First things first, Bluey fucking rocks. I would never watch it for fun but when the kids pick it over Paw Patrol or Blippi I find myself able breathe freely again.
Also yeah, great piece. Back when I was working on a ground crew for the department of transportation, landscaping and ripping down homeless camps and cleaning trash off of freeways and whatnot, my work crew was totally unplugged from Try Guyism. About a fourth were felons, mostly from gang related stuff.
But we had three women in the crew of forty and nobody fucked with them. Nobody harassed them, sexualized them, hit on them (while on the clock anyway, conversations on the way to the cars after you sign out are different), not even behind their back in the literal locker room. And when local crazies and outsiders tried to do so, the lads coalesced into a united front and offered to beat the shit out of them til they left our people alone.
I never conducted a survey or anything, but I’m pretty sure none of those guys thoughts of themselves as feminists or indeed liberals at all, just doing like their mamas taught them.
Maybe being online too much wrecks your soul or something.
I find it hilarious that the Wikipedia entry for Blippi contains criticism from Nathan J. Robinson. You can't make this shit up.
Just imagining Robinson, dressed up in that dumb outfit that makes him look like Truman Capote with color blindness, brow furrowed, earnestly scrutinizing YouTube videos of Blippi singing songs about garbage trucks or whatever is an almost too perfect summary of all things Too Online.
TBF, that quote about Blippi being "dead and sterile" is pretty spot on. Blippi, Cocomelon, etc are the kind of drek that YouTube's "democratizing of the video medium" birthed us.
TBF, Netflix got a hold of Cocomelon recently and made a more structured series ("Cocomelon Lane") that actually has storylines and characters that don't just sing the same 3 tunes and it's actually bearable. Not groundbreaking by any means, but mildly bearable.
I had to do "community service" for a misdemeanor conviction about a decade ago, and same thing with the women on the crew. We all had to basically book-in to the local prison every Saturday and Sunday at 4:30AM before being given gas powered weed eaters, rakes and riding mowers to do completely unnecessary prison grounds yard work. Probably 3 dudes to every female and no issues at all. Didn't hear a single machismo or misogynist comment.
Not sure where on the spectum of good vs bad man masculinity I would be comfortable also where woman would be comfortable. I do know the morals change over time. Not sure its a kind of pendulum change or evolviutionary species change. Both our genetic make up AND the environment it finds itself in play significant roles.
I'm voting it's neither a morals change nor a species change. It's just different POVs of the same thing, which I think you meant by the pendulum change. It is the endless re-creations of our imagination vs the timeless reality of our natures.
I tend to reject the framework. Masculinity and Femininity are constructs and constraints derived from the nature of existing as men and women. They’re observations, suggestions and guidelines, not to be regarded as dictates. Integrity comes from action, as does any other expression of self.
All of which calls to mind Neil Gaiman who throughout his writing career has been a proud feminist, a writer of queer perspectives, a friend of Tori Amos and an upholder of women... and has also, apparently, been sleeping with as many of them as he can and is credibly accused of coercive behaviour and assault.
Many detractors have assumed the feminism and everything else was a screen, designed to disguise a predator. Carefully calibrated to get past defences. I'm not sure it's that simple, that there's a switch into the negative zone where all these previously laudable traits are now evil. I reckon Neil really did believe all that, really did work to tear down toxic masculinity, really did want to present queer women and alternative lifestyles in his work etcetera, and was still the bad guy. That he didn't realise he was, or knew he was sometimes but thought his work mitigated against it, or couldn't stop. That it was more complex and also more simple: everyone is the hard thing sometimes.
By contrast, I don't believe it for a moment. I don't trust the sincerity of any man who puts so much visible (key word) effort into feminism either. Each one of these guys is angling for spot in Freddie's bestiary of Too Online Good White Men in my book.
And the heavens open up, a ray of light beams down, and a feminine (not that we should assume anything!) voice proclaims him to be The One Good White Guy....
Perfectly possible you're right and I'm wrong. And I always found those aspects of Gaiman's work – there's a famous speech in American Gods by one of the manic pixie bisexual dream girls he loved to create – rang hollow to me. Maybe that's why.
American Gods is absolute dreck. The edition I picked up at a charity shop had a foreward by him where he declared that he wrote it because he wanted to write a capital N Novel. And it shows, length for the sake of length.
I only saw the first season of the show, but I found it so-so. Not great, but not terrible. Best part was the gun cult, imo. Great easily digestible metaphor for American gun culture.
Oh, I liked it. Possibly because I read it during my first week in a new house when it was just me, it and an air mattress, but I've read it again and enjoyed it.
I can’t look in the mind of Gaiman, despite having read all of Sandman. But I think sometimes smarter predatory men do know a fair amount about women— they study them after all. They gotta know their prey. Somehow Roman Polanski was able to make several good movies about women’s experience of vulnerability.
Isn't this emblematic of a deeper problem that we all have with artists though? Neil Gaiman writes stories that I've found entertaining at times. Other than outright felonious criminality, I'm not sure why I should care anymore about his personal conduct* than the personal conduct of the guy in the cart who I buy coffee from in the morning. You say you don't want to support someone whose behavior you find odious? First of all, for all I know this could be the same moral preening as you say Gaiman is doing. Secondly, the coffee guy could be a horrible wife beater and honestly, he probably does hold some social views I find to be regressive. Finally, for all I know, the very next guy whose book or coffee I buy could be an awful person in some way.
The broader point is that I, for one, am done with it all. I'm calling bullshit on the whole hypocritical exercise of attempting to enforce a moral consensus through aggressive anti-marketing. I won't feel guilty watching Louis CK, listening to Michael Jackson, or reading Neil Gaiman. I didn't ask to be in this economic system, I refuse to be saddled with the job of moral policeman through my actions as a consumer, and I refuse to give any consideration to the pleadings of our would-be secular clergy who take up the job.
That's not to say that one should or shouldn't take into account whatever they wish to when purchasing things. If one wishes to not buy Gaiman's novel because of his conduct, fine and dandy. What I object to is them telling me about their decision and then asking me to do the same with or without the peril of some sort of social sanction. Once one starts doing that, their motives are instantly suspect.
* Just so there's no confusion, I don't consider explicit political actions, advocacy, and causes to fall under the category of "personal conduct" for these purposes. It's perfectly fine to try to not give people more money who are going to use it to attempt to make a world you don't wish to live in and it's perfectly fine to try to persuade others to do the same.
This is a "separation of art from artist" problem at base, and some people are really into it, and others are absolutely opposed, and of course there's other in the middle who modulate. The crucial point I think is "does this artist portray themselves as something publicly and in so doing offer that their art is a vehicle FOR that something?" If so then it seems harder to make that separation.
Even if they do, so what? What's good, sweet, and true is good, sweet, and true no matter who says it. What's shitty and awful is shitty and awful no matter how good a person says it (a good person suffering a momentary lapse in judgement, I guess). The other view is the beginnings of a cult of personality.
Now, again, you may not want to consume it because of their personal conduct and that's fine, but it doesn't make you better than anyone else and it's just not worth talking about. The whole thing of someone talking about how they won't buy Gaiman's books like I'm supposed to think that means something is just so off-putting. We're both sitting here in clothes made by kids in sweatshops, so either actually do something about the problems you're pretending to care about that doesn't involve consumption or just shut the hell up.
If it's the Art itself you object to, that's an entirely different matter, of course.
I agree with you more than you might imagine, given that I'm the one who brought this up. Broadly, the left does appear to have displaced the right in judging public figures to be sinners based on their personal conduct. Gaiman's a case worth considering because his public persona is of a kind, politically aware, author and dreamweaver, which the allegations blow a hole in. Does that matter to a wider audience?
I saw someone refer to Gaiman, while clearly not entirely swayed by the substance of the allegations, as 'a creep' for having sex with younger women regardless. And sure, that's your judgement, but it comes back to the Try Guy cheating on his wife: do we care? What happened to us being the permissive 'as long as they're consenting adults, who cares?' dudes?
Despite once having a cult of personality, Gaiman's migrated to the show runner realm where his audience hardly knows his name never mind what he's done. It doesn't look like this can damage him even if there were enough people who wanted it to like back in the cancelling days. And there aren't.
I'm just so tired of this pressure for people to make themselves, rather than just their products, into a brand. It's incredibly damaging to personal autonomy and basic sanity. It's also sort of disconcerting to pretend to take parasocial relationships seriously; there's just a basic lie at the center of it. I don't really know what any of the people with public personas are really like and for the most part, I don't want to and more importantly it's quite likely that most of people who tell me about them have no idea either.
There's a reason actors and other celebrities are nut cases. It's like in some point in the mid-1990s people decided that producing and promoting products wasn't enough. I sort of blame Steve Jobs for it. If Freddie bothered reading this far down, I'm sure he'd say that it's the inevitable result of Capitalism and Marx predicted this; if labor is a commodity then people are a commodity. I'm not a Marxist, but if that's true then sure, overthrow the system.
My impression of Gaiman, which predates the allegations, is that he really wants to be liked. I very much doubt that his apparent feminism was designed to enable his abuse; that level of calculating pure evil is very rare. But I suspect there was an element of fakeness to it; he wanted people to love him, so he became what he knew they would love.
Good thoughts. I have to quarrel with you about one thing, though. While on religious grounds I'm not an advocate of "sleeping with as many women as possible", it shouldn't be lumped in with "coercive behavior and assault." I'm just asserting that because *some* feminists seem to have the tacit belief that all straight male sexuality is predatory.
Fair, I didn't want to get into the weeds of the allegations. And they seem connected but separate: one, which I had no idea about but nobody seems to be disputing, is Gaiman slept around. The others, the six women alleging coercive behaviour and assault, should be taken more seriously but have largely been shrugged off.
There's more of substance to the Gaiman stuff, honestly. What was Whedon even accused of other than some people who'd worked with him didn't enjoy the experience? His real crime was Justice League flopping; almost feels like that was why Hollywood was happy to see him punished.
No, he cheated on his wife with various Buffy cast members. 'Instead, he quickly added that he had felt he “had” to sleep with them, that he was “powerless” to resist. I laughed. “I’m not actually joking,” he said. He had been surrounded by beautiful young women — the sort of women who had ignored him when he was younger — and he feared if he didn’t have sex with them, he would “always regret it.”...Buffy ended in 2003, but his affairs did not. He slept with employees, fans, and colleagues. Eventually, his wife found out. In 2012, they split up. In Cole’s open letter to fans, she accused him of using feminism as a cover for his infidelities.'
That wasn't exactly the dynamic here. Whedon's female fans were all infatuated with his feminism and support for "female empowerment" and stuff. So when the Good Feminist Man turned out to be Not That Good, there was a bad reaction.
> In her epilogue to The New Rules of Attraction, Leigh wrote that one of her worst memories was of a boyfriend breaking up with her on her birthday. Whedon read the book, and they talked about the epilogue. In 2015, hours before her birthday, he came over to her house and told her their relationship was over. “If he was like, What could I do to Arden that would be her worst nightmare?, that would have been it,” she said. “Joss destroyed a beautiful thing just to show he had the power to. That’s literally everything you need to know about him.”
> A high-level member of the Buffy production team recalled Whedon’s habit of “writing really nasty notes,” but that wasn’t what disturbed her most about working with him. Whedon was rumored to be having affairs with two young actresses on the show. One day, he and one of the actresses came into her office while she was working. She heard a noise behind her. They were rolling around on the floor, making out. “They would bang into my chair,” she said. “How can you concentrate? It was gross.”
> Michelle Trachtenberg, who’d played Buffy’s younger sister, claimed there had been a rule forbidding Whedon from being alone in a room with her on set. Whedon told me he had no idea what she was talking about, and Trachtenberg didn’t want to elaborate. One person who worked closely with her on Buffy told me an informal rule did exist, though it was possible Whedon was not aware of
I risk discovering I Am The Arsehole here, to Anglicise Reddit, but are those bangers? Or to use the parlance of a generation I'm not part of, is that spilling some very weak tea?
I hold no torch for Joss Whedon; I liked Firefly, I liked the Avengers movies, I gave up on Buffy after two seasons. I'm not a passionate defender and he's not my favourite. But if the charges against him total infidelity, an insensitive dumping, inappropriate making-out and a rumour, is that enough for blacklisting?
Yes, the revelation of his promiscuity damages his reputation as a feminist so he's lost status in the eyes of those who followed his work. But I'd guess less than two per cent of those who watched the Avengers movies knew who he was. He wasn't being paid millions because he was a feminist. He was being paid that because his TV and movies made money, which is why I find it more plausible that his cancelling was allowed because he'd been paid millions to save a movie that lost millions so Hollywood washed its collective hands of him.
I think Neil Gaiman genuinely believes what he says about feminism. At least in principle. In practice...well, we're all good at finding exceptions to our rules. I think he got entitled; years of manic pixie dream girls wanting to show Mr. Famous Author how sexually liberated they could be went to his head. I would hope that he takes the opportunity to reflect and fix whatever egotistical delusions led him to the point of coercion. But tactically, the best move for him is to shut up and let it blow over.
These seem to be wildly different things. What do they mean? Coercive behavior is so vague as to mean nothing; and assault has been subjected to such content/context creep as to mean hardly anything.
There are tons of issues where we understand that people can believe in something and fail to live up to it. I've been told that smoking is a filthy habit that I should avoid, by someone who was smoking as they said it. I've been told to spend my money wisely by people who I know occasionally bought dumb things on impulse. I've been told that public school is good by people who sent their kids to private school. I don't doubt for a second that all of those people sincerely believed what they were telling me.
Why is feminism something where we assume that if a man* who espouses it mistreats women, they must be faking their belief? Doesn't it seem more likely that there are people who believe in feminism, but mistreat women anyway, the same way there are smokers who believe that cigarettes are bad for you?
*This skepticism is only ever applied to men. I've never once heard discover that a lesbian abused her partner and conclude from that that she must be secretly sexist.
No wonder teens are confused and depressed if their options for masculinity are these dipshits and whoever is currently filling the Andrew Tate role online.
Which is the bigger point: a healthy masculinity cannot be defined by saying what men are not.
The post and my comment are addressing how masculinity is presented online. To state the obvious, I think every dude commenting here does not fit those caricatures, but they exist online, to the detriment of our teens (and overly online adults).
Toxic masculinity, like a lot of feminist terms, has become so simplified and misunderstood by the general public that the average man has taken it to mean that ‘all’ masculinity is toxic, which I don’t believe was the original attention. Hence you get soy-faced good boys self-flagellating themselves all over the internet. If you build an incentive for the behaviour, the behaviour will continue. The sad part is that there are women who fall for these masques, but then again, the average women is just as dumb as the average man. They deserve each other, really.
"Toxic masculinity" took the pattern a lot of these very specific, somewhat deliberately provocative, academic terms did. It means something fairly self evident in the original academic writing, is then taught to 18 year old uni students who then post about it on Tumblr based on a misunderstanding of a vast oversimplification in a lecture at which point it is picked up and spread by literal children and the terminally online and it is no longer used as per its original meaning.
Everyone says "toxic masculinity" with the emphasis on the second word, every time they say it. It 100% does mean that all masculinity, and by extension all masculine men, are toxic. If we wanted to use the term to distinguish healthy or normal masculinity, we'd put the emphasis on the first word. But we don't, ever; try it, it sounds weird.
"I’ve spent most of my life in academia in one role or another, and let me tell you, I’ve known many loudly feminist, ostentatiously nice guys whose unthreatening demeanor was tied to a fundamentally predatory approach to women."
I can picture every one of them that hung out in my social circle immediately. At least one of them apparently grew up to be a vicious serial physical and emotional abuser.
Great read Freddie. I really like when you introduce us to strange “progressive” places I was unaware existed like Try Guys, and then crap all over them.
Is there too much useless discourse about masculinity, when men (like women) can so easily create a false front? Only in the sense that the internet creates discourse of dubious worth about anything and everything.
For better or worse, in modernity there is no escaping the need to discuss gender and sex––just as there is no escaping the stubborn fact that people deceive others, especially when they want to get laid. In the 18th century there was no internet, so people in Europe and European colonies wrote endless satirical plays and novels about cads and cheating wives. Others wrote serious reformist tracts about gender roles, which were becoming debatable and no longer went without saying.
No one has solved the issue because in modernity it's not solvable. People just perpetually argue, mores change in a lagging way, and then people argue about the new mores.
To my mind Traister's essay was a fairly thoughtful and intelligent discussion, during an election that is objectively being fueled by the disputed, contested question of what makes for an admirable man. The real malpractice would be if writers suddenly went silent and pretended that we aren't in the middle of a situation where the power and responsibilities of men vis a vis women isn't one of the most pivotal questions.
"No one has solved the issue because in modernity it's not solvable. People just perpetually argue, mores change in a lagging way, and then people argue about the new mores."
And the grifters and liars and unethical strivers will continue to be wolves in sheep's clothing, no matter how the fads may change among the sheep. Any signifier that is useful to indicate moral integrity will be used for unethical purposes by unethical people -- as they use every signifier that is useful to them.
Is it really true that the culture as a whole is reexamining masculinity? The country is divided between the terminally online and everyone else and the gulf in values between those two groups is enormous.
There aren't think pieces being published in all the local dailies or discussed at PTA meetings (at least those not headed by a Moms For Liberty member). But I'd wager that everyone over 40 has had conversations (jokes, arguments, Sunday school lessons, talk-radio rants) about whether the feminism of the 1970s and 1980s made society better or else worse through their critiques of traditional male roles and mores. And virtually everyone under 40 knows most recent versions of those arguments (does rape culture really exist? has the culture and legislation gone too far in stigmatizing certain male behavior that used to go mostly unremarked?)
I'd say that, in practice, the "reexamining" happens less through open reflection than through polemics (critiques, defenses) that influence generational changes and backlashes in the aftermath. I grew up in Utah, and it is definitely the case that models of masculinity have been perpetually discussed, both before and after the internet.
In electoral politics, the gender gap has never been wider. You can bet both presidential campaigns are talking about masculinity and gender all the time, given who is on both of the tickets.
I think everyone in your social group might be having those discussions. I have never heard them discussed in mine.
I have a theory about this election: you have a third of the country that will vote for Trump no matter what. You have another third that will vote D no matter what.
But that means that the tie breaking final third is independents and swing voters. I suspect that the partisans care about "feminazis" and Gloria Steinem but the majority of the country is focused on kitchen sink issues--the economy, crime, illegal immigration recently, etc. and those independents are far more likely to fall into that camp.
It is telling that while the donor class is doubling down internally on all of the various "Identity X for Harris" permutations, the campaign itself is pretty much mum on most of it on the campaign trail. Social Justice politics are personal issues right now, not public ones, with the exception of abortion in some states.
There's a lot of good stuff in here about the issues around the wider Buzzfeed universe, but it is also a media navel-gazing piece attacking media navel-gazing. There's been an overall drop in the rate of violence against women in the 2st century. The gender pay gap has been reduced (though not eliminated). I tend to believe that the former has been heavily influenced by the drop in early childhood lead exposure, but the piece would have been stronger if there were actual statistics. Statistics are more important than any discourse on soyface, which is the type of topic that anyone who is not terminally online has no awareness of.
It should also be pointed out that Buzzfeed's founder explicitly identified as a Marxist. It is arguably the most high-profile modern media company founded by a Marxist in the 21st century.
I think there were effects of the social currents shifting that really did create spaces for men to be genuinely less abusive and dominating in general. I know the image of "man" that my father's generation assumed is basically a laughable caricature now outside of the most isolated communities. Old Boomer Guy who gets mad at everything, yells at customer service people, thinks young women should be hyper-sexy but then sees pedos around every corner, etc, that guy is a cultural joke.
That it also created a large subculture of people who became performative children in order to seem non-threatening is perhaps just how these things go. There's no clear "you crossed a line into Cringe Town and are now a try-hard" and we don't know we overcorrected until we're knee-deep.
KILLER FACT: I was the first person to catch a lifetime ban on Buzzfeed, way back in the late 2000's. I made ruthless fun of their trying to pass off five year old memes as "buzzworthy" by sending fresh memes making fun of their inability to meme.
Peretti himself emailed me to go "NOT COOL BRO, WHY YOU HARSHING OUR MELLOW?" and swung the banhammer on me.
Guys, I might sound slightly cynical here, but I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that Traister's motive for elevating Doug Emhoff, a guy who looks and acts like he sits down when he pees, as an icon of masculinity For People Who Think The Right Things (ie, her readers) may have something to do with the relentless, tedious, "blue no matter who" partisanship of an overwhelming majority of high profile media figures in the Acela Corridor.
And not a secret motive: it was a piece about a presidential election.
" relentless, tedious Blue no matter who partisanship"––or maybe "vote for the ticket that doesn't feature a man found liable of rape and ended the right to get an abortion for president." Feminists are funny about that kind of stuff.
If you think ending Roe v Wade "ended the right to get abortion", you might want to go watch some episodes of School House Rock, or otherwise achieve a degree of comfort and familiarity with high school civics on part with an average high school freshman, circa 1980 or so.
Dobbs didn't access to abortion as a constitutionally protected right? Then how did Indiana and West Virginia manage to pass full bans on abortion? How did Texas pass 170A? How Georgia pass a 6-week ban?
All of those legislative acts were impossible when the dispositive interpretation of the US Constitution protected the right of every woman to get an abortion until viability.
The trial judge explicitly said the liability was for "rape" in the way that term is commonly understood. He said the argument that the conviction for "sexual abuse" was not tantamount to rape was "entirely unpersuasive."
Do correct me, then. When Trump's lawyers tried to claim his sexual assault was not tantamount to rape and thus the case should not have such a steep penalty, the judge said the argument was "entirely unpersuasive" because what Trump did was rape by "common understanding." So the "nice try" was the failed argument by the Trump team.
Feminists also used to be funny about younger women using sex with powerful men to get money and boost their careers.
They also used to be funny about powerful married men knocking up the nanny, then getting her fired from her day job, then when the new wife runs for Senate buying her a house in the Hamptons.
Now they ignore both stories and pretend Doug Emhoff is a model of masculinity instead of the predator they'd call the same behavior if his wife was a Republican.
Or maybe feminists like Traister see a difference between men who do things that harm women but then acknowledge what they did was wrong and change their ways versus men who don't see any meaningful harm.
Emhoff has explicitly acknowledged wrongs and said he was responsible for the end of his marriage. His ex-wife has vouched for him and Harris as excellent people and co-parents. I'll take the word of an ex-wife over the criticism lodged by people who are silent about Trump when a jury of his peers says he is guilty of sexual assault, aka a predator.
The kind of masculinity Traister is claiming for Emhoff and Waltz is not "men who never do harmful things." It is men who recognize what's wrong with certain male behavior and try to live accordingly.
"For all you know, she got paid off, too. Or she's just a hack."
lol. For all I know, his ex-wife is a Russian spy, or will reveal he was a wife batterer 10 days before the election. So one either uses good-faith reasoning to evaluate what people say to reporters, or else you have to give zero weight to all public statements made by everyone.
The larger point: does it matter to a given voter whether the person they vote for has been convicted of a non-consensual sexual assault, or not? If it doesn't matter to you politically because you plan to vote for Trump, then you can't possibly care that the husband of his opponent cheated and got a lover pregnant through consensual sex.
Reading this, I'm actually seeing two archetypes that should probably be considered separately, though they may well be cousins. There's the performatively harmless, dweeby Try Guy this essay mostly focuses on, but distinct from that is what I see in the Elevator Facebook Post: the Woman Respecter who acts online like he's gonna be an action movie badass whenever he sees some guys harassing a woman but would actually walk on with his hands in his pocket. (Physical courage is rare these days, but I prefer those who do not pretend to have it to those who act like they're badasses when they've clearly never been in a fistfight.)
Seeing someone wax performative for all sorts of random things at the office is a reeeally good way to know who NOT to sit next to at the monthly staff meetings. It's like they are doing all my colleague swipe-lefting for me!
Different comment for a different thought. I would push back on mixing Walz in with the performative nice guys... sort of. He's mostly just Minnesotan. Many of the men on my mom's side of the family were kind of like him. Even that one cousin-once-removed who robbed those banks. (Without a firearm, as he will point out any time it's brought up.)
This doesn't mean anything about whether his niceness is sincere. It can be pretty fucking insincere, let me tell ya. It's just worth noting that his particular thing is *mostly* older than the current moment, and will outlast it. There's a certain amount of said current moment in there, the man is a politician, but speaking as someone who was born and raised in his home state, it's impossible to confuse the Walz thing for the Try Guy thing.
Yeah, this is where a greater awareness of subcultures beyond media and the internet on FdB's part would have been helpful. There is a very specific Upper Midwest Minnesota Nice vibe to Walz that is common among men from there of his generation. Being a former teacher probably enhances that as well. It's a distinct way of rural men holding themselves that different from a place like rural parts of the Deep South, the West, or the working class Rust Belt in Ohio and Pennsylvania.
EXCELLENT piece. The choice between "sexless" Try Guy (yuck) and "manosphere bro" is hideous. Respecting others starts with self-respect, and cannot be coerced into any other shape without being distorted in the ways you brilliantly describe. I can't say for certain that this applies universally, but a man who takes time (requiring effort) to get to know himself (for real, mining the accumulated wisdom of the ages and not the Skittles dispenser of current culture) will probably end up respecting himself, and that will lead to neither of these two outcomes but to one that is compelling and intriguing to women (or whoever). Everything else is, as you say, a mask. And it's revolting, which is - perhaps - why such people need to "grab" rather than "attract."
Ah yes, but remember, he then did the utterly progressive thing and pressured her to get an abortion. Doing his part to preserve reproductive choice freedoms. Take that, Donald Trump!
Just absolutely oozing with completely healthy modern male feminist masculinity (insofar as that can still be defined).
First things first, Bluey fucking rocks. I would never watch it for fun but when the kids pick it over Paw Patrol or Blippi I find myself able breathe freely again.
Also yeah, great piece. Back when I was working on a ground crew for the department of transportation, landscaping and ripping down homeless camps and cleaning trash off of freeways and whatnot, my work crew was totally unplugged from Try Guyism. About a fourth were felons, mostly from gang related stuff.
But we had three women in the crew of forty and nobody fucked with them. Nobody harassed them, sexualized them, hit on them (while on the clock anyway, conversations on the way to the cars after you sign out are different), not even behind their back in the literal locker room. And when local crazies and outsiders tried to do so, the lads coalesced into a united front and offered to beat the shit out of them til they left our people alone.
I never conducted a survey or anything, but I’m pretty sure none of those guys thoughts of themselves as feminists or indeed liberals at all, just doing like their mamas taught them.
Maybe being online too much wrecks your soul or something.
When I die and go to hell for eternity, the only thing on television there will be fucking Blippi. I'm sure of it.
Mood
In my regime, Blippi will be locked away for a very, very long time.
I find it hilarious that the Wikipedia entry for Blippi contains criticism from Nathan J. Robinson. You can't make this shit up.
Just imagining Robinson, dressed up in that dumb outfit that makes him look like Truman Capote with color blindness, brow furrowed, earnestly scrutinizing YouTube videos of Blippi singing songs about garbage trucks or whatever is an almost too perfect summary of all things Too Online.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blippi#Reception
TBF, that quote about Blippi being "dead and sterile" is pretty spot on. Blippi, Cocomelon, etc are the kind of drek that YouTube's "democratizing of the video medium" birthed us.
God Cocomelon is so bad. Outsourcing lullabies to AI videos isn’t progress
TBF, Netflix got a hold of Cocomelon recently and made a more structured series ("Cocomelon Lane") that actually has storylines and characters that don't just sing the same 3 tunes and it's actually bearable. Not groundbreaking by any means, but mildly bearable.
I agree the image is funny, but he is a dad and dad's should Read the Media their children consume.
Another upvote for Bluey
I had to do "community service" for a misdemeanor conviction about a decade ago, and same thing with the women on the crew. We all had to basically book-in to the local prison every Saturday and Sunday at 4:30AM before being given gas powered weed eaters, rakes and riding mowers to do completely unnecessary prison grounds yard work. Probably 3 dudes to every female and no issues at all. Didn't hear a single machismo or misogynist comment.
Not sure where on the spectum of good vs bad man masculinity I would be comfortable also where woman would be comfortable. I do know the morals change over time. Not sure its a kind of pendulum change or evolviutionary species change. Both our genetic make up AND the environment it finds itself in play significant roles.
I'm voting it's neither a morals change nor a species change. It's just different POVs of the same thing, which I think you meant by the pendulum change. It is the endless re-creations of our imagination vs the timeless reality of our natures.
I tend to reject the framework. Masculinity and Femininity are constructs and constraints derived from the nature of existing as men and women. They’re observations, suggestions and guidelines, not to be regarded as dictates. Integrity comes from action, as does any other expression of self.
All of which calls to mind Neil Gaiman who throughout his writing career has been a proud feminist, a writer of queer perspectives, a friend of Tori Amos and an upholder of women... and has also, apparently, been sleeping with as many of them as he can and is credibly accused of coercive behaviour and assault.
Many detractors have assumed the feminism and everything else was a screen, designed to disguise a predator. Carefully calibrated to get past defences. I'm not sure it's that simple, that there's a switch into the negative zone where all these previously laudable traits are now evil. I reckon Neil really did believe all that, really did work to tear down toxic masculinity, really did want to present queer women and alternative lifestyles in his work etcetera, and was still the bad guy. That he didn't realise he was, or knew he was sometimes but thought his work mitigated against it, or couldn't stop. That it was more complex and also more simple: everyone is the hard thing sometimes.
By contrast, I don't believe it for a moment. I don't trust the sincerity of any man who puts so much visible (key word) effort into feminism either. Each one of these guys is angling for spot in Freddie's bestiary of Too Online Good White Men in my book.
And the heavens open up, a ray of light beams down, and a feminine (not that we should assume anything!) voice proclaims him to be The One Good White Guy....
The one foretold in prophecy!
Perfectly possible you're right and I'm wrong. And I always found those aspects of Gaiman's work – there's a famous speech in American Gods by one of the manic pixie bisexual dream girls he loved to create – rang hollow to me. Maybe that's why.
American Gods is absolute dreck. The edition I picked up at a charity shop had a foreward by him where he declared that he wrote it because he wanted to write a capital N Novel. And it shows, length for the sake of length.
I only saw the first season of the show, but I found it so-so. Not great, but not terrible. Best part was the gun cult, imo. Great easily digestible metaphor for American gun culture.
Oh, I liked it. Possibly because I read it during my first week in a new house when it was just me, it and an air mattress, but I've read it again and enjoyed it.
I can’t look in the mind of Gaiman, despite having read all of Sandman. But I think sometimes smarter predatory men do know a fair amount about women— they study them after all. They gotta know their prey. Somehow Roman Polanski was able to make several good movies about women’s experience of vulnerability.
There is no such thing as 'predatory men'. It's just such bullshit. Let's start there....
What do you mean?
Just what I wrote. Once you utter something so stupidly false as 'predatory men', nothing else matters.
You seem to think that's self evident but I'm not so sure it is. Do you not believe in predatory sexual behavior at all?
Do you know what the term predation means? Predatory sexual behavior isn't a thing. Thats sociology, and as such, BS.
Are ppl assholes, manipulators, and coercive? Sure. I'd say that's pretty even stuff btwn the sexes, btw. **And I'm being generous.
Isn't this emblematic of a deeper problem that we all have with artists though? Neil Gaiman writes stories that I've found entertaining at times. Other than outright felonious criminality, I'm not sure why I should care anymore about his personal conduct* than the personal conduct of the guy in the cart who I buy coffee from in the morning. You say you don't want to support someone whose behavior you find odious? First of all, for all I know this could be the same moral preening as you say Gaiman is doing. Secondly, the coffee guy could be a horrible wife beater and honestly, he probably does hold some social views I find to be regressive. Finally, for all I know, the very next guy whose book or coffee I buy could be an awful person in some way.
The broader point is that I, for one, am done with it all. I'm calling bullshit on the whole hypocritical exercise of attempting to enforce a moral consensus through aggressive anti-marketing. I won't feel guilty watching Louis CK, listening to Michael Jackson, or reading Neil Gaiman. I didn't ask to be in this economic system, I refuse to be saddled with the job of moral policeman through my actions as a consumer, and I refuse to give any consideration to the pleadings of our would-be secular clergy who take up the job.
That's not to say that one should or shouldn't take into account whatever they wish to when purchasing things. If one wishes to not buy Gaiman's novel because of his conduct, fine and dandy. What I object to is them telling me about their decision and then asking me to do the same with or without the peril of some sort of social sanction. Once one starts doing that, their motives are instantly suspect.
* Just so there's no confusion, I don't consider explicit political actions, advocacy, and causes to fall under the category of "personal conduct" for these purposes. It's perfectly fine to try to not give people more money who are going to use it to attempt to make a world you don't wish to live in and it's perfectly fine to try to persuade others to do the same.
This is a "separation of art from artist" problem at base, and some people are really into it, and others are absolutely opposed, and of course there's other in the middle who modulate. The crucial point I think is "does this artist portray themselves as something publicly and in so doing offer that their art is a vehicle FOR that something?" If so then it seems harder to make that separation.
"art is a vehicle FOR that something?"
Even if they do, so what? What's good, sweet, and true is good, sweet, and true no matter who says it. What's shitty and awful is shitty and awful no matter how good a person says it (a good person suffering a momentary lapse in judgement, I guess). The other view is the beginnings of a cult of personality.
Now, again, you may not want to consume it because of their personal conduct and that's fine, but it doesn't make you better than anyone else and it's just not worth talking about. The whole thing of someone talking about how they won't buy Gaiman's books like I'm supposed to think that means something is just so off-putting. We're both sitting here in clothes made by kids in sweatshops, so either actually do something about the problems you're pretending to care about that doesn't involve consumption or just shut the hell up.
If it's the Art itself you object to, that's an entirely different matter, of course.
I agree with you more than you might imagine, given that I'm the one who brought this up. Broadly, the left does appear to have displaced the right in judging public figures to be sinners based on their personal conduct. Gaiman's a case worth considering because his public persona is of a kind, politically aware, author and dreamweaver, which the allegations blow a hole in. Does that matter to a wider audience?
I saw someone refer to Gaiman, while clearly not entirely swayed by the substance of the allegations, as 'a creep' for having sex with younger women regardless. And sure, that's your judgement, but it comes back to the Try Guy cheating on his wife: do we care? What happened to us being the permissive 'as long as they're consenting adults, who cares?' dudes?
Despite once having a cult of personality, Gaiman's migrated to the show runner realm where his audience hardly knows his name never mind what he's done. It doesn't look like this can damage him even if there were enough people who wanted it to like back in the cancelling days. And there aren't.
I'm just so tired of this pressure for people to make themselves, rather than just their products, into a brand. It's incredibly damaging to personal autonomy and basic sanity. It's also sort of disconcerting to pretend to take parasocial relationships seriously; there's just a basic lie at the center of it. I don't really know what any of the people with public personas are really like and for the most part, I don't want to and more importantly it's quite likely that most of people who tell me about them have no idea either.
There's a reason actors and other celebrities are nut cases. It's like in some point in the mid-1990s people decided that producing and promoting products wasn't enough. I sort of blame Steve Jobs for it. If Freddie bothered reading this far down, I'm sure he'd say that it's the inevitable result of Capitalism and Marx predicted this; if labor is a commodity then people are a commodity. I'm not a Marxist, but if that's true then sure, overthrow the system.
My impression of Gaiman, which predates the allegations, is that he really wants to be liked. I very much doubt that his apparent feminism was designed to enable his abuse; that level of calculating pure evil is very rare. But I suspect there was an element of fakeness to it; he wanted people to love him, so he became what he knew they would love.
Some people do that sort of thing out of guilt. Promoting feminism could be like buying an indulgence for him.
I think ultimately it's a crime of opportunity. Fame afforded him the opportunity.
Good thoughts. I have to quarrel with you about one thing, though. While on religious grounds I'm not an advocate of "sleeping with as many women as possible", it shouldn't be lumped in with "coercive behavior and assault." I'm just asserting that because *some* feminists seem to have the tacit belief that all straight male sexuality is predatory.
Fair, I didn't want to get into the weeds of the allegations. And they seem connected but separate: one, which I had no idea about but nobody seems to be disputing, is Gaiman slept around. The others, the six women alleging coercive behaviour and assault, should be taken more seriously but have largely been shrugged off.
See also: Joss Whedon.
There's more of substance to the Gaiman stuff, honestly. What was Whedon even accused of other than some people who'd worked with him didn't enjoy the experience? His real crime was Justice League flopping; almost feels like that was why Hollywood was happy to see him punished.
No, he cheated on his wife with various Buffy cast members. 'Instead, he quickly added that he had felt he “had” to sleep with them, that he was “powerless” to resist. I laughed. “I’m not actually joking,” he said. He had been surrounded by beautiful young women — the sort of women who had ignored him when he was younger — and he feared if he didn’t have sex with them, he would “always regret it.”...Buffy ended in 2003, but his affairs did not. He slept with employees, fans, and colleagues. Eventually, his wife found out. In 2012, they split up. In Cole’s open letter to fans, she accused him of using feminism as a cover for his infidelities.'
Which takes us back to Try Guys. 'This man cheated on his wife therefore his art is invalid' isn't an equation that makes sense to me.
That wasn't exactly the dynamic here. Whedon's female fans were all infatuated with his feminism and support for "female empowerment" and stuff. So when the Good Feminist Man turned out to be Not That Good, there was a bad reaction.
https://www.vulture.com/article/joss-whedon-allegations.html
This is filled with so many bangers.
> In her epilogue to The New Rules of Attraction, Leigh wrote that one of her worst memories was of a boyfriend breaking up with her on her birthday. Whedon read the book, and they talked about the epilogue. In 2015, hours before her birthday, he came over to her house and told her their relationship was over. “If he was like, What could I do to Arden that would be her worst nightmare?, that would have been it,” she said. “Joss destroyed a beautiful thing just to show he had the power to. That’s literally everything you need to know about him.”
> A high-level member of the Buffy production team recalled Whedon’s habit of “writing really nasty notes,” but that wasn’t what disturbed her most about working with him. Whedon was rumored to be having affairs with two young actresses on the show. One day, he and one of the actresses came into her office while she was working. She heard a noise behind her. They were rolling around on the floor, making out. “They would bang into my chair,” she said. “How can you concentrate? It was gross.”
> Michelle Trachtenberg, who’d played Buffy’s younger sister, claimed there had been a rule forbidding Whedon from being alone in a room with her on set. Whedon told me he had no idea what she was talking about, and Trachtenberg didn’t want to elaborate. One person who worked closely with her on Buffy told me an informal rule did exist, though it was possible Whedon was not aware of
I risk discovering I Am The Arsehole here, to Anglicise Reddit, but are those bangers? Or to use the parlance of a generation I'm not part of, is that spilling some very weak tea?
I hold no torch for Joss Whedon; I liked Firefly, I liked the Avengers movies, I gave up on Buffy after two seasons. I'm not a passionate defender and he's not my favourite. But if the charges against him total infidelity, an insensitive dumping, inappropriate making-out and a rumour, is that enough for blacklisting?
Yes, the revelation of his promiscuity damages his reputation as a feminist so he's lost status in the eyes of those who followed his work. But I'd guess less than two per cent of those who watched the Avengers movies knew who he was. He wasn't being paid millions because he was a feminist. He was being paid that because his TV and movies made money, which is why I find it more plausible that his cancelling was allowed because he'd been paid millions to save a movie that lost millions so Hollywood washed its collective hands of him.
I think Neil Gaiman genuinely believes what he says about feminism. At least in principle. In practice...well, we're all good at finding exceptions to our rules. I think he got entitled; years of manic pixie dream girls wanting to show Mr. Famous Author how sexually liberated they could be went to his head. I would hope that he takes the opportunity to reflect and fix whatever egotistical delusions led him to the point of coercion. But tactically, the best move for him is to shut up and let it blow over.
'Coercive behavior & assault'.
These seem to be wildly different things. What do they mean? Coercive behavior is so vague as to mean nothing; and assault has been subjected to such content/context creep as to mean hardly anything.
There are tons of issues where we understand that people can believe in something and fail to live up to it. I've been told that smoking is a filthy habit that I should avoid, by someone who was smoking as they said it. I've been told to spend my money wisely by people who I know occasionally bought dumb things on impulse. I've been told that public school is good by people who sent their kids to private school. I don't doubt for a second that all of those people sincerely believed what they were telling me.
Why is feminism something where we assume that if a man* who espouses it mistreats women, they must be faking their belief? Doesn't it seem more likely that there are people who believe in feminism, but mistreat women anyway, the same way there are smokers who believe that cigarettes are bad for you?
*This skepticism is only ever applied to men. I've never once heard discover that a lesbian abused her partner and conclude from that that she must be secretly sexist.
No wonder teens are confused and depressed if their options for masculinity are these dipshits and whoever is currently filling the Andrew Tate role online.
Which is the bigger point: a healthy masculinity cannot be defined by saying what men are not.
This piece points out the obvious that these are not, in fact, the only options.
The post and my comment are addressing how masculinity is presented online. To state the obvious, I think every dude commenting here does not fit those caricatures, but they exist online, to the detriment of our teens (and overly online adults).
Yeah, but you have to get Offline to find them. I was blessed with positive IRL masculine role models. Not sure what to say to those who weren't.
Toxic masculinity, like a lot of feminist terms, has become so simplified and misunderstood by the general public that the average man has taken it to mean that ‘all’ masculinity is toxic, which I don’t believe was the original attention. Hence you get soy-faced good boys self-flagellating themselves all over the internet. If you build an incentive for the behaviour, the behaviour will continue. The sad part is that there are women who fall for these masques, but then again, the average women is just as dumb as the average man. They deserve each other, really.
"Toxic masculinity" took the pattern a lot of these very specific, somewhat deliberately provocative, academic terms did. It means something fairly self evident in the original academic writing, is then taught to 18 year old uni students who then post about it on Tumblr based on a misunderstanding of a vast oversimplification in a lecture at which point it is picked up and spread by literal children and the terminally online and it is no longer used as per its original meaning.
See also "emotional labor."
Everyone says "toxic masculinity" with the emphasis on the second word, every time they say it. It 100% does mean that all masculinity, and by extension all masculine men, are toxic. If we wanted to use the term to distinguish healthy or normal masculinity, we'd put the emphasis on the first word. But we don't, ever; try it, it sounds weird.
"I’ve spent most of my life in academia in one role or another, and let me tell you, I’ve known many loudly feminist, ostentatiously nice guys whose unthreatening demeanor was tied to a fundamentally predatory approach to women."
NiceGuy(tm) 2.0
I can picture every one of them that hung out in my social circle immediately. At least one of them apparently grew up to be a vicious serial physical and emotional abuser.
Great read Freddie. I really like when you introduce us to strange “progressive” places I was unaware existed like Try Guys, and then crap all over them.
Is there too much useless discourse about masculinity, when men (like women) can so easily create a false front? Only in the sense that the internet creates discourse of dubious worth about anything and everything.
For better or worse, in modernity there is no escaping the need to discuss gender and sex––just as there is no escaping the stubborn fact that people deceive others, especially when they want to get laid. In the 18th century there was no internet, so people in Europe and European colonies wrote endless satirical plays and novels about cads and cheating wives. Others wrote serious reformist tracts about gender roles, which were becoming debatable and no longer went without saying.
No one has solved the issue because in modernity it's not solvable. People just perpetually argue, mores change in a lagging way, and then people argue about the new mores.
To my mind Traister's essay was a fairly thoughtful and intelligent discussion, during an election that is objectively being fueled by the disputed, contested question of what makes for an admirable man. The real malpractice would be if writers suddenly went silent and pretended that we aren't in the middle of a situation where the power and responsibilities of men vis a vis women isn't one of the most pivotal questions.
"No one has solved the issue because in modernity it's not solvable. People just perpetually argue, mores change in a lagging way, and then people argue about the new mores."
And the grifters and liars and unethical strivers will continue to be wolves in sheep's clothing, no matter how the fads may change among the sheep. Any signifier that is useful to indicate moral integrity will be used for unethical purposes by unethical people -- as they use every signifier that is useful to them.
Is it really true that the culture as a whole is reexamining masculinity? The country is divided between the terminally online and everyone else and the gulf in values between those two groups is enormous.
There aren't think pieces being published in all the local dailies or discussed at PTA meetings (at least those not headed by a Moms For Liberty member). But I'd wager that everyone over 40 has had conversations (jokes, arguments, Sunday school lessons, talk-radio rants) about whether the feminism of the 1970s and 1980s made society better or else worse through their critiques of traditional male roles and mores. And virtually everyone under 40 knows most recent versions of those arguments (does rape culture really exist? has the culture and legislation gone too far in stigmatizing certain male behavior that used to go mostly unremarked?)
I'd say that, in practice, the "reexamining" happens less through open reflection than through polemics (critiques, defenses) that influence generational changes and backlashes in the aftermath. I grew up in Utah, and it is definitely the case that models of masculinity have been perpetually discussed, both before and after the internet.
In electoral politics, the gender gap has never been wider. You can bet both presidential campaigns are talking about masculinity and gender all the time, given who is on both of the tickets.
I think everyone in your social group might be having those discussions. I have never heard them discussed in mine.
I have a theory about this election: you have a third of the country that will vote for Trump no matter what. You have another third that will vote D no matter what.
But that means that the tie breaking final third is independents and swing voters. I suspect that the partisans care about "feminazis" and Gloria Steinem but the majority of the country is focused on kitchen sink issues--the economy, crime, illegal immigration recently, etc. and those independents are far more likely to fall into that camp.
It is telling that while the donor class is doubling down internally on all of the various "Identity X for Harris" permutations, the campaign itself is pretty much mum on most of it on the campaign trail. Social Justice politics are personal issues right now, not public ones, with the exception of abortion in some states.
There's a lot of good stuff in here about the issues around the wider Buzzfeed universe, but it is also a media navel-gazing piece attacking media navel-gazing. There's been an overall drop in the rate of violence against women in the 2st century. The gender pay gap has been reduced (though not eliminated). I tend to believe that the former has been heavily influenced by the drop in early childhood lead exposure, but the piece would have been stronger if there were actual statistics. Statistics are more important than any discourse on soyface, which is the type of topic that anyone who is not terminally online has no awareness of.
It should also be pointed out that Buzzfeed's founder explicitly identified as a Marxist. It is arguably the most high-profile modern media company founded by a Marxist in the 21st century.
I think there were effects of the social currents shifting that really did create spaces for men to be genuinely less abusive and dominating in general. I know the image of "man" that my father's generation assumed is basically a laughable caricature now outside of the most isolated communities. Old Boomer Guy who gets mad at everything, yells at customer service people, thinks young women should be hyper-sexy but then sees pedos around every corner, etc, that guy is a cultural joke.
That it also created a large subculture of people who became performative children in order to seem non-threatening is perhaps just how these things go. There's no clear "you crossed a line into Cringe Town and are now a try-hard" and we don't know we overcorrected until we're knee-deep.
Yeah, Jonah Peretti. He's a tool.
KILLER FACT: I was the first person to catch a lifetime ban on Buzzfeed, way back in the late 2000's. I made ruthless fun of their trying to pass off five year old memes as "buzzworthy" by sending fresh memes making fun of their inability to meme.
Peretti himself emailed me to go "NOT COOL BRO, WHY YOU HARSHING OUR MELLOW?" and swung the banhammer on me.
Guys, I might sound slightly cynical here, but I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that Traister's motive for elevating Doug Emhoff, a guy who looks and acts like he sits down when he pees, as an icon of masculinity For People Who Think The Right Things (ie, her readers) may have something to do with the relentless, tedious, "blue no matter who" partisanship of an overwhelming majority of high profile media figures in the Acela Corridor.
And not a secret motive: it was a piece about a presidential election.
" relentless, tedious Blue no matter who partisanship"––or maybe "vote for the ticket that doesn't feature a man found liable of rape and ended the right to get an abortion for president." Feminists are funny about that kind of stuff.
Trump is projected to win a majority of working class white women. Is feminism just another interest group at this point?
If you think ending Roe v Wade "ended the right to get abortion", you might want to go watch some episodes of School House Rock, or otherwise achieve a degree of comfort and familiarity with high school civics on part with an average high school freshman, circa 1980 or so.
Please. Don't make me beg.
Dobbs didn't access to abortion as a constitutionally protected right? Then how did Indiana and West Virginia manage to pass full bans on abortion? How did Texas pass 170A? How Georgia pass a 6-week ban?
All of those legislative acts were impossible when the dispositive interpretation of the US Constitution protected the right of every woman to get an abortion until viability.
Also 'liable for rape'....an utter lie.
The trial judge explicitly said the liability was for "rape" in the way that term is commonly understood. He said the argument that the conviction for "sexual abuse" was not tantamount to rape was "entirely unpersuasive."
https://newrepublic.com/post/174448/judge-e-jean-carroll-case-yes-donald-trump-rapist
Nice try Nancy
Do correct me, then. When Trump's lawyers tried to claim his sexual assault was not tantamount to rape and thus the case should not have such a steep penalty, the judge said the argument was "entirely unpersuasive" because what Trump did was rape by "common understanding." So the "nice try" was the failed argument by the Trump team.
Feminists also used to be funny about younger women using sex with powerful men to get money and boost their careers.
They also used to be funny about powerful married men knocking up the nanny, then getting her fired from her day job, then when the new wife runs for Senate buying her a house in the Hamptons.
Now they ignore both stories and pretend Doug Emhoff is a model of masculinity instead of the predator they'd call the same behavior if his wife was a Republican.
Or maybe feminists like Traister see a difference between men who do things that harm women but then acknowledge what they did was wrong and change their ways versus men who don't see any meaningful harm.
Emhoff has explicitly acknowledged wrongs and said he was responsible for the end of his marriage. His ex-wife has vouched for him and Harris as excellent people and co-parents. I'll take the word of an ex-wife over the criticism lodged by people who are silent about Trump when a jury of his peers says he is guilty of sexual assault, aka a predator.
The kind of masculinity Traister is claiming for Emhoff and Waltz is not "men who never do harmful things." It is men who recognize what's wrong with certain male behavior and try to live accordingly.
"His ex-wife has vouched for him and Harris as excellent people and co-parents."
For all you know, she got paid off, too. Or she's just a hack.
By the way, I don't see any concern for the woman he actually knocked up in your protestations.
"For all you know, she got paid off, too. Or she's just a hack."
lol. For all I know, his ex-wife is a Russian spy, or will reveal he was a wife batterer 10 days before the election. So one either uses good-faith reasoning to evaluate what people say to reporters, or else you have to give zero weight to all public statements made by everyone.
The larger point: does it matter to a given voter whether the person they vote for has been convicted of a non-consensual sexual assault, or not? If it doesn't matter to you politically because you plan to vote for Trump, then you can't possibly care that the husband of his opponent cheated and got a lover pregnant through consensual sex.
"a guy who looks and acts like he sits down when he pees"
...if he did, would you have a problem with that?
Is this Piss Posture Police Posting?
That is not a trait associated with self confident masculinity, my guy.
Who cares?
Clearly you did since you posted in the first place. If there is no shame in sitting when you pee, why are you whinging?
Reading this, I'm actually seeing two archetypes that should probably be considered separately, though they may well be cousins. There's the performatively harmless, dweeby Try Guy this essay mostly focuses on, but distinct from that is what I see in the Elevator Facebook Post: the Woman Respecter who acts online like he's gonna be an action movie badass whenever he sees some guys harassing a woman but would actually walk on with his hands in his pocket. (Physical courage is rare these days, but I prefer those who do not pretend to have it to those who act like they're badasses when they've clearly never been in a fistfight.)
I'm just glad I was raised and came of age long before the internet age...and long before the ubiquitous cell phone camera.
P.S. Terrific essay!
Oh I don't know.
Seeing someone wax performative for all sorts of random things at the office is a reeeally good way to know who NOT to sit next to at the monthly staff meetings. It's like they are doing all my colleague swipe-lefting for me!
Different comment for a different thought. I would push back on mixing Walz in with the performative nice guys... sort of. He's mostly just Minnesotan. Many of the men on my mom's side of the family were kind of like him. Even that one cousin-once-removed who robbed those banks. (Without a firearm, as he will point out any time it's brought up.)
This doesn't mean anything about whether his niceness is sincere. It can be pretty fucking insincere, let me tell ya. It's just worth noting that his particular thing is *mostly* older than the current moment, and will outlast it. There's a certain amount of said current moment in there, the man is a politician, but speaking as someone who was born and raised in his home state, it's impossible to confuse the Walz thing for the Try Guy thing.
Yeah, this is where a greater awareness of subcultures beyond media and the internet on FdB's part would have been helpful. There is a very specific Upper Midwest Minnesota Nice vibe to Walz that is common among men from there of his generation. Being a former teacher probably enhances that as well. It's a distinct way of rural men holding themselves that different from a place like rural parts of the Deep South, the West, or the working class Rust Belt in Ohio and Pennsylvania.
EXCELLENT piece. The choice between "sexless" Try Guy (yuck) and "manosphere bro" is hideous. Respecting others starts with self-respect, and cannot be coerced into any other shape without being distorted in the ways you brilliantly describe. I can't say for certain that this applies universally, but a man who takes time (requiring effort) to get to know himself (for real, mining the accumulated wisdom of the ages and not the Skittles dispenser of current culture) will probably end up respecting himself, and that will lead to neither of these two outcomes but to one that is compelling and intriguing to women (or whoever). Everything else is, as you say, a mask. And it's revolting, which is - perhaps - why such people need to "grab" rather than "attract."
I'll be one of 50 people who point this out, but Emhoff cheated on his first wife with his children's nanny/teacher and very likely impregnated her
Ah yes, but remember, he then did the utterly progressive thing and pressured her to get an abortion. Doing his part to preserve reproductive choice freedoms. Take that, Donald Trump!
Just absolutely oozing with completely healthy modern male feminist masculinity (insofar as that can still be defined).
Good! Abortions are always good