[quote]Alpha F wrote:
[quote]DBCooper wrote:
[quote]imhungry wrote:
[quote]DBCooper wrote:
[quote]Gettnitdone wrote:
[quote]csulli wrote:
[quote]Gettnitdone wrote:
But your above posts in this thread do smell of beta-bitch insecurity.[/quote]
LOL. What does that even mean?[/quote]
You obviously play video games, which is why you went straight into defensive mode about my video games post, even taking it out of the context I intended.
The actual content of video games are not a problem but the behaviour of choosing to allocate time to that activity may be taking away from social interaction, which is a partial reason for the described deprecation of masculinity in men.[/quote]
I don’t play video games at all and haven’t owned any game system since the original Nintendo came out, which I grew bored of after about two years, so I’m hardly an expert on this matter. That being said, I have friends who play those fucking first-person shooter games until the early hours of the morning every goddamned weekend. I’m pretty sure that they play with each other all the time, as in they are all playing together in the same room.
Sure, they play with people from all over the planet and they do frequently also play by themselves, but the point is that they hardly play these things in solitary confinement on a regular basis. I’m not sure if three or four guys sitting in a room taking turns with the bong and the video controllers constitutes social interaction, but whatever.
Another thing to consider is that two centuries ago, when most people in this thread would probably argue that men were men and not “beta-bitches” as you have so eloquently stated, people didn’t interact with each other all that often either. They might have interacted with their own families, but people didn’t live in the same sort of clustered society that we live in today. Going to the store was a far less frequent occurrence, if they went at all. Many people lived in places where they rarely interacted with anyone outside their own families except on Sundays at church.
I think that video games definitely are a factor in people being different today than they were back then, but I don’t think those differences extend to the de-masculinization of men. I think the effect that video games is having is probably more in terms of our attention spans and what we need in order to be stimulated, sort of like the porn addiction thing. Are we playing more video games because we need more stimulus, or do we need more stimulus because we play video games more often? I don’t know, but I don’t think you know either.
The more pertinent question here as someone else mentioned, which has been covered ad nauseum and is ENTIRELY subjective, is what exactly makes a man a masculine man. Personally, I don’t really think it has anything to do with anything other than our abilities to take care of our families. I think the declining rate of violence in the United States is a clear sign of an increase in masculinity, but others might argue differently if they think that masculinity entails violence. I don’t think so at all, because violence is almost always in the form of a crime, and it is hard to take care of your family if you are in jail as a violent criminal.
However, that would also mean that being a masculine man would mean that you would have to have a family to take care of in the first place. Many men don’t have children or a wife and their parents aren’t old or infirm enough to need someone else taking care of them. I have no children and neither nor anyone else in my family needs me to care for them. So in that sense, masculinity may simply mean the ability to take care of oneself instead, which isn’t a masculine trait at all. Women are just as capable of doing that as I or any other man is, and I don’t think it’s fair to women to say that they are masculine simply because they can take care of their own shit.
So the reality is that the most all-encompassing definition of what it means to be masculine is more along the lines of what it means to be a good, responsible person in general, regardless of gender or sex. All that other bullshit like “masculine men shoot guns” or “masculine men are physically strong” or “masculine men don’t show emotions” or whatever is a bunch of Hollywood superficiality that has no bearing in reality whatsoever. In my mind, “masculine” men are simply good people, period. So even the most feminine of men can still be more masculine than someone who most people would point to as being masculine. It has nothing to do with sexuality or hobbies or anything else material like that. It’s a very ethereal quality that isn’t absolute by any means.[/quote]
Damn good post. As usual.
[/quote]
This is about the time that Pushharder comes in, calls me Delbert, and then says I’m wrong. I know a lot of people here think he’s masculine, and he appears to take care of his own shit pretty well so I won’t argue that he isn’t in that respect. But I think most of the people who think he’s the definition of masculinity think so for other reasons. Personally, I think most of what he believes when he and I get into these arguments is based in fear; he’s driven by his fears, not his strengths, and then identifies his ability to recognize those fears as a strength.
Take the whole gun thing. Who the fuck needs an automatic weapon? Do we really need to protect ourselves from the enemy that, for 99.999999999%of us will never come? Of course not. I don’t fear the govt or some random intruder coming into my home. I don’t think along fear-based lines like that.
Of course, knowing my luck this is probably the one long post that he’ll actually agree with 100%, so I apologize in advance, Push, if it is.[/quote]
How ironic that you should write about masculinity and behave in the true manner of a weak and wounded female.
So you took a beating from Push in the polar bear thread and on a different thread, after having your ego stroked, you start bitching behind his back and apologizing for it in advance?
Am I the only one who sees the female behavior in this move?
[/quote]
I took a beating from Push in the polar bear thread? Hardly.
And I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment about resorting to violence to protect one’s family and loved ones. I’m talking about criminally-violent behavior, which does NOT include self-defense. I have had to resort to physical violence to protect my loved ones. If anyone here remembers an experience I, uh, experienced at a football game in Seattle several years ago that I described in detail here in a long-dormant thread they’ll know what I mean. I don’t feel it’s necessary to rehash it again because it means nothing. It happened, it’s over with, I’ve moved on and whether you know what it is or not is immaterial to my level of masculinity.
Violence for violence’s sake is a whole different ballgame, though, and it isn’t inherently masculine to be violent just for the sake of being violent. I won’t even begin to get into the whole “female behavior” thing again. I spent way too much time arguing about that subject to rehash it now. That is also why I abandoned the gun thread way back when. I simply don’t have the time nor the patience to take on an entire thread’s worth of people on the matter, which is what continuing to participate in that thread would have entailed. I made my beliefs known, you and others disagreed with them, fine. So what? Am I somehow less “manly” because I didn’t stick around to defend them from people like you, whose opinion means absolutely nothing to me anyways?
Now, you may call that chickening out or whatever, and you may even think that there is something feminine about doing so. I have confidence in my beliefs and I’m smart enough to know that your opinion has no bearing on my level of masculinity at all. The “female behavior” would be to flip out because someone disagrees with me and then jump down into the gutter with them and engage in some inane argument that never goes anywhere.
So if that makes me a feminine person, put me in a dress, slap some lipstick on my mouth and call me Suzy.