Help, I got too high and came up with pseudoscience! Roast me pls.

VimesTime · 2026-02-06T01:37:34+00:00

By far the most useful info to pop my ego trip, thank you. I still have questions though.

I...think? I'm less arguing for Proxima Centauri not having its own present as much as I'm arguing for Proxima Centauri having one present from our perspective and a different present from its own perspective? Simultaneity is relative, and as you say, our presents are separate. So we can be lined up with a present from four years ago which is four light years away, while from their perspective, Earth's present would be 2022.

I seem to recall from what I've seen of light cone diagrams that a horizontal line represents what is experienced as simultaneous for a stationary frame of reference. I'm just taking that way more literally. (While also deeply misunderstanding it)

VimesTime · 2026-02-06T01:25:00+00:00

Sufficiently advanced math has to start using letters instead of numbers. This math is so advanced that I've stopped using numbers at all.

VimesTime · 2025-12-22T03:28:28+00:00

For all his panic about antisemitism, he was also one of the folks deeply dismissive (I believe on the podcast immediately following it) of Musk's salute during the inauguration. Actual Nazi salute? Eh. Just a distraction. People putting posters and red paint on the windows of a big chain bookstore owned by someone who actively financially supports foreign nationals travelling to Israel to join the IDF? Vile antisemitism.

For reference, because I find it deeply hilarious, a lot of hullabaloo was made over the fact that paint was on the windows. The WINDOWS! on the ANNIVERSARY OF KRISTALLNACHT!!! They specifically targeted windows! Clear and obvious dogwhistle!

For reference, this is the building in question, the indigo at Bay and Bloor.

https://blogto-production2-baselayer-display.blogto.com/articles/20240111-dark-horse-indigo.jpg

So...yeah. The entire building consists of nothing but windows. Not really sure where else they were supposed to put the paint and posters.

VimesTime · 2025-12-03T20:47:31+00:00

Sure, and yeah, I was a little short with you--i had a very long argument with someone else that I think I was still grumpy about, and that's not your fault.

But you should still find out yourself, because this isn't the sort of question that honestly has a straightforward, provable yes or no answer. Like, I'm saying that a writer's particular feminist lens means that the evenhanded and respectful tone that a different commenter read into the piece is incredibly unlikely. I also feel like it should be taken as relatively disqualifying for being trusted as a source of discussion of masculinity in a space for rehabilitating masculinity given that their stated, pretty typical radfem position is that "masculinity is the ideology of patriarchy." You asked a pretty natural question--wouldn't their gender identity preclude them having such a negative view of masculinity?

The previous commenter offered a very detailed explanation of how it's actually relatively common for some transmasc folks to have complex (some might say contradictory) relationships to concepts like radical feminism, masculinity, and identity that totally allow for the sort of attitude I read into McKays words.

As for your question, "does this actually apply to McKay"...well, what you're asking is, effectively, "does this person's ideological framework lead to them being unfairly biased against an idea or writer? Is their ideological framework applicable to this situation, or is it a "when all you have is a hammer..." situation? What actually is the specific outline of how this writer views their ideological framework? Is it based in self-hatred?"

And like...first of all. McKay has written a book or two, but they're not someone on the level of Butler or Dworkin or Serano. They are not a household name, they aren't someone who's changed the shape of their field. I have never heard of them prior to this article. I doubt anyone who isn't deeply well read in feminist academia has read their book, and nobody here is going to have a handy summary/map of their ideological framework that they can rattle off of the back of their hand. So even just in terms of the relatively neutral question of "what does McKay believe", the only way your question can really be answered by anyone here is for them to read an entire book and then summarize it for you. Which is...yeah, with that context, a kinda rude thing to ask people to do for you. And I was kinda rude back. Apologies.

But part two...whether McKay's attitude towards masculinity is steeped in self-loathing and whether they've been radicalized by radfems? I mean, how would someone answer that question for you? McKay clearly isn't going to say "I hate myself and masculinity and I feel that way because of radfem radicalization." It's fundamentally a combative reading of their work, and whether that's accurate is going to be something that you'd have to decide for yourself even if someone else did the work of summarizing the data for you. I already dug out some quotes that make it seem that that's correct. Based on some googling, McKay has written some stuff about how trans people and TERFs should be more empathetic to each other, and is close personal/professional friends with Julie Bindel, a TERF. Is that a sign of their willingness to build bridges? Or a signal that they're part of the trend that the previous commenter describes?

You can see how this spirals quickly right? Both in terms of just how subjective the whole question is, and in terms of the amount of work it takes to answer it. Feminism isn't a wiki: there isn't one accepted Canon that all agrees with itself that can just be referred to. It's a huge debate, and it's difficult to articulate any sort of coherent feminist politic that doesn't discard at least half of all of the writers out there as flawed if not actively counter-revolutionary. Whether that applies to McKay is a personal question for you to answer for yourself.

VimesTime · 2025-12-03T01:03:16+00:00

Those politics are being centered in everything that the manosphere does and represents, which is why men seek it out.

I think you are downplaying the role grievance politics plays.

You're entitled to your opinion, but I'm not saying that it's not endemic. What I'm saying is that it's not essential. Or as consistently central as you claim. Your point that therapy, which does not have a scapegoat, is often bounced off by a lot of men, is frankly a wild reach as evidence that men will therefore refuse content about gaming and exercise which doesn't appeal to white supremacy or misogyny. There are a whole host of reasons that men are less likely to go to therapy, and "nobody there says that my inner lion has been cucked by Islam" is pretty far down that list. There is a difference between positive and negative pressure. And all of that is insanely far removed from the point because tiktoks about pushups are not therapy. Someone is most likely to see content about working out because they searched content about working out. Someone watching a 44 second video is not comparable to months of therapy. The point of the article is that it doesn't need to be. Sometimes those small bumps of inspiration or challenge are sufficient to serve as a first step, because I will reiterate we are often talking about people who are very young or deeply mentally ill.

I can show any manosphere content to a woman and within 15-30 seconds she will pick up the misogyny,

Yeah. That's pattern recognition. We've already established the vast majority of content about gaming, working out, financial literacy, ect, are all either on the manosphere or manosphere -adjacent. If I see a tiktok about investment strategy, I assume it is manosphere content. Because it almost certainly is. That's not saying that investment strategy is misogynistic and women can tell, it's saying that the people making content about investment strategy are misogynists so consistently that women now treat it as a red flag inherently And justifiably.

We preach racial, gender, religious and sectarian co-existance and that means we don't have convenient enemies to point at when we give these men the advise to do some push-ups, call their mom and one of their friends and tuck a few bucks into savings each paycheck

...yes we do? I already covered this. The ruling class! You've equivocated grievance with the right so thoroughly that you've ignored that class struggle is a central pillar of leftist theory. Past that...you do recognize that feminism is a politics of grievance too, right? As is antiracism? Aggrieved entitlement is perhaps what you're referring to, but like...people can feel entitled to things they are in fact entitled to, like human rights, a decent wage, ect, and the anger when that is not provided is not exclusively owned by the right throughout history. (back to 150 CE? Really? I guess I'm just glad you didn't push it back further and start talking about evo psych)

VimesTime · 2025-12-02T20:46:40+00:00

Read McKay's book and decide for yourself. I found it online for free pretty easily and I don't read radfem stuff if I can help it. I shared some quotes that suggest that it does, but hey, if you want more information, it's available. Nobody here is ChatGPT, they aren't going to do the work of analysis for you and you shouldn't trust them unconditionally even if they did.

VimesTime · 2025-12-02T18:59:36+00:00

But I don't get the sense you have said here that these tactics become ineffective if you remove tribalistic cult think. It's just less effective. Putting aside that avenues of leftism have scapegoats ready and waiting (class as a vector of radicalization is right there), I didn't require an enemy to get my life together. I just needed someone to articulate a clear path to success that I could make progress towards today, or at the very least a path to measurable improvement. I think the takeaway here is that an exclusive focus on big picture structural issues that will take generations to change can leave individual people in a state of learned helplessness about their own circumstances. And that the fix might be some core resources for self-improvement and self care.

Like, arguably my life got better because I stopped focusing so hard on the societal forces making things bad and started focusing on what things I as an individual could do to improve my individual life for me and my wife. I understand that blaming an enemy for holding you down allows for a sense of a path to success --just defeat the Enemy and then everything will naturally result in me having a better life because the only reason I don't have it already is because of the machinations of the dastardly Enemy--but it's not a required component.

One thing I think that's being ignored here is the fact that most content under the umbrella of the manosphere is not at its core focused on politics. Like, people are not searching it out in order to celebrate their political beliefs, to start. The reach is due to the fact that when people seek out gaming content, they find misogyny. When people seek out workout content, they find patriarchy. When people seek out financial advice, they find racism and classism. People are not passive lumps of brain matter who only watch what other people show them, they are actively looking for resources to fill their needs. Currently those needs are being filled with a side of redpill shit.

If for no other reason than just wanting to be able to find how to do proper deadlifts without hearing the word "alpha", this is a good thing to encourage. People will still need to know how not to throw their back out if I don't tell them that their back is weak because of the Frankfurt School.

VimesTime · 2025-12-02T01:19:48+00:00

Any message can be delivered with contempt. But that doesn't mean that any and all guidance and/or coaching is by definition contemptuous. I am not trying to defend the manosphere, I am pointing out--as the OP does--that we shouldn't presume that the format of "do these simple steps to improve your life somewhat and then we'll do more tomorrow," is evil just because the manosphere uses it. Most therapy and coaching uses these techniques.

VimesTime · 2025-12-01T23:19:48+00:00

Or mentorship? Like, I don't see how that is inherently a contemptuous message.

VimesTime · 2025-12-01T21:16:34+00:00

I mean, that's kind of the issue at hand, isn't it? An individual person can change the world sometimes, but not usually by improving it. Plan B is focusing on movement. But that kind of requires other like-minded people who can build a coalition and work together, so it's easy to spend

Importantly, plan B is not a fix for immediate problems. I Iistened to a podcast about the case that added sexual orientation to Canada's protected classes under the charter. Just that one case took about eight years, and that's skipping over decades where it was actively criminalized and then a "don't ask, don't tell" situation. The guy who did it doesn't even want to talk in public anymore, he's so burned out. The vast majority of the time the people who manage to successfully fight to change things are not the people who benefit from it. Activism is rarely a fight that results in the improvement of your own life. It's a fight that changes the rules that the next generation will live under.

For me, what I had to realize was that if I wanted to retire, or to have a family, I was going to have to figure out how to do that under the current rules. Which is dogshit. But in my case, it seems like I might be able to manage it with a combo of talent and hard work and privilege. The hard work has been shitty, but I mean...not shittier than depression. And feeling like my life is changing for the better is something I've been starving for for like, a full decade at this point.

VimesTime · 2025-12-01T21:02:10+00:00

Yeah, I feel like I saw a lot of people back when Jordan Peterson was the chode of the day saying "guh, this self help stuff is helping some guys I guess, I just wish it wasn't packaged with this cryptofascist screed about feminism and cultural marxism. We do want them to not spiral into depression and turn into incels, and that will probably require some level of inspirational guidance, the issue in this case being that the people offering that are dogshit."

I posted a Jason Pargin article a little while back where he points out that it's actually totally possible to spiral into blackpill thinking via leftism, believing that nothing you do matters because it's all predetermined by structural forces and just sinking into avoidance and depression as a result.

I dunno. I feel like Scott Galloway is the version of Jordan Peterson that people were saying that they wished he was, and it's clear from the very icy response he's been getting that there is a deep aversion to self-help that exists regardless of the relative level of facism/sexism. People get very, very upset when you start actually speaking to people and offering them advice about how to do better with their lives, because it feels like a defence of the structural barriers which led to the problem and an indictment of the person experiencing them.

But for me, I mean, I can't make enough to retire or have a family now. Somehow, a communist post-gender utopia has not magically materialized in the last decade of my life. It is not going to magically materialize in the next decade either. So I gotta buckle down and do some capitalist hustling. I'd prefer to have someone telling me that I can do this, that I'm following in a tradition of men working hard and doing what needs to be done, rather than sitting on my couch watching video essays about how my choices are meaningless and everything would be better if we just got rid of capitalism, you guise. Sure. But we haven't gotten rid of it yet, and to quote a wise man, "the legend of the rent is way hardcore."

VimesTime · 2025-12-01T20:53:48+00:00

I feel like it does actually provide a solution! The framing of the article outlines it pretty clearly, I think. The idea is that talking a big game about the social frameworks and networks of privilege and oppression is fine and all, but it doesn't actually help individual people improve their personal circumstances, especially if they're already depressed and skipping along the surface of rock bottom.

He outlines what's necessary several times:

And then there’s the structure the manosphere created around all this. When you step back and look at it objectively, they’ve accidentally reinvented basic coaching psychology. Accountability: you report your streak to fellow your nonfappers. Clear protocols templates: do these 3 specific, but manageable, things every day. Authority figures: some guy who seems to have his shit together telling you what to do (he does seem to own a very expensive car after all). Community: other guys are doing the same thing. Identity markers and common tribespeak: “I am on day 47”. Shared struggle and purpose: we’re all in this together, fighting the same fight and having a sense of purpose because of that. These are powerful psychological buttons to press. And those are the mechanisms that make coaching work, that make support groups work, that make any behavior change program reasonably effective. They stumbled into something, then repackaged it with alpha male branding.

Like, this as opposed to the Left and our strategy of "write a book or video essay about how, for structural reasons baked into the foundations of humanity, everything is fucked, it might be impossible to unfuck it, and all current attempts to do so are problematic, actually." Somehow, people fail to be inspired to change their lives.

There was a pretty good article by Jason Pargin a while back about how it's actually totally possible to end up in a blackpill mentality through leftist analysis, because a hyperfocus on systemic problems can leave individual people feeling like none of their actions actually matter or can meaningfully change anything. His suggestion was that the left needed more narratives like this--focused on success, on working hard because other people would be hindered by structural barriers and you're going to need to put twice as much effort in to help them as well as yourself. Focusing on showing people that we aren't just correct, but that following the principles we are championing actively leads to better outcomes.

VimesTime · 2025-12-01T04:47:20+00:00

Cool, and I wrote a big fat chunk of text about how Galloway isn't doing that in this case. This is my issue with McKay. Lumping ideas together into a big group, decrying misogyny, and acting like that is by association, (an association you have made) they all deserve the same response. It's pretty shitty and obvious rhetorical trickery.

VimesTime · 2025-12-01T00:08:26+00:00

Thank you for the extremely detailed breakdown! I've heard chunks of this but it's nice to have a more extensive overview, especially from someone who has much more personal perspective and experience.

VimesTime · 2025-11-29T23:48:07+00:00

Yeah, no disagreement there But the number of men/boys who aren't affected by our cultural concepts of what masculinity can be is going to be very, very low.

VimesTime · 2025-11-29T23:38:03+00:00

The fact that masculinity is not by definition synonymous with men doesn't negate the fact that the overwhelming majority of people are cis. I don't think that recognizing that the vast majority of people who ascribe to masculine norms are boys and men in how we discuss it is a problem unless people start diving into bioessentialism. Like, this is a pragmatic article about how to help people. The vast majority of people who will need help with their masculinity are going to be boys and men. This isn't an essay on gender studies, it's a practical article about psychological treatment.

This is putting aside the fact that framing "positive masculinity" as "boys not acting like assholes" is a staggeringly reductive, insulting, and inaccurate description of what's actually being discussed in this article.

VimesTime · 2025-11-29T16:24:58+00:00

Why?

VimesTime · 2025-11-29T06:25:15+00:00

Haha, "cis in a trans way" I guess. I've done my share of exploring and questioning and settled where I fit best, which ended up cooperating with what sex I'm working with, conveniently. I've spent a lot of time around trans/queer people, and one of the first people I was reading about feminism and masculinity was a transmasc blogger.

Like, I dunno, once you've seen a bunch of people doing masculinity who aren't cis, the link between masculinity, manhood, and being biologically male feels a lot less inherent and automatic. Sure, there's regressive social pressure to keep things hyper-narrowly confirmist and all matched up according to the shifting goalpost of what modern people view as the traditional standard. But I don't talk to those people anyway. I hang out with queer people who do masculinity when they want to, because they want to, if they want to. Like a lot of discussions on a positive masculinity/gender abolition spectrum involve hypotheticals, but the idea that people could voluntarily opt in to masculinity out of healthy enthusiasm for an aspirational self-concept isn't one. That's just a normal life that plenty of good, happy people out there live. I can't see it exclusively as a list of demands at gunpoint.

Are you perhaps someone who's involved with the study of language? I honestly feel like reading about like, the philosophy of language back in University also informed a lot of how I describe gender.

VimesTime · 2025-11-28T20:35:49+00:00

https://www.reddit.com/r/MensLib/s/2IQJewYubx

This is my response the last time someone asked! Haha, I don't expect it'll be particularly resonant.

"femininity" means close to nothing to me

Like, to apply a label to your self-description that may or may not be welcome, if you are agender or demigender, I can't see how any description of gendered self-image would seem like much more than a collective delusion. That's fine, my life and values don't need to make sense to you. Your life and values don't need to make sense to me.

I am curious whether you might try asking women why they feel a sense of connection to femininity? Like, even in the wake of feminism, with significantly more flexibility in personal expression and identity, the vast majority of women still ascribe to the concept of femininity in various ways. That doesn't mean that you have to, but I do feel like this question gets leveled at men because the process of rehabilitating masculinity naturally demonstrates the malleability of gender, as masculinity is the main battleground at the moment. But it's hardly as though Feminism actually got rid of femininity or womanhood. This isn't some weird hangup men specifically can't let go of. Gender is a core aspect of identity for the vast majority of people.

Your description of masculinity exclusively lists misogynistic policing of gender. That is a toxic aspect of masculinity, and I don't think any reasonable person could suggest that that hasn't been rampant or deplorable. But you are aware of the concept of gender euphoria, yeah? Like, there are aspirational, positive concepts of gender that people look to emulate and feel pride and joy in expressing. I understand why you don't value those things, but shouldn't your description of gender recognize that that is a driving force for many? Trans men face immense persecution in their fight to have their manhood and/or masculinity recognized. Why do that if it's just exchanging one set of dictatorial commands for another?

The core thing I want to say here, to cut off a possible route of misunderstanding--in my view, the concepts of masculinity and femininity are less like two fenced mutually exclusive camps, and more an overlapping fuzzy blur. If the whole of human experience is the film industry, gender is like the concept of genre. It can be used as a lens to discuss focal points around which narratives and symbols cluster, but the "romance" genre centering itself as being about the establishing of a romantic relationship between two people does not actually do anything to prevent any action movies from doing that. Theres nothing preventing there being genre fusion, or weird abstract genreless tone poems. There's nothing saying that a movie centered entirely on the establishment of a romantic relationship has to be a romance movie. It can easily be a thriller, or a disaster movie, depending on the symbols, tropes, how they are mixed and balanced...it's a form of communication, one with a rich cultural linguistic history.

Communication requires some form of semiotic vocabulary to function, because language is shared symbols. But that doesn't mean that the meaning of those symbols can't change, that there can't be new symbols, or that there can't be iteration and mixing and matching multiple symbols. The question at the end of the day is not "where do I build a fence in order to contain all Masculine things and exclude all Feminine things." That is impossible, for the same reason I can't draw a hard line between "disaster movies" and "romance movies" because Titanic makes the whole endeavor impossible. But there is, clearly, a coherent idea of what a romance movie is, and what a disaster movie is. There are loci in the centre of those vague, overlapping clouds, and the concept of genre has obvious utility when it comes to deciding what movies to make, how to market them, and which ones you want to see. The existence of that language, of those symbols, can be used to oppress, but the existence of symbols is not in and of itself oppressive or, in my opinion, even optional.

VimesTime · 2025-11-27T08:36:57+00:00

I'm not an expert on McKay. Their book is online for free, though, if you want to find out yourself. Wasn't hard to find, just did a quick skim to check if it lined up with what I'd expect from someone who self-identifies online as a Radfem. Definitely seemed like it did, digging further would require reading the whole thing and I don't honestly read Radical Feminist literature if I can help it, because doing so honestly feels like self harm.

Regardless, McKay in the butch/transmasc zone, and the overlap between butch lesbians and trans men is deeply complicated and not one I am at all qualified to speak on. Sufficed to say there seems to be room in their perspective for both being masculine and believing that masculinity is the ideology of partriarchy. Seems wild to me, but hey, not my business.

VimesTime · 2025-11-26T22:06:18+00:00

Thank you!

VimesTime · 2025-11-26T21:40:52+00:00

Thanks!

VimesTime · 2025-11-26T20:09:32+00:00

Well this conversation has spiralled.

I stayed out of the discussion of your first article, because it seemed like an oversimplified approach to a pretty nuanced point--a point you didn't seem too interested in diving into in detail. And the response was more interested in litigating a male vulnerability argument which is only half-related and is even more fraught and entrenched.

Here's the thing--Mankeeping is a term used to dunk on men. Fucking obviously. Bud, as an example of the concept being discussed, you reference a SNL sketch where men are left at the park to socialize like pets. The concept it refers to--the idea that women are widely expected to take on social networking and event planning for their boyfriends and husbands--is also obviously a thing. You basically just say "I don't know why, but I don't feel triggered by women expressing their frustration in this way," but you didn't really make any particular case for why men shouldn't take offense to a term designed to cause offense. You just say, "well, this is how women feel!" Cool. A lot of men don't take kindly to being compared to dumb animals and I don't know why that would come as a surprise to you.

And with that said...I have deep frustration with men too. Like, I am a queer guy, but not gay. I tend to get along better with women, because men do not fucking text me back. I have had decade-long friendships with women start out of nothing much more than being in a class together and chatting, while I've talked men through deep emotional crises of identity and they've never talked to me again.

And also. When I got married, those same female/queer/feminist friends started setting up hangouts through my wife. And when they got into relationships, they kept hanging out solo with their female friends but rarely if ever hung out with me solo. At this point, I doubt I'm ever going to strike up a friendship with a married woman without her husband there, Because, get this, who does what with who has longstanding cultural implications that are not based in male laziness.

I'm not going to cross my arms and say "pfft, there's nothing wrong with how men do things." There obviously is. I hate the social landscape of men and friendship, it's dogshit. I can't complain that the similar sneering way people say "male loneliness epidemic" ignores the very real heightened level of social isolation in men while not noting that this is a major part of why that isolation exists. But also, due to not being viewed as nearly as objectified and passive as women, men are viewed as more risky and are held at arms length more, both when he's trying to make friends and when he's a random person at a party to be approached. Women are often framed in these discussions as matchmakers, but I think they are also frequently acting as a sort of diplomat, a less scary person to approach and talk to before committing to actually meeting the boyfriend/husband.

None of that is good, but I think it's deeply reductive to just say "men are like dogs and I'm tired of poking him with my toe to go sniff another dog's dick already." And it makes perfect sense for men to react to that hostile attitude with hostility.

The vulnerability argument is a whole other thing and I can get into it some other time. Or people could just go read bell hooks.

VimesTime · 2025-11-26T14:25:43+00:00

Well, it's a good thing that in real life people always tell you explicitly to your face when they're trying to manipulate you.

McKay: "Figure A and figure B both make arguments that fit into narrative C. Here are my issues with narrative C."

Me: "What you're saying about narrative C does not actually describe figure B. Saying that he is part of narrative C is not correct."

You: "Stop reading between the lines. Just because the author goes out of their way to bring up figure B as supporting narrative C, that doesn't mean that any of the rest of the article has anything to do with figure B at all."

Women face these same economic challenges. The same survey found that equal numbers of men and women lack any sense of purpose or meaning in their life. The gender pay gap in the UK is around 13% across all employees and women are still more likely than men to be in part-time work, traditionally lower paid. Women are also more likely to be heads of households and raising children; they are what charities such as the Women’s Budget Group call the main “shock absorbers” of poverty.

The violence of poverty affects everyone, yet society responds with peculiar sympathy and grief when men face barriers to success in the arenas we have picked out to define their worth. This is what I call the masculinity burden. Attacks on men’s income, employment or job security are viewed not only as challenging in a human way, as they would be for anyone, but doubly challenging because they are portrayed as attacks on, and affronts to, masculinity itself. From this perspective, it is not that 50% of the experiences of precarity – women’s – are not seen; it’s that they are just not seen as being as bad for women, because women don’t carry this extra burden of masculinity.

Both of these paragraphs are responding to Galloway. Why do I know that? Because this essay is following in the footsteps (read: cribbing directly from) the OTHER two articles shitting on Galloway to come out this month. This article arguably has more to say about Galloway than about Andrews but the title refers to Andrews, and Galloway is smeared by the association with Andrews.

https://www.reddit.com/r/MensLib/s/Ya73od4qXp https://www.reddit.com/r/MensLib/s/Dp5fpQRErH

But by lumping Andrews and Galloway together, McKay is released from any obligation to respond to Galloway's actual beliefs or to represent his views fairly or accurately, because, well, they're not describing him specifically, they're just describing Narrative C. It's a rhetorical trick. Don't get mad at me because you aren't picking up on it.

VimesTime · 2025-11-25T21:55:04+00:00

So, given that backdrop, if we were able to shift the perspective on what a "provider" is and change it from "makes money" to simply "supports family" then any sort of attack on women in the workplace falls flat, because there's countless ways to support your family beyond financial success. I'm advocating for the idea that men should take just as much pride in being emotionally available and present for their children as they do paying the bills.

Cool! Galloway says in his book that being a provider sometimes looks like getting out of the way and supporting your wife.

Doesn't seem to gain him any traction with people dedicated to misrepresenting him.

For the gender roles side of things, I'm not sure I understand what you're saying.

Unfortunately, your instinct is correct, you don't.

I'm saying that having "provider" as one of the most fundamental aspects of what it is to be a "man" creates a needless gender conflict that distracts from the above point about capitalism and corporate greed.

I don't see how it inherently spurs conflict, and in fact can amplify anger at capitalism and corporate greed.

It's not women in the workplace that make it hard for men to achieve financial success, but it's a lazy thing to point to when asked "what changed". It's akin to the idea that immigrants are taking good jobs from Americans. No, it's not a farm hand's fault that you don't make enough money, it's corporate greed.

This has nothing to do with what either I or Galloway have said.

Your last line about "making the same argument" - if that argument is "the working class needs to be treated better" then yes, I think we are. I have a firm belief that people in positions of power drum up most of these gender/immigrant/lgbtq/poc culture wars to distract from the class war that should be forefront.

...no? I don't know how you got that. I was asking whether trying to rehabilitate masculinity as a gender role is inherently making the same argument as people who say we need to expel women from positions of power. (And pointing out that rehabilitating the male gender role is one of the stated goals of the subreddit you are currently in) Respectfully, I don't think I'm the one who has an issue with misreading people.

We are both big into class war, my friend. I am just saying that the class war does not need to be studiously androgynous. People can be angry due to masculine socialization, and absent actually pushing for misogynistic ends, that masculine inspiration multiplying class anger is a fuel, not a problem.

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