Men are always talking about what’s “natural” but in nature it’s always the males of the species that have to be pretty or work really hard to get the females.
I want to see more men dressing up and wearing makeup. Dance for me. Build me a fucking house. Impress me, you mediocre fucks.
Pema, can I get you to demolish this post for me, please?
I suspect that this was a piece of personal rage on OP’s part, and is not supposed to be an argument, but since it, terrifyingly, has 35,000 notes, and I keep running into sentiments like this among my peers
What are the expectations surrounding male attractiveness, in american culture generally? Well, firstly, they’re that you perform masculinity. In a lot of communities this involves a degree of emotional self-regulation and repression that I almost can’t fathom. The idea that women’s gender performance is an effortful construct (makeup and fashion), but men just ~naturally are masculine with no difficulty~ isn’t just straight up traditional sexism, it also displays a complete lack of experience with how masculinity is enforced. The fact that men aren’t supposed to wear makeup doesn’t mean that the gender roles expected of them aren’t laborious and occasionally violently enforced.
Speaking of those gender roles: what do we actually expect of men, as a culture? OP seems to feel that we expect nothing: that men feel effortlessly entitled. There are, indeed, lots of gendered subcultures dedicated to insisting that men don’t owe women anything, that women expect too much. Our culture surrounding abuse often puts the onus on female abuse victims to please or placate their abusers. There’s the oft-cited example of romantic comedies where the unemployed loser gets a hot girlfriend because he just deserves her, and so on.
I am convinced that stuff like that is out there. I’ve seen a lot of it myself. But, with what I believe is serious historical backing, I think stuff like that is an increasingly widespread protest against the demands of traditional patriarchal capitalism.
The idea that manhood is achieved by providing for other people is really, really old. In American culture, it’s held far more sway than the image of entitled fratboyhood so many of my feminist peers despise intensely. And the thing is, while a male head of the family was supposed to get lots of power and respect, the price for it was a massive amount of labor. The male-supported family is a profoundly classist construct, absolutely, but it permeated how everybody thought about gender.
For several centuries, the most prominent American construction of manhood was one which relied on the experience of supporting others. Lots of people have devoted sophisticated thought to how this situation trapped and exploited the women and children who were supposed to be supported. I think those arguments are usually correct and important. Very intense feminists tend to assume that the father-provider figure was a horrific and open system of male domination. Conservatives tend to insist that it placed all the work on the shoulders of men and gave women leisure and freedom. I think they’re both wrong, because I think the gender binary is a crock of shit for everybody involved, although there’s a lot of variation in what kind of shit is distributed.
I did the bulk of the research for a coauthored article on gender in the Nation of Islam a while back (Malcolm X was the most public leader of the Nation, although not actually its leader, for anyone who doesn’t recognize the name). While I’m very far from an expert on gender and race in this country, the central tenet of the Nation’s gender ideology (shared by a lot of other black activists, although often differently framed) was that black men in America had been robbed of manhood, and thus authentic selfhood.
The idea was that black men were (/are) systematically denied the ability to care for their families, and that this constitutes horrific violence, because men are people through their capacity to care for others. A lot of socialist stuff, particularly from the Great Depression, makes a similar argument about poor white men. What I’m trying to say is that, across race and class boundaries, our culture’s general axioms of masculinity have historically been that manhood = financial responsibility for a household, and financial responsibility = contingent on correctly performed masculinity.
Obviously, there are lots of exceptions to this. But it seems to me that a lot of men are fed up with the idea that they should be responsible for the financial welfare, comfort, and social standing of their partners and children. Feminist men and women are also famously fed up with this idea, but from a “women shouldn’t be treated like prized objects dependent on male care” standpoint. The problem is that, because people have a deeply and viciously insistent believe in an oppositional gender binary, these sets of interests tend not to talk to each other.
OP is upset that men seem entitled. Men often feel a sense of entitlement because traditional gendered performance a) assumes that they’re paying for that power with literal money and b) because traditional gender roles assume that if they aren’t occupying that role they’re worthless. Everybody is insisting that either men or women are Lazy Assholes who Deserve Servitude. I, because I am nonbinary, am repulsed by cultures of patriarchy or entitlement, and then run headlong into people who are convinced that calling men mediocre and making generalizations about how all men say x is feminist praxis.
Ultimately, nobody is happy, because oppositional gendering actually doesn’t go away unless you directly address it. Equality of gendered power is hypothetically possible in a world where a lot of feminists and a lot of non-feminists continue to assume that men and women have non-overlapping needs and interests, but it requires what’s basically constant gendered warfare, and makes me sad. The end.