#Christine Emba

[carolinemillerbooks]

New Post has been published on Books by Caroline Miller

New Post has been published on https://www.booksbycarolinemiller.com/musings/the-masculine-mystique/

The Masculine Mystique

Weaving in and out of the lunch tables at the retirement center one afternoon, I paused to sit beside a woman I hadn’t seen for a while. Looking up from her book, she frowned.  “Do you know the meaning of viand?” she asked.  Wondering if hers was a trick question, I answered tentatively.  “It means ‘food,’ doesn’t  it?” “Correct!” She slammed her palm on the table for emphasis. “You’d be surprised how many don’t know the answer.” Shrugging a little, I replied. ”Well, it’s an antique word by today’s standards.  What brought it to mind?” “Dickens, naturally!” This time, the hand covered with liver spots landed on the thick book lying on the table.    I nodded with understanding. We exchanged a few more words about the author, then I left her to her reading.  Headed for my apartment, I continued to think about words, particularly the new ones I’d learned that week–Flop era, gynecocracy, 4chan. Vocabulary expands so rapidly these days, why should I be surprised that Viand had fallen out of favor. Other words have suffered a similar fate or undergone revision. Take Man for example. Who can say what it means these days?    Christine Emba shares a dilemma similar to mine.  In her article, Men Are Lost, she notes the definition of man began eroding in the twentieth century.  In 1958, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote  ..the male role has plainly lost its rugged clarity. As a result, …something has gone badly wrong with the American male’s conception of himself.  Historians blame women for the muddle.  They argue that when the industrial and technical revolutions created jobs that no longer required strength, women escaped domesticity for work outside the home.  As typists and file clerks, for example, they enjoyed the independence of personal incomes that allowed them to be choosey about their partners.  Some even chose other women. White males seemed to suffer most from their loss of economic status. Not only was it harder to find a wife,  but they were obliged to compete with women for employment.  Some males retreated to the sidelines, creating a vacuum their counterparts were eager to fill. Today, the fair sex has infiltrated what formerly were all-male bastions, finding jobs in higher education, science, and politics.  (“Explaining Men,” by Jackson Katz, Ms, spring, 2024, pgs. 25-27.) A few closet misogynists have stepped forward in the hope of restoring male hegemony and taking society backward. Jordan Peterson is prominent among them but there are others.  Constin Alamariu, a Romanian-American with a Ph.d from Yale became famous when he published his seminal book on misogyny, The Bronze Age Mindset.  Unfortunately, vainglory brought him unwanted attention which led to his arrest.  Currently, he resides in a Romanian jail convicted of rape and human trafficking. Jackson Katz draws a connection between women’s liberation and the rise of autocracy. …white men find comfort in regressive ‘strong man’ politics and the very conservative gender norms that underlie them. That primordial longing for the past, he suggests, makes the masculinity crisis […] a threat to democracy  (“Explaining Men,” by Jackson Katz, Ms. Spring 2024, pg. 26.)  Katz may have a point, but I would argue that a society founded on the masculine norm of winning and losing also poses a threat.  Inequality can destabilize the system, transforming democracy into an autocratic power game.   We know the forms of that corruption well–rape, suppression, a collapsed justice system, and war. I admit that democracy and equality aren’t natural bedfellows.  The former is an organizing principle.  The latter is a value.  Athenians, for example, saw no contradiction between their method of governing themselves and their right to own slaves.  Our founding fathers held the same split view. While championing equality for their peers, they saw no reason to extend that right to women or slaves. Even so, many in the United States have come to believe the relationship between democracy and equality is a symbiotic one, each as vital to the other as rain to a garden. When the preamble of our Constitution speaks of the general welfare, a majority of us believe it refers to everyone who resides in the country.       Dissenters exist, of course, and in numbers sufficient enough to risk an insurrection. What we’ve learned from the present struggle is that the conventions we’ve adopted are neither universally understood nor agreed upon. Words have failed us. Admittedly, some among us would rather pluck out their eyes than glimpse a future they cannot control. Nonetheless, time and tide are forcing choices upon us. Shall we continue to accept the masculine paradigm of winners and losers?  Or, shall we create a society based on values we hold in common? Either way, the critical issue to resolve isn’t about how we define a man or a woman, but how we define what it means to be human. Yes.  I’m convinced, we need new words for that.    

[nextwavefutures]

Young men and the problem with masculinity (Pt 3)

We need to finds new models of masculinity that are better for men’s health and tht women can also value. Otherwise ‘toxic’ and regressive versions of maleness will keep on filling the gap. New post at The Next Wave.

In two previous posts (Part 1 here, and Part 2 here), I have discussed the recent work about divergent political attitudes between young men and young women. The TL:DR version of that: loss of status, and lack of economic opportunity, breeds resentment. But this also has qualitative aspects: what does ‘good masculinity’ look like? —- My starting point here is a long article about masculinity in…

[shatar-aethelwynn]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/07/10/christine-emba-masculinity-new-model/

I started noticing it a few years ago. Men, especially young men, were getting weird.

It might have been the “incels” who first caught my attention, spewing self-pitying venom online, sometimes venturing out to attack the women they believed had done them wrong.

It might have been the complaints from the women around me. “Men are in their flop era,” one lamented, sick of trying to date in a pool that seemed shallower than it should be.

It might have been the new ways companies were trying to reach men. “The average hoodie made these days is weak, flimsy … ” growled a YouTube ad for a “tactical hoodie.” “You’re not a child. You’re a man. So stop wearing so many layers to go outside.”

Once my curiosity was piqued, I could see a bit of curdling in some of the men around me, too.

They struggled to relate to women. They didn’t have enough friends. They lacked long-term goals. Some guys — including ones I once knew — just quietly disappeared, subsumed into video games and porn or sucked into the alt-right and the web of misogynistic communities known as the “manosphere.”

The weirdness manifested in the national political scene, too: in the 4chan-fueled 2016 campaign for Donald Trump, in the backlash to #MeToo, in amateur militias during the Black Lives Matter protests. Misogynistic text-thread chatter took physical form in the Proud Boys, some of whom attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Young men everywhere were trying on new identities, many of them ugly, all gesturing toward a desire to belong.

It felt like a widespread identity crisis — as if they didn’t know how to be.

“This is such an ongoing thing,” Taylor Reynolds sighs. “I had this kid show up — well, I say ‘kid,’ but he’s an undergraduate here. I mentor them sometimes. He came over to my house and asked me if we could speak privately.”

Reynolds, 28, is a doctoral student at an Ivy League university. With his full beard, mustache and penchant for tweed sport coats — plus a winsome Southern accent, courtesy of a childhood spent in rural Georgia — he reads as more mature than many of the professors roaming the campus.

“And the first question this kid asked me is just … ‘What the heck does good masculinity look like?’”

He grimaced.

“And I’ll be honest with you: I did not have an answer for that.”

[runthepockets]

The American author Christine Emba recently noted that, while the past 50 years have been revolutionary for women, “there hasn’t been a corresponding conversation about what role men should play in a changing world”.

Today’s young men are good at saying what they are not. They are not like their parents or grandparents, and often rebel against gender norms.

Some would rather lose the concept of manhood altogether. Yet they have not yet found an alternative to take its place. As a result, they remain stuck, halfway out of the man box, but more self-conscious than ever before.

[renee00124]

*RELENTLESS HIGH-TECH SEXUAL HARASSMENT*

I totally agree with Ramola D., I and many women endure the mentally derange, twisted psychotic mentalities of the men involved in this program and relentless sexual arousal patent. Reportedly 70% targeted are women of all races. Specific to me are the Black ghetto, hood minded LAPD has hired. I have been told if I date one of them they will stop the torture, or they love me, and explicit details of sexual desire What is insane is this is while torturing, threatning, you within an inch of life or they are going to "Whoop my A**" A woman cannot shower without sexual comments. These predator, parasital men will also develope an unwanted sickening attraction to you resulting from 24/7 assignment.

Yes, men are having issues today getting women who demand a higher standard from them, and are financially self reliant, as a result, the men in this program appear to be on the hunt. For them record, these specific type are not representative of the really good ones and of which there are many!

Sexual Arousal Patent

Somewhere in their deformed shallow brains they think that compliments on and on and on combined with this patent will become an invitation to become involved in your life. I have heard it all including they have never seen a person like me before as part of their gross fascination. This is telling. This reveals the enviroment this street type originate from. I have seen plenty. The compliments are so bad they turn my stomach. We are dealing with the clean-shaven, suited and uniformed sexually focused criminally insane.

These are men sitting at the helm of technology torturing and destroying men, women and children, and are akin to hideous thirsty human monsters. If they realize that they do not have a chance in hell with you, in my case, tonight they began, from the corner house beam cooking your breast for breast cancer and a few days ago, beaming my head giving me a nosebleed. The men behind this technology hideous predators that think that his technology can be used to get women and for sexual gratification.

Associated Links:

The Incel connection to targeting & torture

Why women are sujected to sexual exploitation

Women want good men, not penises

A women is defined by more than the nearby penis

Why Incels hate women

Men are lost

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/07/10/christine-emba-masculinity-new-model/

[reign13]

The disappearance of men | Christine Emba

[dbunicorn]

The disappearance of men | Christine Emba

I thought this was great. But I'd push someone more like lex Fridman, Ryan fugit from Combat Story, or Fareed Zakaria. Who represents a global view. It's not just meat & muscles.

I've been lucky enough to have a slew of supportive men in my life. My husband included.

[hoursofreading]

Part of why Perry’s book seems like a wasted opportunity is that other writers have engaged with the failures and inadequacies of sex positivity in much more productive terms. In the years since Me Too, there has been a groundswell of feminist writing that grapples with the social and political dimensions of sexual dominance in ways that are braver and more truthful than what might have been possible back when sex positivity went unchallenged. Books by lucid, compelling, and often productively uncertain writers have emerged: I’m thinking of Amia Srinivasan’s The Right to Sex, and Lorna Bracewell’s Why We Lost the Sex Wars. Christine Emba’s Rethinking Sex is an idiosyncratic critique of sex positivity on both radical feminist and Christian theological grounds. Nona Willis Aronowitz, the daughter of the influential sex-positive feminist Ellen Willis, has written a surprisingly emotionally honest book, Bad Sex, which mixes memoir with feminist history to examine how, and whether, her mother’s ideas are applicable to her own life. These writers are drawing on a long history of feminist critiques of the sexual revolution, critiques that examine men’s sexual opportunism and force without ceding women’s claims to freedom, or denouncing sexuality’s utopian potential. There’s the incendiary Andrea Dworkin, or the compassionate visionary Audre Lorde, or the singular genius Catherine MacKinnon. Few of these women would agree with each other, but all of them take positions that could be called sex-negative. None of them accept sexual inequality as inevitable. Conservatives like Perry, by comparison, don’t seem alert to sex’s pleasure or potential at all; they don’t seem to really think that much of value is lost, or violated, in sexual violence. But I guess this makes sense. If you think of the whole sexual sphere of life as corrupt and degraded, full of broken delusions and corrupting vanities, then rape, or coercion, or any of the other kinds of sexual cruelties that men inflict on women, might not seem so terrible. They’re not an insult to what sex could be, but merely the logical conclusion of what it always has been.   But for all Perry’s cynicism, it seems like we may be returning to the kind of world she would prefer. A creepy, tech-savvy version of gender conservatism among women is gaining ground. Social media is awash with clips of tradwives and “stay-at-home girlfriends,” performing a choreographed pantomime of hyper-stylized 50s femininity, including cooking and waiting for men to come home. Peter Thiel is bankrolling a women’s media company, “Evie,” that advocates for gender “complementarianism.” Like Perry, they issue dark warnings about hormonal birth control. Roe is gone, and abortion has been outlawed in large swaths of the country; unless something dramatic changes in American politics, a national abortion ban, and the rollback of contraceptive rights, are coming, too. It’s possible that no woman has ever had real access to sexual utopia. It’s possible that all of them, like Ana, have found that exposure to absolute sexual freedom, such as it exists under patriarchy, often leaves them alienated and scared. In that sense, sex positivity may have always been inadequate, partial, a fantasy. But it seems tragic to give up the progress we’ve made, and cowardly to abandon the fight. Maybe sex positivity was always fake. But I think we’ll miss it when it’s gone.

Sex Positivity Was Fake, But We'll Miss It When It's Gone

[stonewallsposts]

Guns, Fear, and Protection 

I saw another thought provoking tweet referencing a Washington Post opinion piece by Christine Emba: "Why do Americans want guns? It comes down to one word." 

The article is behind a paywall, and I don't subscribe to the Washington Post, so I couldn't read it. But there is a bit of it on the America's Black Holocaust Museum site here:  

"At the Nation’s Gun Show in Chantilly, spirits seemed high. People wandered from booth to booth, and the scent of popcorn filled the air. It could have been mistaken for a state fair or weekend flea market were it not for the rows of weapons and accessories — gun parts, AR build kits and body armor — laid out on every surface. It was easy to overlook the one common emotion underlying the event: fear.  Here were weekend shoppers intently inspecting tools of death: moms testing the heft of handguns and fathers stocking up on ammo. When I asked attendees and sellers what gun ownership meant to them, most replied with the same word: “protection.”  The previous week had brought three highly publicized shootings. Ralph Yarl, a Black teenager in Kansas City, Mo., was allegedly shot by an 84-year-old White man after he rang the wrong doorbell to pick up his younger siblings; a 65-year-old man in Upstate New York allegedly shot and killed a 20-year-old woman who accidentally pulled into his driveway; and two cheerleaders in Texas were shot after trying to get into the wrong car after a practice.  For all the talk of protection, gun violence is now the leading cause of death for children and teens in the United States. Yet over and over, people told me they needed their guns to keep themselves safe." 

So the one word answer given by the gun owners themselves was "protection". 

The one word answer the author gives is "fear". 

Of course, you only thinks of protecting yourself if you're afraid, so I don't think she's necessarily wrong in this, it's just an answer from a different angle. But the angle is meant to portray something that may not be true, in which case it is possibly sophistry. 

I don't know if her original article contained these or not, but the ABHM site mentioned three "highly publicized shootings", each of which highlighted incidents where people were killed by others whom, it would appear, were unreasonably afraid. The general takeaway then is that gun owners are unreasonably afraid which leads to unnecessary shootings of innocent people. 

I can't remember the name of the movie that Will Smith made with his son, but in that movie, he explains to his son that there are two separate things at play: fear and danger. Fear is your internal state of mind. Danger is the external state of affairs. There is danger, which is a real state. Then there is fear, which is the internal response (either rational or irrational) to perceived danger. 

I believe that there is a lot of unnecessary fear in our society. I have heard younger people talk about how in the 60's/70's you could play outside and walk places on your own as a kid without worrying about abduction, whereas now you would never dare do that. I don't really buy that. My guess is you could do the same today. But especially with the proliferation of news, we hear a lot more about the negative, so there is more fear. There is also an overparenting aspect too where parents feel that if they let their kids out of their sight for a minute, they are bad parents. One can always find examples of such things to bolster the argument too, so it gets passed into a general knowledge that the world is no longer safe, and the fear is justified. 

I agree then there is a lot of unjustified fear, but of course not all fear is unjustified. 

Are black people in black neighborhoods who have bars on their windows, and who lock their doors, and who avoid the places at night in neighborhoods with high rates of violence just living in "fear"?  

Saying someone is living in fear is meant to portray them as unjustifiably afraid. But the real issue is whether they are reasonably afraid, I.e., there is a real danger; or are they irrationally afraid, i.e., there is no real danger.  

There is one response in the twitter thread that were interesting too. 

A user tweets: 

"So would consider owning other protective equipment as “fearful” or just guns?" 

The author of the article responded:

"Depends on what the equipment is. A bike helmet is reasonable, bc accidents are fairly common. Also, their function is straightforward—you don’t need to have intense training/judgment to use them correctly in an incident. And they aren’t a risk to others." 

The person asks the relevant question about charging someone with "fear". 

The answer given is to say that a bike helmet is reasonable because accidents are common, but furthermore, they aren't a risk to others. Which is true. But the 'danger' from falling off your bike and injuring your head is one thing. I'm trying to come up with the right way to word this, but most likely the only way you're going to fall off your bike, unless you are a child still learning, is an accidental interruption in your ride; someone driving doesn't see you and hits you. For what it's worth, in years of riding a bike, I've never fallen off my bike. Of course it does happen, but I don't know that's it's more common than gun violence though.  

The 'threat' from someone pointing a gun at you and demanding you give them your watch, wallet, and phone, is another thing altogether. This is an willful threat from someone with an active intent to do you harm.  

A helmet will likely do a reasonable job protecting your head from a fall of a bike. But what's going to protect you from a guy pointing a gun at you and demanding your stuff? What kind of threat would have to be in possession of that would deter him from that confrontation?  

I should add that I'm not a gun guy. I don't own any guns and I'm not particularly an advocate for them either. But neither am I anti-gun. I get why people would want them. I have lots of friends who do have them, either for sporting reasons or protection.  

[hannaillustration]

Art as Protest/Art as Voice 📣 . For this year’s Women’s Month and International Women’s Day I wanted to reflect on the years I have had the honor of having my illustrations accompanying my favourite authors’ essays, book covers, or book reviews in various publications. . These authors are terrific, and are leading in social/cultural change and have had a direct influence on me through their writing, including Gloria Steinem, Roxane Gay, V (formerly Eve Ensler), Mona Eltahawy, Rebecca Solnit, Siri Hustvedt, Esther Perel, Christine Emba among others. . Thank you to all the art directors who chose me to illustrate their essays, interviews, book reviews and opinion pieces like The New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, New Republic, The Nation, The Guardian, The Globe and Mail, NBC Universal, Penguin/Random House and Courrier International among other. . Aside from my editorial illustration projects, I continuously investigate feminism, power, sexuality and the politics of desire in my personal work. Everything is connected, and the personal is indeed political. . . . . . . #woman #womensday #internationalwomensday #womensday2023 #illustrator #artist #hannabarczyk https://www.instagram.com/p/CpiHZRpL14T/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[filosofablogger]

How The World Sees Us ...

How The World Sees Us …

We’ve all heard people say that the United States is “the leader of the free world”, right?  We grew up being told that we were that shining example of democracy that other nations hoped to emulate.  Looking back, I don’t know if that was ever quite true, but I strongly suspect that at one point we were respected more than we are today.  Until last night, I don’t recall ever reading anything by…

[bamnbamn]

Consent is Not Enough by Christine Emba

From the Washington Post

[reign13]

The disappearance of men | Christine Emba

[loving-n0t-heyting]

There’s an emerging school of broadly “sex-negative” opinion I’ve been noticing getting mainstream traction, the biggest individual contribution (where normies might find it) being Christine emba’s rethinking sex. I get the sense it’s been fomenting on certain corners of TwiTok but since I avoid discourse on those sites objectively more assiduously than I avoid the plague I’m not really in a position to verify this. Main distinguishing doctrinal features appear to be the following;

As per usual: casual sex (hookup culture)—mb especially swiping app sex—and kink are basically bad, don’t acknowledge the deep meaningfulness of sex, reduce ppl to mere vessels for the slaking of lust, women are the ones to suffer hardest, etc

Similarly familiar: sex positivity has Gone Too Far, we have gone from thoroughly repressed to not nearly repressed enough. There is some cagey and ambivalent allusion sometimes made to “traditional religious” views of sex and sexuality

These are mostly rules of thumb rather than categorical prohibitions. Is there some place for casual hookups? Sure, maybe. Do we need to confine sex to the sanctity of marriage? Don’t be ridiculous. But they need to be scaled back and that’s at least the right direction

The concern is almost exclusively about (ppl who can be rounded off to) cishets; they give the touchy subject of queer sex a wide berth beyond vaguely saying that homophobic sex policing in years past was very bad; for this reason they seem more interested In cultural than overtly coercive enforcement mechanisms

The figures generally present themselves as broadly centre-left and culturally progressive; capitalism is sometimes held up as the chief malefactor in the raunchification of modern society

I think these set the movement pretty clearly apart from other more familiar camps:

3 and 4 put it apart from trads, since the ethic proposed is a lot more lax. 5 also does some work here

4 distinguishes it from antis, who while satisfying many of the other conditions tread enthusiastically into debates around gaysex

While they sometimes offer critical support for radfem and radfem-adj sex politics (e.g. r/FDS), these seem more useful to them as an illustration of contemporary heterosexual failure, like incels. Their approach is less adversarial and also again less committal on intra-lgbt questions

I’ve been trying to beat myself into writing up a critical review of the emba book to try shopping it around but my willpower is sickly and fleeting. Anyway this all seems concerning