Myca’s comment in the “What Makes You Cry?” thread mentioned this amazing Tumblr, featuring testimonies from many of the victims of the American economy, which is to say an overwhelming majority of the citizens of this country. Some of them are hard to read, some of them hurt to read, some of them remind me…
What Makes You Cry?
One of the things feeding into male emotional repression and shaming is the idea that men aren’t supposed to cry. Now, of course, that’s bullshit, but one overcomes bullshit by confronting it, so let’s start openly listing the stuff that chokes us up. Doesn’t have to be full-on tears, a good lump in the throat…
Linkity linkity link
I’ve been gearing up to write a post about the appalling images of men in new TV shows and the implicit assumptions that underlie those images, but Linda Holmes over at NPR has done it for me, so well that all I can really add is to flap my hand frantically in its direction and…
A Christian Writes About Sexual Damage
Trigger warning for sexual mutilation and rape. Linksurfing around, I came across this remarkable and moving little memoir about growing up in a household where the parents followed the teachings of a particularly popular fundamentalist guru with a real fixation on “purity”. I found it immensely sad, and at the same time revelatory. As an…
Nice article on Jezebel and Good Men Project
I enjoyed reading this post titled “You Can Get Laid Without Being A Jerk” over at Jezebel, and it’s also been published at the Good Men Project. It’s a nice piece and makes a rather solid point: that it is not necessary to be aggressive, dishonest, manipulative, or generally unpleasant in order to have sex…
The Success Industry
We can, at this point, take it as well-established that men are too often considered “success objects” by society, yes? I don’t need to once again explain how, just as women are judged by their perceived adherence to a largely arbitrary standard of sexual attractiveness, men are judged by their material and financial “success”? Good.…
Check It Out, Ladies [Laugh Track]
I often enjoy, and am often really frustrated by, Mistress Matisse’s column in the Seattle Stranger. This one, however, is bang-on and deals with an issue that people don’t talk about enough. (Well, we do around here, but that’s kind of our thing.) She’s absolutely right that there’s a reading of male sexual presentation that…
Interesting NYT Article On Boys and Friendship
Just read this article in the New York Times about how boys who lose their best friendships growing up can turn into emotionally stunted men who have difficulty connecting with others. I’m not sure how well this connects to my own experience, but then, part of the point of being progressive is that my personal…
DADT: GTFO. FTW!
As you may know, today is the first day that non-heterosexuals can openly serve in the United States military. That’s very groovy in general, but I’m struck by the headline that the official news outlet of the Department of Defense used for the occasion: Obama: Americans No Longer Have To Lie To Serve That is…
The Swinging Blades Theory
Pretty frequently in the United States, we get incidents like this, where a young father died of an infected tooth, for no other reason than not having health coverage. In response, we get smug assholery like this, saying (among other crap) that he should’ve bought the antibiotics instead of the painkillers. A man is dead…
The Myth Of Men Not Being Hot Party Mix
It is true that men are too often assumed unattractive in our culture. Men are supposed to be the subjects, not the objects, the pursuers, not the pursued, the desirers, not the desired. This ties in with the gatekeeper model of sexuality, with Figleaf’s Two Rules of Desire, with Ozy’s Myth of Men Not Being…
Gender Enforcement In The Wild
We’re all pretty hip around here, pretty into questioning gender programming and taking our own path, and I think we can forget that outside the Social Justice League, things are a lot uglier. Masculinity is conflated entirely with maleness for a lot of people, so that failure to be sufficiently masculine equals loss of one’s…
Ozy’s Law
Trigger warning for brief mentions of rape. Ozy and I were talking over what we’ve learned from hashing gender issues out on this blog, how writing about things has clarified our thinking, what answers we’ve been able to glean, what we’ve learned from discussing these matters with others, and we noticed a very specific and…
Everyone’s A Little Bit Sexist, Or More Than A Little
I read this interesting article from the Seattle Stranger, and it got me thinking once again about privilege. Give it a read and mull it over. As the article points out, we are none of us free of racism. You can’t grow up in a racist society and not have some serious baggage. (And yes,…
Height
Sometimes I feel like height, physical height, is the elephant in the room when it comes to hegemonic masculinity. Everyone knows it’s a giant friggin’ deal, but nobody wants to talk about it, because, as the inimitable Greta Christina pointed out, what the hell are you supposed to do about it? There’s a perception, an…
Why We Fight
Figleaf’s thought-provoking post on perceived masculinity got linked to by none other than Ann Althouse yesterday, in case any of our regular readers were wondering why the comments to that post contained much more troglodytic bullshit than usual. Thing is, you guys got spared the worst of it. Me and Ozy were looking over the…