#masculinity in literature

[novaricewrites]

Very tired of the shadowy/darkness-themed brooding male love interests in fantasy romance books. Especially the ones where the character revolves heavily around sex / sexualization.

This is especially irritating when they are 'healed' or complete as people because they are dating the protag. Seriously. It just promotes that toxic 'You can fix him with love' concept. This is such an inherently harmful message.

Not saying those kind of broody characters shouldn't be allowed to exist at all. However, the dominance of that character type over other portrayals in romance especially, subscribes to the common notion of masculinity having only one desirable form.

The main lead does not have to be the most powerful, the most virile, most tragic or most intimidating.

It's shallow and overdone.

Why can't the men and boys in these leads also be written as thoughtful and warm, sunlight characters. Soft hands and gentle voices. Complex and spirited and vibrant. Let them also be kind, lovely and full of quiet things.

I have so many thoughts on this general topic that go into way too many directions to summarize in one post.

[theoutcastrogue]

"The knife is a weapon of the Other"

"The emerging martial art of Bartitsu, appearing in middle-class magazines during the Boer War, was the encapsulation of British civilian gallantry. Yet Bartitsu would have slid into obscurity had it not been for its curious appearance in the Sherlock Holmes canon. The final showdown of the ‘duel’ between Holmes and Moriarty is a wrestling match between two Victorian masterminds. When Holmes returns to London he tells Watson that he and Moriarty went to battle at the Reichenbach Falls unarmed. Holmes managed to ‘slip through’ Moriarty’s grip as he possessed ‘some knowledge’ of ‘baritsu, or the Japanese system of wrestling’, adding that the art had on occasion been useful to him.

Founded in the 1890s by an Anglo-Scottish engineer, Edward William Barton-Wright (1860–1951), Bartitsu was a synthesis of British boxing, French la savate (kickboxing) and Japanese jujitsu. Barton-Wright tapped into the need for a bourgeois form of self-defence, something which he could promote as being British and yet was also exotic and refined.

The principal aim of Bartitsu’s promoters was ‘to provide a means whereby the higher classes of society may protect themselves from the attacks of hooligans and their like all over the world’. These urban gangs were a new form of folk devil, descendants of the mid-Victorian-era garotter. While they were armed with clubs, knuckles, iron bars and leather belts, it is doubtful that they carried firearms. Nevertheless, the press did represent the hooligan as a threatening presence.

Perhaps the scares promoted the growth of a burgeoning culture of ‘British’ self-defence which avoided the aggressive and increasingly unmanly action of using a firearm against a ruffianly lower-class opponent equipped only with basic weapons.

Barton-Wright follows a literary tradition when he presents his martial art as a British form of self-defence. Pierce Egan’s well-known self-defence manual was supplemented with a word on the ‘Englishness’ of physical heroism, arguing that ‘Englishmen need no other weapons in personal contests than those which nature has so amply supplied them with’. In 1910 the former lightweight boxing champion Andrew J. Newton said in his manual Boxing that ‘the native of Southern Europe flies to his knife’, whereas the ‘Britisher […] is handy with his fists in an emergency’. Elsewhere it was maintained that the ‘Italian, Greek, Portuguese, or South American’ ‘give preference to the knife’ while the Englishman extols boxing. For Barton-Wright, British boxers ‘scorn taking advantages of another man when he is down’, while a foreigner might ‘use a chair, or a beer bottle, or a knife’ or, ‘when a weapon is available’, he might employ ‘underhanded means’. The views of these articles reappear in a later self-defence manual of 1914, where it is argued that Britons ‘live in a country where knife and revolver are not much in evidence’. This statement about the low number of firearms and edged weapons can be read as an attempt to extol British virtues and is not necessarily representative of reality. The knife is a weapon of the Other. Barton-Wright’s view that English practitioners of Bartitsu are principled men is reflected in the Sherlock Holmes canon, where Holmes never uses a knife, although his enemies, whether foreign or British, do so at times."

— Emelyne Godfrey, Masculinity, Crime and Self-Defence in Victorian Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) (very abridged)

[secondstar-acorn]

Me in every Hamlet class I’ve ever been in

[sandwichhour]

Quick Sweeney Todd ref

[i-looove-dillydallying]

On the one hand I like (and understand) the Samwise Gamgee x Frodo Baggins ship, but on the other hand I think it’s a real shame of intimate, 100% platonic healthy male friendship rep that is so desperately needed in todays society where toxic masculinity runs rampant

[rhinestonebabe]

"We have all been thoroughly conditioned to think the adjectives male and masculine are interchangeable, as are female and feminine. This is a mental straightjacket under which not only lesbians but all of society suffers."

The butch-femme question, Rita Laporte

(The Persistent Desire: a butch-femme reader, pgs 208-9)

[howifeltabouthim]

She hated his hunting, but she couldn't ask him to stop; in any case it would have been futile. If she knew anything about men, it was that a man does what he likes.

Anna Biller, from Bluebeard's Castle

[epiphaniiii]

I dance on my own grave. Don't touch me, I'm a sacred fool. And I'm the happiest.

Her Schrodinger's Cat, Mania 2003

[the-daily-male]

Today's daily male is Don Quixote from Don Quixote de la Mancha!

for @don-quixote-and-sancho

[acertainidontknowwhat]

I’m excited to announce that this is coming out December 31st with the University of Edinburgh Press! I am glad to be a part of this project and I think this first-of-its-kind book will be of great interest to a lot of people.

[martyr0l0gy]

Here's another queer book rec and link for my Internet Scholars!! Judith Halberstam's Female Masculinity (1998) is an essential read (in my humble opinion) regarding cis and trans masculine butch identity. Albeit at some points dated (but others refreshingly present), this does a wonderful job contextualising butchness within philosophical, literary, historical, and cinematographic contexts. I highly recommend to all members of the butch/femme community and those who love us 💖

[mirmidones]

obsessed with the cultural implications that differently gendered nouns hold in gendered languages... for example in french the sea is feminine! how wild is that! what kind of person would i be if the sea was feminine to me? in arabic the sun is feminine and the moon is masculine! fascinating!!!! and what kind of effect does this have on a bilingual person who grows with 2 different gendered suns? TRANS RIGHTS wait where was i going with this

[warcrimesimulator]

I hate the sentiment that people interested in the Roman Empire or the American Civil War or WW2 or whatever are fascists and/or toxic masculinity dudebros. These subjects absolutely do attract annoying people but more often than not anyone with genuine interest in any of this stuff is just a normal person with no ill intentions.

[ihateyouvishal]

"It's about being masculine and feminine at the same time."

[jamesthepigeon]

Philosophus in Opus Somno

Philosophus, philosophus, my dearest philosophus,

My loving sweetheart, my wholesome gentleman,

Though, unfortunate, how all beautiful creations must once meet their failance,

Amongst a pond infested with algae, you are the blooming, petit lotus.

A rebuke so cruel, My God had stripped me of my only regard, my beau,

A failance I hadn't foreseen, my demissive delicacy,

For I could never wish for your failance to be of my partaking,

And if I had foreseen this cruel failance, I would have have enabled thou to notice.

An algae, such as myself, could never compare

For you are so fare,

Much too fare for I,

For you are the mallotus to my leonotis.

Neither phrase, nor phraseology could ascribe my Heart,

Oh, my heart aches for you, my peach, my angel, my only,

An ingathering within me, of melancholy fernery.

It hurts, my love, Its infectious  despondency, incontestibly.

Of affliction, Pangs I fear will be the death of me,

My sweetheart, my dearest, my life, my death,

For my acknowledgement thou shall not approve of my verdict,

But, I will implore, my gracious, my studious, my perfect floret.

Shall I partake thy soone, rest for now,

my philosophus in opus somno.

^in the centre of the page is a pencil study of the former male lover 'mallotus' whom the female lover 'leonotis' is writing to^

[ ^ follow me on wattpad if you'd like, 'My Darkest Recollections' is the collection of poems i've made ^ ]

Philosophus [in Opus Somno]: A poem written from the perspective of a woman in early 1900s/ late 1800s who's lover passed. So, she is writing to him in the form of this poem. She expresses her sorrow and how she feels as though she will never find another man as non-ignorant, intellectual, and ahead of thinking as him. The male lover is described as to be in the more feminine role, and the female lover is portrayed as being in the more masculine role, in their former relationship. In my opinion [as being the type of non-heteronormative boy], I don't think it was impossible for this sort of thing to exist in the past, nor in the 19/20th century. Anyways, I made a realistic drawing of the male lover which is at the bottom of this poem and ye... go feminism, I suppose :3.

!! none of my forms of art, such as artworks and literature, are to be stolen, copied, or claimed [reblogs are obvi fine tho ofc] my literature has in fact been copywrited !!

[loongit]

The hypermasculine urge to ask for consent to hug your gf