News
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
view the rest of the comments
The weirdest thing is all that needs to happen is for men to talk about their feelings, doesn't even have to be another man.
That's it.
But so many men just won't fucking do it.
So it's literally one of the only problems that can actually be solved by raising awareness.
I sometimes question whether the "men don't talk about their feelings" stereotype even holds true for the current generation of men. I surely can, and so do the few male friends I have. I mean, I guess it's still broadly speaking true, but my anecdotal experience just doesn't seem to reflect that too much. Speaking about my feelings has never been an issue for me personally. I even talk about them to people I probably shouldn't.
How you doing? I have been better!
That's probably selection bias.
It’s scary to do, especially if it’s with someone you don’t know very well. But I’ve found every time I opened up other men have been very supportive.
It’s also a little weird to me that the article doesn’t seem to treat women as potentially being supportive, deep friends for men? I don’t think they established a rationale for why it is important that strong friendships be specifically with other men. Any strong friendship should have mental health benefits.
I hear you on your second point. I don't feel like friendships with the opposite sex can't be strong and supportive.
Women definitely can be supportive, deep friends for men. However, it’s really important that we don’t inadvertently perpetuate placing the burden of men’s emotional support entirely on women.
I’m a woman, albeit not one that cares much for gender (or the divisions society creates around it.) I have relationships of all kinds with people across the sex/gender spectrums (I’m pansexual, polyamorous.) The sad truth is that, for a lot of women in hetero relationships, we become the sole emotional support for the men we’re in relationships with. We’re expected to perform emotional labor for them daily, but it isn’t always reciprocated.
Men who have other men they can rely on for emotional support don’t end up putting 100% of their emotional burdens onto their relationship partner, and trust me, that means A LOT. One of the reasons I’m drawn to polyamory is specifically because it leads to a support network - multiple people capable of supporting each other. Having been the one and only “everything” for a partner, back when I was monogamous, was extremely taxing on me. I have my own issues to deal with, and when a man has no one else to turn to besides their partner, the division of emotional labor can easily become a one-way street.
So you are right - there’s no reason women and men can’t be strong friends with each other. But it is crucial that men reach out to each other too, without expecting women to always be the ones to provide emotional support for them.
There's also the risk that emotional support and friendship can interpreted as romantic interest. Either within a male-female friendship or by others. More importantly it shouldn't be a female job to provide all the emotional labor for society!
Decades of societal conditioning will take decades more to repair, unfortunately.
I mean, we're talking about the population susceptible to it in the first place.
All they have to do is stop being weird about it, but they'll never do it because they're obsessed with not seeming weird.
It's fucking insane that you think it's on the rest of society to spend decades "conditioning" them to quit it with the toxic masculinity. When all they have to do, is stop doing what isn't working and no one is impressed by.
That's the most ironic thing about it. All they have to do is stop pretending they're tough, but they're not tough enough to do it.
I think you’re oversimplifying when the social consequences for being seen as weak or effeminate have (even in recent history) been so harsh for men and boys. Very often this behavior is abused into boys, with parents (not just dads, but moms too) sometimes going as far as murdering boys they think are gay.
That doesn’t mean men aren’t responsible for their own behavior, but IMO this needs to be understood as an abusive practice foisted on boys from the time they’re old enough to act on their own in any way, a sort of culturally accepted PTSD imprinted on boys. Framing being caught in this cycle of abuse as being somehow weak or unmasculine is itself participating in the abusive structure it is speaking out against.
I grew up on a farm and worked construction, played sports thru college, then joined the military. Raised by and around other men who make my life seem like a cakewalk.
Every stereotypically "manly" group I've been apart of, dudes are all emotionally open because they're secure in their masculinity.
When boys/men think they're acting "tough" by suppressing their emotions, they're not copying men who are actually tough, they're copying other people's false bravado.
That's the entire point of what I'm saying.
All the posturing only impresses other people that are posturing.
And literally anyone can stop buying into it at anytime...
If they don't, they're perpetrating it.
It's the easiest thing in the world to stop caring what douchebags think is "manly" and that's literally all it takes to fix this
If any problem could be solved by ‘just do x’ it would have been solved already. I grew up in the same sort of environment you did, except the men in my life very much bought into the culture of toxic masculinity. It wasn’t until I started to research my own family history and saw the horrific abuse that my father, grandfather, and great-grandfather experienced and perpetuated that I really made the connection between the cycle of abuse, PTSD, and toxic masculinity.
For people that can just drag themselves out of that mire on their own without any help, great. But some need to be pointed in the right direction and to work through all the trauma that was inflicted on them.