Chapter 2 is where the interesting stuff is, they assessed people for misogynistic attitudes, and also political ones they deem extreme. They classify left wing extremism as indicated by:
The rich will not give up their wealth easily. Organised violence, including against people, is the only way to make things fair for everyone.
Capitalism is ruining the world and should be resisted with violence
Without getting distracted by a discussion of the um curious decision to classify that in the same way as beliefs like murdering people who wont fuck me is a cool and good I think it’s an interesting result.
Misogyny in left-wing spaces is real, and this survey indicates it’s not automatically less prevalent than in right wing spaces (although particular attitudes may differ). Despite shit like patriarchy and control of women being recognised as a problematic root of oppression by many prominent theorists (e.g. engles on the origin of class relations).
Something I think we should all think about.
Also at least Aussie gen z’ers seem a bit fucking cooked here, how do boomers have better attitudes about forcing sex on your wife than gen z women? wat is going on? I wonder if some of this can be explained through inexperience, but there is a stark difference between older and younger people. Also much less than between men and women than I would have expected.
Why are we failing to reach kids compared to the right wing here?
Because the manosphere teaches the easy way out, it gives tutorials on how to conform to patriarchy in a transactional way that promises a material return of investment for your obedience to its norms. The stuff that clavicular promotes is in the long term extremely harmful to neurodivergent people (he can himself only bear the insane amount of forcing himself into high-masking situations by constant substance abuse), and all manosphere stuff renders you incapable of leading a healthy long term relationship, and it’s even worse for women who will ruin their entire life permanently when they become tradwifes, but on the pure surface level this shit turns helpless outcast kids into successful adults. A success that is constant suffering that can only be ended by your husband getting kirked because otherwise you are stuck with his kids and none of his money and a 20 year gap in your employment history and probably no college degree because you dropped out to marry that fashy piece of shit, but people who go down that pipeline do not notice that until it’s too late.
And the PUA shit does get incels laid. It’s one big psychological abuse tutorial and requires that for each phone number you get you make 3 dozen women feel extremely grossed out and uncomfortable and it systematically teaches its adherents to treat a lack of consent as a challenge to be overcome, but it produces results for people who would struggle to get them otherwise, because the manipulative abuse techniques it teaches can be used by everybody and with enough targets being harassed you will end up finding a vulnerable mark eventually. And dating strategies that are healthy are never this universal, because what can make somebody attractive isn’t universal and you can’t go through 100 tries of hitting on somebody in one evening when you do not act like a total piece of shit to women.
Also, success will not come quickly and with the PUA stuff it does. It will never last, you can manipulate somebody into dating you but you can’t manipulate them into actually loving you, only into being dependent on you in a shitty and toxic way. And that will make every relationship built on this hell in the long run. But you can’t know that when you’re 16 years old.
When people say “the left needs to give lonely young men good dating advice and instead we scold them for being men”, they are obviously arguing in bad faith or are just genuinely misogynist and do not get what they are saying. But good leftist dating advice will by its very nature be at a short term disadvantage and “just be yourself and find people like you and communicate honestly and openly and most importantly realize that women are human beings and treat them as such” sounds boring and trite even though it’s 100% true and the only actual way forward.
for a very long time mainstream (i.e. liberal, white) feminists only came with a list of what not to do and that is incomplete and unhelpful unless your vision of protecting young straight women from their peers is to paralyze the reachable cohort and do nothing at all to reach or change the young men who only hear from PUA/manosphere chuds.
excusing zero of his faults, dan savage actually kinda met the moment 20+ years ago but i can’t in good conscience recommend him to a nephew or younger cousin anymore and that’s been the case for a while.
At the risk of being snarky, i could swear even liberal, white feminists have told men what they expect them to do, back in the day even they had demands like “spend more time with your kids” or “don’t always let your wife do the dishes” or “equal pay for equal work.” Granted, i have to guess what you mean with your complaint about feminism being “incomplete and unhelpful”, so maybe you expect women to write a complete protocol for men on how to flirt without being sex pests or something like that.
It is … interesting that it’s the task of feminists to single-handedly define for men how they are supposed to be men the correct way. I would have thought that such relatively central parts of one’s gender performance are something people of that gender should figure out on their own. I would say men could be expected to do some reflection when we make really simple demands like “establish consent before you do something” or “accept ‘no’ for an answer and assume that uncertainty also means no and instead ask your partner what they would like you to do when that happens” and btw, these are actually very clear instructions on what to do and absolutely commonplace in feminist discourse about this stuff even if it’s the white, liberal one. I seriously do not know how much more you want to ask of women.
But i forgot that patriarchy is an extractive system that unloads unprofitable labor on women so we do it for free. So of course it is up to us to reinvent masculinity. Maybe women do not want that. Maybe establishing what men shouldn’t do is more important to me because it directly relates to my security and sexual autonomy and i gotta be honest with you here, i do not give a flying fuck if my safety inconveniences somebody. I know way too many women who were put into really threatening situations they could have gotten out of easier and with less trauma if they would not have felt the pressure to be polite, do you have any idea how many people pleaser type girls out there get hurt because they struggle with being rude enough that manipulative creeps actually fuck off when they are not wanted? That should not happen, and it’s the fault of these creeps and not of these girls, yet of fuckig course the conversation is once more about the poor socially awkward basement boy who is really scared by girls and really harmed by the Male Lonelyness Epidemic that btw is not actually a male lonelyness epidemic, but hey, it’s like this every single time, isn’t it?
I can’t tell you how men should flirt with straight women, i never was a man and was never good at flirting with straight women before my transition. I do have found that lesbians and bisexuals have different and better ways to handle this whole dating stuff, but that would probably not work for everybody, especially not because all the women i hook up with are autistic and do not do the counterintuitive ambiguity dance-around that is neurotypical flirting behavior.
I can safely say that it is much easier to clearly establish consent and avoid hitting on somebody who does not want that when you date like an autistic lesbian, but once more, from my experience with straight women i have found they kind of don’t know how to handle it when somebody approaches them and outright asks “hey, is it ok when i flirt with you?” Many find that funny and for some it even works as a pick-up line, and it means you do not spend much time chatting somebody up who does not want that, so it’s absolutely worth a try. But queer people are in my experience so much better at just talking openly about hooking up, sex and relationships than cishets, even cishet women, that it isn’t even funny. So idk, i can just say the straights are not ok, i cannot provide a step-by-step recipe for how to fix that because i’m not the right person for that task.
i was speaking to dating advice for like 14-early 20s year olds, which those three do not apply very much now do they?
are you on some “there are no male feminists” thing? that’s fine but i would include somebody like PZ Myers in the “only don’ts” crowd. Fred Rogers wasn’t talking to teens. If any of the alleged non-toxic masculinity role models had anything to say on the subject it wasn’t getting any reach in the era before we stopped calling it a “weblog” instead of a blog.
damn you just medaled in the olympic long jump.
no argument here, i’ve said before that it’s understandable why that was the predominant discourse and it’s absolutely right to have that priority. but once someone has mastered the do nots, they’re left not knowing what to do and that leaves the vacuum.
part of the problem is that these guys are asking an impossible question, but we need to offer an alternative otherwise there’s no defense against the andrews taint.
Yeah i agree on both counts.
At least when i look around on hexbear, i have a hunch that a lot of the really intimidated guys who are outright terrified of doing something wrong are already struggling with social interaction in general, and while i do not want to remote diagnose anybody, i have a hunch that this may very often be due to autism. And i think the most important advice for autistic boys is to at least focus a bit more on dating autistic girls, especially if these boys so far lack relationship experience. Honestly, a lot of the dating advice out there just forces autistic people to mask super hard and that’s draining, stressful, leads to burnout and is a fucking shitty foundation for having a nice date, let alone a healthy relationship.
Apart from that, i think this stuff is mostly a conversation about consent as far as women are involved. The whole “patriarchy harms men emotionally” thing is absolutely correct, but i see that very often, this is unloaded on women. I see lots of writing about the “male lonelyness epidemic” (that is not a specifically male lonelyness epidemic, but affects all genders) hones in on … well, women supporting men more. That’s so often presented as the fix. Even bell hooks spends so much of The Will to Change on how women should look after the emotional needs of their sons and that mothers should admire their son’s penis more (i am seriously not making this up, that’s literally in there i shit you not). Which is why i blasted out that line about patriarchy being “an extractive system that unloads unprofitable labor on women so we do it for free” - we are talking about emotional labor and care labor here and in our society, it is women that are supposed to handle that.
And i think this is something that can’t work. I think men need to learn to be homosocial in similar ways to how women can be homosocial with each other. To have friendships were they are emotionally available, do not constantly hide behind banter and can show when they hurt without making a toughness performance out of it. I’ve seen after transitioning how much it helps to learn that and build a friend group that is an emotional support structure. Men need that, and men are not allowed to have that because it’s seen as “gay” or whatever. As long as men can’t cuddle to comfort each other when they’re hurting, they will not have undone this issue.
yeah, a lot of that is easier said than done. Narrowing your pool to a tiny subgroup isn’t a good way to meet more people, my hard line now is masking in indoor places and it’s been years since i’ve even laid eyes on someone of any gender, let alone any preferences or propriety like not hitting on people at their job.
tbh lasting friendships are probably harder than romance. you spend so much more time with a partner and on three chat messages once a month you’ll die of old age before building anything.
I’ve observed the exact opposite. My “dating pool” (it feels gross and dehumanizing to even write these words tbh) is nowadays more than a hundred times smaller than it used to be if i’m just going by demographics because i exclusively date neurodivergent, poly and sapphic trans women and transfem nonbinary beings and a few TME people also falling into the neurodivergent, poly sapphic group. That’s really tiny compared to “women in general”. People assume that just wrecks my dating options, but i still hooked up with more people in the first three years of my transition than in several decades before that combined.
I’m too demi to get that. I just can’t build a romantic relationship with somebody i’m not even friends with. I know most people actually do, but i gotta be honest that seems both completely impossible and undesirable to me. If i’m not friends with somebody already, i can’t even feel genuine sexual attraction towards them, let alone anything romantic. I can reliably guess if they’re hot, but i do not want to do anything with them if we haven’t clicked, and that requires that i know and like them. I’ve lost my ability to fuck strangers. And once more you’d think that makes it harder for me to hook up, but actually it does the opposite, because i no longer force myself into situations i am fundamentally not built to handle.
i really did mean romance, not hookup. if you’re upfront about things being a date even if you’re not trying to fuck after the first one, it still comes with the implication that you’re (potentially, anyway) much more invested in maintaining a relationship. Compare that to the friends i’ve seen once or twice a week for several years and then disappear forever when somebody moves or loses interest in the common hobby.
or if you want to say those weren’t friends, then i’ve literally never had a friend who wasn’t also a partner and i’d stand by my musing.
OOTL, what happened with Dan Savage to make him problematic?
i don’t think there was a specific scandal but he falls short on a bunch of stuff and he was going on bill maher’s show a lot. there’s some tumblr that was obsessively keeping track of every slight but i don’t have time for that shit.