#theory of masculinity

[men-and-their-monsters]

One of the reasons I think it’s hard to talk about being a man under the patriarchy is because talking about it as a man also requires people that have an idea of what a man is that isn’t based on the patriarchy but also have the ability to understand and empathize with the fact that people - men in this case - can’t necessarily undo all the stuff they have internalized overnight, and sometimes it’s about making sure that nobody else falls for that trap.

Like a few months ago I was on a discord call providing a metaphorical shoulder for one of my bets friends to cry on, because a lot of shit was happening. And he was talking and he started to cry and then I felt the tears and then I changed the subject. Because I’m a coward. And in that moment it was more important to stop myself from crying than it was to comfort my best friend. That conversation should have lasted hours and instead it lasted 25 minutes and I hate myself for changing the subject. I was not the man I wanted to be, or aspired to be or needed me to be. I was the man I hated and resented and feared.

I bring all this up because the conservatives would make fun of me for struggling not to cry “what kind of man struggles not to cry, only real men are deserts” but there is the insidious other side where leftists tend to reside, where they will use the same language to berate men for struggling to cry. “Why can’t he accept himself and fucking cry” they will use the same language like “tough guys wear pink” “only cowards don’t cry”. They will talk about my toxic masculinity like it isn’t also trauma and violence and pain that I suffered. I didn’t do it because I wanted to, I did it because I had internalized the feelings of society and I still don’t know how to deal with that. I want you to… no i need you to understand that if I could have I would have just cried. That was the right thing to do. That was the human thing to do. That was the human thing to do. And yet, that was the thing that was violently beaten out of me as a kid. The reason I didn’t cry was because of the patriarchy and the societal forces it controls it’s the reasons a lot of men do or don’t do a lot of things and the same can be said for the rest of the human population. This goes unrecognized when we talk about men a lot of the time.

[intersexcat-tboy]

Y'all are not ready for the men who wear dresses to express their masculinity, y'all can barely even (if that) handle cultures (particularly BIPOC) not considering long hair on men to be feminine

[transmascboytoy]

The autoandrophile and force masc community here on tumblr, while relentlessly filthy, has also been so incredibly affirming.

I know autogynephilia and autoadrophilia have been weaponized against us, but like, I don’t understand why feeling sexy/being sexually aroused by your body is a problem.

For most of my life I tolerated or shunned away from the way I looked. Only liked my body for how it turned other people on, for how it was considered attractive by others, but it never added to my sexual pleasure, and often had to be mentally worked around by framing it through the pleasure others took from me.

Now?

Now I’m very turned on by just existing in my body and it’s incredibly affirming. I saw myself in the mirror getting dressed at my partner’s apartment the other day, and in the mirror I saw a man. The lights were low so you couldn’t even see my scars, just my shape, and it was the greatest combination of joy and disbelief and, yes, lust. Not necessarily lust for my own self, but lust for existing in my body. Lust spurred by being able to show up and interact with people and lovers as the self I was always meant to be.

A lust that is essentially the opposite of the self aversion and self objectification that I thought was so normal for so much of my life.

I understand that queer folks have always been painted as more sexualized and deviant and dirty than straight folks for even something as harmless as a kiss, but I hate the fact that something so incredibly affirming for me and many others is used to further marginalize and medicalize us.

[arielthedaydreamer]

The world would be a better place if cis people understood the concepts of gender euphoria and dysphoria as things that everyone experiences, not just trans people.

The woman is not wearing makeup and a short skirt for male attention. She is doing that because it gives her gender euphoria as a woman.

On a more serious note, if a man doesn't feel comfortable to wear a pink shirt; eat a pink ice cream; listen to a female singer who is popular; express his feelings; drink fruity juices; hold his girlfriend's purse; say certain words; act with kindness towards his loved ones; apologize; deescalate conflict; watch a movie enjoyed by women; play with a small and fluffy animal; because he thinks these things make him look girly, less manly or "nor a real man", that is no way to live. That man is experiencing intense levels of gender dysphoria and he needs help.

I feel like people only look at men like that and laugh and call them sexist. Some of them might be and they need to be called out for it, but I feel like gender dysphoria is very common in cis men and we should be calling it what it is.

A cis man doesn't "feel uncomfortable" when he paints his nails for the first time, he gets dysphoric. Just like the cis woman who wears jeans during summer because she forgot to shave her legs and is embarassed about it.

Dysphoria happens to cis people, All. The. Time. Pass the message on.

[trash-and-trash-accessories]

The fear of the masculine woman predates any modern conception of transness and gender. There are stories about monstrous women with masculine traits from the ancient world, they were objects of fear or disgust or hatred. This is not misdirected transmisogyny, it's not transphobia misdirected at cis women, it's a fear of female transgression and masculinity. The two are inter-related and trans women are affected by this fear of female masculinity too, and cis women are affected by transphobia but the fear of the masculine woman didn't come from transmisogyny. It predates it. It could be seen as a fear of transmasculinity, even those early examples of women becoming like men and taking on or embodying masculine traits. But it's also not necessarily that. It contains aspects of intersexism, but isn't strictly that either. It's a fear of female masculinity and the transgression of gender norms and fear surrounding women's control over fertility, and so many other things.

Anyone who sees the way masculine women (and transmasculine people) are treated as purely a result of transmisogyny is mistaken, or actively engaging in misogyny, intersexism, and erasure. It's so much more complicated than that.

I'm sorry but not everything is about you.

[clandestinegardenias]

I just taught a sociology class on masculinities this past semester and I had my students do a media analysis of masculine representation in a movie or show of their choosing and—

Now I’m constantly thinking about The Terror.

And of course there’s SO MUCH THERE, I could do a fucking thesis, probably, but

I’m so interested in James Fitzjames and his relationship to masculinity, particularly as a performance. He’s so incredibly image-conscious, and has HAD to be in order to hide the realities of his birth. He buys into the social norms and goals of his time, HARD. He also has, as is slowly revealed in the show, a variety of more feminine longings and traits that are probably part and parcel of his insecurities.

So he adopts this sort of…overperformed masculinity, but a very specific upper-socioeconomic British Navy type. It also makes him very bragadocious (the China story) in an attempt to cover over those insecurities, and I think this is part of why Francis dislikes him at first.

Because Francis also has a variety of reasons to be insecure in his masculinity, potentially, as an Irish man. He’s denied the upper eschelons of male privilege (marrying Sophia, having command of an expedition) despite performing well on all expected metrics.

Yet he takes a very different approach from James. Once he realizes he’ll never be allowed to meet the hegemonic ideal, he kind of just…stops trying. He rejects the performance, the ideal, all of it (and also is uhhh super depressed and reliant on alcohol). And I think he sneers at James because James is doggedly doing the very performance Francis is fed up with.

Then. Later. He learns how much of it WAS a performance to cover up for those self same “failings” of being an outsider that plagued Francis himself. And that bonds them. Besides the fact that Francis APPRECIATES femininity, respects it, in a way that a lot of the other men don’t (see his relationships with both Sophia and Silna) and probably appreciates whatever feminine aspects of himself James chooses to reveal.

But BACK TO JAMES, I gotta talk about the dress scene.

It hurts so much. Because James BUYS INTO Carnivale, and it allows him to express his more feminine creative side in a way that is socially acceptable—it’s for the morale of the men, and maybe finally James’ true self can be a BOON to his role as leader instead of a drawback. He has the opportunity to combine those masculine and feminine parts of himself and have that combination be CELEBRATED and lauded as good leadership.

And then. The blood at his hairline. And reality comes crashing back down. And he doesn’t wear the dress.

Anyway, this is just some preliminary ramblings. Obviously a lot more going on here, esp re: intersectionality and race and class.

[theoutcastrogue]

"The knife is a weapon of the Other"

"The emerging martial art of Bartitsu, appearing in middle-class magazines during the Boer War, was the encapsulation of British civilian gallantry. Yet Bartitsu would have slid into obscurity had it not been for its curious appearance in the Sherlock Holmes canon. The final showdown of the ‘duel’ between Holmes and Moriarty is a wrestling match between two Victorian masterminds. When Holmes returns to London he tells Watson that he and Moriarty went to battle at the Reichenbach Falls unarmed. Holmes managed to ‘slip through’ Moriarty’s grip as he possessed ‘some knowledge’ of ‘baritsu, or the Japanese system of wrestling’, adding that the art had on occasion been useful to him.

Founded in the 1890s by an Anglo-Scottish engineer, Edward William Barton-Wright (1860–1951), Bartitsu was a synthesis of British boxing, French la savate (kickboxing) and Japanese jujitsu. Barton-Wright tapped into the need for a bourgeois form of self-defence, something which he could promote as being British and yet was also exotic and refined.

The principal aim of Bartitsu’s promoters was ‘to provide a means whereby the higher classes of society may protect themselves from the attacks of hooligans and their like all over the world’. These urban gangs were a new form of folk devil, descendants of the mid-Victorian-era garotter. While they were armed with clubs, knuckles, iron bars and leather belts, it is doubtful that they carried firearms. Nevertheless, the press did represent the hooligan as a threatening presence.

Perhaps the scares promoted the growth of a burgeoning culture of ‘British’ self-defence which avoided the aggressive and increasingly unmanly action of using a firearm against a ruffianly lower-class opponent equipped only with basic weapons.

Barton-Wright follows a literary tradition when he presents his martial art as a British form of self-defence. Pierce Egan’s well-known self-defence manual was supplemented with a word on the ‘Englishness’ of physical heroism, arguing that ‘Englishmen need no other weapons in personal contests than those which nature has so amply supplied them with’. In 1910 the former lightweight boxing champion Andrew J. Newton said in his manual Boxing that ‘the native of Southern Europe flies to his knife’, whereas the ‘Britisher […] is handy with his fists in an emergency’. Elsewhere it was maintained that the ‘Italian, Greek, Portuguese, or South American’ ‘give preference to the knife’ while the Englishman extols boxing. For Barton-Wright, British boxers ‘scorn taking advantages of another man when he is down’, while a foreigner might ‘use a chair, or a beer bottle, or a knife’ or, ‘when a weapon is available’, he might employ ‘underhanded means’. The views of these articles reappear in a later self-defence manual of 1914, where it is argued that Britons ‘live in a country where knife and revolver are not much in evidence’. This statement about the low number of firearms and edged weapons can be read as an attempt to extol British virtues and is not necessarily representative of reality. The knife is a weapon of the Other. Barton-Wright’s view that English practitioners of Bartitsu are principled men is reflected in the Sherlock Holmes canon, where Holmes never uses a knife, although his enemies, whether foreign or British, do so at times."

— Emelyne Godfrey, Masculinity, Crime and Self-Defence in Victorian Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) (very abridged)

[intuitive-revelations]

As I've mentioned in a previous post, I've been thinking a lot about the exact chronology of ancient Gallifrey, and specifically I've put a lot of attention on the Caldera and the Citadel, plus related things like the Eye of Harmony, the Crevasse of Memories That Will Be, the Untempered Schism etc.

All these things seem to be located in the same place on Gallifrey, albeit some at different times, and often overlap in nature. After some thinking, I think I've worked how everything goes together, as well as the order of events. At some point I want to create a fully history, but for the sake of this we'll focus primarily on the subjects above, with some other major events sprinkled in for context.

A Very Brief History of the Capitol

[ID: Surviving parts of the old Capitol, in an illustration from Lungbarrow. Crystal-like towers and walkways stand over a waterfall. The TARDIS, in pyramid form, dematerialises.]

Pythian Era - The capital city is built near the Mountains of Solace and Solitude (likely, in antiquity, a stronghold against the Gin-Seng cats to the south). Beneath the Pythia's temple, in the centre of the city, is the Cavern of Prophecy. Within the cave is a deep, deep opening known as the Crevasse of Memories That Will Be, which holds, in the astral plane, something known as the Gate of the Future, a tear into the time vortex far greater than the similar natural rifts that occur elsewhere on Gallifrey. Time flows out from it, from the future, to the past Gallifrey. In times of meditation, the Pythia sits in a hanging cage above the Crevasse, breathing in the rising vapours, which aid her in her clairvoyance.

[ID: Gif edit made by me, featuring the last Pythia sat in a small cage slowly swinging in a chasm as a mist slowly rises around her.]

The Intuitive Revelation - The Neotechnologists, led by Rassilon, bring a revolution. The Pythia curses Gallifrey with sterility and cuts the ropes holding her cage, falling into the abyss. The Gate of the Future inverts, forming the Gate of the Past. Visibly, the Doppler-effect like colouring of the vortex changes - no longer red, flowing towards the viewer, but blue and flowing away (ironically directionally the reverse of the real Doppler effect). Time from the new future flowing into the chaotic past.

The new government take control of the Capitol. A new age of space exploration arises, with the Shobogans taking on the name, for now, of "Space Lords". One of these first individual explorers, semi-authorised predecessors to future Time Lord renegades, is a woman named Tecteun.

The First Attempt - The stellar engineers, including Rassilon and Omega, make their first attempt at capturing the energy of a collapsing star, recieving the energy on Gallifrey using an obelisk, like that later used to channel energy from the Eye of Harmony, in the middle of the city, using the nature of the Crevasse.

The experiment is a catastrophic failure. A hole is punctured into the Spiral Yssgaroth, unleashing Vampires through openings throughout the universe, fracturing out from the experiment.

[ID: From The Book of the War, an illustration of the "Eyes of the Yssgaroth", human-like eyeballs looking through holes punctured into spacetime.]

Part of the Old Capitol is destroyed in a great blast, destroying the Cavern of Prophecy and opening up the Crevasse, leaving a giant crater: the Caldera. It is likely that many are killed. Left behind in the middle of the crater, is the Gate of the Past, now manifest in the physical world: an open gap in reality. In this form, it becomes known as the Untempered Schism.

(I also suspect this is when Rassilon is forced to regenerate for the first time, to the shock of on-lookers, having secretly previously recieved Tecteun's genetic modifications - I plan to expand on this theory in a future post.)

The Vampire War / Rebuilding of the Capitol - The exact circumstances of the experiment are covered up. Rassilon, leaving to fight the Vampire hoard, swears Omega to secrecy regarding the project during the Arcalian High Council's investigation.

[ID: A gif, rotating around the Citadel is constructed over the Caldera, from part of the (likely partially-symbolic) time-lapse in The Timeless Children.]

Though some of the city survives, including parts of the Pythian temple, a new colossal city-complex begins construction in the place of the old one, suspended over the Caldera, the centrepiece of the new Capitol: the Citadel. It is built as a defensive structure, both for the war, and to protect the new, growing elite, surrounded by a great circular wall named "Rassilon's Rampart". The "core" of the structure, on which the towers rest, reaches down deep into Caldera and the deeper Crevasse.

Meanwhile the Untempered Schism is taken out of the city by those fearing further destruction, to a place in the nearby hills that will one day be known as the Weeping Field, where prospective Time Academy students are initiated.

[ID: The Untempered Schism in the Doctor's time, as seen in The Sound of Drums. It sits in a stone frame on red grass, with the Seal of Rassilon in front of it, and flames on either side. Within it, the blue "past" variant of the RTD1-era time vortex flows away from the viewer. The Citadel's lights are visible in the background.]

(Side note: it's possible the Untempered Schism's 'ring' is deliberately designed to evoke the Caldera. Note how it's lined with pieces sticking out. Look a bit like the battlements on Rassilon's Rampart, don't they? Surrounding the hole into the vortex just as they surround the crater.)

The Anchoring of the Thread - Several centuries later, once the Vampires are more or less defeated, Rassilon returns home. He coups Pandak I, forcing him to resign, and takes the Presidency.

By now the Citadel is more or less completed, though for the next few centuries it still lacks its characteristic dome, likely added during a later founding conflict.

[ID: Gallifrey, around the time the first TARDISes are grown, from The Lost Dimension. In the background past a small outsider village is the Citadel, new and gleaming, but undomed.]

The Triumvirate retry their experiment at Qqaba / Polyphilos, attempting to capture the collapsed star. When the experiment goes wrong once more, Omega's ship falls inside, as spacetime threatens to crack open again. With temporal energy flowing though him (a la the Bad Wolf), Rassilon reshapes the laws of physics, forming an event horizon, and black holes as we know them.

The black hole is dimensionally captured and suspended in the moment it collapses and the event horizon is formed, creating the Eye of Harmony, controlled using the Obelisk of Rassilon storied in the Panopticon Vaults. Meanwhile, the black hole itself is suspended within the temporal singularity of the Caldera, deep below the Citadel.

Harnessing the power of the Eye and the Caldera rift, Rassilon "anchors" chronology around Gallifrey, creating the Web of Time and placing it under the control of the Gallifreyans, now Time Lords.

Future Developments - Over the years, many changes come to Rassilon's Gallifrey.

Over the years, the more and more of the old city is replaced with new towers, forming the new Capitol around a now domed Citadel. Interweaved with these buildings over 28 square miles is much of the new Time Academy, such that the Academy is sometimes considered a whole city itself annexed to the Citadel.

While the remnants of the Pythian Temple are eventually torched by Rassilon, hunting down dissenters, many old buildings remain intact. These continue to be inhabited far into the future, in a community known as "Low Town" or the "Lower Len", as opposed to the "upper" city above. Shanties surround the surviving buildings, some climbing up Rassilon's Rampart.

Another such community is based around the "Old Harbour", whcih once sat on the coast of the now recessed Sea of Time. Nowadays, it likely sits on the shore of the small (possibly designed) lakes near the Capitol, where streams from the mountains presumably once drained directly into the sea.

[ID: From Hell Bent: a screencap as Rassilon turns from looking out the window from an Inner Council chamber high above the Capitol. In the background can be seen some lakes between the mountains, with some signs of what might be buildings on their shores.]

(Side note: I reckon this shot above might actually give us a glimpse of Old Harbour. I might just be imagining things, but there's some small features around and on the lakes I reckon could be docks or buildings? Interestingly, this also comes as Rassilon asks about the Cloister Bells ringing, and Old Habour is well known for the bells in its clocktower, which might explain why Rassilon was looking out at it from the window.)

In the space around the Eye in the Caldera, the Cloisters, the core of the APC net and later the Matrix, are constructed. The structure itself is, externally at least, relatively small, but it generates an entire 'micro-universe' on the Astral plane once accessed by the Pythia. Indeed, just as the Crevasse once allowed the meditating Pythia to see the future, so does the Matrix create its own prophecies.

[ID: From Hell Bent, the Doctor and Ohila converse in the entranceway to the Cloisters, a dark space with glowing optic fibres running across cobwebbed columns.]

In the Matrix is a "womb-like" null-space is where most TARDISes are grown, taking advantages of the Caldera's spatio-temporal properties. Budding within the Citadel Cloisters, a TARDIS's "Cloister Room" is one of the first parts to grow.

By the time of the Time War, though possibly earlier, the sealed Caldera also forms the resting site for many dying Battle TARDISes, the Under Croft, where they presumably decay and fertilise the growth of new time ships.

[mackmacd]

The ways I'm which I've seen people talking about Sedona Prince and Emily Engstler recently are...wild. And the Paige as teen hearthrob hot takes from ASW have been questionble as well. We need to have a serious discussion about several things:

-The difference between being attracted to men and being attracted to masculinity.

-Why treating masc women as inherently dangerous and automatically guilty is unacceptable.

-Why racism, ironically enough, is why y'all are treating these two white girls so weirdly and one of them so nicely.

-Why a lot of the verbage y'all are using to convey your distaste is the same as the people who think queers should be "cured".

-The reason y'all have such issues with queer women being seen as sex symbols that are actually depicted as and fantasized about being sexual.

-Why there's a whole entire private Discord devoted to KB because the fans didn't want to deal with the racism of writing/editing for her on main.

-Why Paige, Emily and KB turning into sex symbols is actually a good thing that's contributing to the alphabet mafia in a good way. (Even if the fandom is doing the absolute SuperWhoLock most🤣)

-The difference between hey mamas and Paige/KB/Emily/Tasha.

-Why y'all are too comfortable exiling masc women from queer spaces when they fuck up. (Remember lesbian plant dad?)

-Why y'all seem think that pillow princesses are lesser than and not desirable to anyone.

-Why getting salty about strangers not holding your fanworks (about then!) in super high esteem is weird. (The edits are funny if you're not in the middle of the fandom)

-Why the personal choices of famous people are not your business unless it's your business. They're 20 somethings. They don't owe y'all adherence to the standards of your fantasy version of them.

-The difference between "speculation" and "private but not secret".

-Why this is all super normal because every generation does this with pop culture figures and the key is to be thoughtful and introspective about the hows and whys of fandom.

So I'm clearly going to be making a lot of TikToks.(I wish y'all behaved better. Because y'all got me out here having to defend messy famous white girls🤣🙃🤣🙃)

[liiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiily]

these men are being ABSOLUTELY PATHETIC out here... what do you mean you're 'so lonely all the time'??? if a sweet girl like me can get up and get myself some help, i'm sure you can too

(don't take this post super seriously i'm just tired of men around me genuinely pretending to have mental health issues)

[men-and-their-monsters]

I think the thing I most want people to keep in mind about men when they discuss what men need to do to heal and grow beyond the patriarchy is that the violence and abuse that men experience because of the patriarchy is one of social connection. When men talk about how they aren’t able to express emotion because of the patriarchal society, we often simply this to “men aren’t allowed to express emotions” which is both untrue and - through patriarchal logic - dismissive of the ways in which women are denied their own full spectrum of human expression. What men and people arguing from a perspective of men mean - and what they should say - is that men are systemically cut off from emotion that express vulnerability or share in the total sense in community. When bell hooks talks about the violence that men face this is that violence.

[v7n5]

I find it funny how some people see us liking a toxic ship from a movie or a show and say that we "miss the point" it was trying to convey. Like don't worry, we are fully aware of the story's criticism on toxic masculinity and grind culture and how that can lead to power abuse etc in our society. We like the ship because we also know that it's entirely fictional and these are two freaks with animalistic need to seek Things from each other lol.

[edwinisms]

i like to think, as a hc or a theory (because it’s definitely possible), that charles has had a few kisses throughout his high school years, sure, but past that he’s undeniably a virgin– well, kind of undeniably, because I think he’d deny it if found out by trying to use technicalities (“I mean that one time there was friction involved–“), but to any reasonable person, and by occult standards (see: edwin being a virgin sacrifice), he’s a virgin.

and i think this because it seems like him to fib about his level of experience (like he did when agreeing he’d sleep with crystal, matching her level of casualness about it) when in the presence of people who do, actually, have experience, in the hopes he doesn’t come off as lame or childish. given what we know about his “friends” when he was alive, they seem like the type to have teased or bullied boys– especially in their own circle– who haven’t gotten laid, or at the very least would’ve thought less of someone for it. and given what we know about charles, i don’t think he’d be nearly as sleazy and inconsiderate as his group when it comes to landing girls with the primary intention of adding to his body count. and considering he’s only supposed to be 16? and has never mentioned any significant relationships pre-death? it just seems unlikely.

all that to say– I can see him maintaining that facade of experience and confidence literally right up until the moment it matters, and in the heat of the moment getting nervous and embarrassed because “uhhh. so I may have been exaggerating some things.” though he’s not totally clueless either, I think it’d take a bit of a soft heart to heart moment for him to be reassured enough that he won’t fuck up and hurt his partner to go any further.

anyway not sure what the relevance of this is, but it’s something.

[identitty-dickruption]

stability thesis

okay this is going to be a long one, so strap in and get comfortable! I present to tumblr: the stability thesis

background: in the UK, there was a study done about swearing. they were trying to work out which social class swore the most. the answer? working class and upper class people swore the exact same amount. it was only the middle class who considered swearing to be rude. why? because it’s only the middle class who has BOTH something to gain and something to lose within the class system

I am proposing that the exact same thing applies to queer theory

so let’s talk about gender non-conformity! have you ever seen a bunch of footy bros wearing a tutu for a laugh? have you seen the most macho man “put on” femininity as a joke? now think of the most middle of the line masculine person you can imagine. is he able to get away with the fake/jokey femininity?

how about a woman who wears a suit in order to be taken seriously at the office? that woman is only actually benefitting from the suit if she’s white, thin, and otherwise generally the perfect picture of femininity. masculinity only helps women if their social class has been granted femininity to begin with (e.g. a woman of colour is often not seen as a complete woman in the first place)

gender conformity is complex, so I won’t pretend that there is one answer to why some people can be nonconforming in specific contexts and some can’t. but I think that a huge part of it depends on how stable that person is within the gender hierarchy. the stability thesis proposes that the only people who have to conform 24/7, 365 are the people who both have the most to gain and the most to lose

right, so what about those who have nothing to gain? the “working class” of the gender world?

when I was a young teen, I was butch as all hell. I’m a disabled genderqueer intersex lesbian. femininity was never an option for me. when I did wear the occasional dress, well… I was once told that I looked like a drag queen’s day off. I gained nothing from pretending to be feminine, because nobody was ever going to see me as the perfect woman. and, since I had nothing to gain from putting on a dress and heels, I thought I might as well do and wear and say whatever the fuck I wanted

this is not to say that the super gender-nonconforming people aren’t punished. I was still punished for my nonconformity. but since conformity was never an option, I was going to be punished no matter what I did

so, the stability thesis:

those with a lot of pre-existing social credit can get away with (and even benefit from) nonconformity

those with no social credit (or very little) have nothing to gain from conformity, so often won’t bother

the only people conforming are those who see themselves as having something to gain AND something to lose, should they choose not to conform

if you read this far, thank you very much! feel free to let me know what you think!

[jacksprostate]

Things I won't forgive the fight club movie for regarding the character of Marla Singer, entry C:

The manic pixie dreamgirlification of her own struggle with life and death. The narrator gets to have a serious issue driving his alienation but Marla gets her cancer removed so her pithy statement about the tragedy of death being that she doesn't fall over dead randomly is just a bit Offbeat And Interesting And Edgy haha! She's a real tourist, really, nothing ever stated to be wrong about her. Sure she overdoses. Sure you can see she's got a shit life. But she doesn't get backstory. She doesn't get a life beyond fun little statements that, when her own reason for saying and thinking them is removed, mostly just reflect the narrator. In the book, it is very, very clear. Marla does what she does because she has cancer and is afraid of The Slow Death. The Wasting. The Struggle. By taking that away you even reduce her suicide attempt. It puts it all in this context of nothingness. Sure, you can assume a depth, but I don't think we should be uncritical about the fact that they chose to remove it. Marla Singer is more than an object that bothers the narrator out of the support groups and gets fucked by Tyler Durden. Marla Singer is a person in her own right in the book, and in the movie she's just... not.

[bobbyfiend]

I'm a little high so now is the perfect time to write shit.

TW: mention of violence and (briefly) of suicide

Today's shit is: Stop saying Fragile Masculinity unless you know what the fuck you're talking about.

I feel the boldface above is perhaps too aggressive, but whatever. Moving on.

The interwebs seem to think Fragile Masculinity means a man who is fragile. Or a guy who is a douchebag. Or something. IDK. What does it really mean?

Fragile Masculinity (a.k.a. Precarious Manhood) is an academic theory about the nature of "masculinity" in patriarchal societies. From here on out, I'm talking like the theory, so I don't have to say "according to..." 100 times.

Masculinity isn't an innate aspect of a person in this conception; it's a status or identity conferred on certain people (i.e., people who look like "men") by their culture or community.

Your culture gave you masculinity, and it can take it away. Easily. "Fragile Masculinity" means that masculinity, as a concept or identity or social status is hard to achieve and easy to lose. It's fragile, get it?

Femininity or Womanhood, by contrast, is not thought to work the same way, usually. The theory isn't really about women, but writers/theorists comment on the contrast, sometimes: Women in patriarchal societies aren't potential people in charge, or even particularly agentive; they're resources to be utilized. Those resources need to be available at any time, and how they feel about that, or what they've done in their lives to be good resources are less important than mere existence and availability. Women become women, generally, just by growing up and having the "right" biological bits. Even bad women are still women. Even women declared good for nothing but sexual or domestic use are still women. By contrast, men become men (i.e. masculine) by doing the right things, and not doing the wrong ones, and they stay masculine the same way. Masculinity can be lost easily.

How do you lose masculinity? You fuck up. You fail to do the things the culture thinks men should do. You fail to retaliate when another man insults you. Or compliments your girlfriend. Or makes out with your wife. You fail to commit the situation-specific violence your society requires of men. You fail ?o dominate others--especially men--in social interactions. You get dominated--much worse if by a woman. You show insufficient physical strength, or (worse) you show fear of being hurt.

I'll stop with that, now. I think you get the picture.

Or you do things the culture says men should not do: you listen to your gf or wife's thoughts a little too much. You play a sissy sport or no sport at all. You hang with gay people. You are gay people. You are (or seem to be) trans--and yes, the system seems to be rigged so that both MtF and FtM trans people will generally be seen as insufficiently manly.

Getting the picture? You don't become a man just because you get physically older; you have to do things, and you have to not do other things. Otherwise, you're not a man, not really.

And every damn day there will be at least one (and maybe a hundred) tests of your manhood. If you fail to meet any one of them, your "man" status can be damaged or revoked.

Why is that so bad? Because non-men have no place in patriarchal society. Men have a place, weak-ass men sort of have a place, women have a place (most of them, most of the time); non-men do not have a place. Non-men do not receive or deserve anyone's respect or even kindness. Non-men are homo sacer. Hurting them is a great pastime because it both harms someone who should should be ashamed to exist and gives you status points with your buddies (this includes both men and women). "Hurt the outsider" is one of the most reliable methods for bonding with your tribal group. It's even better if the outsider is a traitor, someone who used to be one of you. Outsiders can be hurt because they're outsiders. Traitors should be hurt because they have committed one of the worst possible moral wrongs: they were good group members and then they chose to not be. It's disloyalty to the group. Non-men are traitors so fuck 'em up.

What is a man to do who has been declared "non-man", or just lost some of his man status, or is just worried he might? Maybe he gets the most manly job ever: cop, soldier, WWE wrestler. Maybe he makes sure to commit some extra amounts of culture-sanctioned violence or domination. Maybe he kills himself.

I hope you're getting this. Fragile Masculinity is not a description of some men's insecurities or overcompensation (though it's not totally separate from that). It's a sociological/critical theory about the concept of masculinity itself, and how it works within patriarchal cultures. Masculinity in such a culture is fragile. It's hard to achieve and easy to lose. That has a lot of really bad consequences.