[runsonmagic]

This is one of the best essays I've ever read, on par with Roosh's Cultural Collapse Theory, or the Misandry Bubble, exploring how open acceptance of homosexuality has changed straight male friendships and made non-sexual love between men taboo.

A Requiem for Friendship: Why Boys Will Not Be Boys & Other Consequences of the Sexual Revolution
http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/ar...8-07-021-f

Standout quotes:

Quote:

Imagine a world wherein the taboo has been broken and incest is loudly and defiantly celebrated. Your wife’s unmarried brother puts his hand on your daughter’s shoulder. That gesture, once innocent, must now mean something, or at least suggest something. If the uncle were wise and considerate, he would not make it in the first place. You see a father hugging his teenage daughter as she leaves the car to go to school. The possibility flits before your mind. The language has changed, and the individual can do nothing about it.

By now the reader must see the point. I might say that of all human actions there is nothing more powerfully public than what two consenting adults do with their bodies behind (we hope) closed doors. Open homosexuality, loudly and defiantly celebrated, changes the language for everyone. If a man throws his arm around another man’s waist, it is now a sign—whether he is on the political right or the left, whether he believes in biblical proscriptions of homosexuality or not.

Quote:

In the name of protecting homosexuals, we ignore the feelings of boys and snatch from them their dwindling opportunities to forge just such friendships whereof homosexual relations are a delusive mimicry.

Quote:

On three great bonds of love do all cultures depend: the love between man and woman in marriage; the love between a mother and her child; and the camaraderie among men, a bond that used to be strong enough to move mountains. The first two have suffered greatly; the third has almost ceased to exist.

Worth reading in full. Link.

[Fortis]

great read. I, too, wonder after the damage done to male friendships. My dad would harass me about why I only hung out with my guy friends as a kid. He thought I was a homosexual and would call me and harass me, trying to get me to confess to something I am not. I eventually called him out on being an idiot and that shit promptly stopped.

As I grow older, I realize the damage that ha been done to the idea of two men spending time together and learning about the world together. Brotherhood has been marginalized. If I told my father, "hey I'm going to John's house." he immediately thinks it's something gay, or strange. it's so funny how our views of ourselves have been so warped by society.

[TheWastelander]

(07-17-2014 11:40 AM)Fortis Wrote:  

great read. I, too, wonder after the damage done to male friendships. My dad would harass me about why I only hung out with my guy friends as a kid. He thought I was a homosexual and would call me and harass me, trying to get me to confess to something I am not. I eventually called him out on being an idiot and that shit promptly stopped.

As I grow older, I realize the damage that ha been done to the idea of two men spending time together and learning about the world together. Brotherhood has been marginalized. If I told my father, "hey I'm going to John's house." he immediately thinks it's something gay, or strange. it's so funny how our views of ourselves have been so warped by society.

Sounds like a miserable asshole who had no friends of his own and was jealous you did. My dad tried to pull the same shit no matter how many nights of the week I was going out with girls.

He had, and still has, zero friends.

[Fortis]

^ Who knows? he's not that way anymore, but he was such an insecure idiot back then. I eventually found out that he even did this to my sister. He sure knew how to alienate us at a young age. IT was tough for me to be friends with anyone in general, so I often would befriend one or two people and hang out with them on an individual basis. I still prefer hanging out with 1-2 people instead of 5-6. I have naturally reclusive tendencies and don't enjoy team efforts.

He eventually apologised about it all, but he was quite miserable back then. I forgave him for it and we don't bring it up. But that just goes to show you how deep some of these issues run. Men question when their boys want to get together and hang out.

[TheWastelander]

(07-17-2014 12:04 PM)Fortis Wrote:  

^ Who knows? he's not that way anymore, but he was such an insecure idiot back then. I eventually found out that he even did this to my sister. He sure knew how to alienate us at a young age. IT was tough for me to be friends with anyone in general, so I often would befriend one or two people and hang out with them on an individual basis. I still prefer hanging out with 1-2 people instead of 5-6. I have naturally reclusive tendencies and don't enjoy team efforts.

He eventually apologised about it all, but he was quite miserable back then. I forgave him for it and we don't bring it up. But that just goes to show you how deep some of these issues run. Men question when their boys want to get together and hang out.

I'm glad he apologized for it. At least he is man enough to admit what he did was wrong.

Also, I think you're right. It seems like it's usually a thing people (or the media) bring up about guys hanging out together, never women.

[Fortis]

Yeah, he's definitely become a better person over the past 10 years.

Men often get shamed for wanting to spend time with their male friends. I had a friend who's girlfriend would NEVER let us hang out alone. She always had to be a part of our time together. Shit got annoying really fast. She's gone now, but I found it so hypocritical, because if he and I got together she couldn't handle it. But she would cheat on him, go on girls night out (and probably cheat some more) and annoy the living fuck out of him.

If he didn't want her around it was always some absurd shit like, "oh, you don't want me to have fun with you guys?"

No, we just wanna talk about philosophical shit that would probably bore you and go over your head.

[AnonymousBosch]

(07-17-2014 01:03 PM)Fortis Wrote:  

Men often get shamed for wanting to spend time with their male friends.

Why do you think women popularised the snarky tag of 'bromance' a few years ago? They're selling the concept that there's something a little off, possibly-gay, about men having strong friendships with each other, and that a man's best friend should be her wife, and he should naturally want to spend all his free time with her.

Progressive women aren't above using homophobia when it suits their needs - particularly when you don't want to fuck them.

[Teedub]

The "no homo" phrase I've taken issue with previously, is a symptom of this most likely. Stop using it.

[AnonymousBosch]

^^ Damn good point.

[Suits]

(07-17-2014 04:07 PM)AnonymousBosch Wrote:  

(07-17-2014 01:03 PM)Fortis Wrote:  

Men often get shamed for wanting to spend time with their male friends.

Why do you think women popularised the snarky tag of 'bromance' a few years ago? They're selling the concept that there's something a little off, possibly-gay, about men having strong friendships with each other, and that a man's best friend should be her wife, and he should naturally want to spend all his free time with her.

Progressive women aren't above using homophobia when it suits their needs - particularly when you don't want to fuck them.

The truth is that the best friendships are between men. While it is possible for a man to have female friend that he enjoys talking to and has a common mind about a lot of thoughts (I have), it still pales in comparison to a strong male-male friendship.

Male friendships between men who aren't silly bitches don't get ruined over a silly emotional outburst, aren't destroyed by competition and will outlast most any male-female relationship.

Men for teams, battle together. Women just compete and tend towards incredible jealousy, a trait much less common in men.

The expression "two's company, three's a crowd" wasn't written about men.

[Azriel Odin]

This was a joy to read. The author certainly has a talent for writing as well as critical thinking. The article seems even more on point now that it would have in 2005, I imagine.

I also completely agree with the assertion that male friendships are the strongest. The degree i'm currently studying is more than 80% women, and while I would say that I am friends with some of them, the interactions I have with them (and the interactions that I observe them having with each other) are so shallow. Especially in this facebook generation, the way in which they throw platitudes of encouragement at each other seems so driven by appearances rather than true sentiment.

[The Lizard of Oz]

Essays like these strike me as if they're written by people who are so carried away by their ideology that they don't stop to think if what they're saying has the least relation to reality. Or maybe they forgot about reality or never knew much about it in the first place?

Consider the following passage:

Quote:

All boys need to prove that they are not failures. They need to prove that they are on the way to becoming men—that they are not going to relapse into the need to be protected by, and therefore identified with, their mothers.

Societies used to provide them with clear and public ways to do this. The Plains Indians would insert hooks into the flesh of their thirteen-year-old braves and hang them in the sun by those hooks, for hours—a test of endurance and courage. At his bar-mitzvah the Jewish boy reads from the Holy Torah and announces, publicly, that on this day he has become a man.

In our carelessness we have taken such signs away from boys and left them to fend for themselves. Two choices remain: The boys must live without public recognition of their manhood and without their own certainty of it, or they must invent their own rituals and signs.

And here the sexual revolution comes to peddle its poison. The single incontrovertible sign that the boy can now seize on is that he has “done it” with a girl, and the earlier and more regularly and publicly he does it, the safer and surer he will feel. If sex is easy to find, and if (as mothers of good-looking teenage boys will testify) the girls themselves seek it out, then you must have a pressing and publicly recognized excuse for not having sex. To avoid scandal—think of it!—you must be protected by your being a linebacker on the football team, or by being too homely for any girl to be interested in you.

A boy who does not agree to a girl’s demand for sex will be tagged with homosexuality. She will slander him herself. Ask teenagers; they will tell you. But even a linebacker known as a rake will not dare to venture into the dangerous territory of too-close association with the wrong sort. He, too, will avoid the close male friendship. The popular and athletic boys will thus have their tickets punched, while the others live under suspicion, alienated from the other boys, from the girls, and from one another.

What he is saying is that because society has taken away some "rituals" from "our boys" their only way to prove their manhood post "sexual revolution" is to try to fuck girls as soon as they can and have that be known. In addition, he expresses grave sympathy for all the teenage kids who would love to refuse sex when girls throw themselves at them, but can't because they would be considered gay.

I don't really know what to say about something like this -- does this crazy ideologue really believe that before the "sexual revolution" teenage boys never tried to fuck girls as soon as they could and run to tell their buddies about it (or more likely, lie to their buddies about it)? Does he think that this is some recent development in the human male? Does he believe that those Plains Indians were so content to hang from those hooks for a few hours that they forgot all about the need to get with lil Plains pussy? Who are these wondrous teenage prudes who would just love nothing better than to refuse "empty" sex from all the young sluts (supposedly) throwing themselves at them, but are obliged to go through the motions of blowing a load or two in the little whore's mouth lest they be considered gay? What planet is this about, anyway?

Again, these ideas are not just wrong -- they are deranged and completely detached from reality. They imagine some hazy pre-"sexual revolution" past that bears no relation to anything that has ever gone on in an actual human society involving human beings; and they imagine some fantastically debauched present that bears very little relation to what actually goes on now. One can write anything; the pixels have no shame. But it is worth pausing and asking oneself if what is being written has even the most tenuous connection to some sort of reality.

[Tytalus]

@Lizard of Oz - good point. Still, the tl;dr main point that guys are having a much harder time making friends than they used to seems to be very true to me.

[R Smoov]

I love you guys no homo.

[Ingocnito]

Homosexual culture and feminist culture go hand-n-hand, growing in a parallel universe, with action/reaction ties.

The two have similar effects on straight male culture it seems. Reducing male dominance in society and crumbling the positive attributes of the patriarchy are most easily achieved by dividing men's relations to one another.

Thank God for think-tanks like this forum.

[weambulance]

Quote:

The truth is that the best friendships are between men. While it is possible for a man to have female friend that he enjoys talking to and has a common mind about a lot of thoughts (I have), it still pales in comparison to a strong male-male friendship.

Male friendships between men who aren't silly bitches don't get ruined over a silly emotional outburst, aren't destroyed by competition and will outlast most any male-female relationship.

Men for teams, battle together. Women just compete and tend towards incredible jealousy, a trait much less common in men.

The expression "two's company, three's a crowd" wasn't written about men.

That can be true, but IME solid male friendships are incredibly rare. I had a few like that when I was growing up, but in my adult life every friendship I thought was really solid either ended with us moving far apart and the friend not bothering to keep in touch or, given enough time, with the "friend" turning out to be a total douche. It just happened to me again this week, in fact, my "best friend" turned out to be a lying prick. Right now I count zero good male friends in my life. The only person I consider a friend at all is this girl I worked with last year, and we just text sometimes.

Maybe things are different for others, but life has taught me I can't count on anyone but family, and even then it's not a sure thing.

[CRR]

Not too long ago, I was at a friends party, with a lot of their wives/gfs. One made a comment that I seem to like to spend a lot of time with my guy friends (to be fair, she said it in a non-judgmental way). I said "my friends are my family", which of course they thought was nice. I followed that with "and on Sundays during the fall, the only interaction I want with a woman is if she's bringing me food while I watch football with my friends".

[AnonymousBosch]

(07-17-2014 11:36 PM)weambulance Wrote:  

That can be true, but IME solid male friendships are incredibly rare. I had a few like that when I was growing up, but in my adult life every friendship I thought was really solid either ended with us moving far apart and the friend not bothering to keep in touch or, given enough time, with the "friend" turning out to be a total douche. It just happened to me again this week, in fact, my "best friend" turned out to be a lying prick. Right now I count zero good male friends in my life. The only person I consider a friend at all is this girl I worked with last year, and we just text sometimes.

There's a few guys I went from playing cowboys and indians with to carrying their coffins. Some of the living ones I consider brothers, and we have each other's backs.

I'd suggest to get involved in more masculine groups and activities that require effort to do, or codes of conduct to live up to be accepted. Sporting / military / biker.

[Captain Gh]

(07-17-2014 10:25 PM)The Lizard of Oz Wrote:  

Essays like these strike me as if they're written by people who are so carried away by their ideology that they don't stop to think if what they're saying has the least relation to reality. Or maybe they forgot about reality or never knew much about it in the first place?

Consider the following passage:

Quote:

All boys need to prove that they are not failures. They need to prove that they are on the way to becoming men—that they are not going to relapse into the need to be protected by, and therefore identified with, their mothers.

Societies used to provide them with clear and public ways to do this. The Plains Indians would insert hooks into the flesh of their thirteen-year-old braves and hang them in the sun by those hooks, for hours—a test of endurance and courage. At his bar-mitzvah the Jewish boy reads from the Holy Torah and announces, publicly, that on this day he has become a man.

In our carelessness we have taken such signs away from boys and left them to fend for themselves. Two choices remain: The boys must live without public recognition of their manhood and without their own certainty of it, or they must invent their own rituals and signs.

And here the sexual revolution comes to peddle its poison. The single incontrovertible sign that the boy can now seize on is that he has “done it” with a girl, and the earlier and more regularly and publicly he does it, the safer and surer he will feel. If sex is easy to find, and if (as mothers of good-looking teenage boys will testify) the girls themselves seek it out, then you must have a pressing and publicly recognized excuse for not having sex. To avoid scandal—think of it!—you must be protected by your being a linebacker on the football team, or by being too homely for any girl to be interested in you.

A boy who does not agree to a girl’s demand for sex will be tagged with homosexuality. She will slander him herself. Ask teenagers; they will tell you. But even a linebacker known as a rake will not dare to venture into the dangerous territory of too-close association with the wrong sort. He, too, will avoid the close male friendship. The popular and athletic boys will thus have their tickets punched, while the others live under suspicion, alienated from the other boys, from the girls, and from one another.

What he is saying is that because society has taken away some "rituals" from "our boys" their only way to prove their manhood post "sexual revolution" is to try to fuck girls as soon as they can and have that be known. In addition, he expresses grave sympathy for all the teenage kids who would love to refuse sex when girls throw themselves at them, but can't because they would be considered gay.

I don't really know what to say about something like this -- does this crazy ideologue really believe that before the "sexual revolution" teenage boys never tried to fuck girls as soon as they could and run to tell their buddies about it (or more likely, lie to their buddies about it)? Does he think that this is some recent development in the human male? Does he believe that those Plains Indians were so content to hang from those hooks for a few hours that they forgot all about the need to get with lil Plains pussy? Who are these wondrous teenage prudes who would just love nothing better than to refuse "empty" sex from all the young sluts (supposedly) throwing themselves at them, but are obliged to go through the motions of blowing a load or two in the little whore's mouth lest they be considered gay? What planet is this about, anyway?

Again, these ideas are not just wrong -- they are deranged and completely detached from reality. They imagine some hazy pre-"sexual revolution" past that bears no relation to anything that has ever gone on in an actual human society involving human beings; and they imagine some fantastically debauched present that bears very little relation to what actually goes on now. One can write anything; the pixels have no shame. But it is worth pausing and asking oneself if what is being written has even the most tenuous connection to some sort of reality.

I can't relate to the answer, but I know it from having read the book Absent Father, Lost Son from Guy Corneau. In the book, He goes on to explain that for a man to be able to deal with the hardship of life correctly, there was always a symbolical event that was performed where some kind of necessary pain was involved for the boy to grow into a man.

With that in place, sex was viewed as an act of representation of the family unity. A man that would've gotten some pussy on the low would have been shamed by his own family as an act of major disrespect because he did not get the stamp of approuval about being a man from the female's father.That was heavy stuff back then. I'm sure it happened anyway, but it was rare.

In the author's word, since fathers ain't running shit no more there's no more symbolic ceremony to celebrate the passing of a boy becoming a man. Women's nature are to always want to nurture and smother you with love, therefore never giving the chance to a young boy of becoming a men.

So With that gone, having sex with a girl has been established as the new mark to "reach manhood". As most of us know (after getting burned by women), a young boy without the guidance of a strong man having sex will do it on her terms (thanks to her being liberated by feminism), so the chances of him being a beta bitch boy 4 life will be quite high.

[Big Nilla]

FB is interesting. It's shown me that about 90% of the females pretty much lack any substance whatsoever. I've had to unfollow most of them just to get away from the bombardment of trivial and superficial nonsense. Obviously this isn't unique to me.

Too bad FB is also showing me that a lot of my guy friends who used to be cool are also falling into the lack of substance category. Even have a friend in vegas who takes about 3 selfies of himself every week and regularly posts those stupid inspiration and positivity quotes. Vegas has chewed him up and spit him out. He tries to pretend he has a great life and is having fun, but it's obvious he's not. His life is empty and he bares it all on FB like a dumbfuck. No way I could count on him or trust him. He can barely take care of himself and is all over the place with his decisions.

Point being, fewer and fewer guys are worth putting in the effort to have a true friendship with since they can't be counted on.

[fellowhuntsman]

Good points, everyone. Overall, I agree with the point of the original article. The increase of same sex behavior as being an identity has truly stifled close friendship/brotherhood friendship between men. The objective has been to make male friendships less powerful and viable in combatting feminism and multiculturalism.

Lots of historical and psychological research exists showing that men could do quite a bit together and never have the "homosexual label" even threatened to be applied; it was too verboten. Men were called homosexuals for being craven or cowardly but not for loving their buds beyond loving women. Even in the Bible (Deuteronomy 13) God talks about "the friend who is as thine own soul" as well as the "wife of thy bosom," two very distinct (in my opinion) roles.

Actual same sex behavior used to be only an occasional thing and almost always only when women weren't available for adolescent boys, frat buds, military men, or prisoners (and almost always a form of hierarchy building) or actual long-term deviant behavior by degenerates that inhabited the oily places of political and ecclesiastical intrigue. Now feminists have tried to apply that oily taint everything.

Hell, a blowjob never used to be "sex" until the feminists were able to pin it on Clinton, it was 3rd base. but the more you can "add it [sex]" to everything the more you can pin raps like "harassment," "rape," and now "gay" to it.

[RoastBeefCurtains4Me]

It's interesting the title is about male friendships. This is a real issue, but I noticed the idea of the unmarried uncle resting his hand on his niece's shoulder. (Oddly, my phone wanted to replace niece's with incest).

When I was late teens and young adult in the 80s, I enjoyed playing with children, as the innocent, wholesome activity it was. I was able to make money babysitting from age 13-17, and even in college, the neighbor's five year old girl could come in our house to play.

Nowadays it sounds suspicious to me to even say these things happened in my life, as I must be a pervert to have ever interacted with children. However, like most men throughout history, my friends and I would have fought any child molester violently. There was no safer place for a child to be than with me and my friends, as it would be with any group of RVF.

Now, I am highly conscious of the threat of accusation from being interested in children. There are children I love dearly, where I have to play it cool, to avoid accusation, and thereby miss time together that would mean the world to me. I'm not imagining things. The mother of these child is a friend of the family, and has a high opinion of me. However, she's grown up in a world where children can not be left alone with men that are not relatives, and even then better not.

Here's an example. My dad was driving a block from the downtown center of my home town, and saw that a baby was crawling in the middle of an intersection. He pulled up next to the baby, got out and stood over it, and waited for a woman to appear. Finally one did, and picked the baby up to safety. He may have been a little paranoid, but he didn't want to be seen picking up a strange baby in public.

Sadly, I think he was right.

[puckerman]

I think there's something else going on here. If men start to form friendships like they used to, they will start doing other things as well. They will start to form teams and leagues. They will for organizations and associations.

They might actually get together and form labor unions. And that is something that scares the shit, piss, and blood out of the rich elites who run the world. The rich depend on workers taking all kinds of shit from their employers. If workers went on strike now and then, like they used to, the rich would get their heads out of their asses and actually do something to make work tolerable again.

[Fortis]

The necromancers are strong in these parts.

[EDantes]

Slightly off topic but in "The Way of Men" Jack Donovan commented on how in the modern era activities like video gaming as well as co-ed workplaces are taking the place of traditional male bonding activities like sports.

The current dynamic however still benefits women as female bonding leans more along the lines of talking and sharing emotions with one another as opposed to doing activities; hence the digital era of Facebook and Smartphones better serves female communication style. With more and more men becoming physically inactive or obese it's easier for men just to turn to video games for a taste of 'adventure' rather than learn a sport.

This one reason I'm not particularly fond of the stereotypical "corporate job" that many young yuppie college grads settle for; as opposed to traditional "blue collar" or "men's work" such as construction, trade school, etc.

I'm not really for the idea that 'homosexuality' plays a role in it; I've honestly never thought of a guy as "gay" because he hangs out and does activities with other guys; if anything the guy who spends most of his time hanging out with women is more likely gay.