The emasculation of the modern male

originally posted by: glowdog
a reply to: MountainLaurel

it is just role-models that are imprinted in our way to think- nothing special about a man dressing like a woman or the other way around. we are a playful bunch and thats it.
in the video the children had a natural reaction: sympathy.

yeah, maybe's it's all in good fun, it just really seemed weird to me, especially him "lingering" looking in the mirror at himself.

a reply to: MountainLaurel

In Carnivals, you see men dressed like women, without shaving their legs and all in good fun, they even go around making poses and trying to kiss other men but they do it for the "lulz", nothing wrong with that.

I'm guessing it would all be a matter of preference of style for the men and what more appeasing and attractive to most females(Whatever that is),also combine genetics, upbringing, and personality. Some women like an Austin Powers Rug like chest hair, to little or none chest hair.

As for one on one fights, I'd advocate it, since it can give the brain context, but in the ring instead of street fights, where suplexing someone into pavement can be deadly, not only that might make good safe entertainment. Not only that, the concept of Honor or Fair game, or Sport won't apply to some people, that are ether very arrogant, or plain cowardly.

originally posted by: Specimen
I'm guessing it would all be a matter of preference of style for the men and what more appeasing and attractive to most females(Whatever that is),also combine genetics, upbringing, and personality. Some women like an Austin Powers Rug like chest hair, to little or none chest hair.

As for one on one fights, I'd advocate it, since it can give the brain context, but in the ring instead of street fights, where suplexing someone into pavement can be deadly, not only that might make good safe entertainment. Not only that, the concept of Honor or Fair game, or Sport won't apply to some people, that are ether very arrogant, or plain cowardly.

As I've already said, I abhor violence because of what I endured as a child. To be able to defend yourself, though, might not be a bad thing.

a reply to: onequestion

Agreed.

And don't get me started about what this pussyfooting around concerning natural aggression (and outlets for it) has done for the training of our military and police forces. Maybe LEOs wouldn't be so prone to pulling the trigger if they wouldn't get their livelihood threatened for using fists over bullets.

This is why I train in a martial art where I learn how to defend against those with fists and weapons (and how to also use said weapons offensively)...when I don't workout, my wife says I'm just a ball of pent-up emotion, and it's not because I'm always angry, I just need that physical outlet. I'm one of them types...so sue me.

originally posted by: onequestion
So I've been wondering lately about culture and masculibity. Recently in another thread on suicide a member brought up the emasculation of what I can only call manliness in modern culture and I'm wondering... Is stopping people from getting into fist fights really good for us?

I know this isn't PC and it may sound crazy at first but let's take a deeper look.

There is something to he said in my experience about a man whose willing to honestly stand in front of you during a disagreement and choose to fight you one on one. I have respect for someone who will do that. I'm not talking cheap shots I'm not talking gang wars.

I think its part of being a man to get this violent aggression out of your system especially in your early 20's and its my belief that when we try to get that out of our culture we are creating even bigger problems.

Let's take for instance a community of poor people. Kids are taught violence is wrong their entire life but in these same communities we have the biggest problems of violence. It is my belief that by surpressing these NATURAL instincts in young men we are seeing an upswing in gang activity and violent outburst with guns.

I think not allowing young boys and men the freedom to scrap is having a detrimental effect on Americas youth.

Obviously i am not advocating violent but I would like to start a discussion on this topic. I can he swayed in either direction.

So let's start here and see how the conversation evolves. I may let the thread run a little.

Rough housing and violence are two different things. Violence is taught. Rough housing is usually natural to most, but not all engage. Classes that teach history and current events in school show violence standing as acceptable in various ways. Rough housing in school is frowned upon in order to minimize disruption and viewed as ADD /ADHDish, or disrespectful, whereas organized violence gets approval depending on the trending perspective of who the bully is and who the defender is. The defender can easily become the bully as history and current events reveal. Once organizational violence is taught it has to be rewarded and suppressed at the same time. Since it is hard to supress those taught organisational violence is and historically acceptable, people continually act it out in real time or prepare themselves for it with further training. Playing violent video games involves those things; containing them, monitoring them online, while also conditioning them.

For the most part, school teaches that violence is not acceptable on their property unless it is organized into a sport that promotes the school name such as High School football which teaches organizational violence and rivalry . Rivalry is competing for the same objective or for superiority in the same field. Superiority is the reward which this common sport does not implement defending the weak: children, elderly, feminine women/chivalry or poor as objectives. The rivalry is more inline with power and profit for themselves as a personal business/team, not the greater good of all the other football teams. Being superior is the goal using muscle, violence and strategy. The detrimental effect that you are referring to in your OP is based on an "everyone for themselves" type of model which is chaos to a Nation as we can all see with outsourcing jobs, trillions in debt and so on.

I think nothing IS stopping anyone from getting into fights, the opposite of what you state in your OP,. What would contribute to preventing the fighting is personal refusal to not ever engage in violence with one making the correlation to doing that with "never wrestle with a pig, you get dirty, and the pig likes it," or for spiritual reasons encompassing peace.

The loss of masculinity is really due to the development of the gun and technology. Physically weak males who have no advanced skills in combat who have a gun have an even footing with a physically muscular, taller, agile sword yielding warrior who has advanced combat skills who just may be fast enough to stop the bullet with his sword and then fling the sword from a distance into the weaker man's forehead hard enough to kill him before the next round is fired.

The violent agression is not something one acts out until they get it out of their system. A person either choses not to act violently, talks their way out of it, stays silent or humble to not provoke, gets beaten down so bad they give up, or comes back after being beat down and tries again.

The poor were scapegoated into being the most violent when guns were introduced. Defend and help the poor became nonvaluable now that everyone could shoot a gun. Defending a woman and children at about the age of 12 on up became nonvaluable once guns were introduced. For generations those that had obtained their wealth due to being slick and/or violent, who wouldn't be classified as being poor, many times spit on the poor and had an extreme adversion to the greater good of human kind and defending the poor. Forgetting where they came from. Historically intellectuals with noble and just hearts fretted over this and tried to teach people to act compassionately and remember their true purpose of love and light for the whole human family.

It's technology that's removing masculinity. Violence becomes genderless. What's happening now? Well, for a few generations now, guns and sexuality have been meshed together hard with scantily clad chicks holding AR's or handguns and movies with smoking hot bedroom scenes with a 357 positioned on a nightstand. Why is this happening? Well, because we are at the very EDGE of the cliff. The cliff we call violence. Where falling off of it, violence becomes genderless, extremely monstrous and powerful and yields no compassion, nor will suffer one nightmare for engaging in it. Guns are being amped up because subconciously, we all know we are screwed because of way, WAY more advanced weapons. It's a fluffing up of egos and pride right now to sneak the big one in that will devastate precious masculinity originally created for noble, just and true purpose such as providing for and defending women and children and being gentle and good to them. Generationally. To prepare. For no one knew when it was to surface again. Defending them from the machine. Keeping the natural order. Violence was to be used against the machine, not against you and I, or him and her, or us and them. Just on it. It's and it. A thing. A machine. Technology knows no genuine love, but we do. But most don't have that genuine love now, but because we still long for it, no matter if we try to shut it down if the feeling surfaces, it is there still inside us. That genuine love is peace between us all who are human beings and restores our masculinity and femininity that does not have a love, hate relationship because they are on the same team. Team human Being.

I see this happening everywhere. Especially on the TV, in commercials, on "reality TV" and so on...It's becoming ingrained in American society.

It irks me to see/hear women who talk down to their husbands, treat them like children and who are just total nags. I feel bad for the ones on the receiving end, but I also wonder why they put up with it.

I'd never do that to my husband, never!

He IS A MAN and he will ALWAYS wear the pants in MY family!

a reply to: onequestion

You're absolutely correct.

A little over 10 years ago I met some new friends fron the north of Europe, and they would tell me some pretty crazy stories of how guys over there would get into these big fights and generally the worst penalty was anight in jail to cool off. The state didn't press charges, the other party didn't press charges and courts throw out frivolous lawsuits and bill the plaintiff for the courts time.

It began to dawn on me that one of the reasons Americans are more inclined to shoot each other or go "postal" is that we are more repressed and not "allowed" to just get the sh!t off our chests man-to-man. God forbid someone does something deserving of a pop in the face, when they get it, that someone often ends up suing, and or charges are pressed, someone's career is ruined etc etc.

Europe has quickly been becoming softer, but even during the time I spent there on-and-off from 2007-2012 I noticed that men aremore inclined to physically fight, but it usually amounts to nothing, no legal matters and more often than not, the two parties end up having a beer before going home for the night.

It's much more natural and in sync with ancient human behavior, and it gets the aggression out before it builds up and festers and then someone goes and shoots up a mall, or a whole family etc etc

The modern world makes me laugh every day at how strongly we try to deny WHAT WE REALLY ARE. We live in total denial of reality these days. Races have differences, sexes have differences, disagreements are natural, physical aggression happens from time to time and is actually HEALTHY, the sky is blue, grass is green.

We just get more screwed up the head when we try to deny the truth about everything.

its all about yin and yang, when one rises other must go down...just the way this world works.

a reply to: onequestion

I think its part of being a man to get this violent aggression out of your system especially in your early 20's and its my belief that when we try to get that out of our culture we are creating even bigger problems.

This is exactly the opposite of what science, neurobiology and psychology is discovering about the human mind.

The mind is a feedback loop. If you tell yourself what you've written above, you have created an objective within yourself: to be as you just described as the ideal of being.

This way of thinking is absolutely poisonous. It is completely based in shame and the way people think. Right now, what is so horribly wrong about being self-controlled, and cognizant of the probable consequences in starting a fight. Do you know how costly it is to your brain and body? To you know what arousal of that nature does to the organism that you are?

Seriously. Is science meaningless to you? We have evidence - and you know it within yourself - that aggressive behavior ALWAYS provokes aggressive behavior. Even when compelled to use it, I make every effort to signify to the other person that I care about them.

Nothing is intellectually defensible in this position. It is nothing but a discomfort with a position you have unconsciously taken on from the culture around you: it is shameful to prefer peace and good relations than to "protect your pride". Do you honestly not see how haughty and pretentious this concern is? Your "self" is a function of the people you live and relate around, It is totally ecological, just like everything else that exists.

Yet here you are, distressed about something that represents a sign of cultural progress - a progress, because aggression is a feedback loop that has negative implications for other people not immediately involved. And what about habits of mind - or brain? Do you think doing things like this has no unwanted consequences? Heres a notice: you don't control your temper if you can't actually control it. If you give yourself "license", this is just self-delusion, something you needingly confabulate to make sense of the way you feel (shameful, pathetic, "unmanly", as you put it) and the cultural environment relevant to your own development has no doubt scaffolded some of this aggressiveness.

Anyways: point to be learned:

You are not weak to care, or to think in mindful and considerate ways about others. However, if one feels shame when associating with these ideas, this is because other ideas - opposite and antithetical ideas - relevant to your own development occludes the sanity of a caring and nurturing attitude by focusing you in an obsessively aggressive way on the "patheticness" and other horrible features of what you call the "masculation" of the man.

I use to think just this way in the past too my friend. But i grew - and I grew only because as a self-conscious being, I realized that I couldn't pretend like I didn't know things about myself that I didn't like and so struggled to hide. I later learned of the scientific term for this process - dissociation - and so began to use it more and more in my own thinking.

Don't dissociate the feelings of hurt that underlie shame. Shame arises when another person fails to acknowledge or know us in a caring way. We "push" away sensitivity and signs of sensitiity, and indeed, we aggress against those ideas because they remind our brain of the feelings we felt. So the whole aggressive spiel is just a reflexive habit, unconsciously cultivated by a mind that has forgotten its intrinsic relationship to a past pain of not being known in a way that would have felt very good.

This vicious patriarchal ethic HAS TO GO, and will go. The whole need to dominate - to lord power over other people - is the source of all the $hit - vultural hedge funds who feast on the debts of poor people - or said differently, 10 or 15 people depriving 3.9 million people of necessary infrastructure like hospitals and teachers (current Peurto Rico situation). Runaway capitalism breeds markets for all sorts of evil things - like prisons needing criminals and military industrial factories needing wars, or pharmaceutical companies needing sick people. Do you see what the obvious evil here is? The selifhs greed of a few people maintaining and sustaining a lot of unnecessary grief, suffering and evil in the world.

No thank you. As said, this moronic way of seeing this is a function of a) being hurt, knowing the hurt, and reflexively defending against the hurt; b) living in a society, particularly in American conservative areas, where this obnoxious ethic holds ground (quite literally, in the ape vs. ape kind of way) and so everyone "forces" everyone else, in a circular process, to support the 'general meaning' that is important to the group; in this case, that men are being "emasculated".

Lots of talk, no thinking. Intense dissociation. This is not the way to be to make a world with less suffering.

a reply to: onequestion

I think that it it must be said that there is something to what you say, although I would point out that there is FAR more to being a man, and being manly, than whether you throw down.

What marks one out as being a man, and more importantly a gentleman, is WHY one throws down. If one throws down over a spilt drink, then one is a child in adult flesh. If one throws down when one must to defend his life, or the honour of a lady for example, he is a man.

a reply to: TrueBrit

Why should the honor of a lady change anything?

Here is a link to a story of a father who took matters into his own hands and confronted the kids who had been ullying his son and daughter. He's now facing possible action by cumbria police (Primarily because he isn't an emasculated male who is unable to sort things out himself).

Yes, he is facing a possible court appearance, but he did the exact right think imo. Sometimes, in order to feel at peace with yourself you have to do something that puts you at odds with general society.

Although he has the stress of dealing with this, I'm willing to bet that it is less than the soul gnawing knowledge that he failed to protect his own kids.



www.express.co.uk...

They cut your dic off the first chance they get

a reply to: SprocketUK

reading that just made me more sure, that criminals and abusers are the new kings, that serious people are nothing but sheep to them and a justice that should be blind and protective of the abused. I'm with that father, even he was mistreated by the bullie's parents...

a reply to: Astrocyte

If one sees a lady being manhandled, who clearly is not willing to be in that scenario, and one turns on ones heel and make it someone else's problem, then one is not living according to a code of ethics or morality which makes any sense what so ever.

a reply to: TrueBrit

The situation you describe, for example, seems legitimate. But protecting her should be more important than punishing him. I obviously support physically defending yourself - as any sane person should be - but we can't let ourselves hit another person for the sake of punishing. People do not learn well in this way; it just perpetuates a fearfulness and defensiveness.

So hitting someone to protect someone else - if the situation seems to be dire enough and someone is at risk of being hurt/mistreated by another person, than of course your hitting that person would be a lesser evil than standing there and doing nothing. However, after freeing the woman and knocking the guy down, you proceed to kick him, you have gone to far, as you have to wait to see what his general response is; if he cowers and stays down no more hitting is needed.

originally posted by: Astrocyte

This is exactly the opposite of what science, neurobiology and psychology is discovering about the human mind.

The mind is a feedback loop. If you tell yourself what you've written above, you have created an objective within yourself: to be as you just described as the ideal of being.

This way of thinking is absolutely poisonous. It is completely based in shame and the way people think. Right now, what is so horribly wrong about being self-controlled, and cognizant of the probable consequences in starting a fight. Do you know how costly it is to your brain and body? To you know what arousal of that nature does to the organism that you are?

Seriously. Is science meaningless to you? We have evidence - and you know it within yourself - that aggressive behavior ALWAYS provokes aggressive behavior. Even when compelled to use it, I make every effort to signify to the other person that I care about them.

Nothing is intellectually defensible in this position. It is nothing but a discomfort with a position you have unconsciously taken on from the culture around you: it is shameful to prefer peace and good relations than to "protect your pride". Do you honestly not see how haughty and pretentious this concern is? Your "self" is a function of the people you live and relate around, It is totally ecological, just like everything else that exists.

Yet here you are, distressed about something that represents a sign of cultural progress - a progress, because aggression is a feedback loop that has negative implications for other people not immediately involved. And what about habits of mind - or brain? Do you think doing things like this has no unwanted consequences? Heres a notice: you don't control your temper if you can't actually control it. If you give yourself "license", this is just self-delusion, something you needingly confabulate to make sense of the way you feel (shameful, pathetic, "unmanly", as you put it) and the cultural environment relevant to your own development has no doubt scaffolded some of this aggressiveness.

Anyways: point to be learned:

You are not weak to care, or to think in mindful and considerate ways about others. However, if one feels shame when associating with these ideas, this is because other ideas - opposite and antithetical ideas - relevant to your own development occludes the sanity of a caring and nurturing attitude by focusing you in an obsessively aggressive way on the "patheticness" and other horrible features of what you call the "masculation" of the man.

I use to think just this way in the past too my friend. But i grew - and I grew only because as a self-conscious being, I realized that I couldn't pretend like I didn't know things about myself that I didn't like and so struggled to hide. I later learned of the scientific term for this process - dissociation - and so began to use it more and more in my own thinking.

Don't dissociate the feelings of hurt that underlie shame. Shame arises when another person fails to acknowledge or know us in a caring way. We "push" away sensitivity and signs of sensitiity, and indeed, we aggress against those ideas because they remind our brain of the feelings we felt. So the whole aggressive spiel is just a reflexive habit, unconsciously cultivated by a mind that has forgotten its intrinsic relationship to a past pain of not being known in a way that would have felt very good.

This vicious patriarchal ethic HAS TO GO, and will go. The whole need to dominate - to lord power over other people - is the source of all the $hit - vultural hedge funds who feast on the debts of poor people - or said differently, 10 or 15 people depriving 3.9 million people of necessary infrastructure like hospitals and teachers (current Peurto Rico situation). Runaway capitalism breeds markets for all sorts of evil things - like prisons needing criminals and military industrial factories needing wars, or pharmaceutical companies needing sick people. Do you see what the obvious evil here is? The selifhs greed of a few people maintaining and sustaining a lot of unnecessary grief, suffering and evil in the world.

No thank you. As said, this moronic way of seeing this is a function of a) being hurt, knowing the hurt, and reflexively defending against the hurt; b) living in a society, particularly in American conservative areas, where this obnoxious ethic holds ground (quite literally, in the ape vs. ape kind of way) and so everyone "forces" everyone else, in a circular process, to support the 'general meaning' that is important to the group; in this case, that men are being "emasculated".

I disagree.

Sometimes over thinking things is a way of disassociating with the body and senses.

a reply to: Astrocyte

Agreed. But why would you assume that I meant anything else by what I said?

Just curious.

a reply to: onequestion

Australian feminist Germaine Greer was recently booed off a panel show discussing trassexuality when she said "If you're a 50 year old truck driver who's had four children with a wife and you've decided the whole time you've been a woman, I think you're probably wrong"

For once in my life I agreed with her. I think adults should be free to transition if they want to totally fine by me but with a significantly higher proportion of transgender women (men identifying as women) being former marines than any other segment of society you've got to wonder whether, for them, it may be mixed up with PTSD. There are new Gov't anti-domestic violence ads in Australia and they all depict men and boys committing violent acts against women. There are anti date rape ads in the US, another form of violence against women. It seems that at every turn boys are being told to play nice, don't be so rough while girls are being encouraged into more male dominated roles such as scientists and engineers.

I think that many boys and men grow up being uncomfortable with the traditional stereotype of masculinity