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[IdleRich]

Are you adrift in a state of nihilism, lads? I didn't know i was till only a few seconds ago

I dunno about that but I definitely wish I was a horny jester.

 

[john eden]

I like you wild greens so I assume your intentions are good, your heart pure, etc but

While author is simplifying a lot of stuff (e.g. it is very silly to think this happens overnight one generation to another; there are huge differences historically in class roles and what it means to be "patriarchal"; many men still wield traditionally patriarchal roles etc) the basic thesis is pretty impossible to argue with, that we are gonna have growing pains as we figure out what and how men are supposed to be and do in this world, that when the entire culture and its myths are set up around the idea of man as provider and authority, there will be transitional awkwardness. What kind of models and life narratives to sell them, etc. It's also not a new argument, Douthat made this point quite famously w/r/t to Girls, which is a show where, famously, the men are all huge messes. Compare Adam Driver with Don Draper. Both incredibly disturbed individuals, and Don himself is in the midst of the cultural sea change we're talking about, but one has a sense of archetypes and models to follow (as he makes himself a fiction, as we all do when we live up to myths) and the other doesn't.

Saying that patriachal roles have changed and are changing is very different from saying that they have been abolished and replaced with nihilism.

There still seem to be quite a lot of macho role models out there for us men, in popular culture. (Although of course judging the state of the patriarchy through popular culture is in itself quite problematic I would say).

 

[john eden]

I guess you can simply report the headline like that without attracting the unwelcome attention of Sue, Grabbit & Runne.

Well that remains to be seen, Rich!

I had assumed that the tweet I posted was purely factual, but if it isn't then I shally happily append a correction or delete it.

 

[IdleRich]

I like you wild greens so I assume your intentions are good, your heart pure, etc but

While author is simplifying a lot of stuff (e.g. it is very silly to think this happens overnight one generation to another; there are huge differences historically in class roles and what it means to be "patriarchal"; many men still wield traditionally patriarchal roles etc) the basic thesis is pretty impossible to argue with, that we are gonna have growing pains as we figure out what and how men are supposed to be and do in this world, that when the entire culture and its myths are set up around the idea of man as provider and authority, there will be transitional awkwardness. What kind of models and life narratives to sell them, etc. It's also not a new argument, Douthat made this point quite famously w/r/t to Girls, which is a show where, famously, the men are all huge messes. Compare Adam Driver with Don Draper. Both incredibly disturbed individuals, and Don himself is in the midst of the cultural sea change we're talking about, but one has a sense of archetypes and models to follow (as he makes himself a fiction, as we all do when we live up to myths) and the other doesn't.

Interesting how many people looked up to Don Draper and thought that he was an icon of cool. I suppose it is of course possible to be cool and be a mess but as the show went on it became increasingly obvious how horribly lost he was... and yet so many were blinded by sharp suits and a way with women that they seemed to totally miss the bigger half of what was going on.

 

[IdleRich]

Well that remains to be seen, Rich!

I had assumed that the tweet I posted was purely factual, but if it isn't then I shally happily append a correction or delete it.

I'm sure it's fine. I don't see how anyone could possibly have any objection to you sharing (virtually) without comment a factual piece that LT himself was sharing on twitter.

 

[wg-]

I would prefer to think that i exist in an environment generally outside of the always online facade, and tend to perceive all of this as mostly a content-creating machine helping to enable the cyclical graft of writers and commentators who are unable to create anything of emotional worth in real terms thus deciding to lean on the largely artificially constructed mechanism of the "culture war"

I do like the nihilists in the Big Lebowski, though

 

[Benny Bunter]

You've all been misgendering Laurie Penny btw, apparently her preferred pronouns are they/them. Naughty!

 

[Benny Bunter]

Ooops!

 

[sus]

Saying that patriachal roles have changed and are changing is very different from saying that they have been abolished and replaced with nihilism.

"What is chan & Trump culture" for 200

 

[Murphy]

Made Men vs Mad Men

 

[poetix]

Something is up with gender - several things at once, possibly, with no clear order of causal precedence between them:

• Shifts in types and patterns of employment, wage-earning, division of labour and so on - the male sole-breadwinner as standard is very distantly in the rear-view mirror at this point, and many of the characteristics and demands of work previously seen as women's sole domain have been transferred into roles held by all.
• Shifts in social patterns around courtship, marriage, childbearing - an elongated adolescence, spreading out across one's twenties, with a sudden panic setting in for many aged 30-35 around fertility, viability as a relationship partner and so on.
• Gen-Zers notably embracing nonbinary gender and fluidity in both identification and sexual orientation to an unprecedented degree - but also adopting a panoply of labels intended to secure recognition by the world as this, and not that, type of person.
• Both the expansion of trans rights, and the explosion of an anti-trans moral panic ostensibly organised against that expansion, but clearly aiming to roll back existing recognised rights and mobilise opinion against deviant expression in all its forms.
• Certain male-dominated ideological groupings - incels, white supremacists, deplorables of various stripes - acting up and causing mayhem, and becoming a focus of general concern about wayward, anomic or murderously out-of-control masculinity.
• What I call revanchist masculinism - various attempts to repair a perceived demoralisation of men by promoting new models of virtue, often pictured as reclaiming lost ground and status, contesting social trends or movements (feminism in particular) which are blamed for running men down and stealing their enjoyment and sense of purpose.
• Whatever the fuck is going on with young women on TikTok and Instagram.

It's quite a ferment, and not surprising that it calls for interpreters and seers...

 

[wg-]

Assuming that small fragments of extremely visible internet sub-cultures are representative of the whole of society is an easy mistake to make i think, as is assuming - as most do - that this sort of stuff has giant amounts of real-world influence.

The gender elements of the supposed culture war is simply a new derivative of racial panic, just as the personal freedoms/vax argument was a derivative of the religious zealot's online scenario

There are ways to remove yourself from these things altogether and just continue to exist without concerning yourself with trivial matters which were previously the domain of pub bores and benign racists

 

[john eden]

You've all been misgendering Laurie Penny btw, apparently her preferred pronouns are they/them. Naughty!

That’s good to know, Benny. I have corrected.

 

[IdleRich]

It's quite a ferment, and not surprising that it calls for interpreters and seers...

It certainly does. I reckon that one thing that winds people up (certainly it does me) is when people look at a complex situation like the one that you have identified above and then they don't say "Hmmm, I reckon it's probably x with maybe some y involved but I could be wrong and perhaps I've underestimated the influence of Z" but instead they just pronounce high-handedly and with authority that This Is How It Is. I know it's just the style that is required... but for someone who is not in that world there is something quite annoying about statements such as

"The result is that men are adrift in a state of nihilism"

I'd react a lot better if it was phrased more along the lines of "I think that the result may be that some men might be in a state of nihilism" though I can see that that kind of diffidence/honesty is never gonna take off. But... things are complex and mixed up and so on, personally I would accept people who acknowledged that that complexity means that analysis is difficult and arriving at a conclusion is tricky and thus they can only state theirs with a certain degree of confidence that is less than one hundred percent.

And when a statement applies directly to you it's even worse. Someone who has apparently grasped the entire situation and is now telling YOU how you feel, what you do and the reasons for that.

 

[sus]

This is how everything works though, in an age of mass communication. I admit it's a major bug in our society's linguistic technology, but it is harder than you'd think to escape.

E.g. when people give advice on social media ("Be more selfish," "be less selfish," "go easy on yourself," "don't give up") they have a certain kind of person in mind who they think would benefit from being more or less selfish, going easier or harder on themselves. Obviously, some people need the opposite message, some people are already too easy on themselves or too selfish.

But how do you specify who those people are? Perhaps if you're writing a book you can dedicate a chapter to "how to tell if you're the kind of person for whom this advice is meant." But few have the patience or desire to spell it out. Far easier, and more grand, to appeal to the universal. Our language evolved in more local contexts, where we spoke to specific people, often people we knew intimately. Now that's all changed, and each of us is suddenly a politician, an orator, a propagandist, an advertiser to the masses. The language must continue evolving.

 

[sus]

And writers of course have always done this, appealed to the universal when in reality they were describing a specific class of people, addressed all their readers when they had a particular subset in mind.

Very naughty but hardly unique to the author in question.

 

[sus]

Anyway, the point is that any time you abolish old roles, and their associated meaning-myths, of course you're going to have a sort of vacuum, and you need to provide alternate myths, and this is not remotely incompatible with supporting gender equality

Our author in question may be slightly hysterical but let's not pretend to not understand what he means

 

[IdleRich]

Oh far from it. It's just that for me, I find that as I get older and the more I learn, the more complex and hard to pin down, sum up and understand the world becomes. And I become increasingly suspicious of certainties and those who profess to have them.

 

[shiels]

This is how everything works though, in an age of mass communication. I admit it's a major bug in our society's linguistic technology, but it is harder than you'd think to escape.

E.g. when people give advice on social media ("Be more selfish," "be less selfish," "go easy on yourself," "don't give up") they have a certain kind of person in mind who they think would benefit from being more or less selfish, going easier or harder on themselves. Obviously, some people need the opposite message, some people are already too easy on themselves or too selfish.

But how do you specify who those people are? Perhaps if you're writing a book you can dedicate a chapter to "how to tell if you're the kind of person for whom this advice is meant." But few have the patience or desire to spell it out. Far easier, and more grand, to appeal to the universal. Our language evolved in more local contexts, where we spoke to specific people, often people we knew intimately. Now that's all changed, and each of us is suddenly a politician, an orator, a propagandist, an advertiser to the masses. The language must continue evolving.

This is a problem I’m trying to articulate. The very new exposure to very large or strangely stratified audiences is doing weird stuff

 

[sus]

Anyway, the point is that any time you abolish old roles, and their associated meaning-myths, of course you're going to have a sort of vacuum, and you need to provide alternate myths, and this is not remotely incompatible with supporting gender equality

Our author in question may be slightly hysterical but let's not pretend to not understand what he means

Indeed, some of the best feminist thinkers (e.g. le Guin, Haraway) have worked to formulate replacement myths; they just haven't successfully seeped into wider consciousness yet