It’s very much that way for me too. I mean, there are basic things that I’m attracted to or not and I’ve learned that I really shouldn’t try to force myself to be attracted to someone who really doesn’t do it for me just because it’s possible. I’ve done that, and it’s a big regret.
But yeah, a good person is always a lot more attractive to me than a nasty person in a pretty body.
If anything my tastes go to quirky rather than the blandly pretty anyway.
WTF?
I said nothing of the sort.
I said, if anything, that Some Men Are Evil; though I didn’t use that word, and rarely use the concept. Most men don’t attack women, or attack men for that matter. Most men, as near as I can tell, don’t even want to attack women, or other men; and I’ve got nothing against the ones who want to but don’t do it. If you want to say that I called men who can control their impulse to violence but don’t evil, though again I didn’t use that particular word you’ve maybe got a case. But to say that I said that of all men is entirely absurd.
It seems to me that you’re the one who’s saying all men are evil – that all men have violent impulses they’re entirely unable to control. Which would also be obvious nonsense, because again, most men don’t attack women or for that matter other men.
Dogs are incapable of evil. It’s a human concept.
Society including men; who need to stop saying things like ‘men (in general) just can’t help it’ and start saying things like ‘yes, you can help it; and if you really think you can’t, then go get help to stop you from doing anything about it.’
And also to stop getting pissed at the women when we try to do our share of that socialization training.
Okay, but how often does that basilisk stare happen? Like, when’s the last time it happened, and if you remember, the time before that? Has it happened today? In the past week? In the past month? This year?
It’s just such a strange behavior --to meet someone and to stare unblinkingly and with hostility at them–that I’m trying to wrap my head around it.
That’s good advice, and I thank you for it. I’m not really intimidating looking, my scars aren’t that obvious, I just look kind of misshaped. My smashed nose is pretty obvious, though, but a lot of people have broken noses. People don’t tend to be wary of thin guys, I get underestimated more often than not. I’m actually pretty healthy, I just don’t look it.
Yeah, huh!?
The vast majority of men are capable of controlling their violent impulsives. Humans are amazingly social. I once saw a comparison of the number of violent interactions between pigeons in a flock and between humans in crowds. We have almost no violent interactions in groups; pigeons peck and jostle each other enormously more often than humans do.
Men refrain from violence all the time. Most men are really good at that. I (and i think, @thorny_locust ) are just rejecting the notion that somehow men are forced by their biology to be violent. A tiny fraction of men are broken that way. An even tinier fraction of women are, too. But overall, men are totally capable of refraining from violence, and do it routinely. Most men AREN’T dangerous to women. We all know that.
How on Earth is that the message you got from Thorny’s post?
It happens regularly enough that I don’t think it’s unusual. I’ve been very busy in the last 6 months, moving and getting set up in my new home, so I haven’t been that social. My neighbours are reasonably friendly, several of whom are female but I don’t see any interest there, plus I really don’t want to do anything that’d mess up my situation in my probable forever home.
I’m thinking about my social life here… the only women I can recall meeting lately are partnered. Pretty friendly, as I recall it.
The last death-stare I clearly remember was sometime last year, a friend of a female friend of mine. It was obviously that she expected me to be attracted her which in fact I wasn’t. But, you know, she shut me down even though it was utterly unnecessary.
Now, I’m not overly offended by that, I can just roll my eyes and move on. But that’s pretty common; being shut down instantly whether or not I happen to find them attractive. “I get it, you think you’re too good for the likes of me, OK.”
It feels quite hostile to me. Now, there have been incidents where I’ve been introduced and had the women turn her back and/or walk away. And there have been incidents where I’ve been told to fuck off. In those words. For saying hello.
And for the record - I do not approach women and try to strike up conversations. I never do that. I’m shy and I have zero self confidence in that area. I’m not pestering anyone. The only way I meet anyone is if I’m introduced or if someone strikes up a conversation with me.
So I think the thread got derailed a bit to focus on @Shakester’s perceived problems attracting and interacting with women. That’s unfortunate, but understandable how someone who feels unattractive to women might opt out of engaging with them.
What I find more concerning is people like @Moonrise choosing to disengage from emotional involvement with women out of some misguided fear of appearing “toxic”. Perhaps largely based on personal interactions with a female colleague who from what I can tell appears pretty toxic herself and definitely has some sort of political axe to grind.
“Toxic masculinity” has become like the term “woke”. We know legitimate examples of both when we see them, but they have become overused indefensible labels used to further ideological agendas.
I’m about the same age as the OP. And I’ve been married with a couple of kids for the past 12 years, so I’m not out there in the singlesphere any more. But I do know some people who are. It seems to me that it should be relatively easy to go out there and interact with women without being “toxic”. It’s called “not acting like a jerk or a douchebag”.
I understand that these concepts may be foreign to some men who lack social awareness and may have been socialized to believe that women should naturally fawn to them because they spend several hours a day at the gym. But I don’t get a sense that @Moonrise falls into that category.
That definitely sucks. But it’s not what I was expecting when you described it as “the most common reaction” you get. I thought you were saying it happened a lot more than once every year or so. Is it possible that you’re magnifying these relatively rare events, because they’re so outrageously rude?
That cartoon I linked to earlier–“They hated me!”–is something I struggle with in my own life. I’m doing student feedback this week based on the year of classes I’ve taught, and overall I’m getting a lot of feedback; but I see a couple of kids saying things like, “You didn’t challenge me,” and it’s hard not to focus on those things to the exclusion of all the kids saying that I did challenge them.
Maybe instead, frame it as something like, “Once a year or so, I meet someone so obnoxious that it really throws me for a loop, but overwhelmingly the people I meet don’t give me a basilisk stare.” Would that be accurate?
My response was to this:
Which was in response to this:
So let’s suppose that 1% of women are violent and 6% of men are violent. 1% of men being violent is human condition, equal to women. Let’s suppose that an additional 1% are allowed as explanation. We know that serial killers are overwhelmingly male, rule that it’s all some form of insanity, no problem there. So the remaining 4% of men that are violent is where the “bullshit” diagnosis is applied.
Now perhaps these men could be educated out of their violence. Now the recognition that the men may need different education than women seems to be an admission of further innate difference. Because otherwise all such education against violence could be unisex, no need to differentiate.
Of course it’s possible we may not be interested in educating the men, think it takes too many resources or we just decide it’s their business, not ours. We’d rather stop the violence, lock 'em up etc. than spend time fixing the issues. That’s fine, but again it seems to be recognition of innate difference.
For me to agree with the “bullshit” diagnosis is to say that even given all corrective measures available to be as non-violent as women, some percentage of men are simply choosing to be violent anyway. Why? The only conclusion I can reach is that men are more evil, that the cohort of men is less moral than that of women, because a higher percentage of men are choosing to be violent anyway.
That is what doesn’t make sense to me personally, why would men be inherently more evil? No one chooses gender, unless you believe they do, unless you think we are all choosing our genders in the before life and bad people are opting for male. So it would seem that innate difference is the most likely difference in any difference in violence. We should certain stop the violence and disable the perpetrators, but I can’t really make sense out of the “bullshit” theory and the implication that men simply choose to be violent because they are bad people.
Yup, you understood me right.
That long post seems to me to amount to – OK, maybe I’d better not paraphrase. But I’m going to condense:
and
That seems to me to be an extremely weird conclusion; to conclude that men in general are more evil because maybe 4% of them are.
And even if I accept that conclusion – it in no way justifies telling me that I said
which is not remotely anything like what I said. Even by your figures and your conclusion and your choice of wording – I’d have to be saying that 96% of men are not evil. (The exact percentage that behaves badly is going to vary by socialization and situation – as it is for women. And I strongly prefer that sort of phrasing. “Evil” is a word I’d rather reserve for somebody like Putin; though there are some rapists I might apply it to.)
What I said is what @puzzlegal said, quoted above.
And the other thing I said was that most rapists (and most harassers, while we’re at it) damn well can help it. Which we know, because nearly all of them only do it when they think they can get away with it. If they were utterly out of control and really couldn’t help it, they wouldn’t select times and places and victims – whatever their particular sexual tastes are, they’d be just as likely to attack their boss in the middle of the three-hundred-person company party as their similarly-appearing date alone in the car on an empty street. And they aren’t.
Absolutely not. That is a bad faith argument. I know that has been pointed out already but it is so far off the mark it bears repeating. If anything you were the one framing men as inherently violent.
Personally I don’t care whether that 4% is due to “innate” differences or not. I strongly suspect it’s more related to the experience of being bigger and stronger and the relative ease with which men could control women particularly before we had the ability to make choices about reproduction. Pregnancy is a vulnerable state and for whatever reason it tends to make violent men extra violent.
It doesn’t matter why any of us have the tendency to do what we do. All that matters is for those of us who are not psychopaths, we have the ability to make better choices now.
And some of us have been trying to educate men about the impact of violence against women, which I have discussed in this very thread or the other one, there are so many at this point I can’t keep them all straight. But there is a tremendous surge of backlash against this kind of work as we speak, and we need more men to support this kind of work.
I’d start with Men Can Stop Rape, a DC based organization focused on outreach to men. Just look at what’s actually already being done and support that. That’d be a great start.
Because no one suggested that?
The data you made up would suggest that ~4% of men choose to act badly in a way that they are physically capable of acting badly. That same 4% of women are probably acting badly in some other way, maybe abusing children who are smaller and weaker than they are, maybe stealing money from the till, i dunno.
But to observe that a small fraction of men choose to do bad things to other people in a physical and sexual way seems… totally unremarkable. Don’t we all know that? And to assume that this means men are somehow morally inferior to women is just a bizarre jump. No, it means those 4% of men are morally inferior to all the other men who refrain from doing those bad things.
I want to thank all the good people (such as the three quoted) for continuing to attempt to fight ignorance in a way I just can’t right now at least in this thread.
Nobody has to fight all the time at every minute in every context. Nobody could. What we need is just for as many people as possible to do what they can.
(And thanks!)
Somebody gave me pretty much this exact advice during a time of major burnout in my advocacy work and it changed so much for me. Knowing I could set that burden down whenever I needed to basically solved that burnout problem and has enabled me to work for many more years.
Yup.
It even got me through cultivating the peas with the wheelhoe today. In my current physical shape, I need to be able to stop and breathe whenever I need to, and to be able to stop entirely when I really need to; and I wouldn’t dare start if I knew that I couldn’t. But the same applies to mental work.
Wow, thanks, I hadn’t considered broadening that lesson to other contexts, but I needed that message, too!
A quote from Wendell Berry:
“I may be old and I may be slow. But every row that I pick is a picked row.”
(Admittedly, that works better for things like the corn being harvested in the story in question – if you pick a row of corn, it may well stay picked till the next year’s planting. The weeds, on the other hand, come back fast, and often over and over.)
– further note: I must not have the quote quite right, I can’t find it online. It’s probably somewhere in the house, but I don’t know where.
This is not directed at you.
But there was a post earlier in one of these threads that claimed that although 99.5% of men were not the troublemakers that men, collectively, somehow need to do better.
There was also a bit in the OP here about how men were somehow “not doing enough”, again collectively.
We’ve stopped attributing this sort of collective guilt to pretty much any other demographic… except for men, where it is still used, at least by some people.
Getting back to that old man woman bear deal, yes men are more dangerous. Men are also more dangerous to me, a man, though that’s not supposed to be a part of that conversation. Jeffrey Dahmer, a man, killed other men in greater numbers than bears do. Men kill far more people, women and men, than women do. That is beyond dispute. Serial killers, overwhelmingly men.
But I can’t really do anything about Jeffrey Dahmer. I’m open to suggestions as to how to reduce the number of serial killers, it would be great. But I was just born a man like all other men, I never met Dahmer, we don’t have annual conventions of every man in the entire world. I’m not sure how I’m supposed to police that, how Dahmer being a man reflects badly on a gender that I had no choice in being part of.
As well as being a man I have a son among other children. My son is disabled, so I don’t really see how he gets all the benefits of being male, but he is nonetheless a human male. So he’s a male, some aspects of his life do relate to that, but those that would lump together a gender in order to assign collective guilt, he’s in there as well.
Again, to all of those questioning my posts here, this may not be directed at you specifically, but the sort of collective look at a gender that is done with males isn’t done with females, races, you name it anymore, and it needs to stop with males as well.