Sexism and Men's Issues

Yeah, what Sixy said. Usually when it gets into more "body positivity" it has to do more with self love and that someone is capable of being loved and important, regardless of health issues.

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Like I said, basic goddamn dignity issue.

There are countless unhealthy things people do, yet nothing short of double LSD-Meth addiction causes this much hate and scorn.

And the response to this is just "unhealthy tho", as if it's worse than three kinds of cancer at once.

I'm pretty sure that catching someone drunk or high would cause as much mockery. The same can't be said for smoking, but thankfully attitudes are changing.

Also, "fat" is a very broad term that includes many categories. There's having an unshaped bod (most dudes are like this), being a little pudgy on the side, being plus-sized and having a belly and being big chubby dude.

None of the above are likely to be met with much scorn unless someone is deliberately going out of their way to insult you.

Now, if you're a 5'7 dude who weights 250lbs, has D-cup size moobs and can't see his own dick under all that lard, then I'm sorry bro but you're fat! Hit that insanity workout and get yourself a good dietitian.

It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.

MrEnter deconstructs the idea of toxic masculinity

He seems to be overcomplicating the concept or misunderstanding it, to the point where I don't know what he's actually saying.

Sadly, he's cherrypicking his arguments and attacking strawmen. I don't know if it's out of malice or stupidity, but his argument isn't really a good one at all. Stuff like this:

"You don't have to be X" does not mean "X is bad". People criticizing toxic masculinity are not criticizing masculinity. They're criticizing masculine behavior taken to harmful extremes. The problem isn't masculine behavior, it's harmful behavior, but this particular brand of harmful behavior is caused by masculine stereotypes.

He's also confusing cause and effect. For example:

Maybe because of toxic masculinity? Perhaps men don't go to therapy because it's seen as unmanly, because the image of (toxic) masculinity is a self-made, self-sustaining, self-supporting lone wolf who doesn't need anything from anyone?

Hell, his very next sentence shows part of the problem.

Is men valuing themselves solely or primarily on their ability to provide for others not exactly the sort of toxic masculinity he's dismissing? He's contradicting himself. he's saying "men don't go to therapy because they think it's unmanly, they don't go because it's expensive and paying someone else to help fix their problems reduces their value as a man", which is another way of saying they don't do it because it's unmanly.

There are two possibilities here: either that logic applies to women just as much as men, so it doesn't explain why men don't go to the doctor as much as women, or else men disproportionately live in areas without access to affordable health care, in which case the question becomes "why is that the case?". Neither option actually explains anything about why men see doctors less than women.

He talks about mental illness being the real cause behind school shootings. Okay. So why are spree shooters almost invariably men? Do men have a higher rate of mental illness than women? If so, why? If not, why does their mental illness more often manifest itself as violence? Saying "mental illness causes mass shootings, not toxic masculinity" doesn't actually address the fhe fact that mass shootings are an almost exclusively male pastime.

I could go on, but it would all be in the same vein.

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

My one thing against what you said was the bit on school shootings. The ideas and mentalities behind those events don't really belong under the idea of "toxic masculinity". It's more complex than simply the basic "lone wolf" approach.

Actually, let's apply that in general. "toxic masculinity" seems like a really defined concept in scope, certainly one too small to be used as a blanket "big problem with society" it's being used as. And when you use a big wide "theory of everything" to describe a wide variety of related subjects, you risk oversimplification to the point of dismissing the claims you were trying to address in the first place as just another "symptom of toxic masculinity".

I'm not sure what you're saying. No one's saying that school shootings (or any of the other problems mentioned) are due entirely and solely to toxic masculinity. We're saying that toxic masculinity contributes to the problem. The fact of the matter is that there are enormous gender differences in these issues. Doesn't the fact that virtually all spree shooters are male suggest that there's something about being male that makes a person more likely to be a spree shooter? Ditto the fact that men are more likely to successfully commit suicide, more likely to be alcoholic, more often diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder (the clinical term for the diagnosis that includes what's popularly referred to as psychopathy and/or sociopathy), etc.

The fact that these issues are more common in men than women is a fact. Now, some of it is probably purely biological, but it seems unlikely in the extreme that all of it is. So we use the term "toxic masculinity" as a catch-all term to refer to the various societal and cultural influences that push men toward behavior that's harmful to themselves and others.

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

Toxic masculinity encourages men to be violent?

It enforces gender roles along the lines of "Go out and kick his ass! Literally!", so yes, I would say it does. Among other things.

I have disagreed with her a lot, but comparing her to republicans and propagandists of dictatorships is really low. - An idiot

'

That is a rough translation of something I've heard being said near me during a party between two guys in a party.

Inter arma enim silent leges

@Native Jovian: I'm more inclined to view it as that certain behavioural patterns tend to be more common in men than in women (and vice versa), with most of it being viewed as normal and healthy; and the reason for their formation likely a combination of nature and nurture. Subsequently, these normal behavioural patterns are then warped by an underlying mental illness to produce the pathological outcomes that you see.

For instance, more men successfully commit suicide while more women attempt suicide/self-harm. As a side note, the reason why self-harm and suicide are seen together is because it's very difficult to judge intent and knowledge - especially in successful suicides. For instance, did the person who killed him/herself really know that the attempt would be successful or was it attention-seeking behaviour gone awry, did the person who superficially self-harmed genuinely want to die and thought that the method was a lethal one, was the act an impulsive one with little planning/cognitive understanding of the action, etc?

edited 17th Feb '16 11:52:17 PM by peasant

X4 Amongest other things yes.

I'd be interested to hear the nature argument for men carrying out more mass shootings.

"And the Bunny nails it!" ~ Gabrael "If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we." ~ Cyran

Just a point of clarification - I'm not saying that there is a direct cause-effect relationship between males and mass shooting; rather that there are innate biological differences between men and women that contribute towards differences in behaviour and responses to external stimuli.

I will openly admit that I'm not up-to-date on gender sciences but from my understanding of it, there is a general acceptance to the above notion due to observed differences in predisposition seen even early on in babies, and the sheer impossibility of quantifying and dissecting the nuances of every single interaction in a person's life.

Sure but alongside that small biological contribution there's also a massive social contribution, society pushes us towards certain behaviours depending on our gender, and when that pressure pushes ideas of masculinity that are harmful you get toxic masculinity.

"And the Bunny nails it!" ~ Gabrael "If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we." ~ Cyran

And if you don't follow those ideals you get ostracized up the wazoo. Even if you realistically had no choice in the matter because you were built that way.

But those ideas behind what "toxic masculinity" is are far wider than simply the "lone wolf" concept. They incorporate it sure, but you can't really define such a broad subject under such a specific concept.

Did anyone ever say that that issue represents all of toxic masculinity?

edited 18th Feb '16 6:24:18 AM by Silasw

"And the Bunny nails it!" ~ Gabrael "If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we." ~ Cyran

Sure, but that doesn't change the fact that not all typically masculine behavioral expectations are healthy, even if they're normal. We've got a bunch of tropes to this effect. All Men Are Perverts (see also: A Man Is Always Eager, A Man Is Not A Virgin), Men Are the Expendable Gender, Double Standard: Abuse, Female on Male (ditto Double Standard Rape: Female on Male, All Abusers Are Male), Dude Looks Like a Lady, etc etc etc. These are all examples of toxic masculinity, because they force a restrictive or harmful view of masculinity (ie, how men are "allowed" to behave).

Again: no one's trying to. We're just saying that toxic masculinity is a thing that exists and has actual consequences in real life, which the article linked above was trying to dismiss.

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

Mr Enter's arguments are very nebulous. In a way, it seems either he's misunderstanding the concept, statements and arguments around it, or he's has seen some really bullshit stuff about the concept. Or both. I also find his reasoning pretty poor.

To be fair with all the stupid shit you can find online, being exposed to poorly-defined and nebulous versions of the concept isn't that difficult.

But I understood the concept pretty much immediately when I first learned of it. It's not exactly difficult to understand.

Yeah, also it's weird to me how one of the most commonly established reasonings that fully accept men have it rough, is something that people are trying to argue isn't a thing. Toxic Masculinity is literally agreeing with the fact that men are held to toxic standards that most women are not. This should literally be an automatic point of agreement and expansion on, as opposed to debating whether it's real or not.

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Same reason MRA tends to be so heavily about sticking it to feminists: because, at its core, MRA is about reversion of change. The MRA ideal is that everyone shuts up about gender, feminism is reversed, and the world goes back to Fantasy '50's where the man was king of his castle, the woman was his obedient and doting wife, gays and black people didn't exist, etc. It's a counter-progressive movement rather than a progressive one.

Addressing, understanding, and dealing with the societal problems that result in Toxic Masculinity is a critical component of overcoming many of the issues facing men today. As we work on grinding down the pedestal of Male Privilege, we also have to work towards giving men the ability to stand on their own without that high shadow of The Ideal Man hanging over their heads.

But MRA doesn't want this. They want their pedestal back. The very idea that there is anything wrong with the notion of the King of His Castle Ideal Man is fundamentally irreconcilable with their goals and aspirations.

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The main thing is that toxic masculinity as a concept, by default, says that there are many problems with the fundamental idea of what a "man" should be. That is, that being "FUCKING SWOLE BRO" and having a runway model on each arm does not necessarily make you "more of a man", nor should it be an ideal that most men should necessarily strive towards.

Some people take this very personally as an attack on men (and not on the idea that men are being unfairly subjected to stupid and destructive standards of behavior by society), but besides that it's been so well-ingrained that most people aren't necessarily going to see "traditonally male behaviors" as a problem. It's a thing I run into all the time.

In fact, they might even interpret arguments against traditional masculinity as self-serving, in the sense that they feel that men are advocating this talking point because they don't want to put in the effort or can't be a "real man", so they want to destroy the concept of traditional masculinity to save face, in much the same way they might see men defending women as a pathetic attempt to gain favor with women who otherwise wouldn't pay them any attention.

It's an extraordinarily cynical and just frankly bullshit argument, but I do feel a lot of people see things this way.

edited 19th Feb '16 11:38:18 AM by wehrmacht

I can vouch for that. Years back, I expressed on this very forum, possibly this thread even:

"Women's rights are about women fighting for the right to be stronger. Men's rights are about men fighting for the right to be weaker."

regarding stay-at-home dads. There's a lot of societal standards ingrained in us from an early age about what a "real man" is, and we're encouraged to ridicule and degrade those who stray from that ideal - and, in many cases, that straying takes the form of things we consider to be traditionally "womanly", because part of Toxic Masculinity is that women are inherently lesser than men.

This is how Toxic Masculinity can manifest even in a feminist: by applauding feminists for trying to rise above what we consider the inherently inferior realm of the female gender role and instead trying to be "stronger" and "better" like the male gender role.

My Tumblr. Currently liveblogging Haruhi Suzumiya and revisiting Danganronpa V3.