Why Are Right Wing Men So Sad?

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I think it's a spectrum depending on how much attention you give. Yes, the ones who rise to prominence as such are almost always as you're describing but since the term caught-on there's people who will try to use the cliché as a weapon against some women.

People think they can get internet famous off of someone else's freak-out or moment of sh***y behaviour.

It is apparently an observed trend, but making prescriptive decisions to silence women in general is bad. I think that there is the term "hysteria" was used to silence women that might make a scene by treating it like a psychological condition.

Stereotypes are bad, but there is probably something interesting to pick out why it became so widespread.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfBVMiIfJZU

Just to be clear, I wasn't asking if toxic femininity exists as a phenomenon. Of course it does. It's just the phrase that I hadn't heard before. The term "toxic femininity" isn't heard because most people still associate femininity with something positive, even though that in itself is toxic thinking.

I won't even let myself write in detail about sexist propaganda hurled at little girls and boys before they're even born (*cough-genderrevealparties-cough*), about girls' pressures, gendered toys and media, dolls, pink glitter, sugar and spice, minding one's Ps and Qs, being "pretty", being thin, being polite. I won't even venture into rape culture against women (and men).

Just today I saw on Olympics that a women's volleyball team was disqualified because they wore comfortable shorts instead of string bikinis. They were compelled to write a letter of protest stating they were menstruating and that the bikini uniforms were uncomfortable, impractical, sexist, and exploitative. Men wear shorts when they play, and that's fine but women need to wear bikinis for media consumption. I saw breastfeeding mothers -- Olympic competitors -- restricted from taking their babies to Japan because of Covid. They were told to "wean them" and leave them at home, or pump their breasts between competitions if they became painfully engorged by leaving the child in another continent. Women were forced to choose between their babies and the Olympics. Some women quit or didn't travel to Japan at all because of the sexist standards. Then I saw a young woman gymnast heralded as "The sunshine of her team. Always kind, always smiling, always knowing what to say to the other (GIRLS)". I saw vignettes of many women athletes being interviewed, and every one of them, without fail, was asked about their mental health or how they support the mental health of their female teammates. So now they're supposed to be free therapists and motivational speakers? I'd love to see a giant, male sumo wrestler or other men interviewed about their mental health beyond a training regimen, or their ability to counsel, motivate, and support the mental health of the other men without remuneration. I'd love to see that man described in international, Olympic media as "so kind, always smiling like sunshine, always helping the other men, knowing how to console the other BOYS on his team ...." It wouldn't happen. I wanted to hurl.

I loved the women's skateboarding. They could wear whatever the hell they wanted. No national uniforms, no consistency, no bikinis or skin or cleavage like the gymnasts and figure skaters.

I'm a little high. I'm half asleep. I should nix this conversation and revisit it tomorrow so I don't pull a Karen and make a fool of myself.

You're not petty and don't come from a position of entitlement, so no freakout/meltdown/losing of one's s**t coming from you could be framed as being a Karen.

People would just tell the person framing it that way this doesn't count, you're just being a bully.

I had heard about a team being fined in Norway for wearing comfortable shorts over the bikini bottoms they would be forced to wear, which creates a big double standard compared to what the men wear, and is quite clear that it is just being done to allow men to ogle at the athletes.

I suspect that it has parts that are relevant to to the topic at hand of Right Wing men, where the expectations are like like the men being forced to stay to a tradition of forced to wear bikini bottoms out of ideas traditionalism, when there are other ways to be more comfortable.


Oh, I do actually have a kind of weird tangent I wanted to talk about cutesy stuff expected of women such as glitter and princesses. I had been kind of thinking for a while now that it is a little sad that things like video game culture, which can be a big part of these right wing men, has kind of turned away from that sort of femineity that was I think bigger just a decade or so ago. Something like a princess game. I had been thinking about it as a part of such how the Mario bros franchise is pretty uncontroversial, but games kind of put more focus on the male characters as playable: Mario, Luigi and Toad, while being much rarer to play as female character like Peach, outside of something like a sports spinoff.

Even if it has in some ways become more likely to play female characters in games, they also seem a bit afraid of making things girly, even if expectations of girly is bad. I can think of it towards how the certain demographic of gamers didn't take it too well in one of the recent entries not liking when she decided to not want to be treated like a trophy.

Thanks. I appreciate that, but I'm also aware I've been ranting a lot about gender lately. So I'm sorry if I kind of derailed your thread. It certainly wasn't against you and I don't view you as sexist. The rant wasn't just for my sake, but for my daughter's. She's fed up with the culture which allows her to be commodified as a free therapist for all her friends, generally young women, whose boyfriends, intimate partners, and husbands aren't emotionally literate enough to support the women's emotions themselves. My daughter feels she's exploited as free-therapy-on-demand by the women, and expected to offer them emotional charity at everyone's beck and call. It's sexist for them to assume she will support their emotions better than their boyfriends and husbands could. At the same time she is compensating for whatever relationship skills these boyfriends and husbands lack. The counselling-on-call is never reciprocal: my daughter doesn't have a partner so she doesn't expect other people of any gender to fill that void.

I've been feeling for her, and then when I heard that the women Olympic athletes were being interviewed about their mental health and emotional resilience, I got really frustrated. It's toxic for boys not to be taught compassion, listening skills, and interpersonal negotiation with their partners. It's toxic that women expect other women to smile, fill the void, and dispense free psychotherapy whenever it's sought.

It's also toxic that some men are great friends, partners and role models but society still thinks "masculinity" is synonymous with poison. Yes, they're wrong. It's the pressure which is toxic, and not the gender. Rinse and repeat. The phrase is used incorrectly to create a sexist, prejudicial intolerance for men and masculinity as a whole. It totally misses the mark. Instead of identifying toxic ideologies, it suggests masculinity is a social offence.

A man can be masculine if he wants. He can withhold his tears if he wants, go hunting where it's legal, smoke, drink, fart, and look at pictures of naked women. He can even be clueless about women's emotions, or his own feelings, if he's not into psychology. That's all his choice. He can be an individual just like women can choose to wear bikinis or shorts. Women can be stay-home mothers or CEOs. They can be a Madonna or a whore, if it's their choice. We can't tell people how to conform or not, within their chosen gender. The same freedom of gender expression needs to apply to men and women equally.

Masculinity is not toxic unless of course the desired behaviour breaks the law or hurts / abuses / shames another person. What is toxic, is telling a man that he HAS TO behave that way in order to be "a man", or someone else telling him he has to act the opposite way so that he isn't "toxic". If they tell a man he has to cry more often, reject his interest in cars and Playboy magazines, eat tofu, counsel all his friends, and change all his interests just to reject "masculinity" or his authentic self, then THAT MESSAGE IS TOXIC, but he himself isn't.

I'm done lol. Sorry if I'm making no sense.

Anyone interested in the actual topic thread might find this an interesting read
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10 ... 1720936049

Radical right and toxic masculinity seem to go hand in hand.

I haven't watched the video yet, but going by the title alone - this is contrary to multiple studies that have attempted to look at these things somewhat scientifically. The Right are usually happier, have less mental health problems and do better on many similar "life metrics" which are fashionable to study.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/11/04/re ... -liberals/

^ Seems to me all such studies are subjective and depend on the POV of the researchers.

Yes, but we are not allowed to use the "B-Word" (it rhymes with "Witch") on this website.

That is the difference between doing a "Study" and doing "Research" -- the former is more subjective, while the latter is more objective.  These are not absolutes, but the difference seems to trend that way.

I often trash social science myself (a field dominated by Left wing "scholars"), but these particular right vs left differences have been studied repeatedly and the results all tend to skew one way. They may be on to something.

Toxic femininity doesn't mean b-words. It means teaching little girls that they have to be pretty, submissive, stupid, helpless, and defer to men. It means that women shouldn't be called b-words or Karens for speaking their mind like men have done for millennia, and they shouldn't be shamed for being female in whatever presentation of that gender they choose.

I'm not taking sides in the political aspect of this thread. But this video seems to explain what I'm trying to say -- men and women and all humans should be free to have whatever ideology / presentation they want --- whether that means being masculine, feminine, or something in between. The toxicity comes from mainstream society cancelling people's authentic choice.

Agreed. However, to refer to a specific problem (or a specific set of problems), perhaps it might be better to have a more specific word than "toxic." The word "toxic" has been used to mean all sorts of things, and has essentially come to mean "anything the speaker/writer really hates."

Does anyone have any ideas for a good, clearer synonym for what is generally meant by "toxic masculinity" but clearly not referring to "masculinity" in general?

Fair enough.  However, I was referring to the kind of women who act like men, but not like nice men -- foul-mouthed, insulting, and looking for a fight.