I’ve been feeling lost in my work, like I’m drowning in (bureaucratic and very stressful admin) details, and forgetting what it is I’m doing in the bigger picture. Cue sleeping a lot and watching Netflix. I then stumbled on the documentary “Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere“. It wasn’t very good. Theroux spends most of his screentime in mute shock, and I guess they thought that keeping this in the final edit means the audience will fill in the blanks. While the doccie does well at showing to some extent why men would choose to go down this road, it doesn’t clearly show the flaws in their thinking or what to do to change this situation. And the deeper problem is that the audiences will fill those gaps with all sorts of weird things, because most, if not all, the reasoning from these men start in a legitimate place, and we have to acknowledge that.
Fortunately for me and my limbo, the “more like this” button suggested “Beyond Men and Masculinity” which is also available free to watch on Youtube. As I watched I remembered what I’m doing in the bigger picture. I remembered my post – Building an ecofeminist metaverse. And then I heard Carol’s voice before I saw her and it was like seeing an old friend!
One concern I (and others) have is, men at risk will watch the Manosphere doccie and think, I want that. I want those plastic babes and those cars. And that doccie does absolutely nothing to counter that. The Beyond Men doccie has a bunch of simps or whatever they call these normal dudes. It’s not attractive to men at risk. And acknowledging Judy Chu’s comment (1:13:28), it’s not attractive to me. I don’t want an emotional man. I want you to go deal with your emotions somewhere else. I don’t want to carry it or witness it, I don’t want to do more unpaid emotional labour. We probably need some super buff dude who’s probably an asshole in real life, but who can capture the men at risk and then take them into this group therapy vibes. How do we do that?
But anyway, back to the academic musings:
The TL;DR:
0:39: if manhood is threatened, violence is imminent.
0:51: Any move toward democracy, which is toward equality, becomes a threat to manhood. (I think that the move to caring for nature, restoring our relationship with nature, is also a move towards equality, and a threat to manhood, a threat to man’s mastery over nature).
37:34: There’s a puzzle that we have to figure out which is how to make this the change without in the process shaming manhood which will provoke violence. Figuring out how to make that move without it triggering the re-institution of the patriarchal structure.
Linking to Carol’s book “why does patriarchy persist”.
6:25: Feelings will not hurt you. Running from feelings can kill you. It is part of the essence of traditional masculinity that you can run from shame, helplessness, powerless into grandiosity, better than, superiority, dominance and revenge. This is the root of male violence: you hurt me, I get to hit you twice as hard back.
8:15: The healing move for most girls and women is re-empowerment: Finding their voice, and the wound is disempowerment; never having a voice or losing it. The wound for boys and men comes much earlier than girls, it’s about 3, 4, 5 years old and the wound is about disconnection. We teach them to disconnect from their feelings. We teach them to disconnect from vulnerability. We teach them to disconnect from other people, we call that being independent. It’s a particular trauma that men learn to escape by moving from shame to grandiosity. Grandiosity is driving so much of what’s difficult in men. Grandiosity itself is a consequence of trauma that men did not ask for it that disconnection.
13:38: Gender socialization involves and results in disconnections. They feel like “I have all these feelings and there’s nowhere for these feelings to go and the fact that I even have them makes me an anomaly”. If they have to disconnect from parts of themselves, they can’t be fully present and genuinely engaged, then nobody will know them. This is the path to loneliness.
18:01 Boys work very very hard to achieve a masculine identity, but that identity is constantly under threat. If they’re not dominant, if they’re not heterosexual the right way, if they’re touching someone the wrong way if they’re not competent, that masculine identity can be taken from them. And that sends a very important message to young men (and to young women) but to young men about their worth.
20:07 There is very little happening … that are helping students that have been in trouble say “How do you come back?”, “How do you go through this challenging life situation and then restore yourself back?” We just say okay well you’re there for however long you need to be there. I believe we got to do some work around that. I think we got to do some healing work.
21:46: If we don’t give men and boys – starting with boys – these tools to say I’m hurting in a healthy way then we’re going to keep losing them.
and then, personal sidetrack, one of the guys saying
23:39: Feeling like, um, I want to just like be angry and then feeling like I need to just stay in facilitator mode and just you know be cool. It’s a battle. It’s just a battle it’s a mental battle.
This is how I feel all the time. Never time off. I have to play this role of facilitator in work, in my volunteering, and also in my relationship. I never get time off.
So when the group therapist said to this guy, “So you’re not a facilitator right now, you’re not working right now, you’re in an opportunity to receive right now” and the guy breaks down crying, Christ, I felt that, it’s what I vented about in the care-giving and care-taking post. So sure, it’s about me taking space for myself, but it is also how do we give people the tools to help themselves sothat those of us doing this work doesn’t have to work so goddamn hard.
Then there’s a bit in Japanese, the section titled ISOLATION and the trend of young people in Japan withdrawing from society, the majority being men.
Younger man: 29:00 I feel like other people do not exist outside of myself. “Isolation” does not mean physical isolation. It means there is no relationship between other people and myself.
I feel like I have a relationship with my imagination. The point is, the relationship I have with others is imagined. I feel really isolated, as it is not a real relationship.
Older man: 30:00 It is said that Japanese elderly men want their wives to serve a cup of tea at the right temperature and at the right time, without saying anything. Men want their wives to do everything without saying anything. Like an order.
Woman: 30:30: Some young people also have the same idea and it happens in friendships and in work and in domestic relationships. In various situations. They tend to say nothing and expect that women can understand what they want, without saying anything.
Older man: 31:00 Is there any link between these two things? Between the tendency in the older generation expecting others to do everything without saying anything [the invisible care work] and the feeling of isolation resulting from saying nothing.
Woman: That’s it!
If only young people could have asked others “How do you feel?” at the time. Of course, I understand people are afraid of asking others what they truly think.
Younger man: 31:20 If you felt fear, you could ask others (the man speaking to a woman) how they think. But I (as a man) cannot, because it seems to be a weak attitude. The thing is that a vertical relationship comes up here. When asking someone for help I feel like I am beneath them. Doing so means I show my weakness to them.
So, if I get help, our relationship becomes vertical (hierarchical) and is not horizontal (equal) any more.
enter Carol!!! 🙂
33:37: Relationships depend on the ability to repair the inevitable ruptures that occur when you lose touch. How do you get back in touch with somebody? What patriarchy does is in the name of manhood, in the name of being a real boy or one of the boys, when a boy starts to register the loss of connection, a voice comes in and says are you a baby? You don’t need that relationship.
34:12 So it shames the registering of the feeling of losing connection and therefore the ability to act on those feelings and to restore the connection. So it makes the break in relationship irrepairable.
35:05 Once you interrupt or you impede human relational capacities you set the stage for any form of Oppression. (images show Trump).
35:28 Patriarchy undercuts what’s essential for democracy. Democracy rests on a premise of equal voice because if you don’t have equal voice you can’t resolve conflicts in relationship. You are dependent on use of force – who has more strength. The person on the bottom can’t have a voice that is deemed worth listening to, because you can’t listen to to that voice and keep doing what you’re doing. Then the person on top doesn’t feel the feelings of the person on the bottom which you can see in this society right now, all the time.
36:26 If you premise manhood or masculinity on the gender binary it means to be a man means not to be a woman or like a woman and to be in the superior position. So any move toward democracy, which is toward equality, becomes a threat to manhood, and that’s what you see now, that’s what’s playing out.
36:58: And if manhood is threatened violence is imminent.
37:34: There’s a puzzle that we have to figure out which is how to make this the change without in the process shaming manhood which will provoke violence. Figuring out how to make that move without it triggering the re-institution of the patriarchal structure.
39:22 This is the the complexity of this patriarchal system, this expectation that men stand up for their rights and stand up for protecting their children and others when in reality they’re not able to do that within that system. We see this every day …
39:51 Being humiliated standing … with their heads down in obedience to that system of oppression. [almost verbatim, the Manosphere doccie has people saying that they don’t want this system, but then they lose the plot and go hyper into this same system. That somehow they will shortcut the system to be on top of the system. But it’s still the same stupid system, it’s the same vicious cycle.]
40:13 There is a humiliation that these people experience that can only be manifested in violence either internally where they feel they’re not man enough, they’re not good enough and as an outer expression towards their wives, towards their daughters, even towards their sons. It’s a masculine occupation that demasculinizes an entire community.
40:56 The way men relate to each other is a lot of doubt … men are afraid of each other. How men relate to each other there is mistrust and fear. How men relate to women there is mistrust and fear, and the only way to express any form of relationship with the other is in how it relates to power and domination.
In the next two sections, 43:10 onwards, I get annoyed, or bored. Like, I get that this is important work, but it feels performative. It’s supposed to be private work. And I wonder why I feel this way. It’s like the vulnerability opens men up for manipulation. I guess it’s my distrust that showing these feelings is also potentially used to manipulate others. This is probably from my past experience seeing hippie weirdos get all up in emotions and stuff, and then screwing other people over equally easily, like, WTF. Maybe this is also why I have the critical accountability alongside the feminine ethic of care. Yes, see your own emotions, but yes also, take accountability for them. Feeling them and talking about them is the first step, not the whole deal. I think this is also the distrust with the woke movement in general. It bears repeating: this is important work, for men and women, but it’s private work, inside work.
52:44 Here’s the revolution: You can teach a man how to love himself. You can heal the wound of disconnection. You can teach a man how to show up and be responsible for the people around them. You can educate people out of this, but it’s not straightforward teaching, because you have to also deal with the trauma.
55:35: Having feelings breaks the rules. And you have to have courage.
That’s how you beat the system. That’s what we need to get through to the red pill guys.
1:02:41 Vulnerability is a missing link that men need to be truly powerful.
I agree with this, the question is HOW. How to make that move without it triggering the re-institution of the patriarchal structure.
Section: About women still having work to do:
1:09:32 If a woman can be comfortable being different whilst still being herself, she will feel a lot freer and so will men. It will liberate us all.
1:10:11 More is expected of a man. I feel that the world was a lot more forgiving towards me when I was a woman. And I don’t think it’s good for women. It comes from a place that you’ll be forgiven because you’re likely to be less capable. Like a child who you pick up because she can’t walk by herself. I realised I did it to other men as well.
Yes, I do this too. I exploit my own femaleness, and then at the same time I’m super hard on the men around me. It’s a fucked up situation.
1:11:04 I’m feeding the same illogical loop of expectations. … OK, we still have work to do.
1:13:13 to what degree is men’s anger at women for women’s complicity and patriarchy?
1:14:09: Valuing when men show up and bring themselves into the conversation. When they show up openly and honestly, and sometimes being honest and open is going to mean that they’re going to say things that we don’t like. Being a good person is not about only saying things that we want them to say it’s about them being able to tell us the truth. Can we handle the truth? Are we strong enough? Are we tolerant enough to really allow people to enter the conversation as they are? Because I think unfortunately we often we want to hear what we want to hear. It goes both ways.
1:14:52 That’s also advice for just anyone who wants to have healthy relationships, to be ready to not always get exactly what we think we want. Sometimes we’ll be pleasantly surprised, we’ll get something more than what we were asking for or expecting.
1:15:47 What is the one value that is shared by mainstream patriarchal culture and virtually all of the so-called counterculture movements that are in existence?
1:16:01 The value of the individual. Personal growth, not relational growth.
1:16:28 personal empowerment is I was weak now I’m strong. I will survive on my own. I don’t care about you or what you think.
1:16:46 Relational empowerment is I was weak now I’m strong. I’m bringing my full voice into this relationship. I’m going to tell you exactly what I want from you and I’m going to empower you to come through for me. What can I give you to help you give me what I want? How can I help?
1:17:16 being powerful fully voiced and in relationship breaks the back of patriarchy
1:17:25 being relational is what we’re born for. Being relational is how we are designed, is how we function best. It’s the pearl of great price. it’s the only thing that will really make us happy.
1:17:42 As a people we’re trying to work this out. We’re trying to figure out how to be fully ourselves and fully connected, both, at the same time. We have no model. The traditional roles of men and women are not built for intimacy. They’re built for production and consumption. The culture supports the old roles, performance-based esteem and what we call attribute based esteem: I have worth because of what I have, and what we call other-based esteem: I have worth because you think I do, my reputation.
1:19:21 We have the human capacities that are necessary to solve the problems that we collectively face right now. These basic relational capacities are integral to solving whether it’s climate change or poverty or inequality or fascism – human problems.
1:20:56 When we start poking at that agreed upon Foundation of gender then we’re going to also be poking at some other foundational elements – race comes into it immediately. So we’re really disrupting some core foundational elements upon which our society is built and that feels dangerous.
So then reiterating:
37:34: There’s a puzzle that we have to figure out which is how to make this the change without in the process shaming manhood which will provoke violence. Figuring out how to make that move without it triggering the re-institution of the patriarchal structure.