Article on Solidarity for Trans/Cis Men’s Issues

Gnome_Child_Deluxe · 2025-01-03T23:30:05+00:00

Never heard of him before. First half is pretty decent, it goes really downhill from the heading "Ableism" onwards in my opinion. I don't know what kind of audience he's writing this for, but I'm not a big fan of the tone of the article towards the end.

Firstly I'm not a fan of this general idea:

"One reason that men are so inescapably lonely is that they’re not putting in the work of getting vulnerable with other people, or offering others social support. This is not the fault of women. Nor is it caused by men’s inherent evil or selfishness. No, the norms of masculinity are simply so restricting, and the range of acceptable male behavior so thin, that scores and scores of men have no concept of how to meaningfully connect. Men have been conditioned to believe that catering to other people, anticipating their needs, providing service to them, and bearing their wounds to them is something they are not capable of, or should do. The emotional withdrawal and artificial displays of strength that protect their manhood are also what makes it impossible for anyone to get close. You can’t start a club because that would mean admitting you are lonely. You can’t be nice to someone, because then they’ll know you need them. The only way out of this prison is mortifying — it’s by debasing yourself enough to admit you have needs, that you can never be the all-powerful, disconnected man society expected you to be."

This still comes back to this notion that men are essentially inflicting these wounds on themselves when in reality society holds you to that standard. It's this old problem I have with progressive writers writing about men's issues where they keep defaulting back to "men should be more progressive" being the solution for the world's ills when the problem is often not that men don't want to be more progressive but that the world won't let them be more progressive. Unfortunately this article fits into the long list of articles like it that make the same mistake.

The second thing that I'm not a fan of is how various instances of people just doing genuinely fucked up shit get dismissed as guys trying to be masculine. Your lyft driver bragging about having multiple families who don't know about each other is fucking rancid, that has nothing to do with gender or anything. That genuinely seems like a fake story to me idk. Your coworker cornering female employees in the elevator is grade A weirdo behavior disability or not, idem dito for autistic guys. The one trans guy's story about him treating people poorly and basically admitting to taking advantage of women sexually is not normal guy behavior and gets dismissed as such way too easily imo. That's fucked and for that guy to just dismiss it by going "teehee must be my socialization as a man acting up again" is just nasty. It is somewhat ironic to spend the first half of the article talking about how trans men are not seen as real men by people who are allegedly on their side only for the author to then essentially make the same mistake by writing off a trans man's bad behavior as him basically just trying to pass:

“I really, really hurt people, and I did it as men are encouraged to do, and as they are rewarded for doing. I found affirmation in hurting people, and it is so fucking easy to do this without even really thinking of it because it’s the entire culture you’ve come up in. I’m not even talking like, obvious cases here like physical domestic abuse & intentional date rape. There are so many subtle boundary erosions, there’s weird gray areas around drugs & alcohol, there’s attitudes and expectations in established relationships, there’s the potential to exploit community for personal gain. There are partners who will fear you, and freeze and fawn and will not tell you no.”

I'm sorry but this is delusional, being a trans man is literally the only thing saving you here, you can't post the above as a cis man and not get buried for it. If you try to distance yourself from your own sexually exploitative behavior like this by claiming you were culturally encouraged to do it as a straight cis man you'll get set on fire. Take some responsibility.

Sufficient_Heat_610 · 2025-01-03T20:33:54+00:00

Yeah it's pretty noticeable how little empathy men are given. Even in the article it seemed kinda cold twords men who's the author doesn't personally relate to.

Local-Willingness784 · 2025-01-04T04:35:03+00:00

“Patriarchy punishes men for failing to be men. And being a man is usually defined as oppressing women. Men that can’t do this, that can’t oppress women, are feminized and pushed into a lower class.”

no

men are expected if not demanded by women to have power, in general, to be seen as a man, and hence as a human, way too much for this to be a man oppressor women victim narrative all over again, and even if the last fucking thing I want to do is put this person's masculinity into doubt I really don't think this is it. i imagine that as a queer person this is different, but having your mom, your female relatives or your partners put you in "your place" after falling to live up to their expectations is a very shitty experience that you simply cant live thru without being a man, and is an integral part of being one for some of us, its awful how he can somehow try to talk down to men as if he knew better while ignoring this shit.

In Autistic self-advocacy spaces, you can find the same kind of boorish masculine entitlement as just about anywhere else: men will talk at length over women, critique how women express themselves, and undermine women for having so-called “emotional” reactions while centering their own concerns and pressuring people to date them.

It is often men who enjoy very little societal power outside of the Autistic community who seem most primed to do this. They aren’t, as a rule, traditionally masculine — they’re the soft, “nerdy” types who have been beaten for speaking with an effeminate lisp and mocked for liking My Little Pony. They possess both massive social disadvantages, and the frustrated entitlement of someone aspiring to masculinity— and these dual insecurities damage them and everyone around them.

the worst fucking place for an autistic man to be after the incel forums and right-wing spaces has to be progressive spaces, holly shit, I cant even imagine what it would like to be a man in those places and not only be talked down, called names and called out but put into more shitty little boxes and given more "work" for some stupid role that benefit other people, I didn't knew that people there were like this but this is incredible.

SpicyMarshmellow · 2025-01-04T03:31:10+00:00

Really don't connect with this article at all, frankly. It feels like a lot of brain rot. I mean... there's multiple paragraphs dedicated to claiming that the standard proportions of clothing is an expression of white supremacy. Like sure there's something worth criticism there. But it isn't fashion designers twirling their villain mustaches like "Failing to fit into these pants sure will punish them for being born the wrong skin color and failing euro-centric masculine ideals!" People like this author just try way, way, way too hard to see their narratives in everything, to the point that they're incapable of perceiving more basic, mundane realities. And as usual, the toxic masculinity narrative is the focus, used to deflect from any idea that there's real men's issues not rooted in self-inflicted pressure to conform to toxic gender norms.

Whatisanamehuh · 2025-01-04T02:41:35+00:00

I seriously struggled to parse this article. I genuinely tried probably more than a dozen different approaches to respond to it, and all seemed completely inadequate. I think the problem is the article seems to be written by a guy that is still seriously struggling with the idea of what it means to be a man, and as a result it's inconsistent, confused, and sometimes seems to excuse some seriously concerning behavior. The author seems to have somehow internalized a view of masculinity that is primarily driven by a combination of the most extreme voices on the left and on the right. At one point I was thinking he must be pretty young, and it was just the product of a young man growing up in this severely polarized society, with many very vocal outrage merchants looking to push him one way or another, but he’s actually 36, a few years older than me.

I spent about 2 years of my life in a wheelchair, and have used a cane for the 15ish years since then. I think he’s wildly off base on basically everything he has to say about disabled men. His discussion about disabled men being “feminized” seems to say a great deal about how he views women/femininity and has nothing at all to do with how I’ve experienced being disabled.

SuspicousEggSmell · 2025-01-04T00:38:52+00:00

It’s not bad but I feel it still has a lot of the blindspots that progressives usually have towards men, such as the idea that it is exclusively men who uphold high standards of masculinity (when many men’s experiences as well as academic studies have found women: particularly mothers and partners, to uphold a lot of gender norms such as limiting emotional expression), framing men’s desires of appearing masculine as a sorta selfish endeavor when many men feel immense pressure to never be a burden and to self sacrifice for others, and the extent to which it touches on topics such as abuse and sexual assault, it’s either a means of masculine control on women, or something men do to other men, when men themselves are most likely to victimized by women, and women assaulting and abusing men is by no means a rarity.

I also dislike how at the end it devolves into the progressive idea that men just wine for spaces that women made, when in the cases that men have attempted to create self advocacy, it has been derided by both the right and the left as being a failure of masculinity, sexist, taking resources from women, or unneeded. Never mind that while it is true that men do deride women’s advocacy for themselves out of misogynistic intent, it is also true that there are many times where men’s own issues and experiences are dismissed and treated as non existent by feminists and other progressives, which is at times what triggers the “men too” response

Upper-Divide-7842 · 2025-01-05T13:46:27+00:00

I'm not seeing a lot of solidarity in this article. Just more "all of mens problems are generated by how evil men are" gaslighting.

Low_Rich_5436 · 2025-01-08T09:30:33+00:00

This article showcases clearly how the postmodern left is designed to fight the class struggle and defend capitalism.

The author argues cis men can suffer too. This, however, is not because of our general shared humanity and participation in an alienating society. It's because cis men too can be outside of the norm. They can be too thin or too fat, too effeminate, have long hair, struggle with the societal norms around emotions, be disabled, be native american. In fact, everybody deviates from the norm ins some way therefore everybody suffers from our oppressive culture and should work to take it down. Yay inclusivity!

In this world view people suffer only inasmuch as they deviate from the norm. Abolish the norm, and the world will be perfect.

There is no place for solidarity between people not because they share some abnormality, but because they all live in a society that exploits everyone regardless of any attribute. (but one: belonging to the tiny ruling class)

For the postmodern left collective structures are oppressive. Social movements need to be segmented in as many ineffective sub-movement as possible and the solution is always more individualism.

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