Skirts and dresses on men are way less taboo than they used to be - it’s pretty ordinary to see guys in skirts/dresses at music festivals, and to see guys in leather kilts at brew pubs and the like. You’re currently not going to see it in a regular corporate environment and certainly not in government or banking, but it’s certainly not unheard of. Meanwhile your area of expertise reminded me that back in the 60’s and 70’s when there was a huge counterculture movement and people eschewing traditional styles (and in some cases clothing entirely), there just weren’t any guys casually wearing dresses. I don’t think I’ve ever seen even a single picture of a guy just casually wearing a dress at Woodstock or some other big event - yes, there were some drag queens at places, but that’s different than a guy saying ‘I want something loose and flowing, fuck the man I’m slapping on a skirt today’.
Hey pal, I think I have a pretty firm grasp of my own manhood.
Frankly, i have wondered if a lack of interest in dresses for men may come from… more freely moving genitals? I don’t know if that would be a pleasant sensation.
I know the Scots proudly declare that nothing is worn below the kilt. Perhaps i should ask them.
The guys I know who like kilts, dresses, or skirts like the feeling of their junk swinging free and catching a breeze, and tout that as one of the benefits. Personally I am not a fan of letting the boys roam, so I’ve never been tempted towards any of the skirt-ish offerings (plus on this board I have pants in my very name!), but there’s a wide variety in what people like.
Yes, the traditional saying is that if you wear underwear under it, it ceases to be a kilt and becomes a skirt.
Yes, girls and boys are different on a group level, because they are socialized differently and differ biologically as well.
That said, it is still folly to say girls act like X and boys act like Y. Because there are a lot of girls that don’t do X, and plenty of boys that do. On most metrics, the overlap between the genders is likely greater than their differences.
So what are you really conveying when you talk about someone being like “one of the girls”? I hate to say this, but it comes across as something Michael Scott from The Office would say; like a clueless person whose understanding of the world is mostly based on stereotypes.
Time for you to talk in specifics now. What behavior would make a girl an “exception to the rule”? Liking sports? Preferring short hair? I need help understanding what “rules” the vast majority of women are following, because that memo isn’t in my inbox.
When I said that you promulgate gender expectations, this is the kind of thing I’m talking about. Your generalizations about gender actually have an objectifying effect; rather than bringing awareness to the fact that women are a pretty diverse bunch, you actually keep reducing us to a collection of ill-defined characteristics.
This is how we perceive your theories. It must hurt to hear this feedback, but it is what it is.
When you bemoan there are no rebellious men pushing back against toxic masculine ideals, you are apparently believe that you are one of those rebellious men. But your rebellion consists of divorcing yourself from the idea of manhood all together. You’re not rebelling against manhood because you are not a man. Right? You don’t fit the box, so instead of breaking the box and remaking it, you say the box is valid, you are valid, so you belong in a different box. This one, labeled girls.
The ones that are rebelling, they don’t count. They are sellouts, or not really femmy or something. They still consider themselves men, and are modeling this different type of manhood for their children and children’s children. They are saying, through actions and words, that manhood didn’t have to be nasty bad stuff. And instead of respecting that- you denigrate and dismiss them.
If everyone keeps misunderstanding your writings, time and time again, it is not our fault. You have been told multiple times that you aren’t very good at communicating your ideas, and you reject this, and then you get angry when people misinterpret what you’re saying. What do they say about doing something over and over again, but expecting different results?
Your Jewish analogy would only work if you were also doing the whole, “Jews aren’t allowed in the club because Jews are sneaky and greedy”, or they’re DIFFERENT, and some Jewish guy said, “Well fuck you, I AM a greedy Jew, and proud of it!” :dubious:
I have no idea what the fuck you’re trying to say, or how this relates to my comments. However, 21 is not 7. A 7 year old may not want to be called a sissy. They don’t want to redefine things. They just want be who they are, without taking on a new label. Kids don’t like being labeled “different”, generally.
Besides, many people have a mix of interests. My cousin’s daughter is very girl – she loves things that are pink and sparkly, and loves playing Barbies and Disney Princesses. Yet she also adores hockey, and she’s learning how to play. Her mother told her at the outset that “hockey is for boys AND girls.”
People don’t fit into neat little boxes and labels.
I am a male, rebelling against manhood. Rejecting it. I am rebelling against it insofar as it is a thing imposed upon me as a consequence of the maleness.
Not quite that, no.
The box itself — the way it works — intrinsically depends on an internal inconsistency, and it is also defined very strongly by what it is not. Yes, I know there’s a sense in which every damn thing in defintion-land is defined by what it is not, but I mean this is true of this “man” thing in a way that it’s not true of most things.
Part A: If you are male you are a man. Male is man.
Part B: And yet…being male is not sufficient to be a man. To be a man you must be manly. If you are male but not manly you’re not a man, you don’t qualify. But that’s not OK, you aren’t allowed to accept that, either, you must be the man that you currently don’t qualify as being (see A above), it’s a requirement of males.
Part C: Manliness consists of being not-a-female and not-a-homosexual and not-a-sissy. It is defined largely in negation, so in order to satisfy the imposed requirement (see B above) it is incumbent upon you to prove you are not feminine, not female, not gay.
Certainly anyone rebelling and not simply internalizing the above counts as a real rebel. That is true not only of people who happen to use the term or concept “femmy” or “male girl” but also of (for example) Timothy Beneke or John Stoltenberg. John Stoltenberg doesn’t go around saying he’s a male girl. Those aren’t his terms, that isn’t how he identifies, but he’s not going around telling me that my experience is nothing special and nothing to talk about as if it matters and he is most definitely not being silent himself about the phenomenon.
We would not agree on everything but we agree on the basics, that the “man” construct from our vantage point, mine and his, is not worth reforming or fixing, that because of how it is defined, the thing to do, the way for us to rebel, is to say “If there are such things as men, I ain’t one of them” and leave it to the rest of our sex to decide if that’s true for them as well or not.
I don’t, really. I’ve spent very little of my blog-ink denigrating masculine males or non-masculine males who identify as “men” and seek to fix the “man definition” from within.
My parting shot, the “Brother?” post, was aimed squarely not at them but at males who tell me I’m full of shit if I think my experience makes me different, who tell me that my identity as I’ve defined it makes no sense, and who basically tell me that what I’ve said happened to me with regards to the whole “man” thing — see Part B again, above — happens to all guys and therefore it’s no big deal and I should just suck it up like they do.
It seems to me like this whole thing of yours is a deeply personal quest that exists in your own mind, in your own terms, defined by thoughts and ideas that are very difficult to articulate and to relate to the experiences of other people. It’s like you’re speaking your own language that only you understand, and are frustrated that other people don’t understand it. I’m not saying that to put you down or to imply that you’re crazy - I just think it’s a fact that you have a lot of very deep, personal, complex emotions and ideas and they don’t translate to the written word effectively.
Honestly my suggestion to you is that you try to take these ideas and channel them into something other than writing, whether it’s music, art, some kind of performance…anything but text. Some ideas are better expressed without text anyway.
And this, similar to your other posts, is where you are not correct. You don’t have to be manly to be a man. What does “manly” even mean anyway?
According to YOUR definition. Not the defintion used by multiple men who manage to survive and thrive in a changing world.
Ah, the “No True Scotsman”: “I can’t be manly, because no true man I does X instead of Y”. Are you seriously buying into this sort of thinking, that you can’t be a man and plant lavender because planting lavender is not manly? Turn it on its head: planting lavender is manly as fuck, because I do it and I’m manly. I’m a man, therefore what I do is by definition manly.
Part c is kinda bs as well. Homosexual men are not men?
That is going to come as a hell of a surprise to many gay MEN i know.
No! Of course I’m not “buying into it”. I’m boycotting it! Or girlcotting it if you prefer 
I am saying this kind of thinking is something a male child growing up runs head-on into. And copes, in one fashion or another. I’m in the process of describing to you my reaction to it, but “it”, that set of ridiculous and self-contradictory attitudes, is most certainly not something I bought into.
Dude, lavender? What are you, some kind of woman? Jasmine is where it’s at! I know that because I named my daughter Jasmine.
No it isn’t. Every homosexual man you talk to is going to tell you they are extremely well acquainted with the social notion that to be a man you need to not be homosexual. And that anyone who is indeed homosexual is by definition not a man, not a real man, but something much more pathetic that should be despised.
Mind you, I’m not saying they’d agree with the assessment, but there’s no way in hell they haven’t run headlong into that assessment.
How can you boycott something unless you believe it to be true?
Not my definition. The definition of the world into which I was born. I didn’t start this shit, I don’t endorse this shit, and you can’t blame me for this shit. It was already out there and it was aimed at me when I came into the world. You too. And you know it.
The social definition of a man does indeed say so. I was told so many many times. It’s how the world into which I was born defines it. I opted out.
Mmm, Jasmine scent at twilight. I have clematis, too, for the bees, and because I am that fucking manly.