How It's Made: Toxic Masculinity
September 26, 2016 9:07 AM   Subscribe

"American Male, a short film [~6 min] from MTV’s Look Different Creator Competition, is a gritty look at how gender norms make it hard for us to be who we really are." [content warning: some violence]
posted by AFABulous (77 comments total) 25 users marked this as a favorite
 
Maybe watch it with the sound on, then.

"Less of a person, more of a collection of social cues"

"The path of least resistance"

That did more to articulate the basis of fear than anything else I've seen, but I wish they didn't have to make him a closet case to make the point. That seems easier to dismiss.
posted by schadenfrau at 9:26 AM on September 26, 2016 [3 favorites]


Mod note: One comment removed, carry on.
posted by cortex (staff) at 9:45 AM on September 26, 2016 [1 favorite]


I wish they didn't have to make him a closet case to make the point.

I didn't really think they did? He has some eye contact with one particular other guy but I don't think it's clear the main guy is meant to be considered a closet case. It read to me more that he was speculating that the other guy was gay and might be trying to flirt with him. Basically I felt the point was any suggestion of connection or intimacy between guys is suspicious, but whether either guy involved might actually be secretly gay is not addressed or demonstrated.
posted by dnash at 10:05 AM on September 26, 2016


That's odd, I interpreted those two's interactions as somewhat adversarial, with the slimmer guy gender policing. Almost like main guy's performance was as much for gender policer as it was for the women as that's how it often works. When he came over to grind on the girl main guy was dancing with after talking about him to the girls, I got the impression main guy didn't want him over there. Policer gets what he wants because he's "manliest" (always has two women by him, dictating to mainguy what to do, who to paddle etc), and pushes boundaries with encroaching on mainguy's space/dance partner. My 2c.
posted by avalonian at 10:17 AM on September 26, 2016 [1 favorite]


No, I'm pretty sure the main character is meant to be seen as gay. He's looking at the other guy while he's dancing with a woman and seems generally to be pretending around women. And in the last scene, he's clearly inflicting his inner rage on someone else.

I agree with schadenfrau that it weakens the point. Lots of straight guys are going to watch this and think it doesn't apply to them. But it's still a good film for its listing of traits arbitrarily assigned to genders. It makes me, a trans guy, wonder how much I've unconsciously absorbed. Do I genuinely like trucks? Or do I like them because I was told that's what men like? I'm having to learn "how to be a man" and it's really tricky to parse out my true identity from what people think masculinity should look like. There are so many little things you don't notice when you've been socialized as a different gender. People assume I'm capable and that I don't need help (e.g. lifting boxes into my car) and now I hesitate to ask for it lest I seem less capable. It's a real tangle.
posted by AFABulous at 10:20 AM on September 26, 2016 [28 favorites]


fffffffuuuuuuuuucccckkkkkkkkk
posted by Annika Cicada at 10:20 AM on September 26, 2016 [2 favorites]


Right? I was waiting for the trans people to find this post :)
posted by AFABulous at 10:22 AM on September 26, 2016


I suppose we just like whatever it is we like and that it happens to be a part of our constructed identity, well, that was the gender signals we saw and embraced at some crucial part of our genders booting up.

At the base root of identity I believe gender is tangled up in our biological sex in some way that is far beyond how we boot up into a particular construct.
posted by Annika Cicada at 10:24 AM on September 26, 2016 [2 favorites]


"Not all queers are sissies and not all sissies are queers"
posted by robbyrobs at 10:24 AM on September 26, 2016 [1 favorite]


Also, I believe ALL gender has some kind of toxicity built into it and as trans people, we shouldn't place the burden on ourselves to be perfect representations of a gender type, free of toxicity. Experiencing what that toxicity feels like is part of the learning process.
posted by Annika Cicada at 10:28 AM on September 26, 2016 [12 favorites]


I think the dance scene was just set up as a contrast to how it might be with women. It could just be some fun, if they did kiss, it wouldn't be gay, etc.

Because he's a guy, he has to walk this fine line, and avoid even the appearance of being gay.

But yeah, he was definitely looking into her eyes (or down at her breasts?) before his buddy(?) walked over.

Women have pressure to be feminine; they can do plenty of masculine-coded things, including competence with tools, sports, motor vehicles, etc. so long as they're also feminine. Men have pressure not only to be masculine, but also to be NOT feminine. Every hint at femininity is a denial of masculinity. It's a very toxic sort of life.
posted by explosion at 10:47 AM on September 26, 2016 [10 favorites]


Hell, I watched with the sound on and I still don't know what it means. Looked like a collection of really awful kinds of people I've been trying to avoid all my life.
posted by 2N2222 at 10:57 AM on September 26, 2016 [5 favorites]


Women definitely have it much worse overall in society, but when it comes to gender policing I think men get the short end of the stick. But who's holding the stick? Men. And it's all tied back to misogyny, and misogyny is inextricable from homophobia.
posted by AFABulous at 11:04 AM on September 26, 2016 [30 favorites]


As a straight guy very interested in this topic, I don't think it matters whether the main character is intended to be a closet case or not. For me, it could just as easily be interpreted as a guy looking to connect on any real level with another man, something that I struggle with on a daily basis. Whether that connection is sexual or emotional is beside the point. The point comes across either way.
posted by Ben Trismegistus at 11:08 AM on September 26, 2016 [17 favorites]


Once again, I'm struck by the degree to which gender signifiers are also class signifiers. Men watch football, eat hamburgers, listen to rock music, and wear blue denim? Interest in the fine arts or reading books means your manliness is in question? Really?

I guess what it comes down to is: Everyone needs something to base their self-respect on. If you don't have wealth or status, you can at least fall back on your masculinity. Thus, the people most strongly motivated to prove their manhood are the lower classes, which means manhood becomes associated with lower-class things. Except that makes it seem inevitable, and I'm not at all convinced that it's been the case historically.
posted by baf at 11:08 AM on September 26, 2016 [5 favorites]


Makes you wonder how they film something like this. Do you script people acting normally in their back yards (just be yourself), or do you get people who presumably know this stuff is pretty toxic and then tell them to act it out?

Either way the messaging of the film is so blunt and seemingly directed at a lifestyle that I would never willingly inhabit it's kind of hard to incorporate any lessons from it. I had to start skipping over it because who wants to let that kind of reality into my grey matter on any level.

That isn't to say I have nothing to learn from it, only that it's hard for me to personally relate to the protagonist's internal void or despair at their circumstances.
posted by diode at 11:21 AM on September 26, 2016 [2 favorites]


Once again, I'm struck by the degree to which gender signifiers are also class signifiers. Men watch football, eat hamburgers, listen to rock music, and wear blue denim? Interest in the fine arts or reading books means your manliness is in question? Really?

Yes. In the modern United States from the 1940's to present, at least. How people express gender is a pliable and ever morphing thing.

which means manhood becomes associated with lower-class things.

I've seen enough iron-jawed executives of multi-billion dollar companies to disprove this. Toxic masculinity transcends across all classifications of race and class, but race and class *definitely* intersect with masculinity in unique ways depending on the color of your skin and the amount of wealth you have.
posted by Annika Cicada at 11:22 AM on September 26, 2016 [6 favorites]


I guess, to my statement about 1940's to present "US Manliness": The burgers, the jeans, the rock music, the what have you, all that is a shibboleth that changes for each generation, the underlying message is "you are straight, you fuck women, you eschew all things feminine and you are ready to kick ass at all times". I assume that has something to do with WWII and we never really let go of that. So I guess you could call "modern US Masculinity" a form of multi-generational PTSD borne from warfare.
posted by Annika Cicada at 11:26 AM on September 26, 2016 [4 favorites]


Interest in the fine arts or reading books means your manliness is in question? Really?

In huge swaths of the country, yes. Less so in urban liberal enclaves, and possibly less so overall where some of the rise of tech culture may have turned some level of tech geekdom less uncool than it was when I was a teenager in the 80s, but yeah, there's still tons of the "football & brewskis, brah" attitude.
posted by dnash at 11:26 AM on September 26, 2016 [9 favorites]


Keep in mind that this film was borne of an MTV competition, and MTVs demographic is (I presume) teens and young adults. So it may seem hard to relate to if you're a 45 year old guy with a masters degree in literature or something. I think a high school boy would get the most out of this.
posted by AFABulous at 11:39 AM on September 26, 2016 [4 favorites]


Interest in the fine arts or reading books means your manliness is in question? Really?

May I remind you that nearly half of registered voters say they're voting for Trump? Yet no one I know is. It's easy to live in a bubble these days. Fine arts = f*g in a lot of places.
posted by AFABulous at 11:48 AM on September 26, 2016 [17 favorites]


which means manhood becomes associated with lower-class things.

I've seen enough iron-jawed executives of multi-billion dollar companies to disprove this.


Yet, there are plenty of aggressive rich white tough guys who come from relative poverty and are able to achieve financial power because guess what's rewarded in (most of) the U.S. -- being aggressive, white, and male.
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 12:01 PM on September 26, 2016 [2 favorites]


While the signifiers change, I think the underlying gender-class relationships go back to the start of the industrial revolution, if not earlier.

And yes, at one point in my life I did get shit for playing violin and reading books.

I have very mixed feelings about this, but don't put perfect ahead of good and all that stuff I guess.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 12:05 PM on September 26, 2016 [1 favorite]


Having had a boss once say to me of a female client, "I bet she could take you in a fight," among lots of more blatant and subtle sexism and digs at my masculinity, I feel I can relate very strongly to the toxic masculinity complaints. What bugs me, besides the obvious gender essentialism implied, is that the narrower ideas about what masculinity is that dominate the contemporary culture (bluntness of manner, aggressive action over reflection and thoughtful decision making, casual sexism, dismissive antiintellectualism, contempt for perceived weakness and emotional sensitivity/awareness, etc.) drastically limit the acceptable ranges of self expression and identification that are considered "masculine," so that basically all that's left of masculinity in the culture now is football, belligerence, and fart jokes.

Used to be (in various older cultural conceptions of masculinity) men of maturity were expected to master certain more "feminine virtues," too, and to be in touch with their feelings and able to articulate them to intimate friends. Not saying there was ever a Golden Age here, but it's true. This was really only particularly true of the upper classes, but even so, the old gender essentialist ideas held male and female strengths to be co-equal, in a lot of ways. Men seeking self-cultivation were advised to develop the more culturally "feminine" aspects of their identity and personality as well. Now we've just got this really narrow conception of masculinity IMO that only includes the most stereotypically masculine traits. It limits what men are allowed to be in destructive and harmful ways, but I'm not sure what the solution is other than trying not to buy into it individually.
posted by saulgoodman at 12:06 PM on September 26, 2016 [2 favorites]


Lots of straight guys are going to watch this and think it doesn't apply to them.

It's powerful, but I agree. The video proportion seems mostly about repression of male homosexuality and reaction against that. That's not what the audio is doing, but it's what the visual said to me.

There's lots of counter-cultural young male experience which doesn't involve turning yourself into a 'roid monster who beats other guys because of repressed attraction. This says very little about how toxic masculinity works out in male-female relationships, for example, how boys are encouraged to objectify girls and women. There's only the barest hint of the role of peer pressure has on driving increasingly extreme and abusive acts of male performance with respect to treatment of women. Cat-calling escalation, for example can be less about the woman being verbally assaulted, more about the pecking orders of the groups of guys doing the calling. Social pressure can, does, evolve habits of abuse and objectification. I wish more had been said about that.

Male on male violence (and implied violence) is important to understand. Repression of anything but strict heterosexuality is one example, but only one among many, and one not likely experienced much by the people boys this could reach.
posted by bonehead at 12:26 PM on September 26, 2016 [1 favorite]


The nice thing is that that's only true for people who actually care about what other people think about their "masculinity".

In my mind, there isn't much that reads as less manley than fretting about what other people think of your manliness. I can't interpret these big, austentatious, overt displays of masculinity as anything else. The only reason for you to be holding up a giant "I AM A MANLY MAN!" sign is if you're worried about other people thinking you're not.

I think there is an identifiable difference between people engaging in activities because they enjoy those activities and people doing it because of the gender identity message it sends.
posted by VTX at 12:31 PM on September 26, 2016 [2 favorites]


"I don't care what other people think about my masculinity or lack thereof" is a statement that not every man is able to make, though. Because there are lots of places where saying precisely that leads to getting verbally, or physically, assaulted.

That's one of the points this project is about, I think - that the system perpetuates itself, that even people who had other thoughts and wanted other things are channeled by the system into conformity out of fear.
posted by Fraxas at 12:35 PM on September 26, 2016 [12 favorites]


A good video, I guess, but awfully simplistic. Broad stroke clichés about masculinity inform the film's message, and it is clearly about bro culture in particular, a world as distant from many of us urban intellectuals as is the world of the Pirahā. This is an especially toxic form of masculinity.

That said, for me, growing up consisted in large part of learning how to act like a male. It didn't come naturally to me. I was "sensitive." "Artistic." "Quiet." Etc. I took the MMPI (a long psychological evaluation) and there were red flags raised around my masculinity, perhaps because I admitted to liking flowers. (That was one of the questions! I've heard that the test has changed since I took it in the late 60's, back when homosexuality was still considered a psychological aberration on the DSM.) I remember one summer in a school for gifted teenagers, in a creative writing class, admiring the guts it took for a fellow male student to cross his legs at his knees. I had learned that that was something girls did. And (this was mentioned in the film) I switched from the flute to the French horn because of gender policing. I could go on and on.

Arguing that an MTV video is unsubtle is hardly a difficult argument to make. Just saying that the many pressures a boy faces to act masculine seem invisible when growing up, especially in the old days when there was little awareness of growing up gendered.
posted by kozad at 12:35 PM on September 26, 2016 [6 favorites]


I want to bow out of this by saying that I don't believe masculinity is all toxic. I believe all experiences of gender contain some percentage of toxic, that men are pretty fucking awesome and that includes all the guys in this chat. Also, FWIW, there are aspects of how I lived in a "male body" that just this weekend I was missing terribly and I am still find of. So when I talk about toxic masculinity I don't mean to talk about the whole of masculinity and I apologize for my later comments in this thread not being clearer about that. Ciao and hugs.
posted by Annika Cicada at 12:38 PM on September 26, 2016 [9 favorites]


The nice thing is that that's only true for people who actually care about what other people think about their "masculinity".


I'm sorry but that's privileged bullshit. Friends of mine get verbally and physically assaulted for not conforming to masculine presentations. "Just be confident! Don't care what others think of you!" is not an option for many people.
posted by AFABulous at 12:39 PM on September 26, 2016 [22 favorites]


"Just be confident! Don't care what others think of you!"

That's a place some guys end up, true, the fuck-em all sideways option. Getting there isn't easy though. It comes only with a long perspective. That's not possible for most six- or ten-year-olds, which is when a lot of these pressures really start.
posted by bonehead at 12:43 PM on September 26, 2016 [5 favorites]


AFABulous: "I'm sorry but that's privileged bullshit. Friends of mine get verbally and physically assaulted for not conforming to masculine presentations. "Just be confident! Don't care what others think of you!" is not an option for many people."

Yeah, it really really isn't. When I was younger I was often physically assaulted by my peers for not properly conforming to masculine norms, and even as an adult I still occasionally get threats - much moreso now that I'm presenting in more feminine ways. This idea that men (or AMAB people) have the freedom to choose how they present and how they perform masculinity is only true for a very privileged subset of people.
posted by langtonsant at 12:59 PM on September 26, 2016 [3 favorites]


I'm sorry but that's privileged bullshit.

That's true, I should have thought of that, thanks for calling me out on it.

Because there are lots of places where saying precisely that leads to getting verbally, or physically, assaulted.

I guess my comment is predicated on the belief that being a good person means not judging other people for things that don't really affect them. IE: Some guy wearing a dress doesn't affect me, therefore it doesn't bother me. The next assumption is that people are generally good and will get better over time.

So let me amend that to say that you shouldn't worry about outward displays of masculinity to the extent that you're able in any given situation. Work towards that ideal as much as your particular level of privilege will let you while doing what you're able to extend that privilege to everyone.
posted by VTX at 1:00 PM on September 26, 2016


The Good Men Project may or may not have been linked on the blue before, but it's an interesting site that seeks to detoxify masculinity.

As for me, watching the video helped me realize why very few people showed any surprise when I first came out. I'm not femme, but I've also never had any interest in being performatively masculine (and gay people perform masculinity too, in an entirely different way than straight people do).
posted by BuddhaInABucket at 1:02 PM on September 26, 2016




a lot of the lines in the video I've rejected, but even more I've internalized. Thanks for posting.
posted by rebent at 1:30 PM on September 26, 2016 [2 favorites]


Jesse Pinkman and Male Self-Hatred

The central tragedy of Jesse’s character is that it is easy to see the decent compassionate person he could have been, even as he is pushed to do more and more dispicable things. Had he been allowed to pursue his true self, and not learned that who he was was insufficient, he could have found a great niche for himself, perhaps as an elementary school teacher or a nurse. His parents and Walter had no use for the "weak” and “feminine” parts of Jesse. They taught him that he was worthless and that it is wrong to be empathic rather than aggressive. Until he finds a way to accept the parts of himself he has been taught to reject, Jesse will be one of the most painfully tragic and utterly compelling characters on television.

posted by bonehead at 1:34 PM on September 26, 2016 [9 favorites]


There are people in the world that worry about all of the stuff said in the narration but also avoid all the stuff in the visual part. This makes for a very narrow a limited path.
posted by OwlBoy at 1:53 PM on September 26, 2016


One of the things that I keep needing to write about, is how much ABA was used/is used to make boys perform masculinity, that social skills training is training to pass--but it's not only training to pass as non-autistic, but as non-queer, as non-femme, as solid in gender. though this talks about boy, the wording reminded me of my ABA training. Three pats on the shoulder to comfort, standing with hands in pocket, tightening wrists, not over sharing...this kind of permanent shadow land of not passing and passing too well. I think one of the things that disablity does well, is to recognize the violence of the norming is a violence of failing to be properly taught all forms.
posted by PinkMoose at 1:55 PM on September 26, 2016


Also, that second guy that he exchanged looks with might just be in the same awkward situation as the narrator. The fact that we are all assuming homosexuality is involved is part of the social conditioning we are all immersed in. It's easier.
posted by OwlBoy at 1:56 PM on September 26, 2016 [6 favorites]


I've been gnawing at this in relationship to an ask.mefi from earlier today. I'm probably a bad person to talk about this because I doubt at times I have a gender identity so much as a set of performative rituals I do to minimize anxiety about being bashed.

While I generally respect the "men can do ... also!" reform position taken by groups like The Good Men Project, I don't feel like I can really participate. I have a skepticism bordering on paranoia that such reform efforts are truly liberatory and not just a shift of performance or cover for a private misogyny. Frankly, I've known more than a few Hugo Schwyzers in my personal life. I may have even been a Hugo Schwyzer, and that's also toxic.

Different forms of liberation for different people I suppose. I feel a need for a space between implied transition on the one side, and shouldering the burden of "men can do ... also" on the other. To do what I do because I do. (Do be do be doo.) Which, given current politics, I can't so I don't. An anecdote from this article about Jaden Smith depresses me because his "do" is a web-publishing dream by driving hate-mail clicks.

Which is a long-winded way of saying that my response to these pieces is a mix of sympathy and "nope."
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 2:02 PM on September 26, 2016 [2 favorites]


The nice thing is that that's only true for people who actually care about what other people think about their "masculinity".

I'm not piling on but going in a different direction, it seems like this is in itself a trap, I believe that one of the features of "masculinity" as "performed" in our culture is an extreme autonomy or individuality that is often demonstrated by aggression or in films violence. Not caring what other people think of you is high up on the list of esteemed masculine traits. The phrase "man up" comes to mind. It seems almost paradoxical though. The good lays in right alongside the bad.
posted by Pembquist at 2:19 PM on September 26, 2016 [2 favorites]


Also, that second guy that he exchanged looks with might just be in the same awkward situation as the narrator. The fact that we are all assuming homosexuality is involved is part of the social conditioning we are all immersed in. It's easier.

Funny what a Rorschach test that character is. I didn't get an awkward vibe from him, I got an aggressive one. My take (like avalonian's) was that he was a quasi predator type who picked up on a moment of vulnerability on the main character's part (gaze held a moment too long) and then uses it to threaten him by joining him on the dance floor (boundary violation). Whether it was repressed attraction or not, it was the kind of slip that often leads to brutal repercussions, both external and internal, to prevent it from happening again.
posted by sapere aude at 2:24 PM on September 26, 2016 [1 favorite]


I'm a transfeminine person (I suppose) who grew up in an environment not dissimilar to the one depicted in the video, and took more than a few assaults - verbal, physical and in a couple of cases sexual - in no small part because my "instinctive" behaviours tend not to conform to the masculine norms around me. This video was uncomfortably familiar. I watched it as I was getting ready for work, and it's remarkable to me how much of my own inner monologue reflects my fear of being the guy taking the beating at the end of the film. My morning ritual looks like this -

Opening my wardrobe, flick past the dresses that I'm not allowed to wear to work, scanning the t-shirts instead. I'm not teaching today, so maybe I can risk wearing something other than my usual black tee. This one? No, not that one, that's too girly, and I have meetings today, and together with the nail polish that might be taken the wrong way. Okay, that one will do, but I'll have to make sure I don't go too femme with the hair - I'm taking the bus today and I don't want to have another incident like last time. Shaving. Sigh, so much hair. FFS girl get it together and be a man, okay? Hm. Maybe these aren't the best choice of jeans? Is that pushing it too far. This would be so much easier if I could just pass as a woman or if I were happy to do the man thing. God I'm tired. Okay, yeah, this will be okay - just feminine enough to keep me sane, probably not feminine enough to attract abuse. Off to work - wonder if I'm going to get another round of grief about how easy I have it as a dude. Won't that be fun? Sigh.

Well, the real version involves a large dose of internalised transmisogyny and self-hate, but I figure a bit of editing for content might be sensible. What's striking to me though, is how much this whole inner turmoil is driven by my bitter memories of exactly the kind of situations shown in the video, and my fear of ending up back there one day. It would be nice to move past this kind of thing as a culture, but I don't have a lot of optimism about that.
posted by langtonsant at 2:37 PM on September 26, 2016 [5 favorites]


That was intense and (if the ambiguity was deliberate) well-made. I think that idea that "Real Men™ don't need to police other people's gender performance", while problematic, is probably a useful way to frame it in terms of a dialogue with masculine culture. On the assumption that there will still be some analogue of bro culture in 20 years, we (people like me who are traditionally masculine/have been called bro in the last 6 hours but who are aware of the viper pits that crop up when you treat being like that as being better or more natural than being camp or femme) need to push things forward and take the heat (and what is privilege for if not burning?) that comes from going off-piste and not reinforcing the traditional boundaries.

I think that the good men project has that one valuable thing, that insiders get to criticise the culture and be listened to more than outsiders. The good is always in there with the bad in any culture, but that doesn't mean that we can't make things more humane.
posted by Wrinkled Stumpskin at 2:57 PM on September 26, 2016


PinkMoose, what is ABA?
posted by AFABulous at 2:58 PM on September 26, 2016


Advanced Behaviour Analysis, to cure spectrum folks.
posted by PinkMoose at 3:21 PM on September 26, 2016


This idea that men (or AMAB people) have the freedom to choose how they present and how they perform masculinity is only true for a very privileged subset of people.

Mmmm, not sure how far I buy this. Certainly, the costs of exercising that freedom are inversely correlated with your level of privilege, but it's not like poor, working class, disabled, etc. trans people don't exist, and in places where you see very strict policing of toxic masculinity. We pay a price for it, for sure (ask me how many times I've been assaulted and nearly killed, and there are out trans women and AMAB genderqueer people who get it worse than I) but it isn't like it's just not possible.
posted by Dysk at 3:26 PM on September 26, 2016 [2 favorites]


True enough Dysk and yeah, there are folks who have it a lot worse than anything I ever had to deal with. I guess all I really wanted to say with that comment is just that there is a price to be paid when AMAB folks step outside the lines, and there are a lot of places where that price can be very costly. It's not as easy as "just don't care about what other people think of you" when the risk of violence is very real.
posted by langtonsant at 3:36 PM on September 26, 2016 [3 favorites]


It's not as easy as "just don't care about what other people think of you" when the risk of violence is very real.

This is absolutely true, and something that often goes unacknowledged. Life is certainly a lot simpler when you aren't visibly gender-non-conforming in a way that threatens the patriarchy.

(Personally I've always found that it's the presence of femininity rather than the absence of masculinity that really sets people off with regard to violence and direct threat. The absence of masculinity on its own is more likely to see you sneered at or dismissed than subject to attempted murder in my experience. Being read as male and overtly feminine brings the white hot fury out in people.)
posted by Dysk at 3:57 PM on September 26, 2016 [2 favorites]


As someone desperately trying to get things right in what I keep hoping could become a complicated, but manageable, relationship with a handsome, brilliant, bighearted man who's never been with another man, because of a youth spent in a rural place where fear ruled over his choices and duty was considered paramount against anything as weak as love and desire, and who's only just discovered that his same-sex attraction can be about more than just about sex, this filled me with a visceral, planet-killing rage, and then it made me cry, both for the man I dream about in this chaos where we all live, and for myself, too, because it's all too much, sometimes, and that's okay.

Jesus fucking Christ.

I grew up with a father and mother who, while still generally passing as representatives of the norm, crossed gender lines as easy as stepping over puddles that look like the endless ocean of storms to those not so lucky as to be in their care, and my father was clear that an inability or unwillingness to cry was usually the product of a diseased soul, my mother was as comfortable in "man's work" as in nurturing, and I have never once in my entire life ever wondered if I were "enough" of a man, whatever the fuck that means, even as I'm also fluidly drawn to whatever tools, interests, and experiences I need in being alive, regardless of what some miserable shit caught up in ten thousand years of cultural nonsense thinks I should do.

And yet, here I am, trying to coax a beautiful soul out into the light so that he can be loved and love in return and it is an uphill struggle against a lifetime of indoctrination that I fear I just cannot beat, and so tonight, I'm glad I have no qualms about crying over such things, because that's damn well what I'm going to do.
posted by sonascope at 4:09 PM on September 26, 2016 [20 favorites]


all my best loving hugs offered for you and your partner, sonascope.
posted by Annika Cicada at 4:59 PM on September 26, 2016 [1 favorite]


I'm not piling on but going in a different direction

Meh, go ahead and pile on, I done fucked up. Again, I apologize. But if it serves as a jumping-off point for constructive comments, have at it.
posted by VTX at 5:21 PM on September 26, 2016


Lots of straight guys are going to watch this and think it doesn't apply to them.

Well, straight (white cis) guys almost always have the privilege of thinking things don't apply to them. That's one of the perks of privilege. Given the audience this is for, maybe some of them will say "hey, this... applies," and take their lives in a different direction. It's a 6 minute MTV short; it doesn't have to fix the whole world on the first try....
posted by GenjiandProust at 5:40 PM on September 26, 2016 [2 favorites]


For those of you who were affected by or interested in this, I'd highly recommend seeking out Jay Rosenblatt's The Smell of Burning Ants. The whole film is hard to find legally for anything less than a fortune, which is incredibly unfortunate because it's one very powerful and profound work of art. If you ever happen to see it on the bill at an arthouse or film festival, you should go.
posted by treepour at 6:41 PM on September 26, 2016 [1 favorite]


Oh, the joy of being queer and 58, and still alive. We played softball, and bowled and went to football games and bars and acted just like this all the time and dared anybody, anywhere to give us some shit about it. We all looked like this, and beat the shit out of "straight assholes", and fucked each other and had an incredible time. Then we died, one by one.

Sad for guys nowadays. Serious lack of choices.
posted by halfbuckaroo at 8:32 PM on September 26, 2016 [5 favorites]


It's been a strange feeling to go from being (seen as) a straight woman to being a guy who likes guys (but not necessarily being seen as gay). I wouldn't say I'm a bro dude like the guys in the film, but I have a lot more in common with them than I do the stereotypical gay man. I'm glad I wasn't forced into the binary of "gays are like THIS, straights are like THAT,"but on the other hand, without any of the social norms of gay culture, I don't fit in anywhere. The only "gay" thing about me is that I like men.

Of course, most gay men don't fit into the "effeminate, theater loving hairstylist" stereotype. But even the most macho motorcycle-riding leather-wearing bear has a gay culture and history that is different from macho motorcycle-riding leather-wearing heterosexuals. If the guy in the film really is gay, once he comes out he'll have another culture to slip into, with a different set of social norms.
posted by AFABulous at 5:39 AM on September 27, 2016 [1 favorite]


when it comes to gender policing I think men get the short end of the stick. But who's holding the stick? Men.

Not sure we've sole control of that stick. For the last few years I've been watching little ms. flabdablet (now 11) learn how to simper and coo and pout and overdramatise and put herself down in order to stay in the good graces of at least one of the several queen bee factions at school. It turns my stomach.
posted by flabdablet at 6:03 AM on September 27, 2016


I guess, to my statement about 1940's to present "US Manliness": The burgers, the jeans, the rock music, the what have you, all that is a shibboleth that changes for each generation, the underlying message is "you are straight, you fuck women, you eschew all things feminine and you are ready to kick ass at all times". I assume that has something to do with WWII and we never really let go of that. So I guess you could call "modern US Masculinity" a form of multi-generational PTSD borne from warfare.

No it's much older than that. Anxiety about maleness and masculinity is endemic to patriarchal cultures. It always includes subjugating women and policing men who aren't sufficiently living up to the code. Warfare is involved, of course, because violence has always been the ultimate expression of patriarchal manliness.

The very existence of different rules for men and women (property, power, sex, appearance) is something you can only get if one gender is oppressing the other. And that goes back as far as recorded history.

I was actually telling my son today that it's frustrating to have to fight so hard about sexism, but that you have to remember it is thousands of years old. It's not going to be uprooted in a few generations.

I think about all the little boys like him being indoctrinated into the mindset of this video. They start out as innocent kids like anyone else, after all. I'm sure their parents think that by feeding them these scripts, they protect them (from other boys who have also been fed these scripts). That they are doing what you are supposed to with your son. It's heartbreaking.

I've shared this before, but, one of the things that I was surprised to find out when I got to know my husband was that men could have their hearts broken. And of course they can, they're human, but somewhere along the way I had bought into the script that men just don't "feel" heartbreak and loneliness the way women do.
posted by emjaybee at 8:06 AM on September 27, 2016


flabdablet - I was referring to men gender policing other men. Women can of course police any gender, but policing of men needs to be solved by men because women have less power. Why do girls learn to be dramatic and pouty? Because direct assertiveness often doesn't work in relationships with many men. Assertive women are dismissed as bitches. ("Dramatic" and "emotional" women are also often dismissed, but that behavior at least fits into societal expectations.) The playground girls are repeating what they've learned from girls who were repeating what they learned, ad infinitum

emjaybee - I was also surprised that men can be hurt because many of them don't show it. During my marriage I said some things I regret because it didn't occur to me that I had the power to (emotionally) wound him. In my experience, many men express hurt as anger, and women often express it with sadness, which causes a lot of confusion. I thought he was tough and he thought I was weak.
posted by AFABulous at 9:54 AM on September 27, 2016 [2 favorites]


many men express hurt as anger

nodding very much in agreement. I know this feeling process very intimately.
posted by Annika Cicada at 10:16 AM on September 27, 2016 [3 favorites]


policing of men needs to be solved by men

No disagreement from me on that point.

Why do girls learn to be dramatic and pouty? Because direct assertiveness often doesn't work in relationships with many men. Assertive women are dismissed as bitches.

As the closest actual man available to little ms. flabdablet, I've been quite careful to ensure that direct assertiveness works much better with me than any of the underhanded psychodrama crap the cliques at school are training her up in. Also, I've actually seen and heard that training going on. Yes, there is a lot of dismissing certain girls as bitches but the overwhelming majority of that is coming from other girls and it's directed at those who refuse to acknowledge the wonderfulness of the clique leaders. Lots of it was directed at little ms. flabdablet before she figured out that appeasing these people was less stressful than opposing them.

The playground girls are repeating what they've learned from girls who were repeating what they learned, ad infinitum

Well, almost. We have a very small school here (about 50 students total) so the influence of particular individuals on the school culture is quite large; and as I live literally across the street from the school playground, I can tell you for a fact that in the years where certain queen bees were not enrolled there, very little of this kind of thing went on.

Now, it may well be that the queen bees responsible have shitty home lives heavily conditioned by patriarchal norms, and punch down at school in order to seize an autonomy they just don't get at home. On the other hand, they might just be awful people. It's hard to know.

The point is that these girls are absolutely acting as gender role police, which I think is a crappy thing to do and ought to be discouraged regardless of the gender of the perpetrator. And if the root of it is indeed patriarchal, then gender policing of women by women is best tackled by women, lest it collapse into yet another self-perpetuating display of Male Authority.
posted by flabdablet at 10:32 AM on September 27, 2016


sonascope: ... and my father was clear that an inability or unwillingness to cry was usually the product of a diseased soul, ...

What?

AFABulous: I was also surprised that men can be hurt because many of them don't show it.

What? Perhaps a bit of empathy to look beyond the sum of all socialized stereotypes is in order here?
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 10:45 AM on September 27, 2016


Perhaps a bit of empathy to look beyond the sum of all socialized stereotypes is in order here?

Quite so. The tragedy of gender policing is that it makes that very empathy difficult enough to achieve across gender lines that when it finally does arrive it comes as a shock and a revelation.
posted by flabdablet at 11:19 AM on September 27, 2016


To unpack that a bit, part of my reaction to "diseased soul" is that I'm not certain whether it's a theological statement or theological metaphor for behavior. As a theological statement, I disagree that soul (badly translated) can be "diseased," but it's a common idea in Western culture that one can be tainted or rendered impure in some way and show signs as such. In some circles, that statement is quite literally demonization of different norms of expression and possibly the side-effects of mental illness.

We don't all do things the same way, and those ways are not necessarily wrong. A perpetual sadness I have in these discussions of toxic masculinity on metafilter (and going back long before metafilter) is the sense that it's an exercise in adopting different rules and tribal signifiers as ideals. Frankly, experience has made me cynical that talk translates into walk on this, and the people who make demands for emotional expression and disclosure often have problems not taking ownership of it. (See also the conditional autonomy discussion and our lack of orgasm is all about our partner.)

Public reserve in emotional and gender expression strikes me as a perfectly reasonable coping strategy when we can't separate the people who are honestly accepting from those who freak out, get appropriative, or only accept on their own terms. And I think that if you're surprised that other people have emotional lives, that you might not be fully listening in a way that's safe.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 1:49 PM on September 27, 2016 [3 favorites]


CBrachyrhynchos: "if you're surprised that other people have emotional lives, that you might not be fully listening"

This. I guess I don't really identify as male gender anymore, but I have done so for so bloody long and feel like I've run into this "oh wow I never realised men could feel that blah blah blah" surprise so often - and have had to gently explain that yes of course men do, over and over and fucking over again - that I begin to suspect that a lot of people never even considered the hypothesis that I might be human. I've sort of reached the point that I'm wondering whether it's even worth having these conversations anymore. I dunno, maybe I'm just letting my bitterness get the better of me.
posted by langtonsant at 5:09 PM on September 27, 2016 [1 favorite]


And I think that if you're surprised that other people have emotional lives, that you might not be fully listening in a way that's safe.

I mean, nobody is saying this. There is a clear past tense to everyone expressing that they were surprised when they realised, with a clear implication that their previous position is ludicrous in retrospect. I'm not sure 'maybe you're a fucking misandrist failure of empathy' is a fantastic response to someone saying that they made the mistake of falling for the dominant cultural narrative about men's internal lives in the past, before they realised it was bullshit. Maybe they were horribly misandrist failures of empathyat some point in the past, but the tense and context make it clear that this is not how anyone in this thread feels today.
posted by Dysk at 9:48 PM on September 27, 2016


wow, holy fuck. This actually makes me pity all the guys I know that buy into the established "social cues" about being male, and I wonder if they could resist and be more themselves.
posted by numaner at 10:11 PM on September 27, 2016


I wonder if they could resist and be more themselves.

The upside of my having grown up as the Designated School Fat Kid is that I had no hope at all of being accepted by any of the socially influential kids, which meant I had so few encounters with the gender police as to make "resistance" unnecessary.

What I'm learning from little ms. flabdablet's experience is that for people who are not automatically pariahs, conforming to gender norms becomes the path of least resistance by a very wide margin; so wide as to render any reasoned discussion of gender norms and related matters completely moot. To an eleven year old, just getting through the school day with emotions not completely in shreds is difficult enough.

Watching her learn to limit and constrain herself for conformity's sake is breaking my heart, but what's a dad to do?
posted by flabdablet at 12:26 AM on September 28, 2016


"Just be confident! Don't care what others think of you!"

That's a place some guys end up, true, the fuck-em all sideways option. Getting there isn't easy though. It comes only with a long perspective. That's not possible for most six- or ten-year-olds, which is when a lot of these pressures really start.


Exactly. And that applies across the board - to masculinity and to every other thing that the juvenile peer group attempts to enforce: what clothing brands are cool and which ones make the wearer an irredeemable loser, the social hierarchy of sports and other activities, the deployment of slang and kids' culture.

Kids usually say "Dad - you don't understand" - and that's true in one sense and false in another. It's true in that the current generation has its own touchstones that make growing up in it quite unique. It's false in that these common themes of indoctrinating kids into cultural schemes such as masculinity play out in every generation. But in most cases, Dad has some emotional distance from his experience, while the child is living it every day.
posted by theorique at 2:50 AM on September 28, 2016 [1 favorite]


Dysk: Yes, and there's a clear conditional tense behind that not fantastic response. I did, in fact, spend three hours considering it and decided that shifting all the blame for one's past-tense prejudices and failures of empathy onto other people or dominant culture was a problem that needed to be addressed. Reframing that in the way you did with the fake quote of 'maybe you're a fucking misandrist failure of empathy' is completely uncalled for and not welcome.

My past tense includes a bit of women yelling and screaming that I've shamed them because I'm queer or non-conforming. While I probably should just go full steam ahead and come out, (in those environments where I'm not out already) it's a complex dialogue of risk assessment. I pay attention to what people around me say about sexuality and gender, and I float trial balloons and see if they get the hint.

I don't feel safe being honest in an environment of low-level homophobia, transphobia, and gender role stereotyping.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 5:48 AM on September 28, 2016


I don't feel safe being honest in an environment of low-level homophobia, transphobia, and gender role stereotyping. Therefore, much of what's going on in my brain at any point in time gets disclosed only on a urgent need-to-know basis.

That's what I'm saying with that phrase. Casual stereotyping and gender policing, even something as casual as "She [Milley Cyrus] has gone weird," shuts down honesty and intimacy.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 5:55 AM on September 28, 2016


sonascope: ... and my father was clear that an inability or unwillingness to cry was usually the product of a diseased soul, ...

What?


My father and his brother were both raised in low country Georgia, in The Camellia City Of The South, in the full embrace of the Baptist Church, and got up to similar adventures as boys, and both joined the Navy, then came home after a stint. My uncle was shockingly handsome, given our gene pool, whereas my father, and later, his son, was more inclined to trade on an easy smile, a dramatic presence, and a good nature, and they were eight years apart. In time, my uncle dug into a career as an electrician with a degree from GA Tech, while my father flunked out and BSed his way into a path as a traveling typewriter technician with IBM, eventually meeting my mother in a Baltimore bowling alley and winding up just shy of crossing the Mason-Dixon.

I never, in my entire life, saw my uncle laugh with anything but a kind of sneering derision. He never had a strong opinion about anything but sports and politics, and raised two boys to be closed-in tough guys while another ended up living with his mother in Chicago, and had more of a chance. On the rare occasions when Uncle Jack would deign to swing by our place in Scaggsville on a lightning visit on the way to a convention, it was just...unbelievable that they could possibly be related. My uncle was a stunner, if you like that sort of thing, a guy who tanned so easily you could practically write on him with a flashlight, and was a dullard who, when stopping in to "see" us, would have to rush through to hit the TV for scores before he'd talk to us, and boy, we sure were like a family from outer space to him.

"Still doing your little plays and all that longhair music?" he'd ask of my dad, who was active in community theater and with the Washington Opera throughout my life, and would greet any response with a sort of haw-haw dismissiveness that was required of his testosterone straitjacket. He thought of my father as soft, and yet, my dad was a Titan as those roles go, a Thoreau who actually took the definition of manliness as a starting point and ran with it at full tilt, never bothered to ponder whether it was okay when he strayed into supposedly feminine regions, because that's not what you do when you are busy being a person. We kept chickens, farmed our huge yard for most of our food, built a huge workshop where he taught me how to build things and fix things and my mother taught me how to refinish furniture and cane chairs and do old school Baltimore woodgraining, and were a beacon among the suburban traditionalists in the neighborhood that had risen around our two-hundred-year-old log farmhouse, with kids that would flood in to be around us.

The men of the neighborhood would drift in like unhelpful zombies when my dad would have our Gravely tractor in pieces, or was bent over the engine compartment of our '55 F-100, smoking thousands of cigarettes and doing the things men of a certain age and income status would do, mostly acting in fearful unison like my uncle, always careful to guard their boundaries and to seem like experts at whatever bullshit they were bullshitting about, and I'd hang on the side, and they'd try to police me, too, guffawing when I was too curious or too open or just too Joe-B, which was a thing that our neighborhood understood. I missed it at the time, how much my father made room for me to be who I am, but he did, and when he needed to, he'd make a moment to frame the time after the blowhard brigade had left.

"You know Mr. Phil is a goddamn jackass, right?"

"Umm."

"Just take him with a grain of salt, kid."

And the thing was, my father couldn't listen to the maudlin section of Prokofiev's Lieutenant Kijé Suite without being reduced to crying like a baby, and would sometimes be found playing "Me And Bobby McGee" on the tuba in our living room while my sister did wild interpretive dances, and had an absurdly comprehensive makeup case in a fishing tackle box that we all fought over for custody when he died. He was method, and would spend weeks in character, working on his accents at the dinner table, to which my friends would ask "What's going on with your dad?" after he'd shouted "Oy gevault, I should load the dishwasher all by myself?" at me from the other room.

"He's Jewish now, apparently."

"Really?"

"Well, for this month."

And in '97, when I came home from a failed job assignment that had had me working and living in Atlanta with my boyfriend of nine years in a chain of disasters that had wrapped up that relationship along with a lot of other things I'd hoped for, my dad sat on the other end of the couch in front of the TV while he and I were up late, watching the news that Princess Diana had been seriously injured in an accident. I was staying at home while I waited for the people who sublet my apartment in Maryland to leave, and I was already keyed up, and the weird feeling of personal involvement with some distant celebrity and everything else was just...a lot.

"I hope she's going to be okay," he said. "She seems to do a lot of good."

"Yep."

"Is something going on? You seem keyed up."

"Me and Paul broke up."

The words just hung there, in the air, and I had not said them out loud. Paul was the first man I'd ever brought home, and he adored my parents and they adored him, even my dad, who told me, after a period of careful study, that "You should hang onto that one, Joe. He's square and just a straight-up guy, which is exactly what you need."

I felt numb and dead inside, but my father didn't, and he cried without reservation, and said "C'mere, kid," with an arm out, and I cried on his chest while he stroked my hair and the TV just kept on with the story of the hour.

I have known so many men who hide their face, hide their tears, and pull back for fear of ridicule or their own internal image of who they're meant to be, and there's a deadness that they chase after when the fear of being exposed as "weak" comes into play, and yet, no man has ever been stronger than my dad, or a harder presence to miss after his passing, and it is a memetic disease, transmitted by shame and fear and mockery, from those with power to those who need the protection of power, but fail to get it, and I will rage against the failure of such parents as long as I see children denied the full spectrum of their humanity, because it's because of the freedom I was given that I have seen such things in this world that you could hardly believe.

Everyone deserves that.

"What on earth are you doing?" I asked my dad, some time in '84, while he was in yolk-style boxers and a t-shirt in the living room, tethered to the stereo by the long coiled cord to his tuna-can-sized AKG headphones, bouncing around the room in a wild dance like a bowlegged little gorilla. He paused and slung the 'phones around his neck.

"Frankie Goes To Hollywood," he said, a little breathless.

"Yeah, we could hear," I said, looking down my nose with the combination of teen haughtiness and the school-bred insecurity that had been undermining far better examples at home. "It's like a gay disco in here."

And that's true, that I was gay-shaming my definitively heterosexual dad while I was wearing teal seersucker high-waisted pants and motherfucking magenta espadrilles, six years into my sexual experimentation with other boys, and even when you've got a safe refuge from the diseases of the Reagan-era zeitgeist, there's always something about peer pressure that wants to innoculate you with those soulwrecking headviruses, but my father just laughed.

"If you don't get it, son, you don't get it. Did you need anything else from me?"

The 'phones went back on, dad reset the record, and the words bled out as he turned into a little hairy windmill on the oriental rug in front of the piano.

Relax don't do it
When you want to to go to it
Relax don't do it
When you want to come
Relax don't do it
When you want to suck to it
Relax don't do it
When you want to come
Come-oh oh oh


I fled the room, but I have since regained my composure, and brother, I am down to cry.
posted by sonascope at 7:29 AM on September 28, 2016 [7 favorites]


I don't entirely disagree, and I really don't have time or energy at hand to engage in a deep discussion about how crying works in my family. But everyone has seen things I wouldn't believe. Everyone has different ways of expressing emotion. That's humanity. That's the Goddess. As much as I find the traditional masculinity of some family members difficult to be around, I can't, as a religious matter, consider them diseased in the soul or zombies because they don't cry the way I do. (Just to be clear, that's not because my queer theology affirms their gender roles.)

Now then, my barriers on crying are, in fact, due to a disease (Anxiety Disorder likely complicated by CPTSD). But that's a behavioral matter and I'm more than a bit prickly when claims are made about the quality of experience that mentally ill people have.

Memetics is a crap theory and a bad foundation on building any kind of a feminist or queer praxis.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 8:29 AM on September 28, 2016


I'm more than a bit prickly when claims are made about the quality of experience that mentally ill people have

So noted, and definitely worth pondering. My father's take, of course, was last updated more than twenty years ago and is clearly not within the modern realm of critical thinking on the subject, though I do think there is a valid reason to think of a pointless socially transmitted conceptual inhibition enforced by external sanction and internalized fear as a sickness, so we can be clear that those thus victimized are not at fault even as we try to stop other people from subjecting others to the same reinforcement.

That said, while there are plenty of perfectly valid reasons why someone might be unable or disinclined to cry (spectrum, personality and/or temperament, specific neurological mechanism, etc), I think it's also perfectly valid to see people who's outside those and related categories who live less than the full breadth of human possibility because of a chain of idiotic ideas about how we're supposed to be and the wrongheaded or similarly-victimized people who pass those ideas down the line as predatory.

I'm currently embroiled in a very topical complication on this very subject, so I'm admittedly a little passionate on the subject, and may yet throw a brick through a stained-glass window or two.
posted by sonascope at 9:17 AM on September 28, 2016


The other side of experience between the partners who threw abuse at my gender non-conformity, was the partner who made my GNC inhibitions into their political and sexual project (including the crying thing.) So I'm a bit paranoid when it comes to the difference between making a welcoming space for GNC and using GNC as a shibboleth for being the right kind of people.

It's become a useful boundary for defining the difference between an ally and a fetishist. The ally supports even when inconvenient, the fetishist supports only as long as their personal itch gets scratched. Unfortunately what people say in the abstract and what people do at 3:00 am when everyone is emotionally, spiritually, and physically naked are often completely different.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 9:47 AM on September 28, 2016 [2 favorites]


So I'm a bit paranoid when it comes to the difference between making a welcoming space for GNC and using GNC as a shibboleth for being the right kind of people.

Having been on the wrong side of this equation far more times than I'd like to admit, I appreciate this perspective. It's a hard line to draw as to the difference between celebrating the existence of difference and celebrating celebrating the existence of difference.
posted by sonascope at 9:53 AM on September 28, 2016 [1 favorite]


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