@Nocturne
Also, I'm not going to respond to any of your other comments, as this is obviously something very personal to you based on your experiences, of which I have no right to argue. All I will say is that you should try not to let your subjective experiences get in the way of objective reason... and I'm sorry you've had such bad experiences. Nobody deserves to be made to feel worthless by anybody ever.
Ehh, I can't put it out there and then expect no one to comment. That wouldn't be fair. I don't gain some immunity just because its personal. I put it out there to share.
I don't think there is anything remotely objective about toxic masculinity though.
@Ghost in the IDE
I'm not aware of any government that says you can't defend yourself.
UK doesn't even allow you to have butter knifes in an you lunch box or pepper spray on females. Try again.
Safest? Really?
Yes, they're pretty easy to control, a child can do it.
If you pull a gun on someone at close range (let's face it, you aren't going to 'defend' yourself from 100 yards - that's called murder) and you miss, there is a good chance of having your own gun be the tool of your own death.
*sigh*
Throw in the fact that most gun discharges are 5-10 feet apart from the target
People with gun safety training don't fire at distances or directions they can't control. Most people that fire in self defense are in their own home or place of work where they are keen on situational awareness. But yeah, that's right, if you hit someone who isn't an immediate threat regardless of what you are aiming at, that's murder buddy. Thats why people dont allow that to happen in the first place. Thanks for the insight.
I know of many ways to defend myself and the use of weapons isn't one of them. Then again, no one is going to pull a gun on me either. Know why that is?
That's good for you, your stature, and what ever martial training you have. Not everyone has that ability. Don't deny other people an option to protect themselves just because you personally dont need it. Also, Idk what umbrella you live under. But guns or no guns, violent crime and intrusion happen all the time all around the world. Idk why you think you can't become a victim simply cause a place doesn't have guns.
@Smarty
I read up. In 2013 NRA had a total of $350 million revenue. Most of that kind of money is spent on their usual business of training people how to use weapons and organizing events, some of that goes into advertising campaigns to promote gun use (or directly either for or against political parties or its members) and then some straight into the pockets of selected politicians, for whom even the small fry is a considerable amount of money to feed the campaign box.
http://www.guns.com/2017/05/05/nra-revenue-expenses-in-2016/ break down of spending, shown with pride.
Also, whats wrong with promoting lawful gun use in a world where people try to smear gun carriers at every turn?
I hardly think I've heard any politician good at "best representing their values" over the past few days, rather stumbling over excuses on why they accept NRA money. But come on, let's not be naive. Lobbyist donations are entirely what they mean - take a little, give a little. Let's not pretend the NRA's money cannot exert influence.
We've seen what laws are in effect, and those laws spray rounds and rounds of bullets at kids on school campuses. Everyone can conclude that those laws suck.
OH, so now its the laws and law abiders, is it? Could make them suck less if people spend less time and money trying to deflect rampant bills trying to get everyone to stop using guns vs building laws that actually make sense in a current state of affairs.
Yes, they simplified a lot of things. For gun lovers. And we really don't need this gun loving organization to tell us that guns can freaking kill.
THATS GOOD! Making the laws simpler makes it easier to stomp out grey areas and have less problems. How can you be against that? And hey, Im not the one who is pretending these guys have a blood lust or something...
You got to be kidding me. You really can't see that just about anything on that list favors gun owners only?
well. I mean..... yeah??
I do see that, and that's a good thing. The NRA is the defensive platform from the over reaching arms or people with zero insight and fully driven on emotion, where its all or nothing. The laws being defended are well defined and fit common sense, are based in actual information collected and acted upon by people who get paid to do this stuff. You are admitting you don't really care about the reasoning, laws or procedures, and you won't even acknowledged it can be more than black and white. The fact that you don't want laws to protect people, you don't want people to protect themselves with guns and you don't care how you get there regardless of what ramifications and factors it entials, the feeling of an end goal is all that matters. You literally just want things done your way and no other way could possibly be better.
You're just as bad as any climate denier at that point.
The laws are advocated to defend gun owners because the laws being pushed on them are aggressively anti-law abiding gun owners, usually with very little, if anything to back it up other than "someone died here today, lets get mad again and not actually have to think about it"
I mean, most people arnt so blinded by their emotions to get this deep into the barrel. That's why you are linking radical
opinion writers on bias left sites and petitions that couldn't even get number a city block worth of signatures, failing with already low expectations. It's clearly not a very popular, well thought out, or largely backed idea...
It's not even fair to call it a minority opinion because that would imply it has some basis of being effective or represented. Its one that basically doesn't exists outside self-reassuring social circle.
You know... how we define radical...
Someone saying something is a terrorist group because they don't like it and then blogging about it, doesn't make it true lol. Amazing how when people actually go out in uniform with a political idea, anarcho signs, burn cars, beat people, loot buildings, and uterally disrupt entire cities, that's just advocacy and free speech. NOT ALL black bloc! NOT ALL antifa! But an organization of dumpy old people that hold conventions and hand out pamphlets, that simply dares to challenge and wants to discusses laws about how they are allowed to protect themselves in their work and home. Literally Hitler guys!
That petition did about 50 times better and was ignored, even despite making it to the white house even when they were forced to review it.
Sorry, I had to laugh a little. You lmao'd at my perceptions based on my anecdotal experiences, and said they sounded like stereotypes/fiction from the 50s.
Thats because its a perception on presumption. You listed things that happened to no person in-particular as examples. That's specifically why I told my story, a concrete real world example of the shoe on the other foot. Not just some "John doe somewhere must have experienced this at some point" like It's sitcom material.
And then you went on to give me your anecdotal life story in the form of some kind of hellish Dickenson novel, where every woman you've ever met in your entire life has been some kind of evil harpy out to break you down enough to get you to jump off a bridge or something.
I've been told to write my life as a novel many times lmao. I have a lot of tragedies and hardships, don't really notice until I'm way past that point lol. I don't b*tch about it though. Live one day at a time and you can get through anything.
Not every women. Just ones that namely had a profound impact on me, mostly while I was vulnerable and in development, and kinda set a stage for my behavior.
You also gave me like five paragraphs of super general, super opinionated, completely non-sourced "guys do this because of this, girls do this because of this" ranting, hahah. You must see the irony there, right?
Not super general or opinionated. I gave you a life testimonial to counter the claim that men are inherently more intolerable than women, and I told you what I deal with on a daily basis working around a bunch of high school girls and all the things they say and do, how they behave around each other.
The only thing that was generalized was the idea that females are more gravitated towards drama, especially younger (which is.. duh), and find ill confidence to be the biggest turn off for a women, (and as a result, men are encouraged to deal with their issues silently if they want to hold a certain image for partners). And that's not really generalized. That's pretty well known common information, so well known, that I shouldn't even have to source it. You could just ask any female or google it if you somehow don't know that. I'm not telling you George Washington had wood teeth, I'm telling you the sky is blue.
To be clear, I'm not laughing at your life experiences or doubting you, because god damn that sucks and isn't fair at all. Sorry to hear that, dude. Everybody has different experiences, though, and women apparently treating you like absolute **** your whole life doesn't mean they're evil to everybody, or that they cause all the world's problems. Maybe you just lived in a town with really ****ty women or something.
Can A-FIRM on that last note, but I know not everyone is
ty, this is exactly why I don't believe toxic masculinity explicitly exist in a world where there are good and evil people. You can't just source it to the natural state of masculinity being toxic as to why people are
ty. People are
ty because some people just choose to be
ty.
That said, in highschool, I heard of:
+A kid who got beat up in the locker room after hockey practice, thrown into a urinal, and pissed on by the group. Whoa, sociopaths! And dudes! This happened because the kid was "a b*tch," apparently. Guess he wasn't man enough to be on the hockey team!
So you think this happened because they were men, and because you think they think he was a b*tch? What did he do to be called a b*tch? You're just adding your own narrative to the whole. You heard from... you added to... you don't actually seem to know though.
+A kid who got thrown into a trashcan and rolled down the hallway. He was just kind of ugly, or something. Also, small and weedy looking.
This is a problem with being male how?
+Dudes just getting picked on constantly by other dudes. Tripping them in class and crap, talking behind their backs, etc. Just the usual low-key harassment. Always of quiet, wimpy looking guys.
It's funny, though. Whenever the quiet guys spoke up and gave **** back, the louder "cool" guys would laugh it off, and they'd back off the kids. "Manning up" got them instant respect and approval. This is the toxic masculinity I'm talking about. You can't be a quiet/sensitive/whatever guy without people ****ting all over you, apparently. Men (at least young, stupid men) only respect strength. Young stupid men only respect strength because our entire society says "real men are tough, loud, and take what they want. Real men are assholes."
Yeah, its because they are easy targets. Not because they are men. You think that's exclusive to males?
Who is a slut for sleeping with who, who is going to/has beat another's ass at school, who is too ugly for their BF. How they are too ugly for a BF if they are single for more than a month.
It's got nothing to do with masculinity, and everything to do with ego. You are literally talking broad scraping jock/nerd stories while pretending prep/home girls don't happen. Being a dick to people outside your social norms, especially to people that related better to other social circles. Hence why we can even call this "jock/nerd" problems.
I dunno. I don't think most men worry about getting by girls for not being "tough" while growing up. Guys hang out mostly with other guys. I think young men growing up are afraid of being ostracized and bullied by other men more than they are of being bullied by women.
... you dont think..?
Also, thats because you're ignoring the actual problem by pretending it's masculinity itself vs. Most guys that lack confidence don't have the social understanding of why females pass on them, a lot dont care. A lot of guys who are in that position have been emasculated. The ones who do are the "friend zone"ers, guys who have needs, but pushed out of those social circles and expectations to reach them.
Let me tell you, I've never been as intimidated of my friends and peers because of a swinging dick between their legs, even when I was bullied and even got in fist fights. What is intimidating is how your social rep looks to potential female partners and the mass rejection that comes with it if you don't fit in the right social circles.
Stop speaking for what you think other guys think, and tell me what you think and what you experience about yourself.
Now, I'm not saying that women can't be evil, too. I'm sure there are as many ****ty women out there as there are men. The term "toxic masculinity" exists not because women are better than men (they're not, lol), but because this ****ty macho "don't take any **** from anybody, never admit you're wrong, always take what you want, never talk about your feelings, always be angry and hungry for more" attitude is CELEBRATED in men, where it ISN'T celebrated in women. An angry piece of **** dude is a "badass," while the equal female is a "b*tch." A guy who sleeps around and cheats on his girl on the side is "the man" while the equal female is "a piece of **** slut," etc etc.
The term "toxic masculinity" exists to separate it from "healthy masculinity." That's all. We don't need the term for women, because we already call women pieces of **** when they're being pieces of ****.
What guy hasn't been called a piece of
? Only women get degraded eh?
Ok, but this is where I start to massively take a problem with this. We have established women and men are
ty, and each push specific social pressures on their same-sex and opposite sex peers. Why is it then that we are
only interested in looking at and talking about "toxic masculinity" ? Presumably the male on male relation aspect, and even worse, attributing male on male as default negative? Why is it the only attitude change in mainstream media? Why is it used to politically weaponize topics about male expression and isolated them from conversation(man splaning?)? I mean, we just in this thread had people blame males for all war and stripping women from power they never positioned for. We literally have people out there banning words with man in it as offensive, censoring men's rights activist telling them they are hate groups, trying to shut down workshops for men to express themselves. Having men kept out of schools on affirmative action, not allowing them to earn a wage or go into a field they like because heaven forbid females don't represent 50/50 of the attendees, and handing CEO positions to females who didn't earn them for tax breaks on businesses, having them run into the ground because diversity is more important than integrity and ability.
shows like saying cuckold(not being able to stand up to the most important people in your life) is something that should be encouraged, or not being as emotionally driven as females makes their expression of emotions wrong. Just general disregard for meritocracy where merit of males grants them a leap over women in something.
People don't actually care about toxic people, so much as they just don't want men to be men, because they hate the entire image of them and think tearing men down is just as good as building females up, all placed on the misconception that females somehow have it worse to begin with. They do that by simply defining an emasculated man, and acting like its more of a problem than any other social boundary. The world is ever hostile towards men and demands and takes more and more from them while telling them to shut up and
off, that someone else knows best for them.
No one talks about "healthy masculinity" and what it means. Why? Because that would imply there is a positive image they actually want to work towards. They don't talk about women's social health with this default state of negativity either. Why? Cause its not about changing or building up men. It's about tearing them down. It's about emasculating and socially displacing them.
Lets not beat around the bush.
Isolating and proclaiming toxic masculinity exist and impressing it on impressionable boys is child abuse.
Teaching your male child his natural wants and means of expression is toxic, That's just as much as the social manipulation from females that flung abuse against me.
Boys are suicidal/homicidal at rates higher than ever, because people are ever more hostile and making it impossible for them to have accepted social bounds or fill a role in life, and its definitely not by coincidence that people keep wanting to re-define masculinity to push them into social penalty just for being alive.
I wish the regressive-left would stop pretending they actually give a
about them in social change, when all social change has done is risen this number dramatically. One could even argue the rapid demand for social changes and penalties from the regressive-left are the reason so many suicides and shootings happen now. Guns didn't magically become more accessible or anything, and the devaluing and displacement of men is measurable. But why blame toxic attitudes towards people vs inanimate objects that have been around all this time without nearly the same consequences. They dont have the social safety nets, voices, figures to emulate, or places to just be male as they did before. They can't even go into an isolated world of competitive gaming without females trying to enforce some meta environment over them, and simply refusing to with hold control "is sexist and harassment." "Gamers are dead and dont deserve audaince, gamers are sexist, 50% of gamers are female even though we are comparing facebook games and flappy birds to COD players, so female perspective should infiltrate all gaming." Can't join a male dominated space where they are largely forced to recede and get away from the world, without trying to control it and impose politics on them.
What we should be doing is building boys up, and giving them resources to understand themselves and learn to communicate in ways that don't separate them from social norms that wont be changing any time soon. (Thats a hate crime though, after all, we know women are the only ones with problems that need focused on.)
Things like character, handwork, discipline, proper father figures. Telling boys its ok to feel something is not the same as encouraging them to feel something, or telling them they express things wrong because they are just too par for the course against you're radical shift in social norms. Not complaining about how you think they express themselves or how you want to pretend their nature is in particularly more offensive than that of a females.
I found all this astounding, talking about "Our precious children, ban guns now!" in the same breath as "we need to doctor young males away from what comes natural because it gives them advantages in certain ways and boys are just toxic by birth alone, and
what they want or what image or problems peers or females have of them afterwards Their conscious and development and social interaction that they carry the rest of their life should be defined by my politics vs adjusting my politics to best nurture a positive male attitude."