Hey, thanks for this. I was having a bit of trouble getting over the rather rough naive interpretation.
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Great. Glad I could help.
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Might I gently point out that #notallmen is not a good look. Because it is #allmen. All of us. At one point or another, it is us, personally, live and direct, because the horrible, toxic culture we live in makes that ok and to be expected. After that, hopefully, we grow up and cut that shit out.
However, Iâll guarantee that both you, I and almost (See? Almost. Thereâs got to be one guy, though I doubt Iâll ever meet him) all of us have been a bystander to someone who hasnât cut that shit out, and not stepped in to make said shithead shut up with their injurious garbage. I have, you have, all of us have.
And, as per the helpful rape statistics above show, what men really get up to while we ânice onesâ nervously laugh because pulling that putative dickhead above on what theyâve just said would be socially awkward, or bad for our employment prospects, is genuinely horrifying. It is you, it is me, it is the rapists, abusers, murderers, authoritarian rule-makers, all of us.
Listen to women. Theyâre not putting you down, for fuckâs sake. Theyâre sick of getting beaten, raped, murdered, fucked over by lawmakers and given shit on the internet, to name a few. #Notallmenning is toxic masculinity. It is being offended that people arenât accepting your worldview and damaging your sense of your own self. Women get that every day. Ask them, and theyâll tell you.
Great, youâre less horrible to women than most men in recorded history. So am I, I hope. Sometimes they still tell me Iâm being a dick, though. And Iâm pretty sure theyâre probably right. You should be too.
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I agree with what you say, but I think youâre responding to a broader point that I was not making. Not to rehash anything (seriously), but I was responding to one specific person who thought that repeating, âMen are trash. All men are trashâ was somehow helpful. Iâve never adopted the hashtag to which you refer and I donât think my limited point adopts it either. I just donât believe calling a class of ~3.5 billion people âtrashâ will improve their collective behavior (edit: and I think hammering in that message/narrative will probably worsen their behavior, human psychology being what it is).
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They are indeed a contributing factor, like throwing gasoline on a fire. An accelerant. 
Well, yeah, I didnât want to believe it. âVideo games are exactly like other mediaâ. I no longer believe that, in the same way that post-Facebook America is not the same as 1990s America. Could Trump have even been elected without Facebook and Twitter, the videogames of our age?
The videogame versions are uniquely capable of teaching people how to engage in consequence free online harassment, for the lulz. Itâs just another game on their screen, unfortunately, much of 2015 and onward defines increasingly defines much of normal life as life on a screen.
I donât think yâall understand that real life and online life have profoundly different mechanisms. Yeah, for sure, violent video games donât make you a violent person in real life. Thatâs done and dusted.
But in online life? I mean we just started this whole online 24/7 life thing in about 2010-2014. This is new. This is something else. And if ground zero, the absolute epicenter of people treating each other horribly is in competive, aggro videogaming 4chan style⌠thatâs not exactly a coincidence, is it?
No. The everyone is online 24/7 era is profoundly different. Have a read of this book. (Iâm currently reading it.)
Randos can absolutely destroy each other now, trivially, with ease. And guess which randos are super aggro and willing to do it the most?
Agreed â and #notallgames is also not a good look.
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Oh, I know this one! Itâs right-wingers.
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I happened across this just yesterday, and it seems germane:
Itâs a long, painful read about growing up as a trans girl, the effects of cissexism on developing identity, and the tendency for feminist discourse about âmenâ to edge towards TERFdom.
I am not a boy, but I had a boyhood. I was, and am, made to live as a boy and I cannot suspend the perspective that gave me and join in when itâs time to fluster one of those clueless fuckers into anger by calling him a fuckboi and then tell him his anger proves heâs a fuckboi, or to humiliate one with an OKCupid screenshot because weâve willfully conflated the clumsy ones with the threatening ones so we can grab those solidarity faves. Itâs fucked up. It has metastasized.
More than a few out transwomen have told me, privately, they they are uncomfortable with these things, but are afraid that speaking up about it would cause ciswomen to like and trust them less. âI play along,â one of them told me, âbecause in the queer community the only people who defend cisboys are cisboys. I donât want to give up finally being read as a girl .â
On a personal note, Iâll say this:
As an AMAB non-binary person, I can never escape the awareness that strangers will usually perceive me as a man. And every time I find myself in a space where people are talking about âhow awful men areâ, even if they know Iâm not a man, and therefore, obviously, donât mean me, I think: but what about the group next door? The group who are saying the same things, but who Iâm not out to?
Theyâll look at me, and theyâll see the stubble on my neck that never quite goes away unless I scrape my throat almost raw, and the hair that I cut short to hide how itâs starting to thin because my shoulder length locks had started to look ragged and pathetic, and theyâll see another âmanâ, and all those same remarks will be aimed at me.
And very often, when I find myself in a queer space, I donât feel safe.
And itâs interesting to me that when people say âMen are trashâ, or similar things, we are meant to assume, automatically, that they donât mean âall menâ. Because if someone points out ânot all menâ, then they are, of course, some fucking MRA broflake, they should have known not to take it literally. We are meant to assume that whatâs being said is âtrash men are trashâ. Which is a little like saying âwater is wetâ. Which makes you wonder what, exactly, is gained by saying it.
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This makes a lot of sense to me. Generalizations about men are painful reminders of how you are misgendered. Thatâs rough.
Iâm donât-know-what-gender-I-am and I also read as a man to everyone around me. Iâm huge and I have a deep voice and I donât think there is any way I could ever be seen as anything but a man. A few times in my life Iâve felt very angry and hurt when someone assumed something about me because I was a man.
And maybe I have an unhealthy attitude towards other people saying hurtful things about me, and when I say this it makes me feel like itâs wrapped up in toxic ideas of what it is to be a man that I absorbed through my childhood, but I feel sort of like itâs up to me to take that. But Iâve never thought I was going to lose out on a job opportunity, be denied a place to live, be physically and/or sexually assaulted because someone thought I was a man. At worst Iâve felt like someone I donât know doesnât like me or that someone I do know doesnât know me.
Itâs not nice, and it can hurt feelings, but calling it extremism is trying to reverse who is actually being oppressed by who.
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Thank you, both of you, for being awesome. This post isnât directed at you two so much ad building off the posts you two made. Below is an eratz piece for the enlightenment of other board memes and members.
In the academic world, we refer to Toxic Masculinity: internalized beliefs and behaviours that make life worse for the adherents who centre their lives on being read as a Macho Man. Toxic Masculinity can be expressed in many ways, and the social conditioning starts young. ("Oh, Johnny, quit yer whinnying. Tough boys don't cry.")
When masculinity is centred on aggression, and validity in a group depends on how you measure up to a Macho Man standard, everyone gets hurt. Not just dudes, everyone.
This idea that dudes program into each other that men have to be strong, handsome, have a wife and a mistress is toxic as hell. You can see the effects Male Culture has when critical masses of men are around in cities.
Every tine youâre lifting boxes and a broflake makes a remark about a customerâs fine ass or when a broflake complains that another coworker is âfrigid and stuck upâ. As a Cool Person you donât engage in harassment, so you might not see every time a people tell lady coworkers to âsmileâ or make lewd remarks or stare.
This is why Men Are Trash.
Male Culture is trash. Not harassing isnât gold star behaviour, itâs the goddamn minimum effort someone can put in. Until Male Culture is changed, men will continue to be trash.
I shouldnât have to break out the fucking charts to explain it to certain members of this board.
Sexism is structural, misogyny us the actions and attitude that build and enable structural sexism. (Yes, still a thing in 2019)
We gotta say it again for those in the bleachers: Men Are Trash.
@codinghorror read the above. Games didnât start the fire, toxic male culture was always a thing and always will be. The internet didnât enable hatemobs, the internet made everywhere part of the same global village. Rest assured people were rioting, mobbing, and being assholes long before the internet was a thing, becaude: Men are Trash.
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In this case, the person who said it was expressing the frustration and anger that people who are indentified as women feel about the injustice the social structures that create and allow the behavior she was rightfully upset about.
Unfortunately, not one of us is free from or operating outside of those constructions. If we are not allowed to name them, then nothing can change.
With my own awareness of this, I would not casually say something like âmen are trashâ, but I would express empathy and understanding for someone like this woman, and the outsized reaction to her human feelings that only reinforces and reminds her of her place within those structures.
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Iâm not a historian, but Iâm pretty confident that they did not do so in the 19th century, or the 18th, or the 17thâŚ
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But canât we find a better way to make the â very valid â points you do regarding the general shittiness of toxic masculinity and traditional gender roles?
A way which doesnât make trans women feel like they have to express a constant hatred of people they may have spent half their lives being mistaken for?
A way which doesnât make trans men feel like traitors for wanting to be âtrashâ?
A way which doesnât make enby people like me feel as though weâre collateral damage?
Saying âmen are trashâ and other blanket statements like that hurts trans people, and for what?
Because itâs easier than doing what youâve done above in actually explaining the problems with masculinity as a construct.
Because it makes some people feel good about âsticking it to the manâ.
Because, ultimately, itâs âpunching upâ, and that means that we can ignore the fact that sometimes we hit innocent people by accident?
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In this thread:
âHmmm⌠This seems a bit bigotedâ
âOh, we donât mean you, youâre one of the good onesâ
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⌠⌠âŚ
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The issue is not that games of all types donât exist. The reason you donât see many of them among the top sellers is because people choose the kinds of games that they like. You canât blame the those choices on the selection of video games, because the causality goes the other way, to the extent that the selection of video games does skew towards violence, it does so because thatâs what people buy.
This is in no way unique to video games. Before they were even a thing sports ( and sports fans) were generally competitive and often violent.
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We do need better vernacular vocabulary to convey how group dynamics of cis men are problematic without also blaming every individual equally for the actions of all other cis men.
A Congress of Men usually devolves into a misogynistic circlejerk at the most random of times.
Given the problems that the collective group of Men inflict on women and trans women (as a subset, who face more), itâs important that we listen to women and not only hear frustrations but act on it.
Which is why we should call out capital M Men for trash attitudes and actions. Dorks shouldnât hide behind the excuse of âlocker room talkâ, âgaming cultureâ, or âI really like collecting firearmsâ as an excuse for everything that capital M Men as a collective inflict on women and society.
Iâm not calling you out, youâve done nothing wrong. Iâm calling out people like Jeff who like to pretend that Male Machismo is Totally OK. This isnât a dig at you. Itâs a dig at capital M Men (the collective of cis men) and the fellas who perpetuate a shitty toxic culture.
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Thatâs it, basically. The vocabulary.
Because as you say, itâs not OK to excuse the actions of shitty men, and certainly not to try and hold up âmale cultureâ as a justification for it, when on the contrary, their actions should be seen as an indictment of the culture that produces them.
Iâm just not happy with the way that this sort of statement gets chucked around so casually, without any of the context that gives it a meaning beyond a nasty remark, because of all the problems Iâve already mentioned with how it affects trans people.
I havenât actually really addressed the particular issue which started this, so Iâll say that I think calling her remark âextremismâ is bizarre, and dropping her over it is both A) an overreaction and B) pandering to the MRA shitbirds.
But, I also think that remarks of that sort are both unhelpful in terms of meaningfully fighting toxic masculinity, and hurtful to some vulnerable people who donât deserve that hurt.
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