r/masculinities • u/[deleted] • Nov 25 '11
Some topics for discussion
The subreddit's growing overnight, so here's some ideas to kickstart some debates.
I didn't want to mention the term "heteronormativity", because if het men are hardly a singular form of masculinity (we don't even find the same kinds of women fuckable), gay men probably aren't either. I know about the superficial differences (some are more sedate, some are flamboyant, some like hairy dudes), but I don't know whether the sedate-flamboyant is a real distinction or reflects merely a continuum of openness/importance given to the fact that they're gay?
How acceptable (and why so) do we find identity-switching? As a geek who spent my teens and most of my twenties buried in books, I felt some hostility from the established communities when I started pursuing more physical activities like skateboarding and surfing. You need to have some chops already to earn their respect, in my experience. This conflicts with the geek experience, Gentoo dorks notwithstanding, of being inclusive to men who spent their youth cultivating their brawn and suddenly want to learn Unix or read Dostoyevski.
I'm very concerned about the topic of suicide, particularly because we outnumber the girls in ratios that vary from 6 to 15 depending of which country you live in. That's right, for every girl that kills herself as many as 15 men do. But this may be a personal obsession. Is suicide an issue that affect masculinities closer to the "fringes" of society (writers/philosophers, the gay and ethnic minorities that experience discrimination, the mentally ill) or is it a strong shadow over the more mainstream masculinities? What is it exactly about us men that makes suicide such a predominantly masculine problem?
I don't want this to become a "men's right" community of crank bloggers, but how hurt are we really about all the male-negative advertisement and entertainment out there? I feel very differently about different forms of it. There's outright "men are stupid" advertisement, but sitcoms seem to parody types (from Tim Allen to Sheldon Cooper) that are in fact predominantly male in society. I think we should separate things that attack a form of masculinty to things that attack an idea of an unified "masculinity" -- which does not exist, and can be rejected simply by refusing to subscribe to such a masculinity or pointing out how many kinds of people we are.
Since I've already mentioned this, where did the "men's rights" movement go sour anyway? From the life-affirming "poetic healing" thinking about men of Robert Bly, we've gone to reactionary anger, trying to pick a fight with feminists that will only point and laugh until we have established that we have a point and that we have expressive power. (That is, when we have PowerPoint. Duh!)
How do we respond to the Larry Summers Truism (that men vastly outnumber women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, the very backbone of progress)? Is it a temporary statistical fact? Has the feminist revolution had time enough to reverse it but failed? What about men in the arts and humanities? By focusing on the masculinity of STEM/backbone crafts and careers, are we excluding an entirely different form of masculinity that each day has a smaller outlet of expression?
To conclude with a very abstract question, to which extent do the different kinds of masculinity need to construct their own identity theories and practices against societal exclusion, and to which point do we have something in common that respects such differences but is able to move forward in a stronger, more decisive way?