Men's Struggles with Valuing Ourselves

Oncefa2 · 2022-07-20T23:47:02+00:00

This is what internalised misandry is.

I'm sure there's some stuff like this going the other way for women. It's not strictly a men's issue. But I think we recognize that it can be a problem when it affects women. And we're actively trying to solve that problem.

But then we ignore it for men. Which only makes the problem worse.

YesAmAThrowaway · 2022-07-20T20:42:58+00:00

I love Lauren! She makes great videos!

BloomingBrains · 2022-07-22T07:12:02+00:00

Kind of random but this post really reminds me of an incident that happened semi-recently at a family event. Several older men were questioning me on my love life (basically, the fact of me being an "incel"--though of course they did not know that term). One of the advice they tried to give me basically went along the lines of "you need to fake being interesting because men aren't really interesting on our own".

That line left me speechless. At the time I didn't really know how to respond but you're right, its a form of internalized misandry. Its like an extension of "girls good, boys bad" to such an absurd degree that it even causes people to rationalize their own hobbies as boring. And for the record, it wasn't just the "nerd stuff" that I'm into that they were talking about. No, they were more jock-ish types who were talking about sports that way as well. Its almost like there is this brutal dichotomy where if you like jock stuff, you must be a boring backwards hat wearing looser who sits on his couch drinking beer and routing on his favorite sports team all day. And if you like nerd stuff then you're a geek with weird obscure interests women could never relate to. You can't win no matter what. The jock-nerd (or chad-incel) binary is a lot like the Madonna-whore binary, when you really think about it.

But why not reverse that? One could just as easily say women are boring because all they care about is meaningless gossip, wasting money via shopping, getting their nails done, etc. Of course the problem with that is its highly sexist, but why does this logic seemingly only apply to women? Why can we stereotype men but not women? Why are stereotypically female hobbies okay, and stereotypically male ones bad? Why are men the ones that have to "change" (or fake change) for women, not the other way around?

aeon314159 · 2022-07-21T05:23:15+00:00

>Self-worth is so community-based...

What? To me, self-worth is something I find/assign by myself, within/to myself.

> It's not something we actively think about much...

I hardly think about it these days, because I’m now well, relative to where I used to be. Getting here required a lot of self-work, thought, and self-acceptance. I used to think about it quite a lot.

>I think the world would be a completely different place if it were easier for men to cultivate genuine self-worth.

My sense is it was only as difficult for me as I chose to make it. Accepting oneself, and learning to love oneself unconditionally isn’t trivial for anyone, but can be particularly challenging when one has a background that includes childhood sexual abuse, and rape, like I do.

But I’m here to tell you it is possible, and I think and feel it is worth one’s time and effort.

Because even if you can’t see it right now, you’re worth it.

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