"Masculine" doesn't mean "acting like an animal"

[RPGPundit]

Masculinity Doesn't Mean Acting Like an Animal

Why is it that, in this modern world, it seems that there are only two kinds of competing images of "masculinity" being argued for in the public sphere? The first is really a non-masculinity, the feminized man; the one who likes things women wants him to like, who would never do anything offensive to anyone, who is mainly interested in obeying his wife (or his mother), doesn't believe in competition, doesn't believe that being aggressive could ever possibly be good, agrees with what feminist academia calls "women's ways of knowing" (as in that you don't actually have to worry about logic or fact, but Feeling is paramount), and generally spends most of his time crawling around on his belly apologizing for having a penis.
The other, however, is the Barbarian. It is the man who likes loud things and fire and unintelligible grunting, and who likes beating up other men; he is unapologetically slobby and covered in grime, he treats women like they were objects, and hates responsibility of any kind. He thinks learning and knowledge are for pussies, and only wants to have fun with his "bros".

Each of the above is obviously a direct rejection of the other. But both are basically the same thing: Man as Child. In the one case, the good little boy who does what mommy says; the wiener-kid who has handed over his testicles forever to the women in his life.  In the other case, it is the Naughty boy, the one who is free and lives in the wild, the feral child from Lord of the Flies.

And this is of course because the relativist/feminist influence in modern society has taught us that men and all they do is basically bad; people have somehow become convinced that somehow, it is man who is the destroyer, who needs to be contained to exist in society; and if he should escape, can hope for no better but to live like a feral savage.

All of that is bullshit.
Where is the model of true, adult Manhood? The model of Man as Civilizer?!
It was man who created civilization, who wrought order from chaos, far from the destroyer, if it was not for the positive masculine traits: discipline, responsibility, intellectual rigor, bravery, and a willingness to step the fuck up and do what must be done, along with the bravery to say that there are things that are TRUE and things that are FALSE, and that there are things that are RIGHT and things that are WRONG.  It was man who took the competitive drive, and the aggressiveness of human nature and did not try to banish it or repress it but directed it, using the tools of the intellect, into constructing wonders.  If it was not for these traits, we would all still be living, at best, in mud huts. We would lack virtually all of the comforts and all of the freedoms we have today. We really would be barely better than animals.

So I am a man. And I am neither interested in being a simpering unthinking manchild or a dirt-covered unthinking savage. I am a man who has mastered logic, grammar, and rhetoric. I prize Prudence, Temperance, Fortitude, Justice, Benevolence and Charity. I live out the principles of Brotherly Love, Relief, and Truth.
And I mourn the fact that our sick, decadent society is failing to tell people that this is what a man is.

And please note, I am not saying that women cannot have these traits; the world would be a better place if more of them did, in fact, rather than subscribing to the ideological elements in our society (post-modernism, marxism, feminism) that seek to destroy those very traits by selling the lies that you don't actually have to learn anything in order "to know", that irrationality is somehow a virtue and logic a vice, that emotionalism is healthy and stoicism is somehow a flaw; and that nothing is ever really true or false, right or wrong, except actually standing for something. That way lies collapse.

RPGPundit

(february 25, 2010)

[Blackhand]

I am a man who has mastered ... rhetoric.

RPGPundit

(february 25, 2010)

I agree 100% with this assessment of the situation.

[misterguignol]

Have you ever read Max Nordau's Degeneration?

[VectorSigma]

Conversely, posts like this one are precisely what I like about Pundit.  *shrug*

[RPGPundit]

Conversely, posts like this one are precisely what I like about Pundit.  *shrug*

Glad you do.

RPGPundit

[jhkim]

I agree that there is a problem with the image of masculinity.  I'm curious about the way it is blamed on feminism.  

Pundit - Do you actually think that non-feminists or anti-feminists present a better image of masculinity?  

From my point of view, I'd agree that there's a problem with images of masculinity - but the anti-feminist images of men are no better than the feminist pictures.  Basically, after the advent of feminism, masculinity had to redefine itself - and we failed.  I don't think feminism is particularly to blame, but I don't think it helped.  There have been some stabs at creating more positive masculinity, like Robert Bly's intentional "mytho-poetic" masculinity.  I don't think they've gotten very far, though.  

In pop culture, I think of Sam & Frodo from Lord of the Rings or Sam & Dean from Supernatural as attempts to define a more positive masculinity.

[misterguignol]

I agree that there is a problem with the image of masculinity.  I'm curious about the way it is blamed on feminism.  

Pundit - Do you actually think that non-feminists or anti-feminists present a better image of masculinity?  

From my point of view, I'd agree that there's a problem with images of masculinity - but the anti-feminist images of men are no better than the feminist pictures.  Basically, after the advent of feminism, masculinity had to redefine itself - and we failed.  I don't think feminism is particularly to blame, but I don't think it helped.  There have been some stabs at creating more positive masculinity, like Robert Bly's intentional "mytho-poetic" masculinity.  I don't think they've gotten very far, though.  

In pop culture, I think of Sam & Frodo from Lord of the Rings or Sam & Dean from Supernatural as attempts to define a more positive masculinity.

Interestingly, the most fruitful and interesting books on the problem Pundit is talking about are coming from the field of "masculinity studies," which is rooted in the feminist theory Pundy decries.

[-E.]

And I mourn the fact that our sick, decadent society is failing to tell people that this is what a man is.

RPGPundit

(february 25, 2010)

Something I've been wondering about -- do people encounter radical, philosophical feminism in real life, like... ever?

I see it on message boards and I live in a blue state (New York), and from what I can see traditional masculinity is the uncontested standard to the point where it's utterly unremarkable.

The only place I've *ever* encountered feminism outside of the internet or university was a brief (several weeks) experience with a group that worked with people convicted of domestic violence (the feminist group taught the classes the wife-beaters had to take).

To be sure, we have diversity stuff at work and anyone acting in an overtly sexist manner would get (rightly) fired in a heartbeat, I haven't seen anything that addresses the nature of masculinity.

I was dating in the first half of the decade and the women I met across the spectrum of age and professionalism were interested in traditional gender roles (man as primary provider, man with a good deal of agency in the relationship, etc.)

Where does this stuff come up aside from the Internet? Where/how is society telling people stuff?

To be clear: I'm not exactly doubting this is an issue, just saying I don't seem to see it anywhere in my every-day existence. When I *did* run into a real-life extreme feminist perspective of men, I found it quite offensive and more or less a deal-breaker, so it's not like I'm just blind to the message.

Cheers,
-E.

[Aos]

Gender aside, Sam and Frodo do not strike me as particularly positive role models. They do too much whining.

[misterguignol]

Something I've been wondering about -- do people encounter radical, philosophical feminism in real life, like... ever?

I work at a university, so I encounter feminism a lot.  And yet it is *rarely* the boogieman feminism that Pundit mentions in his polemic.  Sure, there are extreme viewpoints that make specious claims, but they are far from the mainstream of feminist thought.

Also, Pundit, I'm not sure what you meant by "women's ways of knowing."  That isn't generally regarded as a feminist privileging of feeling over reason; rather, it most often refers to a landmark study of cognitive development in women undertaken by Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, and Tarule (1986).  Do you have a reference or an example for the way you are using the phrase?

[-E.]

I work at a university, so I encounter feminism a lot.  And yet it is *rarely* the boogieman feminism that Pundit mentions in his polemic.  Sure, there are extreme viewpoints that make specious claims, but they are far from the mainstream of feminist thought.

Also, Pundit, I'm not sure what you meant by "women's ways of knowing."  That isn't generally regarded as a feminist privileging of feeling over reason; rather, it most often refers to a landmark study of cognitive development in women undertaken by Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, and Tarule (1986).  Do you have a reference or an example for the way you are using the phrase?

I'd expect to see more of it at university -- and I'd expect the face-to-face version to be somewhat less extreme and uncompromising than what I see on the Internet.

That said, my one real-life / non-university encounter with feminism in action was pretty extreme in it's negative view of men (basically that all men are abusers -- a position that, while not *literal* was not abstracted to the point where it was making an uncontroversial point).

I dunno if they were mainstream or not, but they were associated with the United Way and leveraged by the court system. They may have been philosophical radicals, but they were definitely part of the mainstream culture.

Cheers,
-E.

[misterguignol]

I'd expect to see more of it at university -- and I'd expect the face-to-face version to be somewhat less extreme and uncompromising than what I see on the Internet.

That said, my one real-life / non-university encounter with feminism in action was pretty extreme in it's negative view of men (basically that all men are abusers -- a position that, while not *literal* was not abstracted to the point where it was making an uncontroversial point).

I dunno if they were mainstream or not, but they were associated with the United Way and leveraged by the court system. They may have been philosophical radicals, but they were definitely part of the mainstream culture.

Cheers,
-E.

There are definitely more extreme positions out there, but they are a minority and don't usually have the support of more even-handed feminists anyway.  If anything, the feminist movement was much more strident during the second wave of feminism in the 1970s.

[Spinachcat]

Have you ever read Max Nordau's Degeneration?

Nope.  Give us a summary.

I agree that there is a problem with the image of masculinity.

I don't.

There are so many images and so many voices in todays content rich culture that everybody can grab whatever image of masculinity / femininity they like and easily have plenty of reinforcement for whatever image they chose.

Something I've been wondering about -- do people encounter radical, philosophical feminism in real life, like... ever?

A few confused chicks in college and some angry hags in school districts.

[misterguignol]

Nope.  Give us a summary.

Nordau's thesis is much the same as Pundit's: the West has become a decadent, degenerate culture wherein men alternately suffer from being over-civilized and "feminine" (Nordau would say "hysteric") or from being brutish and un-evolved.

Of course, Nordau beat Pundit to the punch since he was writing in the 1890s.

Which also means that this complaint is oft-rehearsed and probably much ado about nothing.

[RPGPundit]

I work at a university, so I encounter feminism a lot.  And yet it is *rarely* the boogieman feminism that Pundit mentions in his polemic.  Sure, there are extreme viewpoints that make specious claims, but they are far from the mainstream of feminist thought.

Also, Pundit, I'm not sure what you meant by "women's ways of knowing."  That isn't generally regarded as a feminist privileging of feeling over reason; rather, it most often refers to a landmark study of cognitive development in women undertaken by Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, and Tarule (1986).  Do you have a reference or an example for the way you are using the phrase?

Whenever I've heard it referred to in actual use, it has been used to mean the way that people (not exclusively women) in this day and age can "know" things through means other than logical reasoning.  So that you can "know" with your heart or your sense of compassion or social justice or whatever, and that these "truths" even if technically physically incorrect in every real sense, should be cleaved to because they represent some kind of ideal.

Example: "it doesn't matter that you've collected a bunch of statistics 'proving' that there's no way 15 million witches were burned at the stake during the 'burning times'; the number is a reflection of the powerful feeling of violence committed by the patriarchy against wise women who threatened their hierarchy, and therefore should be 'taken as' truth".

Ironically, another group that makes a lot of use of this kind of thing is a certain segment of the ultra-conservative movement.

RPGPundit