Comment XK Re: Devil and the deep blue sea

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Teen Girls Face Charges After Beating Video Shared Online

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Devil and the deep blue sea (Score: 5, Insightful)

by danieldvorkin@pipedot.org on 2014-03-30 20:07 (#W1)

Boys in this situation have no good choices. If they fight back, they'll be crucified for "hitting a girl." If they don't, they're wimps who got "beat up by a girl." The main difference between this and the unknown number of similar cases is that the girls were dumb enough to publicize it.

Re: Devil and the deep blue sea (Score: 1)

by rocks@pipedot.org on 2014-04-01 01:13 (#WX)

As the rights of women to be strong or masculine rises, at least in some parts of the world, it is interesting to ponder that the rights of men to be weak or feminine has not risen equally. It would seem that changing stereotypes and assumptions is not a zero sum game that is always in some sort of balance.

Re: Devil and the deep blue sea (Score: 2, Interesting)

by vanderhoth@pipedot.org on 2014-04-01 11:08 (#X1)

Actually an overly feminist friend of mine posted a story on my facebook page about how we need to stop telling our boys to "man up". Reading the article was like driving screwdrivers into my eye sockets. The whole premise was we use things like "your such a girl" as an insult thus we're implying that women are weak and a suitable insult, but instead of saying we should expect our girls to be more emotionally stable, intelligent, hard working and strong we should expect our boys to be more like our girls. That's to say we should let our boys to be emotionally vulnerable, tell them it's ok to fail and *require* someone else to help them.

Why The Men's Rights Movement Is Garbage

I'm really not ok with that. I don't understand why instead of expecting *more* from our girls we should be expecting *less* from our boys.

Re: Devil and the deep blue sea (Score: 1)

by rocks@pipedot.org on 2014-04-01 17:30 (#XK)

I like your point, we should expect more from each other, male or female. However, here are two concrete examples from my life which feel more nuanced.

My very young son loves to dance, ideally I would like to put him in dance classes, maybe even ballet to learn the excellent technique. I quite likely won't though because I fear the stigma for a boy in dance classes more.

A husband of a friend is currently under-enemployed. She brings home the money and does most of the domestic stuff. He is deeply embarrassed to not be providing money for his family but is quite hostile to asking for help, especially from his wife, even if it could result in employment. Helping with the domestic stuff may not heal his sense of worth to his family either

There may be more to being a man than current conventions allow. It's not just about allowing weakness in some frail sort of way, I suspect. What do you think?

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