i do think the internet would be a happier place if everyone admitted that the reason their blorbo man is their wife/princess/babygirl/whatever is because of a feminization kink. the related aspects of misgendering, humiliation, needing to "knock him up" are then rendered a fun kinky game, not a serious expression of anti-feminist beliefs about womanhood
which means bringing that play into serious circles is forcing people to be a part of your kink. somebody asking for examples of well written female characters does not want you to tag "dean winchester" please stop kicking your soccer ball into other people's windows
I don't think "you are exposing others to your kink" is necessary to explain why doing this to posts that are trying to center female characters is obnoxious. "You are being misogynistic, as evidenced by your inability or unwillingness to think of women (even fictional ones) for even a fraction of second" is accurate, it's sufficient, and it doesn't invite someone to defend themselves with "Kink? What kink! That's just a joke people say about their blorbos, I wasn't exposing anyone to kink!"
i agree that "misogyny" is a sufficient reason for something to be rude and to want it to stop.
however, I think it's useful to be more precise about what this behavior is. if someone is making misogynistic dehumanizing jokes about women, i don't want them to be doing that anywhere. however, if "my wife, blorbo" is a kink/game, then it's acceptable behavior as long as everyone has agreed to playing.
there are people who are understandably upset and people who just don't get the appeal and are kind of grossed out who are speaking like the feminist thing is to never call your man babygirl. i think reframing this as kink behavior is something that lets everyone win: the people who like the joke keep making it, they just do it somewhere else.
i also think there are people who are getting an unnamed thrill out of calling their blorbo babygirl, imagining him in feminizing situations, connecting that feminizatoin to humiliation or submission, but because it doesn't neccessarily involve jerking off or having sex with another person, they don't think of this as fetish behavior, and this ignorance inhibiting their ability to navigate the situation well. obviously everyone is getting the same feeling out of this! everyone likes this joke! and it's like no i think there's something else happening here
On the matter of kink, I agree that there's definitely people who are "babygirl posting", as it were, that are engaging with it is a kink, perhaps even unwittingly, as you said. I also agree that people doing so would benefit from realizing that's what they're doing, and deciding from there how they'll be engaging with it and with other people.
That being said, I don't think all or even necessarily most of the people who see "Let's discuss female characters" and reach for their blorboy du jour is doing so because they're so invested in feminization as kink that they forgot to step outside of the bit. I think they're doing so because they're uninvested in female characters.
In the example given, telling someone "that's kink behavior, go play somewhere else" doesn't actually get at the core of what they did wrong in that situation, which is "you are so disinterested in women that when asked to think of one, your only answer was Dean Winchester". At that point, I don't think motivation matters, and describing the action ("this is misogynistic") is more to the point than speculating on said motivation (maybe this is kink, maybe they're making an ill conceived joke, maybe they saw someone else tag blorbo and wanted to agreement tag, Maybe-). I think "go play somewhere else" defuses any prompt to self-reflect, which probably isn't ideal.
hmmm you know what i agree that i overreach in what percentage of babygirl posting is kink. i again think its possible that some babygirl posting is people blindsided that this joke is not as universal as they think because not everyone relates to the subject matter the way they do, but i definitely agree that like. this does not work as a resolving prescription in the moment for getting people to stop tagging serious critical theory or representation posts with "dean winchester."
however, i still think the possibility of "babygirl posting is kink" should be raised within the broader conversation, and I hadn't seen that happen at all until my post. there are a few different tags and responses that have me feeling vindicated that this added something to the discussion.
Reminder that "transwoman" without the space is a transmisogynistic dogwhistle as it's used almost exclusively by hate groups like the "gender critical" movement.
The implication of removing the space is that being trans isn't just one way a woman can be, like being tall or being brunette, but that women who are trans require a whole other noun.
Trans women, tall women, brunette women. Leave the space in; trans is an adjective and trans women are women.
How many trans men and transmasc people do we not know the names of because they were victims of infanticide since people wanted heirs? How many were married off as soon as possible, forced to have children, and either died in childbirth or forced to be mothers? How many were considered insane or witches or possessed by the devil for daring to be masculine? How many unnamed people throughout history are there that we don't know about? How many unnamed people now in the present day do we not know about because they're still going through this? Because Western, "developed", imperial powers are not the only places that trans people exist.
The majority of nonbinary adults in the workforce are under age 35 (87%), and half (51%) are people of color. About three-quarters (74%) of nonbinary people in the workforce are making less than $50,000 a year.
Our analysis indicates that employment discrimination against nonbinary employees is persistent and widespread. At some point in their lives, about six in 10 nonbinary employees (59%) reported experiencing discrimination or harassment at work (including being fired, not hired, not promoted, or verbally, physically, or sexually harassed) because of their sexual orientation or gender identity.
Many nonbinary employees reported recent experiences of discrimination and harassment. Within the past year, 16% of nonbinary employees reported that they had been fired, not hired, or not promoted because of their sexual orientation or gender identity, and 20% reported experiencing harassment at work. One in four (26%) nonbinary employees reported experiencing adverse treatment because of their LGBTQ status at their current job.
Many nonbinary employees also reported engaging in actions to avoid discrimination and harassment, including hiding their nonbinary identity and changing their appearance or behaviors. Nearly half (45%) of nonbinary employees were not out to their current supervisor, and 17% were not out to any of their co-workers. Two-thirds (67%) of nonbinary employees reported downplaying their LGBTQ status at work by doing one or more of the following: changing their speech, mannerisms, appearance, or how they dress at work; avoiding work social events; or not talking about their outside activities at work.
Nearly six in 10 (58%) nonbinary employees have looked for another job because of how they were treated based on their sexual orientation or gender identity at work, and half (50%) reported leaving a job because of such treatment.
So I thought y'all would like this too
This great white comes to the jersey shore every year and this year they named her and have been tracking her hella so this is Mary Lee and she decided to show herself under this rainbow for pride month
A true gay icon
Happy pride month everyone always remember that the sinkhole has an ecosystem large enough to house not only insects but likely several species of small birds or mammals
Further context: Durham city council (Reform UK) cut funding and support for Pride. The Durham Miner's Association and other trade unions raised enough money for Durham Pride 2026 to go ahead - a direct call back to when Lesbian and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM) raised money for mining communities when Margaret Thatcher seized union funding during the miner strikes of 1984-85.
At the 1985 Labour party meet, the motion to support LGBT rights as a party was passed due to a block vote from mining unions.
Stephen Guy, the chair of the Durham Miners’ Association, said that when it became apparent Durham Pride was under threat, he took it upon himself to “encourage the trade union movement to step up and do the right thing, and stand shoulder to shoulder with the LGBT+ community […] They not only raised funds for us, but came to our communities, uplifted our spirits when they were down, and showed their solidarity.”
if you've never seen the film Pride (2014), which tells the story of LGSM, you really really need to. Set aside time to watch it this month. Extremely important part of leftist and queer history, and a lesson on what "solidarity forever" means in practice that everyone desperately needs to learn right now.
Here's the r/piracy megathread if you need it. & you can pair that viewing with this article on the real-life history of Lesbians & Gays Support the Miners; they don't make it explicit in the film, but every founding member was a socialist / communist, and that article goes more in depth about the movement.
Notably: LGSM did not wait for the mining communities to be openly supportive of queers and anti-homophobia before showing solidarity. They saw the connection between oppression of Welsh miners and the oppression of queers, and chose solidarity first. It was this choice to materially support other oppressed people, and see the queer community and mining communities are inherently connected through their experiences of oppression and resistance, that allowed the relationship seen above to exist at all.
None of this could have happened if LGSM's solidarity was dependent on the mining communities being queer allies at the time of Thatcher's attacks on them. This solidarity was born out of queer communists seeing things from a broader perspective than just "getting gay rights." They saw how the labor struggle and the queer struggle are connected, and organized to provide material assistance through food and funding. We should all internalize this and seek to apply these lessons to our own communities.
hope you don't mind me adding an extra little resource onto things- this video goes over some of the history in the movie directly! (and the couple inaccuracies too). Also: I just like it.
when i was a tiny baby queer (aka a 24-year-old), i went to my first pride festival probably three months after i kicked ex-gay therapy to the curb and came out to my parents. being the people they are, my parents came with me. they weren’t really sure about this whole gay thing, but they loved me and wanted me to be safe and happy and wanted to be involved in what was important to me, so they came along. (i also think my mother still might have thought i might get drugged or murdered or beaten by a protester of which there were plenty.)
anyway i wanted a memento of my first pride, you know, and this one vendor was selling keyrings, and i liked it, so i bought one. do you remember those italian charm bracelets that were all the rage like 10-15 years ago? it was a keychain like that, and it had a rainbow rooster, a rainbow cat, and then just a rainbow, and so I bought it.
i run into my mom a couple of vendors over and she goes oh you bought something? what’d you get? so i showed her, and i was like, “I’m not sure why it’s a rooster and a cat. Seems kind of random. But I liked the rainbows.”
and my mom, who was some form of minister’s wife for most of my childhood and teenagerhood, stares at me like she thinks i’m joking.
“What?” i say.
“…it’s a cock and a pussy, Jules,” she says flatly, and that is the story of how i died at the age of 24 while attending my first pride festival.
Transmasc person here (and fully coming from a place of ignorance here), regarding your addendum to the really sweet post about how the world gets richer with transmen folks, what do you mean by amab transmen? I’m hoping this question doesn’t come off as rude, I’m just generally confused by what that means.
Not rude at all!
“trans men assigned male” can cover a few difference experiences:
Many intersex people have a complicated relationship both assigned sex and gender; there are men who were technically assigned male at some point, but then have that maleness denied throughout their life; for example, someone might be assigned male at birth, only to then be re-assigned female when it is decided that would be the “easier” assignment, forced to undergo IGM (intersex genital mutilation)* such as a clitorectomy/penectomy, and then raised as a girl. Alternatively, a man might be assigned male and raised as a boy, but goes through estrogenic puberty, grows breasts and develops hips, and thus experiences life as a man who is forcibly feminized and denied his gender identity as a man, and so feels his gender is more trans than cis.
Otherwise, many people who identify that way are nonbinary, genderqueer, and gender-non-conforming men who feel their manhood is trans, while also having been assigned male. This can be for a lot of reasons. I can say that I myself was raised as a “girl” (technically) but am multigender, have always felt any womanhood I possessed was inherently trans, and after having gone on testosterone HRT “trans woman” increasingly just made sense on every level. I am sexed by random strangers as male or female depending on the day and my presentation, and I am frequently read as a trans woman assigned male in public. My womanhood exists within the context of me also being a man, and agender and neutrois and maverique, and my body which has been reshaped by testosterone, and so there really is no context where my womanhood is cis (I am also intersex but it doesn’t play as big a role in my womanhood as it may for others). Trans men assigned male can have similar experiences, although they can have many others! Some are be plural, some are be former trans women who now feel “man, but trans” better captures their identity, some are nonbinary people who are more “man-adjacent” or have some connection to manhood (such as being gay men) while still being very much a nonbinary/genderqueer individual, etc etc.
Notably, if someone says “I am a trans man who was assigned male because xyz,” that doesn’t mean they think that being a trans man assigned female requires xyz. When I point to my multigenderedness or my androgynous body as part of my identity as a trans woman, I am not saying “being a trans woman is defined by being partially male or physically androgynous.” Rather, I am a woman who has a trans body and a trans identity, and I am also transfeminized regularly in public, so on both a personal and social level it is something that makes sense to apply to myself, although I don’t talk about it often because people have not historically been the chillest about it. But its gotten a lot more discussed as of late, and people have even started pushing away from using AGAB entirely, so I’ve decided to be a bit more open about it.
Anyways! That’s why I wanted to shout out trans men assigned male <3 I love my brothers in not being defined by what people thought of our genitals at birth, I love my brothers in transsexuality and genuinely for real changing your sex, I love my brothers in nonbinarity and genderqueerness and the experience of being binary in a nonbinary way, I love my brothers in being denied validity in the very category you were forced into because you were a weird little queer from childhood.
*AGAB language was originally coined for use in nonconsensual surgeries on intersex children, pioneered by notable monster John Money. so if this is surprising to anyone, It Really Should Not Be.
I’m a perisex man, assigned male at birth, who is currently seeking bottom surgery because that’s what feels right. No hormone replacement or other transition, just that. I sometimes joke that makes me a trans man, just the other kind of trans man. Trans(exual) rather than trans(gender).
I'm not gonna articulate this well, but there's this phenomenon I keep seeing on the left that I'll call "bean soup rhetoric," wherein someone fails to understand that they are not the target audience for a particular message, or just can't conceptualize why a speaker would craft their message differently to resonate with a target audience that doesn't already completely agree with them.
"The 'God Made Trans People' billboard is stupid! God didn't make me! I'm an atheist!" Okay. The billboard sits along a major highway in Kansas. We can deduce that the target audience is not you—it's the centrist evangelical Christians driving along that road who could probably be persuaded to become allies as long as we choose our words carefully and don't make them feel attacked for not already knowing everything about trans rights issues. Another one I see a lot is, "We shouldn't be talking about how right-wing legislation catches [privileged in-group] in the crossfire when [marginalized out-group] suffers far more!" I know. I agree with you. Which is why you and I are not the intended audience of this argument!
The entire point of rhetoric is to win over someone who doesn't already fully agree with you. In this case, let's say that someone is Jennifer, the moderate center-right mom in your neighborhood who doesn't really know or care about transgender issues but would be absolutely horrified by the idea of her teenage daughter having to submit to an invasive inspection of her body just to be allowed to play soccer. Tell her, "Banning trans students from sports will inevitably subject all student athletes to invasive gender-policing," or "Legal restrictions on gender-affirming care will make it harder for you to access the hormone replacement therapy you take to treat menopause symptoms," and she is more likely to question her existing beliefs and listen to the rest of what you have to say than if you lead with leftist talking points that she already has a calcified opinion about or which she thinks do not personally affect her.
Tailoring the argument to the things she already cares about does not mean we're forgetting that she has more privilege than most—entirely the opposite, in fact. A privileged ally can be extremely valuable. Jennifer votes in every election. And so do all the other ladies at her book club, and church, and in the PTA, and those folks listen to Jennifer. There's a reason both parties were courting suburban women so hard in the last election cycle! If we can find common ground with her on this, if we can get her calling her representatives and talking to her friends and phone-banking and door-knocking and making a stink, that's how the needle starts to move. If I can convince her to take her support away from the candidates who are actively restricting my rights and throw it toward those who want to restore and expand those rights...then I'm sorry, but Jennifer is a more valuable ally to me than the people who agree that the legal boundaries of gender ought to be abolished altogether but refuse to actually do anything except complain online about how both sides are equally bad because the right is trying to force everyone to drink the cyanide kool-aid while the left keeps serving bean soup and they don't like bean soup
There's this common conception of gender I see: man and woman are often positioned as 'opposites' on a sliding scale and gender as a gradient, and any kind of transition as transitioning 'away' from one end of the scale and 'toward' the other, with 'transfeminine' people being anybody transitioning 'away' from masculinity (which is inherently toward femininity), and 'transmasculine' people being anybody transitioning 'away' from femininity (which is inherently toward masculinity).
This is an inherently exorsexist and intersexist worldview, in my opinion.
Bigender people are almost always forced to 'pick' which gender they are 'more', or have it automatically assigned for them. Their pronouns may be conditionally respected, but people get very uncomfortable, when a bigender person challenges the concept of man and woman as opposite. Constantly, you see "male spaces" and "female spaces", discourse about which labels are for men (and therefore not for women) or vice versa, and other similar conversations, inherently leave out men who are women, and women who are men. Bigender people are ignored, or spoken over, or pushed to 'pick' a gender so they can be neatly categorized, because man and woman are conceived as two opposite mutually exclusive ends of a spectrum that cannot intersect.
Agender/genderless/transneutral people are similarly erased or forced to pick sides, often sorted into a box either based on what people assume they're 'closer' to based on their physical traits (and i hope i dont need to stress how dysphoria inducing that can be) or told they're transfem/transmasc regardless because, well, "You're still transitioning away/toward something", because people conceptualize agender/genderless individuals as being not truly genderless at all, but as being merely at the center of the man to woman spectrum.
Then there are perisex nonbinary people who identify closely with their agab, perisex nonbinary women/fems afab and perisex nonbinary men amab. Gender essentialists either try to cut these people out of trans identity entirely, fakeclaiming them, insisting they're basically cisgender, engaging in intense transmedicalist rhetoric dressed up in a slightly more 'acceptable' font now that transmedicalism is somewhat less accepted in the community..or they insist that, despite many not being at all masculine, perisex nonbinary people afab are all transmasc, and vice versa.
I consider all of these things to be misgendering! Forcing any nonbinary person toward any binary or gendered term they do not identify with is misgendering! And it's done constantly by other trans people who would rather be openly and violently exorsexist than rethink their gender essentialist simplistic reductive sliding scale framework for how extremely complex societal structures and personal identities work.
And, as with any genderessentialist/bioessentialist worldview, this type of rhetoric is also incredibly unsafe for intersex people, who, despite what perisex trans people (and the occasional intersexist intersex person they tokenize) like to insist when they scream over us in these discussions, have a much more complicated relationship with agab and sig than perisex people do, and therefore are also frequently hurt and erased by any model that tries to pose things like man/woman, masculine/feminine, androgenized/estrogenized, amab/afab, etc, as opposite and mutually exclusive. "Intersex people are still [insert agab] despite their 'disorders' and therefore fit into my model the same way any [agab] perisex person would!" is a worldview that will always always be intersexist and extremely harmful.
like bell hooks basically sums up the issues i've noticed wrt feminism & the idea that "feminism has always said the patriarchy hurts men!" yet that idea not materializing into feminists investing in men's liberation:
It was difficult for women committed to feminist change to face the reality that the problem did not lie just with men. Facing that reality required more complex theorizing; it required acknowledging the role women play in maintaining and perpetuating patriarchy and sexism. As more women moved away from destructive relationships with men, it was easier to see the whole picture. It was easier to see that even if individual men divested themselves of patriarchal privilege, the system of patriarchy, sexism, and male domination would still remain intact, and women would still be exploited and oppressed. Despite this change in feminist agendas, visionary feminist thinkers who had never been antimale did not and do not receive mass media attention. As a consequence the popular notion that feminists hate men continues to prevail.
The vast majority of feminist women I encounter do not hate men. They feel sorry for men because they see how patriarchy wounds them and yet men remain wedded to patriarchal culture. While visionary thinkers have called attention to the way patriarchy hurts men, there has never been an ongoing effort made to address male pain. To this day I hear individual feminist women express their concern for the plight of men within patriarchy, even as they share that they are unwilling to give their energy to help educate and change men. Feminist writer Minnie Bruce Pratt states the position clearly: “How are men going to change? The meeting between two people, where one opposes the other, is the point of change. But I don’t want the personal contact. I don’t want to do it…. When people talk about not giving men our energies, I agree with that…. They have to deliver themselves.” These attitudes, coupled with the negative attitudes of most men toward feminist thinking, meant that there was never a collective, affirming call for boys and men to join feminist movement so that they would be liberated from patriarchy.
Reformist feminist women could not make this call because they were the group of women (mostly white women with class privilege) who had pushed the idea that all men were powerful in the first place. These were the women for whom feminist liberation was more about getting their piece of the power pie and less about freeing masses of women or less powerful men from sexist oppression. They were not mad at their powerful daddies and husbands who kept poor men exploited and oppressed; they were mad that they were not being giving equal access to power. Now that many of those women have gained power, and especially economic parity with the men of their class, they have pretty much lost interest in feminism.
As interest in feminist thinking and practice has waned, there has been even less focus on the plight of men than in the heyday of feminist movement. This lack of interest does not change the fact that only a feminist vision that embraces feminist masculinity, that loves boys and men and demands on their behalf every right that we desire for girls and women, can renew men in our society. Feminist thinking teaches us all, males especially, how to love justice and freedom in ways that foster and affirm life. Clearly we need new strategies, new theories, guides that will show us how to create a world where feminist masculinity thrives.
^^ that last part is why anti-transmasculinity theory is so important. what is the goal but new strategies and theories that guide a new understanding of feminist masculinity (more of the quote under the cut, read the book here)
Sadly there is no body of recent feminist writing addressing men that is accessible, clear, and concise. There is little work done from a feminist standpoint concentrating on boyhood. No significant body of feminist writing addresses boys directly, letting them know how they can construct an identity that is not rooted in sexism. There is no body of feminist children’s literature that can serve as an alternative to patriarchal perspectives, which abound in the world of children’s books. The gender equality that many of us take for granted in our adult lives, particularly those of us who have class privilege and elite education, is simply not present in the world of children’s books or in the world of public and private education. Teachers of children see gender equality mostly in terms of ensuring that girls get to have the same privileges and rights as boys within the existing social structure; they do not see it in terms of granting boys the same rights as girls—for instance, the right to choose not to engage in aggressive or violent play, the right to play with dolls, to play dress up, to wear costumes of either gender, the right to choose.
Just as it was misguided for reformist feminist thinkers to see freedom as simply women having the right to be like powerful patriarchal men (feminist women with class privilege never suggested that they wanted their lot to be like that of poor and working-class men), so was it simplistic to imagine that the liberated man would simply become a woman in drag. Yet this was the model of freedom offered men by mainstream feminist thought. Men were expected to hold on to the ideas about strength and providing for others that were a part of patriarchal thought, while dropping their investment in domination and adding an investment in emotional growth. This vision of feminist masculinity was so fraught with contradictions, it was impossible to realize. No wonder then that men who cared, who were open to change, often just gave up, falling back on the patriarchal masculinity they found so problematic. The individual men who did take on the mantle of a feminist notion of male liberation did so only to find that few women respected this shift.
Once the “new man” that is the man changed by feminism was represented as a wimp, as overcooked broccoli dominated by powerful females who were secretly longing for his macho counterpart, masses of men lost interest. Reacting to this inversion of gender roles, men who were sympathetic chose to stop trying to play a role in female-led feminist movement and became involved with the men’s movement. Positively, the men’s movement emphasized the need for men to get in touch with their feelings, to talk with other men. Negatively, the men’s movement continued to promote patriarchy by a tacit insistence that in order to be fully self-actualized, men needed to separate from women. The idea that men needed to separate from women to find their true selves just seemed like the old patriarchal message dressed up in a new package.
Describing the men’s movement spearheaded by Robert Bly in her essay “Feminism and Masculinity,” Christine A. James explains:
Bly claims that women, primarily since feminism, have created a situation in which men, especially young men, feel weak, emasculated, and unsure of themselves, and that older men must lead the way back…. Bly holds up the myth of the Wild Man as an exemplar of the direction men must take and never challenges the hierarchical dualisms that are so integrally linked to the tension he perceives between men and women. Arguably, the notion of the Wild Man merely reinforces clichés about “real masculinity” instead of trying to foster a new relationship between men and women, as well as the masculine and feminine.
The men’s movement was often critical of women and feminism while making no sustained critique of patriarchy. Ultimately it did not consistently demand that men challenge patriarchy or envision liberating models of masculinity.
Many of the New Age models created by men reconfigure old sexist paradigms while making it seem as though they are offering a different script for gender relations. Often the men’s movement resisted macho patriarchal models while upholding a vision of a benevolent patriarchy, one in which the father is the ruler who rules with tenderness and kindness, but he is still in control. In the wake of feminist movement and the diverse men’s liberation movements that did not bring women and men closer together, the question of what the alternative to patriarchal masculinity might be must still be answered.
Clearly, men need new models for self-assertion that do not require the construction of an enemy “other,” be it a woman or the symbolic feminine, for them to define themselves against. Starting in early childhood, males need models of men with integrity, that is, men who are whole, who are not divided against themselves. While individual women acting as single mothers have shown that they can raise healthy, loving boys who become responsible, loving men, in every case where this model of parenting has been successful, women have chosen adult males—fathers, grandfathers, uncles, friends, and comrades—to exemplify for their sons the adult manhood they should strive to achieve.
Undoubtedly, one of the first revolutionary acts of visionary feminism must be to restore maleness and masculinity as an ethical biological category divorced from the dominator model. This is why the term patriarchal masculinity is so important, for it identifies male difference as being always and only about the superior rights of males to dominate, be their subordinates females or any group deemed weaker, by any means necessary. Rejecting this model for a feminist masculinity means that we must define maleness as a state of being rather than as performance. Male being, maleness, masculinity must stand for the essential core goodness of the self, of the human body that has a penis [note: obviously this is very cis-perisex language]. Many of the critics who have written about masculinity suggest that we need to do away with the term, that we need “an end to manhood.” Yet such a stance furthers the notion that there is something inherently evil, bad, or unworthy about maleness.
It is a stance that seems to be more a reaction to patriarchal masculinity than a creative loving response that can separate maleness and manhood from all the identifying traits patriarchy has imposed on the self that has a penis. Our work of love should be to reclaim masculinity and not allow it to be held hostage to patriarchal domination. There is a creative, life-sustaining, life-enhancing place for the masculine in a nondominator culture. And those of us committed to ending patriarchy can touch the hearts of real men where they live, not by demanding that they give up manhood or maleness, but by asking that they allow its meaning to be transformed, that they become disloyal to patriarchal masculinity in order to find a place for the masculine that does not make it synonymous with domination or the will to do violence.
Patriarchal culture continues to control the hearts of men precisely because it socializes males to believe that without their role as patriarchs they will have no reason for being. Dominator culture teaches all of us that the core of our identity is defined by the will to dominate and control others. We are taught that this will to dominate is more biologically hardwired in males than in females. In actuality, dominator culture teaches us that we are all natural-born killers but that males are more able to realize the predator role. In the dominator model the pursuit of external power, the ability to manipulate and control others, is what matters most. When culture is based on a dominator model, not only will it be violent but it will frame all relationships as power struggles.
btw i do in fact have to add at the end of this, that Abdullah Öcalan's paradigm of democratic modernity vs capitalist modernity not only centers women's liberation as a core element of true socialist and democratic liberation, but also i think Rojava and the Zapatistas in Chiapas are great examples of how actually intersectional revolutionary feminism can in fact lead to not just better conditions for women but true connection and solidarity between men and women.
THE ALTERNATIVE MODELS OF MANHOOD AND MASCULINITY ARE POSSIBLE!!!!! but they must be truly revolutionary, truly democratic, truly anti-capitalist, anti-racist, anti-imperialist, and radically anti-patriarchal in order to succeed. feminism has not failed men by going too far, it has failed everyone by never going far enough.
men's liberation requires women's liberation" is a true statement. and equally true is "women's liberation requires men's liberation." we either seek both or we will get neither
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