What a brilliant thesis!

Lying to the husband about the voting record is a “good” thing? What about a relationship based on honesty, openness and mutual respect?

OH MY GOSH!!!! What a bunch of “victims”!!! Man Up already!! Oops! Wrong term.

BTW - Book clubs are cool but can we read something balanced… O’Reilly perhaps?
OK… Just kidding about O’Reilly being balanced.

Interesting. I suppose you could say I have womb envy, in that, if I think about it, I think, “y’know, being able to get pregnant and have a kid would be cooler than not being able to, if I had reasonable control over it.” Oh, and I’d also like to be able to fly, turn invisible, and all that. I mean, the more cool abilities I’d have, the better!

I don’t think of my womb envy as particularly sexist, and I suppose that, at least imagining abstractly, if I were a woman, I’d have a corresponding mild case of penis envy (”Yeah. Being able to control my piss better, have sex-using-a-penis, and being able to impregnate people, if I had reasonable control over it, would be cooler than not being able to.”). However, I suppose that maybe if, instead of regarding being able to give birth as one of many things that I can’t do (along with telekinesis, being able to see perfectly in complete darkness, etc), and thought of it as a usurpation by women of some role that’s so awesome and important that it really should be reserved for men, then maybe I’d resent women, which is where the sexism comes in.

I don’t know. It’s intriguing.

But, for some reason, our country has decided that soccer is a sport for pussies, literally or figuratively. Certain sub-cultures of American society value soccer, and encourage boys to keep playing it after elementary school, but the dominant culture trivializes it.

For god’s sake, keep it that way! If the US, with its well-funded sports teams and athletic citizens, starts getting involved in football (soccer, to you non-Brits) there’s not a hope in hell that England will ever win the World Cup again.

Well, there’s not a hope in hell of that anyway, but at least this way I can still pretend…

Funny we hear so little about that today — or that the first teams were womens’ teams. Just like most other things to which women contributed, it has been simply airbrushed away.

Interesting, given that American football is often perceived as rugby for people who like to pose in padded uniforms and stop every five minutes for a commercial break…

Not that I really know much about soccer, just commenting on what I’ve seen of its trivialization here in the States (and the King of the Hill episode where Bobby joins the soccer team really sticks in my mind, as Hank Hill is a good Everyman). I’m willing to declare it to be an interesting sport, based on its popularity in the rest of the world. Just always been interesting to me how soccer was left to women in this country, and they literally took the ball and ran with it.

Then, men see it and take it over and all of a sudden it’s no longer ok to be a woman and play basketball. It was our game first, buckos!

I will read this book. Sounds very interesting, and I am out of books to read right now.

And, IMO, a book club would be awesome. Give us at least a couple weeks to read it though, as it can take some of us a while to unpack lit (even those who gradauted magna cum laude in college, like me). I will be there, possibly with bells on.

… so men suffering from anxious masculinity are constantly policing the borders to make sure they don’t experience being “feminineâ€? by having tender feelings, admitting that humans are interdependent or even, in the worst cases, engaging with people in any kind of relationship that doesn’t feature an opportunity for such men to dominate. In addition, anxious men are always trying to force women into limiting gender roles, because sharing any role with a woman provokes such anxiety.

OK, and yet somehow the way men use and demand the woman-hating, violence, othering, dehumanisation and hierarchies made explicit in, say, porn, has Nothing Whatsoever to do with any of this.

You know, like the fact that male soldiers “need” porn (’cos they’re just kids and boys will be boys and anyway they might die, so we can’t possibly begrudge the poor little wankers their daily dose of misogyny-for-Real-Men before they go off to knock around their female comrades or the “enemy” in general. Nope, porn is just harmless fun really, no influence, no reflection of male fears and hang-ups, just no connection there at all).

Join the dots ? Hello ? Anyone ?

In my secret heart of naïve idealism, I’ve always felt that humanism, stripped of its sexist underpinnings (i.e. a strong whiff of patriarchal self-justification that some “humanists” have burdened it with) is really the only way out: gender roles are no more than roles, and differences between the biological sexes should generally be given no more weight than other differences between individuals. We’re one species, with endless variety. Biology is only one determinant of who and what we are. But, of course, as a practical matter following this tack makes no more sense than pretending that race makes no difference and so we must be colorblind. Like racism, sexism exists, and must be confronted. Toxic masculinity must be opposed, not just ignored. And thus it must be understood for what it is — which is more than just male fear of female power.