What is real is that other people will refuse to affirm or validate your gender while you are not able to demonstrate dominance.
Anonymous asked:
Dearest Anon-kun,
My representation is a bit more dire than how I actually interpret the situation, in part because it’s intended as a counter-balance to mainstream feminism, which strips women of their agency and refuses to critically examine their role in the social dynamics which create these situations.
“Women are powerless” is really quite deeply normalized almost everywhere! It’s very insidious.
Comments regarding even cishet neurotypical women should be regarded as generalizations that do not uniformly apply to the population, and many subgroups don’t necessarily fit them. Additionally, low-status women also exist. In fact, women that don’t fit this mold are more common in my subcultures!
Additionally,
1) I have a reasonable shot at making it to the Transhuman era.
2) I have a close relationship to my ex WRT expressed vulnerability & female companionship, though not sexually.
3) Have you observed the number of self-identified “traps” and other such individuals among the Alt Right? I believe this represents a sign of an impending Male Gender Meltdown, the consequences of which are hard to predict. Overall, I do think progress is being made, as indicated by the appearance of multiple male gender movements.
Also,
All my exes are bisexual (and therefore have no set reason to behave in a certain pattern of attraction), and this blog will continue to not disclose my sex/gender.
Kind Regards,
Miti
P.S. If you are secretly the tumblr user known as BA, this blog hopes for your swift recovery regardless of whether that is low in probability. If you are secretly tumblr user RO, this blog hopes for an increase in your available useful energy.
people who are very angry about the phrase “toxic masculinity”: what does the phrase “toxic masculinity” mean to you?
(I would very much appreciate not being super angry/offended in your answer, because the reason I’m confused is that a lot of the times when you guys talk about it I get that you’re really mad but it’s hard to understand why)
Toxic masculinity can be divided into two distinct things:
If you bite a guy and you die, that’s poisonous masculinity.
If a guy bites you and you die, that’s venomous masculinity.
I wouldn’t say I’m very angry, but it annoys me.
I understand it as meaning “being violent, being macho, having an honor culture where you have to avenge slights, being protective/jealous about women, thinking being a sissy is the worst thing in the world, etc”
A small part of my objection is that it can have a bailey of “in various ways that stereotypically-masculine behaviors/norms differ from stereotypically-feminine behaviors/norms, the stereotypically masculine ones are toxic and the stereotypically feminine ones are good.” It seems to me that there are dichotomies like individualism rather than communalism, stoicism rather than emotion, nonconformism rather than conformism, assertiveness rather than submissiveness, dignity rather than not-caring-about-dignity, a feeling of responsibility to protect others versus looking out for yourself - that it would be really easy to map onto toxic masculinity if you wanted. I’m not saying that if I phrase it as “assertiveness rather than submissiveness” anyone would read that phrase and so “oh, that’s bad, it’s toxic masculinity”. I’m saying that in real life there are ambiguous behaviors which, if you’re being assertive when someone else wants you to be submissive, they can round it off to “macho aggressiveness” and accuse you of toxic masculinity, and so have a social superweapon behind them..
But a bigger part is just that the whole phrase seems calculated to maximally offend and marginalize men. Imagine that everyone used the phrase “toxic femininity” to refer to causing drama,
being overly emotional,
gossiping, being weak, insisting other people take care of you, and other stereotypically feminine-coded bad behaviors - but there was no such phrase as “toxic masculinity” and people would get horribly offended if you tried to invent it. To me this would seem obviously calculated to pathologize women and identify the whole essence of being feminine with extreme versions of negative stereotypes. Well….
I get this, and I can see why the hypocrisy is galling, but actually instead of less context (swapping masculinity for femininity and seeing if we still like the logic), I reach my conclusion by adding more context.
Toxic masculinity really is worse than toxic femininity. Violence is worse than gossip. Like on one hand we have the evil of Abigail from the Crucible, but on the other hand we have… war.
I’m extremely anti-masculine because even as a man I can step back and say “masculinity has caused way, way too many deaths.” Aggression is bad for the self and very bad for the people who get stepped on, and yet it’s a degenerate and dominant strategy in our social and economic model.
Unfortunately, because “acting like a cliche man” is so advantageous, the real risk is an ideology that latches onto to the particulars of “being a man” as the problem and copies the behavior, thinking it can be purified if done by someone else.
So what you get is people harassing men in a confrontational manner, using all the tools of masculine aggression, but thinking it’s not toxic masculinity because it’s done by a woman (or by a group of people including some men, but who say they are doing it on behalf of women.)
And at it’s worse, the phrase “toxic masculinity” seems part of that memeplex, whereby we take the worst behaviors of man-world and legitimize them so long as they are being done by people we are calling not-masculine.
It must be acknowledged the role that straight neurotypical women have in reinforcing these behaviors. If they weren’t successful in the dating scene, if cishet nt women did not flock to currently high status men and shun currently low status men, regardless of how that status was obtained, if fewer of them fled at vulnerability and other feminine-coded behaviors, then the behavior of straight neurotypical men would change in response.
Instead straight men often seem to hold the idea that if they are not strong, if they are not masculine, if they are not successful, they will not be loved.
And realistically we know it isn’t going to happen. The real thing that undermines it will be the total gender meltdown under Transhumanism as millions of men and women flee their roles or carve out new ones more suited to themselves.
If the current attraction model and sexual liberalism are to be kept, then people have to acknowledge the consequences instead of heaping it all on one gender.
Unpopular opinion: intersectional feminism is responsible for a lot of collateral damage that it is becoming increasingly urgent to address. It presents itself as comprehensive in its revelatory powers re: marginalized experience even though it actually enables silencing and reinforced marginalization of the most marginalized of such experiences by virtue of its very theoretical structure. Its ideals are not practically supported by its theoretical tools due to their own structural flaws.
In brief, upholding positionality as a criterion of discourse and ultimately decentering privileged commentary in attempt to define narrative authority ends up fostering oppressive dogma and suspension of necessary critical inquiry in the very attempts to do the opposite, and in ways that large-scale matter to the lives and plights of the most marginalized. […]
This may be a relatively digestible bit of expansion copied from another thread. For context, someone was musing about how third wave feminism seems to have a severe problem recognizing issues like misogyny and homophobia and generally identifying social conservativism within Muslim communities:Honestly I think this is partially wrought by intersectionality theory itself. It tries to unravel and juxtapose nuanced experiences within marginalized groups, but is absolutely ill equipped to do so because it falls into the trap of crystallizing identities and experiences to the testimony of visible community voices without interrogating those voices to begin with, because its very model undermines interrogation. It hinges on mechanisms like positionality to center the voices and experiences of oppressed people, such that representatives of those people are granted authority and outsiders are considered incapable of accessing the knowledge and experience to challenge that.
Except when those representatives given authority by virtue of their positionality are themselves bound to a conservative institution and dedicated to a cultural zeitgeist that is at odds with the values underlying intersectional theory to begin with, while intersectionality itself put roadblocks against any capacity to question or challenge such positionality and upholds a model of specifically decentering critique from outsiders, you get people who believe they are being the most authentic and supportive they can by refusing to extend models of critique that are not necessarily limited by their position as outsiders by sheer virtue of how they are positioned. So they eat all the BS up and the Linda Sarsours of marginalized communities continue to be upheld as representatives beyond reproach. And that’s third wave feminism ‘done right’.
There’s something perversely lacking in self awareness about the very theoretical models people take as authoritative right now precisely because they attempt radical self awareness.
I think a symptom of is that the moral and epistemic clarity of posts like http://nothingismere.tumblr.com/post/154828689842/ozymandias271-questions-that-will-apparently-be is weirdly uncommon. Like, this is such a bizarre exchange:
Querent - “How can I figure out what I should be doing to fight racism without burdening people of color by constantly asking them what I should do?”
@ozymandias271 - “You have a brain? Presumably you can use it to assess the quality of information yourself? Why are you making people of color do this for you?”
It’s one thing to recommend a debiasing intervention (e.g., ‘people under-weight evidence in the form of self-reports of others’ experiences when those people have lived very different lives; assign more weight to compensate’), and another thing to act as though the debiasing intervention replaces normal weighing-of-the-evidence altogether.
First-hand accounts from the disprivileged are a weight on the scale, not a qualitatively higher form of evidence/argument; obscuring that fact and talking in non-quantitative terms encourages epistemic learned helplessness like in Ozy’s post.
I mean, the exchange makes perfect sense once you take into account that Querent readers are trying first and foremost to ensure that they don’t get yelled at, and that openly admitting to that would get them yelled at. Ozy’s approach is the one that actually works better for everyone in the absence of any risk of yelling.
SSC’s latest seems like a classic case of letting gender politics obfuscate power and class issues that cut across gender.
He quotes some PUA:
Polyamory — multiple and simultaneous sexual relationships — means, in practice, a few high value dudes hording all the pussy.
And then he uses both his intuitive experience and his LW survey data to show that men and women in polyamory date about the same number of people. There’s at least no clear cut numerical advantage to men. My experience also agrees.
But what if we neuter that sentence, and look at it again:
Polyamory — multiple and simultaneous sexual relationships — means, in practice, a few high value people dudes hording all the dates.
Which is to say, charismatic and confident people of either gender, dating a lot of people, and awkward and introverted people of both genders dating no one, only one person, or being a hanger on in a larger polycule that doesn’t get a lot of attention from the partner regardless.
That sounds… less implausible. It doesn’t exactly match my observed experience, but it’s not super far from it either. I’ve certainly seen in nerdy groups a Queen Bee that is dating half the men, in a way that seems parallel to the alpha-males that PUA’s fear/worship.
It’s not at all clear that this is bad. This seems just as likely to be the result of “some people want more partners, and are more socially outgoing to find them, while some people want less or are less willing to put themselves out there to meet them,” which would be fine. Or it could be this high-value thing. (I detest rat-tumb’s focus on high-status-males as the evil beneficiary of social engineering, which seems both empirically and ontologically unsound, but from a capitalist-critical perspective, “liberalizing trade regimes” often means “the rich people get more stuff and poor people somehow have less.”)
But, I’m also not going to be surprised by the subjective perspective of people low on the social totem pole. Before, they had hope in this pigeon-hole thing, where each person could get at most one partner, so eventually the people as attractive as them would realize their best chance for a life long relationship was with fellow low-class dates like themselves. It was a bad model, but I’m aware people believed in it. Now they worry no one will be left waiting for them, and they’ll be entirely alone forever. So there’s some people who seem to be having a lot of sex (stealing their jouissance) and they aren’t reaping the benefits.
The answers they come up with are usually dumb, but they are at least seeing/feeling a thing.
Bambam honey darling kun, and also @slatestarscratchpad friend,
I love weird nerds but weird nerds aren’t a representative sample for the behavior of typical relationship norms.
A better example for normies applying this would be all the other countries, territories and communities where polygamy is practiced, as well as communities within the US where one man will have 11 kids by 8 different women.
No full poly until Tranhumanism makes it possible to ‘defect’ from both your sex and sexual orientation, pls.
are you a “makes fun of otherkin” anti-sj or are you a “writes thousand word posts about intersectionality and the evils of normativity” anti-sj
I’m “thinks otherkin are ridiculous since that’s not a realistic variation on human brain designs, but supports their right to morphological freedom in the transhuman future”.
We keep having trouble coming up with good ways to describe the sorts of e.g. feminism that are harmful and abusive, so I propose that we go with “Discourse Feminism.” Discourse Feminism:
- focuses on naming and shaming individuals as a means of ideological enforcement and/or abuse
- tends to misuse academic terms, often in ways that are the exact opposite of their original meaning. Example: patriarchy, intersectionality, emotional labor
- really just wants a list of who the Bad People are so they can accuse anyone they dislike of being a Bad Person
- puts excessive focus on making sure people use the right identity labels (“if you think women are people you’re a feminist!) and PC language relative to actual substance
- treats anyone who disagrees as an Enemy To The Movement
But this is by no means limited to feminism! You can use it to describe the bad parts of any political group:
Discourse Social Justice
Discourse Anti-racism
Discourse Men’s Rights
Discourse Sex Positivity
Discourse Christianity
Discourse Communism
“Sh-shut up. I’m not a D-discourse!”
“Yes you are. Cast her into the pit!”
Anonymous asked:
I was really expecting to be accused of misogyny, actually. I’m trying to calculate how many levels of misdirection this ask is on.
Maybe it’s about this post?
They can’t undo Toxic Masculinity, because they don’t understand Masculinity, and they don’t want to.
…because that would mean understanding things about themselves that they don’t want to understand, either.
In which the “they” is actually Mainstream Feminists.
Patterns of male behavior are in part driven by what straight women like/don’t like, or more accurately who they treat as hot/not hot, who they date/don’t date, etc.
Undoing what the Mainstream Feminists call “toxic masculinity” would mean that straight women, on average, would have to change, which would mean they’d have to first understand how cishet female preferences shape the very male power/dominance/status hierarchies they ostensibly oppose.
However, Feminism does poorly at attributing agency and power to women (beyond some of the “rah rah, girl power” stuff), as it’s more politically useful to present as the unpowered underdog.
@the-grey-tribe RE: No Reblog post: Feminism collectively never actually overcame male hyperagency. It has been incomplete since the day it was born.
Anonymous asked:
Is this about MRAs?
Anon-kun, honey, I am not an MRA. I am an MRA sympathizer and Feminism sympathizer.
And as for the MRAs, of course they will come off as jerks - their ability to get any resources has been made dependent on showing that men have it as bad/worse than women, because they are constantly shut down for “WELL WOMEN HAVE IT WORSE” which implicitly ends with a very sexist “therefore your problems don’t matter and no resources should be devoted to addressing them.” (And resources have been denied IRL from attempts to address those problems.)
Look, you can either have a movement which actually attempts to resolve all gender issues for real and does not dismiss them because they are coming from “oppressors,” accurately realizing just how bound up together the knot of gender is, or you can have a movement which focuses exclusively on the issues of women. You can’t have both. You tried to have both, and that’s what got you MRAs.
I would also like to suggest cutting back on some of the demonization. For instance, there was an “MRAs Hate Mad Max: Fury Road!” article circulating about. I went looking in places where I previously saw MRAs gather, and they were all baffled by it, because none of them hated Fury Road.
The group that would have disliked it are the r/theredpill types (warning: r/theredpill has lots of actual misogyny, I cannot stand to read it), who are not the same group, but which there is a propaganda advantage to conflating with MRAs, who threaten feminism’s monopoly on the non-trad gender discourse.
A majority of MRAs could still be demobilized if Feminism were BETTER. That won’t happen, because Feminism not being better is how MRAs came to exist in the first place, and the forces that caused that haven’t been corrected, so in fact we’re just going to see more MRAs created.
Yes, that’s right, Anon-dear. More MRAs.
As for GamerGate - have you ever heard of something called the GNAA? Professional troll groups were trollin’ like there was no tomorrow, and GGers were also receiving death threats, questionable mail, etc. The whole thing didn’t really explode until all the “LOL GAMERS ARE DEAD” articles came out.
Might I suggest not engaging in an attempted cultural takeover that involves kicking the original demographic out of their own subculture, which is exactly what those articles were. Everyone knows that if the target weren’t predominantly white, low-status males that wouldn’t have flown.
The transition of GGers to further right-wing has been interpreted as evidence that they were vile oppressors all along, but actually the causality is the other way around. An opening was created for them to become disillusioned and more right-wing by the situation, the callouts, what many felt was a misrepresentation of themselves in the MSM, and so on.
There are two other groups this anon could be about.
Nationalists - Who, like the bean counters that keep corporations afloat, will always be perceived as villains by some because they are the ones on whom responsibility for buzzkilling various liberal projects falls.
Rationalists - I don’t really qualify as one, though I probably qualify as -adjacent.
neurocybernetics asked:
ranma-official answered:
I can easily do so thanks to Tinder, but it makes my dysphoria worse.
I don’t understand what you’re getting at. What framework are you operating under where men prove their value via sexual conquests?
Could it be…
… the patriarchy?
What? No. Proving your worth through “sexual conquest” is a sad weird modern phenomenon that emerged after proper marriage shat the bed. If anything, the patriarchy would have actively shunned manwhores.
Or is patriarchy supposed to be what happened after feminism? I’m confused. Antibiotics and birth control are very recent things.
You must acknowledge the dominance of sexual manquest throughout history! High-status men and their behaviors are all that matters…
