What is Masculinity?

What is masculinity?

When I've seen it described, or attempted to be described, the answer has always been something vague, and always something that applies to women also, which therein makes it non-specific to the gender.

Historically, the idea of decisive action has been associated with masculinity, which in itself is associated with violence, and the courage to face it.

This has led to masculinity being described as toxic, but even those descriptions are vague and don't really answer the question as to what it is.

Is masculinity a thing? And if so, what is it?

Or is it something unique to all males, something that, as a result of being unquestionably gendered male, we have no say in, and like it or not will be expressed through our personality. And, like a male animal, shouldn't think about it, because we simply are. (In this instance, I would suppose that a mans truest form of masculinity would then arise from the truest expression of himself, which the animal, in its freedom, has no issue attaining)

Other urls found in this thread:

thelastpsychiatrist.com/2010/09/when_was_the_last_time_you_got.html
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3597769/
twitter.com/SFWRedditVideos

You've answered your own question

Masculinity is a sort of compendium of the values and attributes seen as typical of males

To expand - if masculinity is something naturally expressed by all males, then perhaps mans confusion with it stems from his confusion with himself, and because of human error and inherent cognitive flaws, he is always held back from true expression of himself, and in turn his masculinity

So masculinity is nothing more than a generalisation of male behavioural characteristics that can also apply to women?

The name therefore seems flawed

I suppose, yes, it can apply to women in an adjectival sense, but masculinity is adjectival anyway - as I said it is a descriptive catchall for characteristics traditionally embodied by men

Look to tradition, you'll get your answer.

There's also the dominance hierarchy that is unique to men.

That makes sense for a couple of reasons:

Biologically, it has been shown than boys and men are more inclined to certain behaviours than women are. And likewise girls and women are more inclined to certain behaviours than men are. Therefore it stands to reason that there would be a general polarity to the behavioural charactisics of the sexes that would be referred to as masculinity and femininity.

It also makes sense as to why fringe elements rail against traditional ideas of masculinity and femininity - due to their fringe nature they naturally don't fall within the behavioural characteristics that the masculine / feminine poles describe - so they feel at odds, and by extension emotionally victimised by their own gender - but their political pursuits are surely pointless as the root of the gender polarity lies within biology itself

I agree, good post.

Imo, it's an inclination towards behaviors commonly associated with the archetypal hero. E.g courage, strength, aggression and confidence, but also wisdom and intelligence.

These are commonly associated with the male sex, however, they don't have to be. Women can have these characteristics as well, but as a sexually dimorphic species I would say they are less common naturally(and less reinforced), in women.

What do you mean?

A spook

DUDE SPOOKS LMAO
nice dubs

Stirner wins again

One of the times where le spook meme is spot on.

Emotional stoicism, confidence in oneself and courage.
I would say that those three things, applied broadly, are what people think about when talking about masculinity.

Louis CK did a skit in his show that I found horribly true to life and highlights how absurd the pressures of being masculine are in the modern age.
He's taking a woman out on a date and they have a great time, ending the evening in a cheap pizza place which Louis recommends. After they sit and begin to eat, a group of rowdy kids, near college age, come in and generally disrupt the vibe, are loud and obnoxious, make Louis' date uncomfortable. Noticing this, Louis does what he feels a man in this situation should do, he tells them to be quiet. I don't think he shouts or curses at them, he just asks fairly politely for them to keep it down.
Aftet a pause the alpha of the group suddenly comes over and stands by their table, it's silent now, and he's staring at Louis. He's stood uncomfortably close and waiting for Louis to look at him, his face is impassive, it's a challenge and a threat. Louis talks with him, asks him what the problem in, still being civil and polite, he obviously understands what's going on. The kid clenches his fist and shows Louis the scars and scabs on his knuckles, telling the couple about how much he enjoys beating people up; he affects a mock sympathetic face and tells Louis that he really doesn't want to beat him up in front of his girl but unless he gets an apology he's going to have to. After some back and forth tension, Louis understands that he can't talk his way out of the situation, he's left with two options. He can be brave, macho and rise to this kids challenge, fighting him in front of his friends and his date, no doubt losing physically but also losing dignity, considering the age difference and how foolish he'd look scrabbling around with a group of boys as a balding middle aged man. Or he can apologise, conceding his inferiority to this kid, giving up his ground and accept his place as the beta male. He does, of course, choose the latter and gets laughed at along side a mocking handshake from the kid. The date ends with the woman he's with looking uncomfortable, after some probing from Louis, she admits that she's not sure how she feels about him now. She agrees that he did the right thing and that it would have been stupid for him to fight, but then she scrunches up her face and says "but I don't know..." there's just something illogically irreconcilable about her feelings towards him now; she's witnessed her date show his belly to the aggressor, when everything about our view of masculinity says that he should have been assertive, courageous and steadfast.
I don't find Louis CK that funny, his self deprecating gets old, but I thought that this episode was interesting, really got the absurdity in our choices as men spot on.

Holy shit this post got long, but yeah I recommend you watch that scene user.

thelastpsychiatrist.com/2010/09/when_was_the_last_time_you_got.html

The cultural influence is far greater than the biological. Even when there is a genuine difference the vast majority express characteristics that are within the normal range for both sexes

What proof is there of this?

Neat post, good work

reason

the ultimate man is the enlightened man

I stand by my post

Wow what an insufferable cunt. Are you posting this in agreement with the writer?

Mostly.

>b-black people are violent and scary
>women naturally size up what men are made of after a couple of dates we've just got that extra sense! :^)

Black people are perceived as more violent by white middle class, that's a given.

Have you got a link to this? Sounds interesting.

>The cultural influence is far greater than the biological. Even when there is a genuine difference the vast majority express characteristics that are within the normal range for both sexes

Really? The great egalitarian experiment of Norway , Denmark and Sweden disagree with you.

Norway still has 20 to 1 female to male nurses, even after 40 years of feminist politics.

>women naturally size up what men are made of after a couple of dates we've just got that extra sense

Women literally know whether or not they could have sex with you after just 10 seconds of looking at you, so this isn't so hard to believe.

I'm a convicted racist and even I agree with this. Historically, whites are the most violent. We've simply been civilized and benefited from a better socioeconomic status which results in lower amounts of outward aggression.

>Black people are perceived as more violent by white middle class, that's a given.

Well they are if you are talking numbers. They are 13% of the population of the U.S and commit something like 47% of all murders.

This thread is fantastic. Enjoyed reading it. I have nothing to contribute, however, except for a pretty painting maybe?

This thread is reddit, this thread is memes. My god, how can people who engage seriously in literature be satisfied so easily?

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3597769/

What a horseshit study.

That's just a false equivalent though. We're talking about violence, threats and whether you can back them up, not sex. Men from all walks of life have to deal with violence growing up; fighting in school, getting mugged as you walk around your area, bullys (for those unlucky enough), cunts who try to fight you because you met eyes for one second ("the fuck you looking at bro"). By necessity you become pretty well aquainted with violence and the threat of it. I'm not suggesting that that means you're 'tough', it just makes you aware. By contrast only women from non privelaged backgrounds really have to deal with the threat of violence, granted there are a lot of women in that situation, but that's definitely not the world the women that the article is talking about are inhabiting. Violence is sport for men, women magically being better 'judges' for a man's worth when shit requires it is a fucking joke.

Engage in OPs post with a paragraph full of truly insightful points and then maybe you can throw your leddit buzzword about. Till then fuck of pseud.

both of those greentexts are true. what's your point?

~said nobody in particular

Read If you disagree you're a cuck and I suggest you kys

>~said nobody in particular

What's this supposed to mean? That I can't comment on a study because I'm not a quack social psychologist?

Well, I'll just come out and say fuck you Mr. Ivory Tower.

>comment on a study
>just says it's bullshit without elaborating his position

hmmmm

thanks for linking this, the whole blog is pretty interesting

He's right though, it was a horseshit meta-analysis

Lol are you joking. It's trash.

This is so simple to rebut. Louis should have beaten the shit out of the guy. If Louis loses what will happen?

1.The girl won't mind and he'll just have to deal with some scrapes and bruises.

2. The girl will become less attracted to him because he obviously lacks the skills to defend himself.

Either way Louis should be less of a bitch. Masculinity isn't toxic at all. It only becomes so when you remove the nuance of it. The fact of the matter is that the human species would have died out a long time ago if it weren't for courage/confidence/emotional stocism. And I'm not talking about some caricature of masculinity like Johnny Bravo or some shit; I'm talking about the masculinity that Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar possessed.

To be masculine is to do simply whatever it takes to succeed. Sitting at a desk for 10 hours straight doing maths is masculine. Being a boxer is masculine. So the definition ends up being a trivial concept ("doing what it takes to succeed") so when Thatcher etc. get accused of being masculine and therefore their glass ceiling shattering not counting, it's people just being stupid with bad definitions.

or 3. The girl is angry at Louis for fighting boys as a grown man. The very next scene is a monologue where he describes being too old to fight people and how it would be ridiculous to think about him fight anyone.

The importance of the scene is that it was Louis who engaged first when he told the boys to be quiet. If he knew that he wouldn't be able to follow up he should not have yelled in the first place. The fact that he doesn't know better than to start something he knows he can't finish shows his inexperience as a man.

>To be masculine is to do simply whatever it takes to succeed.
This is so lazy. To succeed at what?
>Sitting at a desk for 10 hours straight doing maths is masculine.
I can doodle the same trigonometric proofs for 20 hours a day and it won't make me masculine.

Okay, your last paragraph is actually spot on and not something I thought of initially.

agreed. Masculinity is less about succeeding and more about pursuing a goal that is a balance of what you truly care about and what is best for those that depend on you.

if you my goal is to fill as many jars with my own cum does that make me an ubermensch?

If you look at what "experienced" men do in prison you find that they are usually split up into herds where individuals keep their heads down. If a fight is occurring you either stay out of it or jump in to gang up on one person. In masculine settings lone wolves do not last long and most men are natural followers.

Haven't seen a single truly insightful point in this thread. Pretending to be sophisticated or insightful with banal comments is what is normally considered to be the attitude of a pseud, so murda urself my nigga.

But these are biological pressures, in most mammals the males fight and assert dominance over each other or declare territory to attract mates, why wouldn't this apply to humans?

Solution: Louis should have spilt his drink on the kid's crotch.

There are several answers. You know it was a particular subject of Tim Allen in the 80s/90s and is pivotal in many of the problems in Home Improvement.

Recently I've been looking at Cynthia Enloe, she sees masculinity and femininity in relation to one another (in that you cannot understand or have a concept of femininity without the concept of masculinity, and so you end up with women are delicate and need to be protected and men are rugged and need to be strong and aggressive and so on), and how this feeds into ideologies underlying militarization and so on.

This faggot () is not me, I'm I don't get why you posted your 3 point rebuttal. I didn't take a stance with the whole Louis ck scene, I just explained what happened within it. The point was, you find yourself in situations as a man where you are expected to act masculine. Louis was faced with that choice in the donut place, his take on the scene with its direction and writing was refreshing because it shows a funny situation where you lose no matter what. If he fights, he loses, and gets way more than some bruises - it was a group of 5 guys they could easily fuck him up and hospitalise him. If he backs down and apologises he looks like a wimp in front of his girl. If, for benefit of the doubt, he fights and wins, plenty of women would find him just as repugnant for having started a situation and then beaten up a kid half his age over something that wasn't that important.

Again, I'm confused as to why you think I'm taking a solid stance on what he should have done. I'm not saying masculinity has toxic aspects, but I am saying that you find yourself in stupid and avoidable situations simply because you are male and are expected to act a certain way.

Your point about him making the first move and instigating the whole thing I sort of get, but I personally think the group of boys began the whole scene by being obnoxious in the first place. But I guess that's all dependant on your outlook.

I didn't say it wouldn't. I'm just saying, biological pressures + behaviours we've constructed ourselves for every day life makes for stupid situations where your masculinity is called into question. I.e fight 5 kids in a donut shop or apologise to someone half your age, it's just stupid.

It's a spook.

>abloo bloo bloo muh toxic madculinity
>citing comedians as sources

Mcfucking kill yourself

Lol holy shit user is retarded today. Where does it say 'toxic' in my post you fucking sensitive cuck.

>citing comedians as sources
>citing
>sources

What I wrote was "Louis Ck did a skit in his show", who the fuck is citing anything. You're so pilled you just couldn't stop yourself could you?

Pure ideology.

What would you do though? Dominate 5 people or submit to them, if you want the girl you have to fight.

It depends on what you do with the cum.

Well they didn't get rid of the cultural influence, sexism still exists in the scandinavian countries.

Okay, so I'm the so called "faggot". I'll look past all of your immature vitriol and just straight up say that I misinterpreted your intent. I spend a lot of time consuming media and it seems that the popular stance nowadays is to bash the traditional understanding of masculinity; It's only natural that I assume that's what you're trying to do. I agree that it's absurd to an extent, but I also think that's a truism. Most things (especially socially constructed things) are indeed absurd.

Does it actually though? Or are women who politicize their role in society just cunts?

Just power hungry

Those first three posts weren't made by the same person. I was responding to the person who came up with the first two points.

The boys are being a nuisance because they know they can get away with it. They are better able to analyze the situation than Louie who comes off an idiot. The scene is not about masculinity, it's about awareness. That is what The Last Psychiatrist mostly writes about, how people like bullies aren't masculine they are just good at reading the mood.

I want to fill jars with it.

>Masculinity isn't toxic at all
people that argue that it is toxic would point to the kid that challenged him

>me? be quiet? no- i have to kick this guy's ass or humiliate him for daring to give me an order

physically tough as i'm sure the kid was, that kind of response speaks to masculinity being fragile, at least HIS masculinity

needing to display in front of peers, disproportionate responses to something pretty reasonable etc

we've all known people with those traits. i recognize them in myself pretty often too

But I'm focused on Louis. I agree that the kid is obviously compensating, but that's why in previous posts I've made on this topic is that masculinity is not toxic in itself as long as it's understood in a nuanced way.

Will to power, desu.

This.

This desu.

>The man's happiness is: I will. The woman's happiness is: He will.
>'Behold, now the world has become perfect!' -- thus thinks every woman when she obeys with all her love.
>And woman has to obey and find a depth for her surface. Woman's nature is surface, a changeable, stormy film upon shallow waters.
>But man's nature is deep, its torrent roars in subterranean caves: woman senses its power but does not comprehend it.
- RooshV

Oh, yeah. You're masculine.

>The man's happiness is: I will. The woman's happiness is: He will.
You're a fucking idiot if you think femininity is subordinate to masculinity. They are separate concepts.

>And woman has to obey and find a depth for her surface. Woman's nature is surface, a changeable, stormy film upon shallow waters.
You want women to obey and provide no evidence that they are obedient. In many cultures and periods women have been heads of households who make the decisions and worked indoors while the men worked outside.

>But man's nature is deep, its torrent roars in subterranean caves: woman senses its power but does not comprehend it.
Masturbatory nonsense.

Are you telling me you're not a fan of Roosh? On Veeky Forums?

He's the biggest MRA philosopher of the last 5 years. Look at the fucking prose in . His writing is Nietzsche tier.

You really think you can compete with that?

Oh okay, you aren't a faggot then sorry tomodachi. I thought that you were pretending you were me (I.e) and trying to speak for me etc etc.

But in the US male nurses are 1 in 10 a two fold difference. Perhaps incentive structures aren't as obvious as you think?

No worries

I think that the first line may have some truth if you applied it to masculine and feminine as socially constructed roles rather than biologically existent realities. Fuck Roosh though. I am really curious about masculinity and femininity as archetypes across culture and space and I want to know if there is a core concept from which it springs or if it is a collection of somewhat arbitrary characteristics.

>good at reading the mood

Rather, good at imposing a mood in which they can dominate other people.