Best wishes, Reddy Mercury, on your recovery. I hope you get better soon.
Lemme see if I can explain this to the both of you…
Counterpoint: watch this video. It’s about 1/10th the length, and it’s what this asshole’s complaining about people complaining about anyways.
It’s the famous kiss between Han and Leia.
Turn off the pink goggles. A woman is on a near-stranger’s ship, in the vacuum of space, trying to work. She’s a fugitive in a dangerous situation - she can’t just leave. He approaches her in a very physical manner, she pushes him away. She keeps sending signals that he should shove off. It’s not clear whether she’s aroused or terrified. She seems to make it entirely clear that she’s not interested. He grabs her hands. She tells him to stop, twice. David Wong goes into detail on it in the first list element on this article on Cracked:
All right, so here’s the first lesson I got on sexual consent. I was six years old. My hero and lifelong role model, Han Solo, approaches a woman who has told him at every opportunity that she’s not interested. Han comes up from behind and presses his body against hers. She’s a strong woman, a fighter, so she physically shoves him off …
Undeterred, Han moves back in, grabs her hands, and starts rubbing them. She says, “Stop that,” and looks nervous. When he doesn’t stop, she clearly says it again. He still doesn’t stop. Romantic music plays …
[…]
And he kisses her. Note: Her head is pressed up against a metal wall… and all of this occurs in a sealed spacecraft floating in the cold vacuum of outer space. Even if she wanted to leave, she couldn’t (because of the implications). The result of this encounter is that she falls in love with this man and they spend the rest of their lives together.
To put it another way, if Leia didn’t secretly have a huge ladyboner for Han Solo, or if you changed the music on that scene to something less romantic and more creepy, it could have played out very differently. This is a problematic message to send to people, and Star Wars isn’t exactly the only movie sending it - it’s damn near ubiquitous, along with messages that women play hard to get, and that asking is unmanly and you should just take what you want - a very, very toxic combination of values to teach people. That’s the problem here. Han Solo sexually assaults someone and they fall in love as a result - but so does James Bond, much more explicitly. That whole Cracked article is really great, by the way.
Man, you have issues.
No. No, it really isn’t. And you know what my #1 counterpoint is: President Obama. He’s not awkward. He’s not goofy. He’s absolutely in charge of any room he enters - if that doesn’t make him an alpha, I don’t know what does, unless you mean that bullshit pickup-artist crap. And there is nobody worth listening to who would claim that what Obama does is characteristic of toxic masculinity. Obama is a renaissance man, very much in the classical vein. He’s just not, you know, obsessed with his masculinity to the point where he sees it as necessary to adopt negative masculine stereotypes.
And that’s what toxic masculinity is. To take it from Wikipedia: “The concept of toxic masculinity is used in the social sciences to describe traditional norms of behavior among men in contemporary American and European society that are associated with detrimental social and psychological effects.” You can be strong, imposing, self-confident, humorless, and “the boss” without any kind of toxic masculinity.
Want another example? Okay, how about Commander Badass from Manly Guys Doing Manly Things? This guy is, in any traditional sense, the man. He’s a supersoldier from the future made of half bald eagle and half home-grown steak. He has a jawline you could carve meat with. He runs his own business finding jobs for absurdly manly men who struggle to reintegrate with society, and these men (including people like Leonidas, Kratos, and even Big Daddies from Bioshock) listen to him. He’s basically in charge of any situation you want. Words like “goofy”, “awkward”, and “beta” have about as much association with him as words like “honest” and “philanthropist” have with Donald Trump. But at the same time, he is basically a walking repudiation of toxic masculinity. He’s manly as hell, but he doesn’t let his own hangups of what it means to be masculine get in the way of important things in his life (unlike his coworkers).
You may note I skipped the “gentle” part of your definition of toxic masculinity. Because that is valid. If your pre-bound ideals of masculinity are keeping you from being gentle (or caring, or empathetic) when the situation calls for it, then that is absolutely part and parcel of toxic masculinity. Because of course it is! Your hangups about what it means to “be a man” are keeping you from an important part of your psyche. Just like never being willing to show emotion beyond hate and rage. “Toxic” is not just a buzzword here, it is actually really bad for you to suppress your emotions like that.
Before you criticize concepts, try to understand them.
White privilege exists. It is a thing. There is tons of evidence that white people get privileged treatment in countless important ways, from tutoring in college to what houses they get shown to how traditionally “black” names are treated in applications. There is ample evidence that white privilege exists. If believing in white privilege makes you a Social Justice Warrior, then you have placed the entirety of the reality-based community on the opposing side of the argument. You have fucked up.
Good article that.
Really, I guess the interesting part here is not trying to get through to Reddy. He seems paranoid, to the point of a mental disorder. It’s disturbing. The more interesting part is finding out how that happened, and how to prevent it from happening. Did Trigglypuff rape you or something, Reddy?
I don’t have a problem with his Cafe Society threads and enjoy some of them.
This thread like his other threads, is an incoherent rant against SJW strawmen. For a self-proclaimed liberal, he seems awfully keen to regurgitate the most paranoid and hysterical aspects of the alt-right.
White males and their party control all 3 branches of government. They control the most powerful news empire the world has ever seen (Fox news). They even had a representative of their unhinged conspiracy vanguard in the White House for a moment (Steve Bannon) who is likely still collaborating from the outside. White surpremacists enjoy broad audiences and attention on Twitter, Facebook, 4chan, Reddit, and virtually every internet platform out there. They have majorities in most state governments and look like they’ll be holding them in 2018.
Given that your side dominates the media and the government, why again do you think you’re a persecuted rebel minority? Is it because those nasty SJW’s can brazenly hurt your feelings and insult your ideas without being put in jail?
I’m so sorry your feelings got hurt; here’s a lollipop. Go suck it.
Thanks. That explains it all. Musta been one big acorn to produce this level of brain damage.
Maybe I really do need a crib-sheet. @ Reddy Mercury — are you also an “extremely liberal Democrat”?
Darn, I’d better tell my husband I hate him.
Sigh and we had such a nice run going.
they’ve always been out there, precious. The internet has just made it a lot easier for them to be heard.
You know, when I was young I preferred the Three Stooges, but in my twenties I switched around to the Marx Brothers, and now in my sixties while I can’t say I prefer the Three Stooges, but I enjoy them a lot more than I used to. It could be incipient Alzheimer’s I guess.
I’ve never found the perennial mystery “boring loser pretending to have serious issues” vs. “boring loser who actually has serious issues” particularly compelling to begin with, and the number of the former is so overwhelming that I’ve stopped giving a shit about the latter.
If 2017 wakes us up to anything, it should be that the line between the two is about as thick as dorm-room toilet paper. The people pretending to be Nazis have, many of them, become Nazis.
I am so stealing that.
Because the alternative is that nobody cares at all about him. Which can be even scarier than believing that everyone is out to get you.
True- most people do not have the inclination to pretend to be assholes and screw with other people. Those that do suggest an underlying pathology- whether it’s the same pathology they are pretending to have or a different one is irrelevant to me.
Let it go, comrades, it’s no use anymore. The jig is up, Reddy got us. I was afraid this would happen before we were ready, and it was SOOO close 
( Heil Marx )
You forgot white.
Oh wait, there it is, nevermind.
Hard to believe that just a short while ago you were posting trying to convince us that you’re not exactly what you appear to be.
Fuck (with a cactus ideally) white supremacists and people, like you, that have decided to stand with them by espousing their rhetoric. Whether you believe you’re a white supremacist or not is irrelevant. You are.
…
[snip]
As others noted, you did fuck up on why there are people that do have an issue with white privilege, it is because they know that it exists. These dumb points of yours here are a bit related to that.
But that is not just why I want to deal with those points, you are really not too smart by confusing a defense of most of the Muslims by people that seek justice with a defense of radical Islamism.
As I noted before: "I do think like the atheist that said that maybe we should drop a lot of leaflets with Bertrand Russel’s musings about religion in the middle east. (Or to bomb them when we know their specific locations).
What you and many right wingers see as support of the radicals in reality is support for the vast majority of Muslims that are not using Islam as a call to do war or terrorism. (Many of the ones we also support actually risked their lives protesting or opposing dictators or repressive laws in Muslim nations)
What I do believe is happening is that many on the left do assume that most intelligent people already knows that we also hate the terrorists.
Sadly, many on the left are wrong (to assume that).
Many on the right are just not that bright."
So, it needs to be mentioned that indeed we do hate terrorists simply because guys like Reddy Mercury remain so ignorant.
[moderating]
This thread is disappointing. Not because of Reddy’s contributions, but because the responses that seemed to feed him. We’ve decided to put an end to that, and to him. Hope springs eternal that we can do better next time.
[/moderating]