Do you like Adrian Tomine at all? I really love his graphic novels. Shortcomings is the most famous, and was turned into a movie, but I think the Summer Blonde is also really good! Nick Drnaso's Sabrina is also incredible.
I bought Shortcomings a few years ago and liked it enough, though I thought it was a bit too Gen X in its sensibility. I think that an updated version would feel more subtle and lived-in, whereas something like that perhaps felt the duty of having to say everything for the first time, so it had to be blunt and obvious. I know there was a movie version of it made last year, but I had no faith it would translate well, especially given the people involved. Randall Park seems like a talented guy, but he's also nearly 50 and I wouldn't trust him to have the best feel for the pulse of contemporary racial/gender dynamics in Asian America.
Why does it appear that there is any void in a straight man's perspective or that the only choice that remains is the extremists like Tate? All the major social media platforms are equally dominated by males and females. The women might be more vocal about their womanhood or likes and interests for various reasons but men are never asked to repress their interests and experiences. They have a platform in cinema, literature, and social media to express themselves and they are doing it as well.
In fact, one can argue that the requirement of women extensively creating and gatekeeping their interests began because they didn't have a choice to join the general perspectives beyond a certain limit. The cartoons that millennial and older GenZ kids watched while growing up were told from the narratives of little boys (Ben 10, Pokemon, Jake The American Dragon, etc) and the alternatives for girls were Power Puff Girls, Kim Possible, or Barbie movies. Even during that time, the boys had an impression that these cartoons apart from Disney Princesses and Barbies were their sector where girls couldn't join.
Mainstream music including hip-hop, rock, pop, and more has many artists who sing about being a man, falling in love as a man, and leading life as a man. There are endless novels from the perspective of a man, and there are many film franchises dedicated to pleasing men.
So there hasn't ever been a void or lack of space for men to share their perspectives. Secondly, men are more likely to be applauded and welcomed when they participate in something that is female dominated such as fanboys of K-pop are respected by women while female fans of Anime, Star Wars, or other male-dominated pieces are more likely to be doubted of having any genuine knowledge or interest in it.
Lastly, if men do feel like there should be better or more representatives of manhood then they will have to engage in the content that is written by men for men which is being created every day on every platform.
I disagree about men never being asked to repress our interests and experiences, at least as (East/Southeast) Asian American men. I mentioned it in my piece, about how for most of my life, any expression of the common straight Asian American male perspective would be attacked as misogyny because it made those with the most social cachet in our community (i.e. straight well-to-do Asian American women with lots of non-Asian friends and who are usually romantically involved with white men) uncomfortable. One major instance of this was when during a press conference, Jeremy Lin was asked a question about what it was like growing up as an Asian American guy. He said a bunch of things, including that when he was younger, he saw that a lot of Asian girls were popular with non-Asian boys, but Asian boys weren't that popular with non-Asian girls, and he wanted his example to be positivity for those types of Asian boys to build off of.
This innocuous, even wholesome, message was intensely attacked by many of the Asian American so-called social justice activists of that time as misogyny. Almost every Asian American guy can relate to what Lin was saying and he wasn't even expressing any anger. But the problem was his narrative contradicted the more acceptable narrative that either Asian American male problems didn't exist, or if they did, it was entirely our fault, so you couldn't ever criticize those aforementioned well-to-do socially successful Asian American women.
Times have changed, definitely. For instance, some of the stuff I write on this Substack would probably be considered much more incendiary than the stuff I was writing in 2017-2019, yet I got attacked way worse back then. But still, the effects linger. I don't think it's any coincidence that Asian American men shy away from telling our perspectives in culture. I see a lot of Asian American male sci-fi writers, or filmmakers who make movies about their parents, sisters, children... Anybody but ourselves.
Obviously, this doesn't apply as much to white men. Sometimes it's funny to see a white guy complain about the Kathleen Kennedy Star Wars movies for not having a white male hero when, say, the prequels are barely 20 years old. It's not like they have to reach back to the Golden Age of Hollywood to get their fix. But I also do things shifting enough where I do feel more sympathy for these white guys than I did 5-10 years ago. They may have a lot of previous cultural works to identify with, but those works are also not in tune with contemporary times. It's a contradiction, to claim how we live in such unprecedented and mind-boggling times of rapid change, but then also demand boys and men read Jonathan Lethem and watch Clint Eastwood movies to help them find their footing.
For me, there's a dark humor in the tension between certain people's claims that men have enough cultural representation in celebrities, movies, politicians, businesspeople, etc., and also simultaneously get mad at men for having said male role models.
"Why do straight men complain that there isn't enough cultural representation for them in society when they can just go watch Straight White Man Movie I, II, and III? Also anyone who watches Straight White Man Movie I, II, and III is problematic."
I do agree with you that the representation of a straight man belonging to a minority might be significantly less than someone from the majority and they face more hurdles in voicing out their perspectives. I also agree that ironically, some minorities of men might find it easier to make a space for themselves than others but it is also true that men in general have space in contemporary times to explore and talk about their manhood and experiences.
Yes, something I've come to learn over the years is that there is always space to talk and connect, even if those spaces aren't obviously available or you might face some criticism for seeking those spaces in the first place. But that's where guys have to "man up" too. You're not going to 100% beloved and praised for everything you say or do because various groups of people will often have conflicting interests. Develop enough of a sense of an internal moral compass where you can be confident that you can find that balance between advocating for your own interests while still being a good person.
This is a fair comment, but I want to gently suggest that any claim that "men are never asked to repress their interests and experiences" in this era must be juxtaposed against the social ascendancy of woke/DEI/critical theory/call it whatever you want post 2013, at least in mainstream Western culture and institutions. It's absolutely true that men (even straight white men) still have opportunities to say and make stuff, but it verges on disingenuousness to say that there wasn't a disproportionately loud voice calling for male voices and perspectives to be decentered and represented less often in our collective media and institutional cultures. (The particular locus of this in publishing- a field already overly represented by women- is the icing on the cake.)
Also, speaking as a former ten-year-old boy, Powerpuff Girls and Kim Possible were good shows. Don't @ me.
>Secondly, men are more likely to be applauded and welcomed when they participate in something that is female dominated
I sincerely hope this is true in 2023, and I'll be glad to be wrong. But this was definitely not the case when I was a teenager exploring fandom and fanfiction on Tumblr. (LGBTQ+ men were the obvious exception, although even they could end up in the doghouse for expressing opinions that were too heteronormative for the femme safe spaces.) Yes, there were a few spaces on Tumblr where you could be a straight man in peace, like whatabouttehmenz, but the fact that such a blog with such a title had to exist tells you something about the state of Tumblr spaces at the time.
I acknowledge the juxtaposition of my sentence with the woke culture but it is a stretch to say that there is a void in men's representation in contemporary settings because there were/are loud voices asking for it to be decentered.
Also, the shows were great for providing a narrative to little girls and entertainment to little boys. But girls were frowned upon if they enjoyed Bayblade, pokemon, or Power Rangers. That being said I believe that boys were also ridiculed for watching Barbie or Disney princesses but in a setting where more shows include little boys as narrators girls were asked more often why are they watching so-and-so instead of Barbie.
Lastly, about the men's treatment in women-centric fandoms: I got access to the internet later (2017/18) so you'd have better knowledge about it before that time but in the past few years I have noticed that among general netizens and my friends that women tend to engage with men more easily if they have an interest in things that are usually women-centric. I have also encountered men using photos or fan art to approach women without necessarily having an interest in the given show/artist/activity/book.
But then again men are ridiculed for liking anything girly and also defended for it. This then directs to some normal behavior being criticized as toxic masculinity. Internet is tough.
>I acknowledge the juxtaposition of my sentence with the woke culture but it is a stretch to say that there is a void in men's representation in contemporary settings because there were/are loud voices asking for it to be decentered.
Yes, on this we agree. It's true that just because there are some loud voices calling for men to sit down and shut up doesn't mean that men have no representation whatsoever, or that men have no agency to ignore those naysayers and create stuff anyway. That being said, to echo Chris' earlier point, it's also a bit of a social kafkatrap when people say men already have lots of representation in culture but are also often the same people dismissing said representation as retrograde and just something there should be less of in society.* There are lots of Guy Movies out there, but if everyone tells you that watching Guy Movie is heteronormative and problematic, how much is Guy Movie supposed to help in terms of representation anyway? What's the point of being told you have representation if it represents something the people around you don't like, and even more so if the existence of said representation is also the very same reason that people think you don't deserve more of it?
*I don't mean to imply this is something you do personally- I think you brought up your points respecfully. It's just something I notice sometimes in the discourse at large.
> I have noticed that among general netizens and my friends that women tend to engage with men more easily if they have an interest in things that are usually women-centric.
That's good to hear, although I do want to draw a distinction between "women simply being more receptive to men if they show interest in a female-centric activity than if they don't" and "men being welcomed and accepted into a social space centered around a female-coded activity". But I'll try not to quibble too much on this point. Also, I definitely don't claim that women showing interest in male-coded activities in male spaces have it any easier.
>I have also encountered men using photos or fan art to approach women without necessarily having an interest in the given show/artist/activity/book.
Hey, if Barack Obama could do it...;)
>But then again men are ridiculed for liking anything girly and also defended for it. This then directs to some normal behavior being criticized as toxic masculinity. Internet is tough.
If I were to actually type out what I think about toxic masculinity, I could probably submit the result for nanowrimo. Also Chris would probably ban me. I agree with you that internet is tough.
On the lack of "guy's lit" - is it survivor bias? Like, just thinking of the well-adjusted traditionally masculine guys in my life, most of them are not into literature, and if they are they're not into fiction vs "Freakonomics" or WWII history, and if they are they're into traditional genre fare. You mention DFW in this essay in passing, in the way he's usually evoked - not as a writer but as a callsign for anti-"litbro" cryptozoologists. But I think his work *is* on some level alienating, not on account of the verbosity or the footnotes per se (Infinite Jest is, like Ulysses, much less difficult and much more fun a work than its reputation would imply), but because his work is alienating because it pulses with the desire to internalize the normalcy of "ordinary," mentally well people.
As for guy culture - and I can't believe *I'm* positing this to *you,* lol - I think that part of it is that the material conditions of millennial/gen-Z life are hostile towards "growing up" (and achieving the traditional markers of maturity - house, job, kids, etc) and that this is much, much worse for straight guys, whom gender norms dictate are supposed to have and provide these things. The "manosphere" strikes me as the gendered mirror of TikTok's, erm, "girlysphere" - a world embracing gender norms via a ridiculous, not-quite-self-aware cosplay, populated by people who obviously aren't those things. (Well-adjusted guys can probably get girlfriends without resorting to pick-up artist trickery.)
(P.S.: Is there a good way to get in touch with you outside of Substack? I tried the contact form on your site but I have no idea if that works.)
I focused on literature because it's something I'm interested in and it's where this gender imbalance is very stark. But even take something like movies. There was a recent announcement about a new Star Wars movie about Rey that will be directed by a woman who identifies more as an activist than a filmmaker. There can't possibly have been any market research that showed audience really wanted a Rey movie, especially one directed by that kind of director. If this tendency keeps up and men (and many women) simply stop watching Star Wars movies and the franchise will mainly appeal to, say, Hillary Clinton stans, will we then say that this is just the natural course of action, as opposed to the result of a deliberately ideological move?
The contact form on my site didn't work? Weird. My email is chrisjesulee@gmail.com then!
It seems there's something masochistic about all the examples you give—masculinity as torture. Is there no alternative? When we discuss masculine joy, do we inevitably slide into Andrew Tate and Bronze Age Pervert territory?
Also worth considering: your male protagonists consider women as their antagonist, even as they desire them. But rejection stings (in part if not totally) because it is rejection in favor of someone else, usually another man. In evopsych terms, men do not compete with women for reproductive success; they compete with other men. Homosociality is far more of a zero-sum game than heterosexuality!
Regarding masculine joy, I just have a natural preference against anything "joy" because from what I've seen, it tends to slide into wish fulfillment territory and I find that boring at best and extremely annoying at worst. But that's, of course, using a very conciliatory definition of "joy."
Sometimes, joy can be zero sum. I'm thinking of what would bring joy to a young man. Likely, getting laid. In some lucky situations, both the man and woman in that situation would get exactly what they want. But it's often not so. Therefore, if the man were to get joy out of that encounter, it may come at the expense of the woman (e.g. he didn't call for days after). Therefore, under some people's criteria, that'd be misogyny and not allowed to be depicted unless it moralized against the man's actions. So if even this type of masculine joy is suppressed, then it's no wonder that frustration and alienation builds up and explodes in the form of an Andrew Tate. But that, as I wrote in my piece, might also be by design, which is why I think the healthiest culture for young men is to more freely express themselves and be able to take criticism/feedback but also not be too cowed by it.
You generally don't, unless it's your wife, or your girlfriend, or someone who you have a crush on and would like to be your wife or girlfriend. Or, depending on how far along the blackpill incel scale you are, basically any female above 17.
On a more serious note, I understand that there are very good reasons (biological and social) why we live in a world where men and women do not generally cheer for and try to support the other's sexual success. But sometimes I think it would be nice if people could at least pretend otherwise for a few minutes.
But that's my point. The instances where you care about a woman getting laid are those instances where she would be getting laid with you. You don't care about her getting laid in an absolute sense.
I think there's an alternative at least to the tortured masculinity which seems to be at the heart of your examples. Richard Linklater's films, for instance, are pretty "masculine" (at least in my understanding of masculinity) but aren't tormented or brutal.
Something I've been wondering lately on "what would bring a young man joy" - I would say parenthood was on the radar of... maybe 50% of my girl friends as a teenager, and literally 0% of the teen boys I knew. Which in hindsight strikes me as odd, because being a father is much more enjoyable than being a mother! (Or rather, having children is an equal source of joy for fellas and ladies, but even the most progressive, paternity-leave-taking, housework-doing dad isn't getting a C-section.)
Is "masculine joy" vs "feminine joy" just "joy at the expense of others" vs "joy at the expense of yourself" ?
Do you mean "feminine joy" is mostly conceived of as happiness at the expense of yourself (i.e. finding joy at helping others) whereas "masculine joy" is mostly conceived of as happiness at the expense of others (i.e. finding joy at being selfish)?
I was thinking of those ideas in terms of what would make a typical woman or man happy on a day-to-day level that's generally specific to gender. Like a young man's key moment of happiness would be successfully asking out a woman on a date, while a young woman's equivalent would be getting asked out by a guy she likes.
As a gay man my voice isn't the one the author is looking for here, but I'd like to make a plug for my straight brothers anyway. In a culture where oppression is worn like a badge of merit, it's not easy being any kind of a straight male...and if you're a straight white male, forgettaboutit. Straight white men aren't ifso facto "bad" but we treat them like they are -- and then complain when they're not happy about their mistreatment.
I think a lot of male authors maybe feel like they don't need to speak for men in the way that female authors speak for women, because the male authors are speaking for all of humanity, and saying things that are broader than the experience of one sex.
one thing, male feminist need not be derogatory, though I, a 35 year old (asian-american) millenial have also hated the term ever since my second college girlfriend told me her last boyfriend was one. It's possible that feminism in the future would include men, and english philosopher amia srinivasen outlines one in the right to sex -- in which men & women would join together to critique the market-liberalization of sex through apps and internet culture, and the various strictures of gender that unevenly but definitely constrain both.
Thanks! I was making fun of the self-identifying showy type of male feminists who, by 2024, have all long exposed themselves as hypocrites or worse, haha.
I don’t know any of those men. I do know that what you say about the need for men to have models of how to be is desperately important and I salute you for recognizing that. Maybe we have to drop the word feminism for now and just look for decent human beings
"Some may fear that yielding any ground to straight guys’ perspectives will result in the metastasizing of Andrew Tate-inflected manosphere culture. But those cultures also spring up because young men don’t have many gender-specific alternatives."
This has the added bonus of allowing the self-appointed Gender Guardians.to clutch their proverbial pearls and wail about how bad men are when we aren't there to police them.
This is not a perfect analogy on my part, but it has always interested me how some of the most frothingly angry reactions I've seen from feminists (online and IRL) have not been towards boorish men who pooh-pooh the gender pay gap or make crude jokes about Female Body Inspectors, but towards other women- especially otherwise liberal, egalitarian women- who express sympathy towards anything male-coded.*
Don't get me wrong, there are certainly anger, ire, and four-letter-words aplenty directed towards Bad Men. (Just log onto Twitter for a couple of seconds and see.) But for Bad Women, the anger becomes very personal in nature. The Bad Men were never part of the sisterhood, and can be mocked, memed, and dunked on from a distance. The Bad Women are at once closer and more dangerous, like that one survivor hiding a zombie bite who says they're fine. (At least with the male feminists who turn out to be creeps, one can comfort themselves by pointing out that they were always men.) But a woman who has had the lived experience of a woman and all that it entails, yet still finds it within her woman brain to empathize with the enemy, is difficult to parse as anything else than a potential crack in the foundation of solidarity, whether her words are co-opted by opportunistic Bad Men, or whether she (gasp) speaks out herself. The apostate is always scarier than the infidel.
Of course, for gender equality purposes, I should point out that this dynamic also exists in male spaces towards males who express anything relatively female-sympathetic as well. (See the "white knight" or "she's not gonna f**k you bro" reply guys on twitter.) But in my experience, those guys who dissent, while ridiculed and dismissed, rarely receive the level of personal vitriol you see directed towards women. (This might not be true on dedicated manosphere forums, but the average manosphere forum is much less accepted in polite society than the average feminist forum- and anecdotally, if I've seen much more feminist friendly fire than manosphere friendly fire in my usual internet browsing, I suppose that's also something to note.)
If it wasn't clear already, I think navigating the gender wars has been and will continue to be one of the biggest political/cultural divides in modern society. You can go through life without not really caring about the income tax rate, education policy, or geopolitics. Hell, even Hamas and Israel was faraway news for (some) people. But you can't abstain from being seen as a man or a woman (or any other gender identity, for that matter), and you can't opt out of all the things (nice or nasty) that someone else will believe about you just by being born into that particular gender army. I mean, you can try, but modern society and the internet has made that harder and harder.
The question "What should a contemporary guys' culture look like?", I think, is the $64,000 question of our age. Someone could and should write a thinkpiece on why that question has proven so difficult to answer. I am probably not that someone. I will only point out that it is telling that so many of the people who try to answer this question, much like so many of the people who try to suggest "good" dating advice for men, suggest things that are less designed for guys to actually succeed and more designed for guys to go away and stop annoying other people. There is an undeniable tension at the fact that many aspects of guys are problematic (source: I am one), and yet, at the end of the day, no human being, guys among them, wants to be treated like a problem.
This ended up rambling longer than I expected, but I'd feel bad deleting it, so I'm going to post it anyway. I guess this is a long-winded way of saying that if you like probing into the less-flattering but true and honest parts of the human psyche and the social contracts we all grow up in, you should write more pieces about men and women. You might get canceled, but to quote Lord Farquaad from Shrek, that's a sacrifice I am willing to make.
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*obligatory not-all-feminists. Feminists are nice. I'm even friends with some of them.
There's a line I've had rolling around in the back of my mind for a couple of weeks now -- I think I made it up, but maybe I just heard it somewhere and have appropriated it for myself -- "men like women because they are women, and women like men despite the fact that they are men." I don't know how true I actually think this is. I do think, though, that the root of the bitterness that many men feel toward women is motivated more by self-loathing than anything else. A lot of men are angry at themselves for being so desperate for women's affection in the first place. It's as if women are mad at men for liking women too much (or in the wrong way), and men are mad at themselves for precisely the same reason.
That's why explanations of gender conflict that resort to "women are afraid that men will kill them and men are afraid that women won't talk to them" never really seemed correct to me. Violence against women is lower than it's ever been, but women are more afraid than ever. Rejection feels bad, yeah, but the kind of resentment it inspires is so viscerally out of proportion that it can't the real reason. That's why I think that the problem is not with the way men relate to women, but with men's sense of self, and their idea of who they are and what they are supposed to be doing. There is a pervasive sense, felt by both men and women, that (certain) men aren't needed, aren't wanted, and therefore anything they do seems wrong and any attempt to assert their wants or desires feels out of place even to themselves.
I'm not sure what the "solution" for that would be, but I know it doesn't start either blaming women or with trying desperately to earn their approval.
That's an interesting idea, that men have become so confused about our purpose and value that we've become more reliant on our appeal to the opposite sex. In short, we've taken more of what we think of as a female identity. And we don't like it.
My friend has a podcast called Champagne Sharks and in a recent episode, they looked at Fresh & Fit and discussed the kind of guys who are into that. In case you don't know, F&F is a manospheric podcast/Youtube show that mostly consists of the hosts bringing on a bunch of young women (usually OnlyFans girls) and having so-called debates with them. My friend had a great thesis about why F&F fans loved seeing these OnlyFans girls constantly attacked and humiliated: it wasn't a frustrated desire to sleep with them, but instead, it was a frustrated desire that they couldn't be them. These guys thought these girls lived an easy life where they could get money and/or attention by being hoes online and they wished they could do that too, but of course, nobody really wants to see men behaving that way. And that was the source of their resentment.
I'm not sure that's it exactly. How many of those guys would actually be willing to run an OnlyFans if they had the option? There might be some jealousy about the attention that women get for free just for being women, which OnlyFans is an extension of, but I think the deeper resentment is directed inward. A man who resents a women for making a living on OnlyFans knows that the only reason women can do that is because some men are desperate enough to pay those women for their attention.
I think it's a kind of self-hatred projected outward, which is useful way of interpreting why incels persistently refuse to do anything to get themselves out of their miserable state, why advice directed towards incels on how to get laid invariably rings a bit false, and why a desperate attempt to present oneself as an "ally" to women is useless to pretty much everyone. Thinking of this in terms of "men vs. women" is a distraction.
Do you like Adrian Tomine at all? I really love his graphic novels. Shortcomings is the most famous, and was turned into a movie, but I think the Summer Blonde is also really good! Nick Drnaso's Sabrina is also incredible.
I bought Shortcomings a few years ago and liked it enough, though I thought it was a bit too Gen X in its sensibility. I think that an updated version would feel more subtle and lived-in, whereas something like that perhaps felt the duty of having to say everything for the first time, so it had to be blunt and obvious. I know there was a movie version of it made last year, but I had no faith it would translate well, especially given the people involved. Randall Park seems like a talented guy, but he's also nearly 50 and I wouldn't trust him to have the best feel for the pulse of contemporary racial/gender dynamics in Asian America.
I'll check out your other recs!
Why does it appear that there is any void in a straight man's perspective or that the only choice that remains is the extremists like Tate? All the major social media platforms are equally dominated by males and females. The women might be more vocal about their womanhood or likes and interests for various reasons but men are never asked to repress their interests and experiences. They have a platform in cinema, literature, and social media to express themselves and they are doing it as well.
In fact, one can argue that the requirement of women extensively creating and gatekeeping their interests began because they didn't have a choice to join the general perspectives beyond a certain limit. The cartoons that millennial and older GenZ kids watched while growing up were told from the narratives of little boys (Ben 10, Pokemon, Jake The American Dragon, etc) and the alternatives for girls were Power Puff Girls, Kim Possible, or Barbie movies. Even during that time, the boys had an impression that these cartoons apart from Disney Princesses and Barbies were their sector where girls couldn't join.
Mainstream music including hip-hop, rock, pop, and more has many artists who sing about being a man, falling in love as a man, and leading life as a man. There are endless novels from the perspective of a man, and there are many film franchises dedicated to pleasing men.
So there hasn't ever been a void or lack of space for men to share their perspectives. Secondly, men are more likely to be applauded and welcomed when they participate in something that is female dominated such as fanboys of K-pop are respected by women while female fans of Anime, Star Wars, or other male-dominated pieces are more likely to be doubted of having any genuine knowledge or interest in it.
Lastly, if men do feel like there should be better or more representatives of manhood then they will have to engage in the content that is written by men for men which is being created every day on every platform.
I disagree about men never being asked to repress our interests and experiences, at least as (East/Southeast) Asian American men. I mentioned it in my piece, about how for most of my life, any expression of the common straight Asian American male perspective would be attacked as misogyny because it made those with the most social cachet in our community (i.e. straight well-to-do Asian American women with lots of non-Asian friends and who are usually romantically involved with white men) uncomfortable. One major instance of this was when during a press conference, Jeremy Lin was asked a question about what it was like growing up as an Asian American guy. He said a bunch of things, including that when he was younger, he saw that a lot of Asian girls were popular with non-Asian boys, but Asian boys weren't that popular with non-Asian girls, and he wanted his example to be positivity for those types of Asian boys to build off of.
This innocuous, even wholesome, message was intensely attacked by many of the Asian American so-called social justice activists of that time as misogyny. Almost every Asian American guy can relate to what Lin was saying and he wasn't even expressing any anger. But the problem was his narrative contradicted the more acceptable narrative that either Asian American male problems didn't exist, or if they did, it was entirely our fault, so you couldn't ever criticize those aforementioned well-to-do socially successful Asian American women.
Times have changed, definitely. For instance, some of the stuff I write on this Substack would probably be considered much more incendiary than the stuff I was writing in 2017-2019, yet I got attacked way worse back then. But still, the effects linger. I don't think it's any coincidence that Asian American men shy away from telling our perspectives in culture. I see a lot of Asian American male sci-fi writers, or filmmakers who make movies about their parents, sisters, children... Anybody but ourselves.
Obviously, this doesn't apply as much to white men. Sometimes it's funny to see a white guy complain about the Kathleen Kennedy Star Wars movies for not having a white male hero when, say, the prequels are barely 20 years old. It's not like they have to reach back to the Golden Age of Hollywood to get their fix. But I also do things shifting enough where I do feel more sympathy for these white guys than I did 5-10 years ago. They may have a lot of previous cultural works to identify with, but those works are also not in tune with contemporary times. It's a contradiction, to claim how we live in such unprecedented and mind-boggling times of rapid change, but then also demand boys and men read Jonathan Lethem and watch Clint Eastwood movies to help them find their footing.
For me, there's a dark humor in the tension between certain people's claims that men have enough cultural representation in celebrities, movies, politicians, businesspeople, etc., and also simultaneously get mad at men for having said male role models.
"Why do straight men complain that there isn't enough cultural representation for them in society when they can just go watch Straight White Man Movie I, II, and III? Also anyone who watches Straight White Man Movie I, II, and III is problematic."
In the end--men, women, gay, straight, etc.--we’re all narcissists who become sour when others contradict our own most self-pleasing narratives.
I do agree with you that the representation of a straight man belonging to a minority might be significantly less than someone from the majority and they face more hurdles in voicing out their perspectives. I also agree that ironically, some minorities of men might find it easier to make a space for themselves than others but it is also true that men in general have space in contemporary times to explore and talk about their manhood and experiences.
Yes, something I've come to learn over the years is that there is always space to talk and connect, even if those spaces aren't obviously available or you might face some criticism for seeking those spaces in the first place. But that's where guys have to "man up" too. You're not going to 100% beloved and praised for everything you say or do because various groups of people will often have conflicting interests. Develop enough of a sense of an internal moral compass where you can be confident that you can find that balance between advocating for your own interests while still being a good person.
This is a fair comment, but I want to gently suggest that any claim that "men are never asked to repress their interests and experiences" in this era must be juxtaposed against the social ascendancy of woke/DEI/critical theory/call it whatever you want post 2013, at least in mainstream Western culture and institutions. It's absolutely true that men (even straight white men) still have opportunities to say and make stuff, but it verges on disingenuousness to say that there wasn't a disproportionately loud voice calling for male voices and perspectives to be decentered and represented less often in our collective media and institutional cultures. (The particular locus of this in publishing- a field already overly represented by women- is the icing on the cake.)
Also, speaking as a former ten-year-old boy, Powerpuff Girls and Kim Possible were good shows. Don't @ me.
>Secondly, men are more likely to be applauded and welcomed when they participate in something that is female dominated
I sincerely hope this is true in 2023, and I'll be glad to be wrong. But this was definitely not the case when I was a teenager exploring fandom and fanfiction on Tumblr. (LGBTQ+ men were the obvious exception, although even they could end up in the doghouse for expressing opinions that were too heteronormative for the femme safe spaces.) Yes, there were a few spaces on Tumblr where you could be a straight man in peace, like whatabouttehmenz, but the fact that such a blog with such a title had to exist tells you something about the state of Tumblr spaces at the time.
I acknowledge the juxtaposition of my sentence with the woke culture but it is a stretch to say that there is a void in men's representation in contemporary settings because there were/are loud voices asking for it to be decentered.
Also, the shows were great for providing a narrative to little girls and entertainment to little boys. But girls were frowned upon if they enjoyed Bayblade, pokemon, or Power Rangers. That being said I believe that boys were also ridiculed for watching Barbie or Disney princesses but in a setting where more shows include little boys as narrators girls were asked more often why are they watching so-and-so instead of Barbie.
Lastly, about the men's treatment in women-centric fandoms: I got access to the internet later (2017/18) so you'd have better knowledge about it before that time but in the past few years I have noticed that among general netizens and my friends that women tend to engage with men more easily if they have an interest in things that are usually women-centric. I have also encountered men using photos or fan art to approach women without necessarily having an interest in the given show/artist/activity/book.
But then again men are ridiculed for liking anything girly and also defended for it. This then directs to some normal behavior being criticized as toxic masculinity. Internet is tough.
>I acknowledge the juxtaposition of my sentence with the woke culture but it is a stretch to say that there is a void in men's representation in contemporary settings because there were/are loud voices asking for it to be decentered.
Yes, on this we agree. It's true that just because there are some loud voices calling for men to sit down and shut up doesn't mean that men have no representation whatsoever, or that men have no agency to ignore those naysayers and create stuff anyway. That being said, to echo Chris' earlier point, it's also a bit of a social kafkatrap when people say men already have lots of representation in culture but are also often the same people dismissing said representation as retrograde and just something there should be less of in society.* There are lots of Guy Movies out there, but if everyone tells you that watching Guy Movie is heteronormative and problematic, how much is Guy Movie supposed to help in terms of representation anyway? What's the point of being told you have representation if it represents something the people around you don't like, and even more so if the existence of said representation is also the very same reason that people think you don't deserve more of it?
*I don't mean to imply this is something you do personally- I think you brought up your points respecfully. It's just something I notice sometimes in the discourse at large.
> I have noticed that among general netizens and my friends that women tend to engage with men more easily if they have an interest in things that are usually women-centric.
That's good to hear, although I do want to draw a distinction between "women simply being more receptive to men if they show interest in a female-centric activity than if they don't" and "men being welcomed and accepted into a social space centered around a female-coded activity". But I'll try not to quibble too much on this point. Also, I definitely don't claim that women showing interest in male-coded activities in male spaces have it any easier.
>I have also encountered men using photos or fan art to approach women without necessarily having an interest in the given show/artist/activity/book.
Hey, if Barack Obama could do it...;)
>But then again men are ridiculed for liking anything girly and also defended for it. This then directs to some normal behavior being criticized as toxic masculinity. Internet is tough.
If I were to actually type out what I think about toxic masculinity, I could probably submit the result for nanowrimo. Also Chris would probably ban me. I agree with you that internet is tough.
Thank you again for the discussion.
Fair points, thanks for the discussion
On the lack of "guy's lit" - is it survivor bias? Like, just thinking of the well-adjusted traditionally masculine guys in my life, most of them are not into literature, and if they are they're not into fiction vs "Freakonomics" or WWII history, and if they are they're into traditional genre fare. You mention DFW in this essay in passing, in the way he's usually evoked - not as a writer but as a callsign for anti-"litbro" cryptozoologists. But I think his work *is* on some level alienating, not on account of the verbosity or the footnotes per se (Infinite Jest is, like Ulysses, much less difficult and much more fun a work than its reputation would imply), but because his work is alienating because it pulses with the desire to internalize the normalcy of "ordinary," mentally well people.
As for guy culture - and I can't believe *I'm* positing this to *you,* lol - I think that part of it is that the material conditions of millennial/gen-Z life are hostile towards "growing up" (and achieving the traditional markers of maturity - house, job, kids, etc) and that this is much, much worse for straight guys, whom gender norms dictate are supposed to have and provide these things. The "manosphere" strikes me as the gendered mirror of TikTok's, erm, "girlysphere" - a world embracing gender norms via a ridiculous, not-quite-self-aware cosplay, populated by people who obviously aren't those things. (Well-adjusted guys can probably get girlfriends without resorting to pick-up artist trickery.)
(P.S.: Is there a good way to get in touch with you outside of Substack? I tried the contact form on your site but I have no idea if that works.)
I focused on literature because it's something I'm interested in and it's where this gender imbalance is very stark. But even take something like movies. There was a recent announcement about a new Star Wars movie about Rey that will be directed by a woman who identifies more as an activist than a filmmaker. There can't possibly have been any market research that showed audience really wanted a Rey movie, especially one directed by that kind of director. If this tendency keeps up and men (and many women) simply stop watching Star Wars movies and the franchise will mainly appeal to, say, Hillary Clinton stans, will we then say that this is just the natural course of action, as opposed to the result of a deliberately ideological move?
The contact form on my site didn't work? Weird. My email is chrisjesulee@gmail.com then!
It seems there's something masochistic about all the examples you give—masculinity as torture. Is there no alternative? When we discuss masculine joy, do we inevitably slide into Andrew Tate and Bronze Age Pervert territory?
Also worth considering: your male protagonists consider women as their antagonist, even as they desire them. But rejection stings (in part if not totally) because it is rejection in favor of someone else, usually another man. In evopsych terms, men do not compete with women for reproductive success; they compete with other men. Homosociality is far more of a zero-sum game than heterosexuality!
Regarding masculine joy, I just have a natural preference against anything "joy" because from what I've seen, it tends to slide into wish fulfillment territory and I find that boring at best and extremely annoying at worst. But that's, of course, using a very conciliatory definition of "joy."
Sometimes, joy can be zero sum. I'm thinking of what would bring joy to a young man. Likely, getting laid. In some lucky situations, both the man and woman in that situation would get exactly what they want. But it's often not so. Therefore, if the man were to get joy out of that encounter, it may come at the expense of the woman (e.g. he didn't call for days after). Therefore, under some people's criteria, that'd be misogyny and not allowed to be depicted unless it moralized against the man's actions. So if even this type of masculine joy is suppressed, then it's no wonder that frustration and alienation builds up and explodes in the form of an Andrew Tate. But that, as I wrote in my piece, might also be by design, which is why I think the healthiest culture for young men is to more freely express themselves and be able to take criticism/feedback but also not be too cowed by it.
The only time a woman cares about a man getting laid is if that woman is his mom and she wants grandkids.
Ha!
I mean, how often do you care if a woman gets laid? (I can speak for myself, it's never.)
You generally don't, unless it's your wife, or your girlfriend, or someone who you have a crush on and would like to be your wife or girlfriend. Or, depending on how far along the blackpill incel scale you are, basically any female above 17.
On a more serious note, I understand that there are very good reasons (biological and social) why we live in a world where men and women do not generally cheer for and try to support the other's sexual success. But sometimes I think it would be nice if people could at least pretend otherwise for a few minutes.
But that's my point. The instances where you care about a woman getting laid are those instances where she would be getting laid with you. You don't care about her getting laid in an absolute sense.
I think there's an alternative at least to the tortured masculinity which seems to be at the heart of your examples. Richard Linklater's films, for instance, are pretty "masculine" (at least in my understanding of masculinity) but aren't tormented or brutal.
Something I've been wondering lately on "what would bring a young man joy" - I would say parenthood was on the radar of... maybe 50% of my girl friends as a teenager, and literally 0% of the teen boys I knew. Which in hindsight strikes me as odd, because being a father is much more enjoyable than being a mother! (Or rather, having children is an equal source of joy for fellas and ladies, but even the most progressive, paternity-leave-taking, housework-doing dad isn't getting a C-section.)
Is "masculine joy" vs "feminine joy" just "joy at the expense of others" vs "joy at the expense of yourself" ?
Do you mean "feminine joy" is mostly conceived of as happiness at the expense of yourself (i.e. finding joy at helping others) whereas "masculine joy" is mostly conceived of as happiness at the expense of others (i.e. finding joy at being selfish)?
I was thinking of those ideas in terms of what would make a typical woman or man happy on a day-to-day level that's generally specific to gender. Like a young man's key moment of happiness would be successfully asking out a woman on a date, while a young woman's equivalent would be getting asked out by a guy she likes.
I think the false dichotomy is exactly as you describe: either masculinity is presented pathologically (a burden) or a pathway to extremism.
We are deeply uncomfortable with masculinity to the extent that it's now presented as inherently radicalizing and a gradient into terrorism.
As a gay man my voice isn't the one the author is looking for here, but I'd like to make a plug for my straight brothers anyway. In a culture where oppression is worn like a badge of merit, it's not easy being any kind of a straight male...and if you're a straight white male, forgettaboutit. Straight white men aren't ifso facto "bad" but we treat them like they are -- and then complain when they're not happy about their mistreatment.
I think a lot of male authors maybe feel like they don't need to speak for men in the way that female authors speak for women, because the male authors are speaking for all of humanity, and saying things that are broader than the experience of one sex.
Or something.
one thing, male feminist need not be derogatory, though I, a 35 year old (asian-american) millenial have also hated the term ever since my second college girlfriend told me her last boyfriend was one. It's possible that feminism in the future would include men, and english philosopher amia srinivasen outlines one in the right to sex -- in which men & women would join together to critique the market-liberalization of sex through apps and internet culture, and the various strictures of gender that unevenly but definitely constrain both.
G
What’s wrong w male feminism? Fascinating essay, thank you
Thanks! I was making fun of the self-identifying showy type of male feminists who, by 2024, have all long exposed themselves as hypocrites or worse, haha.
I don’t know any of those men. I do know that what you say about the need for men to have models of how to be is desperately important and I salute you for recognizing that. Maybe we have to drop the word feminism for now and just look for decent human beings
I worked in DV for 5 years and stayed far away from that word lol, almost every self-identified make feminist has turned out to be some kind of creep.
"Some may fear that yielding any ground to straight guys’ perspectives will result in the metastasizing of Andrew Tate-inflected manosphere culture. But those cultures also spring up because young men don’t have many gender-specific alternatives."
This has the added bonus of allowing the self-appointed Gender Guardians.to clutch their proverbial pearls and wail about how bad men are when we aren't there to police them.
The crazier and wilder your adversaries are, the easier it is to deal with them. The sympathetic and makes-sense opponent is the most dreaded one.
Re: adversaries:
This is not a perfect analogy on my part, but it has always interested me how some of the most frothingly angry reactions I've seen from feminists (online and IRL) have not been towards boorish men who pooh-pooh the gender pay gap or make crude jokes about Female Body Inspectors, but towards other women- especially otherwise liberal, egalitarian women- who express sympathy towards anything male-coded.*
Don't get me wrong, there are certainly anger, ire, and four-letter-words aplenty directed towards Bad Men. (Just log onto Twitter for a couple of seconds and see.) But for Bad Women, the anger becomes very personal in nature. The Bad Men were never part of the sisterhood, and can be mocked, memed, and dunked on from a distance. The Bad Women are at once closer and more dangerous, like that one survivor hiding a zombie bite who says they're fine. (At least with the male feminists who turn out to be creeps, one can comfort themselves by pointing out that they were always men.) But a woman who has had the lived experience of a woman and all that it entails, yet still finds it within her woman brain to empathize with the enemy, is difficult to parse as anything else than a potential crack in the foundation of solidarity, whether her words are co-opted by opportunistic Bad Men, or whether she (gasp) speaks out herself. The apostate is always scarier than the infidel.
Of course, for gender equality purposes, I should point out that this dynamic also exists in male spaces towards males who express anything relatively female-sympathetic as well. (See the "white knight" or "she's not gonna f**k you bro" reply guys on twitter.) But in my experience, those guys who dissent, while ridiculed and dismissed, rarely receive the level of personal vitriol you see directed towards women. (This might not be true on dedicated manosphere forums, but the average manosphere forum is much less accepted in polite society than the average feminist forum- and anecdotally, if I've seen much more feminist friendly fire than manosphere friendly fire in my usual internet browsing, I suppose that's also something to note.)
If it wasn't clear already, I think navigating the gender wars has been and will continue to be one of the biggest political/cultural divides in modern society. You can go through life without not really caring about the income tax rate, education policy, or geopolitics. Hell, even Hamas and Israel was faraway news for (some) people. But you can't abstain from being seen as a man or a woman (or any other gender identity, for that matter), and you can't opt out of all the things (nice or nasty) that someone else will believe about you just by being born into that particular gender army. I mean, you can try, but modern society and the internet has made that harder and harder.
The question "What should a contemporary guys' culture look like?", I think, is the $64,000 question of our age. Someone could and should write a thinkpiece on why that question has proven so difficult to answer. I am probably not that someone. I will only point out that it is telling that so many of the people who try to answer this question, much like so many of the people who try to suggest "good" dating advice for men, suggest things that are less designed for guys to actually succeed and more designed for guys to go away and stop annoying other people. There is an undeniable tension at the fact that many aspects of guys are problematic (source: I am one), and yet, at the end of the day, no human being, guys among them, wants to be treated like a problem.
This ended up rambling longer than I expected, but I'd feel bad deleting it, so I'm going to post it anyway. I guess this is a long-winded way of saying that if you like probing into the less-flattering but true and honest parts of the human psyche and the social contracts we all grow up in, you should write more pieces about men and women. You might get canceled, but to quote Lord Farquaad from Shrek, that's a sacrifice I am willing to make.
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*obligatory not-all-feminists. Feminists are nice. I'm even friends with some of them.
There's a line I've had rolling around in the back of my mind for a couple of weeks now -- I think I made it up, but maybe I just heard it somewhere and have appropriated it for myself -- "men like women because they are women, and women like men despite the fact that they are men." I don't know how true I actually think this is. I do think, though, that the root of the bitterness that many men feel toward women is motivated more by self-loathing than anything else. A lot of men are angry at themselves for being so desperate for women's affection in the first place. It's as if women are mad at men for liking women too much (or in the wrong way), and men are mad at themselves for precisely the same reason.
That's why explanations of gender conflict that resort to "women are afraid that men will kill them and men are afraid that women won't talk to them" never really seemed correct to me. Violence against women is lower than it's ever been, but women are more afraid than ever. Rejection feels bad, yeah, but the kind of resentment it inspires is so viscerally out of proportion that it can't the real reason. That's why I think that the problem is not with the way men relate to women, but with men's sense of self, and their idea of who they are and what they are supposed to be doing. There is a pervasive sense, felt by both men and women, that (certain) men aren't needed, aren't wanted, and therefore anything they do seems wrong and any attempt to assert their wants or desires feels out of place even to themselves.
I'm not sure what the "solution" for that would be, but I know it doesn't start either blaming women or with trying desperately to earn their approval.
That's an interesting idea, that men have become so confused about our purpose and value that we've become more reliant on our appeal to the opposite sex. In short, we've taken more of what we think of as a female identity. And we don't like it.
My friend has a podcast called Champagne Sharks and in a recent episode, they looked at Fresh & Fit and discussed the kind of guys who are into that. In case you don't know, F&F is a manospheric podcast/Youtube show that mostly consists of the hosts bringing on a bunch of young women (usually OnlyFans girls) and having so-called debates with them. My friend had a great thesis about why F&F fans loved seeing these OnlyFans girls constantly attacked and humiliated: it wasn't a frustrated desire to sleep with them, but instead, it was a frustrated desire that they couldn't be them. These guys thought these girls lived an easy life where they could get money and/or attention by being hoes online and they wished they could do that too, but of course, nobody really wants to see men behaving that way. And that was the source of their resentment.
I'm not sure that's it exactly. How many of those guys would actually be willing to run an OnlyFans if they had the option? There might be some jealousy about the attention that women get for free just for being women, which OnlyFans is an extension of, but I think the deeper resentment is directed inward. A man who resents a women for making a living on OnlyFans knows that the only reason women can do that is because some men are desperate enough to pay those women for their attention.
I think it's a kind of self-hatred projected outward, which is useful way of interpreting why incels persistently refuse to do anything to get themselves out of their miserable state, why advice directed towards incels on how to get laid invariably rings a bit false, and why a desperate attempt to present oneself as an "ally" to women is useless to pretty much everyone. Thinking of this in terms of "men vs. women" is a distraction.