Masculinity

A man has responsibilities.
A man has hobbies.
A man is independent.

A man is strong.
A man is also calm.

A man is bold.
A man is also caring.

These are all masculine qualities to me.

 

• Live truth (don't be a different person when no ones watching)
• Speak truth
• Take care of your family and provide for them
• Take care of your community
• Be interested in history
• Learn from mistakes
• Don't be a people pleaser
• Have interests and things you enjoy doing and pursue them
• Take care of your spiritual, mental and physical health

 

I love the saying "to be gentlemen, you have to be a men first"

Seems to me that masculinity is the capacity of taking the aggresion, perhaps eventually violent, tough-minded, relentless and ruthless side of the human psyche, and putting it to good use, serving and caring for others in a gentle way. Is all about balance.

Quoting Dr Jordan Peterson, some may agree with his views, some don't, although they apply to both men and women but the next one specially to men in my view.
"The capacity to be a monster and create mayhem but choosing not to"

 

Yes sir! Very correct. These are the qualities that every man should try to achieve, be calm and patient when need be, be bold when needed.
Toxic masculinity does exist, the “I am a man, I am stronger and I can do what i want” people. But I have to assume that that group is a minority in our society.

 

No, Toxic masculinity is talked about so much because soneone else has the microphone. Men are supposed to be the backbone of society, but men are not being men.

The people with the microphone also want men to be feminine and addicted to porn. That's the running theory at least.

 

I don't agree with you on this one. If any trait can be taught to either gender, then it is a gender-neutral trait by default, and the prominence observed in each sex is determined by culture. The best way to deal with masculinity/femininity is to see them as a collection of biological characteristics. With the physical biology as the main anchor, it will be easier to distinguish everything else that is the cultural 'masculitnity' or 'femininity'.

 

@WildEntheology I think social grooming and gendered expectations come into play. The way women are raised to be docile and fragile while men are encouraged to be unrestricted and aggressive. I did look into matrilineal culture and there's a lot of difference from what we see about gender behavior. There are also animal species where the most aggressive ones are females.

 

Alot of people get there on there own. usually people with self awareness will recognise some sort of imbalance . Generally men and women interacting long-term can be enough to change perspective from both points of view

 

I see this thread is over a year old, but I've been thinking about this topic so thanks @spot618 for digging it up.

There's a lot of good and interesting stuff being said, and I want to respond to all of it in a giant, comprehensive post, but I'm not sure that approach is the best. This time I'm breaking it up, addressing reactions to individual ideas in individual posts. However, I want to start with my own general reaction; we definitely need to talk about masculinity.

There's a reason men are drawn to rhetoric from Tyler Durden or Mark Driscoll, a Christian pastor who spoke positively about masculinity but is currently defamed, I believe rightfully so, because a lot of his doctrine went too far and his view on sex was/is essentially transactional and pornographic. There's a reason young men in particular are drawn to Jordan Peterson, a guy so mild, soft-spoken, and conservatively minded I'd call him the anti-Durden. It's because all of these men are saying it's okay, maybe even good, to be masculine. That wouldn't resonate unless men were not receiving the message that it's not okay to be a male or masculine, and I feel it because that's what I receive. As far as Western culture is concerned, I feel valued as a person, but not as a man. All the problems seem to come from men, especially white ones, but all of us have a share in violence and oppression. We spread, we 'splain, we take too much space both literally and figuratively. I hear tons of advertisements encouraging women, to go into STEM, to break the stereotypes, to be more, to achieve more, to dare and risk, while acknowledging the deck is stacked against them. Because of Men. I see t-shirts, pink and glittery with flip sequins declaring "Girls can do it," "Girls are awesome," encouraging us to "fight like a girl," to "run like a girl," or simply, "Girl Power." I have barely seen any attire celebrating my boys. I see people talking about women's issues with impunity, but the moment a person brings up men's issues, they immediately have to be cross-examined for misogyny. I see women explaining to men how feminism is really about them too, because the Patriarchy damages men as much as it damages women. Because the Patriarchy is male. I virtually never see or hear the word "masculinity" in public discourse unless it's preceded by the word "toxic." I don't see masculinity being celebrated, unless it's because a person was assigned female at birth and chooses to be male, and even then it seems like self-determination in the face of cultural and biological hurdles is what is being celebrated, not masculinity. I feel as if I am being told over and over and over again, I'm okay as a person, but it would have been better if I wasn't male.
Like my adhd, having a dick is something I'm going to have to learn how to compensate for, build strategies around, learn to function in spite of.
And I can't stand it.

I can stand it for my adhd, I'm at least working on coping with that. Nobody's perfect, everyone has their cross to bear, and this neurological condition is mine. Just don't blow smoke up my ass and tell me it's a disability, because it's not that bad and I won't accept it as an excuse for bad behavior, and don't go the other way and call it "other-abled" either. It's not an advantage in virtually any situation, it doesn't make me a special ninja-unicorn. I wouldn't wish this on anyone, it sucks. But making my gender another obstacle to my being a decent human being, that's too much. Maybe it's because I'm already dealing with the adhd, or maybe it's because literally half the world is male, and it's unacceptable to me that half of us are inherently worse than the other. I think it's probably what @WildEntheology said, about positive masculine traits morphing into gender-neutral traits while leaving us holding all the baggage. Whatever it is, though, men need support because I'm not the only one looking for positive affirmation. We're either going to get it from good, balanced sources like Peterson, or dangerous ones like Durden and Driscoll, but we're going to seek it out.

 

I'm an English lit major, okay, I believe in multiple interpretations of art and narrative, but this is breaking my heart. Tyler Durden is charismatic, and that's impressive, especially to young guys who don't have charisma an don't understand how it works. He's also the bad guy. It's a giant red flag from (novelist) Palahniuk and (director) Fincher, this guy's ideas are excessive, dangerous, harmful, and not a little batshit crazy. Note that the narrator goes so far as to shoot himself in the cheek to trick himself into killing Durden, sorry for the spoiler.
Durden correctly assesses there is a masculinity problem. He might even be accurate in that men in general have struggled to adapt to a post-industrial culture. His prescription, though, for men to beat the crap out of one another so they can learn to tolerate pain and become strong... this is a Jr. high level of sophistication here. This is arrested development. This reflects a total lack of nuance when it comes to understanding what a man is or what he is intended to do.

 

@MrBlue201 please don't take offense. I pick holes in stuff, that's my hobby. I'm glad you answered the OP directly, it's good stuff. That said...

A woman has responsibilities, what are you saying? But a child doesn't. A boy doesn't. Okay. point well made, I'll allow it.

Ed Gein had hobbies.

I'd say this is an ideal, on some level, but let's be real. People need other people. Maybe I'm pushing back because I am not financially independent, at least not in my current lifestyle. I'm not emotionally independent, I have a family, I support my wife and she supports me, that's the deal, so under this definition I'm not a man and I'm being sour. But I would agree that a man doesn't suck the resources out of his community without giving back.

Not wrong, necessarily. Are we talking physically? Emotionally? And again, are we separating the masculine from the feminine, or the mature from the juvenile?

I think I'm all in on this one. Men don't panic. They assess the situation, they develop a plan of action, they communicate, they execute. They don't panic. I think a woman can lose her crap without having her femininity threatened. I respect the hell out of a woman who can keep her cool, though, I'd rather be married to her than some flighty broad, but for a man, staying calm is 100% essential.

I'd like some elaboration on that. In a lot of situations the difference between "bold" and "irresponsible" is strictly in the outcome, and men aren't irresponsible. At the same time, risks are necessary for progress, and men have the courage to take them. I think this is a good but nuanced criteria for masculinity.

The most traditionally controversial one you've mentioned, but I fully agree. You can be calm and bold and have responsibilities and be independent, but if you don't care about your people, you're still a boy. A man can be trusted to watch your back, and that means he cares.

Excellent contribution to the conversation, Mr. Blue201, 10/10.
Do you have any clarifications, any rebuttals? Care to comment on declarations made by your 2020 self?

 

Men are becoming disoriented because their very basic concept of masculinity is centered around power and dominance. And in this day and age where women are gaining financial independence and speaking more about their issues, a significant amount of power and privilege is taken from men, leaving them quite anchorless.

The only advice I would give modern men is to see masculinity as a biological state, no more or less, and be at peace with it. You won't need to struggle around this much more if you take it as simply as it is. Because seeing you struggle to prove you are a 'man', indicates very much that subconsciously, you view 'masculinity' as more than innate physiology and biological function. This is strange because biology and physiology have no need to be proven or revered, privilege and power fill this role.

If any trait is proven to be gender-neutral, then it is in fact gender-neutral. Usually, men who complain about 'positive masculine traits' turning into gender-neutral ones do so when said traits are about skill, intelligence, or creativity. These men are pretty much selfish, and have fragile egos, and can't exist outside the sphere of privileged masculinity. Have no worry, feminists want positive male allies and would give them the reaffirmation they deserve.

 

The reason behind that is men have way fewer sexual restrictions since the old cultural dogma sees nothing wrong with this. Women, on the other hand, are very cautious about sexual interactions and the way they evaluate themselves, and others evaluate them because of it. This gives us the resulting observations you gave. There are far more available penises, but prioritizing sexual pleasure as females comes each time with stigma and bashing from society and culture. In short, while we have access to dicks, using them will cost us a lot socially and psychologically.

We see those results again because patriarchal cultures gave too many privileges to men during centuries, especially with female interactions. Men have learned to take pride in having little to no restriction with having sex, women have internalized feelings of insecurity each time they deal with sexual tension, one-sided or mutual. This is why women tend to be wary in those situations; since the ideas implanted in our minds surrounding sex differ from yours and so does the outcome. A man hasn't much to lose socially no matter how much sex he has, but a female can't do the same otherwise she'll be shunned away and stigmatized each time more and more.

It would be a lie to say the idea of sex isn't intrinsically tempting to us, since we can fantasize a lot about complete male strangers. However, if those very male strangers we lusted for actually tried to bring those fantasies to reality we will become cautious and probably reject them. Because socially speaking, satisfying those desires comes at a costly price on our self-esteem and our place within communities.

I agree with it, and in order to learn those skills, they need to abandon entitlement and stop viewing sex as a conquest, leading to social elevation, or seeing sex as something they do 'to' women instead of doing it with women. As long as men see themselves as the only active agent, thus weaponizing their bodies sexually, they will never be able to learn those necessary lessons.