fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #3200 ]

[ SECRET POST #3200 ]

⌈ Secret Post #3200 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

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New anon

Masculinity: noun form of masculine: pertaining to or characteristic of a man or men (dictionary.com)

So any traits traditionally applied to men work here. This includes things like protection, self-reliance, leadership, manners before a lady, strength of both character and arms, and bravery. It also includes things like brutishness, misogyny, overbearing behaviour, and crudeness. Can we agree that's the starting point?

Over the last few hundred years, depending on your country of origin, women have begun claiming the virtues on the list as gender neutral. Women can be brave, protectors, leaders, and strong. That leaves only the bad traits. We usually recognize women *can* be those things too, but we still tend to overwhelmingly apply them to men.

What does this leave us with? Only negative traits considered truly masculine. Which isn't fair, as then the assumption swings towards 'all men are terrible' from 'some men are terrible', because the entire other half of the equation has been removed.

To answer your question, we first have to know what makes someone masculine? If the virtues are gender neutral, then no. There won't be non-toxic masculinity, because the word masculinity will have come to mean only toxic things. If the virtues are still considered traditional male traits (*that women can still have!* I am not implying only men have them!), then yes. Because at that point, I (who am female) exhibited non-toxic masculinity earlier when I helped a senior citizen walk down a flight of stairs. I did the same when I moved to a new city where I knew no one. Women who stand up for themselves or others have done so. Anyone who has ever held open a door for the next person has done so.

By the same token, a male who compassionately took in an injured animal showed non-toxic femininity and the male who was catty behind someone's back showed toxic femininity.

Or, we can agree that *all* traits are human traits and switch to using pride and vanity in place of words like macho, removing all the genders and focussing on calling anyone who is a shitty person a shitty person, regardless of gender. This would give us the benefit of not ostracizing non-shitty people by grouping them with shitty people.

It's more complicated in practice, because there's no way to remove millennia of history from society, but that's my take on it.

tl;dr there should be non-toxic masculinity if there is masculinity in general, but society is in an awkward growing stage where it's difficult to say that without sounding like a terrible person.

Another new anon likes your style.

Thank you!

Can we agree that's the starting point?

No. I've been gnawing this around all night, and for most of my entire life before that. I'm playing a bit of devil's advocate here since I don't quite have a clue as to where I stand in all this.

But the biggest myth of a gender binary is that there IS a gender binary. From my perspective at least. Stick a pin in Key West and stick another pin in Chicago and then declare that Key West and Chicago are binary. The Bear and rapist #1 may share a socially constructed class, but I don't think they occupy the same space. I lost my heart to a very gay man, tall, bearded, of all the right smells including bay rum and pipe tobacco. Rapist #1 was a whippet of a cross country runner, I heard he went into the Air Force. Two men but two cultures, two language codes, two radically different worldviews in the same town that pretended to be bigger than it was.

Which is the real masculinity? Both and neither in my opinion. Saying that all traits are human traits, well that's true but people are creatures of cultural construction. Chicago and Charleston are different. Hell, you cross the street in my neighborhood and the culture shifts in ways you can't take for granted. We gave up on the notion that religious worldviews fell onto a binary or polarity from atheism through polytheism to monotheism and back to atheism, instead, talking about emic ethnographies over a generation ago. Why can't we do the same for gender if we recognize it as culturally constructed to different degrees?

But gender plurality is a utopia I can't wait for. This week: therapy to deal with the echos of Rapist #1 (a man), Rapist #2 (a woman), and the perception that I'll end up like poor Larry King if I become visible again. (Actually that's next week. Today that process was derailed by having to deal with a dying bird, an emotional and religious thing that most regard as just plain wrong for my gender, such as it is. But thankfully, the usual filters of self-censorship I use to pass didn't kick in today.)

Next year, and the next: Finding or creating space to evolve on my own terms, without stuttering around the words or having panic attacks. Whether sie becomes more like The Bear or an androgynous hippy Unitarian churchlady I don't know. But it's my job to figure that out.

But I can say that I'm getting a bit sick of having these things defined for me and around me. I think it's also worth noting that there's a full century of bad blood, in the literal sense, behind people gerrymandering and playing the hokey pokey with masculinity around people like me. It's one thing for me to stick my own arm in and shake it all about as fairy. When other people try dictating to me the terms of my own gender, I start looking for the physical and rhetorical fist.

... I read your response, but I think I'm to tired to make sense of it right now. I'll try to come back to it tomorrow, okay?

Have you ever done debate? Given the opportunity, I structure my arguments that way. I helps make sure everyone is on the same page, and it usually manages to keep me from wandering off on a tangent. That's why I started my comment with a dictionary definition, including source. Then I set up the definition I use, which I think is reasonable, and which my arguments will be based on. I tried to pick a smattering of traits, some positive and some negative, that are specific enough to be discussable yet open enough to be fairly universal. Looking through my knowledge of current worldwide media, historical media, and mythology, I picked ones that seemed most often to be masculine. The question there was more an invitation to provide a different definition if mine didn't suit.

I'm sorry to hear about the bird. That must have been rough. I'd offer a hug, but they don't come through the computer well.

I don't see this as a matter for debate. LGBTQIA masculinities exist (alongside other masculinities. It's not our job to simplify our lives and politics to fit your theory.

To answer one of your questions:

what makes someone masculine?

A person negotiates complex, situated, and behavioral relationships and identity among multiple cultures and classes. How that relationship is constructed is going to vary from community to community, and even from relationship to relationship. Some of those negotiations can be violent to different degrees.

My focus (not an objective or universal one) is on that violence and what we need to do as survivors of that violence.

Edited 2015-10-09 07:27 (UTC)

Of course they do. Someone can have none of the traits listed and be masculine, or have all of them and be feminine. This isn't like getting a passport, where you need one thing from each of three lists, or like a Cosmo quiz, where a point total tells you where you fall, or like chemistry, where everything over a 7 is basic and anything under is acidic. It's simply an inexhaustive list of traits traditionally considered masculine. Any time *anyone* exhibits traits traditionally considered masculine, they are exhibiting masculinity. It seems like you're saying I said only cis, het males with all those traits are masculine, when my point was actually the opposite.

Masculine traits are considered masculine because there's a high correlation between them and being male. And yes, a lot of that is social conditioning. However, correlation is not causation, and it never has been. Someone's gender is not and should not be based on concepts like masculinity and femininity.

As well, by taking away the context of the original question my whole argument becomes moot. Does non-toxic masculinity exist? My point was that unless masculinity is so narrowly defined that every trait is negative, it must. That certainly doesn't mean all masculinity is non-toxic. It doesn't even mean most. It simply means there is room for *anyone*, male, female, non-binary, *anyone*, to exhibit non-toxic masculinity. Whether they are toxic or not is then entirely up to the person, and not assumed or excused due to gender.

Context is important. Specifically, it's important to that question. Your answer implies that it is simplistic to the extreme and irrelevant. By itself, I would agree. In context, though, it is used to make a point that if someone believes only toxic traits are masculine, then all masculinity would be toxic. Your answer is vague enough that it could mean many things, but I think, in context, it means that masculinity is a fluid concept, changing not only person to person, but situation to situation. Your use of the word 'sometimes' implies that you don't consider all masculine behaviour toxic (to use my wording) or violent (to use yours).

Your definition is nebulous enough to make any discussion or debate on the inherent toxicity of masculinity pointless, as it takes away anything that could be applied across the board and replaces it with entirely different discussions that are not applicable to the question at hand.

As for your last point, I wholeheartedly agree. I just don't believe assuming all masculinity is toxic is the correct way to handle either the violence or the survivors, as it narrows the focus down to a specific group of violent people, wraps some nonviolent ones up with them (who may well be victims), and blames all the violence on them.

Your definition is nebulous enough to make any discussion or debate on the inherent toxicity of masculinity pointless, as it takes away anything that could be applied across the board and replaces it with entirely different discussions that are not applicable to the question at hand.

No, it just means that you can't attempt to theorize about me (and people like me) without our active participation. It is not our responsibility to disappear into the closet so you can make "across the board" generalizations.

'Masculinity is inherently toxic.' That is: an "across the board" generalization. That is also the point I'm arguing *against*. Because it can only be true if 'masculinity' is so narrowly defined that the word is useless. I am not saying all masculinity is non toxic either. I am not saying masculinity is only applicable to certain people who behave certain ways. In fact, I went out of my way to say the opposite. I have at no point said that the traits I gave were the only ones, or that they belong to specific people. My only comment on relation to gender was correlation vs causation, and was in response to you, and I've never mentioned sexual orientation.

Your response was first to flat out state that alternative masculinities exist, without elaborating at all. Then you made a comment that reads as 'people are people and just act like people, sometimes in violent manners'. So which is it? Especially since I made the same argument as your second one.

So what exactly am I doing so wrong that you feel I'm ignoring you? If I offended, what caused it? I can't fix anything, including my way of thinking, if you don't show me.

You want to participate? Go for it. I might be the only one still looking, but I am still looking. Help me see what you think I'm so obviously missing. Give me your definition of masculinity, or even a few of the other ones you mentioned. And then tell me if all masculinity is inherently toxic. Because that is the question here before us.

It's frustrating, because to me it looks like we're making the same arguments, but are using two different languages to do so. Is that it? Am I wording things poorly? In the context of this discussion, do my words not mean what they do in the dictionary? Language seems to be changing so quickly around these three things (gender, orientation, and ideology) that I learn new ones every week.

I read this comment out of context of the debate as a passing flatmemer, but just wanted to say +1 to your ideas about what masculinity is and its loose relationship to gender. And its current relationship to toxicity.

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[ SECRET POST #3200 ]

Re: Toxic Masculinity

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