What's the Alternative to Tucker Max?

Submitted by anthony on Thu, 2010-11-04 17:44

Article here. Excerpt:

'While it's thrilling that there is also a movement of young men all who want to tear down the patriarchy right alongside women, it's dangerous that they don't have a clear picture of what they want to build in its place. At the conference, one young man spoke up against the notion of a new "feminist masculinity," explaining that he feared it would be one more box that young men felt they had to fit into. There's a lot of validity to his argument, but I fear that the old adage is true: We can't be what we can't see. Models help us try on various identities and find one that is truly authentic. The more publicly feminist-aligned men we have, the more opportunities the next generation has to find a positive, masculine gender identity that actually fits.

Many young men, it seems, are stuck in stage one of gender consciousness. They want to prove that they are one of the "good ones" and separate themselves from all the gendered behaviors and beliefs that they now see as oppressive. That, or they wallow in guilt. (This is not unlike the stage many white kids get stuck in upon fully realizing their role in perpetuating racism.) At worst, this point of view is paralyzing. At best, it leads to burnout. It's not until privileged folks, men in this case, can own the ways in which they have a self-interest in resisting systems of oppression that their work becomes sustainable.'

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They fumble without models but continue on because they know that there is so much to be gained. Guys who reject traditional masculinity, for starters, have a greater chance of finding fulfilling work that isn't just a symbol of their provider status.

The author of the article is a young woman and she says rather reasonable things. This is what she writes in another her article:

Women, especially self-proclaimed feminists, must own the truth about our gender's capacity for violence if we are ever going to be effective in ending it.

http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=the_myth_of_the_fairer_sex

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Single men is the only social group benefited from feminism.

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Submitted by nbdspcl on Fri, 2010-11-05 03:52

The author lost me pretty early. And when she included a link to that hatchet job; "Men's Rights Groups Have Become Frighteningly Effective" from earlier in '09, I decided to stop reading.

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Submitted by Belgorod on Fri, 2010-11-05 15:47

While I am encouraged that she realizes (at least a little anyway) that it should not be up to women to define what men should be, what I do find offensive is that she feels that the only way to "fix" men is to change everything about men. What struck me is that never once did she describe any positive attributes for maleness. This demonstrates her deep seated misandry and really undermines my POV of her.

In her other article about the fact that women can be just has violent as men (either literally or figuratively), she also fell for the old gender-paradigm BS that infects her sisters. Never once did she note the proven fact that DV is as much a problem of female perpetrators as male perpetrators. Oh no...in her opinion, while women can on occasion be just as physically violent, their real failure is in allowing men to be violent. And while she is certainly correct that this means they buy a significant share in the blame for this violence, it is quite obvious from reading her article that she believes that female physical violence is quite rare (which we of course know is quite a load of BS when it comes to intimate situations).

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Submitted by lance on Fri, 2010-11-05 15:56