dudebro is just a terrible word for any kind of progressive purpose given that it entirely concedes masculinity to the opposition.
I think we’re more than prepared to concede masculinity to the opposition. What redeeming qualities does it have? Everything I’ve seen masculinity be is aggression, envy, or pride, all of which are, uh, mortal sins.
…are you joking?
Or have you just already defined masculinity as everything you hate?
If it turns out that a significant number of straight women actually like masculine men and haven’t been brainwashed into it, what is your plan?
How can a male build a healthy self-identity if to be male is nothing more than to be a flawed woman?
I don’t think people should build self-identities as men or women. I think they’re stifling. The notion that because I was born with a penis I should want to cultivate A traits and not B traits is silly to me. Let boys play with dolls if they want and let girls play with trucks if they want. Let men be tender, let women be slobs. None of this should mean they’re not doing a good job at being a complete person.
These conversations always get so abstract so tell me what you think masculinity and femininity are and I’ll explain what I dislike.
Masculinity and Femininity are a partially socially-constructed, partially biological phenomenon.
Essentially, gendered trait distribution resembles two overlapping bell curves, controlled by hormonal levels at key points in development, along with genes, epigenetics, and environmental factors.
Pre-natal testosterone levels - in females, not just males - track with later toy preferences for mechanical/systems toys vs social ones. While the effects of sex hormones are not simple, they are very much not a placebo.
Society then layers its gender roles on top of this, driven in part by previous economies and incentives that may no longer exist. Often it exaggerates, or essentializes, and so for this reason people go “well dresses are obviously not biological and not all people like the assigned roles, therefore male and female are exactly the same and all apparent differences are caused by societal brainwashing.”
So we might think of masculine/feminine as the axis of opposition for gendered traits. (Intelligence does not appear to be one of these traits, as the center point seems to be the same.) Alternatively, we might think of it as the center points of the respective bell curves.
It’s important to remember, however, that the masculine woman and the feminine man are both legitimate, as well as various other mixes on more than one trait. Humans are complicated and biology is quite noisy and also complicated. But the clustering is still real.
The issue with your plan is that cishets seem to actually want someone who differs on the gender axes from them in that masc/femme way in terms of their attraction (which they don’t consciously control), and the idea that we’ll abolish gender and not have them identify as the labeled gender clumps associated with their respective sexes (cishets in specific) in the name of some modern idea of liberation… well I’m confident that won’t work out very well.
What I’m saying is that the very idea of masculinity and femininity will inherently invalidate the masculine woman and feminine man.
I don’t care if it just so happens that most men will prefer one thing and most women will prefer another thing, I don’t think we should try to cram people into holes so there’s some kind of sameness.
But if you even put masculinity and femininity up on the pedestal as goals for men and women should aspire to, that will inherently invalidate the masculine woman and feminine man. The ideas themselves should be annihilated, the idea that people born into certain different types of bodies SHOULD want certain different things. If, later, of their own free will, they do naturally end up mostly wanting those things, that’s no skin off my ass.
There should be no gender roles whatsoever. Everyone should be told they can be whatever kind of person they want to be and do whatever things they wanna do.
The existence of straights as a category does not invalidate the existence of gays, and it’s possible to prepare people for the default of being straight, which we’re talking 90%+ probability here, while still saying “yeah also you could be gay, which is okay too, here is some information about gays”.
As such I don’t think it invalidates the femme/masc for there to be masc/femme, and if you don’t do a default and just abolish all the roles and scripts and so on instead, what you’re going to find is not a paradise of liberation, but a bunch of confused people struggling with introspection over their preferences,
like Rationalists wondering why their sex drives aren’t ‘logical’ after hitting a wall of personal experience.
