What is masculinity?

[PatrickC]

I wanted to talk more broadly about my thoughts on this topic, rather than engage in the interesting conversation you are both having. It may help perhaps.

 

There is an awful lot of resistance in the world to discuss masculinity. It's had such a dreadful dragging through the mud of recent decades that even most men feel averse to discussing it. Whereas the feminine has been lauded and celebrated to such a degree that we now currently live in a hyper feminized culture, where femininity is ranked right next to civility.

 

The moment positive aspects of maleness are discussed it's not unusual to feel like you're walking into a highly taboo topic whilst listening to the egg shells literally crunching under your feet. The reason is because this discussion is assumed by proxy to be being critical of women, which in my opinion is the definitive taboo and not the discussion around masculinity.

 

I'm really not buying into this idea that men and women can be either gender. Sure there are exceptions to this, but for the most part any notion that we share feminine and masculine traits are entirely culturally based. For the most part feminists have been very keen to stress that women can and should do the same things that men can. In turn they have used this shared feminine/masculine trait idea to suggest that women can even be better than men.

 

Now for perhaps my most un PC view, if I haven't shocked you enough already. Many women don't feel comfortable with this idea of being better than men. So as a means to alleviate this rather uncomfortable view we find many of them falling into a more egalitarian position. Unfortunately, this still manages to say that men and women are still equally capable of the same things and still drives women into more masculine pursuits, such as careers and putting off motherhood. Egalitarianism is I would argue a very feminine trait and a good one at that. Insofar as it's a great way of bringing people together and avoiding conflict. But men do not function particularly well in that environment. Men will often accept it, because it's seen as a viable option for finding a wife and it often is in the short term. But men thrive on challenge and dexterity. Men's relationships with other men are quite different to that of women's relationships with women. Neither is better than the other of course and I tend to think they compliment each other rather well.

 

Personally I have found that embracing my masculinity in this way to be a liberating moment of self actualization.

[Kevin Beal]

I'm really not buying into this idea that men and women can be either gender. Sure there are exceptions to this, but for the most part any notion that we share feminine and masculine traits are entirely culturally based. For the most part feminists have been very keen to stress that women can and should do the same things that men can. In turn they have used this shared feminine/masculine trait idea to suggest that women can even be better than men.

I think you are totally right. Why would there be such a thing as masculine traits if it could just as easily apply to women.

 

If by chance this was at all in reference to the last post I made where I said there may be times a guy might do feminine things and a gal masculine things, I was more referring to things that are often defined as feminine which I don't actually think are distinctly feminine traits, such as vulnerability, or assertiveness solely masculine.

 

I think the definitions of these things are used in ways by most people that often don't make a whole lot of sense. At least to me.

 

I also really appreciate your thoughts on the PC-ness of it all, and in the spirit of being irreverent I thought I would share something that is sure to offend some people.

 

I was recently working with a group of older women for 8 hours around a table and they were speaking constantly, and constantly over each other. And the conversation was painfully dull. It was either trivial or about other people who I don't know and there were details I didn't want to know. I've noticed this dynamic a lot among certain types of women.

 

The gossip, the framing of debates, the character assassination, the positioning of status in the social hierarchy, the threat narratives, all without any reference to any of the necessary reasoning toward drawing their conclusions. This happens to a much smaller degree around sports with men, but this is mostly the domain of women (especially with the irrationality).

 

It was really irritating and I knew that I was going to have to do something or else I would go crazy or just completely resent the situation, so I started challenging one of them on something (it doesn't really matter what, suffice it to say that she was wrong) and I got confusion back and a re-stating of her position. I pointed out a fatal logical contradiction and she said it was "her opinion that it's not a contradiction". I reworded it another way to highlight the contradiction and then she accused me of provoking her, saying basically that I shouldn't challenge her on things when she just wants to be right. So I stopped there.

 

The conversation was slower going from then on and much more bearable for me. Later on the other two gals expressed appreciation that I had challenged her. I was surprised by that. I'm used to being portrayed as a jerk for calling people on the bullshit they say, especially women.

 

I wonder sometimes if bringing certainty and logic to gossip circles is a worthwhile thing to do. Like, is it the case that too much feminine girl time can be pathological without having a man step in and bring the hammer of truth down? Is that something that more honest women could appreciate? I don't know. But I've been thinking a lot about that recently and that whole dynamic is very interesting to me.

 

There is a gal on YouTube that goes by the name TyphonBlue who has a really great series of videos on how many women gain status by forming a consensus in the group of women they are in. Making some woman she's in conflict with out to be the bad guy and her the poor victim. I've seen that a lot actually and wonder how natural or ubiquitous that is.

[PatrickC]

Interesting.. In my opinion, older females can be the most problematic as you confront them.. I find I liked your approach (as you said it), albeit with some reasonable anxiety attached.. 'Girl power', despite the cartoonish way it is often described, actually does have power at times.

 

I was curious if the ladies that complemented you on your challenge were younger than the lady you engaging with.

[Kevin Beal]

The youngest one actually, but she was maybe the most mystical. She apparently talks to the dead... And I was anxious too when I did it, but I felt it necessary to do something, anything about what was up to that point an overwhelming experience. And when it happened, I thought for sure it would backfire

[PatrickC]

Yes, I imagined you were anxious.. Indeed Bro, pretty brave indeed, kudos!... Anyway, despite that, it doesn't particularly surprise me the youngest lady is taken by your challenge. Remember, this young lady has probably had to deal with the same BS you dealt with her, but you managed to deflect it rather eloquently.

 

Without sounding too verbose, I'd say you gave that older lady the lightest of slap downs, that she may well have perhaps deserved.. Well done for navigating that awesomely well.

[LovePrevails]

either they look at you pityingly or the look edgy and uncomfortable

 

I do like being strong and it a way it's a good invitation to become strong but it's hard to do it on your own

when you're in the growing stages it's good to have lots of female Friends that you don't want to bang so you can be vulnerable with them

and male friends who are cool with that

 

Why do men have to earn it?

 

Because the social paradigm is such that most woman like men to lead,

they want him to be the rock they can rely on, they don't want him losing it at random and unable to cope

if he can't cope with his won shit how is he going to be strong enough to comfort her when she is feeling very emotional

and bring her down to earth

 

if he can't stand up for himself, how is he going to stand up for her

[PatrickC]

Why do men have to earn it?

 

Because the social paradigm is such that most woman like men to lead,

they want him to be the rock they can rely on, they don't want him losing it at random and unable to cope

if he can't cope with his won shit how is he going to be strong enough to comfort her when she is feeling very emotional

and bring her down to earth

 

I'm going to be a devils advocate here. I don't think it's a social paradigm at all. I'm finding that many women assume male leadership roles as the norm and always have done... Having said that, given the vast changes in living standards of recent decades I expect a change in emphasis from prior historical perspectives. Like Sam Cooke predicted, 'a change is coming' (I hope).

 

However, with leadership comes responsibility of course.. So men (in general) have to step up I think from our current situation.

[Kevin Beal]

However, with leadership comes responsibility of course.. So men (in general) have to step up I think from our current situation.

 

Very interesting.

 

In what ways would you like to see men stepping up?

 

Personally, I think that (at least for myself) stepping up is mostly just putting myself out there and being willing to make mistakes and / or be rejected. I think it would be really great to see more men do that kind of thing. Maybe it's just projection or something, but I see most guys have a very limited area that they feel it safe to have strong opinions like with sports or politics or something like that, and it's sometimes really difficult to lure guys like squirrels to acorns out into speaking their minds about things like relationships, about what it means to be a man and that sort of thing.

 

It seems like a real shame. I don't know for sure, but I don't think that's really as much of a problem for women, as they are kind of looked to by most people as being the ones who get relationships, get empathy and emotional health, so I see a little more inhibition there.

 

Is that sort of what you mean?

[PatrickC]

Yes, you make some good points Kevin. I can see that my suggestion assumes a lot of responsibility on the man. However, I think this is the quality that men bring to the table.

 

With those that we dearly care for we (as men) can offer those challenges to them as a means to better ourselves together.. Woman of course can (and do) add a lot of stability to that family situation in different ways.. Men taking responsibility for their personal decisions that they have negotiated with their family about seems like a reasonable responsibility to take. Men seemingly (not exclusively necessarily) like to take those calculated risks which very often pay off handsomely for their family.

 

The situation as it exists now is that men mostly avoid taking those risks, because they can just indulge in the more degenerate aspects of (let's say) PUA to get their kicks. Maleness is all about creating a future and a lineage for themselves, which I believe incorporates integrity and delayed gratification into that mix, if that makes sense.

[PatrickC]

Here is an interesting discussion that took place in Toronto yesterday, which I think has some context within this thread.

 

 

EDIT - As an aside Stefan or Michael, a great interview possibly.

[EllieChu]

It needs to be realized that many gender roles (i.e. “masculine” or “feminine”) are socially constructed, meaning that society and culture create these roles, and that these roles are what is generally considered ideal or appropriate behaviour for a person of that specific gender. And speaking of gender, keep in mind that there are more genders than just the two commonly accepted (male and female), making it even harder to try to fit these stereotypes in your "ideal" boxes.  

 

Everybody is going to have different views of what they believe to be true. There is proof of that all over the world. Why do we always look at the differeneces between genders?

[Kevin Beal]

Hi EllieChu!

 

Thanks for posting

 

I have known lots of different kinds of people. Men who identified as women and were also sexually attracted to women. He may be considered a lesbian in that context. I know that people have different gender identities and sexual orientations and that neither is a pathology, but is actually as natural as my own maleness and heterosexuality. I have a female feminine lesbian sister is getting married soon.

 

I have nothing negative to say about women who identify as men or men who identify as women or any of the many gradations between the two.

 

When I say "feminine" and "masculine" I mean the way it's classically been defined, that they describe nouns rather than people's identities. And there are two more in fact: "undetermined" and "neuter". So a hen is feminine and a bull is masculine. A book is neuter (having no gender) and a dog is "undetermined" (since the gender cannot be determined from the noun alone). More on that here.

 

Forgive me for being a little personal, but I've heard that gender is a social construct my whole life and many times my attraction to masculinity was even portrayed as pathological since I love competition and rough housing. I was made out to be shallow and superficial for liking stereotypically male things like explosions and video games and cheesy action flicks.

 

Sentiments like the kind you are expressing, sentiments I relate to as "feminist" are as familiar to me as public school is.

 

For as long as I have been trying to discover how I relate to myself as a man (since my teens) I have been told that men and women are too much alike to be talked about in "opposing" (complimentary) terms. This resistance has been very noticeable to me and it only makes me more curious about what these differences are. "What don't they want me to know?"

 

In my exploration of the topic I've found strong evidence for inherent gender differences and strong arguments against inherent gender differences. (And by that I mean psychological differences). What is incontrovertible though is that men and women's brains are constructed quite differently. The corpus collosum (for instance) is larger in women allowing for easier communication between the hemispheres. Even our eyes are different (link earlier in thread). It would make no sense to me that the brain would be different and yet the psychology was the same.

 

But even if we accept that the gender roles are mostly artificial, it almost doesn't really matter to me as they are so ubiquitous that they may as well be genetically rooted.

 

Let's just assume for a second (just humor me) that talking about men and women as qualitatively different is not going to lead to unjust discriminations. What are the gender roles that you consider healthy and positive?

 

There are things that I consider feminine that I think are totally vital and awesome, and there are things I consider masculine that I deeply appreciate and revel. How about you? Wouldn't you agree?

 

*ADD

So to be honest, I am using "masculine" / "feminine" in two different ways here. First as a descriptor of nouns and second as a person's sex. Forgive the conflation. 

[Lians]

Thank you for this interesting discussion. It's been a pleasure reading through your responses. The topic of masculinity has been on my mind quite a lot recently and I developed some really rough ideas while trying to understand it. They're very abstract and I haven't worked out anything from first principles. However, I think they bring an interesting perspective to the subject matter and I wanted to share them with you. Please excuse my broad generalizations.

 

First off, we need some good questions as a starting point. These were mine:

• Do men and women bring different skill sets to the table?
• What's the benefit of applying these skill sets in a cooperative manner?

If the answer to the first question is that men and women don't, in fact, have different skill sets, then there's no sense in pursuing the topic of masculinity any further. This answer is very unlikely because it ignores the physiological differences between men and women. For example, what's the point of having a different brain structure from an evolutionary standpoint? If a single design works well, why have two? This diversity indicates the existence of insurmountable trade-offs - opposing qualities that aren't objectively practical on an individual basis. A body-builder trades agility for strength. He can't have both because the time he has spent on developing his slow twitch muscles is a time he can't spend on developing his fast twitch muscles. There are physical limitations as well (elephant vs cheetah physique). Different characteristics have utility in different situations so there's no objective way of determining "the right one". I don't find this particularly surprising because much of the world around us hangs on the balance of opposing forces.

 

Before I set out to look for opposing qualities that differentiate men and women, I'll address the second question. This one is much simpler. Cooperation creates a more optimal state of efficiency precisely because there are no objectively optimal characteristics. Some computer algorithms are inherently sequential while others are parallel (there are mixtures of both of course). So, how do you design the fastest and most efficient computational machine that does both? You can't. That's why most modern computers are equipped with a graphics card (optimized for parallel execution) and a CPU (optimized for sequential execution). The combination of both gives you a good, cost-efficient performance.

 

Having established a relatively decent foundation, I tried to draw some conclusions from my personal experience with males and females. Now, here's the problem. I don't have any personal experience with a healthy woman, so it's difficult for me to generalize female behaviour. My solution to this isn't perfect, so all the ladies on this forum should feel free to tell me how blatantly wrong I am. I abstracted what I perceived to be healthy male behaviour and derived the female counterpart by "inverting" the conclusions I derived for men. I feel relatively safe to do that because I already know that I'm looking for opposing/complementary qualities.

 

I think the roles of males and females are related to the expansion and consolidation of human societies. Notice that expansion and consolidation are not opposites, but they're nonetheless related. This is a very abstract way of putting it, but it's as far as I've gotten. I'll share some examples and ideas to support this claim.

 

New theories are often developed by abandoning one's preconceived notions about the subject. For example, Quantum electrodynamics (QED) wouldn't have been developed if people held onto Classical Mechanics (CM). Once the theory was developed, experimental physicists started working on experiments to prove some of the things QED predicted. On the other hand, theoretical physicists set out to find new applications for QED and how it relates to previous theories such as CM. The knowledge of physics was first expanded and then it was consolidated. Both expansion and consolidation were essential for the continued success of the discipline. You can find similar examples in a variety of situations.

 

I have a lot more thinking to do, but right now, my working theory is that masculinity can be defined as the pursuit of skills that are geared towards expanding both the physical and intellectual boundaries of human societies. I can't tell you what those skills are because our societies are quite complex and change all the time. The qualities that are necessary to develop these skills is what people often use as a definition for masculinity. This is why you end up with so many conflicting definitions. Qualities don't change as much, so they're perceived to be a solid foundation for these definitions. I'd definitely question this premise.

 

This theory can explain why you find more men at the forefront of theoretical research in disciplines that are largely dominated by women. Take medicine for example. At its forefronts, you can find a lot of male scientists and engineers, but at when it comes to the practical application, the majority of doctors are women. I'm sorry I can't come up with a good example to support the female aspect of my theory (I already mentioned the reason why it's hard for me to do that). If you spend enough time around scientists and engineers, you'll find out about an age-old question that they like to argue about: Who's more important? Both sides have some good arguments, but neither can exist without the other. I think the feminist movement managed to paint masculinity as the ultimate goal while disregarding femininity as a patriarchal tool of oppression. The imbalance this view has created is at the core of what's destroying western societies. Women abandoned the pursuit of skills geared towards the consolidation of human societies and societies are now collapsing. No amount of science and research can stop that.

 

I apologize for the lengthy and verbose description of my ideas, but I wanted to present both the conclusions and the process I used to arrive at them. Please feel free to scrutinise both.

 

[PatrickC]

And speaking of gender, keep in mind that there are more genders than just the two commonly accepted (male and female), making it even harder to try to fit these stereotypes in your "ideal" boxes.

 

Let's not confuse sexual orientation with gender. We are discussing heterosexual men primarily, although not exclusively. I have known homosexual men that can and do understand maleness in quite the same way. The assets and attributes they bring to the table, is what matters to other men, not their sexual orientation. This is true despite the rhetoric that most heterosexual men are said to want to exclude homosexuals from their group. This underscores the deep value that men tend to place in mastery and skill.

 

I haven't much to add to Kevin's rebuttal of gender as a 'social construct'. Other than it's that kind of ideology, for half a century, which has been wrecking havoc upon the relationships of men and women and importantly men with men.

[PatrickC]

New theories are often developed by abandoning one's preconceived notions about the subject. For example, Quantum electrodynamics (QED) wouldn't have been developed if people held onto Classical Mechanics (CM). Once the theory was developed, experimental physicists started working on experiments to prove some of the things QED predicted. On the other hand, theoretical physicists set out to find new applications for QED and how it relates to previous theories such as CM. The knowledge of physics was first expanded and then it was consolidated. Both expansion and consolidation were essential for the continued success of the discipline. You can find similar examples in a variety of situations.

 

Hi Lians, thanks for sharing your thoughts. I think you touch on something here that is interesting for me, which might take us to the heart of the matter. Insofar as we have seen great social changes take place over the last 50 years, with technology, ideology and more importantly State intervention. These have all contributed to the questioning of traditional gender roles. In my opinion technology has had a positive contribution to that debate. Whereas the state has managed to corrupt it. Ideology has tended to have had both positive and negative effects on it and it's arguable of course, that it is ideology that has informed the State into destroying those roles.

 

So we know that changes needed to occur within the gender roles. It's just that the changes that actually happened managed to overturn gender roles that had been largely working rather well for centuries. In other words the baby was thrown out with the bath water.

 

I touched on this earlier on in the thread. My theory is that a mans role traditionally was to help his family survive. But since we live in a world of plenty the masculine goal has now changed from survive to thrive. However, I am open to better and more well thought out ideas. But I'm of the opinion, with substantial evidence that it has to embrace those male traits of mastery and skill.