So thanks for making me aware of Jensen, who strikes me as a kindred spirit. I’ve got to check him out. And congrats on your essay in the anthology as well.

It’s hard to explain, but for some reason this post really drove me over the edge. Perhaps because you mentioned Robert Jensen :)

Anyway, it turned into a bit of an anti-feminist tirade so I put it on my blog.

as for junior high school, there were times when I was popular and times when I was an outcast. Some of the same people who once stole my breakfast at school are now some of my best friends. I agree that school can be a damn hard place - this essay by Paul Graham captures the social dynamics of a social environment built around an articificial hierarchy quite well, I think. But toxic masculinity? What about toxic femininity? In my experience if there was any pressure to conform with what would some would call gender stereotypes for men, it was perpetuated through girls, not guys. Most guys don’t care about other guys if they weren’t competing for “get-the-girl”-status in their local hierarchies. In my understanding, whatever masculinity is, is largely a historical/social reaction to female mating decisions who are partly grounded in their femaleness, not just their femininity.

I’m not blaming them, but - to get back to the book - why blame only masculinity for what seems to be commonly perceived as a problematic state of affairs?

As much as I find questions concerning “gender justice” important and “gender” to be an anthropologically most interesting subject, I’ve read too much about feminism as well as articles from academic and non-academic feminist perspectives recently to believe that much of feminism is really a general gender justice theory and thus an attempt to also - quoting myself from above - improve my personal freedom and range of behavioral opportunities. As much as I share its general outlook, I often perceive it as unjustifiedly morally patronizing and aggressive.

So I’m not sure I’d be overly excited to hear the same from what I would possibly perceive to be self-flagellating men/males. I may read the book. But as mentioned above, I think I’ll follow your blog for a while before putting amazon to work.

And if you made it through junior high school without being confronted with toxic masculinity in all its ugliness, hurrah. That’s a triumph unknown to many men.

I’d also note that Jensen is controversial for his strong views against pornography and his belief that masculinity “needs to be abolished”. He certainly doesn’t speak for the entire pro-feminist men’s movement, many of whom take a more nuanced and forgiving view. You might find the work of Jackson Katz more palatable in that regard!

But for all the academic usefulness of separating the “male” and “man”, as humans are cultural beings there will always be something like “man”, and thus, something like “manliness”. I may not agree with particular elements of what I think “man” or “manliness” consists of, but to claim that “manliness” and “full humanity” are mutually exclusive seems not just a little patronizing. In my experience, “manliness”, for all the testorsterone and alleged competitive anti-social tendencies, is much better in reality than in what I feel is a often unfair, sometimes ideologically biased, perception. And when it comes down to it, in my life as a man, I’ve hardly ever experienced toxic violence, hardness, and emotional retardation - whenever I was confronted with these concepts, it was a projection of female, not necessarly feminist, discourse.

Thus, when I read things like the quote above, I feel that I’m forced to accept premises for a discourse that I think are neither helpful nor true.

Maleness is a biological term. We can be biologically male and fully human. But “manliness” is cultural, and so loaded with toxic notions about violence and hardness and emotional retardation that embracing masculinity and humanity seems, to folks like Jensen, impossible..

We live in a time of sexual crisis. That makes life difficult, but it also creates a space for invention and creativity. The possibility of a different way of understanding the world and myself is what drew me to feminism. I was drawn to the possibility of escaping the masculinity trap set for me, and the chance to become something more than a man… I was drawn by the possibilities of becoming a human being.

I doubt it’s fair to jump in with a comment after reading only this post (and skimming a couple of others) on a blog that seems to be so involved with the question of masculinity, and without reading the book and thus the essay from which above quote is taken. I’ll do it anyway - but only because you mentioned that the quote could serve as a general motivational summary for all authors of the volume, and to note that it feels slightly oxymoronic in the given context.

I feel that juxtaposing “being [just] a man” and “being a human being” is buying into just the kind of stereotypes that are - if I understand the purpose of the volume correctly - to be overcome for men to grow. Apparently contrary to you and the author this is one of the things I find most disturbing about not just a couple od strands of feminism. I don’t perceive a feminism that is exposing this kind of thinking as an opportunity to change, as improving my personal freedom and range of behavioral opportunities, but as morally superior and aggressive (to avoid “psychologically ‘oppressive’”), not rarely by simplistically equating “aggression” with “male.”

I agree that we live “in a time of sexual crisis.” And I also agree that invention and creativity are needed to deal with the individual and social consequences thereof. And things are changing. A lot. It’s visible to everyone who opens their eyes, every day, everywhere (I’m not living in the US, but I’ve been there long enough to believe that statement is correct despite the “conservative backlash). However, I do not want to follow when the creativity means equating “man”, “masculinity”, or even “male” with something that doesn’t allow me the expression of my full humanity. I’m a man, and I do have feelings.