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Just waiting for the day when someone can explain to me what makes a man a man without describing skills, qualities, and actions that anyone can do regardless of gender.
And don’t tell me it’s “have a penis”, because if that were true then effeminate men wouldn’t be insulted all the time for not being “real” men, and there wouldn’t be toxic masculinity.
I’m a man because I say I’m a man and fuck anyone who tells me otherwise.
And that applies to anyone with any gender. Because it’s not about anyone but that person.
Otherwise
Now fuck me please
I never said I would be doing the fucking.
Same question for women. Gender is only useful insofar as we decide it is. We have an inherent nature to categorize and differentiate, and in some cases that makes a lot of sense, but outside of strictly biological facts, that distinction between genders is nebulous at best.
Like religion, gender identity is personal, even if it stems from society. No two people will share the same opinion, it’d probably be weird if they did, and as long as they’re not using their opinion as basis for fact, do whatever you want, man woman or anyone in between, outside, or around the spectrum.
A man is someone who identifies as a man.
Yes, it’s circular.
Gender is a social construct that is, gladly, starting to fail.
I hope that in some years people would stop refering to having any gender, and they’ll just have the social behavior they’d like best when they like it best. And will only discuss their sex when it’s medically relevant.
Sadly unlikely because it’s rooted in biological differences (mainly hormones), so on average there will be sex-based differences. I’d love it if people stopped stereotyping because of that but I doubt itll ever happen. Maybe we can at least get rid of the idea of gendered hobbies and such, but even then most people want to identify as part of a group so there will likely always be some association.
It’s less that the social construct is failing, and more that we’re finally letting it flourish.
Tying the way you present to the world to one of two options often linked to your gonads is extremely limiting. What you describe isn’t the failure of gender, it’s an explosion of genders.
A featherless biped or a miserable little pile of secrets, take your pick.
Idk, but i feel like it’s just being who you are and respecting yourself.
Same as a woman being a woman.
Anyone that’s confident in who they are isn’t going to care or announce it.All the blustering either way is just yelling “im a grown ass man/woman!” outside of a grocery store at 1 am.
I’ve always thought the least manly quality you can have is caring about how manly you are.
From somebody named “geekandmisandry”.
That just shows you how impartial they are to the whole thing
Yeah because no one ever picks an online username that doesn’t perfectly represent their irl personality 1:1
You have no idea how this person behaves offline, you’re just reacting to their username
I thought that it was amusing. I have no idea why somebody would want that in their username.
I thought “feeling like a man” meant eating a lot of meat and losing money on sports betting.
Idk I don’t do traditional man things.
I do do traditional man things: woodworking, maintenance on the family vehicles, and I’ve been thinking of getting into machining as a hobby because I have a lot of hand-me-down yard equipment that’s showing its age and I might need to start making my own parts because eBay is looking kind of barren.
Anyway, none of these activities have ever made me feel “manly” I never understood what that means. I feel like myself doing either something I enjoy, or something that needs to be done. My wife always says that she likes that she married such a manly guy who can fix all this stuff and make furniture, but anyone with functioning hands and a brain can do this stuff, it’s not exactly hard. Having a penis doesn’t make you an expert carpenter or mediocre mechanic, working with wood and old engines does that.
I know you’re joking, but I don’t get people who unironically think like this. Like whats preventing a woman from eating lots of meat and losing money on sports betting? Like what physical barrier prevents them from doing that? None.
So how could that define manhood?
So how could that define manhood?
Societal expectations. If enough people think it does then it does. Doesn’t mean non-men can’t do it, but they might get ostracized for it, just like men are when they do certain female-coded things. Why is blue for boys and pink for girls? Why are high-heels for women only? Doesn’t have to make any actual sense, it just kinda is right now, even though it wasn’t always the case.
It’s all society. Always has been. Always will be. There are some very specific biological differences in the two sexes, and we’ve used those real differences to decide a bunch of fake differences we stick to out of convention. There’s an idea of what a man is in our collective unconscious, an archetypal “man”, and that’s what people refer to, but that archetype is breaking down. Man, woman, gender in general. We’re realizing that those distinctions aren’t useful, and sometimes, maybe even most of the time, are detrimental.
That all said, humans are social creatures. That pressure, that idea of “man” is all around us. It’s absolutely understandable that people can still generalize what “man” is. The concept doesn’t have to be based on anything tangible to be relevant to our species.
Most ‘man’ things make me feel awkward and uncomfortable. Even when I was a kid. Other boys would wrestle and push each other around and stuff and I was like, “yeah, don’t involve me in this.”
And yet I have never been insecure about my gender. I’m fine being a man who isn’t “traditionally” male.
I don’t even own one flannel shirt.
I’ve never heard anyone say that phrase, is it possible that people use that expression to mean “a man likes to feel like a man… not a machine”? Ie he has thoughts, emotions, and priorities. He is not a commodity, his worth is more than just profit he can produce.
Not that women don’t also have those attributes, just that “man” is being used as an outdated shorthand for humanity.
I’m not sure how i feel about the post altogether. I mean, i understand that toxic masculinity is bad, but this post needs some assumptions and context to make me want to side with it. For example, if I saw some guy just kinda minding his business doing silly guy stuff and the context was he wants to “feel like a man,” i don’t think i would be offended or concerned?
r/justguysbeingdudes comes to mind
I’ve heard this one before from my conservative grandma, It’s when a girl is doing something manly that the guy ““should”” be doing. Like if a girl is carrying in all the groceries while a guy is just watching someone would say “let [guy] do it, he’s supposed to feel like a man”
This came up a lot as my sister is very much a ‘do it yourself’ kinda gal whereas her (now ex) boyfriend wasn’t much of an initiative taker.
It’s not about a guy not doing manly things, it’s about stopping women from doing manly things.
(also note I’m using ‘manly’ in the stereotypical terms, not how I personally see them)Again, that’s added context. I don’t know how feeling like a man is stopping a women from anything. I don’t think that’s a necessary component of the statement at all, though i appreciate the reply
“A man likes to feel like a man” is a good reason to allow trans men to get top surgery.
Whatever makes them happy I guess?
It probably is about feeling useful/needed. That’s what men are taught to measure their self-worth in.
I think that’s one possible explanation, but it’s vague enough that it could be other things too.
It’s hard to tell from the context, but it felt to me more like something a right-wing guy with really unrealistic expectations says to their soon to be ex-girlfriend (or possibly to the fiance in the marriage the church arranged) about how they need to be the one in charge.
Yeah I think we should believe that the witness correctly interpreted the meaning in the given context, but we shouldn’t assume that everyone that says it means it like that. It’s context dependant.
And if i have to pretend that your ass looks good for you to feel good about your ass, your ass doesn’t look good.
Now let’s get past the idea that relationships don’t involve theater for our partner’s benefit.
Or maybe we are just sick and tired of fighting the world and don’t want that kind of drama at home with our partner.
Every man is by definition a man and feels like one.
i wish that were true
Geekandmisandry. Misandry ie. someone who hates men.
Well at least you’re open about it. Many aren’t when they attack men.
Here’s the thing about “toxic masculinity”. Some people are toxic. Women and men tend to express that toxicity in different ways. Attacking an entire gender for the behaviour of the worst is stereotyping.
More broadly it’s part of the modern notion that we are on teams and that the other team is bad.
Of course both men and women can be toxic. The point of toxic masculinity as a term is to draw attention to the fact that there’s a certain brand of toxicity that has much more harmful outcomes in male-dominated spaces, for a variety of social and cultural reasons. It tends to be a rather controversial term mostly because it gets conflated with the idea that masculinity itself is toxic (which is not what it’s supposed to mean).
The discussion should be about the magnitude of the problem, not hand-waving it away because women do it too but in different ways. The “different ways” is kind of the whole point of the argument.
Also, that’s a lot of extrapolation you did simply from a username in a screenshot. Would you describe any of their actual words in the post as misandrist?
I mean, it pretty clearly implies “feeling like a man” is only a bad thing. That “feeling like a man” can only be done in ways that make others feel inferior. That seems pretty misandrous. to me. Enough to call misandry right away? No. But between that and the name, they’re starting to set a theme.
I got the impression that it’s fine for a man to “feel like a man” but that that needs to be something he finds on his own terms, and needs to come from within. It’s not something he gets to impose upon others, such that it demands their cooperation or subordination. If to anyone, masculinity requires them being superior to others… maybe they need to do some soul searching.
Perhaps the user’s name does contribute to a theme. I don’t see anything specifically wrong with what was mentioned in this post, but we would need more context to determine who’s in the wrong, Reddit AITA style.
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Did you really make an account just to post Facebook-tier self-help nonsense? With all the emoji spam, I bet it actually was copy/pasted off of Facebook. Get out of here.
It‘s AI generated.
Even worse. Blegh.
What’s your go-to trick for boosting self-perception?
Therapy.
For real, I’ve been doing it for two years now and it helped a lot.
Empowerment is for women only. Noted.
How are you empowered by “feeling like a man”? What does that even mean?
Why would it matter what it means? There is someone asking for validation and is ridiculed for it.
Why are strangers under any obligation to validate each other?
Where do you get the obligation part?
What would you consider a proper response to this?
To what exactly?
Empowerment is when people make themselves subservient around you? If you need everyone around you do defer to your ego that’s not empowerment.
Is respecting someone as a human really being subservient? Or is someone strutting around demanding respect for who one is, really just demanding everyone else to be subservient?
The source of women’s empowerment isn’t men pretending that women are strong. It’s women who changed.
Strong people build others up. Weak people knock them down to feel big. You want to feel like a strong man? Protect others and be generous with your spirit.
You want to feel like a strong man? Protect others and be generous with your spirit.
Fucking this. Strong men—strong people—help others. Healthy or not, realistic or not, this is the message that’s been sold to us since time immemorial. The knight that slays the dragon and saves the kingdom. The alien that crash lands and moonlights as a superhero. The sled dog runs 261 miles to bring the medicine to a town beset by an epidemic.
Yes, sure, one can argue some romanticism (or propaganda) with any given example. But the overall message of heroism, of strength, is not one of selfishness or of “me and mine”.
Heroism is something we ought to focus more on as a culture in general. Doing things simply because they are right and protecting others who cannot protect themselves cannot be understated.
I think a challenge with “right” is that it is subjective. For example, there are people today who believe that doing what’s “right” entails doing things that hurt people, or deprive them of happiness, or even a future. Or, that doing what’s “right” means only helping your family or your friends or your church or your Elks club.
I would say heroism has plenty of cultural emphasis already, perhaps too much even. The prevalence of superhero movies, calling anyone who served in the military a hero, all of the nurses/caregivers/essential workers during covid: there are so many examples of loud proclamations of heroism in US/Anglo culture. It is clearly a value held by the vast majority of people.
I think instead we should be looking at the messages people are actually getting from all the hero worship, rather than what we think are the important take-aways. Things like exceptionalism, having strength to prevail against one’s enemies, making hard decisions for “the greater good”. Finding good stories to combat these potentially damaging and counterproductive ideas is where we should be focusing our cultural energies IMO, rather than more hero worship.
Semi-related, as this reminded me of a quote from Cary Grant:
I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be and I finally became that person. Or he became me.
This was then repurposed on Star Trek Strange New Worlds by chief engineer Pelia (from a species that lives several centuries):
Most heroes I’ve seen… are just pretending half the time. There’s this one guy I remember, he said to me, ‘I always pretended to be someone I wanted to be, until finally, I became that someone, or he became me.’
Hah, didn’t catch that when I saw the episode - Pelia knew Cary Grant!
How to really feel like a man
- Ignore gender wars bait, there are way more important things out there.
- See step 1
Yeah, first time hearing “a man wants to feel like a man”
My first interpretation was a bunch of guys fighting with sticks and everyone having a blast
There are fun casual LARP or Nerf groups all over the place. Most of them would love to have more people coming out to the park on the weekend. Bring friends, or make some while you’re there!
Sometimes you find a really great stick. I’ve got one on my porch right now.
Are you male? The phrase is primarily said to women which might be why you’re unfamiliar with it if so.
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You just fell on the first hurdle
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You:
A patient I dealt with had schizophrenia and dementia, “but I’m a man, not a little girl with panties” was his counterargument to everything.
You can only have one cigarette at a time because otherwise you lose them all and run out. “But I’m a man.”
You know the doctor says your food needs to be cut up. “Do I look like a little girl to you?”
That’s the communal cheese bowl, this is your plate. You can’t eat from the communal cheese bowl with a fork. “Do you see me wearing panties?”
Whenever I hear people making these kind of gender essentialist arguments, they just sound pitiably out of touch with reality to me.
Have you asked him how often he thinks about wearing women’s underwear?
In my head I made many cutting remarks. But the reality of this level of cognitive decline is like 90% miserably depressing and only like 10% infuriating. Plus he wouldn’t be capable of understanding the criticism anyway.
That’s potentially worthwhile with someone who is cognizant but just an asshole. For someone with dementia, there’s no point
I don’t know what it says about you if you do it deliberately but I think there’s a lot to say for asking the question anyways because his speech filters don’t work properly and he might not be able to censor himself.
If Men want to feel like Men then they have ways to deal with their insecurity:
Redo their own plumbing, twice. Once to change things and again to fix the problem they caused.
Chop firewood.
Build a furnace that you’re only going to use like 4 times, ever.
50 pushups. If not reaching it makes you sad, start skipping numbers.
Redo their own plumbing, twice. Once to change things and again to fix the problem they caused.
I’m in this comment and I don’t like it.
Similarly there is an old adage that a home plumbing repair will take three trips to the hardware store.
This also describes me.
Plumbing is the one thing I won’t do myself in diy. If screw ups are made I want the responsible party to fix things, and I don’t want to be that party.
Add electrical to that list, because I’m not a fucking wizard, and electricity is magic.
With the plumbing example, the first time was a training exercise and doesn’t count.
I met a marine mechanic once - he fixed Argos afterwards, which is how I met him. His saying:
One [nut] for me, one for the bilge.
Argos is still frustrating at times, he did not succeed.
Thank you to everyone in this thread who made me feel part of a community of my peers online for the first time, in a long time.
Every plumbing project (even yesterdays quick upgrade of the kitchen faucet) is at least a 2 tripper. Each time I finish one I swear I’m never moving again. Then, 5 years later, I’m fixing the previous owners mishaps “one last time”.
To all the people who’ve bought houses I lived in, I’m sorry for all of the " what was that idiot thinking" moments I’ve caused you. Ha
To all the people who’ve bought houses I lived in, I’m sorry for all of the " what was that idiot thinking" moments I’ve caused you. Ha
Hmm from what you said it’s more like, “Yup, I can see what shit the last guy had to fix. Thanks friend I’ll never meet.”
I’ll take that perspective! Cheers
If not reaching it makes you sad,
start skipping numbersforgive yourself and repeat tomorrow. You’ll feel awesome when you get there.NO. THATS NOT MANLY ENOUGH. REAL MEN GIVE THEMSELVES THE AUTHORITY TO SKIP NUMBERS.
No! Perfection every time! Especially the first time.
