"Men are getting weaker" and 60s entertainment

[Exapno_Mapcase]

@Johnny_Angel

Maybe you can answer a question I’ve been kicking around for a while now – when was the last time that American Manhood was not in crisis? Because men seem to be freaking out all through the 20th century, at least.

A series of national and regional women’s rights conventions were held in the 1850s, receiving wide attention and generating the first real backlash. The Civil War quashed women’s rights completely; war was exclusively the province of men (although a few individual woman successfully disguised themselves and fought) and the dominance of those who fought in the war went unchallenged for decades. As late as 1896, McKinley emphasized his war record while running for President and in 1898 Roosevelt formed the Rough Riders because he was pathologically convinced he could not claim true manhood without fighting in a war.

Suffrage remained on a low boil throughout. Women also took a large role in the dry movement. The two came together in the early 20th century with the British suffragette movement being hugely influential. For a few years (before yet another male-exulting war) women became also like humans. One of my favorite pictures is this one of Charles Dana Gibson’s girls examining a man.

@Kobal2

Did we go back to bosoms when I wasn’t looking ?

Thanks. I hoped somebody got that.

We hear a lot of talk today about white privilege but in the U.S. it’s really a set of four interlinked privileges: white, male, straight, and Christian. Until incredibly recently the default depiction of an American had all four. Books, movies, plays almost invariably started with a white, straight, male, Christian and built around him, with white, straight, Christian women as love interests, helpmates, or mothers. That mirrored history and contemporary reality. Despite the tiny percentage of exceptions, politics, academia, industry, religion, banking, science, journalism, and every other area of power and influence were dominated by white, straight, male Christians. Ironically, the women’s movement, though it greatly overlapped the abolitionist movement, was infuriated that black males had received the vote before white women.

Denying that white, straight, male Christian privilege existed and dominated America culturally throughout almost the entirely of the 19th and 20th centuries is as mockable a view as denying that man-made climate change is warming the Earth. It takes you out of all rational conversation. Those who fit the image of the default American cannot imagine what it’s like growing up outside of that image; from the evidence they don’t even try and, worse, condemn anyone who dares to make them. They scream very loudly today as the world rapidly changes to de-privilege them. It’s nice to hear, although they would do better to study history and find out more of what they’re screaming about.

[RikWriter]

Sounds like wishful thinking.

[jz78817]

@Blake

Obviously if some women are not good at maths then it is an observed fact about societal behavior that women are no good at maths.

Obviously if some women lack the agression to make it as senior management then it is an observed fact about societal behavior that women lack the agression to make it as senior management

Obviously if some Mexicans are rapists then it is an observed fact about societal behavior that Mexicans are rapists.

:rolleyes: Right back at ya.

Bigoted rubbish is bigoted rubbish. It doesn’t cease being bigoted rubbish because it’s not being spewed against your favourite victim group.

#notallmen

[Johnny_Angel]

@Exapno_Mapcase

A series of national and regional women’s rights conventions were held in the 1850s, receiving wide attention and generating the first real backlash.

It’s not just the rejection of expanding rights, it’s this peculiar institution of feeling like if other people get more rights you’ve essentially been nerfed. That is, I’m not so much talking about opposing women’s rights, but I wonder when men first looked back at their grandfather’s generation and felt gibbed in comparison. A couple of clothespins: I recall a Humphrey Bogart movie, from before he was a leading man, in which his character was driven to psychosis by his belief that in the modern world nobody was allowed to be a real man anymore. In Rebel Without a Cause, the ‘cause’ was in fact that the boy felt castrated by his father being domineered by his mother, thus blaming uppity women for the rise of juvenile delinquency. In the 70’s there was a song by the Four Seasons called Silver Star in which the narrator dreams of being a bounty hunter in the old west and appears to blame some unnamed woman for the fact that he has a desk job. In the 80’s, John McClane’s marital problems went beyond merely being estranged by his wife – it is heavily hinted that her being more successful and important than him brought him pain, and despite his vulnerability it is an application of masculine and American means that wins the day.

[Exapno_Mapcase]

I swear this is a coincidence, because until I got there I had no memory of what speech I was going to hear. But at the Susan B. Anthony House I just listened to a talk on “The Other Woman: Alice Hay Wadsworth, President of the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage.”

The speaker gave a great many quotes from the anti-suffrage movement. While we today consider their reasoning specious if not actively ridiculous, you could easily alter a few words here and today and imagine them coming out of the mouths of anti-gay marriage activists or any other anti-body. Women don’t need the vote: they have their husbands to thoughtfully vote for them. How can women claim the right to vote if they are not powerful enough to defend that vote in war? What will homes be like if women neglect housework for the ballot?

Wishful thinking? I’d say yes.

The 20th century has been a long, excruciatingly slow slog toward reducing privilege, even after the expansion of rights had been codified into law. Every day is a tiny step forward; some days are a step back. A long view is needed to understand how much has been gained.

[you_with_the_face]

@Johnny_Angel

In the 70’s there was a song by the Four Seasons called Silver Star in which the narrator dreams of being a bounty hunter in the old west and appears to blame some unnamed woman for the fact that he has a desk job.

My husband and I have a recurring discussion about how in the last 10-15 years, so many movies and shows seem to scream this particular theme. Probably more subtle than in years’ past, but it is definitely there. The fantasy involves men revolting from the soul-sucking domesticity foisted upon them by boring emasculating wives, usually in ways that are unlawful, obsessive, self-destructive, and/or involves abandoning their loved ones.

[GrumpyBunny]

@Exapno_Mapcase

They sure do. Loudly. All the time.

Sometimes they mansplain about how they aren’t really in charge of everything and women are misunderstanding everything.

[Memnon]

@jz78817

#notallmen

You can’t hashtag your way out of bigotry, son.

[actualliberalnotoneofthose]

Believe it or not, men can support things like universal suffrage and civil rights without being cuckolds. Not understanding this simple/obvious fact is something certain types of “MRAs” and “feminists” seem to have in common.

[actualliberalnotoneofthose]

@you_with_the_face

My husband and I have a recurring discussion about how in the last 10-15 years, so many movies and shows seem to scream this particular theme. Probably more subtle than in years’ past, but it is definitely there. The fantasy involves men revolting from the soul-sucking domesticity foisted upon them by boring emasculating wives, usually in ways that are unlawful, obsessive, self-destructive, and/or involves abandoning their loved ones.

There’s a lot of women-oriented divorce porn/fantasy.

[Kimstu]

@installLSC

I watch a lot of TV shows and movies from the 60s (born in 1975). One thing I’ve noticed (most notably in “It’s a Mad World” and a couple of “Dick Van Dyke” episodes) is plots that mention the idea American men have become soft and dominated by their women. It’s often compared to the supposedly more manly European male.

Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, which are basically a thin veneer of self-confident masculinity applied over a thick slab of male insecurity (jolly good reads, though), touch on this theme. From Bond’s New York trip in Live and Let Die (1954):

It was no waste of time to start picking up the American idiom again: the advertisements, the new car models […] the standard of driving; the number of women at the wheel, their menfolk docilely beside them […]

Midcentury Canadians were freaking out about this too:

The postwar economic boom in Ontario […] brought new emphasis to such concerns. The period’s child experts promoted the idea that a key “cause” of homosexuality was the modern decline in the father’s status; his daily commute from the suburbs meant that children were left to be raised, without significant paternal influence, by overbearing mothers […]

This rising social anxiety reflected and reinforced Ontarians’ worries about traditional gender relations and identities, specifically those of men. The outcome, between 1945 and 1960, was a vigorous reassertion of traditional gender roles as a means to assuage fears that masculinity was in “crisis”. […] “Much of the male ordeal,” one psychoanalyst suggested, “stems from the growing independence of working women.”

Fuelling the notion that masculinity was in crisis were popular writers, cultural commentators, and media critics. In 1948 a Maclean’s writer, in an article boldly titled “Our Men Are Mice”, decried the state of postwar masculinity:

I’m getting sick of being told that Canada is a man’s country. That’s a colossal falsehood. If we male citizens could be said to have one characteristic in common, whether we happen to be bottle-shaped little tremble chins or tougher than the back end of a cement mixer,* it’s our slavish readiness to lie down flat and let women walk all over us. Except maybe for our neighbors across the border, we Canadians are the most henpecked men on earth.

Similarly, in 1950, the leading Canadian women’s magazine Chatelaine published an article provocatively titled “Man, the Vanishing Sex.” The author, Fred Bodsworth, warned the magazine’s female audience that men were in danger of disappearing altogether, due to the contemporary situation, which, in his view, held men in thrall to dominating and domineering females. […]

In Life on 6 January 1947, one writer warned that “a matriarchy is developing.” […] There is, of course, nothing new to the suggestion that masculinity is undermined whenever opportunities for women expand. […] As a number of historians have pointed out, “crises” in masculinity are recurrent expressions of social anxiety in times of rapid change. Michael Kimmel’s 1996 landmark study on masculinity, Manhood in America, documents how a sense of crisis has plagued American men since the mid-18th century. […]

• Note added: See previous remark about “a thin veneer of self-confident masculinity applied over a thick slab of male insecurity”.

[Kimstu]

@Blake

@jz78817

yes. men get pissed off and defensive whenever someone suggests they shouldn’t be in charge of everything,

Do they?

And what do Blacks do in that situation? Starting popping caps in asses?And Jews? Do they try to connive their way into power?

Oh dear. Blake, while I too get annoyed when people are sloppy in their descriptions of gender expectations, I think your indignation is leading you to conflate socially imposed expectations of gender roles with gender stereotypes manufactured to support those expectations.

For example, it is not sexist bigotry to say “Women are afraid that not getting married will mean they’ve ‘failed’ as a woman”.

Yes, that’s obviously not a literally true statement about the feelings of every woman. There are doubtless some women who have never felt even a twinge of insecurity about being single. But the point is that the societal pressure on women to feel that way is universal in a sexist society.

Saying “Women are too helpless and immature to look after themselves without a husband”, on the other hand, is sexist bigotry. Because it’s making a claim about women’s innate characteristics rather than about societal pressures on women.

Similarly, it is not sexist bigotry to say “Men feel threatened when they’re told they shouldn’t be in charge of everything” (though I think the way jz78817 phrased it was needlessly adversarial and irritatingly clumsy).

Because our traditionally mandated gender expectations are constantly telling men that they should be in charge, and if men are not in charge it’s a potential threat to their masculinity. Sure, there are doubtless some men who are literally totally immune to such societal expectations and never feel threatened by men not being in charge, but that doesn’t mean that the societal pressure on men to feel that way isn’t still there in a sexist society.

Saying “Men have to be in charge because men are too aggressive to function well in subordinate roles” or something like that, on the other hand, is a bigoted sexist stereotype.
We can make similar distinctions in terms of race or other societally enforced category expectations as well. “Blacks worry that dating a white person is on some level a betrayal of their people”, for example, is a non-racist statement about the pressures of societal expectations. “Blacks just want to pop caps in asses” or “blacks just want to eat watermelon”, on the other hand, are bigoted racial stereotypes.

[Exapno_Mapcase]

That’s a nice distinction, Kimstu. Well stated.

[Slithy_Tove]

The best arguments for what a stupid movie is Rebel Without a Cause cite Jim Backus in a frilly apron as the reason for 1950’s juvenile delinquency. Really, that explained everything.

Of course the Canadians as well as the Americans felt their masculinity was under siege. And remember that when this mentality sets in, women aren’t the only ones who face pushback: They also scapegoat the living crap out of homosexuals

[Johnny_Angel]

@Slithy_Tove

The best arguments for what a stupid movie is Rebel Without a Cause cite Jim Backus in a frilly apron as the reason for 1950’s juvenile delinquency. Really, that explained everything.

His emotional outpouring at that scene probably did a lot to make him so famous. But it kind of makes me wince because it’s so clearly about a sense of emasculation. I wonder if East of Eden would turn out to be a manhood-in-crisis story if I watched it again. Or, you know, ever actually read it.

[Slithy_Tove]

There’s a lot of sex in East of Eden. The bit about how the nightly show at Kate’s house went flat because “the girl who smoked the cigar had a cough” took a moment to sink in. But there’s not a lot of homosexuality in Steinbeck. The lonely boys up on Cannery Row somehow kept the jockers off the premises. For all the other frankness about sex, as well as adult breast feeding(!) it may explain how he was welcomed into America’s high schools.

[drad_dog]

@Slithy_Tove

The best arguments for what a stupid movie is Rebel Without a Cause cite Jim Backus in a frilly apron as the reason for 1950’s juvenile delinquency. Really, that explained everything.

Of course the Canadians as well as the Americans felt their masculinity was under siege. And remember that when this mentality sets in, women aren’t the only ones who face pushback: They also scapegoat the living crap out of homosexuals

I can’t tell if you are making that argument, or referring to it.

A great movie. Jim Stark wasn’t a Juvenile delinquent. It was nuanced like other flicks were not. Nothing “explained everything”

[Kimstu]

Thx EM!

[Johnny_Angel]

@drad_dog

A great movie. Jim Stark wasn’t a Juvenile delinquent. It was nuanced like other flicks were not. Nothing “explained everything”

I don’t know, man. I mean, the performances sell the film. But the apron scene was over-the-top and just bludgeons you with its message.

[Really_Not_All_That_Bright]

Good thread. Guess I shouldn’t be surprised to see that “the more things change, the more they stay the same” applies here too.