Before you start reading this, I’ll put it out there that I’m sure a lot of people are going to skim two or three sentences of this, extrapolate the rest, and misinterpret my meaning. I encourage people to read the piece in it’s entirety before you start writing me angry letters. Thanks much, I appreciate it.
I was recently linked to a website dedicated to Men’s rights. There are a lot of pretty important causes being championed over there, like the effort to bring attention to domestic abuse towards men and father’s rights in divorce cases. Anyone reading this comic knows that I am as pro-dads-who-want-to-be-there-for-their-kids as it gets, though I will admit to taking issue with some of the posters who seem to be matching extremism with further extremism (if you’re trying to argue with a woman that it’s wrong to portray men in the media as incompetent children without their wives, calling yourself a member of the “Superior Male Race (Female Sexual Re-Education Unit)” doesn’t make your argument seem particularly sympathetic or rational) But I suppose that is to be expected from any internet community that aligns itself with a specific cause.
Ignoring the threads regarding “Women Under 30 Losing ‘Lady Skills’ Like Cooking and Cleaning” I noticed one arguing that women are scoring better than men in school these days because the education system has been feminized. It is an interesting debate, one that I think it really depends on the specific school system you’re brought up in. I, for one, was raised in Manitoba and know that the same man who taught me how to canoe and skin a wolf was on the committee that rewrote the high school chemistry and biology curricula, so take that as you will.
Anyway, this particular passage caught my attention; “Because doing well in school involves no manual or physical activity but requires instead sitting quietly, reading and writing, the most vulnerable boys view learning as feminine and `uncool`. And being feminine is their deepest dread.This is because men’s sense of their masculinity is far more vulnerable than women’s sense of their femininity. Biology reminds girls what they are every month. Boys, by contrast, need to prove their identity and role, particularly among those with poor prospects and few confidence-boosting attributes.”
Presumably because I am writing and drawing a comic called “Manly Guys Doing Manly Things” and am as I’m sure many of you have deduced am not a man myself, I am very frequently asked to give my thoughts on gender equality, feminism, modern masculinity, and all that business. One question that seems to come up a great deal is “what do you consider a manly guy doing manly things”. As a slight tangent before I get to the point, yes the title of the comic did come from a gay club song, it was chosen as something of a nod to men’s adventure pulp magazines of days gone by boasting titles like “TRUE MEN”, and “MAN TO MAN” that were meant to sound macho and intimidating at the time but presently come across as… well, frankly, kind of gay.
But that’s beside the point. What really made me think was the point that a boy’s masculinity is a fragile thing compared to a girl’s femininity. First off, I’m sure people will argue this with me, but I honestly don’t see menstruation as a badge of femininity so much as a biological quirk that rewards me for succeeding to not get pregnant in a given month with excessive bleeding and crippling gut pain. I would argue that having to shill out twenty bucks on a box of tampons and a bottle of tylenol every so often does not define femininity any more than the ability to get boner defines masculinity, but that still doesn’t clear up the question of what makes a person manly and why that state is so fragile for so many people of the dude-ly persuasion out there.
If you hang around the Art of Manliness site (as I recommend you do because it’s awesome), you’ll find articles regarding things like planning out your future, preparing your car for the winter, getting what you want out of life, cooking delicious soup, and a multitude of other useful bits of knowledge. I gotta say, those are pretty cool things. I think a lot of people would be a lot happier it they knew how to plan ahead and not crash their car in winter and make awesome stew. The Library of Random Man Knowledge on the site has given me the quote “The true test of a man doesn’t come down to one moment, anyone can overcome an obstacle if trapped in a corner, a real man is the guy who shows dedication. The long road may be the harder path to take but if followed you are rewarded two fold with both the satisfaction of a job well done and the experiences you have along the way.”
I will concede that there are individuals out there who have told me I’m the “manliest girl they know”. Keep in mind that I like wearing skirts and corsets and I cry at almost every sentimental movie I see and my favourite colour is hot pink. Taking all that into account, it seems like what defines “manliness” is a drive to be capable and self sufficient. I saw this shirt proclaiming that “The World Belongs To Those Who Hustle” and felt momentary disappointment that there were no women’s sizes available to help me show off my pro-hustling attitude (wait, I don’t think that came across the way I wanted it to) until I remembered that I was looking at shirts on a site called “The Art of Manliness” and I guess their intended marketing audience probably doesn’t have a big female presence. What I’m getting at is that big muscles and beards may superficially make a person look manly, but masculine qualities all seem to revolve around being a capable individual who prepares themselves for whatever the world has to throw at them and toughs through the obstacles in life without complaint. Whenever people call me manly, I tell them they’re confusing “hard work and perseverance” with “manliness”.
If we accept that as what defines manliness, what exactly have we decided defines femininity? The opposite of that? I think if you look at qualities that are typically considered “feminine” a good deal of them revolve more around the outer perceptions people have of an individual than how they feel about themselves. If dressing in utilitarian clothing suited to the environment or task at hand is manly, wearing clothes that make you look pretty is girly. If going into the wilderness with the knowledge and preparedness to survive off the land is manly, going into the wilderness with a man who has the knowledge and preparedness to help you survive off the land is girly. It seems the women who are most often accused of being masculine are the ones who try the hardest to be independent self-sufficient individuals who excel at their jobs.
I think this is where a lot of the debate over the portrayal of gender roles in the media comes into play. The studio heads with money know that generally girls will watch shows about boys but boys do not like to watch shows about girls, so any property meant to cater to a gender neutral audience needs to star a male lead. This is not speculation, it is a statistic I have been bluntly made aware of of through my time as a working professional in the entertainment industry. People who argue that women are exaggerated to damaging ideals in things like video games are met by counterpoints that men are just as idealized and stereotyped through characters like Kratos or Duke Nukem or Marcus Fenix. However the exaggerations of the male characters seem to be based on the idea that men should be big strong lone wolves who live life the way they want to while the exaggerated female characters seem to be more based around the idea that they should look nice for men. Both have an equal potential to be damaging, but one is damaging while being patronizing at the same time. It’s similar to the trend in television that portrays men as lazy buffoons who can’t function without their wives, except imagine while they were being incompetent they were also being smoking hot and scantly clad. That is an essay for another day or possibly never, however.
I think the important thing to remember is that a “macho” person is not the same thing as a “manly” person. A macho individual is the type who needs to constantly boast and showboat about their strength or popularity or sexual prowess. A manly person doesn’t need to rub his accomplishments in people’s faces because he knows he’s strong and cool and sexy. It seems a rarity to see people champion any kind of “screw the haters I’m going to live life the way I want it” attitude in regards to femininity without being accused of being too masculine, and I think that’s why telling people they are effeminate will more often come across as an insult than a compliment. I’m sure it has happened out there in the big wide history of the world, but I have never met a man who took offense to being called a manly individual. Macho or butch, maybe, but not manly. Calling someone girly, lady-like, effeminate, however, that’s a whole different can of worms. It seems to me that it’s considered an “effeminate” quality to obsess over looking pretty and pleasing people, but it’s “masculine” to say you don’t care what makes other people happy because you’re going to go out there and take what you want out of life.
To bring this all back around to a convenient little mantra that you could go off and post on twitter or facebook or whatever without losing people’s attention; it’s wrong to tell men that they should act less like “men”, but it isn’t any better to tell women that they should act more like “women”. “Manning up” doesn’t have to be a gender specific thing. Pretend they mean “man” in the “hu-man” sense of the word, I can’t think of a person out there who would be worse off if they pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and made it their goal to become a confident and self-sufficient adult human being.
Again, just to assure you that I am not trying to be insulting to people in any way with this, This essay is only my attempt to rationalize why calling something “girly”, “feminine”, “Woman-like”, or “effeminite” seems to be more likely to insult someone than calling it “manly” or “masculine”. I do not think that saying women who stand up for themselves and act independently are behaving like men is right, this is just me trying to figure out why that has become the case. I have listened to other women accuse women who prefer video games and comic books to shopping for accessories of having “masculine interests” and “thinking like men”. As well, I have heard women who do like those kind of things proudly boast that they are more masculine than the other women in their lives and act as though their Halo achievements somehow make them superior to girls who are the envy of all their Farmville pals. After I stopped being mildly insulted that such old-fashioned ideas were still being validated and perpetuated by fellow women of all people, I decided I wanted to try to rationalize what might be leading to that kind of thinking. Deduce why manliness is such a respected trait with reasons other than “patriarchal society told us it should be that way”
Wanting to be strong and independent and have adventures is not a y-chromosome specific trait. I believe in equality in the truest sense of the word, everyone out there deserves the same opportunity to be the hero or the villain or the comic relief or the love interest if that’s what they want out of life. Thanks for understanding.
Discussion (261) ¬
masculinity is in crisis because the media works hard to suppress any notion that the idea of ‘manliness’ can adapt and evolve in the way feminity has. Look at how far feminism hs reshaped womens options and notions of sexuality. Conversely the idea of what is masculine hasnt really changed in centuries. There is a lack of intelligent voices on the side of male sexuality
as much as you may not have intended, you could potentially have thrown yourself into a spotlight with this piece, because there are next to naught women on this issue, and you have a popular voice amongst relevant and vulnerable groups.
I realize that I may be going out on a limb with this and I hope people realize that I am only trying to rationalize why it is so much more commonplace for people to be insulted by the accusation that they are behaving in a feminine manner than when they receive the same sort of suggestion that they are behaving in a masculine way.
How to condense years of knowledge into a single post here without writing something longer than your original article…
You’re going to read a few answers that will say things along the line of “manly is good” or “we value male traits but not female traits” and the like. But I’ll impose this one question for you to ponder: When are women ever derided for being feminine? Rarely if ever. It’s not a case of “we value manliness” it’s actually a situation of “we do not allow men to be feminine”. We restrict men to the male gender role while we’ve allowed women to chose a male or female gender role.
And, quite frankly, the reason we’ve done so is that equality does not and can not exist.
I’m sure anyone here can come up with thousands of examples of how “women were historically oppressed”, usually by comparing the rights/privileges of women today vs the rights/privileges of the women of old. But then look at men. Has the role of men changed? No, not really. Men are still expected to be men. Now, I’m sure someone will come up with the suggestion of “liberate men as we’ve liberated women from traditional gender roles” but there’s a slight problem with that:
Societies which free it’s men from traditional gender roles are committing instantaneous suicide. Without men willing to sacrifice themselves to defend the borders, to work the “shit jobs” with must be done to make civilization possible, with the freedom to buck the constraints on their violent tendencies… said society would implode in short order into anarchy and/or be conquered by an outside force which stuck to traditional gender roles.
But there’s a corollary to that statement: Societies which free it’s women from traditional gender roles are also committing suicide, just at a slower pace. When women no longer motivate men to become marriage material, when women influence government/society to replace bedrock “masculine” values (equity) with “feminine” ones (equality), when women gain freedom from the constraints to their promiscuity… that society loses the very things which make civilization work.
I make both statements because I hope you can understand the point I’m trying to make: There is extreme value in masculinity: masculinity is what makes civilization even possible in the first place. On the other hand, there is also extreme value in femininity: femininity is what motivates men to do those things which create civilization! Without either, civilization will not happen. If you have civilization, removing either will destroy civilization (just at different rates).
The sickness which has infested western civilization is the idea that men and women are equal and/or interchangeable. This is simply just not true. Men and women are built for different tasks at a biological level: males (having greater variability in philological traits) go out and test the environment, the males who survive mate with the females (having less variability) and shit the genetics more towards what is best for the environment. Just about every two-gender species works in this manner. The reason is that Mother Nature is rather smart: You don’t waste reproductive potential on environment testing.
So, yes, the fundamental root of the “problem” is that women make babies. Until you resolve that issue (and the biological differences that result from that issue) you will never have equality. And, thusly, since we can’t change the “is” to the “ought” we wish for, we need to stop screwing up society by trying to implement the “ought” instead of dealing with the “is”. Men should be men, women should be women, and we should advance and succeed as a society and team rather than continuing this self-destructive path.
Speaking from a media perspective, because that is my business, What I see as equality is any character being allowed to be written the way people actually act. It’s a pretty standard trope to write men as useless manchildren without their wives, but it’s considered oppressive to write a character who can’t function without her husband. There are women like that out there, I know people who have made it their driving goal in life to get married and have kids before they turn 23, but if you write a character like that people will jump on it and take it as a smear against the entire gender. The same applies to just about any subculture, as soon as a character devites from “average suburban white Anglo Saxon Protestant” people start treating them as though they’re supposed to represent their entire demographic. It’s true that if you have one character who is the only representation of a demographic in a story and you play them as a flat negative stereotype it’s going to be offensive, but if one group always has to be protected and played in a positive light at the expense of well-rounded characterization, that isn’t equality either.
However saying women should act like women and that means being appealing to men to motivate them to be big and strong and defend the borders is uh… well, I’m sure I’m over simplifying your point, but I know I don’t feel like less of a woman or a detriment to society because I want to take care of myself and I don’t care that my appearance isn’t launching ships into battle.
Re: Men should be men and women should be women
The best primer I can give you to introduce the concepts is http://www.psy.fsu.edu/~baumeistertice/goodaboutmen.htm
There will always be some outliers (women who want careers rather than children, men who don’t want to conform to the masculine role) and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. But when the outliers become the norm, you start to break the processes which made civilization in the first place.
Re: having a character represent the demographic
What you will find is a difference in human behavior. Straight white men (SWM) have no “identity” in being a straight white male. You’re not allowed to be proud of being straight. Being proud of being white is so incredibly non-PC. Being proud of being male… well don’t you know that males are what’s wrong with this world according feminism?
But change any of those factors and you will start to run into identity politics. Most women derive part of their identity from being female. Most minorities derive part of their identity from being said minority. Same thing for non-heterosexuals. So when you paint a SWM in some negative light, you don’t offend straight white males; but, when you paint any other segment of society in a negative light, you are implicating that part of what makes up their identity is “bad” in some manner.
I do not yet fully understand why SWMs are outside of this identity definition. My only real guess is that SWMs have competed against each other for so long that they tend not to identify with being a SWM. Even in early US history, “race” was even divided by Irish vs Italian vs something else. And that’s what makes it interesting… paint an Italian man in a bad light and you might actually get some pushback. But that pushback is from the Italian identity association, not the white identity nor the male identity.
Speaking as an SWM, but also one with some experience in diversity and feminist studies, I think the best answer I can give to why SWMs are outside of that definition is the assumed privilege that goes with being one. Other privilege areas you can put in a bad light and not be seen terribly include the rich, christians (sort of), the intelligent, the attractive and the fully-abled people. When you attack people who are not SWM or any of these groups, since they lack that intrinsic privilege of being of a group with historical power, it is an act of widening the privilege gap as opposed to reducing it. True, straight, white and male all get a bit worse of a ride, but I think it has more to do with the recent experiences of those things being actively oppressive of their opposite groups.
Feminism, or really any similar group dedicated to the uplifting of a non-privileged group, intends not to bring males down necessarily, but to close the gap. Some think that the best way to do so is to bring the privileged group down to their level, but generally those people are not approved of by the movement. They are often the most vocal, to be sure, and the most likely to be focused on by detractors, since they make the movement appear to be a threat of sorts.
I think more to it that those groups you mentioned are used to fending off attacks and pay it no heed… to make my point Jews are assumed privileged in more ways than most (if you are Jewish you must have money) but comment on the Jews like I just did taken out of context and you are the worst scum in the world!
Now take Catholics they are usually well educated and have money like the Jews (stereotypically) but they are being slaughtered in some countries (Indonesia and Egypt are examples) and it is not given second thought, most news networks don’t even report on them, and if they do they will usually call it civil war rather than a holocaust as they would if it was another religious group. If you want to learn about these slaughter you have to find them through the catholic news networks or through the religious zealots perpetuating the acts praising their soldiers for a job well done.
Why is it such a different reaction between these two groups, why is it politically correct for one of these acts to be villafied and not the other? I don’t really have an answer to it, but its not either privileged birth that makes them different.
“Feminism, or really any similar group dedicated to the uplifting of a non-privileged group, intends not to bring males down necessarily, but to close the gap. Some think that the best way to do so is to bring the privileged group down to their level, but generally those people are not approved of by the movement. They are often the most vocal, to be sure, and the most likely to be focused on by detractors, since they make the movement appear to be a threat of sorts.”
… look what they (feminist agenda of focusing on “lifting oppressed girls”) have done to boys in education for the past twenty years. There actually applauding the fact there there are more women in college after boys have been doing worse for the last twenty years and are dropping out of school at higher rates.
And what of equality? Why haven’t feminists been closing the health gap instead expanding it will even more spending on women’s (especially white) health? What about the longevity gap? What about the retirement gap? What about the custody gap (women vet special attention in the workplace but keep the status quo of women and children)? What about the sentencing gap for the same crimes (there is no consensus on a racial gap but there is one for a gender gap)? What about the draft and all the other female privileges.
Trust me, I want equality but Feminism is not the way.
civilization isn’t created because of masculinity. it was created because of the agricultural revolution. There is nothing about being masculine, that is absolutly necessary for civilization to function. Matriarchical societies, where not only are families traced through the mother, but power and the final say is given to the elder women, Predate western democracy, and were completly sustained up until the New World was discovered.
Were the Iriquois destroyed because the Europeans were more masculine? not a chance.
Feminism does not destroy countries. Economics does.
I completely agree with you good ser!
Your argument makes absolutely no mention of the fact that Western society hasn’t imploded in any meaningful way as women have achieved more rights. That’s kind of a big thing, because you refer to a “sickness” that infests society, but I don’t see compelling evidence for it. Falling birth rates among Western (-style, I think it’s a bigger issue in Japan than most of the West actually) civilizations? That’s always been associated with technological progress and especially with the lowering of infant mortality rates. Decline of marriage? Hardly a reliable metric for social anarchy.
The assertion that allowing women to be like men will doom a society by virtue of their ceasing to drive men to competition is silly. Competition is a natural impulse in many people, and if it’s somewhat more predominantly masculine, it hasn’t declined in any appreciable way since women’s rights movements have existed. Besides which, we live in a world where even -weapons- are increasingly computerized, to say nothing of the fact that truly large-scale wars have become harmful to -any- of the big powers likely to engage in them, so the threat of western society being conquered by an outside force seems to me that it would rely on aliens showing up.
Anyway, evolutionary arguments for how humans -should- behave have been pretty invalidated for a long time. You’re basically advocating an 18th century philosophy here, and I think one of the lessons we can take away from such periods is that you can -try- to create “separate spheres” for men and women and claim that they’re equally important, but it’s ultimately not going to be very satisfactory for a good number of people, because people really don’t care to live with heavily restraining expectations laid on them.
But on the original comment, this is an interesting post–personally, I feel like there’s too much emphasis on gender in general. Men and women aren’t -equivalent-, per se, and I think gender influences the person you are in various ways, but I just don’t know if I see this focus on what it means to be a man or a woman as productive when it all cooks down to the individual anyway.
Though to possibly undercut that, I’d say that there are some positive connotations with “feminine” qualities as well–sensitivity, kindness, putting others before oneself, even sometimes creativity as opposed by “masculine” destructiveness. So I’m not sure that the fact that it’s considered insulting to be called “feminine” is entirely based on feminine traits being termed inferior. It seems more to me that men just aren’t expected to -have- those qualities, that the over-exaggerated masculine ideal is ambitious, adventurous, etc., and that men are expected to not be satisfied in a “supporting” role which is considered more feminine. After all, in fiction certainly, if a man isn’t actively in pursuit of something, he’s inherently criticized for it (men without jobs are slackers etc.), but a woman is allowed to, you know, have some vague purpose like “finding herself” and it’s a much more positive thing. Going back to the 18th century it may be a “men should have external lives, women should have internal ones,” type thing, but I dunno.
Well, that’s my sloppy analysis anyway.
Massive expanse of government?
http://johnrlott.tripod.com/op-eds/WashTimesWomensSuff112707.html
http://www.springerlink.com/content/x737rhv91438554j/
It’s actually a repeated process throughout history. Read “Sex and Culture” by J.D. Unwin
Marriage is the fundamental bedrock of society. Why this is so (proven beyond a doubt) requires more text than I have time to write at this moment.
The problem is going to be that we’re going to talk about X, where X comes from Y, and we have fundamentally different ideas about what Y even is… making any discussion about X useless. There are so many common misconceptions that you have to dig deeper and deeper till you can get to a level where discussion will have any meaning.
Unfortunately, what I’ve figured out by having this discussion over and over again is that the root idea where we can even start the discussion is so far removed from X that it takes a monumental effort to talk about the root, clear your misconceptions, and then work up from there up to X. But, interestingly enough, I’ve found a similar root issue that crops up again and again and again. How far removed from “survival of society by following traditional gender roles” is this issue?
What are Rights? Where to Rights come from?
Such a large segment of society has been taught wrong and never questioned what they were taught on this topic.
I am confused. In what sense is marriage the bedrock of society? I’ve heard people say this a great deal, but never actually back it up. I am curious as to what about the formality of marriage makes it essential over less formalized long term relationships, which have taken the place marriage for many. There is certainly something to be said for the strengthening of a parental bond through that formality, but I would say that, anecdotally, I’ve seen many couples fall apart because the pressure of that bond makes them feel trapped.
Expanse of government isn’t a sign of the collapse of society. It’s a change, sure, but whether it’s positive or negative depends a lot on your personal politics.
Furthermore, while marriage is a staple of society, it is entirely possible to conceive of a society where marriage does not exist, and this has, I’m fairly certain, been practiced on a small scale. Besides which, the decline in marriage probably has more to do with sex outside of wedlock losing its taboo status than with the loosening of gender roles.
Your comment about roots etc. is vague and could as easily have been substituted with at least some semblance of why you think we can’t actually have a conversation but whatever.
Also, many philosophy classes, some history classes, and probably any class on civics do include a discussion of the various theories of where rights originate from, and most Western thought holds that rights are God-given or otherwise innate, and the idea that certain rights are conferred by states upon their citizens. Ultimately this tracks back to a sense that at least in legal terms all people should be treated fairly, which is to say, given the same opportunities and protections. But I don’t understand why you bring this up in the first place.
My biggest problem with your argument is that you basically maintain that because gender roles have existed when societies were built, and that those societies that survived had gender roles in place, that a society which does not have gender roles will necessarily collapse. This takes no notice of the fact that modern society has been so radically altered by technology that it faces different issues than an ancient society or even itself a hundred years ago. The need for a society to actively explore, expand, and conquer in a physical way is severely reduced, the need for brute force labor is reduced and getting smaller, and women are just as capable of exploration on scientific or intellectual frontiers as men.
Because what you’ve stated as the basis of Rights is incorrect (and the common misconception). Because you subscribe to the common misconception, I need to correct your miss-eduction on the basis of Rights, and then we need to re-evaluate everything that builds upon that faulty basis.
Rights come from violence (or the threat thereof) supplied by you or by someone on your behalf. Period. One of the faults of civilization is that the supplier of violence becomes so far removed from the self that people forget this. Now, allow me to short-circuit your incoming protests with the “North Korea” example: No matter what “Rights” you think North Koreans are being denied, that doesn’t matter until you can supply enough (potential) violence that you convince Kim that he better change his tune.
And then we’ll spend the next 50-100 posts working from that corrected misconception up to where we were 3 posts ago, and you’ll find much less that you can disagree with.
I really wish I had the time for that today.
I’m going to save you some time and point out that telling people they don’t understand what they’re talking about rather than just making your point and proclaiming yourself to be an authority (which really is a waste of time on the internet, because no one will ever believe you) is not a good foundation upon which you will have a lot of success convincing people of anything. I would very much like for this to be a rational discussion, and I simply don’t believe that this sort of stance is conducive to that.
I’ve had this exact same debate at least 100 times. Yes, I recognize you haven’t. Because I’ve had this debate so many times, I already know the next 3-4 points you’re likely to make, and I’ll counter them in said post rather than wait for you to raise them.
Honestly, when I get less lazy I’ll write a damn book on the topic and just send you the amazon link ;)
Now, do you want to complain about the tone, or do you want to contest anything about the basis of Rights?
I’m complaining about the tone, because we are attempting to have a discussion, which must necessarily follow the rules of debate. I’m not going to question that you’ve argued your point many times, but that in no way grants you authority. I actually agree with you on the basis of rights, and I would like you to convince people, but I fear you are damaging our side by taking the stance that you are.
I’m not going to say too much because I’m sure enough other people are going to jump on you that I don’t want to beat a dead horse, but you seem to be equating “imploding society” with “left leaning society”. Debating that women’s rights are causing society to crumble because they lead to more accessible healthcare and employment insurance is an argument that is probably isn’t impressing many people outside of a specific demographic.
Yes, I am. The reason is because they are equatable. When you research societies, you will find that they are transitory in nature. They rise and fall in rather predicable patterns (the only thing that seems to differ wildly is actual method of implosion). When a society “leans left” it is already in its decline.
I’ll admit that there is a “the chicken or the egg” question here which I’ve had lots of honest answer-seeking debate about. Does the expansion of women’s rights cause the decline, or is the expansion of women’s rights a symptom of the decline? It is, honestly, an interesting question if we wish to attempt to lengthen the length of time a society can be successful before it’s implosion.
However, please understand that at this point said question is simply academic. Whether the expansion of women’s rights to “equality” is a cause or an effect, we are still currently in the situation where women’s rights have been expanded thusly and therefore are in the decline and should be preparing for implosion.
Could you give some examples of what you mean by decline, since few societies are ever outright destroyed anymore, and what about them you believe was left leaning, and therefore caused their decline?
There’s a short book that can give you much more information than I could in this post window. It is “The Fate of Empires” by Sir John Glubb. Available for view here: http://www.arlev.co.uk/glubb/index.htm
tl;dr: Societies rise and fall. The rise from hard work, and fall from over-expansion of entitlement (entitlement = “left leaning” expanse of government). Most were conquered by another society or by internal revolution.
But what about, for example, the case of France? They went from a very aristocratic system with huge class divides to one that is undeniably more left leaning, and while not a dominating force, certainly show no sign of impending collapse.
I can’t reply to your comment, Keltslash. We must have hit max nesting.
France, hell all of Europe, is going to be a Muslim continent within the next 50-100 years. The reason for this is due to birth rates. Now, we can be lucky (?) and it will be a bloodless revolution where Shira law is voted into place by the overwhelming numbers, but I honestly think it will get bloody at some point, and I’m pretty sure it will be bloody in France due to France’s attempt to force assimilation of it’s Muslim population.
That’s speculation though, and not really all that different from saying that we’ll be a country of idiots in a generation or two due to where birthrates are higher, which has been denounced repeatedly. Also, Sharia, at least as a public policy, is not the case for the totality of the Islamic world, so I don’t really think that will end up being the case, but that’s rather beside the point.
We’re getting away from the original point, which is that, there overwhelming historical evidence that left-leaning leads to societal collapse, and I would say that there are significant cases where collapse or revolt have been concurrent with right-leaning governments.
Conservatives always seem to think you can only win a culture war by outbreeding the opposition.
I’m European, and most Muslims that live here are integrated modern people who would be first against the wall come Sharia time. And look, Egypt’s having a democratic revolution! Fancy that.
I don’t need to have more indoctrinated kids than you, all I need is to offer your brood better options, I bet I can turn over half of ’em into leftie liberals with my pornography and video games, ha ha!
I would argue that the advancement of a society can be measured by how well off their women are. With that line of reasoning you could argue that women are best off at a nation’s cultural zenith, so from there on out the society can only be on the decline, but I feel that relates more to the old saying that “what goes up must come down” than women’s rights being the cause of that decline. The most developed nations in the world are those where women have the most equality as opposed to nations with the lowest standards of living where they have the highest risk of rape, abuse, and mutilation. Once I had a conversation with a man who had recently come home from a Peace Keeping campaign to Sierra Leone while the country was still ranked as having the lowest standard of living out of any UN nation. The point of the excursion was just to do as much damage control as possible. He recounted visiting an orphanage for girls, where his team was informed that every woman in the building had been raped at least once. All they could do for the problem was buy them a german shepherd and put razor wire around the top of the fence.
It is more or less universally accepted that the best way to slow overpopulation and related problems to it is to educate women and give them a purpose other than being possession and baby machine for their husbands. It you put the idea in their heads that they should want something more out of life than as many sons as their bodies can produce, they aren’t so driven to produce so many kids. Unfortunately, UN plans to introduce Planned Parenthood programs in third world nations were shot down as a plot to “make less non-white babies in the world”. Still, I think the only way that your argument that feminism leads to the downfall of society holds water is if you think of it in terms of people who are the worst off having nowhere to go but up and people who are the best off having nowhere to go but down.
What it comes down to, I would rather be free and poor, watching the world fall down around me than living in a cage with the ambiguous threat that if I step out of it the world might fall apart. Maybe that’s self-centred of me, I guess I’m just too self-serving to care.
I guess what yer not getting is that under those conditions, you will be living under traditional gender roles. Those are the roles necessary for survival at that stage. It’s only when individual survival is relatively guaranteed that we begin to consider stepping away from traditional gender roles. It is the “oppression” of survival that enforces traditional gender roles.
(1) We survive. (2)We advance. (3)We get assured survival. (4) We Relax. (5)We free our women. (6)The nature of women changes society to a point where it no longer works. (7) We collapse or are conquered.
That’s the cycle. The question is: is it even possible to stretch the “good times” between 5 and 6, or do we have to focus on stretching 4 to 5?
Sadly, given the immediate and massive change in government after women get the vote, I think once 5 happens it’s quickly downhill from there (measured in the lifespan of a civilization, that is).
I’m still not quite sure how this leads us to the conclusion that freeing women is in any way related to the collapse of society. It also does not account for matriarchal societies, which have collapsed without ever having to face that issue and were perfectly functional running under the assumption that men were less than women. Hell, some small ones still exist, even if they aren’t particularly large or well known.
Plenty of great societies that have been built have much more obvious causes for their collapse than women’s rights. Rome hardly fell because of it. Women’s rights may or may not have come in the course of many societies that are no longer around, which must indicate, at the very least, that other causes are equal or greater factors.
I think you’re the one who doesn’t really seem to get what I just explained to you and chose instead to pick at the sound bite at the end of the post. I think you’re placing blame in an irrational place, and your earlier statement about how the Muslims are going to “take over” Europe seems to come across as your way of saying that western culture should treat women the same way that Muslim culture does for the sake of presving itself. If your ideal Western culture is a Western culture that doesn’t care about healthcare or employment insurance and keeps women in it’s place, it isn’t a culture that I want to get behind. It’s okay if you disagree with me on that, I’m sure plenty of people do. But plenty of people don’t. That’s why we live in a democratic society where people get to vote.
Well… I guess in your ideal society I wouldn’t get to vote.
saying that western culture should treat women the same way that Muslim culture does
No. I believe the best answer is “firm guidelines which can face exceptions” rather than “totalitarianism and absolutism”
that doesn’t care about healthcare or employment insurance
Healthcare? check.
Section 8 housing? check.
Food stamps? check.
Library for internet/books? check.
If I were naive enough to think that such a society was sustainable, I’d never work another day in my life.
The fundamental flaw in your reasoning is that you think “government entitlements” actually help people.
Well… I guess in your ideal society I wouldn’t get to vote.
Democracy is an unsustainable form of government.
The only two which work are an Immortal Benevolent Dictator (rule by “God”) or democracy limited to those we want society to emulate/become. I’m rather fond of the “must own land to vote” idea. Once you’ve worked hard enough to earn some land, some of the naivety about how the world really works is no longer in your system.
I’m gonna just go ahead and call Demonspawn as a troll now, okay guys? I mean, really, “I don’t feel like having the debate because I know what the next 5 comments are on both sides”? If you’d honestly had this conversation that often then most people who don’t just want the attention would give up trying to convince others of their point, and anyone who was really sincere in their beliefs would try a little harder not to come off as condescending in the interests of getting someone to actually listen to their arguments rather than putting everyone on the defensive.
And seriously, dude, go live in 1700s England. You’d clearly be happier there, and you could have the debate you so want to have about voting/women’s rights, and not be forced to talk to people for whom those issues were settled a long time ago.
By the way, if you want to take notes, the point where you really and truly pissed me off was “(5)We free our women. (6)The nature of women changes society to a point where it no longer works. (7) We collapse or are conquered.” I suppose it was just summarizing what you were saying all along, but something in the way you phrase it there just makes it sound so much more like pure unabashed misogyny.
Also, if you want to go to the literal route on the origin of rights, then it isn’t strictly the threat of violence so much as the idea of the “social contract” which people enter into to form a society, wherein breaking society’s laws results not necessarily in violence but in ostracization, with the possibility of other punishment. Mind you in life-or-death early human social groups being cast out was probably a sure way to -get- yourself killed. And you can make an argument for biologically implanted rights on the grounds that people naturally form social groups and the most basic laws of all social groups are the same, “Do not kill each other,” “Do not steal from each other,” etc.
But yeah, seriously, I at least think I’m done with this particular conversation.
Is it “misogyny” to recognize how the women’s vote changes government, and to recognize that said changes are not good for the future of the civilization?
Really, that’s what this all falls down to: I am recognizing gender-tendencies which you just don’t like. And when I do that, you’re going to be on the defensive no matter what (just like you are now attempting to put me on the defensive by claiming I’m a troll and/or misogynist).
And, the truth is, you even admitted to just how bad it is to allow women influence in government:
That’s exactly what women tend to do with government: steal from men (paying the majority of taxes) to provide for women (receiving the majority of government services) via the “pretty way” of doing it through government rather than just robbing the men themselves.
Now… that paragraph is truth. I guess facts piss you off. If you’re going to be pissed off no matter what I say (simply because you don’t like the facts) why should I spend effort to wrap it up in pretty bows?
Or, put another way, the Red Pill tastes like shit… but in the end it’s worth it.
You’re a fun guy, bro.
Aww, I was having so much fun making him work for it. You didn’t have to go ahead and give him the satisfaction.
Demonspawn’s ideal world:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LS37SNYjg8w
I just want to second something Lynceus said. I think the cycles that society has gone through are broken, and so demonspawns otherwise rational argument is void.
Also why no gyarados this week? (troll face)
Every single one of your points operates on the assumption that it is self-evidently true, and you provide no actual proof for any of them.
There is simply no evidence behind any of your assertions, at all.
“Is it “misogyny” to recognize how the women’s vote changes government, and to recognize that said changes are not good for the future of the civilization?”
Yeah, pretty much.
Your whole argument seems to be more deeply rooted in your conservative political ideology rather than empirical evidence. I’ve also yet to see anything that proves your “biotruth” other than things you sucked out of your thumb.
It’s ridicilous to think that in ancient civilisations women stayed at home and took care of the kids. The women worked the land, the children worked the land, too. They had to.
The idea that men work and women stay at home and cook and take care of the kids is, ironically, a pretty recent development, and for many centuries only applied to the the wealthiest of men. The working class women however, worked too.
By the way, you know that whole thing you posted about “women’s rights”? The same could apply to other human rights. Things like, say, child labor or slave labor.
Yeah, “massive expansion of government” doesn’t prove your point at all.
All I’ve seen from you are a bunch of reactionary arguments for maintaining traditional male dominance.
“Falling birth rates among Western (-style, I think it’s a bigger issue in Japan than most of the West actually) civilizations?”
The interesting part of this is that gender roles here in Japan are still incredibly rigid. Women are expected to marry before the age of 25 and be happy housewives who don’t desire careers of their own — they’re just supposed to be quietly supportive and do the cooking/cleaning/sewing/child-rearing etc. while their men spend 10+ hours a day at the office and then go out drinking. Women are also expected to put a lot of effort into looking nice, where “nice” means both “young” and “feminine” (no pants for you!). There are younger people who have problems with this, but most people 30 and over (women and men alike) take it for granted that this is how things are supposed to be.
And yet, Japan has the worst problems with declining birthrate in the world. Huh, it’s almost like gender roles and birth rates aren’t directly correlated and therefore women having jobs won’t bring about the downfall of society! Nah, that can’t be right.
[quote]When are women ever derided for being feminine? Rarely if ever.[/quote]
Um, are you serious?
Every time a socially prescriptive feminine characteristic is used or portrayed in a negative way, women are being derided for those characteristics. Every time it is implied that a woman is what she is, or does what she does because she has a vagina, women are being derided for what is perceived as a feminine characteristic.
I wish that I could ‘like’ this comment. Repeatedly.
This fo’ shiz. (I’m sure I’ve heard women telling each other not to be a damn girl, or sentiments to that effect.)
Since the reply function isn’t showing up for the direct post, here it is:
“I’m rather fond of the “must own land to vote” idea. Once you’ve worked hard enough to earn some land, some of the naivety about how the world really works is no longer in your system.”
Not only did this not work historically (denying such large segments of the population the right to participate in the civic process led to large scale social stratification that held back national development), it rests on the faulty assumption that anyone who doesn’t own property (which itself is never properly defined by people like you, and is a relic of the pre-industrial age) is somehow naive or lacks sufficient social commitment to hold the responsibility of voting.
I mean, really, “some of the naivety about how the world really works is no longer in your system?”
Every argument you’ve made has been predicated on the idea of it’s self-evident truth, and this is nothing more than an ignoran slam against anyone outside of the social elite. But, with your ranting about putting women back into their proper place and “high Muslim birth rates,” it’s clear you see anyone other than SWM (I cannot believe you used that term seriously) as fundamentally Lesser Beings than yourself.
And yeah, everything you wrote did anger me, because it amazes me that people in this day and age can still hold on to beliefs championed by eugenicists and 20th century fascists.
Well written! I just might have my class read this when I finally get around to teaching that Psych of Gender and ethnicity course…
While I feel a little guilty about being one of the people who have pestered you with questions about gender roles in the past, I am glad that you are sharing your thoughts on the matter, as this is not only thought- but generally inspiring. Makes me want to man up a little indeed.
On a less personal note, I think that the a large problem with the traditional ideas of masculinity and femininity is that there is a large, nigh-global tradition of oppression and misogyny. Women were, throughout most of history, seen as weak and inferior, so all the positive and particularly the capable qualities in a person have been assigned to men. Even most the few positives that have been attributed to females are either tailored to supporting the idea of women being useful for raising children and keeping the home, or have only manifested as marketable kitsch in the last century or two. The reason why I’m bringing this up is because I think that it ties into your point – Much of what is seen as “manly” really applies to being a strong and independent individual, period.
I think the very fact that you write and draw this comic, along with all your work I’ve seen on DeviantArt, proves that “manly” is not assigned to one gender, as odd as that sounds. Finding your profile on DA two years ago was so inspiring. I’m a girl, and I also straddle the line between interests usually catering to males and “girly” stuff (my Hello Kitty stuff near my video games consoles, my collectible action figures near my plushes).
I suppose a huge part of the problem is the assigning of usefulness to a single gender. That to be a self-sufficient girl will be an anomaly, and a male to takes helps when needed is feminine. Both these concepts are as old as fuck and need to go the way of the beeper.
If you don’t write an essay on the prevalence of plaid-clad manchildren in sitcoms, I might. It’s among my greatest pop culture peeves.
Anyway, I think you do a wonderful job of giving people a look at the way our culture defines masculinity – as someone already mentioned, the view most of the world has held of women for centuries means that ‘being manly’ is a sort of shorthand for ‘being an autonomous, respectable member of society’. I wish that this sort of aspirational thinking wasn’t associated with one sex or the other, but I suppose the fact that it *is* is a huge contributing factor to my own appreciation of ‘manliness’. I am self-aware, but not immune. That probably applies to a lot of us.
Now I’m wondering what it says about me that I never even stopped to consider what gender the creator of this strip is. Did I give any thought at all to the person behind the comic strip I recently found? Or did I just blithely plow through the archives, have some laughs, and never once thought about the person holding the pen?
I think it was the last one. I think that means I’m a selfish prick for not thinking of others. I’ll have to get back to you on this.
It’s honestly not something I like to draw attention to for a variety of reasons, but it is something that comes up every now and again. It is important not to judge something by what you know about the person who made it, but rather by how it stands as a work on it’s own. In the same vein, it can be important for people to know that people in a subculture are making those sort of things. For example, it doesn’t matter to the stories themselves that books like The Outsiders, Tex, Rumblefish, and That Was Then This Is Now, were all written by a woman. However, it matters to people to know that women are out there, writing stories of that nature that have been received in the positive manner they were.
Is it? I think not, you do not see that person, so unless it is stated that that person is of a certain gender, you merely automaticly assume things, and all is well in your world. Not thinking of a person is like not thinking how the person writing the comic is, but rather not buying a gift for a close friend, or not being considerate with someone who is having a rough time.
You only should start being considerate to people across the internet when you start communicating with them in some way. For example an email to Coela, you may consider she has had similar ones before, so you need to think about that. That is what I consider being considerate to people across the web.
Though, if I am wrong in some way or all ways, feel free to correct me.
I think Coela may have been saying (and I agree if so) that while it doesn’t matter if you don’t think about the person behind the pen, and it’s rather nice to read something without preconceptions about the author (like listening to Wagner without knowing he was an anti-Semite or whatever)… it rather sucks if everyone makes the underlying assumption that everyone who writes lovely things (like this comic) is male, because we’d never learn to think about females as people who create the kind of lovely thing we like, and that’s why occasionally pointing out that many authors of lovely things are female may be justifiable.
(Run-on sentence is on-running.)
I don’t think enough people point out things like this. I feel that my girlfriend has a lot of self-esteem issues, and I think a lot of them are caused by the popular and social images of what a woman should be. I’m trying to show her how to “champion a kind of “screw the haters I’m going to live life the way I want it” attitude”, because I feel like that sort of thinking (whether male or female) is really the best way to live. Live to your own standards, and do what you think is appropriate for yourself. The “conventional” view of gender roles can’t possibly account for all the different variables in people! Why should we ever think we need to fit into the roles that movies/society/the media tell us we should have?
Many points to you for using your relative online fame to get this opinion in motion! I’m going to repost this and hope people don’t TLDR it. There are just some things that people need to learn.
I will admit it was something I was worried about posting and have been mulling over for some time, because I’m sure there are people out there who will take it out of context and hold it against me. Perhaps directly after the business with the ads wasn’t the best time to be posting opinion pieces, but every day I turn on my computer I look at the tabs I left open as reference for this and think about how it will keep gnawing at me if I don’t say anything.
And I guess if I didn’t say something I wanted to because I was worried about people misinterpreting it, I wouldn’t really be living up to my own ideas.
Personally, if there are people who take things I say out of context to use against me, I just figure they’re the kind of people I don’t want to align myself with. If they won’t listen to me and make a rational judgment/response, then I don’t really care what they have to say.
Good for you for taking the step to post this, even if you worried about it. Now you have it out there, and as you’ve said, you KNEW it would bug you not to do so. Some people just let those things sit because they don’t want to make anyone angry, but it’s like they say. If you make a joke and don’t offend anyone, it’s probably not funny. Same thing applies: If you have an opinion, you’re going to piss someone off, but you’ll be taking a step towards changing things for the better. So good for you. I hope this starts or fuels the machine of change!
There are always people who take things out of context and use it for their own agenda. When the haters come, calmly smile (a real smile not a fake one) and then proceed to ask them to read your works in their entirety. An opinion can never be truely expressed by a single quote, nor a single work. Your opinion runs over many comics, over many essays. Don’t loose sight of who you are, by other’s hate. You are your own person, and should never hide that.
As for advertisers, they will come and they will go. Don’t cry over it. You will find as one leaves you because they don’t agree with you another will come and put their might behind you for the same reason.
Thoughts are powerful. As are dreams.
To finish this I believe everyone should read “If” by Rudyard Kipling. Those who are female just change son to daughter and man to woman, and the words are still fitting.
Let’s not forget all the plastics in the environment feminizing our hormones!
Won’t someone think of the testosterone?
One thing that should be noted, and it is something that does get on a lot of manly men’s nerves. All the way through high school and there after work life, to degrade manly men they are now being called dominate. They use it to say it is a bad thing that we do not care what other’s think of us. That we are poltroons for it. It to me was sexism, all the way through high school. When ever I did something that would be considered manly to the readers here, for example, isolating a school bully from their intended target telling them to have a go at my wits instead of someone who couldn’t defend them self against the attack, it was “dominate”. Though towards the end of my schooling I found I was taking this intended insult as a complement. It was a small pat on the back for doing the things that although hard to do, go little thanks and often less reward.
I found that all the other manly men were called the same thing, yet the ones who showed off their strength rather than using it were the ones called “manly”. I remember thinking that if that is what a man is to be, I will not call myself a man. It saddens me to think I thought that now. The school system makes men into cowards, and bullies, in the name of showing off to get the girls. We all know now that the girls men really look for are the ones who even while looking pretty, can “catch and kill their own”, and they wont settle for a SNAG, as we are taught to be through the school system.
For the record, I have only just started to read this comic the past week (I started from the start after finding one comic on stumble upon, and haven’t looked back). I never once gave any thought to the gender of the artist, only that the work was good and that I got a laugh out of it. Now knowing your gender, does not change that one bit but it does raise a little pride in being a man and that men are still noticed for being manly by what I like to call real women. And to me a real woman is one that tries to better herself, in any way she can. I have the same criteria for a manly man. Those who try to better themselves are true humans, they are one race, two genders, who need each other equally and in different ways, its what makes us strong!
Thanks for the laughs, and keep the good stuff flowing. I know I speak for all the readers when I say we love the work!
I completely agree with you and find your statement concerning this kinda difficult issue very fitting.
It’s this discussion about discrimination and equality issues, that’s a concern of our society for decades (or even longer). At some point, I find this discussion has become kinda perverted, because it seems like there are feminists out there who search equality in getting rid of everything that shows, that men and women are different, particularly in changing parts of the common vocabulary (I’m Austrian and the changes in the german language are significant). I can reconstruct, that there are still things to be done for women rights, but the goal shouldn’t be the “standardization” of the individual and the discrimination of men. So I’m not surprised about men having difficulties with adhering to their manly side.
I’m not seeing the solution of all equality problems in forgetting about our differences – they certainly make us what/who we are and it’s wrong to assume, that men only have the possibility to “act correctly” in society, if they’re forgetting about their manly side… And to be honest, I want a man by my side, not another girl like me, just without boobs…
And that’s, because I like your project so much. It’s about those manly guys who still haven’t become unsecure about their identity and position in society – and by that, I certainly don’t mean being “hard”, brutal and always ashamed to cry. Even crying and therefore showing his feelings – can be very manly :)
I just appreciate that you were willing to put this out there. From the comments thus far, it seems that you’ve got a nice, considerate response. Which is completely awesome, and a reflection of how well you eased the reader through your points.
I’m glad you wrote this.
Being a woman myself – and a woman that has a lot of what could be called “guy hobbies”, and has abhorred most things feminine in my 25 years of life, I’d like to share something:
I believe I’ve always disliked the idea of “feminine” so much because the society where I live is ok withr women not being responsible grown ups. Instead, it’s acceptable for women to be big children, always on the want of attention from others – specially from males – so they can feel validated as human beings. It’s ok for them to be weak and manipulating, and not being able to take care of themselves, and I just hate that.
From my standpoint, this whole macho/feminist thing is just.. idiotic, There’s things males do better, and things females do better, like males usually have more muscle mass without actively training, and they have more body hair, making it easier to withstand cold, while females are more adapt in teaching, nursing, and they have stronger defensive genes, are usually better at multitasking, being social/manipulative, and are more tactical while males usually go for the “Nuke it from orbit” method of fixing problems(Like the age old punch/kick the tv/other electronics if they don’t work properly) Both work, they just take a different path to gain the same.
Though I agree with some feminist stuff, like how they’re underestimated in some aspects, mainly military, since they’re usually better at swiftly deciding on how to deal with a situation, I’m a Dane, my homeroom teacher was an ex elite soldier(Pretty much the same as the british SAS, and the american seals), and fuck she was scary when someone pissed her off(Like bullies, people that didn’t listen in class etc)
If it wasn’t apparent, I’m a man, and I just think of humans as another animal, because we sure act like ones still :V
(Though I’m still not sure if I can trust creatures that bleed that much once a month and still not dying >.>)
I feel you are viewing these stereotypes from the way the media is going… females and males are both equally good as teachers… females tend to teach females better and males tend to teach males better.
Males are the defenders of society from the outside, females are the defenders from the inside.
Multitasking, I can multi task just as well as any female I know.
As for females being more tactical, that is a misconception, females are more diplomatic than men, trying to avoid blood shed at all cost, men try their best in combat to stay alive while winning the fight. Men are very shy from using the “Nuke it from orbit” approach. I know from personal experience I would rather send in a few men than “ground and pound” an enemy in most cases. I would rather write a letter to the widow of one of my men, than have to live with the fact that I only won by killing innocent civi’s. And the lose of a man under your command is something that brings a tear to your eye once the fighting is done.
As for women being “underestimated” in the military, that my friend is totally wrong. They are an asset, if they are a good solder they get promoted, they are assigned tasks that suit them. Women are often used in support roles, and it is often a choice they make. Though in some countries they are front line soldiers in typically equal amounts.
I just have to say, that’s not entirely true on the “withstanding cold” front – the higher percentage of body fat in a woman body’s lends enough of a boost there that in some parts of Korea, diving into chilly waters has traditionally been a woman’s vocation (or at least, that’s the explanation I heard for it).
http://www.cnngo.com/explorations/life/haenyo-divers-korea%E2%80%99s-women-sea-935630
Yeah, no, Crimor, stfu. Male and female humans may have tendencies toward physiological differences, such as the more muscle mass thing you mentioned above, but the whole point of this post (and feminism in general) is that it’s not okay to stereotype men and women based on socially constructed gender roles. There may currently be more women in teaching professions (in general – men still hold the majority in higher ed and specialist fields), which is due to society’s expectations for women to be nurturing and supportive. Likewise, the masculine tendency to solve problems through aggression is part of the issue being discussed here about machismo and masculinity. Men are encouraged to take a direct approach to problem-solving and prove their worth by showing brute force. Your claim, “Both [methods] work, they just take a different path to gain the same,” is pointless, as usually there are specific methods that work in specific problems. Encouraging gender-based techniques is inefficient at best and actually causes more problems than it solves most of the time. (When was the last time you actually saw someone fix a TV by hitting it?)
And if everything else you said wasn’t ridiculous enough, your last line was really contemptible. If you’re hoping to be taken seriously, making childish, ignorant “jokes” like that one aren’t going to get you anywhere.
I’ve just decided you’re what I want to be when I grow up. (Half joking, half not – mostly complimentary)
I’m in my 5th year of college doing things that I generally enjoy doing (once you get to the fifth year of anything it looses the new, shiny factor) that are also typically associated with guy things. I also happen to be perfectly happy looking sexy, sometimes in a ‘girly’ way. This causes problems sometimes, especially with everyone else in my class (male, I’m the only female) because while I’m more like them than not, they don’t know quite where to place me.
It’s a strange situation really, the masculinity vs femininity thing. Personally I think we should just do away with the words and apply merit where deserved based on the individual. It would be so much easier to call someone a half-wit if they’d stop taking it as an attack at their gender.
First off, love the site and the comic.
Secondly, I’ve been repeatedly impressed by your comments on the site. They’re obviously well thought-out – not some random words tossed out to appease an angry commenter.
But… I just have to disagree a bit here. Or maybe point out a lack of understanding. You said:
The sad fact of the matter is that the ability to get a boner is an essential part of being masculine.
Take a look at some porn out there… You’ll see PoV porn is quite popular and prevalent… And all you see of the man is an erect penis. Nothing more.
A guy’s penis is often referred to as his “manhood”.
If a guy can’t get a boner, it’s a dysfunction (even though there’s a thousand other ways to have sex) and needs medical treatment.
Masculinity, whether you like it or not, is a very superficial thing.
There is a reason why so many men out there are terrified of wearing pink, or carrying their wife’s purse, or doing anything that might be mistaken for being gay.
If you’re interested, Greta Christina’s got a few very good blog posts on the subject of masculinity, sexism, and male sexuality.
“The sad fact of the matter is that the ability to get a boner is an essential part of being masculine.”
Just as much as bleeding out your uterus is considered an essential part of being feminine ;) My point is just that as much as men don’t want to be wholly defined by their genitalia, women don’t want to be wholly defined by the presence, absence, or functionality of their ovaries.
There exist men in this world who don’t have penises. It’s true! Boner-having doesn’t mean so much to those men, and it’s pretty sucky for you to determine who is a man and who isn’t based simply on the havingness of a boner. If you lost your boner tomorrow, would you start calling yourself a woman? I’m guessing not.
Masculinity, whether you like it or not, is a very superficial thing.
There is a reason why so many men out there are terrified of wearing pink, or carrying their wife’s purse, or doing anything that might be mistaken for being gay.
It is superficial. It seems that it completely depends on how others perceive you.
The terrified emotion comes more from their own insecurities. I realized a while ago that a piece of clothing or frivolous action doesn’t change who you are.
Interesting read; I enjoy hearing about things from a different viewpoint.
Irregardless, worth it just for the link to the “Art of Manliness” site. I’ll have to check that out post-haste.
There is one thing that bugs me to no end when discussing gender roles: that men are equated with masculinity and women with femininity. That may have held somewhat true in the straightforward world of the fifties, but thankfully it isn’t that simple anymore. Our identities thrive on the freedom to be complex individuals with many aspects both feminine and masculine.
I personally subscribe to the wider, more spiritually definitions of those two poles, that the masculine is associated with direction, death and oblivion, while the feminine represents encapsulation, life and fullness. These are not loaded terms, and each of them would make no sense without the contrast given to them by their polar opposite.
Great post, Coelasquid. Your views on masculinity are also well-expressed in the comic, and I think I’m more or less in agreement with them.
I have a big peeve with the whole notion of a ‘masculine ideal’ and a ‘feminine ideal’ with conflicting traits, such that one is supposed to aim for one as a man and the other as a woman. There’s nothing in Rudyard Kipling’s ‘If…’ for instance that would somehow become bad if women did it. Sure I’m a man, but masculinity is not my identity – my identity is what makes me me, not what somehow makes me more like the average man than the average woman. In fact I’d go further and say it’s better not to use ‘manly’ or words like it as terms of praise. There is nothing inherently praiseworthy about being male or female, and being a good person does nothing to affirm or undermine your gender. Perhaps instead of calling someone a ‘real man/woman’, we should praise them for being a ‘real mensch’.
Interesting and articulate. I’m thinking of writing a paper about how being femme is denigrated in children’s literature in favor of, if not being butch, being more traditionally masculine—which fits right along with the fact that usually males are heroes in gender-neutral stories—and this has given me some food for thought.
I’d like to shake your hand, Coelasquid.
As someone who thinks women who are strong and independent are AWESOME, I too would like to shake your hand. More girls need to read this.
Last night, I was the only woman in a chatroom where we all had a “My Little Pony” marathon :3 I think things are improving.
That thing is contagious… Haven’t seen it myself, but know of several males who’ve fallen for it as well.
I don’t normally read these posts but this one was fantastic. Excellent job!
I think that all people, regardless of gender, should ultimately strive for independence. Unfortunately, I think a great number of us are convinced that we need someone of the opposite gender that fulfills the connotations of masculinity or femininity. And to that end, people are told from an early age to follow and adhere to a certain gender stereotype. So for transsexuals like me, it becomes very hard to maintain your public identity as a man, and yet still foster your womanly self. You worry and wish that people would accept the other part of you that doesn’t play by the gender rule book, but you know you can’t just up and wear a skirt to work because you feel like it. I’m literally the kind of person who will one day be dressing myself up like a girl, and the next be planning fishing trips with the guys. I think we should to some degree discard the Victorian notion of gender roles and simply let people do what they like. If a guy wants to wear a blouse, let him! If a girl wants to be a car mechanic, shouldn’t she be able to without comments like “dyke”?
All I’m saying is that in this time and age, I think we really need to reevaluate a lot of the old customs held by our ancestors, and decide whether they might be harming us more then aiding us.
Hey, great piece of writing here.
I don’t have much to add, mostly because I agree with what has been said but I can’t think of something right now that would approach us to an answer. But I do feel like I should talk about my sister.
She is the youngest child in our home and, while not that young anymore (she’s almost 20), she was raised in a house full of boys – three older brothers and the parents. She spent most of the time with me, the youngest of the trio, but each and every of us somehow changed her way of living. While my mother tried to make her more ‘effeminate’, she always somehow managed to avoid that and instead learned more from her brothers, who constantly talked about obscene things, pummeled each other and acted like little beasts. At around 7 years, she was stronger than me, loved the countryside where we lived, hated other girls and would rather throw herself in a lake than talk with other girls about dresses and somesuch. She even once managed to flee home, talking about “going on an adventure” and secretly drew a map, got her backpack and left home. After a couple of minutes of silence, we started to wonder where she went and it took us some half an houre to find her (shorty legs don’t walk too far).
Nowadays she is strong, doesn’t talk too much, does everything she needs to do and also what she wants to do and is quite unique in her own way. She simply hates to imagine herself walking around with the same clothing as the usual woman wears. And while this all means that she occasionally gets picked on by her brothers about “being manlier that most man”, I find traits on her that doesn’t make her a “macho”. She has a huge collection of plants in her small apartment, tends to a family of small lizards and adores cristals.
I know this does not bring up much to the question at hand, but even with her small quirks, I think that she is a good example of a person who goes by the motto “Eff the haters I do what I want”, and that is what she does.
(To clarify myself, I ain’t saying that she has reached this point just because she had three older brothers – I am just saying that even though she turned out to be a bit more different than most gals, she doesn’t feel the need to be like every girl she meets. She has her style and keeps to it.)
I was referred to this article by a friend, and (having never read any of your other work) I came in expecting a lecture. I had my good trolling mindset all queued up, but by the time I got through reading your post I knew I wouldn’t have occasion to make use of it.
You make an excellent point. There’s a polarization being perpetrated upon all of us by all of us, dictating (and assigning value judgments to) our concepts of masculinity and femininity. It’s a product of an incredibly complicated and interdependent cultural construct, and it’s conveyed to us subliminally. But the insidious bit is the fact that it’s so skewed towards masculinity as a positive force and femininity as a negative.
I do have one question, though. Could it be that, even without labels of “masculine” and “feminine,” our educational institutions aren’t preparing students to be self-reliant or confident in pursuit of their goals? As an American, I never learned to skin a seal or use a canoe in school, and what I’m asking is: is that not a deficiency? I think life would be a richer experience for all if every person, male or female, was taught a more comprehensive set of skills with which to pursue their own adventures. But here I’ve gone and changed the subject from gender identity to school reform.
At any rate, thank you for the article. I am ever grateful for fresh perspectives.
Ahahah I have to wonder how your friend was recommending the article to you that you came expecting a lecture ;P I’m glad that you enjoyed it though, I always think approaching an issue rationally is going to benefit all of the parties involved more than if you touch on it with fire and brimstone, or even not at all.
I think you hit the nail on the head there. It all starts with the schools. I say this because some people do not have parents and a molded the same way. I was never taught how to shoot or skin an animal in school that came after my schooling years and was learnt through trial and error. But your point stands to reason. Schools should teach valuable skills, I dare say if hunting was a class 99% of males would take it, and so would quite a few females. But they won’t do that as it is a masculine skill set. Even though it is more valuable than being able to write an essay on why my nose is green.
Most people live in cities nowadays. How is hunting likey to be useful? Fun perhaps, but I can’t see it being useful at all.
Hunting is a useful skill for many reasons, it teaches you patience. It teachers you to take good care of your equipment (ever seen what happens when a gun or rifle isn’t cleaned?) It teaches you to be delicate (when you skin an animal you want to keep the hide, and its worth more un damaged). It teaches you to get your hands dirty (gutting an animal). It teaches you to live your life (death comes to all). It teaches you mercy (if you would an animal you kill it with the next shot you don’t let it suffer). It teaches you to rely on your self, as only you can make your own kills. It teaches you to be gentle (you be rough with the trigger you will miss). It provides you with food. It is relaxing. It teaches you the value hard work (carrying a large animal 4 or 5km).
it has far more value as a skill to have than just these points, hunters know these things and some of them are specific to rifle hunting, but I think you get the picture from that. It is a useful skill to have. Plus a good hunter can go out in their spare time to hunt fill their freezer and live off it without having to buy meat. When I was living in a city I hunted for my food, I had a chest freezer and when I got low I’d go out for a few days and hunt me a feed. I live in the country now, so mostly I sell on what I shoot, road kill is easy meat just cut it up and stick it in the freezer…
I hope that told you how it is a useful skill… plus hunting is useful with vermin control, which effects the food supply in the cities, you get wild dogs, its the safest way to be rid of them!
A theory:
Traditionally men have held most of the power and responsibility. More upper body strength, larger size, and a greater ability to deal with mental punishment (on average) will do that.
Most people’s mental correlation equation shows a strong relationship between masculinity and desirable things, while feminine things are highly correlated with “weakness” and vulnerability – traits that aren’t terribly great for survival.
Most folks then simply make the leap from correlation to causation (incorrectly) and so masculine becomes a compliment and feminine an insult (more often than not).
Your hypothesis ignored things like the female body’s tendency toward greater endurance and lower body strength, as well as skipping over that there are quite a lot of traditionally feminine things that are fantastic for survival- food preparation, multitasking, childrearing, creating and repairing garments, social interaction.
You make a good point but the labels come from historical analysis and the points you brought up are often ignored completely until you get into people specializing in sociology.
Wrong, females do not have greater endurance and lower body strength. One would just have to look at the squat and marathon records to see that. It’s just that female inferiority in endurance and lower body strength is less drastic than in burst strength and upper body strength. The fact of the matter is, men are superior to females in most physical activities not involving carrying babies (which admittedly is a huge biological deal and the largest reason for sacrifices made by the female body in terms of athletic performance) and at least equal to them in most mental activities.
There is no justification to discriminate against women when there is no basis to discriminate against, but I hate it when people trot out old myths like “women have greater lower body strength so women are equal to men in athletic activities.”
The sooner people realize that “manliness” and “femininity” are cultural phenomena, the better off we’ll all be. If we combine that knowledge with the realization that culture changes (and that isn’t a bad thing) we’ll be in great shape.
Essentially, I feel like people are comparing themselves and their peers to outdated stereotypes, desperately clawing for validation (reminds me a lot of the ‘should’ article on the Art of Manliness). In our modern culture we’ve separated sex from gender, gender from reproduction, we’re working at separating gender from advancement.
I’m looking for the post-masculine, post-feminine world… post gender world.
Signed: A proudly effeminate man.
This is pretty great, though I have a couple of things to bring up (being both very interested in this debate in general and also being Very Concerned with language and use thereof):
Positive “feminine” and “womanly” traits, traditionally, are being caring, compassionate, supportive, etc. Being the “mother”, basically. A lot of the time, the reason people complain about women being written as “men with boobs” or whatever, is that there seems to be no space in fiction for active, capable protagonists who are at the same time traditionally “feminine” in more than just looks. Caring, supportive, sensitive characters tend to end up victims or eye candy.
This is partially why “acting like a man” is viewed as a bad thing, sometimes — women having to adapt to idealised masculine traits (even though they’re not actually inherently masculine, just socialised as such) to be respected. Basically, I’d like to get away from the notions of certain behaviours being masculine and certain others being feminine and just let people act however they want. But I think that’s what you were saying anyway.
On another note, I think the concept of manliness vs. womanliness is too fraught a landscape for me to be comfortable to compliment people on being capable and handy by calling them “manly”, since it seems to hark back to the constructed separation between men and women, between men being automatically strong and women being automatically weak. I’d probably just call them capable and handy.
The other problem with “manly” being used as a compliment is that it’s gendered, more than anything. This is, of course, a personal concern.
If you read David Weber’s Honor Harrington series, I would like that he has created a character that is very distinctly female while still being strong and capable but you are right that they are rare in fiction.
Thank you. ♥
Interesting. Makes me think of Margaret Mead, Sex and Temperament is an interesting read on gender roles in societies if you feel like reading some.
Generally I think most of this is as a progression of western civilization still catching up with how women aren’t chattel anymore and we can’t lynch people for not being normal anymore. Ideas take a long time to fade; it was a tenet of our civilization for so long that it hasn’t faded over night. Especially because we still hold things from the older culture in such high regard.
One comment I have on the tangent of women doing better: In secondary schooling, namely college, women just plain outnumber men. I figure it’s because women make up about half the population and working class roughneck jobs are handled almost exclusively by the other half of the situation. So it’ll be interesting as someone interested in sociology to see the coming times where most traditionally male-dominated jobs like lawyers, doctors, and businessmen are being handled by women and more couplings of middle or upper-middle class women making the bacon and working class men. How’s it goin’, traditional gender binary. Although that brings up a whole ‘nother can of worms about mens’ rights about what jobs are okay for them to do vs what women can do.
I read your comic via rss, and I admit, I thought you were a guy, I think mostly because of the title of the comic. Now I find out you’re not, and I have to say…
I think I’m in love.
I identify a lot with your piece here, and it’s not normally my stance to say anything if all I have to say is “I agree,” but here I am anyway.
I write a gaming blog. Often people refer to me as ‘him’ or ‘he’ in comments or in responses on their own blogs. Although I am not male, I am perversely and sadly proud when mistaken for one. To me, it’s a badge showing that I have not “feminized” my writing, and that people are showing it respect.
It just sucks that “respect” subconsciously equates to “this was probably written by a dude. This person sounds knowledgable, informed, confident, and secure.”
I think the other reason I assumed you were a guy (apart from the content and title of your comic) is that I perceive the comics industry as populated primarily by men, so it was pretty good odds you were one too.
I am *ahem* FUCKING STOKED *ahemhem* that you are not.
Thank you for writing this. You made my day.
I think your point that ” “respect” subconsciously equates to “this was probably written by a dude” has completely hit the nail on the head with what was bothering me enough to write this.
I guess I’m unusual in this, but I never thought you were a guy.
Look at it this way: if you found a comic of a bunch of hot women totally busting out of their clothes, you’d immediately assume it was drawn by a man, right? So, I found this comic, which is of a bunch of hot men totally busting out of their clothes, of course I immediately assumed it was drawn by a woman!
Comics with hot people of all sexes totally busting out of their clothes leave me worried about using the supposedly-gender-neutral “he” to refer to the artist.
I don’t really care if people know what gender I am, it isn’t a closely guarded secret. It isn’t relevant to the comic or characters at all, and I really hate seeing discussions regarding the comic go “doesn’t a GIRL draw this?” “Is she a HOT girl?” and then the rest of the conversation is people scooping up my DA profile pics. Or “Doesn’t a GIRL draw this?” “She must have penis envy”/”She must just be drawing self-serving fanservice”/”She must want to ber a man”/”She must be using that girl hanging out with the commander as a self-insert”. Fact of the matter, I just like drawing men. I think it’s fun. I also like drawing classic American muscle cars. And skeletons and zombies and mosters and deep sea creatures and old people with craggy faces and wild boars. I like to draw big tanky intimidating scary things with lots of solid structural connectivity. That’s just what I find fun. I just try to write well rounded characters based on what people actually act like in real life, if it was supposed to be some kind of wanky fanservice outlet I’d just cut to the chase and draw Space Marines making out with Gladiators on the hood of a 1959 Cadillac Eldorado every strip.
Great essay, you’ve raised some fantastic points and explained them eloquently, but I must raise an issue that I have. I realise this may have been unintentional, but you really have to be careful with the point that manliness is directly related to self-sufficiency. While self-sufficiency in itself is an admirable trait that all people should have, lining it up with the ideals of masculinity puts an unexpected strain on boys as they develop their sense of identity, as anything less is not only considered abnormal for their gender, but inferior to boot.
This is probably the strongest factor towards the gap between the academic results of the two genders; it’s not normal for boys to seek help or to find a task too difficult to proceed, they have to “man up”, stop complaining and get the job done. When failure is not an option, the only other choice is simply to not bother at all.
As for the “I do things for myself” approach to self-sufficiency, that’s also limiting a man’s lifestyle choices to the ambitious and nothing more. You can be a doctor, but not a nurse. You can be a five-star chef, but you can’t stay at home and cook dinner for the kids. It places unnecessary pressure on men to take charge of the situation, to become the alpha male or remain a failure. I believe this pressure is perhaps the main trigger that can lead a man down the path of depression, alcoholism and suicide, statistics of which have men outnumbering women by an alarming ratio.
I’m always wary of knee-jerk reactions to feminism that call for “men’s rights”. Men already HAVE rights. What we should be focusing on is men’s expectations, men’s role in society, men’s ability to give each other a bit of slack if they’re struggling with life and need to sit down for a bit. If that’s going to harm society’s view of a boy’s masculinity, then I think society ought to get a new perspective.
TL;DR – This whole mess is the result of society trying to define every one of a group of individuals as the same two-dimensional person. And when it’s mostly positive traits that are aligned with a group, it causes those individuals who do not adequately display those traits to suffer a crisis of identity.
Japan would like to have a word with you. I know many guys who like to watch the “cute girls doing cute things” genre of anime.
The hilarious thing about the “feminization” of schools is that this is exactly what schools were like in earlier centuries, when they were BOYS ONLY institutions, and nobody thought there was anything wrong with it. So apparently it’s only become a problem since girls started being allowed to be smart and get better at something.
No in earlier years the boys were taught “manly” subjects so that they could be the man of the house, the problem we have now is that they aren’t teaching the things that make the man of the house although a lot of it has been rendered useless by technology and not using slaves. It has none the less gone away from the need of the students and into equality. Making everyone score equally well means you are doing something wrong, both genders have their strong points and their weak ones from their biologics. One thing that got me was we were writing essays in chemistry for our exams, that should not be on! It should be a report on what happens not an essay on it, these things naturally favor the girls over the boys in writing style. And it just made making sense of the work harder… but it was equality… see where it becomes a problem now?
No. Each person’s brain has its own strengths and weaknesses. Socialization plays a major part in academic success, both on the individual and cultural level. This has been proven repeatedly with studies that, for example, found that girls had lower math scores when it was suggested that their instructor expected less of them. Any biological trends are just that – the same way that men tend to be taller than women. There are plenty of women who are taller than some men, because height is a range, and we don’t tell the women that they should be shorter.
Instead of assuming that boys and girls have different strengths, we should allow for individual strengths based on the persons. Making sweeping statements or trying to create gender-specific education ignores all of the people who don’t fall into those categories, discourages them from using their natural talents or pursuing their interests, and generally benefits no one.
Yes but that system is not currently do-able. Not while teachers are doing things as they are. Subjects should be elected by the students. And then the teachers teach to the strengths of the students, not the students study to the strengths of the teachers.
Right now the way the school system works, at least in my locality, is that students get a very limited set of courses to chose from if they are allowed choice at all. I had trouble in a mixed school because not only did the teachers favour the girls, but the subjects provided were aimed towards girls. I was forced into doing drama in amongst my leaving subjects because the school arranged the classes so that all the “male” subjects outside of Maths, Physical education and Science were on the same line. Meaning that I could only take one of the following, Agriculture, Primary Industries, Metal or Wood Workshop classes, or Mechanics, instead of taking any of those. Ideally I would have taken them all plus Maths Chemistry and English, but instead I had to do Maths, Chemistry, Geography, History, English, Drama and Agriculture, 5 out of 7 subjects main focus was on writing, and not in report style which is what I am used to, what I do when I am writing out how things are done. I make an effort on here to write out things because really most people wouldn’t read it if it was all one sentence lines.
Until we can teach the students better in a mixed environment, I say teach them in single sex classes, and studies have proven time and time again that single sex classes produce the highest scores in exams. Specially early in life, but also reliant to adult classes as well. I am yet to see a mixed class where gender isn’t an issue, usually there is some bias one way or another.
Well said (and fun stuff).
I have one little thing to add. There’s manhood as opposed to womanhood, but there’s also manhood as opposed to boyhood. What with men traditionally considered default people and women being sort of an exception that only applied when specifically brought up, it’s easy to get the two confused.
Being independent and taking the stuff that happens without getting thrown off course is basically a grown-up thing, more than a manly thing. Women being sort of childlike for life is just some of the gunk that sticks to traditional gender roles. Growing up when the time comes and taking charge of your life is a universal virtue to me, attached as it is to traditional manhood.
I’d have to say that I agree with your article.
At the end of the day, true equality is not going to come around until the feminists and the chauvnists stop being at loggerheads with each other. I’m a guy and I don’t really think the “alpha male” way of thinking is the answer but on the same foot it’s a bit insulting when someone who believes in feminism generalises you as ignorant and an imbecile due to having a male gender.
People just need to stop generalising and seeing such terms as a way of defining, people don’t need to justify or advertise the way they are. I know it’s not very related, but me and a friend were discussing an episode of a sci-fi where a one-off character who had no development throughout the whole episode made a point they were gay, which is understandable as the writer is very pro-gay rights. When I was asked if I had a problem I just said it’s not their allignment, just that I wouldn’t have though the character was straight either if they didn’t say anything on the subject. I never make assumptions like that because at the end of the day, is that kind of information really important to me?
I don’t see sexual preference as a defining factor, same as gender in general and any gender-based characteristics, I’m not going to treat a someone differently because of either of those factors, so to me those things are useless information if I want to really treat everyone equal.
How can I put it? Maybe secondary knowledge? Like, I know that you’re a woman, but everytime I read the comic I don’t think “My god, a woman made this!”.
Like you said earlier, you don’t draw attention to your gender in the comic either, it all relies on a mutual appreciation, it might seem ignorant or selfish to some, but I think it’s more beneficial and open minded than that.
At the end of the day there’s only three important pieces of information that define the way I usually interact with this site:
a) You’re the artist who works hard.
b) This is kickass comic you create.
c) I’m a reader who appreciates and enjoys the comic and wants to support it.
Who cares? If we stopped making such a big deal about issues, people would come to forget them. Trying to force people to change and constantly revisiting topics doesn’t make them go away.
Speaking as someone who is constantly accused of having penis envy or wanting to be a man for drawing a comic about macho dude characters, I just figure it’s more proactive to try to rationalize why that happens than it is to pretend I’m a man so I don’t get flack for the stories I want to write.
I tried not reading the comments but could not resist. Just… no. Every major social change dealing with human rights has happened because of MASSIVE PUSHING. Yes, societies change over time organically, but a human is loathe to up and change his world and sense of self JUST BECAUSE. It is not innate to most human societies to be completely fair. Every good thing done to advance human equality has needed convincing, cajoling, wheedling, protesting, to change laws and drill into people that THIS THING RIGHT NOW IS NOT GOOD OR JUST.
If you shut up and avoid the issue, you’re simply allowing every suffering and injustice to go silenced. The status quo is not caring or intelligent enough to listen to suffering people of their own accord if their needs and wants are different from the average.
You and many of the people in this thread make good points. Mind if I throw my ideas in?
Masculinity is much more fragile than femininity. What does it take for a girl to become a woman? Usually, staying alive for a decade and a half. First period or first bra, maybe, and society says she’s a woman. It will happen, eventually, through no effort. But for a boy to become a man? He’s got to do something. Have sex for the first time or kill something (in a war, maybe, or hunting deer). How many “becoming a man” ceremonies and rituals do we see around the world? Masculinity is something that must be worked at to be achieved.
Then that masculinity must be maintained. A man cannot be seen doing anything feminine while retaining his manhood. You think Master Chief would be considered a manly icon if there were cutscenes in Halo where he practiced ballet by himself in his room? No matter how many aliens he pistol whips he wouldn’t be manly if he painted his toenails pink. This is where machismo comes from. If someone, say a Manly Man in a bar, threatens another Manly Man’s masculinity then the challenge must be answered. Call a guy a fag (we won’t even go into the mixture of homosexuality and gender) and two things can happen: he’ll do nothing and be ridiculed for not being a real man or he’ll fight back (in a bar fight or insult match, maybe) in order to keep his masculinity intact.
Maybe two manly men are walking down the street and Manly Man One starts cat calling a girl across the way. Manly Man Two can tell MM1 to knock it off but that would bring into doubt his manhood; doesn’t MM2 like women? Or he can do nothing, making the woman feel uncomfortable but maintaining his identity as a woman-loving man. Think construction workers in New York reinforcing their masculinity at the expense of the women who walk by.
One slip and its over. If a man fails to maintain his masculinity heloses his status, he falls and becomes… a woman.
See how this degrades women, too? Femininity is considered a failure. I’ve known many women who pride themselves on doing manly things and staying above those other silly girls. These independent women are above vapid girl talk and fashion and makeup and all that. This, too, is an indication of the problem. Femininity is seen as something to overcome, a base that must be built upon.
Not only does this thinking equate to half of the human species being inferior but it also makes feminine ideals automatically less valid than masculine ideals. Being independent is a manly value, right, one everyone wants? Why is that automatically better than cooperation? In a society that values “standing apart” it seems to be a bad idea to “stand together”. In a recent comic, Leonidas and Kratos were in a staring contest. These were Manly Men who needed to show dominance. Being on top is valued more than being equal for them. Why? Imagine what a Kratos-Leonidas team could do! A god-killer and the Slayer of Ten Thousand Persians could work miracles but instead just fight each other for petty dominance. That, and an awesome comic strip.
Feminine ideals, since by definition aren’t manly, are things that would “bring down” a man. Just as a manly man can’t be insulted in a bar, just like Master Chief can’t be caught practicing ballet with toenails painted pink, a Manly Man can’t be found to adhere to feminine ideals. Cooperation instead of competition, compromise instead of domination, discussion instead of combat, these would instantly make a manly man stop being manly. Thus real men just will not do these things.
So this idea of manly men hurts women (since they are seen as embodiments of a failed man) and it hurts society as a whole. The one who dominates his way to the top without letting his feelings get in the way is cheered on (If you don’t cheer him on then what are you, a woman? Can’t have that.) while those who don’t want on top but would rather foster a community are given funny looks. After all, there are more statues to soldiers than there are to community organizers.
Anyway, to sum up, I agree that the masculine/feminine divide hurts men. It is exhausting trying to keep up appearances and living in fear that one wrong statement could leave your manly friends to abandon you. It hurts women because, for the most part, they are seen as less than men if they aren’t masculine (and if a woman were to become a tomboy, then she’d be seen as better than women who haven’t made the change). It hurts society because it favors the masculine side of things at the expense of the feminine. Being on top is valued more than being on the same level.
I don’t think this is something that needs to be encouraged or tweaked. It needs to be eliminated altogether. That’s why I’m a feminist. What makes it so hard, though, is that getting rid of it means taking the idea of superior masculinity away from the Manly Men. They can no longer be considered better than others. And seeing how Manly Men work so hard at maintaining their masculinity (even making Men’s Rights websites) they will actively work against breaking this system down (in this system, remember, fighting for a shitty world with you on top is better than conceding your position to make a better world for everyone as a whole).
Saying that “being a woman is defined by biology while being a man is defined by your achievements” is pretty much the exact point I’m talking about through this whole article, (and why there is a whole paragraph talking about why I feel patronized when people say men are defined by their accomplisments and women are defined by shedding the lining of their uterus once a month) and why I’m surmising people are generally more impressed by things that are considered “manly”. Women like to feel proud of their accomplishments too.
Just the fact that women who are the least bit proactive about things like this apparently have to be “tomboys” is saying something.
I’m proud of my penis, and you should be proud of your boobs.* Neither of us are defined by our bodies, but our bodies are a part of us.
* I’m not accusing you of not being proud of them, mind you.
The social constructs are gender are as fluid as ever these days, and I find that to be a good thing since more people can be happy with who they are. I don’t think most people realize their gender is an entity completely separated from their biological sex. As I just said, gender is a social construct, and what’s manly or feminine varies from one culture to the next anyway. I think if you live a life that makes you happy the rest will fall into place.
“mildly insulted insulted”
Oops?
ah yeah, I was rewrording this until 4AM, I’m sure there all little quirks sprinlked all over.
I think this is very well said and good points all around. I’m going to try to be short here. I won’t read the comments JUST IN CASE – don’t want to get upset tonight. I’ll bring out one point that feminists keep saying over and over again: sexism is not just about women, sexism is not JUST about the expectations society lies on women.
Sexism is damaging to men and women both and a feminism-inspired world would not be some sort of amazon paradise – on the contrary, it would be a more equal place for women AND men. Doing away or lessening societal expectations of gender behaviour allows men much more freedom as well and relieves inane, oppressive and depressing expectations of MANLY MACHO DUDENESS and what have you. Can’t really demand equal treatment and freedom from fucking impossible expectations for yourself and then turn around and… demand those same ridiculous things from others. Funny how that works, eh?
BUT: why do feminists consider woman rights more a priority than men’s rights? Even though women make up about half of the world population, they can still be considered a minority in that they don’t have institutional power and respect. Men have privilege over them as they are the status quo (example: women are adjusted and expected to consume and like men-oriented media, while men are not “used to” women as prominent figures and main leads in popular culture), as white folks have institutional privilege over black, straight and gender-normative folks have over LGBT and so on. This is not a point of debate, pretty much. And if you go “BUT IT MAKES ME SAD THAT YOU WANT ME TO THINK LESS ABOUT ME AND MORE ABOUT OTHERS”, you are a flaming douchetruck and go away.
So. Long post is long. I wanted to bring this up from the perspective of a femi/humanist just as a reminder/fyi. Mission accomplished, I guess! Also: I would happily call this thing you’re talking about either gutsiness or determination instead of manliness.
An excellent and polite discussion, which is rare on this topic. I’ve always been frustrated by how manliness is obsessed with surface trappings. Physical strength is only of marginal use in modern society (unless necessary for one’s job), and unbridled aggression is more likely to put you in jail. In my view, there is nothing more “manly” than being a damn good father and raising happy and healthy sons and daughters. Similarly, anyone who would abuse his girlfriend or take advantage of an intoxicated woman is the furthest thing from a true man. At the core of the concept of manliness is, indeed, developing a core of strength and determination. But this is *never* at the expense of others, and someone who can’t control said strength is a failure. A real man (or woman) has nothing to prove, especially not by harming or degrading others. This is why Navy SEALs don’t get in bar fights; if you can’t walk away from a pointless altercation, than you’re an idiot with no self-control.
That being said, I wanted to bring up a few examples of fictional women I consider extremely strong characters who wield that strength while still being solidly “feminine”. Not “men with boobs”, but following their own path. Firstly, Nausicaa from the manga series (Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind). Particularly in the longer story, you see that she is incredibly strong and capable (as a fighter too), but rather than getting mixed up with choosing sides in pointless conflicts, she has her sights set on solving the root problems of the world and bringing peace for humans and the insects. She sometimes is overwhelmed by her compassion, but quickly brings it under control and stays focused. She barely even has a love interest as well. Princess Kushana, from the same manga, is pretty badass as well.
Secondly, Delenn from Babylon 5. While I (and all right-thinking people) love Ivanova, she’s a bit closer to the “manly lady” archetype. Similarly to Nausicaa, Delenn is trying to solve ancient conflicts and bring peace to her people and the rest. She shows incredible strength of character, is never weepy or at a loss so a man can fix things for her, and (though not a fighter) has some badass moments herself (“Only one human captain has ever survived battle with a Minbari Fleet. He is behind me. You are in front of me. If you value your lives, be somewhere else!”).
Japan is an intriguing source for kickass women as well. A mixed bag, since they typically fall in love with a shlubby protagonist and act like jealous schoolgirls. On the other hand, they are often the most powerful and interesting characters (I’m thinking of Tenchi Muyo here). Of course, Miyazaki makes almost every movie about a girl, and it never feels forced or “princessed-up”. I wish Pixar could broaden its horizons a bit. I’ve always enjoyed female main characters, since I tend to care about their fates slightly more.
Anyway, great essay, great comic. I too never thought about the gender of the artist, though it makes sense a little in hindsight. In a way the young woman is our protagonist, since we learn a lot about the Commander through her questioning.
Great piece — especially the part about the paradox of how masculinity, the characteristic of being strong, gets made out by soi-disant men’s right advocates to be simultaneously so fragile that ostensibly-weak women can take it away from a boy or man by waving a finger.
Are you familiar with Julia Serano’s book Whipping Girl? She has a lot to say about the insidious campaign against femininity (in people of any gender), and it’s well worth a read.
Thanks for writing this really diplomatic and thoughtful piece. I think I identify with you and your experiences in a lot of ways – no one wants to be the sum of their parts, male or female.
I was and still am a nerd, I read more in a day than my classmates (male or female) did in a week. I am a gentleman, I didn’t see a need to ogle or objectify, I did not need to constantly talk about sex or conquests. And because of that I got a lot of crap from my male peers, a whole lot, I still do. I personally never felt unmanly, but this is because I had good parents. There are a lot of problems with the public school system, but this gender issue has more to do with the role-models a kid has in life. My father was a soft-spoken man that worked hard to provide for us and never fought unless he had to. This includes the time mom got into a drunken fist fight with some guy at a party. My father didn’t whoop on the drunk he just held him back without hurting or getting hurt. My mom 5’5″ a 120lbs soaking wet was outspoken and ready to fight. She once punched a Highway patrol man in the mouth twice for calling my dad a “son of a bitch” and it took two more officer to handcuff her and get her into the car.
With parents like these, its no wonder why I felt secure in my manhood. A kid learns what it means to be a man or woman from his role-models. You can’t find a role-model at school where you see 2-3 adults a day for few hours. You can’t find a role-model on T.V. where I fear too many are forced too. You have to find role-models in real life.
That’s very true, I mean, my dad is a mountain man adventure naturalist who unabashedly plays warcraft and D&D and collects swords. And since my mom has the disadvantage of not being able to walk, he does his share of the housework too. And I guess that’s what shaped my idea of what respectable men are like from the earliest time kids start forming that concept.
I would argue that you can find role models in school, though. If a person can make a lasting impact on you in a few hours a week, they’re obviously doing something right. I know my dad, now in his mid fifties is still very close friends with his old teacher from seventh grade. And the kindergarten class my mother taught before she had to leave the school on disability asked her to come back twelve years later as the guest speaker at their high school graduation. If you are an inspiring person, you are bound to inspire somebody, no matter how briefly you meet them in passing.
Wooooooooooooooooooooooow. I thought this was just a really funny comic.
Can’t believe you were ‘hiding’ (not really hiding but whatever) that brain of yours, this is brilliant.
I apologize if I misinterpret or anything, because I don’t have exactly enough free time to read this whole discussion, but still, there are a few statements I read here that made my eyes widen a little.
Marriage being the bedrock of society? I think this vision lacks a bit of subtelty.
Marriage was the foundation of societies for two reasons: firstly, because of private property. What a man would gather in his lifetime, he’d want to pass it on to an heir to avoid his efforts being lost. And before DNA tests, as a man, how could you possibly tell if a child was yours? Well, you’d be certain if you’d have a woman, bound by a civil/religious institution, that had been faithful to you all her life. Marriage, as such, was important, because it allowed a continuity in private property that wasn’t broken by death of individuals. Capitalism wouldn’t have come to existence without marriage, as the capital itself wouldn’t have been legitimately passed on so it could grow some more and fuel industrialisation. As such, marriage was founding for civilization.
Secondly, it had an important role as the family cell was the base of everything. A child could not get the support it needed if it was born outside marriage, as it had no assured father. Same goes for an unmarried woman: how can you cater to your needs if you can’t work? By preventing children and women to die in the streets because no man was there to support them, marriage was founding too.
However, if you look closely, you’ll see that there is a flaw to both these arguments: they both require women to be infeodated to men. If women can work, earn their bread and raise their kids, they don’t need marriage. Since it is the case now, marriage isn’t the foundation of society anymore.
As for the society crumbling because of women rights…I must point out the fact that Quebec, the canadian province in which I live, became a social democrat government before it even thought of giving women the right to vote (it did so quite late compared to other democracies). It’s not about women encouraging unnecessary expenses: it’s about a society’s political priorities. So let’s see what we have: societies that give rights to women and help the needy, with two statistics following themselves. Wouldn’t be the type of society the reason why women are emancipated and the poor are helped, rather than having the two concepts influence one another alone? I think it just might. A society that values equity will want all of it’s individuals to have equal chances at succeeding to whatever they want to achieve. That means helping people out of poverty, and giving equal rights to all, men or women. And equity didn’t wait for feminism to exist: it’s more of a white anglo-saxon protestant idea developed by 18th century englishmen.
I’d love to write more on-topic stuff about masculinity and feminity, but time is running out. Thank for this great essay anyway, it was a very interesting read!
I think you mean this as a response to Demonspawn, I was a little confused at first because this comment didn’t seem to be attached to his thread :P
Well, it looks like everyone is discussing the biological and social matters related to being manly or feminine. What I think is also interesting is the impact of the vocabulary on individuals. Saussurean linguistics demonstrate that any language has a basis on relatively random symbols. Yes you can trace them back through older languages, but is the entity known as tree no less an arbre? The point being that for communication to be usable, people had to agree upon universal definitions. Yes there are varying ranges of understood expressions, or symbols, in dialects or sociolects among other groups. Really, the point is that the gender role association in language has resulted in the masculine neutral form. I’m not going to pretend that I know all of the impacts of this but certainly it plays a role in making it insulting for most males to be called feminine when in fact the word is merely meant to generalize certain characteristics that are stereotypically (and originally biologically) associated mostly with women. While there are biological limitations that impose the role of male and female, I think that manliness and being feminine are not mutually exclusive ideas. Most people only look at the world through the symbolic code of their primary language. Everything in existence is really part of a continuum though, languages of any king define certain things through what they are and are not. In English river and stream indicate size while in French fleuve and riviere depend on if the water falls into an ocean or another riviere. Of course everyone knows that men and women can’t really defy their genes, there is only one way to create a new generation (at least right now). The real battle is overcoming stereotypes associating certain behaviors to certain people, reworking who or what is indicated by manly or feminine. The only real way to overcome this is to either have people realize that the linguistic symbols are not the only truth or to create new neutral words replacing current terms. Perspective, perception, and the definition of a characteristic are what I believe matter most in situations like this. (Feel free to disagree, just tell me why I’m wrong, I may be. This is simply what I have deduced from my current experiences. I have to say that I have really enjoyed reading all of the other responses.)
I think you’re absolutely right from the standpoint of society’s ability to accept the gender ambiguity of manliness and femininity but from a functional standpoint I think there are deeper issues.
It’s not that I think women should be a certain way and men should be a certain way, it’s just that if you’re looking at a family surviving in this economy/society we’ve created, someone has to earn and someone has to raise the kid(s). Again I’m not saying the woman should be raising the kids and the man should be earning, I think that part is totally meaningless since both genders can do both tasks perfectly well. The real issue is that without addressing that need and purely approaching this as a ‘everyone should be able to do what they want to do’ thing, it leads to a conflict with the equally important ‘if you have a child you are responsible for making sure he or she is well looked after’.
So when people ignore the second bit you get into situations where both parents are working, and while the child can grow up in that, sure, I have friends who did, I don’t think that’s really fair to the kid. You need a parent around the vast majority of the time. I’m not saying there needs to be a parent constantly hovering over the kid but, someone has to be around and an arbitrary nanny or whatever doesn’t cut it. I feel like the real gender role issue that exists now isn’t so much can they be changed, but, can we accept that a change in one gender’s role necessarily requires a change in the other gender’s role, if only within the context of an individual relationship. This all holds true for gay/lesbian couples as well obviously, no matter what you need someone in the traditional ‘woman’ role and someone in the traditional ‘man’ role. There’s certainly some grey area and mixing as to what each entails, sometimes the ‘man’ in the relationship needs to take care of things that are traditionally part of the ‘woman’s role but as an overarching idea of what responsibilities there are I think it largely holds true.
I think you’re vastly overestimating the efficacy of a single-earner household in the U.S. today. Is it different in Canada? My husband would love to be a stay-at-home-dad when we have kids. It ain’t happening for us, and I think it’s not a very strong possibility for most families. Both parents can and should raise children as individuals, not as men and women raising boys and girls. The suggestion that having a non-working parent can solve gender problems fundamentally ignores reality.
I think that this is a good comment.
The question of what it means to be a woman has not received the attention of poets and philosophers the way its counterpart has. And when it has been asked, the answer is likelier than not to be something demeaning stifling, or at least something more in the context of romance or family than of life in general.
I sometimes wonder if it might be decided that “traditional masculine virtue” is just as limited and regressive as “traditional feminine virtue” turned out to be – its championing of authority, obligation, dynamism, and strength a mirror of the emphasis for woman on servility, dependence, reaction, and purity. While there’s certainly much to be said in favor of any virtue, whether traditionally masculine or traditionally feminine, being pressured into a given set of them is undesirable. Rigid complementary values can make a robust social structure, but not fulfilled people.
There is the matter of traditional masculinity being loud and conspicuous; if a man finds a way to live with confidence in whatever way he pleases, he is often unseen and uncounted. By contrast, the woman who has successfully chosen to be what her great-grandmother could not have been is the more visible one (as a side note, this means it’s easy to overlook the women who sincerely prefer the domestic sphere).
On the question of education, it’s at least partly a matter of the sex of the teachers. Exposure to an adult man can help a boy develop a more well-rounded understanding not just of manhood but of adulthood in general. He sees in each prominent male in his life a reflection of possibilities of what he might become. Deprived of such examples, it is predictable that immature, macho behavior will be how he presents himself.
Jung postulated that people learn to conceive of their own sex as human early on, but only later – in some cases, never – attain such appreciation of the opposite sex. I don’t even know what’s relevant to this conversation any more, so that’s a good sign for me to stop writing and just submit the comment.
You’re… you’re a woman? I had no idea….
Well I didn’t knew you were female, but after this article I most definitely do. Not because you state it so, but because this article is way to long and repetitive for what it actually says. So in my polarised stereotype world, you’re female or a politician.
Okay by me. I’m sorry you don’t like reading too many words in a row, but in my experience anything you can’t put on the internet in 140 characters or less needs to be repeated ad nauseum and reworded every way imaginable unless you want poeple to wildly misinterpret the point of it. The people who are only going to read one or two sentences have a better chance of seeing the right ones that way.
Wow, you cared to answer. Anyway, I simply don’t like hearing/reading the same stuff over and over again. I’ll guess I’ll just stick with the conclusion next time. My point is, all you’re saying is:
I don’t like the common steorotypes associated with male/femal in context of self dependency. My reason for this is, that self depency doesn’t come with your gender, but with your mental/emotianal capabilities.
Ok, you stretch it a bit with other male/female relationship stereotypes and the typical educational vs. community background and add some personal touch, such as by linking to some sites you like. But this is far away from a reason to write an essay about it. Especially since there are tons of gender studies about this and related topics.
As a personal note, I find your point valid, but the hole thing isn’t such a issue in my surroundings, since the genders are seen more and more equal in all but some emotional/physical aspects, which shouldn’t be tried to overcome anyway in my opinion.
This is by no means meant to be a scietific document, it’s an opinion piece on a subject I am very frequently asked to give my thoughts on. I figure if they’re asking me for my opinion rather than reading university papers on sociology and gender studies, I may as well tell them what I think. And then reiterate it as many ways as possible because any words you put on the internet are almost guaranteed to be misinterpreted by someone.
Um, I know more guys that repeat themselves than girls. This is the future generation. Panic time.
*GGGG*
I’ll guess it’s more the life game factor, since game experience may differ. As do stereotypes and sarcasm.
Thank you for that link! I need those manly skills. (It’s funny how they’re mostly just survival or DIY things.)
I think both sexes are bound to stupid stereotypes in different ways, though as you mentioned the female ones tend to be more patronizing. Also, I can’t tell whether this is because of the individuals or the system, but has anyone else noticed that there just aren’t unattractive (in terms of body shape) women in TV or film, generally speaking? Even when the role calls for someone to be unattractive?
It does seem to be improving, even in small steps. I know people will say what they will about Glee, but there are a lot of extras and secondary characters in that show who look like regular teenage girls (Even the female football coach who seemed like a straight up comically butch stereotype at first has had a few episodes devoted to how people precieve her for being so defeminized). I completely argee with you and have discussed the point at length with people, we don’t have female equivalents to Bill Murray or John Goodman or Steve Buscemi who have seen the same sort of success that they have. Even personality wise, there is a very broad spectrum of what men in the media are allowed to be, but a relatively narrow one for women.
All you can do is make stuff snd put it out there. Create, endorse, consume, be the change you want to see in the world and all that.
There are a few who escape the confines of “beauty=career”. Frances McDormand isn’t Hollywood-beautiful, nor IMHO is Sigourney Weaver (though she’s very striking and beautiful in her own way). Tilda Swinton is beautiful, but in a very odd transgender way. But your general premise is, of course, true. Ugly = gorgeous but wearing glasses.
I think if you look in the right places, there have been plenty of women in media that don’t fit neatly into degrading stereotypes. Interestingly, there were quite a few in the late 80’s and early 90’s:
Marge Simpson has proven, time and time again, that she’s more than capable of making it on her own. She’s explicitly stated, multiple times, that she’s a stay-at-home mom because she likes taking care of her family that way.
Rosanne showed that women don’t have to sit around looking pretty, they don’t have to be dainty or delicate, and that factory work is a perfectly valid way for women to take care of themselves and their household.
Murphy Brown showed that, while it has its difficulties (which, by the way, would still be there even if she was a man), it’s still possible for a single mother to have a successful career.
Interestingly enough, TV women nowadays seem to be a dumbed down version of Marge Simpson: a stay-at-home mom whose competency, while evident, seems to exist only to highlight just how much of a blundering manchild her husband is. While this is poor writing, it’s an accurate portrayal of how some men feel about their relationship: “I’m a clumsy dolt of an idiot, but you– you can actually do things! In fact, you don’t even need to actually do them, because your competency is just that self-evident! I wish I could be as wonderful as you.”
Marge Simpson is a pretty terrible role model if you’re taking the past decade or so into account. As the deviate from they original “Average American Family” thing they started out with, she has become an unrepentant nag and despite episode after episode of her threatening to leave Homer after he does whatever the last straw du jour is and endangers the family in some way, she won’t stay away. It’s almost gotten to the “battered spouse” level of “HE’S HORRIBLE BUT I’M SURE HE WILL CHANGE”. As far as “everything being a dumbed down Marge Simpson, she’s just another in a long line of nuclear family Honeymooners wives. It’s a formula that’s worked this long, studios don’t like to spend money on things that deviate from proven formulas.
Though I would like to add, the women who really want equality and aren’t just out to hate on men don’t really like the “dumb husband with capable wife” thing either. Suggesting a man is incapable of taking care of his kids or cleaning his house is just further enforcing that the women are expected to do that, and showing a male character acting like a dolt who needs his wife to keep him in line is as bad as making a woman a damsel who needs protecting. I’m sure the whole trend started as a self-satirizing thing male writers started implementing to poke fun at how much their wives really did for them, but… well, it turned into a formula and like I said about formulas before, studios like to get their teeth into them. I think its also worth pointing out that as much as men are often delegated to being the buffoon character, they’re also more often than not the heroes. It’s not a problem that one gender is the hero or the dolt or whatever, the problem is that one gender has a wide spectrum of roles and the other does not yet. Both men and women should be capable of being the hero or the goofy one or the douchebag one or the dumb one or the spoiled one or whatever the story calls for. That’s how it works in real life, I’m just waiting for the media to catch up.
But anyway, there are always going to be exceptions to the rule, but as of now they are few and far apart. Where is Rosanne now? The only acting roles she’s had in the past decade were a walk-on in My Name is Earl and a cartoon cow. Look at the success her career has seen VS what John Goodman’s been up to lately, he has more characters credited to his name in 2011 alone than she’s had since the 90’s. Murphy Brown ended 15 years ago, I refuse to believe you would suggest that the by virtue of a show with a strong female existing two decades ago there is no problem today. I’m just saying if you take the male actors who are obviously not there for the point of being sexy and the female actors who are in the spotlight for the same reason, you’re going to see a big discrepancy in the number of individuals and the success they see over the course of their life.
To be fair, I did say that there “have been” strong female roles, and then mentioned a specific time frame. I suppose my point wasn’t that there isn’t a problem now (you’re right, there is), but that there is precedence for trying to buck the negative portrayals.
As for the capable housewife / dumb husband formula, like I said, it’s bad writing, plain and simple. For precisely the reasons you pointed out. My point there was just that men tend to put their significant others on pedestals, which distorts their perspective. While, objectively, both the man and the woman are equally likely to be the dumb/goofy/douchebag one, men oftentimes can’t see those qualities in the person that they’re with. I could be mistaken, but I believe the term is “love blind”.
Which any person can be equally susceptible to. I’m sure you’ve heard the “but he can change!” excuse from battered women. Female characters very frequently written in the “stuck with a jerk because they couldn’t see their flaws” trope. Not saying men aren’t too, but it’s not hard to find an example of girl-with-a-jerk-until-the-nice-guy-saves-her in the media.
Re: Origins of the Name of MGDMT
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLnWf1sQkjY
More of these essays, please! They’re really excellent.
Wow, lots of opinionated people here. I just wanted to say great comic, and an interesting observation. :D
GO GO GADGET EQUALITY!
wow, that is probably the best, in depth anaylisis of the meaning of masculinity I have ever read. While it is wonderfully thought out and well placed, one has to wonder, what sort of free time do you have that allows you to think this all through?
Very little, I’m just becoming so accustomed to not sleeping, I get insomnia if drawing isn’t happening and I try to turn in early.
Aww, that bites. I have a few friends that have to deal with that and it doesn’t sound fun.
I don’t really have the training to offer any comments in the psychological or theological spectrum without coming off as a spectacular dunce, so … my own perspective comes mostly from personal experience being socially ‘punished’ for not fitting the stereotypical macho role. Youngest child, with three older sisters and a mother who was clearly “in charge” of the family. And then taking up mostly sedentary hobbies, like arts, crafts, music, cooking, occasionally trying to learn to sew.
Suffice it that growing up was a bit of hell for me, because I utterly failed to display any “masculine” characteristics outside of a periodical need to shave and a tragic lack of fashion sense. Lord knows my dad tried to instill in me a love of sports, carpentry, and other things that required heavy lifting, but in the end I was a pansy, as my brother enjoyed reminding me. School mostly involved being gay-baited.
So arriving at college and getting acquainted with young women who could all individually beat me to a pulp (and an ex-girlfriend who often did physically assault or publicly emasculate me), writing passionate essays about how awful it is for a woman in the world . . . I dunno. I never really got it. Probably just me, though.
I can offer up a similar experience except on the opposite side of the spectrum. I was brought up not to be girly or ‘sissy’ as my dad called it. Because of that I was more of a risk taker with vehicles and just all around adventuring which was about equal or higher than most of the males the same age. I always took carpentry, small motors/electricity, and survival classes when ever I was given the option in high school. At the same time, like you I was accosted for not being normal. I wasn’t accepted in any of the girl cliques nor in the guy activities which really left me at a social disadvantage. I’ve come to the conclusion that I despise gender roles because in groups where people put little emphasis or no emphases on such ideals, I find I fit in just fine.
Obviously, we should band together and fight crime. I volunteer to drive, if only because I get carsick otherwise. :D
And admittedly, I did have a handful of friends during high school, mostly girls who also didn’t fit the traditional gender role (they, too, could probably beat me up in a fair fight). So it probably wasn’t as bad as the melodramatist in me wants to make it sound. It did admittedly get awkward when I wound up becoming the “come-out buddy” for various friends, but I still probably put worse of a spin on it than I should.
I sympathize, and agree that gender-policing can affect guys even more forcefully. However, I think guys who fit in reasonably well are presented with a lot of advantages compared to women. Not to diminish your experience, though. Obviously, the best thing would be no enforced gender-roles for anyone.
And I’d like to emphasize that girls who abuse their boyfriends are just as bad as abusive guys. The fact that it is less common is not relevant.
Yeah, I would have to agree with you on this one. I think what a lot of guys don’t get when they think women are just whining when they talk about inequality is the difference it makes to be harassed by someone more imposing than you. I understand that life is hard for kids who are different, and also that most kids ARE different in some way. Eveyone gets picked on as a kid for a variety of reasons, some get it more than others, some let it break their spirits and spend the better part of their adult lives nursing emotional wounds, some use it as motivation to grow a coat of armour and be a stronger person. But when we get to adulthood, it’s generally accepted that picking on people for childish reasons like that isn’t acceptable and people should respect each other, so if someone is jeering into another person, they come of as the lesser of the two more often than not.
However, it still seems to be acceptable to harass women in public for some reason. In the city where I went to college, it was so common for groups of guys to shout drive by appraisals of women and heckle them while they stood at street lights that it was a harrowing task just to walk from my house to the grocery store and back. The one time I acknowledged them by flipping one off while he stood at the streetlight shouting at me to come over and get into his car, the group of them took it as a go ahead to slowly drive down the road beside me, yelling about what a stupid fat bitch whore I was while I walked home. And apparently that’s considered socially acceptable for some reason, because there seem to be a lot of guys who so it. I’ve been grabbed by guys while I was riding the subway, and I have to say it’s one of the most demeaning things I’ve experienced. If it isn’t okay for a strange woman to walk up and slap you out of the blue, it isn’t okay for you to walk up and grab anybody.
Toronto has this guy who exists as something of an Urban Legend. He runs classes as a “sex-guru” teaching men the way of pickup art by passing on his ideas that all women were biologically designed to be raped and writing guides on his website for how women can win over their boyfriends by acting more like dogs (yes, dogs specifically, the article was regarding men respecting dogs more than women, and saying the only way women can gain that trust and respect is by acting like dogs). He has gained some bizarre subsect of agressive followers who identify themselves as “Dimitri’s Devils” and follow women around downtown Toronto handing out business cards and asking for sex. I know there are a lot of guys who, upon hearing that say “well suck it up and take it as a compliment”, but they don’t seem to get the difference between “recieving an unwanted sexual advance” and “being stalked through the city at night for half an hour by a stranger asking for sex”.
I am not by any means the kind of person who looks like a victim, or even that much of a target. I have been told that I come across as intimidating at first glace, I’m fairly average as far as looks go, on the heavy side, and have had multiple acquaintances assume I was a lesbian from first impressions (because being self-reliant and boisterous apparently makes women lesbians just like being sensitive and quiet apparently makes men gay), but the majority of men are still bigger and stronger than I am. And when they become agressive, it’s degrading an intimidating. I know that anyone tearing into another unprovoked is going to debase them, but there’s an extra level of helplessness there if the other person is more physically capable than you. And, while I am fully aware that there are exceptions, it is a general rule of thumb that most men are bigger and stronger than most women.
the tl;dr version is that absolutely no one feels good about being degraded. I fully acknowledge that men who are subjected to domesic and sexual violence and other similar abuses are hit just as hard by it no less deserving of help than women are, but women are almost expected to face some form of gender-based harassment. They’re told that they’re lucky if they only have to deal with nonviolent confrontations of the sort I described earlier instead of outright voilence. I know that there are always going to be people out there who act like disrespectful assholes on either side of the fence, I just wish it was considered equally shocking, serious, and intolerable for everybody. That encompasses men who feel like they aren’t taken seriously for such claims and women who are told they should expect that behaviour alike.
Okay first of all, It is bad that abuse happens regardless of who the abuser is. I didn’t think to bring it up as I perceived that to be a relatively standard ideal. Second to go with your catcalling experience and really what woman hasn’t gone through that? I want to know their secret. But what you said reminded me of a investigation of public humiliation between the two sexes by showing the public what goes in in frat houses and recording their responses. Of course when bystanders saw what was happening to men, they instantly intervened. When it was woman, people would actually stop and start recording it on their cell phones!! For women it was okay to be accosted like this unless they were flat out bawling because obviously it’s okay unless she’s being weak like that. So utterly infuriating and ridiculous.
Like you said, every woman has been through it. That’s my point, it’s not special, it happens to every woman. I think that’s a problem worth making noise about. I also think it’s a problem when men are harassed and people don’t take it seriously. Things can only be considered socially acceptable as long as society continues to accept them.
You seem to be just agreeing with me and making it sound argumentative. Men and women both face different kinds of harassment, with women it’s more frequent but there may be a better chance that someone will get involved (No guarantees, mind you, in my personal travels, I have seen one experience of a woman being harassed and having someone come to her aid. Your mileage may vary) Men do not have to go out into life expecting to be sexually harassed, but when it happens they’ll probably be less likely to have strangers come to their aid. It is no better to invalidate what women go through and say they’re whining when they want it to stop because it “happens to all of them” than it is to invalidate the more infrequent cases of the same thing happening to men because it “barely ever happens to them”.
Slightly off-topic but I thought you might find it funny:
I passed by a guy who was leaning against a fence in my city neighborhood and he said something to me (I don’t even remember what it was now, but your typical leering not-friendly sort of comment). I’d had quite enough for one day and I turned around to him and I says:
“Really? Do you really think that is going to work? Do you really think it makes me attracted to you in any way?? REALLY??”
… he looked pretty well mortified after that. I think I even said something to the effect of “why don’t you think about that next time”
Now, me? I don’t look intimidating in any way. Which is another reason I found his reaction funny. He never spoke that way to me again.
I was recently watching a DVD of Kevin Smith giving a Q&A, and one guy in the audience yelled out to ask if Smith’s wife had “sweet titties.”
His response was, “Yes she does, sir, and you just guaranteed that you’ll never see them. Do you think women really respond to that? ‘Lemme see dem sweet titties.’ No, sir, they do not.”
I ended that last paragraph wrong, now that I look at it. I made it sound like women’s troubles in the modern world were insignificant, when to be honest it was meant more as a gripe that many of the essayists downplayed or denied the possibility that men might have image problems of their own. My bad on the wording.
And my perspective in college was probably kinda warped anyway, seeing as most of my friends were in the medieval club. There was something of an unspoken rule in medieval club that a lady was always right, was entitled to win nearly every competition, and deserved only the best of treatment from everyone. Call it a very romanticized view of the code of chivalry; there’s nothing quite like studying historical misogyny to put someone in the mood to tip the scales the other way for a while.
In the mean time, I should have complimented the essay from the start. You make a lot of good points throughout, and it’s always good to see someone put that much thought into what gets said. Kudos.
Ahaha, I can still remember back in the fourth or fifth grade, the first time I read a medieval fantasy book that was centred very much around the princess character being the strong capable one who was always right and better than the guy at every turn and constantly degrading him because she just knew he was gonna do something stupid and have to get saved again and thinking “That’s not fair, I don’t like her”. I remember picking up the second book in the series (which I cannot for the life of me remember the name of); reading the synopsis on the back that the two had gotten married and had a kid and became king and queen, but now the king got himself kidnapped so his go-getter wife has to go save him while also being a capable mother and running the kingdom; and just put it back on the shelf. I’m sure the intent was to inspire young girls to be go-getters and offer an alternative to the old save-the-princess trope, but all it taught me was that I don’t like it when I see people who have to boastfully SHOW YOU JUST HOW TOUGH THEY ARE by debasing other people. Maybe that was a better lesson than the one the author intended.
Hey, sometimes the unintended lessons are the best ones you can learn.
Why you brought up the mra (men’s rights movement) I have no idea. You don’t tie any of those ideas into the essay, don’t seem to understand where were commingle from, and just tell us its worse for women. (Just so you know I and many others at the mra hate hearing “man up”)
“. However the exaggerations of the male characters seem to be based on the idea that men should be big strong lone wolves who live life the way they want to while the exaggerated female characters seem to be more based around the idea that they should look nice for men.”
Are you kidding me? The phrase save the princess (princess being practically any woman because women don’t have to do anything) doesn’t cone to mind? And don’t get the idea that just because she doesn’t have to do anything, except maybe menstruate and look pretty, she isn’t respected. That damsel in distress was obviously valuable enough for him to risk himself and then he tried to protect her purity and virtues and blah blah blah. The point is that it is just assumed that she is good but she has not proven herself or actually done anything. Believe me I wouldn’t mind a woman trying to save me just because I can pee standing up. In all truth I like the idea of having someone that could make me stronger but I can only believe in what I’m doing, that its real, if they would be willing to do the same. If I ran in a burning building to save my wife but she didn’t do the same years later; the marriage is probably done.
“It seems to me that it’s considered an “effeminate” quality to obsess over looking pretty and pleasing people, but it’s “masculine” to say you don’t care what makes other people happy because you’re going to go out there and take what you want out of life.”
Wow, how argumentative is that statement without ANTTHING to back it up. Since when the hell were masculine values about serving yourself? Ever heard of protector or provider? That is servitude and trully at the expense of the person doing it. That is true sacrifice and complete BS when it is not mutual. Makeup and homemade meals don’t even come close to that sacrifice. Sorry but you have got the servitude backwards.
I just don’t feel like explaining it to you but the way men are defined is that are constantly having to prove themselves (to others) just to gain respect, something women are given for practically nothing. At that point many of your romantic notions of manliness fly out the window. To force one group to earn respect but to give another group respect just for breathing is wrong. Men end up extending themselves and not complaining for people (women) who wont do the same.
Men work longer, take more risks, retire later, and yet women end up with more resources.
I will gladly relinquish my manliness if I feel I am being extorted and id be happy to work for someone who works for me (such as an equal non-helpless wife).
Without getting into details men could learn to complain and get help and women could learn to put themselves out there more.
I wasn’t bringing up the Men’s Right’s Movement, just the message board I was linked to that got me thinking of this. I wasn’t using it as a point at all, just an introduction. could have just as easily been “I was eating spaghetti last night and got to thinking” Except I wasn’t eating spaghetti, I was getting emails from the message board.
I’m sorry that you seem offended, but I think you’re misinterpreting my meaning. I’m not sure what exactly you’re taking issue with when I say exaggerated male stereotypes in video games tend to be extrapolated from the idea that men have to be strong standalone warrior types. I am speaking specifically of the Kratos or Duke Nukem types (really, all the kind of guys this comic ends up being about) who’s whole schtick is that they are better harder faster and stronger than everyone else, built like a tanks, and going through life in a storm of profanity, violent rage, and casual sex. When people bring up the point that female characters in video games can be damaging to the way people feel about real life women, they are met with the claim that these sort of testosterone charged male characters are just as damaging to men. And I can’t argue with that. Kratos is a terrible role model. I love games like this because they’re ridiculous and over the top and they make me laugh. I think it’s just as funny when Bayonetta attacks people by having her clothes fly off everywhere as I do when Kratos has a poolside threesome for red orbs, but no one should treat Kratos like a role model and look at him as an example of what real men should be just like no one should look at any of the myriad of exaggerated female characters and act like they’re what women should be.
Complaints that female characters are sexist and damaging more often revolve around the fact that they are overly objectified and impractically dressed for their situations. And while there are plenty of male characters who also end up impractically dressed, impractical male attire usually ends up being a tank top where body armour and a helmet would be appropriate and impractical female attire ends up being high heels, elaborate chest pieces that cover the areola and little else, or even panties that lace corset style up the asscrack where body armour and a helmet would be more appropriate. Both types of character are sexualized, but one comes across as more of a sexual force than a sexual object. Like I said, each damaging to people who might for some reason be looking at video games for role models, but damaging in different ways.
You seem to be talking about “save the princess” style games as though they’re something I’m trying to defend. I’m not sure where you’re getting that from but I think you may either be misinterpreting what I’m saying or projecting issues you want to cover that I haven’t really gone into at all. As I said, I support equality. I do not like the trend of debasing men to make women seem more rational anymore than I like the trend that women are all princesses that need to be saved. When I said “Everyone deserves to be the hero or the villain or the comic relief or the love interest” I mean that I think female characters should be able to be goofy or dumb or fat or ugly or blatantly in the wrong just as much as male ones are. I think a lot of men don’t realize that most women are just as insulted by the “stupid husband can’t live without his wife” trope as men are. I don’t consider it equality until any character can be pulled through the dirt just as much as any other, be just as capable or just as incompetent, and the writer won’t be chastised for it because of the character’s gender (or race, religion, whatever else). That’s just a sign of treating people as people, and not as a representation of their entire subculture.
I think you aren’t reading into my comment about femininity being about pleasing people and masculinity being about taking what you want out of life the way I intended either. That may be a mistake in wording on my part, but I thought I had reiterated my point in enough different ways it wouldn’t read the wrong way. What I mean is that masculinity seems to equate to being capable, a person who can take care of themselves is considered a manly individual. They can take care of their families as well, and that also relates to being competent and capable. I’m not sure why you’re acting like I said looking pretty is a comparable sacrifice to taking care of your family. You seem to be missing my whole point that I believe femininity is seen as a negative trait by so many people because it has come to be synonymous with shallow, frivolous matters in many people’s heads. The concept of masculinity is respected because it represents accomplishment, while femininity seems to carry more connotations of attracting and living off other people’s accomplishment.
I had hoped that I had made it excruciatingly clear in the essay as a whole that I am in favour of women being just as self sufficient and responsible for their own well being as men are expected to be, but apparently I failed to communicate that message to you so I apologize.
“What I mean is that masculinity seems to equate to being capable, a person who can take care of themselves is considered a manly individual”
And you are ignoring the control it has on men and how often they are pushed into bad dispositions that amount to servitude. Men should not he pushed to serve at the threat of masculinity, a man’s human dignity. Its only a tragedy that men are sent to their deaths in the draft or told to work until they die and not complain.
I brought all that up because you were saying masculinity was about being capable and taking care of yourself while feminity was about serving others. That distinction is not true as I’ve already explained. To summarize the problem (not with your article), men are really only being heroic when they are not having their masculinity (humanity for men) being threatened if they don’t act heroic. If not they are just being used and treated inhumanly.
“while femininity seems to carry more connotations of attracting and living off other people’s accomplishment.”
That’s only what I would argue because I see women doing that and getting away with it. They get away with it because they aren’t “losers” or “deadbeats”; they aren’t seen as privileged moochers. I think this may be starting to change, except ridiculous alimony and affirmative action.
I get what your saying I just wanted to point out in my post that men are often “used” by masculinity (which is why I hate “man up”) and that the princess is not always seen as useless (rewards are undeserved) even though that is what she is.
Human up you say, I’m fine with that.
“Serving others” was probably a poor choice of wording, I just mean that “feminine traits” are often considered the traits that will attract men to them, like looking young and pretty, and maintain a happy home. Men also have to worry about appeasing others, and that’s where a lot of the pressure to act macho and showboat comes from, but as I said, Most people consider it “manly” if a person decides they’re secure enough with themselves not to care what people think (As I mentionmed above; “A macho individual is the type who needs to constantly boast and showboat about their strength or popularity or sexual prowess. A manly person doesn’t need to rub his accomplishments in people’s faces because he knows he’s strong and cool and sexy.”) For example, a “macho” guy may jibe at the masculinity of a man who decides he’s going to let his wife work while he stays at home to take care of the kids, and a manly guy would just rise above the ribbing and be a damned fine stay-at-home dad. If a woman shows no desire to strive for so called femenine traits such as looking pretty and vulnerable and netting a man to take care of her, preferring instead to follow their own interests, build careers, learn to live as capable independent people who do not need to be taken care of, or even join the military or other such institution to serve their country or community, they are very frequently told they are acting like men, accused of having penis envy, or even accused of being lesbians (I imagine under the assumption that any woman not actively trying to “catch herself” a man is clearly gay)
I’m not really sure I can discuss this with you much further because you seem to be either wildly misinterpreting the things I’m saying or perhaps only skimming them and missing bits and pieces crucial to my meaning. The whole point of this piece is that I think everyone should be encouraged to develop a sense of independence and not make it their goal to be carried through life by other people.
I’m just not taking you characterization of the situation at face value. It is just incomplete and becomes inaccurate.
“For example, a “macho” guy may jibe at the masculinity of a man who decides he’s going to let his wife work while he stays at home to take care of the kids, and a manly guy would just rise above the ribbing and be a damned fine stay-at-home dad”
See, your just appropriating the term to give the exact perspective you want to give. And when you are redefining the term to support your persective you are once again mischaracterizing the situation. You are clearly idealizing masculinity as apposed to looking at the reality of it and how it plays out.
I get some of what your saying but you are idealizing things and exaggerating; and yes, “serving others” wasn’t the best choice.
The only point I ever really wanted to bring up is that men shouldn’t be told to “man up” out of sexist pressure. I am however fine with telling people to human up for the sake of men and women.
“The whole point of this piece is that I think everyone should be encouraged to develop a sense of independence and not make it their goal to be carried through life by other people.”
That’s a good thing.
I’m getting a little carried away with my comments on here, but this is one of the few that I initially wanted to make:
It’s been well addressed that media’s exaggerated gender role stereotypes are insulting to women, but it isn’t as well addressed that they are actually dangerous for men. We are implicitly expected to prove that we’re capable of taking on the sort of stuff that Kratos, Duke, Sten, etc. take on. I don’t know any real guy that can do that, and I honestly doubt you do. You’re right; they’re horrible role models, but they’re just the sort of role models society expects us to have.
Interestingly, Duke Nukem was designed to mock those stereotypes the same way that your comic does, but became popular because everyone misinterpreted him as being an ideal representation of them. The developers just went with the more commercially viable version after that.
You’re not expected to punch a mountain to death or kill a dragon, but you should be expected to take care of yourself. Man or woman, move out, get a job, pay your bills, stand up for what you believe in, take care of yourself, don’t expect other people to do everything for you. It is as dangerous to tell men “you have to be able to do this all alone and can ask for help from no one” as it is to tell women “find other people to do this stuff for you. If you aren’t pretty enough to net someone to latch onto you are a waste of a person.”
On a bit of a tangent, it seems off to group Sten in with Kratos and Duke, two of whom are parodies of over-the-top machismo, while the other is a disciplined, honourable art appreciator. Translating Sten’s character arc into something more real-world amounts to something like “take responsibility for your mistakes, don’t be afraid to challenge your beliefs but stay true to your morals.” and I would say that yes, I do expect people to prove that they’re capable of that.
My apologies, I’m only really familiar with Sten through the comic. From the sounds of it, that’s something I’ll have to remedy.
As for the first paragraph, you’re right, we all should be expected to be able to take care of ourselves, men and women alike. Men in today’s society, however, are expected to kill dragons and punch mountains to death. That’s why these characters exist. The same social subtext that tells girls that they should aspire to be the princess-in-the-castle, tells boys that they should aspire to be the Arnold Rambo Nukem Balboa The Cimmerian to save said princess from said castle, so that they “live happily ever after.”
And you’re right: that’s dangerous to everyone involved.
You find Sten trapped in a cage for the crime of killing a family of farmers, which he does not deny and deeply regrets. He turned himself over willingly to the authorities, so when you find him you can either convince him that joining your party will help him attone for what he did or just leave him there to die when the darkspawn sack the town. He starts out very aloof and will not give satisfying responses to your questions, but as he warms up to you, you find out that his outfit of soldiers was attacked and killed with him being the only survivor. When he awoke, his sword was missing, the family that had taken him in had no idea where it was so he killed them all in a blind panicked rage. In Qunari society, the tool of your trade represents your soul and returning home without it means that you have abandoned the Qun and are to be executed on sight. So as long as he is without it, he is a deserter to his people and can never return home. He deeply regretted what he had done to the humans who saved them over something that they had no hand in, and that was why he turned himself in to the chantry to be punished by human law.
He comes from a very rigid society described by the lead writer as the “militant Islamic Borg”. they have very clear-cut customs and gender roles, so if you’re playing as a female warden, Sten will question why you are allowed to be on the battlefield, but ultimately accept that you know what you’re doing if you manage to win him over. He won’t respond positively to you in conversation if you try to be the nice guy and pander to what you think he wants to hear, the only way to get approval is to tell him that you’re the boss and you aren’t here to do what he wants. All of the characters have gifts you can give them to win their approval, while others like shoes or drinks or jewelry, almost all of Sten’s gifts are paintings because he has a profound respect for the control and discipline the artists display.
@ demonspawn
“Societies which free it’s men from traditional gender roles are committing instantaneous suicide. Without men willing to sacrifice themselves to defend the borders, to work the “shit jobs” with must be done to make civilization possible, with the freedom to buck the constraints on their violent tendencies… said society would implode in short order into anarchy and/or be conquered by an outside force which stuck to traditional gender roles”
Why not have women do those things? How much harder and shittier was life 10 kya? What about when women used to die during labor but have to take the risk anyways? And you say men have violent tendencies but what about women who commit half of all DV? What do you think would happen if men weren’t dealing with all the stress of being the sole provider or were actually supported and weren’t told to do a bunch of risky stuff. That would surely minimize men’s violence.
I don’t think the point is to just free everyone of responsibilities but have the genders share more rights and burdens and allow people to go where they “fit”. Why not let a woman be a mathematician or a man be a nanny? As long as they are good at it you are only increasing involvement.
Btw it is a tragedy if the only way to get people guarding the front lines is to just tell men to do it or there worthless.
You’ve already admitted that you’re an MRA, so I’m not directly addressing you with this comment. Anyone who is reading this who doesn’t already know, fondueguy’s claim about women committing half of all domestic violence is bullshit. In heterosexual partnerships, men and women are almost equally as likely to hit a partner; however women experience much greater degrees of physical, mental, and emotional distress from abuse than men. Men will likely respond with escalated violence to an initial strike from a woman. More women are hospitalized or killed by men in their lives. Women who strike are most often responding to verbal abuse or threats from men.
I’m not even going to address the outlandish excuse that men commit partner violence because they’re too stressed out, because that’s the biggest bunch of victim-blaming I’ve seen since the claim that a 13-year-old girl shouldn’t have been hanging out with Roman Pulanski if she didn’t want to get raped.
You don’t want to victim blame yet you demean male victims of domestic violence as not being effected much and you just blamed men for women’s domestic violence. What disgusting hypocrisy. Thank you for showing your unashamed and bigoted feminist colors.
Wow, great piece. Reading such a rational, level-headed article made me forget (however briefly) that I was connected to the internet.
Thanks for this.
It’s… always strange to me when femininity is shown as weak or somehow worth less. To me, the gender roles for men and women have always been as protectors and nurturers. Both roles take incredible strength, intelligence, self-sufficiency, and endurance. Even with the advancement of civilization, neither role has become any less vital. Their forms have simply shifted. Families need both protectors and nurturers, and to a degree it is still ingrained in our psyches.
But I think that strength and self-sufficiency are attributed to masculinity because it’s the more obvious- it’s much easier to see self-sufficiency in a fight in which weakness is failure, than in the skill of slow and steady creation.
……………………….. <3 Can I marry you?
You know how to skin a wolf.
There is no understating how awesome this is.
Please continue being awesome.
I’ll be honest, I’m replying to your original essay. I read some of the replies for context, and I thought many of them were insightful and thought-provoking. I’m something of a nerd, I love taking care of children, and I’m not really into sports. At the same time, people tell me that I am one of the manliest people they know, because: a) I have a vast repository of general knowledge about things from building a raft to setting a compound fracture (from the nerdery), b) I don’t start fights, but I end them, c) I have my views, but I’m willing to listen and consider what people say.
So, to me, being a man is not about going out and killing a bear with my mighty gonads, it’s about having the skills and temperament to help your fellow humans, and willingness to do so.
In addition, I do somewhat agree with the statement that the school system, at least in America, having a bias towards girls. Things like sitting still, listening, and playing nice are valued, especially in the younger grades. I have met very few 4 to 10 year old boys who can sit still for hours on end, or not roughhouse during recess. I asked my young cousin (he’s 4) who the smartest kids in his pre-school class are, and he immediately rattled off a list of girl’s names. When I asked him why he picked those children, he replied that his teacher said they were. My cousin is a devious, crafty, and over all, very smart little boy. I somehow doubt that neither he nor any other boy in that class is any less intelligent than any girl. Not saying boys are smarter, of course.
And one last thing to say on my little ramble is that conventional manliness makes sense, in regards to evolution. Men were out doing feats of manliness like killing gigantic beasts and trekking all across the landscape, and if you weren’t manly enough to cut it, you died. It’s only been recently that people haven’t had to rely on raw muscle and martial prowess to survive.
So yea. There’s my say.
I think the subject of schools depends very much on the teachers as someone mentioned earlier. There are teachers who think a successful class is a quiet class and just assign flat textbook reading and questions. Maybe girls have more aptitude at that sort of thing than boys, but honestly I don’t feel like anyone thrives in that kind of environment. Successful teachers will make a class engaging and interactive. I had a history teacher who more or less spent the entire class putting notes on the board, but all of it stuck with me because he would elaborate on them as though he was telling you bar stories about the wild exploits of his old friends and kept everyone in on the conversation. The grade 12 physics class my dad teaches is almost entirely built around building projects like moustrap cars or little contraptions that climb ropes, or trebuchets, and whoever builds the contraption that outperforms the others gets the highest grade. He gives his biology class the choice between dissecting pigs or spending the week out in the woods to identify 50 types of local plants for the final unit, and has a whole lesson that involves around building and racing little lego cars to help explain the concept behind natural selection.
Totally agree about what makes a good classroom – most people learn best when they can use their whole bodies, ask questions and discuss the topics, apply them personally, and reinforce concepts with hands-on skills. Very few actually get the most out of either reading textbooks or listening to lectures.
However, it’s not really a matter of girls being better at sitting and minding the teacher. Little girls are rewarded for sitting quietly like dainty princesses and little boys are expected to be rambunctious and active. Girls are trained to go to their rooms or do quiet solo activities when they show a lot of energy, and boys are sent to run around outside. If there are biological tendencies linked to gender in the brain, they are simply that, and saying “you’re a boy, you should be rambunctious” doesn’t help the boy who likes to sit quietly, and vice versa for girls.
(Er… hi! I’m replying to a lot of comments and haven’t directly replied to the post yet. It’s awesome, and so is your comic, which I just read and now adore.)
This is besides the point but complete inactivity even hurts adults, yet for some reason we want boys to sit all day.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=can-sitting-too-much-kill-you-2011-01-06
But it’s okay to want girls to sit all day?
Have you by any chance read the book “Stiffed”, by Susan Faludi? I think you’d find it quite interesting. It relates a fair number of points similar to yours, and goes a lot into the crisis that manhood is facing in modern America. One interesting point it makes is regarding a man’s percieved superiority and control over his situation. If he admits that he wants to change how he is percieved, he also admits that he is not in control (because if he was in control, then it would already be how he wants it to.) This means that he looses his status as a man, and thus has no right to change the system. Interesting stuff.
Okay, there’s a lot of essay posts on this page. This is not school. Stop it.
I agree with most of the points, but where I live most of that isn’t a problem. No one cares what you do or say, as long as you don’t want something.
Also I’m gonna make a point that asking for help when you need it is perfectly acceptable no matter the gender. Depression is worse for guys because most of them feel they need to toughen up or what ever. Don’t be that way, it’s hard enough getting a boyfriend without you all killing yourselves.
Oh, fish. I just wrote a mini essay.
And there are plenty of women who feel like they need to toughen up when they have a problem and feel like it means there’s something wrong with them or they aren’t pulling their weight if they need to ask for help, just stewing on the issue until it hits the boiling point. They’re told that they’re acting like men for behaving like that. And that’s kind of what the whole point of this essay was.
“Depression is worse for guys because most of them feel they need to toughen up or what ever. Don’t be that way, it’s hard enough getting a boyfriend without you all killing yourselves.”
*EPIC FACEPALM* Wow. Okay. You’re a moron.
:)
I’m glad you wrote that.
You’re a cooler cat than I previously suspected <3
Thanks for this post. I enjoyed it. Too many comments to read, but the initial ones (aside from obvious troll being obvious) display a lot of thoughtfulness.
Whether a comic that plays on masculinity tropes would naturally attract a gender-aware audience, or whether there’s a big crossover between gender-aware audiences and people who like the video game jokes, I can only guess… :)
Thanks for writing this. It’s nice to see there’s a woman out there who understands this very notion- equality as in EQUALITY, not “I’m a feminist and I want to be ‘equal’ to men but I don’t want to be drafted, pay for my dates, etc” or “I’m a ‘feminist’ and I hate men, they should be below me” and so on. Obviously, I am exaggerating a bit, but I have encountered such women as this. Unfortunately most women who claim any type of feminism, whether they are as well-informed and well-spoken as yourself or just the opposite, are vilified immediately. But I say, brava. I am also a skirt-and-corset-wearing but self-confident, independent, and passionate human individual and if more women thought like you, things would be a hell of a lot better.
Hi! *waves* I’m a feminist, and I want all people to be equal in the sense that they deserve respect for their individuality, whether they present as men or women or none of the above. I don’t like the draft and I’ve never not paid for a date. I also don’t hate men, and I haven’t actually encountered any feminists of the type you describe. If you’re interested in learning more about feminism that helps everyone, I can recommend a few websites.
I’ve run into women like that. They’re not exceptionally common, but they certainly do exist. I’ve met women online that were perfectly fine with me, but then got mad and flat-out refused to talk to me once I confessed to my dangly bits.
Sign me up for the draft- doubt any of the forces would take me, unless they’re crazy desperate. It was only recently brought to my attention that not only are women not required to sign up for the draft, but they CAN’T. Personally, I’m all for it. I’m not going to be considered equal unless I have the same responsibilities as penis-bearers my age, so c’mon, lemme sign up.
I also don’t hate men. I’m terrified if they’re not closely related to me, but I don’t hate them. 3 brothers, all younger; I’d have a horrible life if I hated men.
I’d love to join the debate, but I don’t think my knowledge about gender roles and related issues is good enough for that. Also, some of these comments are giving me a strong Dave Sim vibe. And that’s freaky.
Just want to let you know this is an awesome essay… article… post… whatever. It’s awesome. =]
Also, had no idea you’re a woman. That’s very cool.
I have to admit the very first comic I read of yours, I pegged you for a girl. By the 3rd I was certain. It’s not that I really cared whether or not you were but because I could relate. I still find it striking how many people are shocked to discover that I’m female in the online world; or that in RL how many people can’t grasp the fact that I play video games like God of War and the like. I hang out with a lot of guys so I know how they perceive the feminists of today. The ‘new’ feminist movement or since there’s about seven branches I’ll restate that. The loudest of the feminist movement (gender feminists as one author called them) has now harmed those of us who tend to be low key because it’s no longer a damning issue. Their quest no longer seems to be of equality but to achieve superiority. Which of course and rightly so has caused a backlash. That said, despite what Demonspawn has stated, you’re not spotlighting yourself in a bad way. Instead you are addressing how most of my peers feel on the subject. So basically, thank you for voicing this observation and opinion.
Cheers
Thank you so much.
i loved reading this because it reminds me of how my guy friends tend to just tell me im just a guy to them or how they forget im a girl simply for liking comics and games just as much as them. Apparently that means my tits just disappear into thin air.
And then my girl friends who tell me im to much a of chick to be a guy. the utter confusion i go through all the time.
I was laughing at your awesome Commander Badass vs. Commander Badass comic when I saw this article. Now, usually, like using Penny-Arcade as an example, I don’t read their news feed as it tends to be a rant about nothing I have any interest in. But this caught my attention as I’ve always been curious about this myself.
Femininity, anytime I ever heard about it, always has negative connotation, while manliness had quite the opposite. Finding a girly-girl is now a rare thing, and even then, society tends to treat them with chagrin or as a stereotype. And we all know how that turns out. Just something to mull over.
Now I don’t think I am a manly-man, as manly men go. I don’t like football, I’m not good at sports, I enjoy writing, reading, and drawing (though I’m not any good at it). Superman and me go way back, too. But yet I take initiative, get things done. That’s what truly makes me a good example of a man. But is it manly? Ladies sure can do the same. In fact, I could probably think of more good examples right now. So really, being ‘manly’ or ‘girly’ shouldn’t mean being overly effeminate or buff and good at sports. It should mean being a positive example of one’s gender, regardless of what they do.
On a sidenote, Kelly, your comic is hilarious and intellegent. Keep doing what your doing.
All I’ve been thinking about while reading your essay and the comments following it, is the movie “Princess Mononoke”. It’s one of those few Miyasaki movies doesn’t really have a female as the main lead. But saying that, there isn’t just one protagonist, there are quite a few, who are both men and women working for their own ends. They are all badass and vulnerable in equal measure.
I like the idea that people should be judged as people, and not by their gender, or the roles applied to them. There’s a reason they do what they do and think what they think, and it hardly has anything to do with “Because I’m a man/woman, dammit!”
Thank you for posting this, it was great to hear your thoughts on the matter. Masculinity as a topic is complicated as hell but important to analyse, I think (I wish more people did so).
Came across this TED talk the other day on the same subject – I don’t know whether you would agree with all of it, but it was interesting to hear a guy talk about how being expected to ‘man up’ had affected him and his parenting (especially a black dude, which probably makes the social pressure to be manly even stronger).
It means a lot to me when a person I already admire shows that they have great, influential ideas that I totally agree with as well. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for taking the time and effort to write such a frank, yet tactful work. Writers with such reasonable and deliberate thought as yours are the people that, in my utopia, are influencing society.
Amen.
I just wanted to say I thouroughly (spelling?) enjoy your thoughts on this subject so much that I have bookmarked it and your blogpost about mary-sues is also bookmarked keep up the good work both in writng and in comics. ;D
The more I think about topics such as the one you wrote about here, the less convinced I become that transsexuality is a real thing.
Now, I know that’s not true — the experiences of hundreds of trans people and many years of psychological research kinda trump the feelings of some insecure fool on the internet — but I find it pretty difficult to draw a clean line between “trans” and “tomboy”. And from what I can tell, the transgender community can’t draw it either. They just hold up their big, welcoming umbrella and say that anyone who is uncomfortable with their assigned gender can come stand under it if they like.
So if the line is that blurry, exactly where does “misogynist woman”/”independent woman” end and “transman” begin? Would we even have trans people if gender expression was limited to which folks get to grow babies inside their own bodies?
That is a very interesting point, I think it’s one that we’d have to get the opinions of transgendered individuals themselves to properly address it. I know I have spoken to some who were more fixated on feeling wrong in their bodies, like men who want the hips and breasts but still want to retain a fairly masculine role in society.
Yeah, a lot of trans folks — the ones who go on to transition, anyway — would say that it’s about feeling “wrong” in their bodies. But there are two problems with this:
1. A lot of trans folks have written that calling them a “[gender] mind in an [opposite gender] body” is an oversimplification. The psychological element is an important one, and I can see why that would really complicate things — how can you ever be certain of something as intangible as a thought? Especially if you’ve studied psychology and know how easily your own brain can make you believe something that isn’t true.
2. Not all folks who identify as trans want to change their bodies. Or maybe they do, but they only care about one or two features — one transman whose transition I followed on YouTube refused to take testosterone because he didn’t want to lose his soprano singing voice. So if being trans is about wanting a different body, do these folks — especially the former group — well, logic would suggest they aren’t trans, even though they are.
(By the way, sorry if you felt obliged to respond because my comment ended in a question. I was (and still am) just kinda rambling about something that’s been on my mind a lot lately, you don’t have to give your opinion if you don’t feel like it.)
I think I posted a reply to your original comment that didn’t get threaded with it. Oops.
Anyway, the [x] trapped in a [y]’s body narrative is indeed problematic. I’m not sure what you mean by “how can you ever be certain of something as intangible as a thought?”, though. How do you (specifically, you, not the rhetorical “you”) know you are your gender? It’s not something that is a logical proposition. I can’t show that “‘Someone’ is the gender that they are” is true or false. It’s an aspect of your subjective reality.
The reasons why many trans people do not wish to change their bodies often relate to economics and/or their dissatisfaction with the body modification options available.
I really recommend you do some reading on the subject because clearly you have an interest, but you’re trying to reinvent the wheel. Part of the confusion here is that you seem to be conflating gender role, gender identity, and subconscious sex. These are all distinct, though related, concepts, and if you read any Julia Serano, she explains the difference quite well.
I’m faily sure I have a grasp of the concepts of gender role, gender identity and subconscious sex. The first is the behaviour you’re expected to display. The second is how you choose to behave and how you describe yourself. The third is how you feel.
I don’t doubt these are all real. I’m just sceptical of the underlying feelings and assumptions that cause them because, frankly, I don’t believe that my subconscious sex is something I was born with. I’m willing to believe that some folks are less of a blank slate in this regard than others, but I don’t really buy the idea *everyone* is born with absolute knowledge of their internal sex.
Actually, ignore me. I’m rambling stupid bullshit again.
Oh, no need to apologize, I thought it was an interesting point. I think it’s really a matter of different people all having different experiences in a similar delicate situation, so suggesting that any single experience is the exception or the rule is probably going to make a lot of people feel threatened.
Hello, trans guy here, driven to respond!
The difference between trans guy and tomboy is right here: I ain’t a tomboy. I have little to no ability with group sports, or cars, or any of that. I’ve been told over and over again by people around me that I’m just not masculine enough to be a guy. (They seem to think this will “fix” me. It hasn’t.)
It’s not entirely a body issue either. Yes, I have issues with some parts of my body that cause me distress, but other parts, I’m totally fine with.
But I’m still a man. Why? Because that’s how I identify. Period. I’m not a butch girl. I’m not a tomboy. I am a MAN. What my body may or may not look like is irrelevant. How manly or womanly I act is irrelevant. Who I want to bang is irrelevant. I don’t even know what the hell a man actually is, because I can find no definition I agree with, but I still know in my gut that I am one, and no amount of feminist and postmodern literature has managed to persuade my hindbrain otherwise. Sure, it’s totally fine to be a tomboy, there’s nothing wrong with that… but that’s not what I am.
The difference is purely in how someone identifies, in my opinion. And you can be both.
“Someone”, are you saying that you’re coming to think transsexual people’s genders are less real than cissexual people’s genders? And if so, why?
The thing is, a lot of scholars have thought really hard about the questions you’re asking, and it might serve you well to find out what they have to say about it. Julia Serano is one of them (see the other comment from me); there are many others.
No, that’s not really what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that cisgendered people are the ones whose genders aren’t real. Sex — as in whether you have a penis or a vagina — that’s real enough, but gender? The feeling of “being” a man or a woman? Not quite as cut-and-dry. It exists, that much is obvious, but how much of it is innate and how much of it is the result of being trained to behave a certain way when you’re a kid by a social structure that relies heavily on the assumption that man and women are inherently different? Maybe trans people — or some trans people, at least — are those whose personalities just clash horribly with the role they’re forced to play?
Thanks for the reading suggestion. I guess I need to do some reading on this, although philosophy frustrates me. It raises more damn questions than it answers.
Well, it’s complicated because, like you said in another comment, “trans” is a very inclusive term.
There are trans people who don’t have any feelings of bodily “wrongness”. It’s just that the role that goes with their assigned-at-birth gender is not right for them. And the socially constructed nature of gender roles doesn’t mean that not fitting the role you’re expected to fit can’t have very real and devastating consequences.
And there are others of us who might have some of the above feelings, but *also* have a feeling that neurologically, we were really supposed to have a different set of genitalia and/or secondary sex characteristics. Like we just can’t get much more excited about having sex in our unmodified body than about playing a game of checkers, no matter how hard we try.
It’s kind of a coincidence that some of us happen to feel that both the role, and the body are not right for us. I believe that the former is socially mediated but not the latter. Who would have an interest in convincing me that I’d function better psychologically with a different set of hormones in my bloodstream? I doubt anyone would. Gender roles, on the other hand, serve a lot of other people’s interests.
A lot of trans people say that it started out with thinking “I’m *not* a man” or “I’m *not* a woman”, and then the part about what you *are* comes later. I feel like I’m on the verge of rambling myself here, but I guess the main point I wanted to make is that “is a social construct” doesn’t mean “isn’t real”. We can question and challenge social constructs, but they don’t magically stop affecting people once we observe that they’re just constructs.
Thanks for your reply. I also took a lot at your blog and a lot of the articles there were very informative, they helped me understand a few things I didn’t really get before. And, I know it’s lame to only apologise for your behaviour once you realise that the person you’re speaking to is a member of the group you were talking smack about, but I’m sorry that my previous comments were so abrasive. I guess I’m just frustrated because I can’t figure out my own gender, haha.
Still. I think that what irritates me about social constructs is that I don’t see any way to reconcile the two ideas of “you must conform because society requires that you do so” and “you shouldn’t conform because it’ll just make you unhappy”. The former will make you feel like an outsider, and the latter just makes you an outsider. I guess the answer to this problem is just that each individual needs to figure out the compromise that works for them, but, meh. That just doesn’t feel like a great solution to me.
Manly, womanly, these words are loaded with thousands of years of tradition. We dont need gender roles anymore. The qualities that make a man virtuous are the same that make a woman virtuous, and the ill qualities which can hold us back or lead to ruin are also the same. Is it not time to strive towards what we know we should be rather than hold on to social categorization?
You know I really shouldn’t be surprised that a webcomic about ludicrously macho guys has so many neckbeard douchebag fuckheads, but somehow I was surprised by a LOT of the comments here.
Holy fucking shit I mean seriously.
More on-point to the main post, I think a very poignant example of women in media is with the current influx of games that let you choose your sex. Only you really don’t get to choose your sex you get to choose if you want to be a woman. So ingrained we’ve become to accept that the male is the default of the hero that any mention of “Choose your sex” is code for “You get to be a woman in this game”.
Still, a step forward to be sure, but then you consider how these games are marketed. How many games wherein you get to choose to be a woman actually advertise the woman as the hero? Take Mass Effect for example. The Male Shephard is considered to be the REAL hero, while the female one could pretty much be classified as the alternate-reality throw-away hero.
No box art glorifies. No manual defaults to mentioning her. Not even one commercial where she is doing anything exists. It is always the man. He is the one that truly matters.
It’s really disappointing once you think about it.
ah, the negative comments are just one or two people trolling, most of the people here are behaving themselves.
I think in some cases the gender select thing really doesn’t matter, like in Pokemon games. Ash/Red has had a personality granted to him mostly by virtue of starring in the TV show, but all of the other protagonists are largely hollow vessels for you to live out your lord and commanding god of natural order fantasies through. Both protagonists seem to get an equal amount of promotion, and the box art features the monsters rather than the human characters. I probably couldn’t tell you what any Pokemon lead past red/blue even looks like beyond “kid with a hat”
I do understand what you mean, though. Just because there are exceptions doesn’t mean that they disprove the rule.
On a slightly unrelated tangent, customize-your-character games are becoming the bane of my satire efforts. If I draw a character like Kratos or Volt, they have distinct facial features, hair styles, and costumes that make them read at a glance as “Kratos” or “Volt”. However, if I want to draw a Grey Warden or Commander Shepherd, I have to explicitly point out who they are supposed to be because all of the Wardens and Shepherds are as different as people’s Sims avatars. Don’t get me wrong, I have a lot of fun customizing my characters but damn it makes them hard to cameo and make fun of.
IA that male is the default in “choose your gender” games. Another example is Dragon Quest: Chapters of the Chosen. I played as both genders out of curiosity, and the dialogue is pretty much the same except that the male protagonist has a love interest and in the female version there is an extremely tacked-on and unconvincing line about how “You’re like a sister to me.” Yeah, very much male = default.
i used to worry about my manliness, being a fat nerd. But i ended up in the building industry(too many videogames and not enough work) I found my manhood through my work.
I discovered that i actually do enjoy excercise and testing my strength, only for me it helps a lot to have a purpose to it since i dont really enjoys sports(aside from now and then) but despite what people say about ending up digging ditches, i kinda enjoy labouring. Im still a pretty unique person in my industry, someone who hasnt been in a fight since primary school(thats the one before highschool for you americans). But ive seen these tough guys and i see that some of them are just idiots, while others are mal-adjusted. But there are some great role models for me too.
My strength growing has removed my concerns about my manliness. Getting genuine compliments from people i work with for my labour and hearing my dad(who works with me) say hes proud of me for how hard i can push myself to work and knowing that he really is proud and its not just the compliments you are obligated to give your family members.
Speaking of my father, I havent read most of the comments so it may have been mentioned already, but i bet that men have always had these doubts, most dont voice them, heck i never did. Young men anyway. We have just come out of childhood and we need time to learn how to be as strong and as bold and decisive as our fathers and most of the men of their generation. Then one day our sons will be measuring themselves up to us too.
Its just now we are a little less afraid to say out loud “What if im not enough of a man?” because of changes to our society.
My dad gave my brother and I a lot to live up to, I gotta say. Actually, my first exposure to the webcomic Oglaf was when someone sent me a copy of that strip where the Conan guy throws his daughter into a wolf pit and when she kills them all he’s like “truly, she is my son”, because they said it reminded them of me.
This is hilarious. I LOVED that strip; perhaps you were in fact the original inspiration.
id say that a manly guy doing a manly thing is man who sits and knits wearing a pink housecoat and bunny slippers and ABSOLUTELY NOT GIVING A FREKKIN SHITE BOUT THE LOT OF YA LAUGHIN AT HIM. hell yes.xD
I think both sides are guilty though, it’s not just the guys who oggle the girls. As far as I know in my college, it’s not unusual for the girls to oggle men with certain traits, I know because I hang around with two of them at lunch. Thing is that I really want to ask one of them out, but all she talks about are “cute guys” who are tall, muscled, tattoed and fairly well.
I don’t really want to buy into the whole macho thing as I’m only a litle over five foot tall, fairly skinny, no tatts, not much money and a jawline that’s weaker than I’d like. Aside from that I am confident, helpful, a good leader, a good cook and house proud which are all manly qualities in my book, but it seems that just like “manly men” who value ladies physical qualities over anything else, there’s ladies who do value mens’ physical “manly qualities” over anything else too.
But I can’t protest against that notion because when I do I’m still seen in the wrong because I’m not “manning up” and the girl in question is never seen in the wrong for the way she looks at men. Though if it were vice-versa, it wouldn’t take too long for feminists to say I’m in the wrong for having similar ideals.
Trouble is feminists are as biassed as the chauvnist jocks, give them a female stripper and they’ll be on the warpath, give them a male stripper and they wouldn’t bat an eyelid. Is this because a man is supposed to be so “manly” that he wouldn’t be in the same unfortunate sticky situation that leads some ladies to such jobs? If so they are as guilty of assigning gender roles as the stereotypical macho nuts they hate so much.
Just found another example of “fairness and equality” gone mad today, a football ground who’s team is managed by a vegan has banned certain meats from the football ground, even extending to the fans who pay to watch the games. Is this more equal than offering both vegetarian and non-vegetarian food or is it oppressing the freedom of the people who do eat meat?
Sorry about going off on a tangent, but as you can see it’s all too easy for the scales to slide over in the other direction if people ignore overall fairness in favour of just taking the side of a minority.
Everyone likes looking at sexy people, but there’s a sifference between oggling and talking about what you think of someone amongst your friends and going up and grabbing them or yelling your appraisals at them. I am not denying that it does happen the other way around, the human population as a whole is a big wide sample and there are always going to be exceptions, but the general way the world works is that most women will deal with that sort of harassment and most men will not.
I also think it’s unfortunate that there is no terminology for the distinction between feminists who want real equality of the sort I’m explaining here and feminists who want to tear down everything male to raise their own cause. It’s entirely possible to support one cause without wishing ill on another, and it’s unfortunate that the extremists cause a lot of men to get on the defensive when they hear women bring up any kind of inequality.
Agreed on that last point, it’s the same with most things in that respect, religion, politics and all sorts included. A lot of people generally tar a lot of people with the same brush. I think it’s a case of whoever shout’s the loudest gets noticed, the people who are more extreme will always be souting loudest and the media will always pick up on that and it’s the same on both sides, so those closer to the middle will always end up more defensive.
Sorry about getting a bit ruffled, I just get a bit tired of being told by the local girls that I’m not much of a man because of physical characteristics and am not desireable. Maybe I’m at fault for generalising too much also. :/
I do really enjoy the thoughts on this page though, it’s been a huge inspiration for a citizenship paper I’m currently working on at college. Identity slips in there like a glove, so thanks for your thoughts. :)
Hello, I’ve commented on a few other pages, inconsequential things, but I’ve been looking over these comments(after reading your thoughts in the first place and enjoying them greatly), and this just sparked in my mind a thought I’ve been having lately. It is never necessary to tear down another person or idea, when both are presented accurately and evenly. The only possible reasons for a person to tear down someone or something else is either them ignoring their rationality because of heated emotions, or their own sense of inadequacy in themselves or their view. The person who screams loudest against any other person or view is the person who finds the least respect for themselves, or their own opinions. Honestly, looking at simply myself, and those around me, I can certainly say that the times I have gotten worked up or loud, have always been the times when I was most unsure of myself or my opinions. As you’ve said of the differences between a man and a macho, the man knows who he is inside, and so he doesn’t beed to show off anything, while the macho, who doesn’t have that inner peace or confidence, needs to showboat, and ensure people see that they’re capable, or strong, or whatever. But, as I said, emotion can overcome rationality, and my friends adn I are the sort to value rational thought above most everything else, so in my view, the balance is skewed. I would love to hear the opinions of others on what I’ve said, whether they agree with me or disagree. After all, the only way to gain a true understanding, and a true confidence, is to test yourself and your ideas, to see whether you or they will stand, shift, or break.
Whoops, I seem to haev forgotten who I was talking to halfway through that. The man vs macho part was meant to be adressed to Coelasquid.
It’s interesting that I get called “manly” because I own and know how to use power tools, collect swords, and write bloody combat scenes. One female friend told me that she didn’t need a man because I have tools, and another female friend watched me drool over a historical encyclopedia of things sharp and pointy and sighed, “You are such a guy!”
Yet one of my favorite pastimes is quilting, I love long skirts, and I’m about as romantic as they come. Am I a man in denial? I don’t think so; I just have varied tastes.
Your essay was amazing. I didn’t expect something as deep and researched from a source of weekly humour, but glad you addressed something that is never really touched on without going from one extreme to another. I agree with you on our perception with gender roles, but I never saw your gender being a cause of such debate and never thought of asking questions, I wouldn’t do that for a male artist, no matter the works and their demographic.
What has interested me now is reading through the comments to find a general consensus…I started but, it’s quite a lot to go over so late.
Thank you for the food for thought, you spoke your opinions and musings really well and I enjoyed reading them. :)
Wonderful. Very thought-provoking as well.
I think being masculine and being feminine basically is being comfortable with what you are dealt and being a role model doing it. The only difference is gender.
I also find it interesting that females do not take being masculine as being as much as an insult as a man being feminine. Truly the male has the most vulnerable physiologically in this world. I would know, from first hand experience :P
Calling anyone manly probably won’t be taken as much of an insult as calling them girly or effeminate would be, because “acting like a man” carries more positive connotations than “acting like a woman”. That’s kind of the whole point I’m getting at here. Telling anyone they throw like a girl/run like a girl/ draw like a girl/ drive like a girl/ play cards like a girl/ ANYTHING like a girl, even if they ARE a girl, is going to carry the cadence of an insult.
I think that femininity and its different aspects and/or stereotypes are often used and taken in derogatory ways because, ultimately, women in general – not always and not everyone, but IN GENERAL – are physically less able than men; thus, feminine qualities carry the connotation of being “weak”.
It’s unfortunate, since obviously pure physical strength and ability are far from being the only things one needs to be successful in today’s society, and often are barely even relevant now. But, shrug – that could be why femininity has always had that connotation and probably will continue to do so for a long time. Physical ability is, for some reason, a standard people still judge by, as irrelevant as it is to success. Look at professional athletes: there are many jobs that require just as much if not more time and hard work; yet, pro football and basketball players are paid ridiculous amounts of money to do things that really when you think about it serve no directly useful function in anyone’s lives. And then when you look at schoolkids: who’s usually at the top of the social ladder? Is it the smart kids? The responsible ones who pay attention in class and get good grades and do their work? Nope, more likely to be the ones who excel in sports.
Okay so I went off on a bit of a tangent, but hopefully the point was still in there somewhere. I hope nobody gets on my case about “but girls can be good at sports too!” because I know that, and that isn’t the point. It’s just that, bottom line, men are physically stronger than women. Society judges people on the basis of physical ability.Femininity and its many aspects, therefore, often have negative or at least condescending connotations when used descriptively.
That’s my take on it, anyway! Shrug.
Being strong physically changes you mentally. I feel very different about myself and my identity on the days that I climb mountains than on the days that I play Wii in my basement for hours. Thats just being human: there are a ton of weird benefits all over the place that come from sweating your ass off. Now before anyone accuses me of equating strength with confidence/intelligence….. actually no, accuse me of that. That way you will have to think about to what extent it is true. >: D
Hey, I love this comic, keep up the great work and I squeeled like a school girl at this page :D It made my day X3
Ahh Coelasquid, thankyou! You have a lot of guts to post this, there are some people that just feed off their own self righteous anger and will go on forever twisting your words or making excuses why it’s okay to say things like “I’d hit that”or other objectionable bullsh*t.
On the other hand, the next time someone gives you a headache about gender issues, you can link to your essay and they will have everything they will ever want to know about your opinion on the subject. Let’s hope then that it will mean less stress for you in the long run :)
I hate that the word “feminism” has been hijacked to mean “women that want to be superior by stepping on men”. All I want, all I ever wanted was to be treated as an absolute equal – nothing more, nothing less. How disappointing it is that the StandOurGround forum is full of so much aggressive and hateful anger towards women, when there is clearly a need to address things like abuse and father’s rights that is better achieved by working together.
Why does standing up for one group of rights have to mean trampling on someone else’s?
I hated that the publicity stunts made by Fathers4Justice were laughed at and ridiculed, these men were willing to stand up and be role models for their kids to show how serious they were and how much they meant to them. That’s something to be valued and not laughed at.
I’m glad that the majority of the conversation has been insightful and thought provoking, which is rare on the internet. Most of all I’m glad that despite idiots (that are very good at shouting louder and being seen before everyone else) making comments and judgments about you, MGDMT really speaks for itself. I have yet to show it to someone who hasn’t absolutely loved it.
I’m still in the middle of reading it, but I’d like to congratulate you on a well written accurate piece dedicated to describing manliness
Reading it has for sure helped me define the way I think about it and I will be sure to reflect these ideas whenever I get the chance
I’m just gonna try and sum up.
Society has gender roles, which have been useful. Sometimes/often they do not reflect reality/have adverse affects. They can lead to discrimination, which can be reinforced unintentional by language(original post). These gender roles rise from biology, so they are not going to just disappear .
Thats what i got out of reading this for an hour. (very interesting!) So, how shall we mod these rolls so that we can still have manliness, and feminineness (wow<.<) and not squash peoples identities/aspirations?
The deceptively simple solution is treat people like people rather than their subcultures, but that’s going to take a lot of work on all fronts. all you can do is go out there and live your life, desensitizing the way for people following behind you.
But that would be ignoring those subcultures. I think its clear we cant do that. What i’m asking is, since we define manliness and womanliness, what should they be? If we recognize traits and actions that woman have (besides looking good/caring) then those things will become feminine. However, what we call feminine has to be different somehow from what we call masculine. As a westerner, the biggest non negative difference i can think of is the concept of beauty.
Beauty is different from how it used to be. It no longer means gigantic dresses, or excessive makeup. In the world of computer programing, code may be “beautiful” or “elegant” if it is written very well.
So here is my proposed solution solution: We keep “manly” and “womanly” separate but we emphasize the the “beautiful” part of being womanly and apply it to more things than her body. Thus, sports are womanly. Art is womanly. Kick boxing and martial arts, (as they are very beautiful when performed on the highest level) are extremely womanly.
So, uh, thats how i see it. Do you guys like my definition? Or is my womanly still not manly enough?
Thanks for sharing; you write well.
The whole gender issue is such a delicate one. I like your thoughts about manliness vs. machodom.
As for me, I’ve found some serious strength in the world of women. Not in the scanty outfits and being generally useless manner that Hollywood portrays, but in other attributes more common to the female persuasion than the male.
The thing is, men have serious strengths too. It’s all a great trade-off…if only general society would get it. >_<
I was thoroughly impressed with this. :P All I can think to say is “amen”.
I haven’t read every comment, so I hope no-one brought this up before me. I have an addition to the definition of femininity.
It’s true that enviable traits like courage, independence, and strength are all manly. I don’t believe femininity means the reverse at all. Instead I believe that it exemplifies kindness, empathy, and grace among other things. A woman and a man can have all six descriptors I just listed and it does not make them less worthy of praise to have the traits of the other gender.
That being said, the only part of your essay I don’t quite empathize with is the part where being feminine is considered something of an insult. I guess it’s all how you look at it.
Power tools…now thats manly!
I loved this, thanks.
I wish people would realize how flexible gender is, and that “gender bending,” far from being the end of the world, really defines the human condition. 99.9% of people just don’t fit completely into the rigid stereotypes of what defines “man” or “woman,” not to mention those definitions change…
A great essay, thank you!
This is actually a topic I’ve had reason to dedicate a fair bit of thought to. A couple of years ago I was diagnosed with anorexia nervosa, and was admitted to the hospital adolescent ward with a 30bpm heart-rate after running myself in to the ground (literally). During my stay, which lasted many months, including a return trip after being released prematurely, I slept in a bed covered with love-hearts and gold stars, and such symbols typically associated with femininity. Every few of weeks a new patient would arrive, or be discharged, but in all this time I never saw another male admitted.
Apparently about one in ten people who get anorexia is male. I’m not certain about that statistic, since in my case it took three different psychologists before the word anorexia was mentioned. There are a number of reasons why I ended up that pink starry hospital bed which I won’t go in to here, but insecurity about masculinity was definitely one of them. As a kid I wasn’t interested in sport at all, partly because I disliked physical activity, partly because (being an ADD child) I didn’t have the attention span to participate in team sports. My brother teased me, and my parents complained that I had no interest in extra-curricular activities beyond video-games, besides occasionally drawing. By the time I was midway through high-school, surrounded by kids talking about football and surfing, I had become incredibly self conscious, not just about my physical appearance, but also my apparent lack of masculine traits. So I started exercising, constantly pushing myself until I was running up and down our staircase for forty minutes every morning (before anyone else was awake, I couldn’t let them see me) and at the same time having physical difficulty even walking up the hill to school (I still don’t know how I managed both these things at the same time).
While I was running, I specifically remember having delusions of what I thought masculinity was, and what I thought I would be. In ancient history class at school we started a case study of Sparta, learning how weak children would supposedly be left to die, and young boys were forced to steal food to survive, and how they were beaten if they were caught. My secret morning running sessions became my ‘triumphs’, which is what the ancient Romans called their military parades sanctifying great military achievements. I was in hospital pretty soon after that.
I know this sounds terribly messed up, and that’s because it is. I can’t possibly explain what was happening in my head at the time, I’m just glad I don’t think that way so much any more. I guess the reason I’m saying this is to try and give some perspective on a) how damaging the ideal of manliness can really be and b) how deeply ingrained it is either in the male psyche or society (I can’t tell which).
Sorry for the long, boring post, I just wanted to get this off my chest. There aren’t really many outlets to do that unfortunately. Time to go watch My Little Pony.
Mh.
I always thought that you were a guy.
This was a good read. But a quick question that’s been in my mind since I read it:
What fictional female characters do you like?
Very, very few of them.
Brienne of Tarth from Song of Ice and Fire, Wilhelmina Slater from Ugly Betty, Sue Sylvester from Glee, Meg in Hercules. Phffft, I dunno. Cameron Diaz’s Green Hornet character is what I wish Pepper Pots had been. Bonnie in Red Dead Redemption is a bro. Miyazaki does a really great job writing any of his female protagosists. They don’t top any of my favourite-people-ever lists, but for the most part they act like human beings. I’m quite fond of Zara the Pirate of DA’s Turkish wrestler satyr mom character Merichi. The mom in Fido was pretty great, and I gotta say I’m a fan of Rosario Dawson a la Sin City.
And you know, as much as people hate on Disney’s Pocahontas, she’s the only Disney female protagonist to have a chance to live happily ever after with the guy and give it up because someone she met three days ago wasn’t worth uprooting her life and abdicating her responsibilities. And then in the sequel, she hooks up with a completely different guy.
Hey, Coelasquid: Thank you. For the comic, the external links (we need more ‘useful’ sites and magazines like this for women) and for this post.
Even though this comic is full of well-muscled guys, this makes me think even a naturally slender or chubby guy can be ‘manly’- after all, you don’t need muscles to be an excellent father, employee, boss or friend. In fact, ‘manly’ seems to be defined as the best traits of all our courageous heroes, especially from times when men actually got a good rap, like Doctor Watson and Sherlock Holmes. Sure we have intelligent, independent Sherlock, but Doctor Watson is a smart, brave and patient man who cares about others deeply. It’s also fun watching old movies for the heroines: Holly Golightly was ‘naughty’ and was a gold-digger- it was made clear it wasn’t a healthy lifestyle, if prettily decadent on the surface- but she had grace, wit and charm, and when Grace Kelly actually screamed when she saw the gorilla in Mogambo, I felt relieved because it’s a realistic reaction from anyone who’s never seen such a animal before, especially if it’s angry. Even if it’s a woman acting ‘weak’, her husband was also panicking in that scene, and only the smarter, experienced adventurers (both a man and a woman) were calm- so I don’t think it was even meant to be sexist.
A scary thing in today’s media is that some of the most cowardly, conniving things that people do are now advertised as ‘normal’ women’s behaviour. I’ve read a magazine for teens (most of them written by women who used to work at Cosmopolitan and the like) that said things like ‘We all love a good bitch!’, and I wondered if I was a freak because I most certainly didn’t and was often hurt from ‘bitching’. I mean, look at Desperate Housewives: most of these women play the martyr to get sympathy or do underhanded things ‘for their family’ when they really care more about their ‘own way’ than about the family they constantly whine about or the husband they continually belittle. But that’s okay, the men aren’t competent in anything they do or they’re cowards or psychos! The only reason why the blonde vampy one was deemed ‘the bitch’ was because she was the only one with some honesty and humour, and didn’t blame everything on a child or husband she dragged up for convenience.
Even Sex and the City isn’t entirely better, for women who actually had fun during sex: in the film, the nice one has something horrible happen to her in Mexico. The response of the three friends she’s supported over the years? They laugh at her and don’t apologise as she nearly bursts into tears. Also, one of the others puts on a tiny amount of weight and all of them are SHOCKED.
Even otherwise pleasant characters like Bridget Jones obsess over being a spinster and tolerate toxic ‘friends’, but she’s still an improvement because she actually cares about her (real) friends and family and clearly loves them very much. Mind you, Helen Fielding may have been trying to put in a more realistic portrayal, while the two telly shows are likely to have tongue-in-cheek writers but the average viewer and ‘women’s media’ do not seem to want to accept that the characters are heavily exaggerated from humanity’s worst traits and not those to aspire to.
And this was why I’m mainly friends with men or ‘geek girls’: while they all do ‘bitch’, it’s once in a while and quickly forgotten. And while there’s some boasting, some materialism, it’s something that can quickly be put to one side for the sake of having fun or completing a personal project. Being ‘manly’ in the way you use the word- constantly striving to learn, improve and be kinder for your sake rather than petty competition, and taking responsibility for yourself and others- should be an aspiration for everyone, and no amount of designer clothes, make-up and hilariously trashy books can diminish those qualities in a woman unless she refuses to try in the first place.
PS about trashy novels. Some of the Harlequin’s/Mills and Boon’s I read (I’ve read 2 and they’re at least 10 years old) were actually very decent compared to modern chick lit: only a few pages worth of the writing was about whining and blaming others, characters and subplots were introduced as a catalyst to the plot rather than being ‘padding’ and often, it was about both of the main characters realising they were being judgemental pricks and getting over it. The women often did have careers, were very good at them and were very responsible, caring people. For escapist trash not meant to be taken too seriously, it’s probably wiser than most of the modern women’s telly shows and magazines that are called ‘intelligent’ and ‘relevant’ when it’s just whiny, selfish back-stabbing crap (with one or two tips to about work or money, that just happens to be what anyone with a brain has already thought of).
On the subject of “bitchy” women, I’m going to say that the term has taken on enough different meanings that it really depends on the context. It seems any time a women “steps out of line” or tries to implement some discipline on people she is supposed to be in charge of or even just stands up for herself she’s open to accusations of being a “bitch”. I see it happen all the time, like, guys heckle a woman, she yells back at them, she’s a bitch. Some guy is running his mouth about a subject he feels strongly about, woman interjects with opinions of her own, she’s a bitch. Mom tells her teenager that they can’t use the car today, she’s a bitch. Teacher tells her students that they’re going to need to stop disrupting class or they’ll be separated from their friends, she’s a bitch.
And because words only have the power you give to them, when people use an insulting term to refer to women who stand up for themselves the term stops being insulting and takes on a whole different connotation.
I think I see. I mainly mean that word as in ‘someone who is two-faced, having an overly- negative attitude and simply being cruel,’ but it’s sad to hear that a woman who reasonably disagrees with someone or stands up for herself is lumped with the same derogatory term, after all it’s not ‘overly-negative’ to say “If you don’t pipe down, I’ll separate you.” I guess I’m lucky not to see that happen often to an assertive woman, or unlucky because I haven’t seemed to have met many assertive ones. Then again, when rude students call a nice teacher a horrible name under their breath, I roll my eyes at them.
It shows that we’re a lazy species when it comes to insults and sometimes so self-absorbed we don’t consider if the person not letting us have our own way is really so horrible. I’m not immune to it either, despite my best efforts and I get really embarrassed when I realise I’ve done it (often too late to fix it).
And with this dual usage, who knows when being ‘bitchy’ is going to become an adjective for ‘assertive’ and confuse everyone? I’d rather know an assertive ‘bitch’ who’s a good friend than a mean back-stabber. Maybe one day ‘bitch’ will stop being used in the context I normally use it in, and become a compliment. It’s happened before with other derogatory ‘nicknames’…
I think “bitchy” has already become an adjective for “assertive”, and that’s why so many women laud it as a positive term. I’m sure a lot of those magazines that say “unleash your inner bitch” or whatever are really advertising articles on how to stand up for yourself at work or keep your friends from walking all over you. Words change like that all the time, it’s the same kind of transition the word “gay” took from meaning “happy” or “boner” took from meaning “screwup” (with hilarious results)
This post makes me happy, and I rarely feel that way when I see MRA get mentioned straight off. I agree with you, that issues such as child custody, abuse where it’s not female-abusee male-abuser, and the draft are things that need to be looked at and dealt with in our society–but it often comes with such a dose of feminism-bashing that I can’t stand it. There are only so many times I’m willing to explain, “Dude, I’m on your side. We have issues of interest in common, but I really like being able to vote, get an abortion, and own property!”
You expressed yourself succinctly, and I have nothing more to add.
One thing about gender roles that’s always bothered me is a well-known rule of western society:
“It’s not okay to hit women.”
Now, before giving the kneejerk reaction to this, please hear me out.
Taken as-is, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. It’s true, hitting women is wrong. So what’s the problem? It goes on exactly one word too long. It’s not okay to hit. Period. It’s not somehow “okay”, or even “more okay” to hit someone just because they happen to have a penis.
I’ve brought this up in conversation before, and the response is almost invariably “you’re right, it’s not okay to hit, but…”, and then goes on to cite the “women weak / men tough” stereotypes. The rule really falls apart once people realize that not all women are weak, not all men are tough, and it’s not okay to hit anyone.
Sorry if this was a bit of a mini-rant. As I said, this is just something that bothers me.
What really blows is, I remember in the 90s we were all starting to move towards “you get to define what your gender is, because if you’r eit, then that gender is it. It must be, because you are, and you’re one of those”
And now instead the gender roles are more rigid than ever, but with the option of being the gender that suits you better and expecting others to go along with that.
Oh, man. What I love about the arguments that “women’s education hurts men’s'” is it assumes there are a finite number of people who are allowed to succeed in this world. I suppose that comes from “we expect two halves of a whole to equal 100%,” but in this case the groups are more like two separate data columns, which can each, independently, equal 100%.
An interesting set of articles I’d read by teachers points to that: it’s just seen as unmasculine to study and make good grades. The issue there is the culture men are assigned to, not the female one.
The educators agreed with you in a sense, based on the answers they were receiving from students after interviewing them with basic questions such as: “Why don’t you study more?” They were told repeatedly that: A guy is supposed to get passing grades without effort, and prioritize sports over mathematics. If he’s seen carrying around a book, he’s a loser, compared to if he carried a football or baseball bat.
Supposedly, to cap it all off, and I’m too tired to track down the numbers, male graduation rates also haven’t really changed over the last few decades. The difference is, female grades/graduation went UP. …and so politicians, etc. began paying attention and finally asking WHY…when they should have, decades ago.