27
votes
The Buff Scammer, isolation, and the male loneliness epidemic
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- Title
- Reblog by @whetstonefires
- Authors
- whetstonefires, doubleca5t, redeless, overfedvenison
- Word count
- 1563 words
You know... This is actually a really insightful take, I think. I would maybe even further qualify this as "straight cis male sexuality". Gay male sexuality is (rightfully, I think!) very much celebrated, at least by circles accepting of gayness.
There's a reason for this cultural perspective: the vast majority of predators are men, and a horrifyingly large portion of non-men have experienced at least some level of predatory sexual behavior from men. But I would contend that most straight male sexuality is probably still not predatory? I don't have numbers for this. But there are a lot of straight men engaging in sex, and I suspect most of it is mutually consensual and mutually enjoyed.
I don't think it's wrong for femme folks to be wary of or averse to sexual advances from men. And I definitely think that the way we teach boys about sex and relationships is alarmingly problematic, and directly leads to the predatory behavior we see from so many men.
But it also sucks that there's a real message being delivered to young men that their sexuality specifically is problematic, while basically every other group is being told that their sexuality is beautiful and powerful. And to be clear, I don't even think this is the dominant message — that winner is still the Buff Scammer, which is obviously also a terrible message designed to make men feel bad about themselves.
I have no idea what to do about this, but it does suck, and it is nice to see it expressed well and with nuance.
Yeah, I think the fact that this post is on Tumblr helped make this point particularly salient because it's so often a very progressive, queer space, and those spaces are often where people fall into this trap (or, less charitably, where radfems try to launder their gender essentialism as being progressive).
There is obviously a huge amount of societal stuff that leads to men being more often perpetrators of a wide array of pretty awful behaviors (and not even only towards non-men -- men are very often victims of other men too), and I do think that support for victims is deeply necessary. But framing men as inherently predatory I think is ultimately counterproductive if we actually want to encourage men to have healthy, positive behavior towards themselves and others. It absolves men of the choices they make in perpetuating these behaviors and utterly fails to offer an alternative path forward for men who don't want to do so.
I don't have anything to add, really, but I totally agree with everything you've said here, especially this:
Thanks for sharing this conversation, I got a lot out of it!
It makes me think of comments like "oh you know how boys are" being used to justify and attribute an individual's behavior, and how it's often said with a tone that says that the behavior is expected of them.
The type of straight male behaviors that, if taken to the extreme, lead to harm and assault, are at the same time, if exercised in moderate amounts, explicitly desired. Men are still expected to make the first move when dating. Confidence and (monetary) independence are still highly valued traits, which if taken to the extreme, lead to this classic manosphere toxic masculinity described in the tumblr post from OP. But if you take that confidence down a few notches, then it's what's required for dating. The "traditional rugged man" is what a lot of women still like and want.
(Edit: I remember years ago reading an article from a reputable German newspaper about how university educated women still look towards a man that is higher on the educational ladder than them, which narrows your dating scope significantly when you have a Master's, lol.)
At the same time, I think that considering how many individuals on the internet this discussion involves every single time, you're just going to get a lot of conflicting opinions on top. It's the usual mistake of online discussions involving 3+ people.
I think there's also a lack of role models right now. Look at famous men. The really famous ones. What do they embody? What do they stand for? Could a boy growing up, lacking good examples in his immediate surroundings, use them as a guiding star? It just seems dire to me.
Even in homosexual situations I've seen this collective male guilt manifest. Two male friends of mine - one pan and one bi - are currently in a strained friendship because one asked the other if they'd like to cuddle together twice without getting an enthusiastic response either time. The guy that was doing the rejecting clearly wasn't being as clear and verbal in his rejection as necessary for the other (somewhat autistic) guy to perceive. The requester also should have realized that asking twice without getting a yes meant he'd overstepped and should have apologized.
When I brought this up to my friend to suggest he apologize he clearly felt very guilty. I kept telling him that I knew (because I had been told so) that apologizing would completely clear up the matter and that he's not a bad person for making this mistake. That didn't quite make it through at the time, but hopefully will after a couple of days of reflection. Men are taught that any kind of mistake in courtship is a tremendous grievance if not outright sexual harassment. Most of the blame here goes to the truly abusive men out there, but some of it goes to the rest of humanity that doesn't have the emotional intelligence to discuss this stuff and educate each other on nuance.
93% of sexual crimes are commited by men. Of course most men are not predators, but that kind of statistical imbalance is hard to overcome.
I think we'll just have to accept that we have to watch our behavior constantly in order to not be perceived as a threat and that is unlikely to change in our lifetimes.
Gay men are also constantly watched and scrutinized by the way.
In the past, I've been very critical of a lot of the posts people have shared here discussing the "male loneliness epidemic". I've found myself very dissatisfied with most of the "discourse" surrounding it, where I've encountered a lot of stuff that's, frankly, rife with misogyny. But I do think it's a worthwhile topic worth addressing from the right angle, because the phenomenon in question is real and is caused, imo, by a lot of complex intermingling societal factors.
I suspect most other Tildes users don't use Tumblr and might scoff at someone sharing a Tumblr post here, but I think this particular post and its replies are some of the best, most nuanced discussion I've seen of the topic. And, for the record, I think the fact that the OP is a trans woman and the first reply is from someone who's trans masculine are a big part of that. I think transitioning socially does genuinely give many trans people a lot of unique insight into how society and gender interact in ways that aren't necessarily obvious to most cis people.
I hope others here appreciate the linked discussion and hopefully gain some insight from it. I know I did!
This is a lovely post, thank you for posting it!
i love this. every time i see discourse about "how can we solve the manosphere", someone always makes the point that women doing more emotional work to pander to men is a terrible idea. they're obviously right, but it's never said in good faith and is more used as a way to avoid any critical analysis of left-wing cultural ideals and fall back on "men are bad" rhetoric. this is the first time that i've seen anyone make that argument in an honest way, and it's an incredibly good point.
i'm a cis man, and i haven't ever experienced the "That's Gay" thing earnestly, but certainly i do not open up to any of my male friends as much as i would to any other friend, and that's already not a lot. that point got me thinking about my own experience, and i think it's touching on something that's a more specific version of the root cause: male friendships are mean.
there's a stereotype that men are mean to each other's faces (and nice behind their backs) and that women are mean behind each other's backs (but nice to their faces), but that stereotype always comes with some kind of implication that the male mean-ness is... better? like, it's not equally as harmful? sure, there's banter that never actually leaves any emotional damage but when so much friendly male interaction walks that line, it (accidentally) gets crossed a lot and you end up genuinely hurt. when everyone else shrugs it off as just more banter, you're pressured to let the hurtful stuff go as you would with harmless stuff and you build up a distrust for these people, even if you like them!
this is sort of a stream-of-consciousness comment, and i'm now not so sure which of the two issues comes first: are men mean to each other to not seem gay, or are men scared of being called gay because that's the kind of insult that might get thrown around?
in my own experience, the "That's Gay" thing actually manifests as the complete opposite: men will act gay for their homies, with the intention of laughing it off. i really don't know what kind of cultural aspects contribute to that but it gives a vibe of "making a facade of male intimacy to get a hit of that security, but still maintaining the low-level homophobia of 'haha no but thats actually fucked if i did that for real' to keep up masculine appearances/affirm my own gender"
i have no grand point to make, but thought i would say that i liked the post.
welcome to the club, it sucks in this corner too.
This topic somehow reminds me of an article I read in the Village Voice sometime back in the 1980s. A woman writer passed as a man for a while and wrote about her experiences. She went to a meeting of some kind of men's self-help group (sorry, it's been a few decades), and one of her observations was that she found the spectacle of men sharing their feelings ludicrous. That was one of the few times I have genuinely been outraged by reading something.
I did experience the “That’s Gay” thing earnestly — as a boy, I was friends with a lot of girls, and did “girly” sports like cross country and swimming (??) and “girly” activities like art (??), and I got called gay and the f word like… quite a bit. I developed a reflexive retort — liking these things doesn’t make you gay, and it doesn’t make you a girl, straight boys can like whatever they damn well please. This was an easy stance to take, because I knew I liked these things, and I also knew I liked girls.
Except… I also liked boys. And folks that later turned out to be non-binary. And trans. It turns out gender didn't really have any role at all in whether I had romantic or sexual feelings for someone. But I didn't really allow myself to see that until I was halfway through college, because I had spent so much energy defending myself against “That’s Gay”.
Anyway, all that to say that the “That’s Gay” thing really fucks up straight men's relationships, and it also fucks up queer men (which is, I guess, the intended audience). I guess that's probably not news to anyone, but it was what I thought of when I read your message (which I rather like and agree with, by the way!).
The other thing I thought of is how fucking constantly my brother, dad, and ex-step-dad insist (in private) that they know the sexuality of someone (always another man) based on ridiculous things like their mannerisms or speech patterns, and have the gall to get extremely defensive and mad at me when I lightly suggest that you can't actually know someone’s sexual preferences based on how they speak. Me. The only queer person they actually know. I get where, psychologically, this defensiveness comes from, but goddammn is it infuriating.
I don't think the "that's gay" thing is overt. It's just sort of an ever present background noise.
I don't even know if "that's gay" is really necessarily the right way to frame it though. I was never afraid of being perceived as gay growing up. For one, I'm not gay, and I'm pretty secure in my sexuality. Secondly, I wouldn't mind if people did think of me as gay, although I was never bullied for being perceived as gay so maybe that colors my opinion there.
I think the fear is more like being perceived as weak, rather than gay.
There's always been an undeniable pressure throughout my whole life. Physically strong, mentally tough, always even keeled, the bedrock, the one who had the answers, the person with the plan.
This pressure came from friends, family, and especially from women. In the back of my mind, I always knew that if I came home one day, and could just no longer keep it together and fell down on the floor sobbing because of the sheer weight of all of my responsibilities and expectations, a not insufficient amount of respect for me would be irrecoverably lost.
I think most heterosexual men can identify with this.
That's the real reason I haven't and still don't open up to people about the things that really weigh on me, and as a result I think I'm worse at relating to other people when things weigh on them.
It doesn't really have anything to do with being worried about looking gay, at least for me.
This is my experience also. The best way I ever saw it framed was the difference between what is explicitly requested of us, versus what is implicitly expected of us.
It was from a Reddit post a decade ago that I saved. Full post in full below, I can't credit the original author because they've deleted it. It came from a thread about 'Why do men always try and solve problems instead of just listening?'
Sorry for the long quote, but it's important to get the whole context. I'm really, really glad I never bought into that notion. I think this whole concept of being close with male friends as being "gay" is on the way out. Almost all of the younger people (20 and under, especially elementary and middle school kids) I see have no problem with being emotionally close to their friends.