"Bailey and Harvey found that even men who fancy My Little Pony cartoon characters are likely to scrap with each other using similar terms and putdowns to 'normal' men, even to the point of using the same terminology, such as 'faggot,' to police their environment."
What's the basis for saying "even"?
१३ मार्च, २०१५
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Ignorance
Bronies!
Homophobia is assumed to be the province of masculine men, or something.
Is this a costume party problem. How do you determine if the way they dress is really them or not?
Under their skin are they masculine aggressives or good little boys.
That was not a problem when men had team sports and hierarchy games that sorted us out.Some were leaders and some were followers of worthy leaders.
WE ARE MALE HEGEMONY!
Lots of feminists assume men are defective creatures, but eminently fixable. That's what this masculinity conference is all about. How can we get these stupid men to act like women so that women can succeed without "male hegemony" getting in the way?
Even in a group of “self-described nerds” who meet up to fight each other with foam swords, there are parallels to the ways women are held back in more mainstream society.
Even though the conference is about men and masculinity, it's still really about women.
Hundreds of academics and activists will attend sessions over four days.
Mostly women?
A "bundle of sticks" may break bones, but semantic games are childish.
The "even" was because the Little Pony Brigade is much more likely to have been bullied with such language by alpha males, use they use it themselves to put down others.
The assumption is that men who fancy My Little Pony characters are sissy boys, hence the surprise that even sissy boys display the same aggressive behaviors as other men.
But that MLP sissy boy proxy measure only holds up if you can rule-out females (who also like MLP characters) acting in in similar, aggressive wayse to "police their environment".
In many places, women are fancied and must be thought of as the equivalent of My Little Pony characters who don't have competitive, aggressive or even hurtful tendencies.
Question about the word "even"? Seriously?
Well, since I getting ready to go on vacation tomorrow (meaning my wife is doing all the work) I had time to read most of the article, and aside from the grammar lesson, it seems the main point is that in order for women to succeed, men must fail.
I would expect men who are insecure about their masculinity to be the first in line to be calling other men "faggot."
That's why I think the use of the word "even" in the quoted sentence is just stupid.
That column was really strange. Consider this paragraph:
"Martin found out that the Dagorhir group conformed to masculine norms in several ways. One of the most significant, heartbreakingly, was in how they dealt with what seems to have been a near-constant barrage of insults from non-Dagorhir playing hecklers. The group would cope by ignoring the insults, pretending they were unhurt by them, pushing their feelings down deep inside. They were showing stoicism, refusing to show anxiety: hallmarks of hegemonic masculinity."
Most of it is describing the work of the researcher, but the word "heartbreakingly" belongs to the column's author.
Who thinks it is "heartbreaking" that these particular men ignore insults directed at them and that they push "their feelings down deep inside".
What does that say about the author? And why is he judging those poor men? Why is it "heartbreaking" that they cope with insults directed at them in a different way, presumably, then he would?
I would expect men who are insecure about their masculinity to be the first in line to be calling other men "faggot."
That's why I think the use of the word "even" in the quoted sentence is just stupid.
Are you saying that bronies are insecure about their masculinity?
I imagine that in the future- 10, 50, or a hundred years from now we'll still be doing research trying to find out why women are not men. Women would do well to stop continually trying to be just as good as men. Men see no compunction to be as good as women, we already know they're better than us, and we're ok with it.
Are you saying that bronies are insecure about their masculinity?
She's inferring the opposite (That men who openly profess their passion for cartoons and toys that were designed ostensibly for little girls would be more likely to be very confident in their own masculinity)
Ann Althouse said...I would expect men who are insecure about their masculinity to be the first in line to be calling other men "faggot."
That's why I think the use of the word "even" in the quoted sentence is just stupid.
They aren't very masculine, that doesn't mean they are "insecure" about their masculinity. I don't see anything wrong with "even" here any more than in the sentence "even gay men use the term 'faggot' to describe effeminate men." Which they do.
"Are you saying that bronies are insecure about their masculinity?"
If they call each other "faggot," I am.
The use of the word "even" implied that more noticeably masculine men have a known tendency to call each other "faggot."
That's an unexamined premise, and I question it. It's not what I've seen happening in the world.
EDH, a-yup. Female homophobia is subtle but it absolutely exists. I've never heard a chick straight up call a guy a fag. I have heard them wonder aloud if a male rejected her sexual advances because he's a repressed fag.
"NTTAWWT, I just think it's sad he can't be true to himself."
Since bronies act in a stereotypical female manner, the assumption is that they should be more subtle.
It's stupid.
I'm also declaring shenanigans on this supposed bronies fad. Every generation produces a few guys who sincerely gravitate towards things meant for girls, they got the ball rolling. Then there's a few earnestly seeking approval from feminists, those who appear at this conference & keep the meme alive.
But I'd wager that the bulk of bronies are bandwagon smartasses who enjoy trolling. In the 70s, they'd be devil worshipers. They didn't ACTUALLY believe that the devil was cool. They just thought rebellion was fun & this was one way they could do it without serious legal repercussions.
"In another, we learn that some men in the US are showing real progress in “friendship labs” – designed to teach men how to be friends with one another."
The fact that friendship labs exist is both depressing and incredibly terrifying.
The thing I've wondered about some of these interenet sub-cultures, like Bronies and Pro-Ana, is how many participants are actually trolls egging on the others.
"The fact that friendship labs exist is both depressing and incredibly terrifying."
Yes. And what horrible things do you suppose they do to their lab subjects to get them into one of those places? (Surely nobody goes into one voluntarily?)
Purely Anecdotal Linguistic Tidbit from a Youth Spent in the Quasi-Underclass:
1. Virtually every close-knit group of young men will toss around the shorter word 'fag' as an all-purpose response to any perceived breakdown in a member's masculinity. And yet....
2. Even in such groups, one virtually never hears anyone called "faggot".
Appropriate:
https://youtu.be/42fyiFuwkE0
"Ann Althouse said...
"Are you saying that bronies are insecure about their masculinity?"
If they call each other "faggot," I am."
The place I have most witnessed the use of "fag" and "faggot" have been when hanging out with male gay friends. The only guys they referred to in that way were gay men so I think they meant it pretty literally. The context was usually, but not always, in response to one of their gay friends acting in a stereotypically gay fashion.
The bronies are probably compensating for some kind of insecurity. This is all speculation on my part though, since I have never met one.
Brony's are an interesting phenomenon. They went from bizarre, to utterly hated, to "Ok, guys, we're crossing lines hating these guys" to viewed in a benevolent-but-condescending way. A major feature of that last bit is the hypothesis that they are men for whom normal life is so stressful and depressing that they retreat to a carefree, bubbly fantasy world.
The big issue with the point of the article is presuming anything can be extrapolated from the users of 4chan, the self-selected Hate Machine of the Internet. This is like pointing to the activities of the SS as an example of "normal European behavior". The big issue with the rest of the article is that it's vapid, psychologizing drivel.
I'm under the impression (probably from too much pop culture) that "faggot" is commonly used by homosexual men when speaking to other homosexual men. Like the "N" word, some black sub-cultures. It's an insult from someone who's not, acknowledgement of a brother-in-arms from someone who is.
¡Cabrón!
maybe the author is a homosexual. makes it OK.
So much make-work! I just get back from running errands and find that I have to research "brony". Now I've dumped it into the "don't need to know this meme" folder.
I should revise my protocols.
I don't see in the article where they compare the frequency of the use of "faggot" in the brony community vs. the frequency in other all-male groups, e.g. sports teams, etc. Without that, I don't know that you can infer anything about their anxiety about their masculinity.
This point was interesting to me:
After the talk, Bailey tells me that one of the main takeaways from the pair’s research is that it adds to the understanding of how and why even young men can “reject feminism so aggressively and so vehemently”.
“Men have a hard time buying the notion that there is a patriarchy, that there is male privilege,” he says. “The feminist talking points don’t make any sense to them. I think it’s something that the feminist movement and feminist allies need to be cognisant of and aware of and find a way to talk past that.”
If they're talking specifically about young men, say, under 25, I think one of the problems the "patriarchy" feminists are going to run into is that these men have spent the vast majority of that time in female-dominated environments, whether the home (the role of paterfamilias had basically vanished by my generation), schools (~75% of schoolteachers are female), or university (where a majority of students and graduates are female). In such circumstances, the notion that there is a patriarchal power structure is going to strike most young men as flatly contrary to their own experience.
And these circumstances have been in place for basically all Millenials. Basically, it's a bunch of people who hold all the power in your immediate environment, telling you -- who stand subordinate to them -- that you are the one who is privileged, and they are the ones who are disempowered. They might as well be saying that war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength. Vehement rejection is the natural response. At least among those who have not yet won the victory over themselves, as it were.
To believe in the notion of male privilege requires an imaginative leap not into the shoes of young women their own age, but rather, into an imagined world outside the walls of the nursery, school, or university, where men still hold sway.
I can see why the new My Little Pony cartoon appeals to some adults. It is witty and well-done. Certainly better than some of the stuff I had to sit through as a kid because my sisters wanted to watch it.
Also this:
This is reinforced a couple of hours later when I attend a talk called “Breaking the male code: how close male friendships can change men’s lives”. I am expecting to hear examples of great male friendships and the benefits of this, like the US illusionists and entertainers Penn and Teller, or Batman and Robin. Instead, Robert Garfield, a psychiatrist, therapist and psychiatry lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania, tells us that men in the modern age are lonely. They want to speak to their male friends about their feelings, but they do not. It’s that idea of the stoic male again.
I think there's a confusion of terms here. Yes, there's an idea of male stoicism, which dates back I think at least to the 19th century in Anglo-American culture. But it coexisted for generations with a culture in which deep and even emotional male friendships were quite permissible.
The problem is that close male friendships are now inevitably sexualized, in that heterosexual men are constantly reminded of the possibility of homosexuality. You see the flip side of this before, if you read biographies of famous homosexuals -- there's frequently some close male friendship which, from their perspective was romantic, but from the perspective of the object of their ardour, was merely a close male friendship (see, e.g. AE Housman and Moses Jackson). It's not like these people were all delusional -- there really was a friendship and an intimacy there, notwithstanding male stoicism (stiff upper lips) in Victorian and Edwardian culture. It just wasn't romantic.
If you invert that, though, it's obvious how male-male friendships would be inhibited in the present day, where the salience of male homosexuality is, if anything, inflated out of all proportion with its miniscule incidence in the population. Now, Housman reflects the mainstream as much as, if not moreso than Jackson. The Holmes-Watson and Frodo-Sam relationships read as homosexual to many modern readers, after all.
That's not to say that close male friendships are made impossible today by celebration of homosexuality. Just as with male-female friendships, where sometimes people have to affirm or reaffirm explicitly the platonic nature of the relationship, you hear men today say things like "no homo" to reaffirm the platonic nature of their relationships. But of course, they get accused of homophobia when they do that.
"We wanted to find out about men generally, so we researched men who are sexually attracted to My Little Ponies, men who play with foam weapons in public, and men who attend male friendship workshops with feelings wheels."
Hm. I suspect there is a sampling problem here...
Let's not forget that the Bronies got Derpy Hooves into the Pony canon. At least until someone at My Little Pony Enterprises realized "derpy" was an insult.
Ann, that was an absolutely horrid article. Just painful to read. While I cannot improve on Balfegor's brilliant take, I will say that the impression is these people see men as a disease they need to cure.
I am rather amused that anyone would go to 4chan to study human behavior. It is the troll central of the Internet, to the point that you can never be sure who is serious and who is engaging in some trolling strategy or another. The conversation highlighted could be two trolls trolling each other. It could be the same troll with two identities having a conversation with himself (and it is probably a him, but you cannot be certain). While this may be an interesting topic of study, it is not useful for the topic in question.
It is also clear that the author, the grad student, or both know very little about Bronies. That toy on the top of the article is definitely not from the current incarnation of the show "Friendship Is Magic," which is the only generation that has had a significant male fan base, and frankly the toy is probably the ugliest thing they could find. While the show is intended for a young female audience, the show is very well written and was designed to be enjoyed by both the kids and their parents, much like Looney Tunes decades in the past. The male audience was not the target of Hasbro and its toy selling division, but a good show is a good show. A girls' show finds wide popularity with both males and females of a wide range of ages, and the feminists go "oh, look at the boys watching a girls' show HAHA." It boggles.
Let's not forget that the Bronies got Derpy Hooves into the Pony canon. At least until someone at My Little Pony Enterprises realized "derpy" was an insult.
Derpy is best pony.
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