A lot of people like to blame FBI director Jim Comey's last minute announcement about Hillary Clinton's Emails on Anthony Weiner's laptop late in the 2016 Presidential campaign and The Supreme Courts 5-4 decision to stop The Florida Recounts for Hillary Clinton and Al Gore losing very winnable Elections. My question is which action was more unprecedented by our Legal Institutions?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGP7bie3Us0&t=210s

Looks like it shows that with the right stimulus, the brain can switch over gender identity then revert it back again within a short space of time.

Researchers from the Kinsey Institute are seeking participants for a roughly 25-minute online study of sexual initiation and peer opinions.

You are eligible if you...

• Identify as a man
• Are 18-30 years old
• Have been sexually active with another person before

Participation will include

• 1-time completion of an online survey taking roughly 25 minutes
• In exchange for your time, you may enter for a chance to win one of four $50 Amazon.com gift cards
• For more information or to participate, click here

We often hear about how low it is for men? But is it high for women?

What are your thoughts? What are your experiences?

As a guy who never had a serious until his early 30s I can recall the chatter around being a single guy.

"Something must be wrong with him."

"He must be gay." (coincidentally back in my tiny home town a rumor did get around that I was banging the husband of a married couple I hung out with.)

"Must be afraid of commitment."

"Man-child" (I know this is overused but it gets used for this context a lot.)

In short when man gets to a certain age and is single there is an assumption that something is wrong with that man.

And as we have seen in recent years things really haven't gotten much better. These days when men decide to not get married a misogynistic intent is pretty much assumed on their part.

After living this reality and seeing the effort going into being sympathetic to women who aren't married by a certain age (this post brought to you by pondering over this article: https://getpocket.com/explore/item/why-are-increasing-numbers-of-women-choosing-to-be-single?) I do wonder what it would take to remove the negative stigmas of being an unmarried man of a certain age.

​

Any ideas?

I happened across this article in the Times today: What Do Women Want? For Men to Get Covid Vaccines. As the Biden administration seeks to get most adults vaccinated by summer, men are holding back. (link is non-paywalled)

Excerpt, emphasis mine:

Women are getting vaccinated at a far higher rate — about 10 percentage points — than men, even though the male-female divide is roughly even in the nation’s overall population. The trend is worrisome to many, especially as vaccination rates have dipped a bit recently.

The reasons for the U.S. gender gap are many, reflecting the role of women in specific occupations that received early vaccine priority, political and cultural differences and long standing patterns of women embracing preventive care more often generally than men.

The gap exists even as Covid-19 deaths worldwide have been about 2.4 times higher for men than among women. And the division elucidates the reality of women’s disproportionate role in caring for others in American society.

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The article also links to this interesting article at the CDC: Men and COVID-19: A Biopsychosocial Approach to Understanding Sex Differences in Mortality and Recommendations for Practice and Policy Interventions, which examines both biological and behavioral reasons why men might be more than twice as likely to die from COVID as women.

Since this sub focuses on gender, I'll list some of the behavioral differences in both articles:

• Men are more likely to downplay the severity of the virus and the risk to their health
• Men are less likely to avoid large gatherings or close physical proximity
• Men have higher rates of tobacco and alcohol consumption, which are linked to increased mortality from COVID
• Men have lower rates of handwashing and mask wearing
• Men are less likely to seek preventative care (like vaccines)

Both articles also suggest possible gender-based outreach approaches, to encourage men to engage in more health-protective measures and to seek preventative care at greater rates -- I'll leave you to read, rather than summarizing here.

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What do you think? Consider this especially as part of the bigger picture: we know that men on average have shorter lifespans than women do, and this is due to both biological and behavioral factors. COVID mortality rates and vaccination rates seem to reflect this larger trend. What social factors play a role in these gendered behavioral differences? How can we encourage men to engage in more behaviors that are beneficial to their health?

In the last few days, a social media uproar has arisen over the tragic disappearance (and subsequently confirmed death) of Sarah Everard. The story gained traction in a way that blindsided many people, with international media attention throughout the western world.

If I intended to write an op-ed, I would point to a series of articles, tweets, videos, etc. that reflect the gender politics of this situation, specifically their claims about men. (I've had an influx of men reporting that the current climate is driving their suicidal ideation, so please respect my decision not to hyperlink the relevant material.)

I'll paraphrase a sample of those claims:

• All men need therapy—even ostensibly "good" men—as they're burdening women
• Men are complicit enablers of crimes of this nature
• Men don't take women's victimization seriously (or recognize their humanity)
• There's an unwritten cultural constraint on women being out and about freely, especially at night
• Men need to better themselves

I'm not going to address each of these claims; their overall merit is less important than the dynamic, and that's the reason for my post's title.

One of the most fiendish aspects of gender issues is that gendered expectations are both reactionary and inextricably bound, i.e., changing one set necessarily affects the other. This defines the down-to-detail struggles with navigating these issues—employment, education, dating, recreation, childrearing, etc.—beyond a simple "abolish gender and do as you please," which isn't quite practical as a solution.

Now, if you're an American black male, you've likely encountered nonblack people who expect you to modulate your behavior to allay their fears. However, this has significant negative effects and is indeed recognized as not only a cognitive burden but also a "soft ban" from certain public and private spaces.

The current charged discourse around men's role in allaying women's fears affirms behavioral modification. It also departs from race in both proportion of the population it affects and the manner in which it affects them since androphobia is, of course, much broader than racism.

It's easy to condemn this because of the mismatch between fear of victimization and actual rates of victimization, arguing that no one is entitled to arbitrary levels of safety (emotionally). I don't entirely disagree, but there's a deeper issue than prevalence: fear of escalation. In other words, it's not some vague fear of a low-probability independent event that's stomach-sinking; it's the fear of increasing vulnerability once things get hairy.

Consider the following...

Lewd comment (gross) -> starts noticeably following (sketchy) -> actually grabbing her arm (terrifying)

For a petite woman uninterested in going Rambo, this is probabilistically a much more awful situation to manage if it escalates fully.

In the past, I've had a few men pooh-pooh this type of thinking, which is odd since it often applies to their concerns re: false accusations...

Lewd comment (gross) -> starts noticeably making sexual advances (sketchy) -> actually claiming unwanted sexual activity occurred (terrifying)

Though not a silver bullet, targeting the escalatory behaviors might help strike a balance between creating an outwardly safe environment without requiring overbearing good-guy signaling. Judging by the conversations I've seen these past few days, it's clear that just throwing out competing figures isn't working. After all, cherry-picked stats are often part of inflammatory rhetoric...

What strategies would you propose? I'd love to see everyone else's thoughts.

As promised, we are turning the sub over to a democratic process. The first step of this is to look for anyone interested in moderating. If you are interested in moderating, please respond to this thread with a message that people voting can read to come to a decision.

You will only be considered if you have participated in this sub over the last month. Starting thursday, 3/4 nominations will be closed, and a voting instructions will be posted. The winners will be determined on sunday.

Existing mods, you are welcome to throw your name back into the hat if you want.

I am not sure how many people have looked at the sidebar to notice that we have a meta sub for discussing the mechanics of how this sub should operate, and I wanted to highlight five new threads that are pretty important:

• Voting Pt. 0: Concerns and Case Studies
• Voting Pt. 1: Vote Resolution Algorithm
• Voting Pt. 2: Casting Votes
• Not-voting, but pt. 3: Possible Mod Rules
• Voting Pt. 4: Moderator Term Length

Please review and discuss if you have any concerns or contributions. We're approaching the end of the month and want to follow through with our promise for democratic turnover, using an election system that the community feels is most fair.

Currently the Satanic Temple is raising money to continue their lawsuit against texas challenging state-mandated impediments to getting an abortion, which they claim as an important religious ceremony.

There is a whole side discussion that we could have contrasting the satanic temple vs, say the church of the flying spaghetti monster, and how much of a meme religion they are. There is a documentary, Hail Satan? that is an entertaining history of the satanic temple, available currently on hulu. After watching it I came to the conclusion that the satanic temple is simultaneously serious and trolling. It's not a faith based religion, nor is it completely unserious.

The thing I find interesting about their lawsuit is that it is a different angle of attack for people who are pro-choice, in that it has access to the same "weapons" that religious pro-life advocates have at their disposal.

The main question I would like to investigate is: if I had $666 dollars that I wanted to spend on pro-choice activism, would I be better served giving it to the temple of satan, or to planned parenthood (if there is a better pro-choice group that might give a superior ROI, I would also like to hear about it).

We don't do straight link posting here, and want to try to frame articles that are submitted with productive starting points for the discussion, so here goes:

Newsweek printed an article by Warren Farrell this week that was critical of what amounts to a rebranding of the White House Council on Women and Girls to the White House Council on Gender Policy. The reason he maintains it is a rebranding is that its' subject is still women and girls, with no place at the table for men's issues.

Before I say what kind of discussion I would love to elicit, let me start off by pleading with you not to turn this into a discussion about Biden and his fitness for office, or Trump. Let's try to keep it a specific critique of the council itself, its' implementation, and Farrell's claims and concerns.

Some starting points:

• What do you think of this idea for a Male Teachers Corp? Personally I like the big brother program, but think that something similar done by the state has all kinds of awful ways it could go wrong.
• Are Farrell's citations accurate? Can we find sources for his claims?
• Is Farrell being fair here? What is the steelman position for these issues being left out of discussion?

Recently becoming a mother of a baby girl has made me look back at certain things in my childhood. My father would sometimes talk to me about how I was going to be a mom when I grew up, that I would be a stay at home or part time mom later in life. That wasn't something I wanted to do, but he assured me I'd think differently when I was older. While reading the Bible as a kid I could see the difference in women and men being treated. Everything from laws, to stories of Eve being created second. At the time I saw these questions as blasphemy and tried my best to ignore it. Looking through history books, seeing political leaders, and citations and mentions in science books, I saw that my gender was strangely absent.

I told myself that throughout history women didn't have the ability in society to be these people. But there was still always a nagging feeling. Was my gender and particularly myself handicapped? Was I born inferior? Was I destined for the typical traditional gender role. I distinctly remember not wishing to be a boy but that the roles were reversed.

These are thoughts I eventually came to terms with but I can't help but think they didn't have to have been so prominent. Looking back, while there were some who straight encouraged gender roles, many of these things I just noticed myself. And while times are better than they were when I was a kid I still suspect she will grow up wondering the same thing.

So how do you talk to girls about these things? If ones religion shows a strong separation and preference? In case they ask when looking at history books. "Why are they all men?" Or a preemptive conversation before hand in case they are thinking it but not saying anything?

Many people define sexism as "power + prejudice". I consider this a somewhat absurd definition, but that's not relevant to this discussion. What this definition requires is that there be a significant prejudiced powerbase against one of the sexes for sexism to truly be present.

Barack Obama, president of the USA stated without shame or hesitation that women were indisputably superior to men. The response was cheers. - https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/16/politics/barack-obama-women-are-better-than-men/index.html

Donald Trump, widely known as a misogynist, also said that women were superior, though his statement was less extreme than Obama's. Once again, his supporters - who are generally considered sexist against women - cheered loudly. - https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2016/12/02/women-better-than-men-trump-rally-sot-ac.cnn

Other major government officials have made similar statements, but I feel that just knowing that the last two people to hold one of the most powerful positions in the world were avowed female supremacists is enough to raise some serious concerns about whether women are truly as powerless as the "power + prejudice" crowd tend to claim.

The crazy thing is that their claims are completely unbacked by science, unlike anti-female bias, which almost always uses some form of research as an excuse/justification. I would expect the less popular opinion to require more evidence, yet anti-male sexism is generally believed to be non-existent/minimal/rare.

If it is politically a good move to publicly hold up women as superior, can it really be claimed that sexism against men does not exist? At some point "benevolent sexism" must surely become regular sexism, right?

One example of male privilege I hear frequently is that what men say is taken more seriously by others, especially other men, than what women say. Kinda like Cassandra, speaking the truth but cursed that no one would believe her. I, even as a man, see this play out all the time too, during work meetings, talking to repairmen, etc.

I have a pretty strong imposter syndrome—a couple of science degrees and a job giving technical advice, but I can’t believe people listen to what I say. It’s like the opposite of Cassandra: I can’t really tell if some of what I’m saying is true, but everyone acts like it’s gospel. Of course, when what I say turns out to be poor advice, it gets railroaded over by others (men, mostly), and when it is good advice, I get a pat on the back.

The whole situation sucks. I only want to say what I’m sure about, but there’s a lot of social pressure to say more than that with confidence. Women are frequently saying things they are sure of, but others don’t have confidence in them.

It's Raining men

It's somewhat understood that a dearth of women relative to men creates societal chaos; but what about a society where technology has replaced more and more men without removing those men from society? That is the future we are starring down the barrel of as we transition from the industrial revolution(s) to automation. We observe some of the issues that come from this with the "where have all the good men gone" Genre of articles. So far it has been the murmurings of spinsters that have come to the end of their reproductive runway and are hitting a brick wall. There is a whole new generation of women that's is coming up that have priced themselves out of the traditional mating market and will have to make less traditional compromises (dating younger or dating down). But this is not a post about women. We can observe what asymmetries in sex distribution can do to a society by looking at China, but what about when there are roughly equal numbers of men and women but one demographic becomes economically unviable?

#Welcome to the churn

Automation is eating jobs from the bottom of the IQ distribution going upward. Rungs of the economic ladder are being removed for these unfortunate souls. How does this affect men? (Keep this chart in mind Going forward.) Men, in general, have higher variance than women, with regard to IQ this means you see men at the extremes of the distributions. The upshot is women tend to economically outperform men. The distributions don't favorably cross over for men until you get about 1 standard deviation out from the mean; from that point forward the trends strongly favor men in that part of the distribution. In terms of IQ 2/3s of men are basically out of luck in the new information economy which favors intelligence strongly.

Competition for jobs that aren't strongly IQ dependent is going to get absolutely brutal. There is a finite number of jobs that can be filled by lower IQ individuals. Men are unfortunately going to be over-represented in the first few waves of casualties as automation hockey sticks and nukes jobs that those on the west end of the IQ spectrum could fill.

#Hello Darkness my old friend

Traditionally when nations have found themselves with too many men they have opted to fight a war and reward men that fought with the blood and treasure of their enemies. With the state weaponry as it stands, a war to cull the herd isn't viable. Also, it's not like there are fewer women, it's just a large swath of men will no longer be able to compete economically. Worse still many men find meaning through their work. The changes to the economy and society are obviously going to affect women as well, but due to the nature of men and women, I suspect the changes will be very asymmetric in how men and women are affected.

#Getting it good and hard

It's been noted before, but feminism sprang from upper-middle-class women seeking parity with their male peers. The MRM is largely filled with "the losers" of society. Most men generally don't find the MRM because their life is going great. The MRM suffers from this because the men who find it are not 'respectable 'or well-heeled, they are the fallen of society. This plays into why the media and wider society scoffs at the MRM (aside from issues agency ascribed to men and women in society). Feminism is the social cause for socialites, the MRM is far more blue-collar which the modern media class would never associate with. (See also the media classes talk of class issues while being repulsed by the working-class and blue-collar people.) As men become more and more disenfranchised their issues will continue to be marginalized. Society already has trouble acknowledging men's issues as real, the trends mentioned above won't make a valid victim to the powers at be. I expect that men will either be blamed for being victims of the churn or anything targeted to help them will be framed as "fixing them" so they can fill a hegemonic role of yore which won't be achievable for a large swath of men in the not to distance future.

Of the men that aren't going to make I expect more failures to launch, and more suicides of men with no economic prospects. For some men in this bracket, we will see an increase of hyper-aggressive men clinging to anything that looks like some form of masculinity even if decidedly anti-social.

If you have a chance to read it, I recommend this short book. The premise is the Nigerian author writing a letter with some advice to her childhood friend about how to raise her baby girl as a feminist as per her request. In her own words, (paraphrasing the introduction of the book here) this was a huge task but she felt it was morally urgent to have honest conversations about raising children differently, about trying to create a fairer world for women and men. With this intro and this one line, you get a feel of the type of book it is. She doesn't shy away from identifying as a feminist or advocating for it, and yet she still included "men" in the results of her fairer world.

In the book, she says that to be a feminist you only need to believe women matter as much as men. That making a "feminist choice" is not as clear as doing the opposite of what is traditional; it is contextual. The example she gives is that while men cheating shouldn't be forgiven on the basis of "men will be men", it could be feminist to forgive if they would do so for her as well. That makes them equal.

She also suggest that gender roles are nonsense. That men and women should share the burden of domestic work and care-giving equally. That a father should not be seen as "helping" with the child since it is as much his duty to raise them as it is the mother's and that means refrain from micromanaging them about it. A father can do everything a mother can except breastfeeding.

That women shouldn't settle for conditional equality. That whatever standard is there for one gender should be the same for the other. An example she give is powerful women having to care more about niceness, appearance, etc.

She thinks we should teach girls self-reliance and acceptance of their body. That shame should not be part of the language around female sexuality and body functions. That nobody should say things like "my money is my money and his money is our money". It's not the man's role to provide, it is the role of whoever is able to.

That women are just as human as men are. They are allowed to be flawed and should not be revered as special beings. That misogyny can come from women as well.

Finally she says to question language. That words are full of beliefs and assumptions. Not use words like "princess" to describe your daughter if you don't want them to associate with everything a princess stands for (finesse, waiting to be saved, etc.). That it is better to explain how things are and how they could be changed than simply use jargon like "patriarchy" and "misogyny". That if you criticize X in women but not in men, you don't have a problem with X, you have a problem with women. To be wary of those who can only feel empathy in a situation when it includes someone they are close to (e.g. if it were my daughter/mother/sister).

I was gonna summarize the whole thing more thoroughly but I'm afraid that gets into copyright infringement. So if this got you curious, you could buy the book, rent it... or get it by whatever means you deem appropriate.

This is not an endorsement of everything that she says, but I think it's a good example of feminism that doesn't come from twitter hashtags and facebook groups.

This is something I think gets lost when advocating gender issues online. How to be helpful in real life when confronting these things. So any tips for what to do, things to keep in mind when helping, personal stories of helping others here and how it went, links to websites. Anything gender related that might be important to keep in mind?

When Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique she talked about “the problem that has no name” that would eventually drive many women to the feminist movement.

The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night—she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question—“Is this all?”

This was not an existential matter of human rights or basic freedom like suffrage- it was a much more elusive, contentious issue. It dealt with something as basic as satisfaction and contentment with the role that society expected them to play. I believe that we are currently in an era where men struggle with their own problem that has no name.

It’s been my experience that few MRAs come first to the movement because they are concerned with the many legitimate, concrete, issues on the platform (some do- particularly men who have run into direct contact with some of these issues through divorce courts, or the loss of a loved one through suicide). Many men come to the MRM because they are grappling with a pain that they do not have the tools to describe, or even fully understand. They know that it has something to do with being a man in today’s society, and they are hoping that the MRM can help. The issue is not one of the oppression of men- it’s more the resentment, opposition to, and antagonism of men as a class. More specifically, men are struggling with the inability to think of themselves- or ask others to think of them- in a positive light on anything other than an individual level. The last 60 years have not produced a more progressive gender role for men, as it has for women- but they have emphasized group identity, and characterized the group identity belonging to men in negative terms.

I suspect that this is true of other movements, like men's feminism, and the sort of users who gravitate to places like /r/menslib. While being an MRA strikes me as ultimately a rejection of this negative collective identity, their approach strikes me as accepting the negative judgement of society and seeking to bargain or find a path of redemption. The prime initial motivation, however inglorious, remains simply that it is painful to live with a negative collective identity, particularly, again, as collective identities are increasingly emphasized in all walks of life.

Paul Nathanson and Cathy Young deal with this issue extensively in their misandry series (and you can see a brief introduction here). Their simple proposition is this:

no person or group can have a healthy identity without being able to make at least one contribution to the larger society, one that is distinctive, necessary and publicly valued.

This is, for me at least, a somewhat uncomfortable truth about the motivations of most people drawn to men's issues, myself included. Issues like educational attainment, disproportionate incarceration, gender discrimination in the draft, erosion of due process- these are comfortable, concrete, things to make a case for. Feeling bad? Not so much. I'm not really inclined to give twitter feminists crowing about male tears any ammunition with which to celebrate. While I recognize that I've been directed towards stoicism my whole life, I don't count that as neccessarily bad- being able to put my feelings to the side and get to work has seen me through some very hard times.

And yet, when I see posts on LWMA where a user wrestles with guilt about being a man, or see menslib wrestle with the impulse to have positive role models, or notice here that /u/askingtofeminists observes that poltiically motivated social scientists have stripped away any positive adjective that could be associated with masculinity- I wonder if my aversion to acknowledging this issue just because it seems soft and vulnerable really is the best course.

First of all, I would like to make the case that feminism could not exist without collectivism. Feminism generally assumes the existence of a collectively organized patriacharchy, which has made it its business to systematically oppress women.

On the other hand, feminism makes politics for the collective woman and accepts that the interests and rights of individuals are sometimes seriously violated.

An example of such a violation of individual rights would be the lack of or only superficial prosecution of false accusations, especially in cases of rape. While on an individual level a person should have the right to justice in such a case, feminists argue that this could further discourage victims of actual rape from reporting such an act. Thus, it is deliberately and willfully accepted that victims of false accusations are significantly restricted in their rights and do not receive justice.

Another problem with this way of thinking is that men as a collective are made responsible for the acts of a few individuals. Not all men are rapists, but too many are. What at first seems like a very understandable statement is, in my opinion, just an empty shell of words. First of all, it does not explain why men are collectively held responsible or should take responsibility for the acts of a few criminals. Moreover, even one rapist would be too many. I see no reason to take blame for the actions of a small majority i dont even asociate with.

Women have historically been oppressed by men, they had few to no rights. While this is certainly true to a certain extent, this is hardly the case anymore. At least in the societies where feminists are mainly active today (because women are no longer systematically oppressed). Women can vote, practice all professions, and discrimination is illegal. If we broaden the view a little, the "oppression" in the sense of the traditional role models was not only partly a necessity for the social continuity, because only women were able to get pregnant. Also many of the jobs were very physical. Here, women generally had a disadvantage due to biological differences. For women's rights, it was of great importance that work became less physical with digitalization and that contraceptive methods such as the pill enabled women to decide for themselves when they would become pregnant.

For men, the past was not necessarily better. While the woman had to take care of the children and the household at home, the men were for the most part active in physically grueling jobs (workers' rights were also only a distant wish at the time) and sometimes accepted considerable damage to their health so that the family could eat. I do not even want to talk about the wars.

The oppression in the past did not necessarily arise from the bad will of the collective "man", but rather from social necessity and to a large extent probably also from economic inequalities.

A popular argument of collectivist feminism here is that the rich, oppressive people were all men, so its the mens own fault they have been opressed. However, this argument only works from a collectivist point of view. The individual is completely indifferent to the gender of the oppressor.

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Measures such as quotas for women today do not punish those who have actively participated in the oppression of women in the past or present.

Young men in particular face a society that is increasingly hostile to them. Masculinity is toxic, they are privileged and should be ashamed of their privileges, and anyway they should make room for women because they belong to the wrong sex.

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However, these young men in particular have not yet had a chance to contribute to patriarchy nor do i think they will ever do so. These young men in particular are much more liberal than the generations before and these young men in particular probably never had the opportunity nor the will to rape or oppress a woman.

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Yet these young men are regularly told they are part of the problem.

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What are your opinions on the subject?

It is a hard to contest fact that men commit far more homicides than women do.

Government stats indicate a ~9/1 male/female ratio of homicide culprits. That's a massive difference, almost certainly too high to be entirely explained away by police and judicial bias(though such bias does exist).

So the behavioral difference exists. This means that there is either a biological difference in behavior between men and women, a difference in social training between the sexes, or a combination of the two.

This simple fact is incredibly important IMO to understanding the divide between male and female. If biological, pretending that men and women are the same is absurd - the behavioral differences are large and important. If social, society is pushing men into the roles of murderers, and nobody even realizes it.

What do you think are the main causes of this divide, and how would you suggest helping with the problem? I figure that everyone should be concerned about this issue, regardless of their gender or political affiliation.

In the course of my online time I often meet people who want relationship advice, and a common problem people make is calling whoever they are talking to overly emotional. There's lots of ways of doing it. "Why are you so emotional." "Why are you so angry." "You mad bro."

This tends to simply worsen conflicts because telling someone's emotional state tends to make them feel childish and hurt. I am sure for women there's often an element of sexism to it, dismissing people's feelings and women have noted that when they do masculine coded emotional displays, like female leaders being overly aggressive in public they get pushback.

I definitely think there's a lot of pushback in society as well when men express inappropriate emotions. I've heard from a lot of guys that if they cry in front of a woman, even if the woman said it was ok, they tend to lose support from that woman after. Angry men often get arrested or punished for their anger.

Likewise, if a man expresses fear of something, there's often a good reason for it, but there's a lot of pushback.

For men and women, we should try to call them overly angry or fearful or sad less, and ask them questions first to see what and why they're feeling about things. People often have good reasons for emotions. We should be more accepting of strong negative emotional displays from men and women and learn about them.

To start off with, I think that toxic masculinity is a thought terminating cliche, rather than a descriptive term with a precise definition rooted in an academic tradition. This piece in the Atlantic does a good job discussing the history of the term and its' associated weaknesses, and includes a conversation with Raewyn Connell about the term, which is fortunate given that I am about to talk about a term that she coined that is horribly misused across reddit.

While I intensely dislike the term Toxic Masculinity and how widespread its' use is, I will cede the point that I think I can steelman what people generally use it for, which is "male marked behavior or norms which are maladaptive either for the community, or for the individual performing the behavior, or subscribing to the norms". Anything seen as part of being a man which is not healthy for the self or others, basically. Part of my issue with its lazy usage is that I do not believe that everyone using the term has that particular comprehensive definition. The other parts of my objections involve feeling that the definition is far too broad and should be disambiguated at least to one word for behaviors and another for norms, and that I think the term is mainly used to police gender and reinforce the male-markedness of the norms/behaviors which are toxic. This, ironically, reinforces the prevalence of what you deem toxic..

I have often seen it said that "toxic" masculinity is interchangeable with the term Hegemonic Masculinity, and this is a real shame, because nothing could be further from the truth. Hegemonic Masculinity is a term introduced in Raewyn Connell's Masculinities, which is a feminist book I consider worth reading for anyone interested in men's issues. While there are many arguments the book makes that I take issue with (including the central argument which is centered around a tired articulation of the forces of patriarchy, using Gramsci's notions of hegemony as a framework), Connell does a fantastic job laying out a framework through which norms for men are asserted, and categories of masculine archetypes at play.

Connell describes "Hegemonic Masculity" as the collection of traits and behaviors that a group makes the gold standard of masculinity. Those who perform it well are granted status and empowered by the group, institutionally if that is an option for the group. Because Connell is rooted in an argument about patriarchy, this is then extended to describe how men performing hegemonic masculinity LEAD the group, but I don't think that you really need a patriarchal premise for the idea to hold up. Even in a society with a majority of women leaders, you would see these mechanics at play, possibly even emphasized because EVERYONE in the group takes part in reinforcing these norms, and I suspect that a society with majority female leadership would be, if anything, more inclined to rely on social pressure to elicit the behavior from men that they found desirable (remember that that infamous Gillette ad was not produced by a man).

I keep saying "group" because I think that when you look at all the various tribes that are formed in our society, you will see different norms and standards in them. An obvious example is that Democrats and Republicans seems to have different ideals of the gold standard of masculinity- but so do evangelical christians and libertarians, and both of these groups tend to be lumped under "the right". People tend to belong to many different groups simultaneously, and each of these groups will have their own set of norms that fight for dominance in the individual.

To bluntly drive the point home: feminists are a group (or set of groups), as are progressives. And these various groups will all have their own vision of masculinity which is hegemonic in those groups. Hegemonic masculinity is about an intra-gender hierarchical dynamic (enforced by men and women alike), not a value system. Superman performed a hegemonic masculinity. Trump performed a hegemonic masculinity. Trudeau performs a hegemonic masculinity. Michael Kimmel performs a hegemonic masculinity. If you are critical of hegemonic masculinity, you are critical of hierarchical gender policing, not the traits which are dominant for a specific group- because you will probably agree that the traits that your group admires are, in fact, admirable.

Hegemonic Masculinity is one of four masculinities that Connell identified in Masculinities. The other three were complicit (men who perform this masculinity do not exhibit all the traits of hegemonic masculinity, and do not derive the same rewards, but they validate the traits of hegemonic masculinity and support the judgements which put hegemonic masculinity at the top of the hierarchy), subordinate (defectors who exhibit none of the traits associated with hegemonic masculinity, and which might be opposite to those traits. These men tend to be pariahs of the community), and marginalized masculinity (men who literally cannot exhibit hegemonic masculinity, due to essential traits associated with a hegemonic masculinity like the color of your skin, intelligence, or not being able-bodied). Much of Connell's book was concerned with the way groups treated these other categories, and yet only one of the four terms seems to have made it into popular discourse. I confess that I find this evidence of a predilection toward uncharitability to men on the part of pop feminism, but there may be other explanations.

The Boy/Man dichotomy is what I see at the root of a great many of men's issues today, and I wanted to use the subject for my first post to this sub, as I expect I may be referencing it in conversations to come. #Part 1: Be a Man In 2011, Hugo Schwyzer wrote a piece for the good man project entitled “The Opposite of ‘Man’ is “Boy,” Not ‘Woman’”. Schwyzer claimed that “man” was something that we are expected to become through a process, and that “man” is a status that can be stripped away. The problem, as he saw it- was that we defined “man” by behaviors women didn’t do, when we ought to be defining by behaviors that puerile children wouldn’t do.

Two years later, Hugo Schwyzer had a very public meltdown in which he acknowledged that:

I always wrote for women but wrote in a really backhanded way where it appeared I was writing for men so that it would not appear too presumptuous and instead it would make me look better.

I can’t think of a better example of that than the piece I referenced above- because Schwyzer was standing right at the threshold of what I consider the key insight into modern masculinity, and ended up trying to wrap traditionalism in progressive clothes. Rather than questioning this unique pressure on men, he embraced it.

The phenomenon Schwyzer was getting at is called “precarious manhood”. In a paper opening a special issue on the subject in the Psychology of Men and Masculinity, Joseph Vandello and Jennifer Bosson describe the thesis as follows:

The precarious manhood thesis has three basic tenets: First, manhood is widely viewed as an elusive, achieved status, or one that must be earned (in contrast to womanhood, which is an ascribed, or assigned, status). Second, once achieved, manhood status is tenuous and impermanent; that is, it can be lost or taken away. Third, manhood is confirmed primarily by others and thus requires public demonstrations of proof.

One attains “man” status by doing things associated with men. But the things associated with men which benefit other people are not cheap, and are not always an available resource for all men. Antisocial things associated with men are usually more available, and the more precarious manhood is- the more tempting those things are going to be when no better alternative is available. James Messerschmidt, with his “Masculinity Hypothesis” was the first scholar to really look into this. Later, Matthew Conaway refined the idea and argued that increasing standards of masculinity and/or decreasing ability to achieve those standards of masculinity result in the increased "appeal" of violence (and presumably other “cheap” forms of male-marked behavior like catcalling) as a means of achieving masculinity.

These theories get to something that I think is incredibly important to understand- much of the way that masculinity is criticized in popular culture treats antisocial male resources as the problem, while completely avoiding the more fundamental question of why masculinity is precarious in the first place, and how do we, as members of society, reinforce that dynamic?

Complaining about catcalling and mansplaining may do a good job of portraying certain behaviors as being undesirable- but it also reinforces the degree to which those behaviors are male-marked and emphasizes them as masculine resources of last resort. As long as manhood is precarious- men who feel they have few options will perform undesirable behaviors because they feel they need to act like some kind of man, any kind of man, and that is all that is available to them.

#Part 2: Where Does this Pressure to Act Like a Man Come From?

An MRA writer for whom I have tremendous respect has provided the most plausible explanation that I have found for the origins for this. Essentially his argument is that biological dimorphism combined with survival pressures favored different gender roles- centered around reproduction and provision. The ability to perform the reproductive role was just something that happened as a girl matured into a woman, but the ability to perform the masculine role was not at all guaranteed, and so we formed norms which placed the status of “man” as something tenuous and contingent on performance, which had to be repeatedly demonstrated. Unexamined, these norms have persisted through the industrial era and still undergird our understanding of masculinity today.

These norms are reinforced whenever young boys use slurs which call into doubt each others’ manhood (it’s an oft-noted fact that homophobic and misogynist slurs are used interchangeably by young men, but so are slurs which question courage, sexual prowess, strength, etc…). It’s this performance of masculine-marked traits like courage and strength that drive a lot of the rites of passage that adolescent boys concoct for themselves, and the importance that they place on those rituals is driven by the strength of those norms, even as those rituals themselves reinforce those norms.

We tend to notice and object to it when young boys use the language of misogyny or homophobia against each other, or engage in crazy risky behavior. But these norms also sit in a progressive blind spot when they can be made to work for ostensibly progressive agendas. Shame is the weapon of choice in modern activism, and shaming men for being poor examples of manhood just works. That’s why even in “progressive” circles people resort to ad-hominem like “man-child”, imputing sexual undesirability, or suggesting that a man they don’t like must live in his mother’s basement (being dependent on others past childhood and unable to perform the manly role of providing for himself, let alone anyone else). Consider the norms being leveraged in the image of this MarySue article about the boycott that wasn’t in light of this dynamic. To fight a problem, you have to understand it- and there is far too little awareness of this issue.

The final complication of this issue is that it tends to dictate which men we should listen to, and which men we should be dismissive of. Complaining about the Boy/Man Dichotomy is not something a man does. Our ingrained attitudes towards proper masculinity encourage us to be dismissive when men complain about emasculation- and respect the men and women who mock them for it. We emphasize models of successful manhood that are contrasted with a foil of contemptuous failure, and that is where the pressure to be a man- even a bad man- comes from.

Hi everybody!

I'm excited to help get this sub off the ground -- I'd like to help create an environment where we can all come to understand different viewpoints a little better.

As a mod, I will use this thread to document my moderation actions, and I will create a separate thread if I must ban somebody. Please direct feedback to the meta sub, /r/GenderDialoguesMeta/ -- I will be listening.

Hi. We just started this sub, and I will be moderating for a month. I don't know if the month will be quiet as the sub gets up and running, or crazy as it is a new sub with fairly subjective rules.

I promise to moderate frequently while I am here, and use this thread to archive moderation actions I take, with explanation if time permits. In the event I have to ban someone, I will create a separate thread for that.

I am doing this so you have the sub you want. That means that the we will rely on the community to tell us what is working, and what isn't, and it is our job to respond to that and do what we can to create the sub you want. You are my boss.

I expect that I will burn out quickly, but a month is doable. Afterwards, I look forward to relaxing with you in the conversations of the sub itself as just another user.