← Back to context

Comment by Urahandystar

2 days ago

One of the saddest things I heard was a young kid say he's never heard the word masculinity unless it was paired with the word toxic before it. With that kind of attitude is this any wonder?

29 comments

Urahandystar

Reply
lelanthran  2 days ago

It is difficult to get society to accept that maybe it's time to balance the constant public and media validation of women with some public and media validation of men.

Disney has seen a bunch of Marvel flops since they switched the focus to Marvel properties that target women (they've since publicly indicated a course correction on this).

Take a bunch of IP that primarily males are interested in (super-heros), water it down so that it's less male focused, and then find that neither males nor females are interested.

  • pjc50  1 day ago

    > Marvel

    One of my most crank opinions is that superhero stuff is (a) for kids, (b) inherently a bit fascist even if you make it textually anti-fascist, and (c) ultimately like popcorn, something that should be only a small part of a more varied diet.

    Now, that's not a terribly strong opinion, and I know it'll make a lot of people mad, but I have personally got fed up with the oversupply of superhero stuff and believe that there should be more movies that mixed-gender adult audiences would like. Maybe find a way of doing an action-romcom that men will like. Characters that have human level ability and must find human level solutions. Probably the problem is that audience has now fragmented, moving the genders further apart.

    • lelanthran  1 day ago

      > One of my most crank opinions is that superhero stuff is (a) for kids,

      You must not have seen The Boys (Prime Video) :-)

      >> ... there should be more movies that mixed-gender adult audiences would like. Maybe find a way of doing an action-romcom that men will like.

      Maybe has the same problem that changing super-hero movies has - you make less money.

      The movie Killers with k-Something-Heigl, that guy from The Butterfly Effect and Tom Selleck was a rom-com that I enjoyed, but AFAIK it wasn't as popular with females as standard rom-coms, and wasn't as popular with males as action movies.

      > Characters that have human level ability and must find human level solutions.

      That's not why people see movies, though; I might find that entertaining, and you might find that entertaining, but it's a pretty hard sell if if doesn't make enough money.

  • FranzFerdiNaN  2 days ago

    > It is difficult to get society to accept that maybe it's time to balance the constant public and media validation of women with some public and media validation of men.

    But its up to men to do the work. Women needed decades and decades to figure out what it meant to be a women and how to get what they wanted. They took the time and effort to organise, resulting in suffragettes and women's clubs and feminism and all that. Men could so far skip this all and just coast by on being the default. And now we're stuck with the situation that there are barely any male role models (except incredibly vile and toxic ones like Tate and Peterson), and trying to figure out what it means to be a man in a world that is rapidly changing, where men no longer can just be the breadwinner.

    Not only that, but women are also demanding more from men (more emotional maturity, more support with chores and child raising, having a fully developed personality). And too many men seem either incapable or unwilling to change, preferring to lash out against 'woke' and voting for extreme rightwing politics that aims to put women back in the kitchen.

    • lelanthran  2 days ago

      > But its up to men to do the work.

      What work would this be? Any organisation to the benefit of males would instantly be shutdown.

      What do you have in mind that won't get backlash? I mean, after all, even just a quantitative study has elicited, in this thread, much anti-male sentiment in the form of strawmen.

      So I am curious how you see male-advocacy groups proceeding in a manner that has no or limited backlash.

  • ml-anon  2 days ago

    Yeah “society” had millennia of that. It’s quite telling that perhaps less than a decade of taking women seriously led to a a vitriol filled backlash full of Tates, Trumps and the manosphere.

    It’s also quite telling that your main complaint is Disney superhero movies. It’s difficult to think of something more juvenile and unimportant.

    • lelanthran  2 days ago

      > It’s quite telling that perhaps less than a decade of taking women seriously led to a a vitriol filled backlash full of Tates, Trumps and the manosphere.

      1. It's been about 30 years since the "strong independent women" meme first started in popular media.

      2. Where is the vitriol and backlash in my post to which you are referring to?

      Your response looks like a canned one that can be inserted into any discussion about males.

      4 replies →

wincy  2 days ago

My friend’s son was four and had to have it explicitly explained to him that men can be scientists, too! Based on all the books he’d been read and other media, he assumed only women were scientists.

  • Fire-Dragon-DoL  1 day ago

    My son wants to be female because every super hero that's interesting to him, it's female (he is 4). We learned to coast with this, but I did complain about the lack of cool male characters for young kids: the female ones seems to be better curated and more abundant

yetihehe  2 days ago

Sites like artofmanliness.com seem to be more and more needed in today's world.