this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2024
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menby
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A space for masculine folks to talk about living under patriarchy.
Detoxing masculinity since 1990!
You don’t get points for feminism, feminism is expected.
Guidelines:
- Questions over blame
- Humility over pride
- Wisdom over dogma
- Actions over image
Rules (expansions on the guidelines):
- Mistakes should be learning experiences when possible.
- Do not attack comrades displaying vulnerability for what they acknowledge are mistakes.
- If you see good-faith behavior that's toxic, do your best to explain why it's toxic.
- If you don't have the energy to engage, report and move on.
- This includes past mistakes. If you've overcome extreme reactionary behavior, we'd love to know how.
- A widened range of acceptable discussion means a greater need for sensitivity and patience for your comrades.
- Examples:
- "This is reactionary. Here's why."
- "I know that {reality}, but I feel like {toxicity}"
- "I don't understand why this is reactionary, but it feels like it {spoilered details}"
- You are not entitled to the emotional labor of others.
- Constantly info-dumping and letting us sort through your psyche is not healthy for any of us.
- If you feel a criticism of you is unfair, do not lash out.
- If you can't engage self-critically, delete your post.
- If you don't know how to phrase why it's unfair, say so.
- No singular masculine ideal.
- This includes promoting gender-neutral traits like "courage" or "integrity" as "manly".
- Suggestions for an individual to replace a toxic ideal is fine.
- Don't reinforce the idea the fulfillment requires masculinity.
- This also includes tendency struggle-sessions.
- No lifestyle content.
- Post the picture of your new grill in !food (feminine people like grills too smh my head).
- Post the picture of the fish you caught in !sports (feminine people like fish too smdh my damn head).
- At best, stuff like this is off-topic. At worst, it's reinforcing genders norms..
- If you're not trying to be seen as masculine for your lifestyle content, it's irrelevant to this comm. If you are trying to be seen as masculine, let's have a discussion about why these things are seen as masculine.
Resources:
*The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love by Bell Hooks
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"The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love" by bell hooks BOOK CLUB - Preface and Chapter 1 Discussion
(hexbear.net)
Hello comrades, it's time for our first discussion thread for The Will to Change! Please share your thoughts below on the first two sections of the book. There's quite a lot to talk about between hooks' discussion of masculinity discourse within feminist circles, the ways both men and women uphold patriarchy, and the near universal experience of men being forced to suppress their rich emotional worlds from a young age. I'll be posting my thoughts in a little bit after I'm done with work.
If you haven't read the book yet but would like to, its available free on the Internet Archive in text form, as well as an audiobook on Youtube with content warnings at the start of each chapter, courtesy of the Anarchist Audio Library, and as an audiobook on our very own TankieTube! (note: the YT version is missing the Preface but the Tankietube version has it) Let me know if you'd like to be added to the ping list!
Our next discussion will be on Chapters 2 (Understanding Patriarchy) and 3 (Being a Boy), beginning on 12/4.
Thanks to everyone who is or will be participating, I'm really looking forward to hearing everyone's thoughts! 
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If I can be frank, I'm having trouble reading through it and relating like "omg that's it!" like what I'm reading in the discussion.
My parents have issues with emotional processing, but I don't feel like I'd think of my dad as a cold, uncaring patriarch. I think he's a blue MAGA corpo-brain, but I think it would take a contortionist's touch to be able to frame it as a style of toxic masculinity.
I have an emotional tender spot from being overlooked romantically. But I feel like of all the woes that women have in looking for male love don't seem primary to me. Like if women are looking for male love, then they're not really looking in my direction. My friends who are women don't seem like they're compensating for some kind of lack of love when they talk to me. The first thing that comes to mind is my friend who wanted me to be more into Kpop and Chappel Roan, but again, it feels like a stretch to say something like I'm too closed off emotionally and that if I were more honest with myself I'd like Kpop.
If I had to point to my weakest spot in my relationship with femininity, it's that I don't have any women who make the short list of people I'd go to when I'm expressing vulnerabilities that I'm working through. Women, in my mind, are the recipients of healed emotions, never the ones who see the dirty work of fixing deficiencies. I can relate to the idea of "please don't tell us how you feel." so if my mental landscape is a place people can visit, only a select few people help with the work of environmental remediation and the rest, which includes women as a whole, are more readily compared to tourists of approved sites where 99%+ of vulnerable emotions are inert. For example, if you ask, you'll learn that my most recent ex broke up with me over text, but you'll never hear me tell you that once I feel like the rot hits any of my relationships that nobody's ever been down to do work like establishing boundaries, discuss miscommunications, and make explicit expectations with me.
I just feel like I'm a self-aware person to the point where my biggest weaknesses are intense internal criticisms of myself and others. So I detest playing ignorant with myself to the point of emotional dysregulation. It doesn't appear to me like my mental landscape is rooted in toxic masculinity even as I talked about these concerns while preparing for this discussion. I'm open to and would relish in new perspectives.