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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   38283 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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A lot of cult classics like Fight Club and Taxi Driver had already impended signs of a male crisis.

They were talking about a male crisis in the 1800s. Masculinity's always under threat

There are two conclusions which can be drawn.

Either the defense was successful or the perception was wrong.

third option: masculinity has been being shaved down from its original form for thousands of years.

In the 1800s men were legally able to tell their wives to stfu and get in the kitchen, or bend over, or whatever. In the 800s some cultures probably let you stone a woman to death for being a slut or something. Go far enough back and being a man is literally just grabbing a rock and smashing the skull of everyone who you dont want to fuck.

Go far enough back and being a man is literally just grabbing a rock and smashing the skull of everyone who you dont want to fuck.

There is no evidence I'm aware of to support this statement. The past being a different country, people make up fictitious stories about it freely, when in fact all the evidence I can see supports the idea that men and women have always found a reasonable peace between them.

I don't think they were wrong, but I believe they would be surprised by the depths to which we have sunk.

IIRC Francis Drake complained of the "effeminate age" he inhabited, and also IIRC there are similar complaints from Roman authors.

Everyone's effeminate compared with a globe crossing pirate who beat the spanish armada with 34 warships.

That doesn't mean they weren't right though.

Scott had a Tumblr post recently making a similar point (https://slatestarscratchpad.tumblr.com/post/690907658183720960/re-1-please-see-the-sentence-in-parentheses-i ):

I will never understand the human urge to leap from “lots of people have thought this was true over a long period” to “and therefore it must be false”.

What I see is that, if lots of people have thought something was true over a long period, and there doesn't seem to have been any particular evidence that it actually was true in much of that time, then clearly there's a desire to believe that it's true that ought to be taken into account.

Or, at least, that they had correctly identified a problem but were wrong about the degree.

And since social conditions are different in different locations about the globe at different time periods, it could indeed be possible for there to be an ongoing 'masculinity crisis' insofar as one country or the other ends up weakening and falling from power whilst another ascends.

I'm not able to take this thesis very far, though.

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