[Scuba_Instructor]

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/...asculinity

The picture says it all, really.

Check the comments below the article. A few examples:

condescending much? As a conscientious man, Get fucked.

Can you imagine if a group of men organised a festival to teach women about the correct way to express their femininity? Feminist groups would barricade the doors and set off the fire alarms (as some did at a Warren Farrell lecture in Toronto).

So sick of this double standard. Jude Kelly and her ilk are sexists and gender-baiters.

I rarely bother reading the articles any more. The comments are where the truth is at.

[draguer]

That creature has no business lecturing on being masculine.

And

Quote:

The festival is – obviously – the idea of a woman, Jude Kelly, artistic director at the Southbank Centre. Her mission, she suggested, was in part age-old female wisdom: that men need reminding that it might be a good thing to share their anxieties. Or, as she put it, to provide the space "for an overhaul of masculinity" and an "opportunity for men to go naked" – prompting a proportion of her male audience to cross their legs.

[roberto]

Hell, what do you expect from the Guardian?

I was intrigued by the backlash from the comments section though. They can't (and don't appear to) all be trolling. Could it be that we are seeing a shift in attitude amongst the Guardian-reading leftwing elite?


"Speaking as a lesbian endowed with a penis, I consider it to be utter bollocks."

[2Wycked]

Part and parcel of female perceptions of feminine moral superiority. There must be a biological explanation for this, as many cultures paint women as moral superiors. Maybe women are better at cultivating images of chaste, loving individuals and are better at hiding their nastier sides.

Regardless, this drivel is predictable but has some interesting permutations. Check out this comment:

Quote:

Whether their reactions are angry, aggressive, smirking, defensive, self-pitying, mocking, or just pathetically, incoherently dim-witted seems (at most!) an issue entirely secondary in importance to the fact that so many men respond to issues like this from somewhere deep inside the blinkered conviction that any critical look at the arbitrary conventions of the gendered status quo is an existential threat.

It's almost as if issues of status and power, happiness and fulfillment, and almost anything else commonly reckoned to be important - all of it in flux and all of it up for grabs - were as nothing compared to the one imperative need to cling to the simple-minded certainties beaten into their heads as children, about what they were, and what they should be.

Yeah, no shit Sherlock, when you attack people's identities' they tend to not like that.

What I have never gotten over any psychological genius who critiques "male privilege" or "white privilege" is what you are going to replace their mindsets with. You don't just label somebody with incorrect thought patterns, shame them deeply for it and expect them to come clean out on the other side. Dumbasses that crop in these festivals like this "Being A Man" situation don't understand this. They only understand naming and shaming. They don't understand how to help people lift themselves up.

Further, as the comment I linked to mentioned, these sorts of progressives always need to paint their opponents as hyper-aggressive and, yet, simultaneously dumb as hell. Obviously, in their mind, there is only enlightened people like them and X, Y, and Z (whatever they have been told the Others are or what they project onto them). They consider themselves the deepest and most introspective thinkers, as they always reference "critical looks at critical things that affect your soul." They don't seem to get that critical thinking almost always operates outside conventional ideas, memes or ideology.

What men's rights activists get wrong is they frame their rhetoric through the authoritarian posture of the Left: "We need moar rightz!" What they don't get is that is a smokescreen on the Left: those who cry about those things already have the rights they are bitching about, they are just upset that their life isn't playing out as they thought it would. Gay rights? You mean governmental recognition of your consensual relationship? Congrats, non-gendered bro, you just made your gay relationship a matter of public record. OMG - I thought society was so deeply homophobic!!! How ever will you not get murdered or heckled or ignored at Starbucks!!!

In many ways, this festival is representative of the bewildered approach to the proscriptions feminists laid out for men a generation ago. It didn't improve relations between men and women - only made them worse. This idea that men didn't listen or talk or anything is curious. Feminists don't realize that they are arguing that men, in the past, were collective narcissists. Everybody has emotions. Just because that men and women express themselves differently doesn't mean they don't exist. Unless, of course, feminism starts with women's alleged individual experiences and goes from there....

Finally, notice how the term "masculinities" gets tossed around, but I have NEVER seen the term "femininities" get used. Why?

Festivals like this don't help men, but I suppose that isn't the point.

[A New Man]

What a pussy society we're living in.