Chapter 2 is where the interesting stuff is, they assessed people for misogynistic attitudes, and also political ones they deem extreme. They classify left wing extremism as indicated by:
The rich will not give up their wealth easily. Organised violence, including against people, is the only way to make things fair for everyone.
Capitalism is ruining the world and should be resisted with violence
Without getting distracted by a discussion of the um curious decision to classify that in the same way as beliefs like murdering people who wont fuck me is a cool and good I think it’s an interesting result.
Misogyny in left-wing spaces is real, and this survey indicates it’s not automatically less prevalent than in right wing spaces (although particular attitudes may differ). Despite shit like patriarchy and control of women being recognised as a problematic root of oppression by many prominent theorists (e.g. engles on the origin of class relations).
Something I think we should all think about.
Also at least Aussie gen z’ers seem a bit fucking cooked here, how do boomers have better attitudes about forcing sex on your wife than gen z women? wat is going on? I wonder if some of this can be explained through inexperience, but there is a stark difference between older and younger people. Also much less than between men and women than I would have expected.
Why are we failing to reach kids compared to the right wing here?
i was speaking to dating advice for like 14-early 20s year olds, which those three do not apply very much now do they?
are you on some “there are no male feminists” thing? that’s fine but i would include somebody like PZ Myers in the “only don’ts” crowd. Fred Rogers wasn’t talking to teens. If any of the alleged non-toxic masculinity role models had anything to say on the subject it wasn’t getting any reach in the era before we stopped calling it a “weblog” instead of a blog.
damn you just medaled in the olympic long jump.
no argument here, i’ve said before that it’s understandable why that was the predominant discourse and it’s absolutely right to have that priority. but once someone has mastered the do nots, they’re left not knowing what to do and that leaves the vacuum.
part of the problem is that these guys are asking an impossible question, but we need to offer an alternative otherwise there’s no defense against the andrews taint.
Yeah i agree on both counts.
At least when i look around on hexbear, i have a hunch that a lot of the really intimidated guys who are outright terrified of doing something wrong are already struggling with social interaction in general, and while i do not want to remote diagnose anybody, i have a hunch that this may very often be due to autism. And i think the most important advice for autistic boys is to at least focus a bit more on dating autistic girls, especially if these boys so far lack relationship experience. Honestly, a lot of the dating advice out there just forces autistic people to mask super hard and that’s draining, stressful, leads to burnout and is a fucking shitty foundation for having a nice date, let alone a healthy relationship.
Apart from that, i think this stuff is mostly a conversation about consent as far as women are involved. The whole “patriarchy harms men emotionally” thing is absolutely correct, but i see that very often, this is unloaded on women. I see lots of writing about the “male lonelyness epidemic” (that is not a specifically male lonelyness epidemic, but affects all genders) hones in on … well, women supporting men more. That’s so often presented as the fix. Even bell hooks spends so much of The Will to Change on how women should look after the emotional needs of their sons and that mothers should admire their son’s penis more (i am seriously not making this up, that’s literally in there i shit you not). Which is why i blasted out that line about patriarchy being “an extractive system that unloads unprofitable labor on women so we do it for free” - we are talking about emotional labor and care labor here and in our society, it is women that are supposed to handle that.
And i think this is something that can’t work. I think men need to learn to be homosocial in similar ways to how women can be homosocial with each other. To have friendships were they are emotionally available, do not constantly hide behind banter and can show when they hurt without making a toughness performance out of it. I’ve seen after transitioning how much it helps to learn that and build a friend group that is an emotional support structure. Men need that, and men are not allowed to have that because it’s seen as “gay” or whatever. As long as men can’t cuddle to comfort each other when they’re hurting, they will not have undone this issue.
yeah, a lot of that is easier said than done. Narrowing your pool to a tiny subgroup isn’t a good way to meet more people, my hard line now is masking in indoor places and it’s been years since i’ve even laid eyes on someone of any gender, let alone any preferences or propriety like not hitting on people at their job.
tbh lasting friendships are probably harder than romance. you spend so much more time with a partner and on three chat messages once a month you’ll die of old age before building anything.
I’ve observed the exact opposite. My “dating pool” (it feels gross and dehumanizing to even write these words tbh) is nowadays more than a hundred times smaller than it used to be if i’m just going by demographics because i exclusively date neurodivergent, poly and sapphic trans women and transfem nonbinary beings and a few TME people also falling into the neurodivergent, poly sapphic group. That’s really tiny compared to “women in general”. People assume that just wrecks my dating options, but i still hooked up with more people in the first three years of my transition than in several decades before that combined.
I’m too demi to get that. I just can’t build a romantic relationship with somebody i’m not even friends with. I know most people actually do, but i gotta be honest that seems both completely impossible and undesirable to me. If i’m not friends with somebody already, i can’t even feel genuine sexual attraction towards them, let alone anything romantic. I can reliably guess if they’re hot, but i do not want to do anything with them if we haven’t clicked, and that requires that i know and like them. I’ve lost my ability to fuck strangers. And once more you’d think that makes it harder for me to hook up, but actually it does the opposite, because i no longer force myself into situations i am fundamentally not built to handle.
i really did mean romance, not hookup. if you’re upfront about things being a date even if you’re not trying to fuck after the first one, it still comes with the implication that you’re (potentially, anyway) much more invested in maintaining a relationship. Compare that to the friends i’ve seen once or twice a week for several years and then disappear forever when somebody moves or loses interest in the common hobby.
or if you want to say those weren’t friends, then i’ve literally never had a friend who wasn’t also a partner and i’d stand by my musing.