Scott! Finally getting around to leaving obnoxious rambling comments on your Substack.
Obviously I am not a gender anything expert so throwing some largely uninformed takes your way. Interested to discuss if you'd like.
On this section:
"The typical framing is that, for men and women to have equal power, men must surrender some of their power. Resistance to feminism arises because men want to keep all the power. As a man sympathetic to the fight against oppression, I propose an additional possibility: that feminism makes it unclear what it means to be a man."
I'm interested in that last bit. My take would be something more like this:
* One of the main differences between men-writ-large and women-writ-large (glossing over a lot of nuance here) is just average physical strength. That's my layperson take anyway.
* There used to be loads of work/jobs where that difference in physical strength mattered. Plowing fields with oxen. Almost anything construction-related before machines. Fighting other people (tho it seems a little unclear to me whether the prevalence of war/fighting has actually fallen over time. I know there's been some pushback on the Stephen-Pinker-type "war is less common today" narrative. Way outside my knowledge base here).
* Anyway now there are just fewer jobs where brute physical strength matters. Check out this cool BLS data, for example (I wish they had a timeseries of this): https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2017/physical-strength-required-for-jobs-in-different-occupations-in-2016.htm. If you refer to the definition of each category, even the "medium work" category doesn't involve a ton of super heavy lifting. And just in general, many common job types involve endurance (e.g. standing for long periods) but not tons of muscle: https://www.bls.gov/spotlight/2014/occupations/images/chart_01_large.png (Don't get me wrong, some common jobs like nursing involve literally picking people up. But making a point about general trends here)
* And even for jobs that used to require tons of physical strength, less strength is now required. We have tractors that plow fields and machines that assist warehouse workers. Basically anyone can kill other people with 4 pounds of pull force in their index finger, which seems like maybe partly why many modern armies have opened the ranks to women in combat roles. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/01/25/map-which-countries-allow-women-in-front-line-combat-roles/).
* As an aside I think it's fun to notice how traditional gender roles get jumbled in office jobs, where things often revolve around collaboration & diplomacy (I have female co-workers with "traditionally male" traits like "decisiveness" and male coworkers who are especially emotionally competent, which people often to code as "feminine").
Anyway assuming we believe that:
* one of the hallmarks of this gender split is/has been brute physical strength
* there is less need in society for brute physical strength now, as a proportion of all jobs
I'm not sure I would say "feminism" has made it unclear what it means to be a man. Seems more like the world / technology has just changed the relative value of lifting/pushing heavy things?
And yeah that's tricky. If the old narrative was "I'm a man bc I can physically dominate other people and keep an ox-driven plow in the ground", we probably need a new narrative here. Both because the old one had problems (pervasive threat of violence = bad) and because I'm not sure the old one could even be successfully resurrected (tho some ppl will try; i guess never underestimate our ability to backslide into raw impulsive bloodlust). But it's hard to imagine brute strength becoming as important to society at large as it was 400 or 1000 years ago (right?).**
Anyway on the question you pose: "in a world where men and women are equal, what does it mean to be a man or a woman? Are these categories to be simply abolished?"
IDT they need to be abolished (what would that even mean), but in a way the fact that they're less relevant in some contexts is not a bad thing. When gender differences feel relevant something is often wrong (e.g. someone is feeling physically threatened). Or else we're in a context (oil drilling, pipefitting, etc) where men predominate because physical strength is important.****
Sort of related: I'm reading this interesting book by Jonathan Lear called "Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation" that's about the near-collapse of traditional Crow culture in the late 1800s. The book asks some of these questions around "what do you do when the things that gave your culture meaning vanish?"
I think about this essay all the freaking time. Like, this is the problem to me in a nutshell. Men had a traditional story about manhood. It doesn't always make sense anymore. Many men don't think maintenance and care ("gathering berries") constitutes a compelling story. So some men are like, kind of drifting.
On this bit: "For better or worse, womanliness seems to be associated with globally positive qualities like being nice to children. By contrast, manliness seems to be associated either with globally positive virtues that we think should belong equally to men and women, like strength and ambition, or to wholly negative traits, like being mean to children."
Who cares? I mean that as an honest question haha. Like I don't think these kinds of lazy generalizations (which I agree, people sometimes make) mean much. Gendered violence is obviously a real problem. We should restructure society so women don't fear for their lives. But people who say stuff like "men are the weaker sex" or "men are terrible" (assuming they are not just voicing general frustration, which is understandable, but making some kind of social science hypothesis)--like that is just a little silly, entering sloppily-written think piece territory. Not saying you're doing that here! But the people that write stuff like that--I just don't think that's especially useful or thoughtful or interesting. (It's not hard to frame "manhood" as terrible; you can find the statistics to support a 1000-word essay w/ that thesis. But coming up w/ a novel, productive formulation of "manhood" is actually interesting and difficult).
**I wanna be careful with this "how important is physical strength to society today" stuff. I think it's easy to underestimate how important strength is as a person who has a desk job now. Like amazon warehouse jobs are exhausting. Being a nurse is exhausting. And plenty of extractive industry & primary energy jobs (the basis of modernity) are freaking brutal. Even my own, short-term manual jobs (landscaping, demolition, construction, kitchen prep) were pretty taxing. Sometimes I think this "what does it mean to be a man" stuff is really a question limited to men who have desk jobs now (or are struggling to find stability & employment) not the men out there welding 10 hours a day. Although sometimes you hear people talk about how we don't collectively value manual labor enough anymore, and how men in manual jobs don't feel valued. IDK if there's merit to that. Again, having had manual jobs, I have some appreciation for how taxing they can be and how important they are. Curious what you think on this.
(Also I know in large coastal cities traditional gender roles are often morphed/remixed. But I don't think we should underestimate where most cis, hetero Americans are on this stuff. Most American men and women still hold pretty traditional views on gender roles).
**** I'm not saying men's higher average physical strength is the only reason (or even the main reason) there are more male oil rig workers. I know relatively little about oil drilling. I'm sure it's a constellation of factors. I am guessing that physical strength is one of those factors. I could be wrong.
Final thought: I'm not sure sports are, like, a replacement for oppression or violence. Having grown up playing sports in Texas (albeit a commie sport like soccer), my experience was more that sports are a simulation or a taste of violence. A kind of training in (semi) controlled violence. One way to view this is "we're channeling boy's inherently violent tendencies into something mostly harmless." Another is "we're training boys to value violence and being physically dominant over other people." I'd tend towards the latter, although I had some pretty shitty soccer coaches (e.g. outright abusive coaches that were later fired for their behavior) and didn't especially enjoy their overt homophobia. The first perspective also tends to assume boys are inherently violent and I'm not sure that's right. Reading a couple books on this by primatologists right now. Will lyk if there's anything interesting in those.
Sports also adopt this inherently "insider group" / "outsider group" mentality. IDK if that makes for a good basis for masculinity, or needs to be central to a conception of masculinity. There are plenty of problems in the world--arguably the most important problems--that threaten us all (death, disease, environmental degradation, poverty, hunger) that don't require inside/outside group frameworks. (The universe wants to kill us all haha). That said I'm a big believer in unit cohesion and there are definitely ways to create group identities without falling into in/out group frameworks. Which you say above.
Anyway that was a lot of words! Curious to discuss. Hope you're well.
Scott! Finally getting around to leaving obnoxious rambling comments on your Substack.
Obviously I am not a gender anything expert so throwing some largely uninformed takes your way. Interested to discuss if you'd like.
On this section:
"The typical framing is that, for men and women to have equal power, men must surrender some of their power. Resistance to feminism arises because men want to keep all the power. As a man sympathetic to the fight against oppression, I propose an additional possibility: that feminism makes it unclear what it means to be a man."
I'm interested in that last bit. My take would be something more like this:
* One of the main differences between men-writ-large and women-writ-large (glossing over a lot of nuance here) is just average physical strength. That's my layperson take anyway.
* There used to be loads of work/jobs where that difference in physical strength mattered. Plowing fields with oxen. Almost anything construction-related before machines. Fighting other people (tho it seems a little unclear to me whether the prevalence of war/fighting has actually fallen over time. I know there's been some pushback on the Stephen-Pinker-type "war is less common today" narrative. Way outside my knowledge base here).
* Anyway now there are just fewer jobs where brute physical strength matters. Check out this cool BLS data, for example (I wish they had a timeseries of this): https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2017/physical-strength-required-for-jobs-in-different-occupations-in-2016.htm. If you refer to the definition of each category, even the "medium work" category doesn't involve a ton of super heavy lifting. And just in general, many common job types involve endurance (e.g. standing for long periods) but not tons of muscle: https://www.bls.gov/spotlight/2014/occupations/images/chart_01_large.png (Don't get me wrong, some common jobs like nursing involve literally picking people up. But making a point about general trends here)
* And even for jobs that used to require tons of physical strength, less strength is now required. We have tractors that plow fields and machines that assist warehouse workers. Basically anyone can kill other people with 4 pounds of pull force in their index finger, which seems like maybe partly why many modern armies have opened the ranks to women in combat roles. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/01/25/map-which-countries-allow-women-in-front-line-combat-roles/).
* As an aside I think it's fun to notice how traditional gender roles get jumbled in office jobs, where things often revolve around collaboration & diplomacy (I have female co-workers with "traditionally male" traits like "decisiveness" and male coworkers who are especially emotionally competent, which people often to code as "feminine").
Anyway assuming we believe that:
* one of the hallmarks of this gender split is/has been brute physical strength
* there is less need in society for brute physical strength now, as a proportion of all jobs
I'm not sure I would say "feminism" has made it unclear what it means to be a man. Seems more like the world / technology has just changed the relative value of lifting/pushing heavy things?
And yeah that's tricky. If the old narrative was "I'm a man bc I can physically dominate other people and keep an ox-driven plow in the ground", we probably need a new narrative here. Both because the old one had problems (pervasive threat of violence = bad) and because I'm not sure the old one could even be successfully resurrected (tho some ppl will try; i guess never underestimate our ability to backslide into raw impulsive bloodlust). But it's hard to imagine brute strength becoming as important to society at large as it was 400 or 1000 years ago (right?).**
Anyway on the question you pose: "in a world where men and women are equal, what does it mean to be a man or a woman? Are these categories to be simply abolished?"
IDT they need to be abolished (what would that even mean), but in a way the fact that they're less relevant in some contexts is not a bad thing. When gender differences feel relevant something is often wrong (e.g. someone is feeling physically threatened). Or else we're in a context (oil drilling, pipefitting, etc) where men predominate because physical strength is important.****
Sort of related: I'm reading this interesting book by Jonathan Lear called "Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation" that's about the near-collapse of traditional Crow culture in the late 1800s. The book asks some of these questions around "what do you do when the things that gave your culture meaning vanish?"
Also sort of related: Have you read this: https://otherfutures.nl/uploads/documents/le-guin-the-carrier-bag-theory-of-fiction.pdf
I think about this essay all the freaking time. Like, this is the problem to me in a nutshell. Men had a traditional story about manhood. It doesn't always make sense anymore. Many men don't think maintenance and care ("gathering berries") constitutes a compelling story. So some men are like, kind of drifting.
On this bit: "For better or worse, womanliness seems to be associated with globally positive qualities like being nice to children. By contrast, manliness seems to be associated either with globally positive virtues that we think should belong equally to men and women, like strength and ambition, or to wholly negative traits, like being mean to children."
Who cares? I mean that as an honest question haha. Like I don't think these kinds of lazy generalizations (which I agree, people sometimes make) mean much. Gendered violence is obviously a real problem. We should restructure society so women don't fear for their lives. But people who say stuff like "men are the weaker sex" or "men are terrible" (assuming they are not just voicing general frustration, which is understandable, but making some kind of social science hypothesis)--like that is just a little silly, entering sloppily-written think piece territory. Not saying you're doing that here! But the people that write stuff like that--I just don't think that's especially useful or thoughtful or interesting. (It's not hard to frame "manhood" as terrible; you can find the statistics to support a 1000-word essay w/ that thesis. But coming up w/ a novel, productive formulation of "manhood" is actually interesting and difficult).
**I wanna be careful with this "how important is physical strength to society today" stuff. I think it's easy to underestimate how important strength is as a person who has a desk job now. Like amazon warehouse jobs are exhausting. Being a nurse is exhausting. And plenty of extractive industry & primary energy jobs (the basis of modernity) are freaking brutal. Even my own, short-term manual jobs (landscaping, demolition, construction, kitchen prep) were pretty taxing. Sometimes I think this "what does it mean to be a man" stuff is really a question limited to men who have desk jobs now (or are struggling to find stability & employment) not the men out there welding 10 hours a day. Although sometimes you hear people talk about how we don't collectively value manual labor enough anymore, and how men in manual jobs don't feel valued. IDK if there's merit to that. Again, having had manual jobs, I have some appreciation for how taxing they can be and how important they are. Curious what you think on this.
(Also I know in large coastal cities traditional gender roles are often morphed/remixed. But I don't think we should underestimate where most cis, hetero Americans are on this stuff. Most American men and women still hold pretty traditional views on gender roles).
**** I'm not saying men's higher average physical strength is the only reason (or even the main reason) there are more male oil rig workers. I know relatively little about oil drilling. I'm sure it's a constellation of factors. I am guessing that physical strength is one of those factors. I could be wrong.
Final thought: I'm not sure sports are, like, a replacement for oppression or violence. Having grown up playing sports in Texas (albeit a commie sport like soccer), my experience was more that sports are a simulation or a taste of violence. A kind of training in (semi) controlled violence. One way to view this is "we're channeling boy's inherently violent tendencies into something mostly harmless." Another is "we're training boys to value violence and being physically dominant over other people." I'd tend towards the latter, although I had some pretty shitty soccer coaches (e.g. outright abusive coaches that were later fired for their behavior) and didn't especially enjoy their overt homophobia. The first perspective also tends to assume boys are inherently violent and I'm not sure that's right. Reading a couple books on this by primatologists right now. Will lyk if there's anything interesting in those.
Sports also adopt this inherently "insider group" / "outsider group" mentality. IDK if that makes for a good basis for masculinity, or needs to be central to a conception of masculinity. There are plenty of problems in the world--arguably the most important problems--that threaten us all (death, disease, environmental degradation, poverty, hunger) that don't require inside/outside group frameworks. (The universe wants to kill us all haha). That said I'm a big believer in unit cohesion and there are definitely ways to create group identities without falling into in/out group frameworks. Which you say above.
Anyway that was a lot of words! Curious to discuss. Hope you're well.