Also, literally who cares. This isn't politics. Zoomers and millenials are very left-wing and that hasn't changer significantly in recent years. This isn't happening at scales that are shifting the political landscape. Idk why there is an obsession with this shit.
what if instead of books about working out and hating women, we made books about working out and not hating women?? anyone ever had this idea before?
Fr the suggestions I see for creating a "positive masculinity" always make me groan, because they always go on to describe behaviors and values that aren't specifically masculine. the only reason a man or boy would need to view them as masculine to pursue them is if he felt his masculinity was under threat. The right affirms this position and the left necessarily rejects it. Our self-help, such that it is, is concerned with how to become a better person, which is distinct from how to become a better man.
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Advice on how to overcome toxic masculinity does indeed make one a better person, not a better man. It is still a gender specific problem, though. And when we want to adress it and do something about it, we can't do that without men.
Unfortunately the best advice i have to offer in that regard is "just stop wanting to be a dude, this shit crumbles immediately when you realize you've been a girl all along". That obviously doesn't help cis dudes, even though it was a complete game changer for me and how i relate to people, how i take care of my friendships, how i access and regulate my emotions, if and how i seek help when i'm in trouble, how other people treat me and also how i talk to women i want to date (or at least write smut with). And i can say with 100% certainty that being molded into an emotionally dead, constantly guarded shell of a human being constantly fighting for control is literally killing men. It's just very difficult to adress that when the same molding also makes men kill women before they kill themselves. This is the central contradiction of the left's ability to tackle men's issues: We recognize the privilege men have, and they do, cismasculinity is the default gender in our society and on top of nearly all hierarchies. But we struggle to address the fact that this privilege comes with a price for them because capitalism gives you nothing for free. Boys get broken until they can become the oppressors that capital needs to manage its institutions, let its political power grow out of the barrel of the gun and stratify society in ways that are conducive to the egotistical nightmare worldview of eternal oneupmanship that is the ideological backbone of the capitalist hustle. This is on purpose. And we cannot fight patriarchy, and by extension capitalism, if we do not heal men from this hellish mindset.
Men want to get the girl, not be the girl.
Silly boys, why not both?
Yoda voice: "and this is why you fail"
Well yeah, this probably wouldn't work as well for guys as it does for me. Like i said, i can't really help people who are men and need to maintain some kind of male gender role. I can just relate to how being expected to perform as a man fucks people up.
I guess my corollary to this, being somebody that is deeply entrenched within exactly the kind of personal hell that you're describing, is that I don't really think that you're going to fix or solve the mindset issue without first solving the material issue.
The fact is, or at least my experience is that the reason men adopt the mindset that they do is because it's required of them to actually compete, to keep themselves "alive", and to meet their needs within society as it is presently constituted. Unless you can directly prove that they can still achieve all those things, that they can still sustain themselves & exist as a meaningful member of society right now without having to compete in the ways that they do, then you don't have any real basis by which to argue against it other than acknowledging the fact that it's a fuckin' miserable existence that hurts themselves & others. Which yes it is, but the alternative is material squalor & total social disenfranchisement, you in fact might as well just fucking kill yourself in that scenario because you're going to die early, wretched, alone & unremarked upon anyways.
And like no you can't reasonably expect most people to be willing to take that option; that is IMO the problem with, and to some extent the paucity of the critique of Toxic Masculinity. It refuses to acknowledge that there are real material reasons why it exists; and it's not just some kind of bizarre cognitohazard that propagates completely independent of the social or material reality of the moment.
Because some people (not me) actually like being male and want to continue doing so and still be seen as a good person. "Alpha Chad" mindset says toxicity is inherent to men and to be toxic. Some women (typically terfs) treat being male as if it makes you a rape demon. Under both these systems you can not be a decent human and a man simultaneously. Is it not wrong for someone to want both masculinity and humanity as part of themselves?
well here's how i do it: if someone hates me for being a man, i ignore them.
i'm not sayin it feels good when people are mean online, but there are solutions available.
Exactly. I've worked through this shit myself. Also good on you for being an emotionally mature and well adjusted human being. These are not things that teenage boys and young men who hear right wing propaganda are.
They exist irl too