[Discussion] Men talking to men about Feminism

This thread is for people who believe that when it comes to feminism it's important for men to listen to women and to talk to men.

In this thread we assume Feminism is something you wholeheartedly support or want to support. Questions about the validity of Feminism are for somewhere else.

Stengah wrote:
RawkGWJ wrote:

And just to be clear, when I make a call for civility, I’m not telling anyone that their message is invalid because they deliver it with anger or fervor. I’m simply trying to point out that their message will be received much more clearly if it’s delivered with grace and dignity. If it’s delivered with insults and abuse, your most likely going to turn people off. To me it comes off as the type of toxic male behavior that I’m trying to steer clear of.

But hey, you do you.

The quotes are supporting the idea that attacking people for missteps isn't always the best route to take, not that it's never the an appropriate route to take. Don't make the mistake of dismissing everything posted anger as invalid or ineffective because of how it might be received; often times being able to express that anger is more important than how effective it was.

Outrage has a valuable place; it is the natural reaction to injustice, to a severe moral breach that must offend every nerve ending of one’s sensibilities. To look at our world at present there’s much to be angry about, and there’s some wisdom to the idea that outrage is better than a placid acceptance of our present condition, better than becoming desensitized to the cavalcade of moral crimes that litter the daily newspapers. But like any emotion or tool, there are right and wrong ways to deploy it, and when we uncritically suggest that all rage is valid so long as it is expressed by activists we thereby foreclose all strategic discussion of the utility of rage.

Yeah, please do read the full text of the articles Stengah and I posted on page 39 if you haven't already -- there is a lot of subtlety and nuance to the discussions had within that you might have missed, to the effect of what Stengah has mentioned a few times on page 40. I really think you'll find some interesting ideas to chew on that might help you understand better why you're getting pushback here. (And conversely, also lots of ideas that are at least parallel to the arguments I think you're trying to make, and might help you present what you're arguing for a bit better.)

Reminds me of what recently happened on another (Christian) forum. Someone posted a thread with the title "Should women be allowed to drive" and a bunch of the responses were equally if not more offensive, so after being notified of the thread in a PM, I posted:

I haven't had a chance to read the thread yet, and I don't know if I will bother or not because I've seen excepts and they are pretty awful, but this question is just as utterly stupid, hateful, and offensive as asking, "Should Muslims be allowed to drive?" I don't even know why this thread is allowed on this forum any more than the above should be allowed. It's just blatant bigotry and not something that Christians, or really any human being with any moral integrity, would even ask.

Only to get a response from someoone:

No no no.

There's plenty of other instances of blatantly unequal treatment of women that are sanctioned or even required by various Christian denominations. This site explicitly allows for the discussion and positive presentation of those doctrines.

I responded that there is no such thing as positive presentation of bigotry.

He admitted in a later post that he was personally against this sort of discrimination, and so I wondered why he felt such an obligation to defend the bigots having a voice on the forum.

I can't stand that sort of wishy-washiness and it's definitely not a way to *show* support when you're more worried about the supposed rights of bigots vs. the ones being threatened and harmed by them.

In a way, I feel like we’re shouting the same things at each other but from opposite sides of the street. I’m going to bullet point a few ideas and then I’m taking a step back from the tone debate.

* I am in no way trying to take away your right to be angry or outraged.
* I am not saying that we should never be angry or outraged.
* I am not dismissing anybody’s statements based on their tone.

I am suggesting that:
* Since we are all on the same team here, it would be helpful to dial back the shaming and insults.
* Since the definition of “tone policing” seems to be vague and convoluted, maybe stop using it as a short hand for what you’re trying to say, and just explicitly say what you mean.

-

Stengah wrote:
Natalie Patterson, a queer Black female poet, teaching artist, and activist and founder of Sister Support wrote:

There is no value in shame, only ego and belittling. I think shaming others is really evidence of a lack of leadership and maturity. We all have a place in these conversations because no one is an island. We have to do the emotional self-work so that we are prepared to be peacemakers, not just fire starters.

I wanted to come back to this quote from Natalie Patterson.

She mentions leadership. I don’t think I’m a leader-type. I’ve always felt more like the advisor to the king. But I feel like I can recognize a leader-type when I see one. I get the sense that Maq has that leader-type mojo.

bekkilyn wrote:

Reminds me of what recently happened on another (Christian) forum. Someone posted a thread with the title "Should women be allowed to drive" and a bunch of the responses were equally if not more offensive, so after being notified of the thread in a PM, I posted:

I haven't had a chance to read the thread yet, and I don't know if I will bother or not because I've seen excepts and they are pretty awful, but this question is just as utterly stupid, hateful, and offensive as asking, "Should Muslims be allowed to drive?" I don't even know why this thread is allowed on this forum any more than the above should be allowed. It's just blatant bigotry and not something that Christians, or really any human being with any moral integrity, would even ask.

Only to get a response from someoone:

No no no.

There's plenty of other instances of blatantly unequal treatment of women that are sanctioned or even required by various Christian denominations. This site explicitly allows for the discussion and positive presentation of those doctrines.

I responded that there is no such thing as positive presentation of bigotry.

He admitted in a later post that he was personally against this sort of discrimination, and so I wondered why he felt such an obligation to defend the bigots having a voice on the forum.

I can't stand that sort of wishy-washiness and it's definitely not a way to *show* support when you're more worried about the supposed rights of bigots vs. the ones being threatened and harmed by them.

It's amazing and disheartening how many people will enforce and defend unjust rules in hierarchical institutions.

This is an awakening I have experienced in my life, particularly in the military during DADT. I worked with several LGBTQ soldiers over the course of my career and, while I never outed anyone or turned them in (grounds for an automatic discharge if it became officially known in the command), I admit that young me, if forced to choose, would have followed the rules rather than take a risk and look for an opportunity to be an ally. Looking back at my rigidness I am ashamed.

I fired up a web browser tab yesterday and pointed to Kottke.org. I go there to find things when I need a jolt of nostalgia redux (like Andy Clarke's reminiscence of late-90s web design) or something a little inspiring (like a metalsmith building a puzzle box from scratch).

Sometimes I go for something bittersweet, too, which can overlap the nostalgic and inspiring. In the current case, I came across the letter from the editor of Design*Sponge about their planned end in August of 2019. I started it a couple of days ago and have yet to finish, following a classic Drunkard's Walk across its links and landing, today, on a piece from 2011 by Miranda July, published on Rookie.

It's a short piece recalling with cold clarity what happened when a community was forced to reckon with some of the things feminism is trying to eradicate. We talk sometimes in generality about the challenges and struggles non-dudes face in our patriarchal hellscape, but pieces like this are where we can draw specificity for our discussions and reflections. This is how we bring women into this thread: from the work they've already done to make these issues known.

The first thing I thought of in any concrete way after reading it was:

Spoiler:

How would our world need to change for this story to have been written by a man who had taken this action? How far are we from those changes?

Here, I found a possibly-substantive link for this thread:

American Psychological Association links 'masculinity ideology' to homophobia, misogyny

For the first time in its 127-year history, the APA has issued guidelines to help psychologists specifically address the issues of men and boys.

(I'm posting this out of genuine interest/curiosity, btw, not as a dunk. I think masculinity studies as a discipline is a real and valuable thing, but I'm way out of my lane to offer comment on it.)

bekkilyn wrote:

Reminds me of what recently happened on another (Christian) forum. Someone posted a thread with the title "Should women be allowed to drive" and a bunch of the responses were equally if not more offensive, so after being notified of the thread in a PM, I posted:

I haven't had a chance to read the thread yet, and I don't know if I will bother or not because I've seen excepts and they are pretty awful, but this question is just as utterly stupid, hateful, and offensive as asking, "Should Muslims be allowed to drive?" I don't even know why this thread is allowed on this forum any more than the above should be allowed. It's just blatant bigotry and not something that Christians, or really any human being with any moral integrity, would even ask.

Only to get a response from someoone:

No no no.

There's plenty of other instances of blatantly unequal treatment of women that are sanctioned or even required by various Christian denominations. This site explicitly allows for the discussion and positive presentation of those doctrines.

I responded that there is no such thing as positive presentation of bigotry.

He admitted in a later post that he was personally against this sort of discrimination, and so I wondered why he felt such an obligation to defend the bigots having a voice on the forum.

I can't stand that sort of wishy-washiness and it's definitely not a way to *show* support when you're more worried about the supposed rights of bigots vs. the ones being threatened and harmed by them.

The bigots already have a voice on the forum. You asked why that thread is allowed, and he's essentially saying "bigotry is allowed on this forum--look at all those threads discussing the bigoted doctrines of bigoted Christian denominations."

He used some fancy words, but essentially, that's what it boils down to: the bigots are already an established and accepted presence on the forum.

This happens to me a lot, so it's probably good for me to keep in mind that a lot of times, someone will ask a question that can be answered by some other fact I'll assume they're aware of, but they're not.

clover wrote:

Here, I found a possibly-substantive link for this thread:

American Psychological Association links 'masculinity ideology' to homophobia, misogyny

For the first time in its 127-year history, the APA has issued guidelines to help psychologists specifically address the issues of men and boys.

(I'm posting this out of genuine interest/curiosity, btw, not as a dunk. I think masculinity studies as a discipline is a real and valuable thing, but I'm way out of my lane to offer comment on it.)

I did see this and have only just skimmed it but that seems like a pretty great thing to me.

My only substantive observations are that the MRAs of twitter are up in arms about the contents so that means it is probably good. And I appreciate the fact that they have used the phrase 'Masculinity Ideology' rather the 'toxic masculinity'. Seems like a productive way for them to address much of the same information while also side stepping arguments about 'not all men', rejections of the phrase 'toxic masculinity' and arguments about the very existence of said.

There's a teachable moment in the main thread that I hope all of us read.

What's your experience? Did you hit a turning point in your life where you woke up? Was it a specific thing? Who inspired you?

Just wanted to bump this one more time. Really appreciate the folks willing to open up a bit about their personal lives and experiences.

Was kinda hoping to hear from some of our longer-running members too. No pressure, not everyone is comfortable talking about their personal experiences.

This is rambling, sorry. I am typing this in between calls during a busy work day. Also kinda nervous to post, but here we go.

I would say that, like the majority of the liberal posters on the board, I always just kind of called myself liberal and never really thought much about it, keeping a general sense of superiority about my beliefs but never really questioning them too deeply. I lived in a majority white country town(North of Kansas City) so there wasn’t a lot of diversity. I would spend most of my summers in New Jersey, where my family was originally from, so I was luckily exposed to *some* diversity(and developed an accent that has stayed with me throughout life, natch). While my father wasn’t perfect, he always had a lot of black and latino friends so diversity in my household was always something that was stressed (I said the n* word once at home at about 13 and my father lost his f*cking mind and created this elaborate story about how we were really part black and when using this word, I was dishonoring my family. I am part Italian so that family honor stuff really resonated with me and I never used the word again. His story was fabricated he later told me, and ancestry.com confirmed).

It wasn’t until college that I made some gay friends(late 90s/early 2000s) and began to actually think that spectrum’s life experiences and how it was different than mine. These were just the vague ramblings of a mind not yet ready to consider what a different life actually entailed, but were the beginnings of acceptance and consideration.

That would be my general LGBTQ/Race story until college, but my gender relation situation is a separate paragraph.

I was raised by and around women for most of my life(strong Italian grandmother’s influence, and most of my cousins were female and my mom was the eldest of 7 daughters(she had 1 older brother, but he doesn’t count). As such, as I grew, I figured that I was pretty woke from an early age. I was very wrong. I very much was one of those nerdy guys who thought that because I was generally a “good guy” that women kinda owed me, and that if I didn’t have a girlfriend then it was because the women had problems, not because I did. It is very painful for me to think back to how I once viewed and related toward women. I was definitely not always the good guy that I envisioned myself to be.

Fast forward to my mid-20s and I meet the woman who(ultimately) I am going to marry. She is intelligent and willful, has a mostly gay extended family, and all these assumptions I have about myself(how liberal and open-minded I am about sexual identity and gender relations) are put to the test. My comfort levels are pushed and my views challenged. I remember getting so mad at her younger brother because we were on a canoe trip and he was limp wristing one of the oars while we were paddling against the current and then yelling at him for letting his sister take over because he got tired. f*ck you toxic masculinity. What an asshole I was.

These are all ramblings about moments where I had opportunities to self-reflect, opportunities that I didn’t always take. Ultimately the real turning point for me was GWJ, and the P&C sub-forum. I started listening to the GWJ podcast in 2008-2009, but after lurking for a while, I joined the forum. After posting a while in the gaming section, I dipped my toes into P&C and wasn’t really ready for what I found there, ha! Then, as now, I always liked when people were nice to each other(I didn’t always follow my own code, and have definitely been a sh*t-heel at times over the years). P&C lead to the IRC cabal, which had a number of non-binary members, one of whom gave me one of the worst ass-chewings I have ever received, which lead me to quit GWJ for a while. Once I got over my sensitive fee-fees, I really started to think about what RNG had to say and ultimately I began to more personally examine my own privilege. While I still prefer civility, if any one thing woke me up, it was the digital tongue lashing I received from a minority poster whose experience I hadn’t fully considered. Clocky, one of my favorite people, as well as Hyp and Freya also documented their journey which expanded my horizon greatly and continue to do so.

I guess ultimately GWJ P&C was my enlightening experience, though it took place over many years, and continues today.

I don't think I have a ton of specific moments I can point to as 'this is when I took the water of life and the sleeper awoke', but it's been a steady, ongoing process over my whole life. The biggest inflection points were probably joining GWJ, which began to open up my eyes to trans issues, and becoming friends with a number of sex workers, which added to my understanding of a whole mess of intersectional issues.

Certis wrote:
What's your experience? Did you hit a turning point in your life where you woke up? Was it a specific thing? Who inspired you?

Just wanted to bump this one more time. Really appreciate the folks willing to open up a bit about their personal lives and experiences.

Was kinda hoping to hear from some of our longer-running members too. No pressure, not everyone is comfortable talking about their personal experiences.

I have a trash can full of incomplete drafts about my family of origin, my desire to the best possible partner for my wife, and the really transformative experience of becoming an active member of local kink communities, but a combination of actively increasing work and personal life pressures have kept me from getting any of them into a form I’m comfortable sharing.

But, in and of itself that is a huge part of the work I’ve been doing over the past half decade or so. I’m overly quick to have a thought I want to share, overly quick to assume it’s complete and correct, and more to the point, overly quick to assume it matters and/or is relevant — particularly when talking across race, socio-political or gender boundaries.

Because of a fun combination of various childhood traumas and innate nature, I have powerful codependent drives that compel me to feel like I’m making valuable and helpful contributions to the happiness and well being of social contexts that I’m invested in. But as emotionally (and at times even physically) distressing as it is to hold those compulsions in check, it has been made painfully clear to me time and time again that they combine in dangerous ways with my privileged positions and my brash, Dunning-Kruger style unwarranted assumption of competence. The myriad of ways I’ve discovered in which an over exuberance to help or contribute can instead do harm or detract is staggering, and it seems like I find more all the time. Albeit, maybe with decreasing frequency in recent years. Hopefully. Hard to say for sure.

(Worse still, other more base drives to act within me are often clever enough to pretend to be my codependent desire to help, and I don’t think I need to elaborate to explain how dangerous that can be.)

So, there’s a lot more I want to say in deeper response to the prompts here (y’all know I can write a wall of text when I want to). But these days I try to take twice as long to write half as much, to listen twice as long before I speak, and to put twice as much effort into trying to understand whether what I have to share is really going to be helpful in the way I mean for it to be — after all my good intent can maybe shield me from external accountability, but it is as good as tissue paper in a rainstorm for anyone my words or actions harm, and my internal accountability mechanisms will understand that and don’t give a sh*t about either intent or whether anyone else blames me.

Anyway, this post is already far longer than I intended and really hasn’t said much at all, other than that these days I miss a lot more moments where I want to participate in valuable discussions. It’s frustrating every time I do, but for the most part it’s usually for the best for my personal growth and my emotional wellbeing — it’s much better to bear a small frustration myself than to create frustration and distress in others through thoughtless action. So I hope to find the time to write more about the personal experiences that guided and informed this being one of my primary focuses for personal growth, but I may not be able to form those thoughts before this moment passes by. And that will be frustrating too! But if so, that’s okay — not everything needs to be said at every opportunity for it to be real and of value, even if only to myself.

SallyNasty wrote:

Once I got over my sensitive fee-fees, I really started to think about what RNG had to say and ultimately I began to more personally examine my own privilege.

Talking to RNG (I think we're thinking of the same person) made me consider whether the cost of intellectual honesty was really worth it if lives are at stake. It wasn't the topic at the time, but every time Obamacare survives I think about that.

Honestly, I have difficulty drawing the roadmap of how I got to here. It's just too complicated, too many things have happened, and correlating them to my historical mindstate at the time is tenuous at best, and entirely confabulated at worst.

However, I can point to a few big mountains that that roadmap drives over.

GWJ has definitely been one, at least over the last decade. Particularly with trans issues, thanks to the visible and out trans members of the community. I've only had passing contact with trans folks IRL, so the chance to get a window into some of their experience was a first.

It wasn't like I was anti-trans to start with, it was just something that as a cis dude, I'd never given much thought to. I've always been very "live and let live", and that extended to trans folks, but with a large side order of "well that's f*cking weird, but ok, you get on with your bad self." Having some second-hand experience handed to me has gotten rid of that / shown me that it's no f*cking weirder than the rest of life.

My girlfriend and wife have have been part of the picture too. My wife of 16 years is (in her own words) "fat and not commercially attractive". My girlfriend of 9 years is height-weight-proportionate and commercially attractive (and much smarter than me on gender issues to boot). Their experiences of moving through the world are *very* different - my wife says she's never been catcalled - my girlfriend get masturbated at on the street at least annually. Having a partners-eye view from both of them, and contrasting their two experiences has been very much been an awokening. Both are staunch feminists, but both come at that from very different directions - my girlfriend has a much more academic understanding of gender issues, and she's taught me a lot, where my wife is less of a book-feminist, but very much lives and embodies feminism on a day-to-day basis.

Moving from monogamy to polyamory was another. It forces you think about the cultural assumptions of relationship dynamics, and so much of that is patriarchy 101.

I was the first person my teenage best friend came out to as bi when we were 18 - that was a watershed moment between childhood unthinking use of slurs like "gay" and "poof" and adulthood.

Having some involvement in kink communities was another step in disabusing me of the "well that's f*cking weird" notion, and replacing it with "well that's really not for me but I'm glad you think it's hot".

Jonman wrote:

Having some involvement in kink communities was another step in disabusing me of the "well that's f*cking weird" notion, and replacing it with "well that's really not for me but I'm glad you think it's hot".

A few of the many important things I’ve learned from kink communities:
- The power of empathy to change your view of people and the world is amazing.
- That power is exponentially multiplied by the intensity and honesty of the experiences being shared.
- We all wear masks, but it doesn’t have to be about hiding what we are. It can be about shaping or expanding who we are as well.
- Seeing someone else shed or try on a mask within their unique emotional context can completely change how you feel about that particular mask. Sometimes it might remove some of its appeal, but for me at least, usually it just opens me up to a rich new understanding, respect, and admiration for it, and often it leads to developing some level of interest in it as well.

Nothing in my life so far has been a stronger antidote to my personal issues surrounding “masculine ideology.” (Incidentally, a huge thanks to Clover for bringing this useful new framing device for describing this concept.) It was one thing to intellectually acknowledge that the patriarchal society I was formed in has wrapped me in uncomfortable and unwelcome layers of concepts and behaviors around my sense of self, my methods of personal expression, and my interests in the world. But, the action I was able to take on that understanding was relatively limited until I joined communities that centered on people developing and expressing their sense of self outside of — or in direct contrast to — that patriarchal framework.

It has now been part of more than half a decade of generally positive personal change in that area, and while I see so much more I want to work on in that regard, being surrounded by a warm, welcoming, accepting community makes it feel like it’s possible in a way that it just wasn’t before.

Something I've learned from SW and kink communities is that no matter how outwardly liberal and inclusive, etc, a group is, it will still harbor predators, and people who are only paying lip service to those ideals, and who will drop them in a heartbeat to cover their own asses.

zeroKFE wrote:

- We all wear masks, but it doesn’t have to be about hiding what we are. It can be about shaping or expanding who we are as well.

I hope it's okay to riff on this because it's not *exactly* within the subject matter of the thread, but I don't think it's irrelevant either.

When I was younger I used to think a lot about authenticity. Especially if some cool new band seemed to be expressing everything I was about. Or some music band working within the confines of my ethnicity. I used to to think about why I like this music, that is my authenticity dependent on being born in such a specific time and place? That gets you thinking about all kinds of issues of authenticity vs. circumstances.

I started to think about masks. The analogy that I came to was that there's a 'me' that is pre-mask. But we're not complete until we put on a mask. That doesn't mean there's no essential 'me'--there's a 'me' that's a face with certain contours and features. That means plenty of masks will be uncomfortable.

It doesn't mean, though, that there's only one mask that is comfortable. There are probably plenty out there that are comfortable. There's still an individual, unique, valuable 'me' underneath those masks, though. It's about the harmony between my face and my mask, and it's a good thing that there's not some single mask and no other will do. There's room for both individuality and discovery in life.

Hope that doesn't come across as stealing any of your thunder about masks.

Tanglebones wrote:

Something I've learned from SW and kink communities is that no matter how outwardly liberal and inclusive, etc, a group is, it will still harbor predators, and people who are only paying lip service to those ideals, and who will drop them in a heartbeat to cover their own asses.

I was trying to focus on positives, but ooof, yeah, that also is true. People are people everywhere you go, sadly.

I've been impressed by my local communitiy’s actions to be proactive about stopping predators, but even when handled as well as possible, it’s still heartbreaking and infuriating the way things go down. And on a broader scale, the most popular kink networking tool (Fetlife) has rules designed to limit their liability that actively inhibit victim’s abilities to act against their abusers — or, at least it did the last time I was paying attention (about a year ago).

At most, it feels like things are riding just a bit ahead of the crest of the wave in broader society. The internet connected rope community, for example, got started with a serious #metoo style movement about eight months before the one in the broader culture did. Good, I guess? But, one would hope it would have happened much sooner than that given the organizing principles of the community.

Cheeze wrote:

Hope that doesn't come across as stealing any of your thunder about masks.

Not at all -- what you're talking about is very much in line (perhaps a parallel line, but still) with what I was talking about. And, for me, very relevant to the topic of the thread, because that concept is a big piece of me slowly reconstructing a more healthy sense of self that is less confined by culturally transmitted ideas of masculinity that just don't fit with who I want to be.

Certis wrote:

*mod*

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/OtWCeQn.jpg)
(Best part of the Muppet Show. Come at me.)

IMAGE(https://media3.giphy.com/media/3o6MbisQwZAh4Lqesw/giphy.gif?cid=3640f6095c3cc58e5441553563e12868)

Certis wrote:

I think it'd be good, especially for folks who have focused entirely on the behavior of others, to get on the stage instead of solely critiquing the what's playing out. Otherwise this endless wheel spinning about HOW we discuss things and chewing over rules starts to feel less about growing and more about establishing bona fides.

What's your experience? Did you hit a turning point in your life where you woke up? Was it a specific thing? Who inspired you?

My biggest turning point actually took place on this forum. My oldest daughter was just starting to have boys come around the house, and I wrote a post that I thought was hilarious about threatening violence to any young man who dared flirt with my daughter. There were a few pages of people agreeing with me, joking with me, and then several of the braver members of the forum politely suggested that I consider what kind of message I was sending my daughter, the young men, and my family as a whole. I got super defensive, and promptly went to my wife, explaining the situation, and how rudely I was being treated on the forum.

Her response was to shrug, and say, "Well, to be fair, you're kind of being a sexist ass."

She was right. So I started trying to pay attention more. I'm far, far from where I need to be. I don't actually think I'll ever be completely where I need to be. But people like momgamer, clover, Yellek, Eleima, sometimesdee, amoebic, Hypatian, pyxistyx, and quite a few more have all helped me head in the right direction. Any progress I've made has come from shutting my stupid mouth and listening.

I'll also say that living in a hyperconservative state sometimes spoils me. I compare myself to my neighbors, and occasionally become quite self-satisfied at how progressive and woke I am. But when they're flying a Confederate flag and go to a local church that includes among its stated goals to restore the family to a "godly model", that bar is set so low I risk tripping over it. Coming here helps me set my personal goals to a point where it'll actually do some damn good.

@trichy - That moment actually came up in a conversation I was having with Kittylexy last night as one of the times where someone was open to listening to corrective advice, and growing from it.

That thread opened my eyes as well. It was a pivot point in how I view gender relations and bodily autonomy. It was an uncomfortable situation but lead to a good dialog. Our trichy is a great guy, but damn, I'm glad I'm not him.

Gilette dropped this new ad that addresses toxic masculinity. I've got my opinions, but I'd love to hear the perspective from men.

My opinion is that the less cultural cachet we can take from advertising, the better.

Gillette's opinion on gender relations can be summed up as "how can we leverage this to sell more razors?"

Jonman wrote:

My opinion is that the less cultural cachet we can take from advertising, the better.

Gillette's opinion on gender relations can be summed up as "how can we leverage this to sell more razors?"

While this is true, advertisers have basically three routes: Appeal to conservative thought, Appeal to progressive thought, pretend nothing is going on.

There's no doubt ads are made to sell things, but I'm happier when the route they take to do that doesn't appeal to things like toxic masculinity.

Nothing like hoping for a viral ad to burnish Gillette's brand image and boost brand awareness among the coveted 18-34 demographic even though a lot of those men are terrible Gillette consumers who've grown beards or don't shave everyday.

That and it basically appeals to/exploits one idea of masculinity to attack another idea of masculinity instead of opting for the more appropriate "don't be an asshole and just be a good person regardless of your gender" approach.

I'd like to share a recent experience with y'all to further demonstrate that you can make a difference to other men's lives just by talking on the internet.

So I had a 1 on 1 Discord discussion with a gentleman just under the age of 29, and he's your stereotypical alpha male; large muscular features, one of the boys. We're part of a "book club" for a specific manga title that's come to an end. As a social group, we're still trying to come to grips with the ending and keeping our friendships going. But under the hood, he's a quiet person who lacks self confidence and questions his self worth. He admitted that he had thoughts of self harm, especially so during the festive season. Drinking problems. Stress about work and underperformance. Stress about not being happy in life, not finding the "perfect woman". Stress about not being the "perfect man". Stress about being ridiculed for not wanting to have sex with random women for the sake of the conquest. About being attracted to women of certain ethnicities not from the same ethnicity as himself. All these things, he doesn't feel comfortable with discussing with friends or family. Because he feels it's a sign of weakness and he believes people look up to him as the kind of man they want to be.

We spoke about self worth. Discovering who we are. Just being able to find another person to talk to so these fears and concerns aren't just bottled up. Not being judged for our thoughts. Reaching out for counselling. Being able to influence our peers from how we behave, and unpacking toxic masculinity. Deconstructing the concept of sacrifice for its own sake and finding the essence of what makes us individual and what drives each of us forward. I got him to download the APA guideline for counselling men and boys. To read it for himself and do some self-reflection. I'm happy to say I think he's in a much better space than where he was before we had that discussion. But he's not out of the danger zone yet, and he still needs to work on his mental health. I'll be making sure I check in on him daily so that he knows there's someone out there who cares enough to reach out and spend time working through the fears.

I'm not the most woke guy out of all of us, but I'm trying, and I think I might be making a difference just by how I carry myself in discussions. I hope that more of us here can help spread that message and change lives for the better.

Jesus you guys are cynical. I loved the ad - I thought it was great. I hope to see more like it.

SallyNasty wrote:

Jesus you guys are cynical. I loved the ad - I thought it was great. I hope to see more like it.

yeah I agree. And I hope Gillette wears the number of dislikes the video got as a badge of honor.

Would love to hear thoughts on if shows like You on Netflix help or hurt causes. My wife wanted to give it a go but I feel like I see red flags everywhere on this thing. Obviously the big ones are easy to say no to like murder. But does a show like this generate more discussion on creeps and toxic relationships that causes good ?