Edit. I want to kill myself reading the comments. Guess it's because I deserve it as a toxic male.
There used to be this beautiful butterfly garden in the public park next to where I grew up where the monarchs would lay their eggs and the caterpillars would hatch and feed on the milkweed. I must have been 7 or 8 when I visited during one of the great annual migrations that the monarchs make. There were thousands of them, a truly wondrous sight. I know I enjoyed it, but I didn't appreciate it, I guess you never do appreciate something like that until it’s only a memory. I wish I could go back there.
That section of the park got paved over for a parking lot to the adjacent private tennis club that the residents of the town just had to have. This is progress, I'm told. The monarchs don’t fly through the town anymore. There are so few of them left now. Was it worth it? Who am I to say?
Smh if only beings like the pagan spirits of the forest actually existed irl...
ngl, bougie tennis club members being eaten by an enraged butterfly god sounds rad as hell
I’ve only experienced their migration once, and there were dozens of them flying through the streets and around houses. I’d like to recreate that by planting milkweed flowers all over my yard. It’s a start for something.
I honestly think this is true for most women too, it just manifests in different ways. We're all just very tired.
I have to wonder how people like this therapist can be happy? Surely they must realise on some level that society is collapsing, the environment is dying and our immediate future, hell, present, looks bleak. Being positive with our current situation seems borderline delusional to me in a scary way.
Maybe being rich makes it easier to distract yourself from current life under capitalism, but I honestly feel this therapists positive outlook is the minority. Nearly every person I meet, man or woman, is stressed, depressed and tired (usually all three) and I'm in the service industry so I meet a lot.
I have to wonder how people like this therapist can be happy?
$$$$$$$$
Also its the cope of thinking that despite everything, ones cushy desk job helps other people directly, and thus everything can be solved.
This is broadly true in capitalist society of course, but 48 is right about the perfect for age for dealing with jaded, single men. At that age most of the single men are either divorced and bitter about it, or never married and bitter about it. I don't want to over-generalize and of course there are plenty of exceptions, but just something I noticed.
Or there could just be an actual problem with alienation that fascists are exploiting
porque no los dos
it's a good point though. real or not doesn't matter when it matches underlying conditions
wouldn't attempts to alienate try to deflect from digging into the actual psychology and try to blame it on the women instead?
yeah but that's what comments are for
idk I don't reddit anymore. but this fits the trope
I assure you, I am in fact a real woman, and I noticed this about men I interact with. Just an anectdote, but also [hand-wavy generalization]
the one thing that makes me think it's real is the demographic, which is right around where reddit's at nowadays, so it could be earnest
A lot of the time guys of that age and generation have also been aggressively against dealing with any of their shit and accumulated decades of toxic behaviors and self loathing. Especially common in boomers who internalized the whole "shut up and deal with it like a man" thing.
I don't think it's a coincidence that every man of that age range I've ever met that wasn't a horrible person was a functional alcoholic, smoked a shitton of weed, or both. You need substances to survive that without becoming a bitter ball of hatred.
You need substances to survive that without becoming a bitter ball of hatred.
If you’ve been avoiding your entire mental health for decades, then yeah, you’re going to be self-medicating.
by 48, it’s mostly the worst men alive who are still single
they are single because they are the most emotionally twisted dudes around
....Or maybe because they haven't found a partner yet for whatever other reason (stress, mental health, general alienation) and/or just don't want to get married?
What about the people who are 48+, married, and are shitty, disgusting domestic abusers?
Here we see undercurrents of the christian mind prison present within western angloids, where marriage/human relations are seen as part of a measure of an individual's purity and moral worth. If person is not married by age X this means they suck shit, are a sinner, are most likely a psycho etc. etc.
I am not saying this isn't a phenomenon, but, before making such sweeping claims about marriage as a measure of human morality it would be better to at least find robust empirical data to back such claims up. Otherwise, it just sounds like a strawman to spur hatred against alienated individuals spurred on by slave morality and magical thinking.
Exactly. Because MRAs are a mostly online movement with no substantive bearing to real life. Your response does not address the key issues of rightist christian moralistic thinking and the resulting views on marriage based on a correlation fallacy and slave morality.
Even assuming I have seen an MRA protest in the flesh (from a distance due to their rancid stench), their numbers would still be nothing in comparison to the total population of men in the area of protest, an unknown portion of which would be partnered/married. Therefore, a generalization cannot be drawn between the aforementioned rotten acolytes of nurgle and the majority of men.
I really shouldn't bother to respond beyond this because I have already addressed that point, while you have yet again failed to address my key point of the right wing christian mind prison. However:
MRAs are largely drawn from the 48+ single/divorced and boo-hoo-hoo about it crowd.
Once again you take a tiny, tiny minority of antifeminist nurglings who are limited to the online and have no bearing on reality, then, you extrapolate their behaviour/character to make a universal judgement (one might say, god's eye) to the majority of men with no other empirical datapoints besides "muh christian morality" and "muh fee fees". Its absolutely nonsensical, the "crowd" of psychopathic human failures you allude to simply does not exist, what exists in its place are rather tired, alienated, beaten down people.
If you even want to respond after this then please address your christian morality before anything instead of dilly dallying around this point which you have lost on.
whoosh
:cringe:
Actually go do your homework you plebbit simp.
This account is like two weeks old and likely a wrecker. I wouldn't bother.
Edit: I checked the mod log and they were apologizing for America's nuclear war crimes and imperialism. They're an asshole.
Yet another example of the incel's projection of their own character onto men as a whole. :stupidpol:
Are you intending this as a dunk on me or the guy who argued it was cool to nuke Japan?
argued it was cool to nuke Japan
:le-pol-face: in action
yes it was a dunk on the incel who assumes all men are bad because MRAs (and himself) are bad
still single.
You do know that's a fairly common age to get divorced, right?
A good (i.e. frequent) sex life (not just masturbation but human touch) is incredibly important to individual’s physical and psychological wellbeing, especially men’s. These men didn’t get it because they didn’t deserve it. I can’t imagine why anyone would want to be around them. They are toxic and poison everyone they come in contact with.
What the fuck? This reads like what a chud thinks a feminist believes in.
Do you really believe that the female touch has some magical ability to make men more mentally healthy lol
I think affection can have that power, yes. Not siding with that weird chud poster though.
This hit me hard this morning. Don't know why exactly, but I'm going to write down some thoughts.
It's easy to just say toxic masculinity. But also, clearly this therapist has gotten close enough to them to get them to open up this way. Which if you grew up a certain way is a really hard thing to do. Let's hope that this opens the actual individuals in the story up to work on their own happiness.
But I'm a bit saddened by the reactions here and I think they happen in society at large a lot as well. Quite quickly their feelings are contrasted with what women go through, or that everyone has this issue. While often valid points, I can see people opening up about their emotions, possibly for the first time since childhood, finding this very scary as they're taught that they'll be judged for it. It immediately being relativised based on the experiences of others usually doesn't lead to the man opening up to see those perspectives, but to shut down his emotions again because the first reaction is a slightly differently worded "suck it up buttercup, you're not special."
And this I think is the big problem with men opening up about their emotions. In both the traditional space they're shot down as being unmanly and in the leftist spaces they get shot down because there are more marginalised groups dealing with worse issues. There really isn't anywhere healthy to go for them to be able to open up without a form of disapproval for them opening up. I think a lot of men, and I would include myself in that, feel like they're not allowed to speak about their feelings in public spaces.
I was very disappointed to wake up and read the comments. That everyone wants to say it's just toxic old men and it's their fault for not getting therapy. It's just nobody cares. Everytime I post about men's mental health, someone also post, but women get depressed to, thank you for proving my point that no one cares. Everyone either tries to erase the hardships of the male experience or tries to pretend they don't exist.
That if you suggest anything other that it's men's fault their depressed, your some kind of lizard brained men's right activist. That to point out that poor men cant be emotionally broken and isolated so they can be forced longer and longer hour, is wrong because of the patriarchy, but also their fault for not wanting to go to therapy.
This is one of the reasons why I've given up.
But it's still an important discussion to have, so I really appreciate you posting this this morning comrade. Don't give up as there's value to pointing out that men suffer just as much under patriarchy and that they deserve the space to express themselves as well.
Are you talking about the comments here or what?
Talking with other men about how we need to work through internalized sexism / patriarchy doesn’t rule out other issues. It’s an actionable step toward bettering our conditions.
Acknowledging that men need to also combat sexism is not erasing our hardships.
tbh my first reaction was "lol this isn't just straight dudes, go ask my bi enby ass about feeling dead inside." But you do have a point, and i think being raised as a boy has saddled me with a lot of the problems you're describing that i'm still working through in spite of having been able to emotionally open up more ages ago, in spite of having a decidedly nontoxic circle of friends, in spite of always having been an introspective person more aware than the average dude of what's going on inside me.
Admitting that patriarchy also harms men in very specific ways doesn't detract from adressing the problems of women and nonbinary people. Believing otherwise would mean to fall for the liberal fallacy of pitting people against each other over who's more oppressed when the only viable leftist answer to oppression is universal solidarity. Dismantling patriarchy is a necessary part of overcoming capitalism, as it's a core element of the superstructure maintaining capitalism and you can't dismantle the patriarchy without adressing all of the harm it does, including the harm it does to men.
Well said, suffering is suffering and everyone deserves solidarity to move through that.
I don't think she's gotten them to open up in a unique way - it sounds like she's bringing work home by treating her partners like a patient.
I would also say that the subset of men who are "casually dating a late 40s woman" is far more likely to have a shitty life than average. They're by definition single/not in an LTR and likely in their mid 40s to early 60s, probably have an ex wife and kids with varying amounts of stress, probably some other issues, etc.
I don't think noting guys have mental health issues and trouble opening up is bringing work home with her. That seems like a big jump, but maybe I'm missing something.
The weird one where they start off claiming "It’s women who are learning not to care about men" or another one?
My dudes, it goes beyond capitalism. Capitalism is built on top of, and made possible by, other systems of oppression. This includes the patriarchy and its hostile enforcement of gender roles.
Your mental health and your emotions matter. If you think you haven't felt any emotions in a while, that is a sign you're suppressing them. They are still there, you're just shoving them down and falling into a cycle of avoidance.
The "men would rather [do thing] than go to therapy" meme caught on for a reason, because it is true. Therapists help you unpack your shit. They get shit from a certain part of the left that thinks they don't focus systemically enough, but that's not the point of therapy.
Therapy is field medicine provided by a combat medic. It patches you up and gets you the skills you need to keep fighting the good fight. Under captialism, yeah, a lot of the time that focus is on getting you back to where you can work in a stable way.
Therapists often prioritize that because your access to healthcare in this shithole country is attached to being employed. You have to hold down a job to have your insurance to get healthcare, both physical and psychological. If you lose your job, then you lose coverage and it's harder to help you.
Start unpacking your issues with a therapist. There are community mental health clinics in a lot of cities/towns if you'd otherwise be unable to afford a therapist. Many offer teletherapy, which helps a lot.
If that somehow isn't an option either look up some Cognitive Behavioral Therapy workbooks. Going in solo with one of those is the psych equivalent of performing frontier medicine on yourself, but probably better than never thinking through the topic at all.
Since going through therapy I've become a better partner. I've become a better person since doing this. I'm a better socialist since doing this. I have a lifetime of emotional self harm to work through, but it doesn't take a lifetime to work through your past.
Kill the patriarch in your fucking heart before he can kill you.
He did also mention getting a CBT workbook and going through it yourself if you can’t afford therapy
It doesn’t always. Like I said, community mental health clinics + CBT workbooks can help a lot as well if you don't have insurance that helps cover therapy. Community mental health clinics adjust rates based on income.
My state's version of medicare also covers therapy, although finding a therapist who takes that can be challenging.
For some people, medication is another tool that can make a difference. Not for everyone, but life changing for those who it benefits.
Mental healthcare in general right now is pretty impacted because of the pandemic, but it's still worth seeing if you can schedule an appointment. 1-2 months wait to get started isn't unusual right now from what I've heard from friends.
ib4 some kind of weird "what about women though" brainworms:
A lot of women have their own shit to work through because they are also especially oppressed by the patriarchy and capitalism. That's not the point of my comment though and shouldn't be used as an excuse to not take care of yourself.
I've been thinking about the idea of being "dead inside" and I don't think it's a good fit. If people are anything like me - someone you could definitely describe that way - they have an unstable cocktail of emotions stirring around at any moment. What creates the illusion of being "dead" is that we have throughout our entire lives been trained to never express them. Even if we think emotions are when you cry or rage or whatever, that's just how you would normally act on it. The underlying feelings are still there to create suffering and guide our behavior. If we have a "dead" reaction to something big, it might as well be that we are too drained to absorb more ingredients into the cocktail.
I'm dead inside and I have a bunch of complex feelings, it's just I have no positive feelings.
Women is when not alienated by late-capitalist hellworld, men is when alienated by late-capitalist hellworld. Thank you reddit, very cool!
Obviously women are alienated too, but this takes different forms. Women can be open about struggling without facing major social consequences (labor consequences may be a different story). Men will not even acknowledge that they have any problems in the first place, which makes them that much harder to deal with. Women on the other hand are almost expected to have some defect, in basically a modern evolution of the infantilizing "hysteria" argument. Women can say "sorry I didn't do task X, my ADHD was acting up again" and it's no big deal, but I've never heard a man use such an excuse, either because they don't want to admit it to themselves or because they're afraid they will be looked down upon. (My defaulting to "them" in that last sentence may very well be a Freudian slip.) People aren't afraid of women like they are of men, which I think speaks to how much more messed up men are. It's no coincidence that fascists (maybe one of the purest forms of projection) are a male-dominated movement.
The chickens are coming home to roost.
No, this is literally people combatting the patriarchy.
You're the wrecker that said nuking Japan was fine. This u?
:PIGPOOPBALLS:
Ngl I read the mental and emotional effects of estrogen and I’m like yes please. I was so mad when I found out softens your skin. My skin sucks
Oh I was saying I was jealous of the skin thing. I just don’t think I’d care for the fat redistribution
ITT: Speculating on this post being fake and made by a man, that men deserve their poor mental health or that poor mental health is universal and men don't experience any unique issues.
Toxic masculinity is very real and it is something men need to work through. We need to make sure we are not avoidant of combatting the patriarchy.
Acknowledging and addressing the issues that men as a gender have does not somehow invalidate the wider struggles of humanity.
Also I don't think you need to put therapist in quotation marks. She is a woman correctly pointing out that men have noteable mental health issues inflicted on them by the patriarchy.
