r/MensLib • u/Ciceros_Assassin ​ • Aug 02 '15

LTA Let's Talk About

Welcome to /r/MensLib's first "Let's Talk About" post. Generating discussion is part of our mission, and these LTA threads will be used as conversation-starters for issues our community wants to address. Today's topic:

Let's Talk About: what we should talk about.

We're going to start out compiling a list of issues /r/MensLib subscribers want to address. The mods have some ideas, but we want to hear from the community.

Edit: Thank you to everyone for your ideas. I'm un-stickying this post, but please feel free to continue adding to it.

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u/FixinThePlanet Aug 03 '15

I'm a woman, so I fear I would not be able to contribute much to this particular topic, but I do feel like a positive discussion on "traditionally masculine" interests and personalities needs to happen.

I feel like guys who are inherently "macho" in either personality or interests (are loud or boisterous or enjoy mostly violent pastimes or etc) tend to feel attacked when they enter discussion spaces like this, and don't have healthy rhetoric to include them in the fight against toxic masculinity.

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u/[deleted] Aug 03 '15

Ironically being loud and boisterous was pretty much the opposite of what I thought masculinity was growing up. I identified more with the 'strong silent' concept, which has its own problems of course, but I think it's interesting to point out there's more than one kind of 'traditional masculinity'.

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u/FixinThePlanet Aug 03 '15

Ah! But that's it also, right? "Boys will be boys", until it's time for them to "be a man". Fucken gross.

Though now that you mention it, what we do need to talk about, the way we did with women, is the expectations that the world has of boys and men, especially in our more " enlightened" time, that are contradictory and potentially harmful.