The Manhood Trap

[James Brown]

From Epstein’s Island to Musk’s Baby Farm — How the Right Redefined Masculinity as Control, by Thom Hartmann.

Underneath the memes, podcasts, and tradwife fantasies lies a dangerous agenda: train young men to reject equality, fear women’s power, and embrace authoritarianism disguised as masculinity . . .


Rape culture isn’t just at the top; it’s everywhere, especially in the digital spaces young men inhabit.


This isn’t just a parental issue, it’s a cultural emergency. This content is shaping how an entire generation understands sex, power, and consent.

And Trump’s “best friend” Epstein was an avatar of that twisted worldview.


. . .


White women are expected to go “back to the kitchen and bedroom,” producing more white babies in a panic about the “browning” of America.


This fixation on race and reproduction mirrors the same “Great Replacement Theory” rhetoric promoted on Fox “News” and other rightwing outlets that fed the Charlottesville rally and inspired mass murderers in Las Vegas, Buffalo, and El Paso.


From Trump saying, “If Hillary Clinton can’t satisfy her husband what makes her think she can satisfy America?” to telling Esquire Magazine that “arm candy” is essential for a successful businessman (“You know, it doesn’t really matter what [the media] write as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass”) to sarcastically calling Kamala Harris “a beautiful woman,” our president has long made clear his thoughts on the role of women. . . .

 

[bigfield]

I think these two points are worth comparing:

[Toxic masculinity is] being sold to young men as an antidote to their anxieties, be they economic, social, or existential.

What we need instead is a redefinition of masculinity: strength defined by compassion, power defined by service, leadership defined by respect.

What we need is the antidote without the toxic side effects.

Compassion, service and respect aren't an antidote to young men's "anxieties"; they're an antidote to everyone else's anxieties about young men.

Young men want to solve their problems. If you don't offer solutions, they'll find someone who does.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

I think these two points are worth comparing:

[Toxic masculinity is] being sold to young men as an antidote to their anxieties, be they economic, social, or existential.

What we need instead is a redefinition of masculinity: strength defined by compassion, power defined by service, leadership defined by respect.

What we need is the antidote without the toxic side effects.

Compassion, service and respect aren't an antidote to young men's "anxieties"; they're an antidote to everyone else's anxieties about young men.

Young men want to solve their problems. If you don't offer solutions, they'll find someone who does.

That isn't what I'm seeing. Some young men are being drawn to this masculinity argument. Life is hard... here is who you can blame... liberals. The alt-right isn't proposing a solution, but they are providing a likewise useful anger angle and some people enjoy being angry.

 

[thebeave]

From Epstein’s Island to Musk’s Baby Farm — How the Right Redefined Masculinity as Control, by Thom Hartmann.

Underneath the memes, podcasts, and tradwife fantasies lies a dangerous agenda: train young men to reject equality, fear women’s power, and embrace authoritarianism disguised as masculinity . . .


Rape culture isn’t just at the top; it’s everywhere, especially in the digital spaces young men inhabit.


This isn’t just a parental issue, it’s a cultural emergency. This content is shaping how an entire generation understands sex, power, and consent.

And Trump’s “best friend” Epstein was an avatar of that twisted worldview.


. . .


White women are expected to go “back to the kitchen and bedroom,” producing more white babies in a panic about the “browning” of America.


This fixation on race and reproduction mirrors the same “Great Replacement Theory” rhetoric promoted on Fox “News” and other rightwing outlets that fed the Charlottesville rally and inspired mass murderers in Las Vegas, Buffalo, and El Paso.


From Trump saying, “If Hillary Clinton can’t satisfy her husband what makes her think she can satisfy America?” to telling Esquire Magazine that “arm candy” is essential for a successful businessman (“You know, it doesn’t really matter what [the media] write as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass”) to sarcastically calling Kamala Harris “a beautiful woman,” our president has long made clear his thoughts on the role of women. . . .

Interesting article. I see the Democrats are determined to lose even more support from young men going forward. What are they shooting for the next election? 10%? Someone needs to take that shovel away...

And what's the status on the $20 million Democrats are spending to see what makes men tick? Have they come to any conclusions so far? Maybe they could hire Jane Goodall?

 

[Politesse]

From Epstein’s Island to Musk’s Baby Farm — How the Right Redefined Masculinity as Control, by Thom Hartmann.

Underneath the memes, podcasts, and tradwife fantasies lies a dangerous agenda: train young men to reject equality, fear women’s power, and embrace authoritarianism disguised as masculinity . . .


Rape culture isn’t just at the top; it’s everywhere, especially in the digital spaces young men inhabit.


This isn’t just a parental issue, it’s a cultural emergency. This content is shaping how an entire generation understands sex, power, and consent.

And Trump’s “best friend” Epstein was an avatar of that twisted worldview.


. . .


White women are expected to go “back to the kitchen and bedroom,” producing more white babies in a panic about the “browning” of America.


This fixation on race and reproduction mirrors the same “Great Replacement Theory” rhetoric promoted on Fox “News” and other rightwing outlets that fed the Charlottesville rally and inspired mass murderers in Las Vegas, Buffalo, and El Paso.


From Trump saying, “If Hillary Clinton can’t satisfy her husband what makes her think she can satisfy America?” to telling Esquire Magazine that “arm candy” is essential for a successful businessman (“You know, it doesn’t really matter what [the media] write as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass”) to sarcastically calling Kamala Harris “a beautiful woman,” our president has long made clear his thoughts on the role of women. . . .

Interesting article. I see the Democrats are determined to lose even more support from young men going forward. What are they shooting for the next election? 10%? Someone needs to take that shovel away...

And what's the status on the $20 million Democrats are spending to see what makes men tick? Have they come to any conclusions so far? Maybe they could hire Jane Goodall?

The meaning of this post eludes me. Just what is it you think Democrats should be doing?

 

[southernhybrid]

Maybe the Dems should require all young men read a book that I gave a lecture on at The Atlanta Freethought Society, called "Demonic Males". The men actually agreed with many points in the book.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demonic_Males

Richard Wrangham Dale Peterson

English

1996

United States

350 pp.

34798075

Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence

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Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence is a 1996 book by Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson examining the evolutionary factors leading to human male violence.[1][2][3]

Summary​

Demonic Males begins by explaining that humans, chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans are a group of genetically related great apes, that humans are genetically closer to chimps than chimps are to gorillas, and that chimps and bonobos are most closely genetically related. After speculating about what enabled humans' ancestors to leave the rainforest (the use of roots as sources of water and food), Demonic Males next provides a catalog of the types of violence practiced by male chimpanzees (intragroup hierarchical violence, violence against females, and extragroup murdering raids). The high incidence of rape by non-alpha male orangutans and infanticide by male gorillas are also cited as examples of our mutual genetic heritage.
The authors present chimp society as extremely patriarchal, in that no adult male chimpanzee is subordinate to any female of any rank. They present evidence that most dominant human civilizations have always been likewise behaviorally patriarchal, and that male humans share male chimpanzees' innate propensity for dominance, gratuitous violence, war, rape, and murder. They claim that the brain's prefrontal cortex is also a factor, as humans have been shown experimentally to make decisions based both on logic and prefrontal cortex-mediated emotion.

 

[Politesse]

Great, forced readings of dubious science from the 90s...

A typical solution for our age, I suppose.

 

[Toni]

I think these two points are worth comparing:

[Toxic masculinity is] being sold to young men as an antidote to their anxieties, be they economic, social, or existential.

What we need instead is a redefinition of masculinity: strength defined by compassion, power defined by service, leadership defined by respect.

What we need is the antidote without the toxic side effects.

Compassion, service and respect aren't an antidote to young men's "anxieties"; they're an antidote to everyone else's anxieties about young men.

Young men want to solve their problems. If you don't offer solutions, they'll find someone who does.

Those last two sentences contradict each other. I think that they are both true but therein lies the problem.

Young men want to solve their problems —but wanting someone else to provide the solutions is lazy and childish—and ultimately unproductive.

Actually solving a problem is a three fold reward: problems solved and a sense of accomplishment but there is that rush of good feeling endorphins.

Having someone else present the solution to your problem or perceived is just short term endorphin rush and perhaps an immediate solution to a orobjrm but this scenario dues not help the individual grow in mastery of skills or knowledge nor does it allow them to feel any sense of accomplishment, except perhaps becoming better at manipulating others.

Obviously we all need to rely on the skills, knowledge, expertise and goods of others to a certain extent—increasingly so, perhaps, in the growing complexity of the world. We do not need to build our own homes or our own vehicles and we are not going to perform our own appendectomy.

But by learning to solve problems from the beginning, our brains grow, our capacity to solve more and more complex problems grows and we feel more satisfaction with our own abilities —and see where we need to improve or grow.

This applies to learning ( anything) and to building our relationships with others.

Babies learn the exchange early on: they mimic smiles of their parents and learn to smile to get a response. Actually before that, they learn that crying will bring comfort. They learn that they can make their toys move or mage sound. They begin to try to mimic sounds they hear around them. They learn give and take by offering their nummie or their toy and getting it back. And they learn this all better if their parents aren’t trying to do it all for them.

This is a life long process. Hopefully.

 

[southernhybrid]

Great, forced readings of dubious science from the 90s...

A typical solution for our age, I suppose.

I guess you don't understand sarcasm, although I thought the winking emoji might help. Still it's true that statistically men are far more violent compared to women so there is likely some truth in that book that I read a long time ago. Plus, isn't this exactly what some of these young men on the right are doing, trying to take us back to the times when women were supposed to "get back in the kitchen and rattle those pots and pans," to quote a line from an old song?

Plus, have you read the book? If not, how do you know there wasn't a lot of truth in it?

 

[TSwizzle]

Interesting article. I see the Democrats are determined to lose even more support from young men going forward. What are they shooting for the next election? 10%? Someone needs to take that shovel away...

And what's the status on the $20 million Democrats are spending to see what makes men tick? Have they come to any conclusions so far? Maybe they could hire Jane Goodall?

Insufferable prick Newsom is being utterly cringe as he tries to appeal to males with his recent appearance on a FOUR HOUR podcast where he tries to be all manly by dropping f-bombs, son-of-a-bitches and god-damns all over the place. Newsom is such a toady.

 

[TomC]

Great, forced readings of dubious science from the 90s...

A typical solution for our age, I suppose.

Nah...
I've never heard of the book before. But the fundamental reality described in the synopsis is utterly clear. Because I live in the real world and I know A LOT of guys.

Pretending that they are so similar to gals that they should be entitled to use the women's restroom or sports leagues at will is agenda driven ideological nonsense.
Tom

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Great, forced readings of dubious science from the 90s...

A typical solution for our age, I suppose.

Nah...
I've never heard of the book before. But the fundamental reality described in the synopsis is utterly clear. Because I live in the real world and I know A LOT of guys.

Pretending that they are so similar to gals that they should be entitled to use the women's restroom or sports leagues at will is agenda driven ideological nonsense.
Tom

That's not relevant to the thread.

 

[Swammerdami]

Maybe the Dems should require all young men read a book that I gave a lecture on at The Atlanta Freethought Society, called "Demonic Males". The men actually agreed with many points in the book.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demonic_Males

The authors present chimp society as extremely patriarchal, in that no adult male chimpanzee is subordinate to any female of any rank. They present evidence that most dominant human civilizations have always been likewise behaviorally patriarchal, and that male humans share male chimpanzees' innate propensity for dominance, gratuitous violence, war, rape, and murder. They claim that the brain's prefrontal cortex is also a factor, as humans have been shown experimentally to make decisions based both on logic and prefrontal cortex-mediated emotion.[/SIZE][/COLOR][/FONT]

Two points which MIGHT give cause for optimism:

(1) I have read that chimps and bonobos -- while VERY close genetically -- have distinctive cultures. Bonobos are much less aggressive than chimps.

(2) In this post from years ago I mention a study published in N.Y. Times. The study is now behind a pay-wall but I gave a long excerpt. Briefly, most of the alpha males in a certain baboon society died of tuberculosis, and the remaining baboons became much more congenial. This new (improved!) culture persisted over several years despite the arrival of new "outsider" males.

 

[Politesse]

Great, forced readings of dubious science from the 90s...

A typical solution for our age, I suppose.

I guess you don't understand sarcasm, although I thought the winking emoji might help. Still it's true that statistically men are far more violent compared to women so there is likely some truth in that book that I read a long time ago. Plus, isn't this exactly what some of these young men on the right are doing, trying to take us back to the times when women were supposed to "get back in the kitchen and rattle those pots and pans," to quote a line from an old song?

Plus, have you read the book? If not, how do you know there wasn't a lot of truth in it?

You read my post and thought, "this man does not know sarcasm"? My post was sarcasm...

And yes, I'm well familiar with the text, and indeed have a copy of it sitting behind me as I type. It was a topic of much discussion during my undergraduate years not long after its publication. If you're interested, you're welcome to read a brief blog post I wrote on the subject some years back:

A student recently asked me about the Demonic Male Hypothesis; the central idea of this book being that we can perhaps learn more about human sexual differences by studying chimpanzees, our close phylogenetic relations, than ethnographic study of our own species-internal ideas of sex and gender in present human cultures. Depending on the speaker, this may allow or compel someone to consider cross-species data sets in combination with, or even in preference to, cross-cultural ethnographic data points.

I find conversations about comparative primatology fascinating, both as a topic of interest in and of itself, and as a cultural artifact reflecting the assumptions of the day. Public voices like to use speculative work like this to justify any number of sociopolitical ends, a process which as a cultural anthropologist I find interesting. In many respects, plunging an entity like "biology" or "physics" for social models to use is a more creative and flexible act than people realize, or that many would care to admit; the simple fact is that a significantly complex system can be used to justify any number of social positions, owing to the complexity and variability within that system. DNA may not be a literal book, but that doesn't necessarily stop the bioanthropologist from "poaching in the stacks" of genetic potentialities in much the same way that Michel de Certeau meant when he coined that phrase. We are always moving through the library of human knowledge with certain goals and purposes in mind.

This is getting long-winded, but I felt it should be pointed out. Every time someone tells you a narrative about "how things used to be", they are also telling you a narrative about "how things should be", whether they are making an essentialist argument of returning to base or a revolutionary argument about what we must overcome. Either way, I think it is important to remember that you are being told a story; one that though likely true and justifiable in some respects, chose its data points selectively and for subjective reasons. The human biological pedigree is vast and complex, let alone our cultural history, and any number of social models could be found in or justified by the situation various points along the way. Between ourselves and the chimpanzees, our genetic closest cousins, there sit nearly 4 million years of history at the inside, and maybe as many as 11 million years of genetic diversion and cultural invention. Don't let that number just drift past you. "History", to you, is comprised of possibly 1/2200th of the time depth since that divergence. And between have been many variations. Strict herbivores, omnivores, and mostly-carnivorous variants. Savannah dwellers, forest dwellers, tundra dwellers. Everything from troupes to tribelets to communist states. Gender-dyadic societies and gender-spectrum societies. Patriarchies and matriarchies both.

And let us not forget the physical differences; an adult human is so physically different from an ape that neotony has been suggested to explain our seeming lack of a meaningful final adult growth spurt. We don't have an estrus cycle, alone among the primates. We usually have the largest male sex organs as well as the largest mammary glands in the entire order. We otherwise also present the least overall sexual dimorphism, to the point that forensic anthropologists frequently mis-type sex, at a rate that would be inconceivable within a gorilla assemblage. So not only does biology allow for critique of cross-species analogies, sex and gender are areas in which biology should be warning us to be especially cautious; sex differences are one of the things that make us the most anatomically distinct from our cousins, not similar. And the other major difference, our brains - a chimpanzee peaks with mental equivalency to a human toddler - means that our extra-cranial anatomy may have much less influence on an individual's life than it would for any other primate. Chimpanzees, too, in turn changed greatly over time and no longer resemble our presumed common ancestor in closely analogous fashion; as we became dissimilar to them, they were also becoming dissimilar from us, in different directions for different reasons. Nowhere is this clearer than in studies of chimp-human cohabitation cases and experiments; our social instincts diverge from chimps qualitatively, not just in degree.

I am not saying that one shouldn't make observations or suggestions based on comparative primatology. We can, and do, and especially when we find that the entirety of the primate order holds something in common, the cultural anthropologist gets very interested indeed. We are apes ourselves, and despite our distinctive qualities as a species, our heritage shows its face somehow or other in nearly everything we do (and not just the primate portions of it, read Neil Shubin's "Your Inner Fish" sometime if you want your paradigm shook up a bit). But the natural limitations of such analogies should also be considered, and we are justified in always asking about the motivations of a given theorist when they highlight this fact from this cousin at this time rather than another.

You may be overinterpreting my use of the term "dubious" if you think I was claiming there was no truth in the book, it has just been... well, the authors never intended it to be more than a starter of conversations, it is not an exhaustively researched exposition of conclusions. They would not be offended by anyone having doubts about a claim that they knew was speculative when they made it. Well, Richard Wrangham might, but he's a pretentious asshole by personality and a bit too addicted to the cameras. The point is, we're colleagues, not dueling authorities.

 

[Politesse]

Great, forced readings of dubious science from the 90s...

A typical solution for our age, I suppose.

Nah...
I've never heard of the book before. But the fundamental reality described in the synopsis is utterly clear. Because I live in the real world and I know A LOT of guys.

Pretending that they are so similar to gals that they should be entitled to use the women's restroom or sports leagues at will is agenda driven ideological nonsense.
Tom

If you want to fight about that topic some more, please go and do it in the thread already long-established for the purpose. Wrangham and Peterson weren't writing for or against "trans rights".

 

[TomC]

Great, forced readings of dubious science from the 90s...

A typical solution for our age, I suppose.

Nah...
I've never heard of the book before. But the fundamental reality described in the synopsis is utterly clear. Because I live in the real world and I know A LOT of guys.

Pretending that they are so similar to gals that they should be entitled to use the women's restroom or sports leagues at will is agenda driven ideological nonsense.
Tom

If you want to fight about that topic some more, please go and do it in the thread already long-established for the purpose. Wrangham and Peterson weren't writing for or against "trans rights".

I was talking about your casual dismissal of reality when it doesn't match your ideology.
The synopsis of the book sure matches the world I live in.
Tom

 

[Jarhyn]

Young men want to solve their problems. If you don't offer solutions, they'll find someone who does.

The thing is, the men I've met with problems tend to be in denial of many of the "problems" they have.

Toxic masculinity ends up being a cover, not always but often enough to not be surprising, for latent homosexuality and gender issues.

The issue for many of these people is that they believe something about themselves is the problem, and that's not a problem that can be solved by hating yourself more, and they are taught to fear the actual solution: to actually explore all of themselves and be open to having been wrong about what it means to be a "man".

The made up solution to the made up problem is "blame everyone else", for the incels.

If men want to solve their problems, maybe they could start by asking "what even is a 'man' and why do I even care?!?"

 

[Toni]

Great, forced readings of dubious science from the 90s...

A typical solution for our age, I suppose.

Nah...
I've never heard of the book before. But the fundamental reality described in the synopsis is utterly clear. Because I live in the real world and I know A LOT of guys.

Pretending that they are so similar to gals that they should be entitled to use the women's restroom or sports leagues at will is agenda driven ideological nonsense.
Tom

If you want to fight about that topic some more, please go and do it in the thread already long-established for the purpose. Wrangham and Peterson weren't writing for or against "trans rights".

I was talking about your casual dismissal of reality when it doesn't match your ideology.
The synopsis of the book sure matches the world I live in.
Tom

Pot?

 

[TomC]

'The synopsis of the book sure matches the world I live in.
Tom"
@Toni
Pot?
I realize that you are being sarcastic here.

But no. The world I live in includes male humans with a consistent behavior pattern. One accurately, if simplistically, described by the book's synopsis.
Tom

ETA ~Forum is not allowing normal quoting, at the not got me at this time.~

 

[thebeave]

Interesting article. I see the Democrats are determined to lose even more support from young men going forward. What are they shooting for the next election? 10%? Someone needs to take that shovel away...

And what's the status on the $20 million Democrats are spending to see what makes men tick? Have they come to any conclusions so far? Maybe they could hire Jane Goodall?

Insufferable prick Newsom is being utterly cringe as he tries to appeal to males with his recent appearance on a FOUR HOUR podcast where he tries to be all manly by dropping f-bombs, son-of-a-bitches and god-damns all over the place. Newsom is such a toady.

Was he doing his crazy made up sign language crap with his hands again?