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Notes -
300 Ways It Can Hurt to Be a Man
Hey all, longtime SSC and TheMotte lurker here. Some of you might know me from TPOT.
Some years ago I wrote a blogpost series about masculinity and manhood, and the many struggles these entail that frequently go unnoticed in contemporary discussions. I've recently given it a full do-over, collating the whole series into a pdf and epub that I think look pretty great. It's now available to download for free. There remain few spaces on the internet where something like this might find a proper audience, but I figure anyone who appreciated Scott's writings on the topic — especially Untitled, Radicalizing the Romanceless, and the like — might find my writings on the topic valuable.
The pitch:
Contemporary gender discourse has left many men unseen. On one end of the debate, there are feminists: a largely virtuous group of people who have regrettably failed to understand men as more than defect women, and who have neglected to include men in their humanizing frameworks. On the other end, there are men whose visions of masculinity remain primarily rooted in outdated and often harmful ideas, and whose attitudes towards women frequently leave much to be desired. The modern man is stuck in a quagmire. Where does he turn, who has listened to women's pain but now desires to integrate his own? New voices on gender are needed. It is my hope that in this book, empathetic men may find their voice.
It is not needed to contest who suffers more, and suffering is not the whole of masculinity; nevertheless, it is a part of it, and it deserves an uninterrupted space in which it may be witnessed: known, and moreover allowed. It is my hope that in this book, unloved men may take off their heart's armour and find their sanctuary.
Even in these polarized times, many women still seek to know men truly, and through this have seen that being male marks men more deeply than society has cared to make known. It is my hope that in this book, compassionate women may find their love reflected.
You may find the book for free here: https://elodes.gumroad.com/l/300ways. Feedback is welcome. Thank you for your interest.
Is your goal to practically persuade, or to say true things? Truth-wise, the pitch is frustrating to read. (I say this as someone who agrees with the spirit of what you're trying to do, and I don't want to discourage you from doing it.)
The most irritating thing is how you divide the discourse into two groups:
Is this a practical attempt to persuade feminists to read your book, where they otherwise would have no reason to; or is this something you genuinely believe? (Or some third option.) Because your presentation isn't true. Presenting one side as basically good, one side as basically bad, is incredibly frustrating because it doesn't correspond to reality. (I need a word that conveys the strength of "gaslighting" without implying it's deliberate or malicious. "Reckless mishandling of truth" or something.)
Idk if you have something like this on your list:
Men do not feel "seen" when you tell them up front something like: "hey, the person saying 'kill all men' is fundamentally virtuous; but the people saying we should address your problems -- they're bad."
There are plenty of men (and women) making sober, rational, kind, decent, truthful arguments that society should be a bit less crap towards men. These people already get called misogynists by the "largely virtuous" group. I wish you'd represent these people fairly, seeing as you're basically trying to be one of them.
Assuming you're a man, you're also completely setting yourself up. To the extent your book fails to tightly comport with whatever popular feminism demands, you won't be cast as some kind of reasonable compromise "new voice on gender" -- you'll be lumped in with the people you label misogynists! Later, when someone like you writes their own book on this stuff, they'll characterise you as a man with "harmful ideas", whose attitudes towards women leave something to be desired. And that'll be really unfair, because it's not true of you. And it's not true of other people, either.
With that said: I basically agree with your underlying premise, and think it is good you've written this.
Seriously an excellent comment. Detailed and convincing, while showcasing a strong caring for the topic. Thanks for this.
I had a lot of trouble figuring out what framing to go with in my pitch. Ideally I wouldn't have had to write one, and the book's introduction would have sufficed; alas. I think maybe an alternative way to describe how I view the landscape here is that roughly speaking I really have seen primarily two groups talk on gender (with e.g. SA being a rare outlier outside of these groups). One of these groups is feminists, who certainly can get an awful rep sometime, and whose ideas, I agree, frequently end up being sufficiently harmful so as to make any right intention insufficiently moral on the whole. But I understand why they try to hold their beliefs, and I think they're frequently 'good' people in the sense that they care a lot about acting right, behaving well, listening to people, and so forth. Yes, there absolutely are also bad feminists; but there are many feminists too, including those I've known irl, who 'might yet be saved', and whose kindness and care I would like to have on my team. My ideal perfect-world goal would be for these people to read my arguments, be convinced by them, fix their own blindspots correspondingly, and come to my side. I think there is no way this will happen if I keep harping on about bad feminists who are bad.
There is a subtler point here, too, which is something like... This is a group of people who have come to their beliefs through trying to maximize how 'empathetic' they are, and they are thus unlikely to listen to any sort of criticism that marks them as bad, because 1) calling people bad isn't very empathetic, so probably the person doing so isn't worth listening to, and 2) they would feel misunderstood by someone who frames them as bad. Instead the approach I'm broadly trying to take here is to accept that empathy and kindness are to be optimized for — a belief I broadly share (though specifically it leads me broadly to conclude that being right is more important than being kind, because correctness builds trust builds cooperation builds many more opportunities for kindness, whereas kindness without truth builds mistrust builds dysfunctional communication builds frequent suffering) — and the book is an exercise in optimizing for kindness... for men. The byproduct here, which I leave somewhat implicit until the conclusion, where I make it much more explicit, is the ultimate belief that, yes, feminism has basically failed its own ideals, and I have now detailed the ways how it has failed and, in the process, directly specified an alternate movement that better upholds those same ideals.
(Edit: to clarify this further, and very compressed: I think feminism has the right ideas, but applies them so incompletely, they are indeed further from 'good' than non-feminists are. But the truth does not lie in non-feminism, nor in anti-feminism; the truth lies in post-feminism, where we apply feminist ideas to men and women alike, and earnestly grapple with whatever conflicting desires and narratives result from this. Thus even if I agree feminists are frequently immoral, they are also in some sense closer to becoming my allies, than people who disagree with feminism fundamentally, are. This is yet consistent with feminism being — I agree — in practice a net negative in much of the discourse.)
I agree moreover that feminism labels people misogynist far too quickly; nevertheless, the group of 'normal people' widely does not seem to say much on gender, instead broadly assuming that their ideas are so obviously true so as not to be worth stating. Certainly the vast majority of writing I've seen on gender has been from people who cared strongly about it one way or the other, and empirically for me, that has been primarily feminists or — sure — I wouldn't call them misogynists, and I don't; but I would say they frequently seem to have not integrated feminist ideas, by which I mean they frequently do not have even pre-emptive defenses against feminism and are stuck repeating traditional ideas. Even where those ideas are correct — and in the vast majority of cases I think they are! — it seems empirically the case that the traditional framework is vulnerable to get infected by feminist ideas; the solution, imho, is less "the traditional framework, but stronger!", and more "a new framework that has moved through feminism and has come out the other side, ready with well-defined arguments that guard against the more convincing-but-wrong parts of feminism."
This book is my attempt to create such a framework, by, regardless of anything else, seeing what all truths might dawn if we tried to treat men with the kindness feminism seeks to universalize for women.
(Edit: You say "There are plenty of men (and women) making sober, rational, kind, decent, truthful arguments that society should be a bit less crap towards men." I sincerely have come across very few such people throughout my years on the internet. Hence my framing! I would love to hear recommendations, essay links, etc. It saddens me a lot every day to believe that there are very few such people out there, so I'd be made genuinely happier if you were able to change my mind about this.)
Having said that, I'm well aware that many feminists live in such a closed-loop framework that it is easy for anyone to say "don't read Elodes, he has written misogynist things!" and then anyone who expresses they've read my writing will be met with "you read Elodes, even though you heard he's written misogynist things? you must be misogynist yourself!", the certainty of which response will certainly ensure many people will fail to read my actual words. Alas. Certain frameworks one must simply hope others will find their way out of. The only thing I can do is write my truth; certainly I despise being maliciously misunderstood, but past some point there is nothing I can do about it. Indeed, much of my introduction to the book is implicitly about how one must never find themselves in this kind of self-locking, disagreement-excluding framework-loop.
I hope this answers your question, and clarifies my views on the matter! I remain unsure what a better pitch might look like, since the above requires a lot of context and includes a lot of complex, incompletely-defined framings. If, having read this, you feel you'd know a better pitch, I'd be eager to hear it. Thanks again for your comment and for your interest.
Appreciate you handling the criticism so gracefully -- hope I wasn't too harsh.
There's a spectrum here, right? I'm certainly not advocating for "harping on about bad feminists who are bad". Just note that, even in this paragraph, you volunteer that feminists are basically good -- your criticisms are that their ideas can be harmful, or that their reputation is bad -- without the same charity being given to the other "side."
If it's a dial from 1-10 (with 1 being "maximally whitewash group", and 10 being "harp on about bad group who are bad"), you come across as like a 3-4 for feminists and a 6-7 for people who advocate for not-hurting-men (it's telling that there isn't really a good label for this group). So you're not doing anything egregious! I'm advocating for equalising these dials around a 5, not turning the first to 10.
Because the issue is, basically:
I think you're slightly off. They're not maximising their empathy, their maximising their personal perception of their own empathy (+how others around them perceive their empathy). A person who says "all men are pigs", "kill all men", "fuck straight white men" (not a strawman; I have dated these women) is not actually empathetic. They are lazily optimising for being able to feel like a good person, not for actually being one.
But yes -- they won't listen to criticism that marks them as bad. This is a pretty universal trait. This is why I point out that you're doing something practical at the expense of truth. Again, you don't have to court any non-feminists, so you feel free to mark them as bad, because they don't have any power that's relevant to you.
But it's nothing to do with empathy.
Extremely strong disagree.
This is giving infinitely flexible charity to a memeplex -- "feminism is too big to fail". The central bank of ideas should not be giving a bailout to an idea with this kind of performance. If you can transmute "feminism" into meaning any kind of idea, to the extent that "post-feminism" means "even more feminism", then what the heck are we doing with that word?
"Applying feminist ideas to men and women alike" isn't feminism. It's a different thing. It is opposed to feminism.
I notice that my own brand of gender egalitarianism -- which is either non-feminism or anti-feminism -- consistently gives kinder, more truthful, more humane answers than feminism generates. So I'm going to object to any process that decides that none of that matters, and we have to go with feminism anyway, regardless of what it actually does.
Do you have examples of "feminist ideas" that you could test me on?
Because I would generally view it as an extreme positive that someone hadn't "integrated" feminist ideas. In the same way I'd view it positively if they hadn't integrated Young Earth Creationism or phrenology. Some philosophies are just bad. It is good and correct to reject their framing and assumptions. These are fields of anti-knowledge; absorbing them makes you know less about the world.
You're certainly right that a lot of traditional frameworks lack the defences against, basically, virulent memeplexes. But these memeplexes don't win by overwhelming you in a one-on-one discussion! If they did, many of them could be easily defeated by spells like this: "Stop redefining words. Explain what you mean by X. Show me your sources for Y. No, don't change the subject onto Z. Predict exactly what W would mean..." These memeplexes don't win because people are unprepared to argue against them; they win by popularity contests like "Ewwww, you don't accept X? Don't you know that person Y, a misogynist, disagrees with X?"
I think you are overestimating the effectiveness of rationalist-type debate of ideas, vs how those ideas actually spread via social dynamics. (I don't like that this is the world we live in, but yeah.)
I mean... you go on to perfectly answer your own point! I don't really have anything to add to it. Your analysis is correct. Feminism bullies any other kind of position out of the public square, so you don't see those arguments. Worse than that: if you can't discuss your own actually correct and kind positions in public, and can only discuss them with other heretics, you stand a good chance of being corrupted by nastier versions of the true position. Which then get used to justify further crackdown on the true and kind and good position.
Still, you know all these; and you know about Scott's post, and you know about yourself, and you know about me (to the extent that you believe I'm not a woman-hating chud). So you know these people exist, and you know the social dynamics that prevent them from being visible to you.
Afraid I don't have a better one. I think the underlying goal, while noble and good and correct, is ultimately doomed. Because empirically:
Literally, it is far easier to convince the median feminist to break the very concept of words, than to get them to apply the "kindness" of feminism to men.
Still, I hope your book proves me wrong about this.
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