Emerging domestic terrorism

Masculinity.

A topic that I have blogged about a lot, because I have been concerned for years that we are not talking about it as a serious issue.  I will continue to rant, even if nobody listens!

There is a particular kid of masculinity that I am increasingly worried about--misogyny.  Not the kind of pussy-grabbing misogyny that Dear Leader epitomizes.  But, a misogyny from the incels.  (Keep in mind that the screwer-in-chief is not an incel by any means.)

Incels are "involuntary celibates"--they don't want to be celibate, and desperately try their best, but they feel rejected by women and, therefore, they are celibate.   These guys are creating real worries among the law and order community:

Last month, the Texas Department of Public Safety released a report finding that incels “are an emerging domestic terrorism threat as current adherents demonstrate marked acts or threats of violence in furtherance of their social grievance.”

An emerging domestic terrorism threat?  Oh my!

a group of computer scientists have painted the most complete picture yet of the misogynistic groups that fuel the incel movement online. The “manosphere,” as it is known, is divided into four broad groups. “Men’s right’s activists” (MRAs) claim that family law and social institutions discriminate against men. “Men going their own way” (MGTOW) take this feeling of grievance further, arguing that society can’t be “amended”; they often avoid women, blaming them for their problems. “Pick-up artists” (PUAs), meanwhile, date and harass women; they believe society is “feminizing” men.And then there are the incels, the most potentially violent of the group.

Why are the incels most potentially violent?

Incels abide by the “black pill,” a belief that women use their sexual power to dominate men socially. For that, incels want revenge.

This is insane!

Worryingly, it seems that there has been a significant migration from men’s rights groups to incel groups. Every year since 2015, around 8% of MRA or MGTOW members appear to have become more radicalized and joined incel groups online. 

Sex is so primal and yet we choose not to openly and constructively talk about it.  Many a lives have been ended because of this three letter word.  Add incels to that, and I can easily see how explosive it can get.  It does not have to be this way.

So what can be done? One step might be to create tools to help spot and protect potential victims, along with an earlier analysis of when and how men’s rights and MGTOW groups get radicalized

These people are serious about incels as potential terrorists.  OMG!  Masculinity can easily become toxic in many ways.

Be a man ... and cry a little?

Remember that old Pepsi ad featuring MC Hammer?  I still remember that commercial not because of any fondness of Pepsi over Coke, but because of "feelings" that the macho rapper starts to croon.  I thought that the ad did young boys a huge disservice by suggesting it was not hip to sing about, to talk about, feelings.

I was raised with phrases like "don't cry like a girl"--like almost all kids were back in those days in the old country.  Anger I could display. Fight I could--because boys will be boys.  But, crying was unmanly. I see that attitude even now, even in the adopted country.

We seem to forget that feelings bring people together.  Women cultivate their sisterhood through talking about their feelings, whether it is about their husbands or mothers or colleagues or kids or ... it is a long list of people about whom we have feelings and women seem to unreservedly talk about them.  Men, on the other hand, talk about sports and politics and the weather and everything else that is not about one's own feelings. 

All these despite plenty of men singing about feelings.  Like even that "feelings" song that MC Hammer sings because he drank the "wrong" soda.

Feelings, nothing more than feelings,
Trying to forget my feelings of love.
Teardrops rolling down on my face,
Trying to forget my feelings of love.

It is also the case that men who sang about feelings were immensely popular with women, from Frank Sinatra to Marvin Gaye to ... recall Rebecca's weak spot in Cheers?

Yet, "vulnerable emotions are coded as not masculine."  But, men's emotions are not merely about women.  It is a world of emotions.  The inability to share emotions means men have difficulty with friendships too, unlike women and their sisterhood.

Normalize it. Normalize the desire. Normalize the fact that all humans need these relationships to thrive. Charles Darwin said that our social abilities and skills is the reason why we've thrived as a species. I mean, we've known this for over a century - that these relationships are critical to our mental health - and we need to stop having a culture that says, somehow, you know, a certain gender doesn't need them and only another gender and sexuality needs them.
It's human to want friends - close, deep ocean friends, friends you love with an exclamation point, friends who know your deepest weirdness and your favorite emoji.

It is strange, bizarre, and tragic that this is talked about even in 2019!  Am not at all surprised that of the students who come to my office, only female students ever are honest with their emotions and seek my assistance.  With a couple of male students, I have even mildly attempted to convey to them to sort out their issues, but ...

Some day, we will get past these false gender norms and become healthy.

Neither a real man, nor an empowered woman

"we need to start being honest about what being a man has come to mean."

Readers of this blog will be familiar with how often I address this question, and my worry that we don't talk about this enough.  I don't understand why we shy away from this question.

First, let me admit to this: Like any male, I too took my gender privilege for granted, especially during my formative years in the old country, even as I empathized with the struggles that my sister had to go through, the experiences of my grandmothers, their "monthly" hassles,... And, I am sure I have behaved like a jerk on one too many occasions since.  This post, or any of my loud thinking here, is not because I believe I am on a high holy ground, but because I believe that I, and we, can do better by tackling that question of what it means to be a man in the contemporary world, and in the future.

The current (p)resident in the White House provides us with an urgent context to think about it.

Trump’s rise has made it terrifyingly clear that his toxic version is not at all peripheral to 21st-century modern masculinity. It is central. It is authoritarian. And it is lethal.
If we’re going to survive both President Trump and the kind of people he has emboldened, we need to attack masculinity directly.

I agree.

Like the author, I don't believe that tackling this masculinity means that women need to be like men.  That's bullshit and sexist.  It does not mean that men ought to be kinder and gentler like women, because that is also bullshit and sexist--as if only the "fairer" sex is capable of being kind and gentle, and that they are not "womanly" otherwise.

We need to stop talking about what it means to be a “real man” or an “empowered woman,” and begin talking, instead, about what it means to be a good person and a good citizen. Our nation’s future depends upon it.

Exactly.  Is that hard to understand?  But then how does one get this message across to 63 million people?

What does it mean to be a male?

I had drafted a blog-post. And then I read the news.

Now, I want to think more about "save the males."  That other post will appear later.

In this #MeToo context, "save the males" might sound strange.  But, it is not. Not to me.  I have been saying this, and blogging about it, for a mighty long time.

I am not referring to the rapists and the gropers and the assholes.  Nope. Not at all.  I have no sympathy for those males, and I continue to be shocked and angry that 63 million voters elected one such scumbag to the Oval Office.

The "save the males" that I have been writing about has many aspects. For one, boys are getting lost all the way from middle school on.  They are falling behind.  We have not been able to articulate for them what it means to be a man in a changed and changing world.

Right from the mid-1990s, I was talking with people and cautiously writing in op-eds that we were not paying attention to the developing trends of boys being neglected.  I deleted all the blog posts from 2001 to 2007 because looking back I felt they were rather sophomoric. I wish I had not.  Thus, the earliest I can cite as evidence from this blog is this one from November 2008.

I don't mean neglected as in abused, but neglected as in we were systematically redefining what it meant to be a girl in the changing world, but were not doing the same with boys.  And boys were falling behind in schools.  Men were falling behind in colleges. Masculinity was being re-made and men were not readying themselves.

Thus, when I read this NY Times piece, I was not surprised one bit.

For parents, raising a girl can seem as if it’s about showing them all the things they can do, while raising a boy is telling them what not to do, researchers say.
“There’s been a much more complete gender revolution for women than for men,” said Dan Clawson, a sociology professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. “If I’m raising a daughter, I’m raising someone who can challenge conventions, and that’s an attraction. On the other hand, if I’m raising a boy, am I raising someone who’s going to get in trouble, who won’t do well in school and so on?”
The fading bias against girls should cheer all who desire a more egalitarian society. But there are risks to society if what replaces it is a bias against boys.

I don't understand what it will take for American society to start talking about this.  But then we are the same people who don't talk about guns, about racism, about ...

One of the earliest scholars whose works I found to be extremely valuable in this is Christina Sommers.  Which is the reason I spent a good chunk of a Sunday, four years ago, watching her on C-Span.

Even early on, Sommers was sharply attacked by her critics. Now, those attacks have become even more vicious because she is a feminist from the right side of the political spectrum.  So much so that her scheduled talk in Oregon--in Portland--was interrupted and had to be wrapped up early because of protesters.

Sommers was labeled a "fascist" and protesters wanted her talk to be canceled!

I don't always agree with Sommers. But, to call her a fascist? To not let her speak on a college campus?  It is one thing to protest against a Richard Spencer or a Stephen Bannon. They are thugs. Fascists. Neo-Nazis. But why shut down Sommers?

Lost in all this brouhaha: The much needed discussion on what it means to be a male, and what we ought to be teaching young boys about masculinity!

Masculinity and jobs ... with a p*y-grabbing president

Trying to get people--students, in particular--appreciate the urgency in understanding what masculinity means in the 21st century has been a frustrating failure for me, and yet I try again and again.

This issue of masculinity is extremely important because so many of our public policies, and social mores, depend on how much we are ready and willing to redefine a new masculinity that will be appropriate for the contemporary times and into the future.

Even in this blog, I have forever been talking about it.  There is a thread of "save the males," for instance.  Right?  Or, consider that just a couple of months ago, I quoted the following:

Succeeding in the new economy and culture may well require rethinking conventional ideas about masculinity.

Which is why I find nothing new when I read in the NY Times:

Much of men’s resistance to pink-collar jobs is tied up in the culture of masculinity, say people who study the issue. Women are assumed to be empathetic and caring; men are supposed to be strong, tough and able to support a family.
“Traditional masculinity is standing in the way of working-class men’s employment, and I think it’s a problem,” said Andrew Cherlin, a sociologist and public policy professor at Johns Hopkins and author of “Labor’s Love Lost: The Rise and Fall of the Working-Class Family in America.”
“We have a cultural lag where our views of masculinity have not caught up to the change in the job market,” he said.

Seriously, tell me something that I have not been saying for years now!

 One solution is for the men who have lost jobs in factories to become health aides. But while more than a fifth of American men aren’t working, they aren’t running to these new service-sector jobs. Why? They require very different skills, and pay a lot less.
They’re also seen as women’s work, which has always been devalued in the American labor market. ...

“It’s not that they couldn’t become a health worker, it’s that people have backward views of what their identity is.”

Unfortunate that quite a few men (and women) are holding on to some outdated definitions of "real men."

It’s no surprise, then, that Donald J. Trump appealed to men who feel this way — not just his promises to bring back factory jobs, but also his machismo.  

If only many more had understood that masculinity does not mean grabbing pussies!

Man up. Be a man.

"Anything you can do, I can do better" is rapidly redefining what it means to be a man, and men simply do not know what they are supposed to do about it.

Now, as a man who has never been a macho-man, I have no problems here.  So, do not jump all over me thinking that I am going to engage in griping sad stories.  No woe-is-me here.  I am doing fine, thank you.  But, as I have been blogging for years, and talking about this for even longer time, we live in a world where the old formula for masculinity is being thrown out--which is an awesome thing--but without a replacement formula for what it means to be a man.  This is especially troublesome for young men of today, and for middle-aged and older men who are used to operating in the old ways.

I completely agree with President Obama's bottom-line on twenty-first century feminism: "the idea that when everybody is equal, we are all more free."  But, ...

This is leaving muddled what it means to be a man in the twenty-first century.

Pandering political rhetoric aside, there is a genuine question here: What is masculinity today? Is it flexing steel pecs and biceps? Is it bringing home the bacon? Is it possessing testicles and a functional urinary tube? Or is it merely the possession of a Y-chromosome in an era when the value of muscles plummets before a digital economy?

I am glad I am not a young man, at least for this reason.  I have had my own share of angst right from my teens, thank you.

It is also getting reflected in the crazy political soap opera theatre:

Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are tapping into what I’m calling a “Lean Out” generation of young, discouraged and angry men—men who are feeling abandoned by the thousands of years of history that defined what it meant to be a real man: to be strong; to be a provider; to be in authority; to be the ultimate decision maker; and to be economically, educationally, physically and politically dominant. A growing percentage of young men are being out-earned by young women, as women capture 60% of the higher education degrees required for success in today’s economy.

Maybe you want to counter argue that the Trump and Sanders supporters were/are mainly those who are struggling for what used to be a guaranteed American Middle Class life.  But, ahem, dig deeper and the economic issue is mostly a male problem.

So, any words of wisdom here?

Today’s chorus of angry men might want to revisit Benjamin Franklin. Drawing on the Latin word vir, or virtue, he characterized manliness as tranquillity, resolution and orderliness

Tranquility.
Resolution.
Orderliness.

Hey, young men, listen up: It looks like good ol' Uncle Ben was talking about me after all! I am delighted to be highly masculine, by Franklin's definition.  And I have a manly beard too! ;)