In my personal relationships I have a right to be totally irrational, including being totally intolerant.
It is irrational to end a relationship because of political differences. But so what?

“Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît pas.”
Kirchick should think about that, even if some frenchman said it.

Two marginalia:

1) Writing about a former love interest in the column of a national magazine isn’t classy.

2) Kirchick is doing yeomans work against antisemitism by proving that there are dumb jews.

As for Jungian stuff, I remember from high school, talk of anima/animus, the feminine or masculine traits. And back then, I’d been pretty happy to report that I had a strong animus, being more inclined to the masculine rather than feminine side of most dichotomies given. Back then, I was thinking about it in terms of nonconformity, but I also see that I’d accepted cultural ideas about masculine traits being more desirable. Now that I’ve become a little more schooled in femininsm, I can see that I had a colonized mind, and was perhaps excited by honorary male status.

Which gets back to 6’s idea about recovering the term masculinity. Can’t be done– the term enforces the idea of dichotomy and gender difference. Thanks, Mark for approving my suggestion of “adult” for traits children should aspire to, and MAJeff for using it when the topic came up again.

OT, but actually, in my experience, Apple customer service has been excellent, and better than most. Sure, I’ve had a couple bad experiences, but on the whole they’ve been great.

I’ll second that. Discounting the fact that they charge you for telephone tech support, I’ve never been anything but happy with Apple’s customer service, and I’m an original 1984-ish Mac user.

It doesn’t hurt that there are now two Apple stores in Austin, either.

I’m still trying to figure out what all those outraged male responders have against bratwurst that makes it such an insult.

I’m guessing it’s the “funk” part.

I think I see where you are coming from, 6079, but the problem with an egalitarian (I actually prefer the word individualist, but that’s another thread) appropriation of the concept masculinity is that the concept doesn’t fit us. When sexists use the word, it actually means something: they actually believe that a particular set of qualities typically and ideally belongs to men, which is what any coherent notion of masculinity requires. Individualists, who don’t think personality traits should be restricted to one sex, have no business using the term in a positive sense, because to do so, we have to either compromise our ideals, or redefine the word in such a way as to render it almost meaningless.

Maybe my concern is that your proposed marketing campaign is perhaps a little dishonest. Let’s not pretend to be something we’re not by appropriating a concept that is by its nature foreign to us. Marketing a product is different from marketing a philosophy. With a product, the object is sales. With a philosophy, the object is agreement. But to persuade someone to agree with you, they must first understand you, and muddled concepts are an impediment to understanding.

Let the sexists have their word; let our potential “customers” know exactly what they’re getting. We can still win. Or if not: better to have 15% of the market actually agree with us, than to trick 80% of the market into thinking they agree with us, with little substance behind the apparent consensus.

despite a sucky customer service attitude, at least in my experience

OT, but actually, in my experience, Apple customer service has been excellent, and better than most. Sure, I’ve had a couple bad experiences, but on the whole they’ve been great.

Samantha Vimes
August 21, 2007 at 9:46 am

….

I simply do not believe we can extol the virtues of masculinity or femininity without the cultural baggage going along with it. Maturity, on the other hand, is much easier to praise without invoking the wrong ideas.

Exactly!

Well, my mind might be a bit warped by one of the best teachers I’ve ever seen, Dr. Betty Kovacs, who was teaching “Mythology” classes at Pasadena City College in 1987 (and on through 1992 at least, when I left Pasadena). I thought it would be a dull, easy class (never mind for now why I registered with low expectations; this class totally changed my preconceptions about that school and community colleges in general.) She seemed like a helpless Minnie Mouse at first to me, but soon I appreciated how skillfully she wove the class together, eliciting near-universal enthusiastic participation. And I learned to take “myths” seriously, as a coded way of discussing human psychology and social values. To be sure, Betty had some notions I thought were way out there (about Edgar Cayce and Atlantis and stuff like that) but these in no way invalidated what I took from her excellent classes–I eventually took three.

Well, she was always going on about what she called “the feminine mode” and “masculine mode” of human mentality–a lot of Jungian stuff. But it made perfect sense to me in context.

However, it clearly did not mean that men always must use one mode and women the other; rather that a sane–mature–human mind would develop both, whereas in our patriarchial societies we tend to try and suppress one or the other; mayhem, mental and physical, generally ensues. And the suppressed modes make themselves felt in this struggle but are handled badly.

It is unwise to label these aspects of the human mind in this way and possibly they don’t actually sort out just as Dr. Kovacs suggested, but I think the basic insight is clearly correct.

Praise children for acting MATURE and ADULT. That’s something every kid wants, pretty much. And there’s a general agreement that is pathetic for an adult to be childish, petulant, and immature. When they hit young adulthood, there will be a lot of pressure on them to meet other people’s idea of masculine and feminine. But if they learn that adults make up their own minds, mature people don’t care about the opinions of the foolish, adults refuse to be tricked by manipulative insults, etc, they will have the strength to hold to their values. If, on the other hand, they reach 19 wondering if they seem manly or womanly enough, then they can be pressured into following other people’s definitions of those things.

I simply do not believe we can extol the virtues of masculinity or femininity without the cultural baggage going along with it. Maturity, on the other hand, is much easier to praise without invoking the wrong ideas.