But also because pronouns are just easier right? — Srap Tasmaner

You'd have thought... But how long did it take for women to have an option accepted for an address that didn't declare their marital status to world?

We don't seem to be that good at 'easy'.

I probably picked a bad example. The fight over puberty blockers might have been better, or affirmative action on race, or the bill to have birth certificates reflect chosen gender, or ... These were not easy. And we could compare them to even the slightest progress on monetary reform like restrictions on the issue of fiat currency, or limiting stock buybacks, or just putting the tax rate up.

I'm not really disagreeing with you. I'm just highlighting that what's 'easy' is also a function of what people will accept, which itself is driven, in part, by the very process you've outlined.

Is that the difference between authoritarian and anti-authoritarian politics? No superheroes but plenty of supervillains? — Srap Tasmaner

I think the idea is that we're the superheroes in the story -- rather than a jefe who brought order, the anti-authoritarian wants leaderless order, the order that comes from people working together as a group.

But given human nature with our particular history it's really hard to get that idea across to people. People are so used to hierarchy, which does have the advantage of efficiency of action, that the notion seems like a contradiction.

I suppose we could say that's a good thing, it's just that the other thing going on is that the crazy left seems to have agreed that everyone not a hero-activist is not a bystander, not an opponent, not a villain, but in fact a supervillain. The right still seems to distinguish between the evil masterminds of the new world order and the gullible cucks and libtards that they've taken in. — Srap Tasmaner

I can't deny what I've seen. There's a lot of interpersonal problems which get mistaken for political stances -- the great irony of the left is its belief in solidarity in conjunction with its tendency to factionalize over things that don't matter to the people at large.

Maybe some take that "we are the heroes we're waiting for" line a little too egotistically. It's supposed to shake someone to realize that they, all of us, are the adults in the room and no one else is going to take care of our collective problems other than ourselves.

But your notion of superheroes would make sense of righteous fury. Especially if someone hasn't really encountered their own failures and weaknesses. (it's this latter part that usually keeps my ego in check -- anytime I start to think some self-righteous crap I can usually think of a time when I was basically doing the exact same thing)

But your notion of superheroes would make sense of righteous fury. — Moliere

I don't know if this holds up, and these days I would associate it with the Stanford prison experiment (which I didn't know about when I heard this) for good or ill, but I remember clearly an explanation of how you create torturers -- or, more broadly, that sort of personal guard or secret police, the trusted elite troops of the dictator.

The main idea is that it's not about dehumanizing the enemy. What you actually need to do is convince these young men that they are special, that they are the real defenders of the nation, uniquely qualified to do this important work. You build them up so that they feel they are above everyone except their master. That's why it is as easy for them to torture collaborators, their own countrymen, even their own friends and family, as it is to torture the foreign spy or soldier, the rebel, the ethnic other. None of those distinctions matter to them. Whatever your status or position is, theirs is higher, in their eyes. You convince them that they are in effect superhuman, and that's why they are beyond good and evil, and needn't concern themselves with questions like whether what they're doing is moral. That's what lesser beings worry about.

Now, I don't spend any time on Twitter or the like. But I hear things, and read thoughtful highbrow articles about what goes on over there. Any sense that some of these folks have taken such a view of themselves? The right still seems overwhelmingly driven by grievance and resentment. That's not my impression of the left. They do seem a bit more like avenging angels, meting out justice with an unforgiving certainty people used to be much more hesitant to claim for themselves --- unless someone went to the trouble of teaching them.

Any sense that some of these folks have taken such a view of themselves? — Srap Tasmaner

It's really interesting you brought this up, my first post in a while was provoked by this very thought...

What's worse is that the direction of modern discourse is to make the truth even more pedestrian. In just a few years it's gone from the golden light at the end of the long tunnel of scientific enquiry to being easily accessed from the pages of the New York Times, or the lips of the government spokesman. Now we have 'disinformation experts' who's only truth-o-meter is to check what the government website says... — Isaac

(having a go a the whole quoting myself lark - see, I learn)

It's this that I think is the source of your new breed of superheroes. They actually know the actual hand-on-Bible, God's-honest, Truth. Not just a theory, not just fighting it out in the grubby boxing ring of politics... the Truth.

Imagine the power trip that produces. The idea that you don't have to worry about actually supporting your position like we used to have to do, you don't need to understand the facts and do all that hard work anymore because we've moved on from arguing about what's true to 'countering disinformation'. The narrative has changed from one of discovering the truth by dialectics, to merely 'defenders' of that truth which has already been discovered - a much more heroic role. Guardians of Truth (already bought the film rights by the way, gonna be a hit - "In a world where some people still disagree with each other about stuff, one man stands between Truth and other-things-people-might-believe, the last great battle between what-some-people-on-Twitter-think and what-the-Governement-website-says...").

I have a slightly different view about this, and I'm curious what you think about it.

If these people were indeed coming from a place of superiority and a belief in 'the Truth', perhaps we wouldn't expect to see this type of anger, nor would we expect such folks to be reluctant to engage in real discussion. Both neither suggest confidence nor a well-rooted belief of 'the Truth'.

To me it suggests the opposite, though in some ways it is related.

The anger stems not from a sense of superiority, but from taught ideology. Through what is basically indoctrination the ego is bound to the ideology, and the individual develops a sense of self-esteem that is directly connected to this ideology.

The result is a lack of confidence, because the ideology is what has value, and not they the individual. Only through the ideology does the individual gain value, or so they are implicitly taught.

When the ideology starts showing cracks (as any ideology is bound to do at some point), it is their fragile sense of self that starts cracking along with it, hence the aggression - they perceive debate as a direct attack on themselves.

Rather than going through the painful process of decoupling one's sense of self from the ideology, they develop coping mechanisms to deal with a stubborn reality that doesn't conform to the ideology, by shunning honest debate and instead relying on every dirty trick in the book to protect their sacred egg.

That's a very well thought out theory. I have some sympathy with the general idea. At a gut level, I definitely get the feeling that people are defending something they know is nonsense but are somehow frightened of letting go of. I agree about these people's faith in The Truth. I don't think it's all that strong, and shows cracks pretty quickly. You see an awful lot more "I'm not going to engage with this..." than we used to. If that was just exasperation, or dignity, I'd understand, but (I'm thinking of this site now, I've no real experience elsewhere), the same people who say they'll 'refuse to engage' with someone on one topic will be producing machine gun frequencies of retorts on other topics against someone they think is obviously a lunatic. It sure doesn't sound like exasperation - it sounds more like what you describe. They think they've got a chance with the 'lunatic', they're frightened of being shown the cracks in the other thread.

That said, I have a couple of quibbles too.

Firstly, the way I view our understanding of the world is that it is all already interpreted, there's no understanding that isn't framed by a narrative (we won't go into why I believe that, here, as that really would totally derail the thread, and I suspect we're on thin ice in that regard already!). So the issue I have is how you might de-couple what you're calling 'ideology' from what you're calling 'sense of self'.

For me, an ideology is just a narrative, a story with which to make sense of data which is otherwise ambiguous (which is virtually all of it). We have this information which could be interpreted one of several ways, we have to choose which, we can't do so on the basis of the evidence itself (it under-determines), so we do so on the basis of it fitting a narrative we like - an ideology. I also don't believe we can 'suspend judgement' on most matters (but again, not the place to go into why).

If you want to make the case that one could pin one's self-esteem to an ideology, or not (ie not just choosing ideologies, but having the option to choose none), then I'm not sure what method one might use to choose between interpretations of under-determining evidence - stuff that could be taken one way or another and you can't tell which just by looking at it.

An ideology, in my sense, is just a collection of choices about the interpretation of ambiguous data that coheres (a tendency to always interpret ambiguity in one direction, or toward one end). I think we all have such a tendency, it helps us navigate an otherwise very confusing world full of uncertainty.

So to make sense of your theory within my framework (not that we need to do that, but I like your idea, so I'm going to try), We'd have to have 'ideology' as something more than just narrative, something which becomes more hooked into self-esteem than mere narrative does.

I think you allude to this possibly in your post (when you talk about 'superiority'), as does @Srap Tasmaner. In the ideology, you are the hero. In the narrative you're maybe just the protagonist (but the plot is not so clear that you're the hero). It may be something to do with the suffusion of social media into people's lives, but the big issues seem to take on an importance that invites a hero narrative. I think this is what has changed. The enemy used to be big business, government, the Russians, ...pick your poison, but whatever story one held, the enemy were very big and very far away. We were not even foot-soldiers. We were the support staff at best.

Now, with 'disinformation', the enemy is anyone who doesn't agree with The Truth. We can all be foot-soldiers at least, heroic commanders, even. Because we now have direct access to the enemy. They're right here on this forum!

So maybe the self-esteem link (which I think you're right to highlight) is about letting oneself see one's role as being 'fighting the disinformation trolls' as opposed to merely 'waiving the flag', or 'wearing the badge', or making the right donation. That raises the stakes if you seem to be losing that fight.

Any sense that some of these folks have taken such a view of themselves? — Srap Tasmaner

You ever heard the expression that the media is a mirror?

I think it works especially well for Twitter-- it's tailored for you. You can block who you want, follow who you want, report who you want, and even set your profile to private so that you're only seen by your close circle.

Looking at it objectively I think we have real cases, but ones selected for us through what is effectively a black box to us. We have reason to believe it maximizes engagement. Which means what I'm seeing is even more about me, and now without as much of an audience that needs to be catered to -- it caters to me and my individual tastes as determined by what I "like" (a button on a post) or spend time on.

So if we want to find this case we will, and we can then daisy-chain through the follows/retweets/links/likes to find more. So it feels like "Yeah! This is exactly what I've been talking about!" -- hence why it's very easy to write reflective think-pieces about cultural trends on Twitter because you'll probably find confirmation. Even more the subject of identity is complicated not just by anonymity but the ease with which sock-puppets can be created, as well as bot networks. There is no way of confirming even if your positive confirmation is a genuine confirmation of some niche network of individuals, or some trolls having fun on twitter making fun of people that don't really exist anywhere but inside their own heads. There's enough of them that are genuine, but enough of them that are not to cause doubt.

Which is all to say: I can't say, and this is why. It's almost impossible to gauge a person based upon their tweeting habits if we're just reflecting on our own experiences. It breaks how we normally communicate.

(we won't go into why I believe that, here, as that really would totally derail the thread, and I suspect we're on thin ice in that regard already!) — Isaac

:D

I'm still looking for the loop back -- but I can see the relation due to the timing of trans issues becoming more prominent in popular discourse aligning with changes in norms of discourse. This not really talking about trans issues but rather the media form which all of these political views get disseminated through. I've enjoyed the reflections you've shared.

I've enjoyed the reflections you've shared. — Moliere

Thanks. I've enjoyed having a space to reflect them in (or on - whatever the right term is for the object of a reflection).

still looking for the loop back -- but I can see the relation due to the timing of trans issues becoming more prominent in popular discourse aligning with changes in norms of discourse. This not really talking about trans issues but rather the media form which all of these political views get disseminated through. — Moliere

Yes. That's was my plan (he says, rapidly post hoc justifying what was actually a meandering ramble often completely forgetting what the title of the thread even was!) I appreciate your tolerance.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. :pray:

I'm going to give what you wrote a think, and come back to it later.

Great. I look forward to hearing what you think.

I'm still looking for the loop back — Moliere

There's some stuff here. One is that the behavior we all deplore -- because Street's gone, so there's no one to take the other side -- among certain groups of young progressives has a name: bullying. So there are some cultural paradoxes about masculinity threaded through all this.

Harry Potter, and the fate of its ("its" because I don't mean him but the world and the stories) creator, is the big case in point. On the one hand, Harry Potter was deeply meaningful to a great number of young people because part of the message was, it's okay to be a weirdo, it's okay to be different, it might even -- ugly-duckling style -- be wonderful to be different. Queer kids everywhere got the message.

But with time it's been possible to take stock of Harry Potter, and more people have done so. (My son has pointed me to some interesting video essays re-appraising HP.) Even early-ish on, Ursula K. Le Guin was asked about it and commented that it seemed to her pretty derivative and "somewhat mean-spirited." This is the point a number of people have been converging on: it is mean-spirited, and in fact the whole thing looks a bit of a revenge fantasy. The queer kids, the theater kids, the weirdos, they get bullied a lot (as Harry does by the Dursleys) but secretly they're the ones with the real power, power you can't imagine, and when it's their turn, you're gonna pay.

When Jo Rowling shot her mouth off, a generation of readers of put into practice what she'd taught them: make her pay.

If Street were here, he'd argue that this isn't violence, it's counter-violence. Fuck Jo Rowling. She's got it coming. But to the rest of us, this looks like the same old tragic tale of the revolution adopting the means of the oppressors they overthrew.

And in this case, the means are unmistakably associated with toxic masculinity: it's bullying. The desire for revenge is understandable but besides being wrong, it's a mistake. It retrenches the technology of power you were trying to undo. What's wrong with toxic masculinity is not that it's abuse of women by men, but that it's abuse at all, and that ought to be obvious because asshole men are more than happy to abuse other men. (It's why the conclusion to the British Office -- as we call it over here -- is so satisfying, when Brent stands up to his bully. That's not a blow for cis-white-men, it's a blow against bullies.)

What comes out of the superhero stuff is issues about what the favored term is. Because of the holocaust, there was a lot of talk for a while about how dangerous it is to dehumanize the other, and that's true so far as it goes. What struck me -- and why that story stuck with me all these years -- is that the how-to-make-a-torturer story takes the torturer as the favored term, not the victim. Everyone not the torturer is a potential victim.

For whatever reason, the current state of play takes victim as the favored term, and everyone not a victim is (potentially?) equivalent to the torturer. And the trouble with that turns out to be that you miss the opportunity to mark characteristic behavior of the villain as what makes him the villain. You the victim have no problem becoming the bully in turn because the problem with the world was only that you were being bullied, not that there were such things as bullies at all.

There's some stuff here. One is that the behavior we all deplore -- because Street's gone, so there's no one to take the other side -- among certain groups of young progressives has a name: bullying — Srap Tasmaner

Heh. I'll note that I don't deplore violence in principle. Context matters, and the series of sins goes back and forth. While I dislike violence, I don't deplore it because it's so much a part of our world that when it comes to politics it's impossible to do without (and those who are most attracted to non-violence are often ones who aren't aware how much violence their own society requires to function). It's like deploring lying -- sure, Kant, it's bad to lie, but we're all going to do it anyways. So goes violence.

I often look to Nelson Mandela as a person who managed to express the perfect pitch on the question of violence -- he never condemned it on principle, but also didn't pursue it as his main tool.

But I also think there are some incredibly large egos out there that could use deflating, and that the stakes are too high to allow egos to be the reason why we engage in political activity. I'm not up to the point of being able to say something as specific as J.K. Rowling -- she has really shown her ass in public on trans issues as far as I'm concerned, but then I wonder why in the world we're talking to a popular author about an issue she doesn't have to live with in the first place. It's probably because she said some dumb stuff, and it got amplified, and she then doubled down, and the back-and-forth created these hard-division identities -- you're either with JK Rowling or against her!

Which is the exact choice you have to make if a political campaign is underway -- you have to stay in the picket line or go to work, there is no in-between. But this isn't the same kind of political campaign because we're dealing with the personal psychology of J.K. Rowling and whether or not that is a good psychology or if she is a bad person, and this is why she's good/bad, and if you do/not like her then you're also good/bad. There is no demand hooked to the decision which can be debated. It's her, and reflectively our own, moral character that's at stake.

There's a place for that level of demonizing, even. But you have to be like a holocaust denier or a legitimate member of a white supremacy organization or a cop before I even think about it. And it has to be for a purpose rather than because I think this person is a bad person (there are a lot of bad people in the world, and I have a life to live not chasing them all)

we're dealing with the personal psychology of J.K. Rowling and whether or not that is a good psychology or if she is a bad person, and this is why she's good/bad, and if you do/not like her then you're also good/bad. There is no demand hooked to the decision which can be debated. It's her, and reflectively our own, moral character that's at stake. — Moliere

Certainly there are people who see this as the job, sorting people into good and bad.

Some people feel it's important -- and their job -- to sort art into good and bad. To sort artists into good and bad.

It's related to something I have found very peculiar about the reading habits of my millennial and gen-z friends and coworkers, that the first thing it occurs to them to say is, I liked this character and I disliked this other character. I didn't grow up reading novels that way, and I don't understand how this happened or why people do it.

and I don't understand how this happened or why people do it. — Srap Tasmaner

An aside: can confirm. People do this at book clubs.

But more to bullying -- and toxic masculinity. I just wanted to point out that I wave a similar flag to good old Street, though we had different modes of expression.

I've touched on toxic masculinity in the thread because I figured it'd come up and it needs acknowledging. It's a real phenomena. I'm not sure I'd put the various stances of political actors in that box, though. The conflict isn't coming from a sense of the masculine as much -- we aren't bullying people because that's what men do, I mean, even in a toxic masculinity. Resentment is the emotion of toxic masculinity moreso than the pleasure of bullying.

I think that bullying can become pleasurable for anyone in the same way that the use of power can be pleasurable. pointed out Trashing, the Dark Side of Sisterhood which describes a similar phenomena. Some people are unable to distinguish between the boss and the loyal opposition, and some people don't even want to bother because they're not there to build a world-wide movement. They just don't want that person there anymore for whatever reason.

-- my guess is that masculinity probably isn't related to where we landed, though it's important to talk about with respect to trans discourse because it shapes where our present thoughts are probably reflecting from, at least.

my guess is that masculinity probably isn't related to where we landed — Moliere

Indeed it isn't. @Isaac successfully Mao'd over the thread.

Resentment is the emotion of toxic masculinity moreso than the pleasure of bullying. — Moliere

Everyone can resent. What flavours of resentment are uniquely masculine or essential characteristics of toxic masculinity? Can you give a list of contributors to toxic masculinity? Something like correctness conditions for the predicate "is an instance of toxic masculinity"?

Everyone can resent. What flavours of resentment are uniquely masculine or essential characteristics of toxic masculinity? Can you give a list of contributors to toxic masculinity? Something like correctness conditions for the predicate "is an instance of toxic masculinity"? — fdrake

True! And just because one feels resentment or acts on it I wouldn't say that's even an identity.

Whatever "identifying with" means -- if you identify with your resentment and simultaneously identify that resentment with your identity as a man ("It's because I am a man that...") and want to do something about it against not just a person, but the world -- that seems to get closer. But I hasten to add I'm being creative and attempting to build something. I'm sure I missed something.

Isaac successfully Mao'd over the thread. — fdrake

?

More the point: I believe that we talk about women's bathrooms because we live in a patriarchal society. One of the classic responsibilities of men is to protect women from bad men, and that's how the issue is framed by the opposition because people have views which are cemented about genders that makes this an appealing story. What could have been a series of discussions where a person explained how everyone has special needs and in public we should accomodate everyone became an issue on women's health, which in turn relied upon what various people thought "woman" meant -- when the issue was health.

So I thought asking about masculinity was fairly on target for the original topic. If we are spurred on to defend this or that view because of our masculinity, it makes sense to start asking what is the value of this masculinity? What else other than our masculine identities is contributing to this confusion?

Plus I do actually like thinking about this stuff, and thought that our usual regulars might have more to say on the topic of masculinity than the meaning of "woman".

EDIT: I should note that this isn't a dig. I would not have started the thread without the impetus, and all that. I felt the need to justify my approach though.

So I thought asking about masculinity was fairly on target for the original topic. If we are spurred on to defend this or that view because of our masculinity, it makes sense to start asking what is the value of this masculinity? What else other than our masculine identities is contributing to this confusion? — Moliere

It's sort of hard to pinpoint. I've never cared much about my gender, but at the same time I've never doubted that I'm a boy/man. It's always seemed to me that gender is made relevant far too often, and that doesn't align with my intuitions very well. But at the same time, I can't rule out that there are biological-behavioural tendencies I follow - which makes my behaviour masculine. But it's just not deeply rooted in my identity. How to explain? Maybe if you compare social life to a piece of word processing software "masculinity" would be a macro someone's once written and others have contributed to that I don't use; but I might go through the same operations one by one anyway, just not always or consistently, so I get results that are slightly different than if I were to usually rely on the macro.

I have no emotional attachment to being a boy/man. An example from my puberty: In sports class, we were supposed to do some task; I can't remember which. I couldn't do it - too weak probably. Imagine it was pole climbing: I would have made some low-motivation token effort. Someone asked me whether I'm a boy or a girl. I replied something along the line, "Don't care, you choose." He thought that was the funniest thing he heard that day, but when he told his friends he couldn't get humour across. As for me, I just wanted to get to the end of the hour-long class. Things like that happen a lot; I care about the activity at hand (presently somehting I was ill-suited for and not motivated to get better at). The gender thing was probably supposed to be a way to motivate me, but it doesn't work on me, because I just don't care about my masculinity. It's a nuisance lable in situations like that: now I not only have to do this task I don't care for, I have to put this in a wider context I also don't care for. Dead pan humour often works - I rarely offend, but I did usually get some sort of outsider status out of it.

When I'm focussed on something else, I can even get literal minded and not get the social function of the reference. Example: I had a job at a market research instute entering data from physical questionnairs into the software. I busy doing that when the boss of a different section came in asking for help from "strong men". I heard he words, heard "strong", and tagged that as having nothing to with me. My friend who sat next to me (a woman) tapped me on the shoulder and said, "C'mon, we'll help." It's only then that I realised that this was likely just the usual male-ego flattering and the job won't require all that much strength - but carrying stuff is a "man thing". So I went to help (with mostly women I might add), and the task involved moving tables, which weren't all that heavy, so even I could move them (with help). But I did hear "strong men" as ("men who are stronger than expected") rather than ("men who I call strong so they feel good about helping"), which is a mistake I probably only made because I was distracted.

The upshot is that I usually understand masculinity culture enough to function, but I don't connect to it through identity. I don't consider myself particularly masculine, but neither do I consider myself particularly feminine. Any gender typology applied to me is something I put up with rather than something I feel. As a result, "Grow up and take responsibility," is likely more effective on me than "Be a man and take responsibility," even if the speaker contrasts "man" with "boy" in this scenario, so that the intended meanings are close. But the gender aspect is a distraction which I tune out, focussing on "take responsibility," which I will then do if I think I should. With "grow up," you're telling me I'm being childish, which is something I might actually consider. It's more likely to hurt, too. Gender-based appellations usually fall on deaf ears with me.

Something like correctness conditions for the predicate "is an instance of toxic masculinity"? — fdrake

Coming at this from a more functional perspective rather than an imagined type of psychology: a toxic masculinity is an identity which results in misogyny. In my previous psychological type I ought to have said not "the world" but more specifically "the women's world" -- resentment of women as a type of person seems to get closer to the psychological type, but functionally it wouldn't matter what the psychological type is if it results in misogyny either way.

I promise to try and stay more on topic this time.

resentment of women as a type of person seems to get closer to the psychological type, but functionally it wouldn't matter what the psychological type is if it results in misogyny either way. — Moliere

So, in order to have misogyny, there has to be a 'gyny to mis', yes. The object of the hatred/mistreatment has to be an identifiable one, otherwise you're talking about misanthropy.

I suppose that's why you've got 'woman-as-a-type'. But back to identifiability, we could go with the modern trend toward self-identification, but that doesn't seem to fit with mis(anything); I can't determine to hate some category that I can't even identify without asking. So woman-as-type has to be some kind of identifiable group (even if only identifiable by the misogynist - maybe the rest of us don't agree such a group exists).

So I'm wondering who does the identifying here? Is it the misogynist ("I hate all people like this"), or the women (declare themselves to be such, and immediately become the object of hatred, like gravity), or society (but we have no end of trouble with society defining what a woman is)...

Simply put, who or what is the object of the misogynist's hatred?

my guess is that masculinity probably isn't related to where we landed — Moliere

Maybe you're right, and maybe bullying is just one style of a manipulation among others. The ones that matter here lean heavily on devaluing the target. It looks a bit like shaming, but the twitter threads I've looked at did not seem to be shaming as a means to get someone to change, but as a means to get them to shut up, to take away their power and their agency. It's not you ought to reconsider your life; it's you need to understand that you're a piece of shit who doesn't deserve to speak. It's the sort of thing abusive husbands say. Manipulation on kickass 'roids. All of which is why it struck me as bullying, and as the kind of manipulation we associate, for very good reason, with less than admirable men.

Simply put, who or what is the object of the misogynist's hatred? — Isaac

I don't know to what extent Incels are real, but that serves as a more concrete example of what I think of as basically the worst kind of misogyny -- not even just identifying with resentment (there's a lot more to an identity than that feeling too I should note, and that too can pass), but an active despising that's re-expressed and becomes central to a person. So I think the person doing the identifying here is the misogynist. But "like this" doesn't need to be very specific. "Woman", to the misogynist, probably has a collection of traits associated with it but I wouldn't be too keen on accepting the Type as the misogynist sees it either. I'd likely say "you have the wrong notion of woman", or something along those lines.

Active patriarchs are another -- as in people that want the patriarchal family structure not just for themselves, not just for their community, but want it enforced by the state up to and including restrictions on birth control. Here there are traits which don't necessarily have to be pinned to womanhood, but the patriarch sees women in a particular way and wants that to have social force behind that view. Here the object of hatred are the women who aren't doing the right thing -- again, it's the misogynist that's doing the identifying.

But then there's me doing identifying, and I'd include trans women as women which means I'm more liable to make the type about self-identifying than about some set of traits. Not that self-identity is the whole of gender, but rather that it's a good way for determining what category someone belongs to -- rather than looking for traits I'll just ask them, given that it's their identity, and as long as they aren't lying then that's a better measure than inferring based upon their traits, be they physical or mental. What I mean isn't anything close to what the misogynist's notion of "woman" means.

So from my perspective the object of the misogynist's hatred is partly a fantasy. I think it has something to do with resentment of the perceived power of women over men: hating that women have a kind of power over them. That's when I think it gets nasty.

"Woman", to the misogynist, probably has a collection of traits associated with it but I wouldn't be too keen on accepting the Type as the misogynist sees it either...

...it's the misogynist that's doing the identifying...

...So from my perspective the object of the misogynist's hatred is partly a fantasy. — Moliere

So if...

a toxic masculinity is an identity which results in misogyny. — Moliere

...but the object of misogyny is identified by the toxicly masculine person, then toxic masculinity has to be a feature identified by them as well.

A is a trait identified by an attitude toward B and B is identified by the possessor of A. That makes A a trait entirely identified by the possessor of A.

Btw, a little cluster of articles about masculinity in American politics recently dropped over at Politico.

Hrm! People don't identify as misogynists, so that'd be problematic! And I don't think men usually identify as "toxic" either, so the judgment of "toxic" is more a my-sided thing rather than a them-sided thing. (or, rather, if they do identify as toxic, it's not something people like to declare, and I certainly have the claim that there are toxic masculinities to defend with what I've said so far so it's problematic either way)

The object of misogyny is identified by the misogynist. If we were talking structural problems, like patriarchy, then it'd make sense to talk about a social determination -- but at the level of identity I don't think it makes sense to say that's a social determination. Or, at least, it's not the same (clearly we're a social species and all that, but that seems to be talking at a different scope).

Also I'm not sure that an identity is a trait as much as it's a manner of expressing traits. "Tall" is a trait that's relative to the group, being between such and such heights on average is a range of traits associated with some group, and expected behaviors are one step away from traits. But the manner of expression is what differs.

So a toxic masculinity is an identity which results in misogyny -- misogyny being the hatred of the type "woman" over something to do with perceived power. Or I've been saying resentment too, which isn't the exact same as hatred. What can I say: I'm theorizing. I'm not totally certain where I'm going.

So it's a way of displaying one's manliness, or expressing one's manhood, or being a man that results in the hatred -- in this general sense that's not specifying the bundle of emotions because I'm trying to remain more functional (given the problems of identifying the type) -- of women-as-a-type. And likely there are also tokens of the type -- so not just an idea, but rather an idea coupled with lived and interpreted examples.

It'd have to be the tokens which give me evidence of the identity though, since I'm not a mind-reader. So there is a social input of sorts in making the identification -- but it's not the default that I think of. It's just a possibility I'm aware of given what men do to women and say about women.

I took a peek and didn't see. Link

People don't identify as misogynists, so that'd be problematic! — Moliere

That's what I thought.

If we were talking structural problems, like patriarchy, then it'd make sense to talk about a social determination -- but at the level of identity I don't think it makes sense to say that's a social determination. Or, at least, it's not the same — Moliere

Yes. I think that's the tension that many traditional feminists feel with the newer gender identity prescriptions. If there is a group that is oppressed in some way, it can't be a group that is self-identified because the oppressor does not ask questions about identity before oppressing, the object of their oppression is that group identified by them as deserving oppression and so the subject of any fight against oppression is the group the oppressor identified, not the one any other group identify.

Also I'm not sure that an identity is a trait as much as it's a manner of expressing traits. "Tall" is a trait that's relative to the group, being between such and such heights on average is a range of traits associated with some group, and expected behaviors are one step away from traits. But the manner of expression is what differs. — Moliere

That makes sense, yes.

I've been saying resentment too, which isn't the exact same as hatred. — Moliere

Yes, I agree with you there. I chose 'hatred' as it was the dictionary definition and I didn't want to get hung up on definitional differences, but I'm also happier with your idea of 'resentment'.

So it's a way of displaying one's manliness, or expressing one's manhood, or being a man that results in the hatred — Moliere

So here again it's unclear how a set of traits can be identified by an outside observer as expressing a property which is given by the person 'manhood'. There are traits/expressions/ways-of-being which result in hatred of an identified group (identified by the one doing the hating), but then you link those traits/expressions/ways-of-being to a property (manhood) which is self-identified. How is it that you (the third party) are doing the linking then?

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To give a concrete example. Let's say a boss at a bank is traditionally toxicly masculine (bullying, competitive, and misogynistic). He favours the promotion of a man over an equally qualified female colleague because he somehow feels a man would be 'better for the job'. Later he finds out that the female colleague he overlooked identifies as a man.

What has happened in that instance? Has he, unbeknownst to him, not been a misogynist because he resented a man? Or has he been a misogynist all along, but the target of his misogyny is not self-identified?