Rolling Maleness and Masculinity Discussion Thread

Welcome to the MANCAVE bros! Lol psych, this is for contemplating serious issues NOT raised by the men's rights movement, and also we need to stop hijacking the Weinstein thread for real.

this is maybe going to sound incredibly dumb, i'm not trying to be #notallmen or #reversepence, but these days i just don't like to hang out with a group of dudes for a night out, or a party that's all men, etc...the energy weirds me out a lot of the time. most of my friends these days all are couples and we hang out as such, but i have other male friends who will just socialize with THA BOYS and i find when i join them that the conversations just go places i'm not comfortable with a lot of the time, or the vibe is just weird, the balance is all off, etc. i don't like the "men's club" feeling. i don't know.

― nomar, Thursday, October 12, 2017 11:39 AM (fifty-one minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

agree

― mookieproof, Thursday, October 12, 2017 11:42 AM (forty-eight minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah, I totally feel you. I am generally averse to 'dude hangs', particularly 'white dude hangs'. Speaking as a white dude, no demographic is more likely to creep me out than other white dudes.

― the scarest move i ever seen is scary move 4 (Old Lunch), Thursday, October 12, 2017 11:43 AM (forty-seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

same

― brimstead, Thursday, October 12, 2017 11:44 AM (forty-six minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I think the only time I'm in that situation is at band rehearsal but we aren't all white and we aren't all male so it's only intermittently when there's just a subset of us there. idk it doesn't bother me, there's no assholes in the band lol

― Οὖτις, Thursday, October 12, 2017 11:47 AM (forty-three minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Just don't hang out with assholes imo.

― IF (Terrorist) Yes, Explain (man alive), Thursday, October 12, 2017 11:48 AM (forty-two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the classic Max Ophuls film Letter from an Unknown Woman is relevant on this point

Did you see the cuts Harvey demanded?

― Anne of the Thousand Gays (Eric H.), Thursday, October 12, 2017 11:48 AM (forty-two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

"That's locker room."

― Josh in Chicago, Thursday, October 12, 2017 11:48 AM (forty-two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

men who feel the need to exclude women aren't usually up to anything worthwhile ime

where does the conversation go that makes you uncomfortable? i'll admit to being curious.

― weird woman in a bar (La Lechera), Thursday, October 12, 2017 11:48 AM (forty-two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I mean, IDK I haven't had that experience so much. I don't hang out with anyone that much these days, but I get together with a group of guys to play music and it's mostly just talk about music, being a dad, work sucks, and maybe football in which case I tune out.

― IF (Terrorist) Yes, Explain (man alive), Thursday, October 12, 2017 11:49 AM (forty-one minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Seems like a thread derail anyway.

― IF (Terrorist) Yes, Explain (man alive), Thursday, October 12, 2017 11:49 AM (forty-one minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

men who feel the need to exclude women aren't usually up to anything worthwhile ime

yeah I think this is the real issue

― Οὖτις, Thursday, October 12, 2017 11:50 AM (forty minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I really hate the idea of stag weekends

― good art is orange; great art is teal (wins), Thursday, October 12, 2017 11:51 AM (thirty-nine minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

in the future they will figure out a way to lower testosterone in unborn male fetuses. or something like that. i'm an optimist! #scifireader

― scott seward, Thursday, October 12, 2017 11:51 AM (thirty-nine minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the company i work for has a large salesforce of mostly men . they come into the office from all over the country for training and meetings and want to go out in the City while they are here . I only went once and never again , the worst part was that most of them are married but when they come here it's like they are on some fucking weied free for all, it's horrible .

― (•̪●) (carne asada), Thursday, October 12, 2017 11:52 AM (thirty-eight minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

that's disgusting ^^^

it's not the testosterone -- it's the culture
we can change it if we try. y'all have kids. time to destroy the fratriarchy :)

― weird woman in a bar (La Lechera), Thursday, October 12, 2017 11:54 AM (thirty-six minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I have a great core of friends, no assholes, but one of them keeps gravitating toward these sort of fratty activities. For example, he had his 40th birthday in Vegas, and my wife and were all, who actually does this? (So we decided not to go, since Vegas sucks - sorry, Vegas). The other week he made this half suggestion that we go back, but he added "and this time it should be just the guys!" And another friend of mine basically looked at him funny and said, "why? I like having my wife around." Which is to say I think some guys, even not assholes, sometimes get it in their head that they should do guy things in the most cliched guy way possible, and when a group of dudes, even good dudes, get that in their head, things can escalate into assholetry.

Or, like a different friend around the backyard fire pit the other night, actually take out his acoustic guitar and start strumming (and singing!) rudimentary classic rock songs. Don't do that either!

― Josh in Chicago, Thursday, October 12, 2017 11:54 AM (thirty-six minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^^Harvey would have been a lot better off if he'd just done that tho.

― to fly across the city and find Aerosmith's car (C. Grisso/McCain), Thursday, October 12, 2017 12:00 PM (thirty minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah that's my attitude to stag parties, just complete befuddlement. "A pre-wedding party, but no women allowed!" Lol what, no, that sounds fucking terrible and dumb. Where are we going, your treehouse?

― good art is orange; great art is teal (wins), Thursday, October 12, 2017 12:00 PM (thirty minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The only all-male context I have in my life right now revolves around the alumni group for my all-male college chorus and even there enough of the guys are married to women that it's rare to have a meetup that is actually all male. (We do have an alumni chorus gig every two years, alternating between West Coast US and Japan, where the rehearsals are all-male but we are also in the middle of an activity so there's no real opportunity for things to go super gross.)

I will say that as a straight guy in this context, there is apparently some intragroup harassment that completely bypasses me; one issue that we've had in getting younger alums involved is apparently a core group of guys in their 60s-70s who make a habit of trying to prey on anyone under 30 who shows up. I knew nothing about this until one of my friends told me some stories about rescue missions he and his partner have gone on to keep things above board.

xp: lol, my wife had her 40th in Vegas, as did one of the guys I mentioned who was cockblocking old predators on the last alumni chorus trip.

― Marcus Hiles Remains Steadfast About Planting Trees.jpg (DJP), Thursday, October 12, 2017 12:00 PM (thirty minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

"we can change it if we try. y'all have kids. time to destroy the fratriarchy"

my kids were lucky enough to go to a really kind/loving/progressive school during their formative years and it totally helped form them in a really positive way. they are very quick to cry foul if they see/hear anything unfair/sexist/racist. not everyone gets that opportunity. i wish i'd had that!

― scott seward, Thursday, October 12, 2017 12:01 PM (twenty-nine minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

a core group of guys in their 60s-70s who make a habit of trying to prey on anyone under 30 who shows up.

as someone who used to attend an LGBT church (overwhelmingly white men), this is not an unfamiliar phenomenon to me

― ice cream social justice (Dr Morbius), Thursday, October 12, 2017 12:03 PM (twenty-seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I wholly reject the notion that ending toxic masculinity requires men not hanging out in groups together, that seems silly. I've had great groups of male friends where no such toxicity existed. But I'm all for ending what-happens-in-vegas style weekends and frat culture and the like. And there is definitely something to the idea that "good" guys will feel pressured to act in a certain guy way when in these situations. I was at an all-guy work dinner recently that got very close to crossing some lines, but thankfully a senior mgmt guy read the situation and was like "Ok, it's time to go."

― IF (Terrorist) Yes, Explain (man alive), Thursday, October 12, 2017 12:04 PM (twenty-six minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

so happy i don't know what a "stag party" is and have to guess

and yeah i have/have had a lot of friends who are extremely "the boys" mentality. i.e. daydrinking & playing Xbox & doing blow. shit is dark. it's so stupid

― flappy bird, Thursday, October 12, 2017 12:05 PM (twenty-five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

La Lechera -- i guess it's that the conversations turn towards talking about women a lot or relationships in a way that feels a bit retrograde, there's always going to be a bit of that type of flirting w/servers that makes me feel like i'm with a bunch of embarrassing uncles, and it feels kind of gloomy for some reason in a very existential dude way. i can't really explain that latter part, it's more an overall feeling i have. that's probably not a great answer.

it differs from other friends where the couples will hang out and it's just fun and easy and no one has any hangups about the lack of dude nights in that particular circle. though there are times when i'll go hang out with one of those dudes. we just don't get all together as a group to visit the secret world of men, away from the women!

we have a son, and his two oldest friends are girls. and i think that's been more helpful than any advice i could give him. i think he's weirded out by dude energy too, maybe. it's good to err on the side of caution!

― nomar, Thursday, October 12, 2017 12:06 PM (twenty-four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

as someone who used to attend an LGBT church (overwhelmingly white men), this is not an unfamiliar phenomenon to me

As someone who used to host trivia in the only gay bar in town that attracted a 55+ clientele, me neither. The difference here, though, is that these men were not in positions of power, comparatively speaking. Not excusing, just observing.

― Anne of the Thousand Gays (Eric H.), Thursday, October 12, 2017 12:06 PM (twenty-four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Stag party = bachelor party. If they don't have those where you are, hopefully you can guess from "pre-wedding party for men" xp

― good art is orange; great art is teal (wins), Thursday, October 12, 2017 12:07 PM (twenty-three minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

xxxxp yeah man alive otm, ya gotta call em as ya see em. Shit is pretty widespread though. I didn't go to college, but a lot of the friends I was referring to above went to art school. "the boys" / frat mentality extends way beyond actual frats.

― flappy bird, Thursday, October 12, 2017 12:07 PM (twenty-three minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I wholly reject the notion that ending toxic masculinity requires men not hanging out in groups together, that seems silly. I've had great groups of male friends where no such toxicity existed. But I'm all for ending what-happens-in-vegas style weekends and frat culture and the like. And there is definitely something to the idea that "good" guys will feel pressured to act in a certain guy way when in these situations. I was at an all-guy work dinner recently that got very close to crossing some lines, but thankfully a senior mgmt guy read the situation and was like "Ok, it's time to go."
― IF (Terrorist) Yes, Explain (man alive), Thursday, October 12, 2017 6:04 PM (two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

for the record i'm not suggesting that but then again if men really never hung out in groups that were exclusively men...hmm

― nomar, Thursday, October 12, 2017 12:08 PM (twenty-two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I feel you, man alive, inasmuch as I have male friends (that I've known 15-20 years and who can comfortably hang out with like my mom) I can chill with as a group of just guys, so I don't condemn the practice in and of itself as much as I personally generally avoid it because the majority of my creepiest hangs have been dude-exclusive.

― the scarest move i ever seen is scary move 4 (Old Lunch), Thursday, October 12, 2017 12:09 PM (twenty-one minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The difference here, though, is that these men were not in positions of power, comparatively speaking. Not excusing, just observing.

A detail I'm leaving out is that the people I'm talking about are all on the board of our alumni organization.

― Marcus Hiles Remains Steadfast About Planting Trees.jpg (DJP), Thursday, October 12, 2017 12:09 PM (twenty-one minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

There’s also work-related male hangouts before or after meetings where the women who don’t go/aren’t invited are not given career breaks or don’t get bondy face time with superiors.

― kim jong deal (suzy), Thursday, October 12, 2017 12:09 PM (twenty-one minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This should probably be a separate thread, huh.

― the scarest move i ever seen is scary move 4 (Old Lunch), Thursday, October 12, 2017 12:10 PM (twenty minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

There's no "power" per se as far as other alumni are concerned but we do make decisions that affect the current students' abilities to tour, etc.

― Marcus Hiles Remains Steadfast About Planting Trees.jpg (DJP), Thursday, October 12, 2017 12:10 PM (twenty minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah, where can we move this discussion?

― IF (Terrorist) Yes, Explain (man alive), Thursday, October 12, 2017 12:10 PM (twenty minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

some kind of NO GIRLS clubhouse

― Οὖτις, Thursday, October 12, 2017 12:12 PM (eighteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Rolling Tree House Thread 2017

― flappy bird, Thursday, October 12, 2017 12:12 PM (eighteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

― Οὖτις, Thursday, October 12, 2017 12:14 PM (sixteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

?!?!

"the boys" / frat mentality extends way beyond actual frats.
otm
i foolishly thought if i stayed away from broey fratty people, i could escape it. wrong!

― weird woman in a bar (La Lechera), Thursday, October 12, 2017 12:15 PM (fifteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yea i agree w/ man alive. probably a better thread for all this btw but whatever

i was extremely averse to all-male situations after going to a boys' catholic high school which was frequently toxic, homophobic, misogynist, crude, awful. after that experience, when i went to college i sought out friendships mostly with women, and i now work in a profession that is 80% women.

but eventually i've found great value in cultivating close, intimate friendships with other men and that sometimes that intimacy can be facilitated by male-only environments. they don't have to be toxic.

in the past decade, i've been part of a few all-male things, all of which have been super healthy, positive, and rewarding, and have never gone into that kind of toxic gross shit mentioned itt: 1) a men's group to talk about healthy sexuality in the context of being a man; 2) a regular "dad's night out" for special needs dads (mostly autism parents) organized by a local autism/special needs non-profit; 3) a regular friday night group w/ some of my childhood male friends, mostly we talk about music, politics, food, art, film, sex too but ime some men are able to talk about sex without being fratty creeps.

though i have talked to male friends and family members that work in male-dominated professions and tbh it sounds fucking horrible

― marcos, Thursday, October 12, 2017 12:15 PM (fifteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Rolling No Girls Allowed Treehouse Thread (All Gender Identities Welcome)

― IF (Terrorist) Yes, Explain (man alive), Thursday, October 12, 2017 12:16 PM (fourteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

that's exactly what bob pollard said
"no girls in the treehouse"

― weird woman in a bar (La Lechera), Thursday, October 12, 2017 12:17 PM (thirteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I could've sworn there was already some "masculinity" thread

― Οὖτις, Thursday, October 12, 2017 12:19 PM (eleven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i would like to add, perhaps relevant to this thread, that my bad-vibes groups are men who work in the entertainment industry. not all of them are these bad dudes, most are not, but the conversations which wind up occurring are often...not the greatest.

― nomar, Thursday, October 12, 2017 12:19 PM (eleven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

there's a few xp

plus like...... most of ilx sadly

― marcos, Thursday, October 12, 2017 12:19 PM (eleven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol, my wife had her 40th in Vegas
Ha! Well, women do their own shit in groups, but defending this from afar, I doubt large groups of women get together and turn into assholes the way men often do. Or at least certainly not the same way.

― Josh in Chicago, Thursday, October 12, 2017 12:20 PM (ten minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I doubt large groups of women get together and turn into assholes

lol sometimes I think there is nothing more terrifying than a gang of 10yo girls, the level of real emotional cruelty can just be insane

we're wandering rather far afield here...

― Οὖτις, Thursday, October 12, 2017 12:23 PM (seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

(ftr my wife made me go to Vegas with her for her 30th birthday - it was just us though. also I hated almost every second of it apart from the Star Trek experience thing)

― Οὖτις, Thursday, October 12, 2017 12:24 PM (six minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Don't get me started on kids.

BTW, per "locker room," back when the Access Hollywood tapes came out, the same friend who was anti-"dudes only!" in Vegas didn't defend Trump but did observe that the shit he was saying wasn't that different from the shit any one of us (guys) might say in private. My first thought was, not me! But my second thought was that I at least understood what he was talking about. One man's ironic quip ...

― Josh in Chicago, Thursday, October 12, 2017 12:25 PM (five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The last time I was in Vegas, for a wedding (bride was from Vegas), was actually fine, but after that my wife and I basically breathed a sigh that we would never have to go to Vegas again.

― Josh in Chicago, Thursday, October 12, 2017 12:26 PM (four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

where all my gamergate bros at

outmoded. deal

I remember Andrea Juno insisting that men hanging out in groups occasionally was good for them but I didn't understand why she thought that.

Marcos- I understand the male only sexual health group but not the other examples.

I've been to one small bachelor party, maybe a dozen years ago. I had some experiences, as the only queer there (afaik), that I had not had before. (The groom behaved impeccably btw.)

FWIW my "bachelor party" was just me and my close friends getting ethiopian food and drinks and seeing some music. There was a brief moment of me and a friend talking shit about a woman we had both dated, with a sort of knowing "Okay, just this once, since it's a *bachelor party*" wink. Even that shittalking didn't get all that ugly.

Being a straight, white male has pretty much always felt weird to me inasmuch as I don't relate to most of the things I'm 'supposed' to relate to as a straight, white male. Beyond even just like sports or whatever, I mean weird-ass competitive displays of dominance and strength and machismo and whatever the hell. Just trying to describe the prescriptive aspects of maleness that squick me out, I feel like someone who's always experienced it at a remove and barely has any idea what he's talking about.

yeah I hear you.

bewar! others have trod where you wish to tread: maleness

i think progressive men who don't want the world to be the way the world has always been need to STEP THE FUCK UP. but i don't know how you change the world. i just try to change myself on the regular. and evolve. i am all for evolution. which can be difficult for people. and which is a daily process. and this is why a lot of men just choose to put their hand down their pants Bundy-style and turn on the boob tube and fuggedahboutit.

One thing I was thinking reading the Weinstein thread is how important it is for men to kind of guide other men away from the wrong kinds of attitudes and behaviors and give them an alternative. I feel like I was extremely lucky that I had this freshman year roommate who happened to have this friend from home who was at the school and who became my very good friend -- he was a very confident guy and just wasn't having any of the bullshit. My first weekend we went to hang out with some junior that one of them knew and he was being a complete piece of shit, saying gross stuff about women, pressuring us to get wasted, etc. and the guy who became my friend made an exit for us and then talked on the way home about how much the whole experience sucked, and it made me feel like "Okay, college doesn't have to be like that, I'm not going to go that route."

I'm gonna be the contrarian and say....I don't mind when my buddies wanna hang with me away from wives and girlfriends? And I like/love their wives and girlfriends. I don't see the big deal. Maybe my gayness is the x factor.

also, marcos on the other thread describing his gross toxic high school was a description of EVERY school i ever went to. and i went to....five schools. just being around that for so many years was so detrimental.

I've tried steering other men's behavior before and ime it is thankless and usually unhelpful, which is not me saying it's not worth attempting.

i have a friend whose marriage ended and he has apparently quite literally gone down a rabbit hole of cocaine and escorts. meanwhile a mutual friend told *me* that guy actually has some kind of problems w/my low-key lifestyle, like how i don't actually want to party anymore (ftr, my partying w/him involved having two beers and him having three cocktails and then insisting we split the bill, so...)

dude i don't want to hang out w/you and listen to your BS "true man" advice about how to live while you're doing lines with someone you're paying to have sex with you.

Our friend group has never done all-male things (even the bachelor 'parties' were co-ed), but there are definitely 'ladies only' nights that get organized and my wife hates it.

That said there have been issues over the years with certain dudes tending to dominate the conversation (shocking I know), so I can appreciate wanting a different dynamic. But most of us who are in relationships, y'know, like having our partner at social gatherings with mutual friends.

xp

yea that's gruesome xp

i have better friends than that guy, fortunately. i think one aspect of this is that sometimes you change and other people don't change.

Maybe my gayness is the x factor.

yeah having non-heteros in an all-male mix definitely alters social dynamics in my experience

I'm often in the exclusive company of men when I socialize, and not always all-gay. Generally things don't get gross.

or should i say, sometimes you change in one direction and other people change in another direction. xp

I didn't have to deal with much toxic maleness as a kid/teen. I'm very thankful for the friends I had back then. I had lots of time with other young men and we were mostly never gross about women, or like weird and competitive. Began to experience it a lot more as an adult, which definitely made my social anxiety worse and led to me being pretty much a shut-in.

We discuss music, movies, politics, our sex lives in an adult, non-gross way, problems with dating/wives/girlfriends. They find it more helpful than I do. I don't see anything wrong with me for wanting to see them a couple times a month without their spouses and girlfriends. In fact, if anything, in Hispanic culture there's too much of an obsession with couples doing everything together.

I've tried steering other men's behavior before and ime it is thankless and usually unhelpful, which is not me saying it's not worth attempting.

― a serious and fascinating fartist (Simon H.), Thursday, October 12, 2017 5:54 PM (seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I feel like this is a massive public health issue and want to do something about it, but I have no idea where to begin

"I don't see the big deal. Maybe my gayness is the x factor."

i would be totally happy to hang out with a group of gay guys. i miss hanging out with gay guys. living with gay men in philly and knowing a wide range of gay men was one of my favorite things about living there. living in squaresville can suck sometimes.

i think men should make sure they listen to a lot of music by artists who are not male and read a lot of books by authors who are not male. that sounds like a very simple thing, but it's important.

i will say though on behalf of my squaresville that the men i know and am friends with tend to be mellow/creative/metrosexual/progressive/not gross/freak folkers and i can't say enough good stuff about them. but i don't really hang with men outside of music events that much.

xps: I would definitely not categorically exclude gay guys from the group of men who think they can let loose with their misogyny once they think it's 'just us guys'.

i mean a lot of the men i know COULD be gay if they just tried harder. those are the str8 guys i get along with best.

Several straight friends are gayer than I am.

i think men should make sure they listen to a lot of music by artists who are not male and read a lot of books by authors who are not male. that sounds like a very simple thing, but it's important.

― nomar, Thursday, October 12, 2017 1:03 PM (five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Totally. I can't really shut up about it, but I've been somewhat obsessed with Adrianne Lenker/Big Thief lately. The first song on the new album has been having a huge affect on me, the way I see male-female relationships, sex, etc., it really puts some things together that I sort of was subliminally aware of but hadn't allowed myself to get in touch with. In general her lyrics are so humanizing and I find her very therapeutic to listen to.

*effect

I would definitely not categorically exclude gay guys from the group of men who think they can let loose with their misogyny once they think it's 'just us guys'.

this is def true but gay misogyny is a different beast, it's coming from a different place where the sexual frustration/aggression angle doesn't come into it

xp

The most heinous group I know is around an acquaintance/former lover who never lets an opportunity to shame women slip by.

this is def true but gay misogyny is a different beast, it's coming from a different place where the sexual frustration/aggression angle doesn't come into it

I don't really buy that. The misogyny I've seen from both straight and gay men revolves around demeaning women and reducing them to objects that are at disposal; whether they want to touch them sexually or not doesn't drive the behavior, which manifests similar patterns of diminishing, gaslighting, and undermining.

one of cyrus's best friends has a gay dad - this kid has two moms and two dads for the total western mass package - who is totally into 80's/synth/disco and when he comes around i try not jump on him with madonna talk but i get starved! rupaul was his roommate in the 80's! how can i resist?

some sorta x-post

The misogyny I've seen from both straight and gay men revolves around demeaning women and reducing them to objects that are at disposal; whether they want to touch them sexually or not doesn't drive the behavior, which manifests similar patterns of diminishing, gaslighting, and undermining.

otm

Nomar OTM about reading books by women, listening to music made by women, experiencing art made by women. I've made a concious effort the last year to read more women, and I don't know if it has profoundly altered the way I see thee world, but it's also helped me understand some subleties abt the experience of women in the world. Idk. I try, but I'm no paragon of virtue. I think especially when I was younger, late teens/early twenties, I probably said lots of inappropriate or terrible things when hanging out with dudes. But it's important to be work at being better and acknowledge the fact that by making (even ironic) sexist or racy jokes we are perpetuating a bad thing.

Ass far as hanging out in male groups -- I think a significant portion (20%?)of my socializing is in a male only environment, but it's never organized or thought of in those terms. There are a couple of guys I get together with once or twice a month to listen to 78s. We're just the only ppl we know who are nerdy about that music at that level, and we're all happily married. Rarely does the topic of wives come up; too busy talking about alternate takes and who was playing 2nd guitar on a session. If anything, we most often express how thankful we are to have partners who indulge our weird hobbies and other quirks.

Helen and I don't go out with other couples very much in a "double date" kinda way, but our neighborhood pals are a healthy mix of men and women. A group of people coming over for dinner or to listen to records is never one or the other. Definitely having close friends who are women has helped me to be a better person and more concious of my words/actions.

Maybe ILB should stop having FAPs :(

i think w/the exclusively male nights out i've had, there is this sense of MEN, TO BATTLE, for tonight we etc etc. it's a little lame. i do have a few male friends with whom i have some record listening parties and talk audio shop and equipment and the like, though we've also had women involved w/both (just not most of the time.) that feels a bit more natural as opposed to a "just the boys" night out.

you need a gay man in your life, nomar

maybe it's because i think my friends skew younger but if there happens to be an all-dude hangout it's unintentional and ends up being like record shopping/listening and beers and n64 basically. and it's usually 2-3 guys, never like a big posse

xp no kidding, i mean none of my bros want to talk about saint etienne w/me

oh so you all take it seriously this time

This discussion has prompted me to try and remember the last time I hung out with just guys (who weren't my brothers)...and I honestly think it could've been a decade or more ago.

Like the closest I can think of was an all-male anxiety group (organized and run by my then-therapist, a woman). And that isn't quite what I'd call a 'hang'.

Heh, it's actually kind of a problem that a lot of my straight male friends are musicians who often want to talk to me specifically (and not my wife) about music shit that only we care about.

My gay friends want to talk about books (but are way better about including everyone in the conversation).

Wow, you guys have whole groups of friends!

I often see a conversation on twitter where
1. women will talk about how men have a responsibility to challenge problematic comments made by male friends, esp when in all-male groups
2. a bunch of men will respond saying that avoid hanging out with the kind of guys who say stuff like that, or avoid hanging out in all-male groups altogether because they find them toxic
3. women will respond saying that this is not helpful/an abrogation of responsibility etc, that men who consider themselves 'allies' or whatever have a duty to engage with these ppl/situations.

idk, befriending ppl you don't enjoy spending time with solely so you can admonish them for their bad behavior seems unlikely to end well for anyone? to actually maintain those friendships imo you would have to pick your battles to a certain extent, let some things slide, be complicit up to a point, and where do you draw the line? but I can see the logic of saying that a guy who avoids this kind of environment to keep himself 'pure' is actually doing less to help than someone who hangs out in groups that are problematic but makes some attempt to push back against that.

I think half these dudes who just talk at a computer all day when not doing (or performing on camera) their professed expertise, be it video games or getting swole in a weird way, are basically the 2026 version of MTV Jackass spinoff shows. Except those dudes never had to pretend to be political?

X users have compared Clavicular’s slang, alternately, to Geoffrey Chaucer’s Middle English; James Joyce’s “Ulysses”; and Nadsat, the alienating dialect of the nihilistic goons in “A Clockwork Orange.”

Yeah, Nadsat was my first thought in seeing some of the slang written out

Matt Bomer is his Ludwig Von.

Seen much Joycean clavicular pun play on the everything app

it attracts female sperm-catchers

― more difficult than I look (Aimless), Saturday, February 14, 2026 11:37 AM (two days ago)

and yet:

Though Clavicular’s aesthetic ideal is hypermasculine, he believes he is currently infertile because of testosterone replacement therapy, which can affect fertility. Earlier that day, Clavicular confessed that knowing he could have sex with a woman was in some ways better than the deed itself, which “is going to gain me nothing.”

If you want to become more depressed, gift link to article about Clavicular and “looksmaxxing”

― a tv star not a dirty computer man (the table is the table), Saturday, February 14, 2026 8:51 AM (two days ago)

huh. i mean the whole thing is not good, clearly, but i can't say it makes me any more depressed than i already am. to me it kind of speaks to the consequences of growing up online, unhinged and unmoored from... well, from anything that _works_, honestly.

i definitely think that his overt racism accounts for a _large_ part of his popularity. to me i think it really shows how fundamentally aligned patriarchally constructed masculinity and white supremacy are. it's just so... unhinged and desperate, though. when i was younger, you didn't have to go to such extreme lengths to "make it" as a white supremacist misogynist.

i'm kinda with unperson re: tracking him down on his 40th birthday - he is, i think, just another disposable face of an increasingly deranged and desperate death cult. i do feel bad for him and the millions of young men who are being fucked over by internalizing some truly awful ideas about themselves, but i feel worse for the people who aren't actively perpetuating this bullshit in ways that hurt other people.

the thing that grabbed me most about him is that he started DIYing T at age 15. there's something about him that's almost _transmasculine_. i hesitate to say that because i know people are gonna look at him and maybe get bad ideas about transness or transmasculinity, and i don't mean it like that. i've seen people do some really fucked up stuff, i've seen people internalize really fucked up ideas. he's definitely doing what he's doing _as_ a man, and at the same time there is a way in which he's reinventing the wheel. the kinds of behavior peters is engaging in is, honestly, very similar to one of the norms patriarchy imposes on women. our value is determined to a great extent by how good we _look_. i think a lot of these new words is because he wants to make it clear that what he's doing is not _womanly_ or _effeminate_ - which, again, it isn't! it's deeply fucked, but there is, in fact, nothing "womanly" about his pathological appearance standards.

so yeah, i found his discomfort with the "looksmaxxing" woman he went on a date with really interesting. like, the idea that a woman would be a "looksmaxxer" instead of, like, a "hot girl". there are some women who do build their entire personalities around the idea of being "hot". a lot of times they're deeply traumatized abuse victims. that said, wanting to look "hot" is not in itself a flaw, nor is it a flaw to be more invested in looking good than one is in having sex! i mean imagine cat from red dwarf. he's _funny_ but there's nothing wrong with looking at oneself and saying "yeeeeeow, I look GOOD!" of course cat can't be a looksmaxxer, what with danny john-jules not being white - cats like him are gatekept out of the "looksmaxxing" pathology.

anyway yeah, sometimes i just wanna look good for the sake of looking good, and this is something that patriarchy discourages in men, like it's "gay" or something. i mean ok sure, i'm gay, i guess i can look as good as i want. or i can just wear jeans, a t-shirt, and no makeup. i look fine that way. i just don't look _hot_.

maybe there's something uniquely panopticon-adjacent about it - patriarchy assigns men the role of observers, but we are all of us constantly being watched. i get the sense that he "likes to be watched and be the watcher too", as wire put it - and collapsing the distinction between observed and observer, active and passive, top and bottom, i very much value this in myself! the boundary he lacks, though, is that between self and other, and this i think is where the idea of "narcissism" comes in:

"He would see faces in movies, on TV, in magazines, and in books
He thought that some of these faces might be right for him
And that through the years, by keeping an ideal facial structure fixed in his mind
Or somewhere in the back of his mind
That he might, by force of will, cause his face to approach those of his ideal"

well, ok, that's not what peters is doing - he's doing T, he's wanting to get surgery - and taking hormones, getting surgery, these are both accepted and celebrated in the communities i operate in. one of the things that really fucks with me is that to some extent my face _has_ come to look more like that of my "ideal", which is a gendered ideal. i don't think it was "force of will" exactly, even though it did take me a lot of will to do what i've done. basically i think of it as privilege. i look in the mirror and i see a woman, and that is good. other people look at me and see a woman, and that is also good. i haven't gotten facial feminization surgery. i've thought about it. i know that if i did that, i'd look younger and more attractive, and absolutely that's appealing to me. i absolutely want people to look at me and find me "hot", and facial feminization surgery would accomplish that.

and, honestly, that's not a good enough reason for me. i'm not dysphoric about my appearance. i was dysphoric about my alopecia, and i had surgery for that, and i'm glad i did. i'd definitely say that surgery was medically necessary for me, that it treated my gender dysphoria just as much as my GRS did. for a lot of women, facial feminization surgery is medically necessary for them as well, it's something they're dysphoric over. it causes me a lot of pain that i didn't get to be a 30 year old woman, but facial feminization surgery isn't going to actually make me a thirty year old woman. there are limits to what surgery can do, and some people i know have a hard time with that, they get surgery after surgery and nothing they do is ever "good enough" for them, because of this abstract ideal they have fixed in their head.

the number one reason i don't want facial feminization surgery is because there are, inevitably, racial and cultural aspects to these surgeries. my strong impression - one that is buttressed by this particular white supremacist's desire for "looksmaxxing" surgery - is that facial feminization surgery would make me look more _white_, that to some extent people would find me _more attractive_ if i looked more white. that feels really fucking gross. don't get me wrong, i'm not ashamed of being white. i just don't think that whiteness is a salutary quality i should seek to cultivate. if it was the price of dealing with gender dysphoria, that would be one thing. nah. i like how i look. i don't care how many people swipe left on me. i'm reasonably physically attractive, and personality? personality i got.

that's maybe one of the funniest things. peters is not short on personality either. he's got enough personality, in fact, that he could probably even form a cult around it. if he wanted to.

This TikTok video from "Judah thee Glutelord" is really good on the whole Clavicular "looksmaxxing macho testosterone pretty boy olympics" thing:

https://www.tiktok.com/@werewolffbarmitzvah/video/7607195818772188447

It's very good but I'm a bit disappointed that I almost certainly can't show it to my sons

thanks for sharing that, unperson. he points out some of the things that i find depressing… namely, that sheer queerness of this whole enterprise makes me feel bad. not just that toxic masculinity culture and peacocking are a thing in certain sections of gay male culture, but that i play into them and am subject to them in certain ways. that i can point a finger while a finger points back a la Spiderman.jpg, it makes me depressed.

From above:

Dingle is a common placename in the English language, which means "steep wooded valley"

― The Olde, Old, Very Olde Man. (Tom D.)

i hate to say it but it is very popular for us americans to laugh at historic british place names. it's absolutely immature to laugh at, say, the village of Weeley in Clacton-On-Sea, but phonetically, to my american ears, it comes across as very silly. in contrast, native american names don't sound silly at all to me.

thinking about it i don't mean to deride the peoples of great britain. mainly it's a matter of me as a white person making fun of other white people, which is one of the most wholesome pastimes i know. particularly making fun of american or british white people.

---

This TikTok video from "Judah thee Glutelord" is really good on the whole Clavicular "looksmaxxing macho testosterone pretty boy olympics" thing:

https://www.tiktok.com/@werewolffbarmitzvah/video/7607195818772188447

― placeholder username till I think of a better one (unperson)

god, yes, this is absolutely true. there's this queer dude on youtube who goes by Swolesome who talks a lot about the roots of toxic masculinity, that a lot of the male role models held up by patriarchy are the sorts of masculinity that are most appealing to a certain subset of gay men. all of peters' "nadsat", to me, all i an hear is him saying "no homo, no homo, no homo" over and over again. like, it's ok to be queer. he doesn't even have to like men to be queer. he could be aro, ace, somewhere on those spectrums. i recognize the slang this guy uses, because there's a lot of overlap with certain varieties of queer slang, particularly as practiced on 4chan. there is, for instance, "transmaxxing", totally cis men who _pretend_ to be trans women because, as everybody knows, women have it WAY WAY WAY easier than men. isolated from historic queer culture, people there have come up with their own uniquely toxic variations on shitty queer terms from the past. a non-passing trans woman isn't called a "brick", for instance, she's a "hon". someone who passes isn't a "fish", she's a "passoid". the two are treated with equal contempt. in general, 4chan trans women tend to have this deeply internalized belief they are "hons" and a desperate desire to have the, i don't know, _genetic superiority_ that would allow them to be "passoids".

theory para: shit like that, the way people behave on what's called "/tttt/" - the lgbt board, which has a preponderance of trans women on it - is _why_ i don't talk about "misogyny", _why_ i believe it's necessary to challenge white supremacy in order to develop anything resembling a healthy sense of masculinity. 4chan, much like the internet itself historically, is implicitly white-centered, and that is one of both 4chan and the internet's deepest and most profound flaws. white women in particular do a _lot_ of work to support patriarchy, not because patriarchy itself benefits them, but because a white supremacist society _does_ demonstrably benefit us as white people, and, well, white supremacist culture doesn't really exist without patriarchy. it _certainly_ can't exert the power it does without patriarchy.

back to the anecdotal: speaking as a woman who's attracted to men, i am frustrated to no end by guys who complain that they can't get girls, and take advice on how to "get girls" entirely from other men. it's like... women _have_ desires and a lot of us are perfectly willing and able to express those desires. the whole thing about "heteropessimism" is like... the only people who seem to _listen_ to us, to take us seriously, are queer! there's nothing inherently doomed about heterosexuality itself. there are all kinds of different women and we like all kinds of different guys. one of the main reasons i don't worry about my looks is because the second straight guys find out i used to have a dick, nothing else matters. most straight guys aren't going to take me seriously when i talk about what i'm attracted to as a woman. as much as straight guys are good at not listening to women, the vibe i get is that they particularly aren't going to listen to _me_.

it's the stupidest thing i can imagine, this idea that i'm somehow "not a real woman" just cuz i used to have a dick. quite honestly, these guys are missing out - and they're not just missing out on people like me. the norm is that if a guy gets with a woman, she's gotta be some hot 20 year old, and it doesn't matter if the guy is, like, 50 years old. i know plenty of cis women who have the same sort of problem - when you're 50 years old with a 50 year old body you're fucking invisible to dudes. the lack of people being creepy to us is nice, but straight guys swipe left, swipe left, swipe left... like, dude, i know patriarchy is telling you that all you should want out of a partner is a pretty hole to fuck, and ok, i think people should figure out for themselves what they need. it's gonna be real real hard to figure that out if your frame of reference is fucking 4chan, or, well, anywhere on the internet. that's what's _available_ to them. that's the _default_, that's the _norm_, and it's fucking killing them, whether or not they admit it.

one of the funniest things about that article is peters' criticism of the american vice president, what's his name, vance? he doesn't like vance because he says vance is "fat". it's the same kind of body shaming that men have applied to women for ages. i'm sorry, that man is not fat. he is a bit of a soft boi, and he does get shit for it. i've seen people give him shit for wearing makeup, or the _wrong kind_ of makeup i guess, and it's the dumbest shit i can think of. "oh you wear mascara, why don't you admit you want to be a woman and start taking estrogen and sucking dick", i mean, look, clearly taking estrogen and sucking dick is right for me but i think there's a little bit of a false dichotomy here. one ought to be able to be a man and also, like, wear makeup, be a soft boi.

god, femboys. femboys just make me crazy, not as in, like, i'm overcome with lust for them - i'm not. it's a whole matter of the way the game is rigged so badly against trans people, that trans people have historically been denied so many opportunities, to where for a lot of people being a femboy _is_ part of the "pipeline", part of the bargaining process of coming to accept that someone _can_ actually be a girl. and there _must_ be some femboys who aren't just trans women who think they can't be trans, aren't just trans women who are afraid of being an "ugly woman", but...

what does masculinity have to _offer_ men? really? this is something else i observe - the stereotype that "nonbinary" people are transmasc. well, i'm nonbinary and i'm not transmasc, a lot of trans women are also nonbinary, but that's the thing... there are a lot of transmascs who are very explicitly not men. that's an individual choice, and one that i strongly support everyone in, and there are also systemic factors. i feel like there's room for me as a woman. that there are lots of different ways to be a woman. i don't feel like i'm constantly under pressure to prove that i'm a _real_ woman. everybody who's a man, though, is under suspicion. like peters, men have to prove that they're _real men_ over and over and over again to the point where, i mean, why? being a man is great, but being a man on _their_ terms? god, no amount of privilege is worth that bullshit. i know i'm hardly impartial on this point. i want to make it clear, though, that i do LIKE men, i think men are amazing. i would like it if there were more men in my life. it's just that patriarchy requires men to be, well... useless! if you're a "real man", like peters, i guess there's no point in having sex with a woman - it's going to gain him nothing! god, how stupid. how utterly, utterly, ridiculous and absurd.

ok i went off on a vent there, sorry

i think the issue people have with vance using mascara or not is that he is a gender essentialist and is actively using the government to promote patriarchy and erase the existence of people like you or my niece/nephew

the dudes agree: while it wasn't great, we're rolling back all manosphere content to the Spike TV era

need at least two shows that are just guys throwing knives at things

From above:
Dingle is a common placename in the English language, which means "steep wooded valley"

― The Olde, Old, Very Olde Man. (Tom D.)

i hate to say it but it is very popular for us americans to laugh at historic british place names. it's absolutely immature to laugh at, say, the village of Weeley in Clacton-On-Sea, but phonetically, to my american ears, it comes across as very silly. in contrast, native american names don't sound silly at all to me.

There's a Dingle in the Philippines too, something I warned about last year

https://maps.app.goo.gl/dmhCb4YvyVfUnykg6

is it pronounced Din-gleh?

Ween has a song that mentions a character named Eddie Dingle. So dingle was a word that got tossed around on the Ween Forum a lot.

So when I read it, I instantly feel like an adolescent boy.

just read a tweet about Clavicular that stikes me as accurate as well:

“In another time he would've been one of Andy Warhol's factory stars who starred in seven vaguely pornographic underground films shot in blurry black and white talking about the meaning of beauty while doing drugs then coming to a tragic end at a remote gay millionaires mansion in Santa Barbara at the age of 27 under strange but unexplained circumstances”

i don't think vance actually wears mascara. his eyelashes look like that in old military photos

maybe he wore mascara in the military

They called him the Maybelline Marine

Dingle is a common placename in the English language, which means "steep wooded valley"

― The Olde, Old, Very Olde Man. (Tom D.)

And dingleberries cannot be referred to as such unless they are grown in steep, wooded valleys in England. Otherwise they must be labelled as "Sparkling Berries" or "Berries, Méthode Dingle."

i think the issue people have with vance using mascara or not is that he is a gender essentialist and is actively using the government to promote patriarchy and erase the existence of people like you or my niece/nephew

― Toe Bean Sprout (Boring, Maryland), Tuesday, February 17, 2026 12:01 PM (four hours ago)

i'm absolutely opposed to vance being transphobic. i don't really give a shit whether or not he uses mascara, personally. his policies are the problem, not his presentation. i mean i'm opposed to a lot of the shit caitlyn jenner says too, and some people think that, like, because she promotes cruel and bad ideas, and some people are like, "HOW DARE YOU BE TRANS WHILE SAYING TRANSPHOBIC SHIT", like the thing that's wrong is her _being trans_ and not the transphobic ideas she promotes. poppycock. pure applesauce.

what does masculinity have to _offer_ men? really?

i feel like a lot of these examples lately are of people .. desperately trying to fill a hole, so to speak. my experience of my own masculinity is that the more i think that i need to do something in order to make myself masculine, or behave a certain way to make myself masculine, the more the masculine slips out of my grasp. i locate the formation of my gender in a place that isn't social. i experience it in my soul. i feel it not as a thing that i am but as an expression of creation within me that flows and changes shapes like a cloud. this frees me to embrace every expression of myself as related back to the gender that i feel in me. i can be a man who feels strong or i can be a broken, floundering man, or i can be a flip and bitchy man, etc. my gender becomes fortified by being applicable to everything i am, instead of fragile and constantly under threat because i'm locating it outside of myself.

of course the social view and scaffolding around one's gender can be an addictive thing to maintain. but people absolutely lose the reality of the gender that is inside them when they think it's in the external stuff. of course the external stuff can be .. rewarding and motivating. but it's important not to take it too seriously imo. because that stuff ebbs and flows like moods and money.

idk my experience of this stuff has changed a lot since i started meditating. i don't even want to click on some nytimes gender ghoul any more - to "know what their deal is" - bcz i already know it's worthless to me. even though i have more empathy for the source of that pain than i used to. i don't need to "know" anymore. because i already know for myself.

thanks for sharing that, unperson. he points out some of the things that i find depressing… namely, that sheer queerness of this whole enterprise makes me feel bad. not just that toxic masculinity culture and peacocking are a thing in certain sections of gay male culture, but that i play into them and am subject to them in certain ways. that i can point a finger while a finger points back a la Spiderman.jpg, it makes me depressed.

― a tv star not a dirty computer man (the table is the table), Tuesday, February 17, 2026 11:45 AM (four hours ago)

for what it worth, i definitely get why you're depressed, and at the same time i'm like "oh, thank god, he _sees it_." all of this endless discourse about maleness and masculinity, i guess there are a lot of different factors, and for me a lot of it is "god, how the hell do guys not _get this_?" for me it's a rhetorical question, one that i already know the answer to, because i had that same moment, where i realized that the finger was pointing back at me. i suspect that when cis women distrust trans women, that's part of where that comes from, the fact that the finger _does_ in a lot of cases point back at us. first i had that moment, or moments, realizing that my pre-transition self was part of the problem, and then i had that moment where i realized that oh, wait, us white women can be just as bad as any guy. some of the worst transphobia i've seen has come from other trans women!

for a long time i was suspicious of cis gay men, simply because there was this particular masculinist gay male narrative that was perpetuated at the expense of my very different experience of queerness. when i look back at the Problematic time when i was promoting this kind of absolutist transfeminine narrative, to some extent that was an attempt to challenge or push back against the gay masculinist narrative that's been normative for so much of my life. and i have seen a similar sort of distrust, often much more pronounced, among other queer people of varying backgrounds and identities. for a little bit there was this initialism people used - ABCD, "Anybody But Cis Dudes". and it's not used anymore, thankfully, because it was bad and essentializing, but there is, i think, an unspoken distrust a lot of queer people have of cis gay men, particularly white cis gay men who conform to the masculinist mold - "menergy" and all that stuff.

i can look back and see that the masculinist narrative didn't become a predominant one until the 80s, and that it was in large part motivated by the AIDS epidemic, by wanting to appear as though one didn't have HIV, whether or not one actually did, as well as a response to the historic erasure of masc gays by "third sex" narratives - todd rundgren's "you don't have to camp around" being an early example of pushback against the stereotype of gay men all being "queens".

mostly, though, it's not something so much reflected in _media_ as in, like, the everyday experience a lot of us have had with certain gay men. there was this time back in 2019 advertised as being for trans people and there were a few very masculine men in jockstraps, manspreading out on the dance floor, the timorous trans people like me lined up against the wall. well, i'm in favor of queer liberation! i'm in favor of mascs cavorting on the dancefloor in jockstraps! it's just, well, everything seems to be centered around them. a friend of mine unearthed some correspondence she had in the 90s with a, shall we say, MSM complaining about "faggy queens on estrogen". so, _so_ many stories of transfem elders going to bathhouses back in the day and people just treating them like guys.

things are different now! the irony of all of this masculinist culture nowadays is that a lot of gay guys have, like, gotten the message over the past few years (including, i'd say, every gay man on ilx). occasionally you'll see some holdout... i recall alfred talking about a gay friend of his who was in this very masculinist transphobic mold. in 2019, though, that kind of thing was absolutely the norm among cis gay men, and now it's not. my transfem friends who have boyfriends, most of those boyfriends are gay or bi. i've seen multiple cases, though, of cis gay men with girlfriends who are trans women, and these guys love and support their girlfriends _as_ women. it's not a chaser thing at all. like, some of the women in question have had grs, so if these guys are chasers they're really bad at it.

guys like peters, i don't think it's just that they're afraid of being "gay". it's that i can't see someone who behaves like him _not_ throwing up red flags to any self-respecting gay man. peters, were he gay, would absolutely be a Bad Gay today, which i don't think would have been true of someone like him ten years ago.

xp and i'm not sure how much of this me sawing my own wood (an expression i just completely made up) but i just can't trust any of this hyper online discourse about gender that comes out of message board rabbit holes - it strikes me as people creating virtual places in their heads that are likely disconnected from their bodies and the physical realities they inhabit. there's where i guess i'm over-conjecturing, i have no idea if that's actually true or not, and my urge to say it definitely says something more about my limits with the internet. it's just like i can only get 12% of what i need by typing in a text box and staring at a screen and i have a very hard time believing any of these people are self-actualizing by getting super sophisticated about the intricacies about their gender tribe online.

of course the social view and scaffolding around one's gender can be an addictive thing to maintain. but people absolutely lose the reality of the gender that is inside them when they think it's in the external stuff. of course the external stuff can be .. rewarding and motivating. but it's important not to take it too seriously imo. because that stuff ebbs and flows like moods and money.

idk my experience of this stuff has changed a lot since i started meditating. i don't even want to click on some nytimes gender ghoul any more - to "know what their deal is" - bcz i already know it's worthless to me. even though i have more empathy for the source of that pain than i used to. i don't need to "know" anymore. because i already know for myself.

― map, Tuesday, February 17, 2026 4:55 PM (four minutes ago)

completely agree! i had this friend who's been gone ten years now, gay guy, a bit of a queen, and the thing i remember most about him is that he told me he was more convinced of my masculinity than that of anyone else he'd known, because i didn't feel the need to perform masculinity. well, he happened to be mistaken in that specific case, but the general PRINCIPLE of it is one that i strongly endorse. the more confident someone is in who they are, the less they're going to feel the need to prove it. it's just that, well, patriarchy is constantly undermining men's sense of their own masculinity!

i've grown to love y'all cis gay guys on ILX so much. there aren't a lot of great male role models out in the public eye right now, and god, there are so, so many great men who are being done wrong right now :(

Guns, drugs, misogyny, body dysmorphia: The miasma of nihilism swirling around Clavicular has made him an irresistible symbol of social decline — a freakish avatar for the hopelessly fallen, social-media-addled state of the young American man.

At the same time, he may simply be ahead of the curve.

Classic NYT “and yetting” right there.

xp and i'm not sure how much of this me sawing my own wood (an expression i just completely made up) but i just can't trust any of this hyper online discourse about gender that comes out of message board rabbit holes - it strikes me as people creating virtual places in their heads that are likely disconnected from their bodies and the physical realities they inhabit. there's where i guess i'm over-conjecturing, i have no idea if that's actually true or not, and my urge to say it definitely says something more about my limits with the internet. it's just like i can only get 12% of what i need by typing in a text box and staring at a screen and i have a very hard time believing any of these people are self-actualizing by getting super sophisticated about the intricacies about their gender tribe online.

― map, Tuesday, February 17, 2026 5:04 PM (two minutes ago)

ok i feel like i am promoting lily alexandre's videos literally all the time, but this one is a great in-depth examination of exactly the sort of "hyper-online discourse about gender" (which mostly happened on Tumblr in the 2010s and is mostly disappeared now) that you're talking about. worth watching IMO!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DoZFZto6Wqg

i recall alfred talking about a gay friend of his who was in this very masculinist transphobic mold.

Oh yeah. I no longer see this person, but I see vestiges of this mold -- gay men who say, "I get trans people, but what's this about them becoming athletes?"

never ceases to surprise me where people's hangups are and how vigorous they are about them!

i've grown to love y'all cis gay guys on ILX so much. there aren't a lot of great male role models out in the public eye right now, and god, there are so, so many great men who are being done wrong right now :(

this is really sweet kate. for what it's worth, i've learned so much of value from your posts here over the years. and i've watched you grow so much, especially recently. there's a beautiful element of kindness in your posting lately that honestly takes my breath away. you inspire me very much.

and i'm sorry i came in to this thread a little grumpy. these masc grifters .. it feels like there's an unending stream of them lately, and they just seem more and more bizarre and desperate. i feel really sorry for guys out there sort of inhabiting this kind of thing as a default landscape. so derelict! so empty! i take great pride and joy in knowing a few who aren't like that and watching them take wing ;_;

awww! thank you so much map!

nah i wanna get back to clavicular though, one of my friends has gotten kinda obsessed with him and this dude is wild, the thing about him being "frame-mogged by the ASU frat leader" has blown up

Olympians are being asked by Hoopify where they were when Clav got frame-mogged by the ASU frat leader pic.twitter.com/p5WoMvmPnu

— FearBuck (@FearedBuck) February 20, 2026

With all of this vocab, he reminds me of...early Pauly Shore?

I thought this was worthwhile. From https://open.substack.com/pub/magdalene/p/clavicular-and-the-nihilism-of-looksmaxxing

And so again none of this — the mogging, the jawlines, the livestreaming, the cloutbombing, the flamboyant nihilism — is in pursuit of sex. That matters because it would make far more sense that way. It would be more legible. It is, after all, what looksmaxxing is allegedly supposed to be about. Inceldom utilizes a taxonomy, where everyone can be ranked and ordered according to their ability to attract a member of the opposite sex. Looksmaxxing is the method of rising those ranks, of changing one’s appearance in order to reach a higher place in this taxonomy to theoretically be able to have sex with more attractive people. There are other valuable, tangible benefits of being hot, obviously, but this is the foundation. It is why these other benefits even exist, to begin with.

When Clavicular talks about sex, he does so as if it’s a chore. He readily admits that he takes as little time with it as possible — he has no interest in “impressing” a woman in bed, and he has other, more important things to do. Yet he does at least still claim to do it, even if begrudgingly. I’ll give him that. On his appearance on The Adam Friedland Show, he said sex usually takes him about a minute, and agreed when Friedland suggested he’d be better off just masturbating. All of this is again to say that none of this is about sex for Clavicular. None of this broader moment, really, is about Clavicular himself, either. The realities of Clavicular’s life are superfluous. He’s fucking with us. Even so, he has become the latest patron saint of the psychosexual cultural moment, one that continues to say that sex is boring, sex is secondary, sex is less important than embracing this empty cult of virality.

[…]

>>> All of this, then, is a way for young men to structure their life and its aims according to something that at least feels concrete. To go to college, to try and earn an honest living, to find a wife and have a kids and leave some type of modest but respectable legacy — that no longer feels tangible enough. That doesn’t make enough sense. There is no coherent meaning to pull from the narratives of living that we have relied upon, and so men like Clavicular have returned to something far more basic and animalistic, yet through an entirely digitally-mediated filter. The only goal is to be the alpha in the room, so long as the room is constantly being recorded.

Looksmaxxing is the obvious medium of achieving status in this framework.

early pauly shore is a great callout!

i definitely agree with other commentators that what clav is doing _isn't_ intrinsically gendered... there's probably a better word for it, but i think of it as being "panopticonmaxxing". "success" now seems to be defined entirely in terms of getting people to look at you at all times. that's basically the only thing the american president has ever been good at. i know a lot of people will call that "narcissism" or whatever, and if that works for people fine. the problem with "narcissism" is that one, people essentialize it, it focuses on the person and not the behavior, which i think doesn't help. because two, people look at "narcissists" and conclude that they think really highly of themselves. that's not my experience with people exhibiting that behavior.

to me, someone who's always trying to get everybody to look at them, admire them, be jealous of them, is someone who thinks really poorly of themselves, and tries to compensate by always talking about how amazing and great they are. like if someone else isn't looking at them, paying attention to them, thinking about them, they feel kinda like they don't exist. and of course everybody needs external validation, everybody needs praise, and for whatever reason the world we live in right now is one where like we're all constantly getting invalidated and being told we're not good enough. when people praise me and validate me it strengthens my sense of self-worth and confidence and helps me do things that are hard for me. that's kind of like the ideal.

in the past, though, i had more of an attitude of, well, if all these other people like me, i don't have to learn to like myself. and that didn't work out very well for me at all. the reason it didn't work out, on reflection, is mostly this idea of _impermanence_, nothing lasted beyond the moment. i felt like i needed nearly continuous reassurance. i think that's one of the things that frustrates me so much about internet culture, the way in which it's kind of a harrison bergeron ADHD machine.

it's not that i'm not fond of what bill griffith called "language as table tennis" - i am - but table tennis isn't a fucking team sport. public social media often feels to me like a million people simultaneously yelling "yo la tengo!" and smashing into each other in the outfield. i like to see car crashes as much as anyone - and i'll admit that it's kind of empowering when i see people getting into car wrecks over _me_.

for whatever reason - mostly by circumstance, i think, partly due to my insecurity - i have found myself the center of attention at various times in my life, and it got really boring really quickly. i'm happy talking to an audience, if you will, it's just that i haven't ever thought it was a good idea for that audience to be "everybody". hobbes was wrong about the state of nature being "the war of all against all" - it was an artificial state in his time, and it's an artificial state in ours. and to some extent i do think it's the reality on the internet. if there was ever any sport in it, it's long since degraded to the point of meaninglessness - not tragedy, not farce, just fucking _stupid_. i'm not _pessimistic_ about men, i'm bored. not with _men_. everybody figures things out at their own pace, and the situation men are in right now is difficult. a lot of guys are figuring shit out, and i'm very fucking happy to see it, because i like men and i want them to be happy.

i'm bored with how much the internet does resemble those shitty comedies from the late 80s and early 90s. yahoo serious. carrot top. pauly shore. fucking... the american president, the first time around it was weekend at bernie's, and now it's weekend at bernie's 2, and i just have nothing to say to weekend at bernie's bros. and too much to say in general, and not a lot of really good places on the internet to say them!

i get the appeal of looking good, but when i look at people... i'm not a fit person but i do like people who are strong in certain ways. if someone's a bodybuilder, anything they have going for them is really only good in short bursts. i'm more attracted to people who have what i guess is called "slow-twitch muscle", _endurance_. i don't know if y'all guys know this, but one of the things that's really big on the lesbian internet is women chopping wood. strong women with big strong arms, hooo boy, i tell you what i absolutely melt for that. whether that's in a man or a woman, i mean, that's really appealing to me. because looking is free, and it's also pretty superficial. if a guy is juicing like clav is, look, i know what the effects of that are. it's not about _size_, i'm not a _size queen_, it's just, well, i _don't_ value form over function. like, nice hammer smashed face, dude. what can you _do_ with it?

frame-mogged by the ASU frat leader vs. sonned by a white kid after a AOL beef

i don't know if y'all guys know this, but one of the things that's really big on the lesbian internet is women chopping wood. strong women with big strong arms, hooo boy, i tell you what i absolutely melt for that. whether that's in a man or a woman, i mean, that's really appealing to me. because looking is free, and it's also pretty superficial.

It's funny; the popular death metal band Arch Enemy, who first broke out in 2003 when they replaced their male singer with a female singer, and have had two other female singers since (the first one, who is married to the band's guitarist, is now their manager). They just announced the newest one with a song/video, and the first thing I noticed in the video is that she's pretty ripped:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WujjCSEJcDk

i have thoughts on bodybuilding vs "functional" muscle that i won't get into, they kinda resemble a snake eating its own tail. i'm into strength that says "i do a lot of different things, some of them at the gym but not all, that harness the power in my body". strength is a spiritual thing imo, a state of mind, a focused application of breath. the task it accomplishes .. i'm impressed by athletic barbell lifts and strongman type feats that aren't actually about modifying / creating the external world. i'm impressed by applied and "useful" strength too, that are about creating the external world. definitely get the chopping wood thing. one of my favorite insta follows is kinda buff kinda dadbod dudes doing home building / repair stuff.

the type of bodybuilder i'm not into are the ones who can afford gear and/or growth hormone, have a borderline eating disorder and only use machines at the gym. like, miss me with your leg press with 6 plates video. rmde. so unimpressive to me. i don't mind seeing guys who are obviously using performance enhancing drugs but are also somewhat advanced in the feats of actual strength they can do. there is a juiced up mega huge guy i follow on insta (jujumufu or something like that) who really plays up the ridiculous "street fighter caricature" aspect of himself but in so doing accomplishes some hugely impressive moves and skills. to be able to play the goofball is inspiring to me. something about how silliness is the ultimate accomplishment of seriousness.

When Clavicular talks about sex, he does so as if it’s a chore. He readily admits that he takes as little time with it as possible — he has no interest in “impressing” a woman in bed, and he has other, more important things to do. Yet he does at least still claim to do it, even if begrudgingly. I’ll give him that. On his appearance on The Adam Friedland Show, he said sex usually takes him about a minute, and agreed when Friedland suggested he’d be better off just masturbating. All of this is again to say that none of this is about sex for Clavicular. None of this broader moment, really, is about Clavicular himself, either. The realities of Clavicular’s life are superfluous. He’s fucking with us. Even so, he has become the latest patron saint of the psychosexual cultural moment, one that continues to say that sex is boring, sex is secondary, sex is less important than embracing this empty cult of virality.

see this is the really frustrating thing about talking about clav, is that _individually nothing he's doing is inherently bad_. including, like, smashing his own face with a hammer.

i know that's a hard sell. i know most people are gonna look at that and say "jesus, what the fuck is wrong with this guy, why would anyone _do_ that," and the awkward thing is that i do in fact know why he would do that. and if we're doing clavicular thinkpieces this week, i mean, i might as well talk about my perspective. and when i look at clavicular, i look at what happened to a man by the name of philip bondy.

mr. bondy suffered from a rare condition known as "body integrity identity disorder". it's also known as "xenomelia". it was formerly known as "apotemnophilia". it's probably most widely known, though, as "an amputee fetish".

there are probably lots of people with amputee fetishes. i don't know. i used to run into them... i was a regular in an irc channel for the newsgroup alt.music.pink-floyd, #amp-f. occasionally someone would pop by the server, see the channel name, and assume we were amputee fetishists, which we weren't. i don't remember any of them being particularly inappropriate about it. one does not infrequently run into people being weird and inappropriate about their sexual fetishes on the internet, and this very definitely does cause problems. i have nothing against "sissies", but the behavior of some of them did make it very difficult for me to accept myself as a trans woman. it sucks because i know they don't represent the majority - they just act very entitled and privileged and that behavior does make it difficult for the rest of us.

anyway i gotta assume that there are plenty of amputee fetishists out there in the world, having run into a few accidentally, and that the vast majority wouldn't have any interest in doing what philip bondy did, which was to attempt to have his ... his leg, i believe, one of his legs ... tried to advocate for himself to get his leg medically surgically removed. and he couldn't get it done legally, so he wound up going to tijuana to get it done by this former surgeon by the name of john ronald brown.

mr. brown - and this is, if you haven't caught on already, pretty much going to be a real-life horror story - mr. brown was well-known at this point to people in the transfem community. specifically, he was known to them as "butcher brown". see, he'd focused his career on genital reconstruction surgery, what i think at the time was often called "sex change surgery". he did get his license revoked in the united states. brown drank a lot, and his surgical practices were well below an appropriate clinical standard of care. he kept performing genital reconstruction surgeries, moving his practice to tijuana. he kept marketing his services to trans women. and trans women kept coming to him for their surgeries, because they were desperate and couldn't get the surgeries they needed elsewhere. his prices were a lot lower than the prices charged by surgeons who provided, you know, clinically adequate care.

mr. bondy went to see mr. brown for surgery for similar reasons. in his case, he couldn't find anybody else who would perform the surgery on him. this isn't because there were no clinicians who advocated for him getting this surgery! this is the interesting thing - from a clinical standpoint there was actually a _strong argument in favor_ of mr. bondy having access to surgical treatment for his body integrity identity disorder.

now, having a leg amputated is obviously in no way _physically_ comparable to having genital reconstruction surgery, no matter how massive a woman's penis is (i will admit to sometimes suspecting that God gives His biggest cocks to His strongest dolls). the central issue is that losing a leg is, in fact a disability. patriarchy has a long history of _acting_ like not having a penis is a disability, but this belief of theirs is most assuredly false. the complicating factor in this case is that body integrity identity disorder is _also_ disabling, to the extent that in some cases a sufferer's quality of life really is improved through surgical intervention.

i personally don't have body integrity identity disorder as it's clinically defined, and i don't know anybody who has experienced it. it is, i am told, extremely rare. quite honestly, i can't begin to imagine why having a leg off would improve someone's quality of life to such a degree that it would more than compensate for them, you know, losing a leg. i'm also, however, quite unable to explain why my quality of life has been improved so dramatically by having genital reconstruction surgery. there is absolutely nothing wrong with penises. they're pretty great, actually. there's also nothing at all wrong with women having penises. again, overall? pretty great. i'm a supporter. it's actually disappointing to me how much happier i am with a vulva than with a penis, because truly, genuinely, there's not that much of a difference. i have never felt like my genital reconstruction surgery made me a "real woman", or any _more_ of a woman, or had any effect at all, really, on my gender. i also never particularly had a problem with my penis. it was a great penis, though i wouldn't necessarily characterize myself as one of God's strongest dolls. i just had no particular use for the product.

i guess some people are just happier with vaginas than with penises, and i guess i'm one of them. no idea why this should be. that's just how it is. this being the case, i guess i can see why someone would truly, genuinely be happier without a leg. again, this doesn't mean that i think that anybody who feels like they'd like to try not having a leg should be able to have their leg off, simply because, again, it is a disability. i look at mr. bondy, who did wind up dying as a result of mr. brown's grossly negligent surgery, and i do think it's stupid and unnecessary. at the time, though, people had some... some really bad takes. there was this... a guy named paul ciotti wrote a lengthy article for LA Weekly, published december 15, 1999.. it was well-received, won some award i think. i read it a couple years back. it was pretty horrific - not just what mr. brown did, but ciotti's judgements about trans people. he's still alive, i guess. i don't judge him personally for it. it's just the way things were back then.

maybe all this is why i'm more sympathetic to mr. peters than i by rights ought to be. maybe there are clinical indications for this guy to be on T! maybe there is potential clinical benefit to him surgically having his facial bones broken and reconstructed! as someone who's historically been considered a weirdo freak, i don't think there's any real benefit in saying "look at this weirdo freak". i also don't think there's any benefit to treating _him personally_ as an example of "masculinity in crisis". cuz whatever the hell he's got going on, i think most guys aren't like him, most guys aren't ever going to be like him.

i guess the fucked up thing is the context. it's the way he treats the kids who look up to him, who want to be like him. he's shitty towards them. he's dishonest and he's like, oh, i'm so great, you can never be as great as me. if he wants to mog, that's fine, let him go ahead and mog, but this idea that he's, i don't know, the god-king of mogging... that's the bit that's fucked up, him putting other people down because he thinks that'll make him look better. it doesn't.

idk this is maybe the most gen-x conclusion ever but these kids need to watch some marlo thomas or something.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwoyfT52Qt4

It's funny; the popular death metal band Arch Enemy, who first broke out in 2003 when they replaced their male singer with a female singer, and have had two other female singers since (the first one, who is married to the band's guitarist, is now their manager). They just announced the newest one with a song/video, and the first thing I noticed in the video is that she's pretty ripped:

― placeholder username till I think of a better one (unperson), Friday, February 20, 2026 11:54 AM

holy shit, yes, yeah that's definitely one of the many types of woman i find hot

not to get too into training stuff in this thread but i use machines, they are useful, etc., but if i only used machines and their strictly limited movement paths determined by a company and its factory and didn't do a lot of freely / expressively lifting heavy stuff from the ground using my whole body i would be a much more boring and vacuous person than i actually am lol. xps

that post that kingfish linked seems to be a parallel to a tiktok video that was going around where a very swole dude (who is apparently "glutelord" on bsky) opining that this is men sculpting themselves for the male gaze, and he compared it to circuit party aesthetics

that look appeals to some women, but it's not a widespread preference. oddly enough, I was listening to some ridiculously long video this morning analyzing the career of Tyler Perry and his movies have some of the same thing going on, where the men the women want are super-muscled, oiled even, and shirtless a bizarre amount of the time. movies made by women generally don't have dudes like that

lol map

I haven't gone to a ~gym~ gym for years, but when I did it was sporadic and I was mostly trying to maintain my fitness and didn't care much about muscle tone or getting swole necessarily. the only safe lifting techniques I learned from a complimentary personal training session that came with one gym membership, and I think I determined that I wasn't invested enough to turn my gym visits into a social interaction in that way. maybe someday!

so, using machines is antisocial and might keep you from doing something dumb that you should be learning from another human

that look appeals to some women, but it's not a widespread preference. oddly enough, I was listening to some ridiculously long video this morning analyzing the career of Tyler Perry and his movies have some of the same thing going on, where the men the women want are super-muscled, oiled even, and shirtless a bizarre amount of the time. movies made by women generally don't have dudes like that

There was a Substack essay I read a while ago where a woman was discussing this phenomenon and her central argument was that "men don't understand that women find James Gandolfini incredibly hot."

that look appeals to some women, but it's not a widespread preference. oddly enough, I was listening to some ridiculously long video this morning analyzing the career of Tyler Perry and his movies have some of the same thing going on, where the men the women want are super-muscled, oiled even, and shirtless a bizarre amount of the time. movies made by women generally don't have dudes like that

― mh, Friday, February 20, 2026 12:25 PM (yesterday)

oh the fd signifier video! yeah i want to watch that but my god i do have other things in my life i want to do

yeah, I think I made it about as far as that observation and not much further. four hours of analysis of tyler perry in a row might break me

not to get too into training stuff in this thread but i use machines, they are useful, etc., but if i only used machines and their strictly limited movement paths determined by a company and its factory and didn't do a lot of freely / expressively lifting heavy stuff from the ground using my whole body i would be a much more boring and vacuous person than i actually am lol. xps

― map, Friday, February 20, 2026 12:17 PM (yesterday)

i personally think it's cool when you get into training stuff, it's not something i know a lot about and particularly since it was something i brought up on a really superficial level, it's good to hear about someone who's more knowledgeable about it!

not to get too into training stuff in this thread but i use machines, they are useful, etc., but if i only used machines and their strictly limited movement paths determined by a company and its factory and didn't do a lot of freely / expressively lifting heavy stuff from the ground using my whole body i would be a much more boring and vacuous person than i actually am lol. xps

― map, Friday, February 20, 2026 12:17 PM (yesterday)

i personally think it's cool when you get into training stuff, it's not something i know a lot about and particularly since it was something i brought up on a really superficial level, it's good to hear about someone who's more knowledgeable about it!

---

that post that kingfish linked seems to be a parallel to a tiktok video that was going around where a very swole dude (who is apparently "glutelord" on bsky) opining that this is men sculpting themselves for the male gaze, and he compared it to circuit party aesthetics

that look appeals to some women, but it's not a widespread preference.

― mh, Friday, February 20, 2026 12:25 PM (yesterday)

that's the thing that really gets me about the whole "male gaze" thing, it assumes that we all have the same preference, and more than that, it assumes that we all have _one_ preference, _one_ ideal we aspire to, and that if someone doesn't conform to that standard they're an inferior specimen.

it's something i find really challenging as a lesbian, because i am very definitely into a lot of feminine coded appearance traits. a lot of the stuff women do to appeal to men, i do definitely find a lot of it attractive, and so i want to ask myself "wait, am i attracted to this in a sufficiently lesbian way?" which is a silly question and one i see a lot of lesbians ask, it is easy to be insecure when patriarchy, you know, centers everything around men and what they want haha.

the other thing is that i find people attractive in different ways. there are all of these MOGAI identities about preferences, aesthetic vs. sexual or whatever, and yeah there are some people who are what get called "easy on the eyes". and i appreciate that and just cuz someone's easy on the eyes doesn't mean i want to do anything else but appreciate them. i don't think clavicular is wrong to say yeah i'm not doing this to get sex, i'm doing this because i look good and i know i look good. when i put the effort into looking good, it's not about me trying to "get laid" most of the time. it's a matter of self-confidence.

i've seen what clavicular is doing described as "mortification of the flesh" and i don't think that's quite right. for a long time women have tortured ourselves in order to look good. absolutely i do this. i epilate, and some women hear that and look at me like i'm crazy, like, girl, why do you put yourself through that, and it's cuz i like how i look when my legs are hairless. when i think of "mortification of the flesh" i think more about the time when i used to dress in shapeless sacks, just putting no effort at all into caring for my body. and i do see a lot of guys who do that, who don't take care of themselves physically, because there's this idea that guys aren't supposed to be _perceived_, and it's miserable, these guys look just about as miserable as i was when i lived like that.

i saw this meme the other day captioned "the three types of lesbians", a recent picture of two younger people and an older person, and the only one of them i recognized was The Rock. and of course the rock isn't a woman or a lesbian. i do find a lot of men attractive, and it doesn't make me not a lesbian. the thing i say a lot is that i'm not attracted to _genders_, i'm attracted to _people_ - gender and anatomy and all that stuff matters, sure, but it's a secondary concern. so if a guy thinks he can "convert" me that's not going to go well, because there's nothing to "convert" really. i'm not gonna quit finding girls hot and i'm not gonna quit fantasizing about girls. at the same time that doesn't mean that if i find someone attractive i want them to be more like a girl, cuz if i'm attracted to someone it's for who they are, whatever they find comfortable being, and a lot of times that does wind up being more feminine simply because i'm not gonna judge someone or shame them based on some arbitrary gendered standard... a lot of times people are afraid to be vulnerable in that way, and that significantly limits the possibilities, if someone wants to conform entirely to some abstract ideal.

when i look at what makes the rock attractive as opposed to, say, steve austin, it is a matter of personality. steve austin was definitely a charismatic guy, but he just came off as shouty and aggressive, and someone like dwayne johnson or chris hemsworth or pedro pascal, they just come off as being _wholesome_ in ways that make them really attractive to me as a woman. that doesn't mean they _are_ necessarily "wholesome" - i don't know any of them, not really. there are just these memes... there's this meme template of a big strong guy typing on a computer to try and encourage some kid who's getting bullied, validating and supporting this kid, and all three guys have that same kind of aura. it's like, they're interested in things other than sex. it's wholesome when pedro pascal takes his sister as a "date" to black-tie events. it's not an incest thing and it's also not a thing where he's taking pity on her because nobody else would ever date her, that's very much not the thing going on there. he's just being an awesome brother.

which is why it's fucked up that people are like, oh, empathy is a sin, oh, human kindness is weakness, like they sound like armand schaubroeck in "ratfucker", is what people like that sound like. "Sex? I gave it up a long time ago it's a WEAKNESS to me, you can't have WEAKNESSES in my block..."

...well, the idea of the panopticon is fundamentally a carceral one, isn't it? the internet doesn't _have_ to be a prison, but the people who control the social structures of the internet treat it like one, certainly. and then we all went through "lockdown" a couple years back. i know it's hard to adjust to life on the outside, it's hard for _me_ certainly. it's overwhelming and disorienting and scary and one doesn't necessarily have a lot of opportunities. it's easy to judge and essentialize a person for what they've been through, for what they've done because that's what they felt like they needed to do in order to survive. and it's something i'm at working towards at least!

is the male gaze supposed to have one monolithic preference? dozens of comedy movies with guys debating who and what they find hot seem to differ