Are Things Masculine?
The thing I learned in childhood, and was proven true over and over in life, is that I must always be able to stand up on my own. Other people will inevitably be torn away, everything dies, and I’ll be left drowning if I’m not already secure solo.
This is a core reality of masculinity.
Why masculinity?
First - I cheat, by answering the wrong objection
A friend objects (emphasis added):
[I’m] thinking “wow this is so relatable, maybe i’m not as alone in my experience as i thought” and then they say something like “This is a core reality of masculinity.” and i’m like, “oh.” and suddenly that brief sense of connection and shared humanity is gone and i’m back to feeling like an outsider and an interloper and like it was terribly presumptuous of me to think that i could understand someone in that way, or be understood, and it makes me sad.
but, like, what if we DIDNT insist that all our experiences were unique to one gender/race/social class/etc, and left ourselves open to opportunities to connect with people that we maybe didn’t realize we could connect with?
I firmly disagree that this is just a men thing. My grandmother raised my mom by herself, moving across the country several times to find work so she could provide for her daughter and help set my mom up for an easier life than she had.
My previous partner Alex1 left her parents’ house at age fifteen. She worked a part time job to pay the rent on a room in a crappy shared apartment while putting herself through high school with basically no support from her parents. Her first husband exploited her trust then dumped her. Her core experience in life was that she can’t rely on anyone other than herself, and has to do everything alone. It was lonely, and hard, and one of the things we bonded over.
“I wish I’d never met you,” she told me as I moved out during our break-up. “You made me believe I could count on someone else. I knew better. I was that stupid again and it’s humiliating.”
She’s back to relying only on herself now.
So yes, I’m aware this isn’t only a man thing. Self-sustainability is a good strength for anyone to have. I’m very attracted to women with aggressive self-sufficiency and I end up filtering for them. I don’t insist it’s unique to one sex, and it’s kinda dismaying that someone who knows me could think I don’t know that.
So why do I say it’s a “masculine” virtue, and “a core reality of masculinity?”
Second - I defend my “gender normativity”
“if you have posts defending this gender normativity, i am super curious for a link to it”
The quoted request implies that I believe this is how things should be. A description isn’t necessarily an endorsement, though. Men have a lot more physical power than women. It’s kinda stupid, and definitely unfair, how much more. In addition to the baseline difference, women were additionally incapacitated for a significant portion of their adult lives via pregnancy and childbirth. I bet evolution optimized men to be the violence-and-labor machines of the human species specifically because pregnancy and childbirth were so vulnerability-inducing. Optimize your builds!
In the pre-modern world, the majority of work required a lot of raw physical power. Chiseling security out of an indifferent world is hard and sometimes dangerous work. It must be done for survival. It’s easier for men to do. You know what else is hard and sometimes dangerous, and must be done for continued survival? Bearing children.
Culture is downstream of environment and biology. It is a masculine virtue to be self-sufficient and to clear out security for loved ones because this is what men have to offer. Women have something to offer which doesn’t depend on taming a portion of the outside world. They have intrinsic value in their own right, due to the realities of biology. A man who cannot produce something of value in the world has nothing of value.
This has observable consequences. Women in dire straights get more sympathy and help then men. Women are physically protected to a far greater extent. A man is expected to eventually stand on his own, and is a failure if he cannot. Women can be successful and loved even when entirely resource-dependent on others, because that is not where their social and cultural value lies.
On the other hand having one’s social value primarily as an intrinsic property bound to your biology, rather than bound to the external world, does mean outsized external achievements will raise a woman’s social value to a lesser degree than the outlier man’s social value.
This extends to the personal. Women find men who can fix things around the house and solve problems more attractive. Women find men who complain about hardship less attractive. Men want to be around women simply because it feels good to be near them.
In Pursuit of Beauty
Could we destroy all this and flatten the sexes? The practical differences are lesser in the modern day. The world is safer by default and physical protection is less in demand. Less work requires physical power. All the most valuable work is cognitive. Women spend a tiny fraction of their lives incapacitated by childbirth compared to the past, and it’s much less dangerous.
And yet the instincts remain. We’ve been programmed by millennia of evolution to demand competence from men, and to find women intrinsically valuable. It remains the case that only women can bear children, and that they are physically weaker, and this makes them more vulnerable.
To work to provide for and protect them is beautiful. To take on risk in the service of this work is noble. The pursuit of these ideals makes the world a more beautiful and romantic place. Lives filled with striving after virtues are richer.
Anyone can shine a masculine or a feminine virtue into world through their actions. The virtue is called masculine because it embodies a role originating in the male mythic archetype. It is ultimately aesthetic—to be a beautiful virtuous man requires this self-sufficiency. It is also good in women, but it is not a requirement of the feminine aesthetic.
The tragedy of realizing one will drown if they cannot secure their own footing in the world is a core reality of masculinity. It is part of the narrative of life in a male body, and every man who isn’t shielded by extended childhood will come to realize this. It can befall women too, but it isn’t definitionally a part of their existence due to their very biology.
That is fine, there are many other tragedies and difficulties to bring adversity into our lives that ensure we’ll keep weaving entrancing narratives with our lives. If some of them are male-archetypical, that doesn’t mean they can’t be found in a woman’s life. It just means it’s an outside-of-distribution story, with many new twists.
And, vice versa, of course.
Not her real name
"Could we destroy all this and flatten the sexes?"
You talk as if these are inherently joined, but they are not. If we "flatten the sexes," it doesn't destroy the joy of living out a (previously sexist) archetype. It just removes the sexism from the archetype!
In fact, I argue that this has already happened and you're trying to force it back into a sexist box. You claim "The virtue is called masculine because it embodies a role originating in the male mythic archetype." But there isn't a single male mythic archetype. There are many archetypes traditionally associated with men, all of which have different virtues. The one you describe here - self-sufficient, productive, protective of the weak - is a classic Hero archetype. But there is also the Outlaw, the Nerd, the Activist, the Mastermind, the Trickster, the Average Joe, the Con Man, and dozens of other traditionally-male archetypes. All you're doing is describing the one that appeals most to you personally and declaring it the One True Masculinity. But as you readily admit, anyone can be a Hero. One of the good things feminism did was it expanded the archetypes to allow in members of both sexes (even as it did go too far at times and claimed neither sex was more likely to fit). So instead of calling it "a core reality of masculinity," why call it a reality of the person you want to be? Or a reality of heroism? Or anything that doesn't draw false dichotomies and alienate anyone who doesn't conform.
This whole post gives whiplash because you say "I’m aware this isn’t only a man thing... and it’s kinda dismaying that someone who knows me could think I don’t know that" and then go on to talk about how yes, it's only a man thing:
- "I bet evolution optimized men to be the violence-and-labor machines"
- "It is a masculine virtue to be self-sufficient and to clear out security for loved ones because this is what men have to offer"
- "Women in dire straights get more sympathy and help then men"
- "A man is expected to eventually stand on his own, and is a failure if he cannot"
- "outsized external achievements will raise a woman’s social value to a lesser degree than the outlier man’s social value"
- "It is a truth that applies to all men"
What you're describing her are (small to medium) statistical disparities, not realities. It's the kind of collective judgment that is obvious, cartoonish racism if you apply it to race or nationality. Imagine someone calling leadership a "white virtue." By your logic, it's accurate because it "embodies a role in the mythic white archetype." But it's also ridiculous to do that, because we understand it would be (reasonably) upsetting to people to suggest that certain virtues are inherently associated with one race, even if we did make up a plausible-sounding evolutionary story. It's entirely possible to acknowledge that the sexes have certain tendencies without proclaiming things to be manly or womanly.
You say "Women find men who can fix things around the house and solve problems more attractive" as if men don't find that attractive (we do). You say "Women find men who complain about hardship less attractive" as if men don't find that unattractive (we do). You say "Men want to be around women simply because it feels good to be near them" as if women don't do the same thing (they do). You're taking very common experiences of both sexes are falsely describing them in sex-based terms.
You don't have to do anything or be anything just because you're a man. You don't have to be self-sufficient! You just have to find someone who wants to support you (you know, like Captain America does). I'm not self-sufficient! I'd be completely lost, both emotionally and materially, without the people in my life who support me. That doesn't make me any less of a man. You might choose to describe that as less masculine, but that's a choice you're making, not an inherent aspect of humanity.
You ultimately try to justify using sexist terms with the declaration that "the tragedy of realizing one will drown if they cannot secure their own footing in the world is a core reality of masculinity. It is a truth that applies to all men, and every one who isn’t shielded by extended childhood will come to realize this." It is not. And if you thought for five minutes, you'd realize it's not. "Self-sufficiency" isn't even really a thing unless you're living in the woods and foraging all of your resources. But to the extent it exists in the modern world, it is not a requirement to be an adult man. Plenty of (very impressive men) got where they are because they had extra help. They had, and continue to have, parents, spouses, friends, and sometimes even strangers supporting them.
As one of the most masculine men once said: we all need someone we can lean on. And if you want it, you can lean on me.
[Inferential difference](https://www.lesswrong.com/w/inferential-distance) too high on this one.
Also why give your ex a fake name and then never use it in any future sentence in the post?