social skills. I think a lot of people are way behind on that. But unfortunately, due to being context dependent, it's harder to teach someone social skills than it is to teach them how to learn a hobby or an exercise routine. Honestly, that's what I think people are talking about when they talk about how there isn't enough advice for men about this.
And the red pill types, while they hide it in so much misogyny, pseudo-evopsych, and a bunch of shit, does actually have some good advice on how to learn social skills hidden in them. Now, even when they give good advice, the reasons why they say it works is completely wrong. One example of this ks in the Mystery Method, when the reader is interested in a woman but she's talking with a group of friends, the reader is advised to talk to all of her friends to make her jealous. That is good advice, but hidden behind someone who thinks relationships are adversarial. The reason that works is not because it would make her jealous, but because she likely wants to talk to her friends, and she still can while talking to you, plus, if her friends approve of you, she's more likely to.
Social skills are learnable, maybe we need to do more advice on that. Plus, I mean, how can we ever expect to organize if nobody knows how to socialize or build community?
:this: :this: :this:
the left is not solving all their problems by magic, because that's the standard i guess