void is made of gender

I’m gonna do The Bad Thing You Aren’t Supposed To Do. Also this is a bunch of poorly organized thoughts that can't be organized because the train of thought is nonlinear.

There is an asymmetry in the way that people talk about male and female gender norms. I can see you typing, please let me make my point in full. The general way people that think they’re tolerant see these norms is you don’t have to follow them, you know, it’s a free country, but people will think you’re weird if you don’t, you know? You don’t have to, but you don’t get to have any opinions on how people react to you. Ostracism isn’t real, it’s just that everyone has independently decided they hate you, and can you imagine the disaster it would be if you could force people to be your friend? Humans are black boxes. There is no difference between people shunning you for wearing the wrong clothes and people shunning you for, uh, I’m trying to think of examples of heinous things that can’t be cited as This Is Actually About Police Brutality Because That’s In The News and coming up pretty much blank. You understand the sentence I was trying to write even though, given the associations a reader would reflexively make, it is not currently possible to write it.

There is something of a contingent of feminists that see this and come to the obvious conclusion because they have brains. That conclusion being: This is coercive, it’s pointlessly cruel. The gnawing omnipresent knowledge that you have the option to sell out to get that acceptance you crave is acknowledged as a mental burden. It is recognized that there are valid reasons (and personal expression is treated as a valid reason) to not want to follow a given norm, let alone reasons it may be impossible or much more draining than average, e.g. disabilities.

This sounds about right, to me anyway. I dislike standpoint epistemology and am therefore a bad person, but it rings true to my experience, which means nothing at all. Obviously there are differences in the specific norms, enforcement mechanisms, and so forth. But based on testimony I gather that the basic shape is the same.

However, when the norm under debate involves men, the discourse is a bit different. The rewards for conforming are rhetorically treated as some kind of universal privilege. If it’s pointed out that not every man conforms, well obviously it’s because men are lazy and it’s their individual fault. Norms have no actual content, they merely exist as effort-receptacles.* The only possible complaint you might have is effort bad. Which is extra maddening when there are plenty of criticisms of female gender norms, widely accepted as valid, that also boil down to effort bad (e.g. mandatory makeup). And that’s not to discredit them! Wanting a little more time and mental energy for yourself is in fact a valid desire. Every time I see a post that uses “cargo shorts” as shorthand for “lazy manchild” I want to tear out my skull and throw it at someone. You’re trying to stick it to The Men by insulting… loose, pocketed clothing? Sure, I bet this won’t backfire at all and is 100% non-hypocritical w.r.t. criticisms commonly levied at women’s clothing.

(guess I’ll stick out my neck here and say yes, I do in fact primarily wear The Trousers Of Sin, if that affects any of your moral calculus. wow it’s almost like people don’t like being insulted over things that are obviously completely harmless. i am very heat sensitive and need a place to store things within reach. fuck you)

*This is not always the case, obviously people talk about the consequences of emotional repression and that sort of thing. It’s only when someone points out that the speaker is conflating “cartoonishly masculine men” with “all men” that this really applies.

I was going to write a short and hopefully pithy message to my friend that went something like… look I don’t envy the shit that you no doubt put up with, or have any illusion that you don’t have an impossible aspirational beauty standard glaring at you from every magazine rack with transparent, dripping contempt. What I envy is that your specific aspirational beauty standard is at least not blatantly ugly.

And that’s part of it, but… not really the entire story, because also the idea that your advocates understand that there are a million different reasons you might not actually define that as success? Like even in explicitly left wing places you see this idea that there’s a Correct Way to Be a Man, and that it’s Obvious, and that it's exactly like the right wing definition except who you're supposed to beat up is swapped. An example that sticks in my mind was one time Vaush was talking about an entitled attitude he saw in a lot of men, and it sounded legit awful on its own merits. But then he went on to say these men tend to be “smelly and poorly dressed” and I just - poor hygiene is on a whole different level of bad as not following fashion, a thing which is not in fact on any level of bad. And I don’t think Vaush is stupid, I’m sure if you prodded him he would say “yeah, clothing standards are gendered, I don’t think anyone will deny that,” but he’s on record as a gender abolitionist, he explains the concept at length in videos and has clearly given it a great deal of thought, and then he goes ahead and mentions not adhering to an arbitrary gendered standard with unconcealed disdain juxtaposed with not fucking taking baths.

(Incidentally, is anyone else put off by how a lot of “entitlement” discourse barely mentions “doesn’t take no for an answer” and jumps straight to “asked for something too good for them in the first place”? And of course every commentator claims the role of Unbiased Arbiter Of Individual Worth, because why would you not put people down at every opportunity? Like, “didn’t take no for an answer” is enough to morally indict someone. You can stop there, in fact it undermines your case if you don’t stop there. “I don’t like your shirt” is morally nothing. It’s not even morally neutral. Zero implies the possibility of positive or negative. Morality segfaults if you pass it an article of clothing. It’s gibberish. )

The implication in all these purportedly progressive spaces that what makes a Correct Man is Obvious, and the idea that you might look at what’s being held up as the ideal and recoil is literally alien to people. It’s completely inscrutable that I do not want to be a “hunk” because I do not, in fact, consider it a compliment to be compared to a lump of material with no internal state. If you don’t want to be a grunting American-football player that can’t form sentences more complex than “me smash” what is there? Well, there’s femboys, they’re minimally tolerated, but you have to go all the way otherwise you’re just claiming that as a get-out-of-football-free card. And when you get there there’s superficial lip service but everyone hates you anyway, either because “just come out as trans already” or “yeah I guess it bucks the trends but men have been allowed to get away with too much, the rules need to get more restrictive for them not less,” or my personal favorite, “idk it’s suspicious a lot of alt-righters are like that.” Because obviously, anyone who doesn’t see the obvious goodness of football man can’t be right in the head and therefore maximally bad. The etymology of the word “bad” is left as an exercise for the reader. Or I guess you can be Lazy Gamer Filth who is also automatically assumed to be extremely racist because uhhhhh… well I’ve never understood that particular leap but extremely clever people have assured me that a) it makes perfect sense and b) they are extremely clever, so it must be true. Like I’ll fess up to being Lazy Gamer Filth because “please leave me alone, the sun is trying to kill me” is an objectively reasonable request, fuck you

The end of this post was originally a bunch of questionable gibberish about "just say you're not a man then" and not understanding gender theory enough to actually make any assertions confidently. I will probably never be able to conceptualize gender as anything other than arbitrary made up rules that order you to do obviously vile things, because that is how I have experienced it and go fuck yourself.

There is a... Thing that goes on in certain Woke Men's Forums that goes, existing masculinity is bad, it's up to men to make a new one that's better, and just... who is men? This strikes me as the sociological equivalent of editing a list you're iterating over. And whenever this topic comes up it's treated as just implicitly making sense and requiring no further elaboration to the point that I'm wondering if it's just sounds to these people. It's like that thing morlock-holmes is always on about where people shout slogans to prove that they know the slogans, and the idea that someone might interpret the slogans as meaning what the words mean never crosses anyone's mind.

Like.

DO GENDERS HAVE FUCKING DEFINITIONS OR NOT.

There are 37 different answers to this question and the proponents of each consider their position to be the obviously correct one that needs no explanation.

I'm trying to write about rhetoric I have seen, which is positioned as Correct Woke Rhetoric, but is in direct contradiction with other Correct Woke Rhetoric and I'm going fucking insane here because someone can bring up that mentioning the factual statement that the rhetoric is used has failed to account for Psionic Aether Theory and I therefore need to be pelted with rotten fruit.

I can't fucking understand and I can't fucking articulate my non-understanding because what if I misspeak and my understanding of what constitutes misspeaking comes from the non-understanding I'm trying to rectify

And I'm writing all these disclaimers and damage control for a blog post that nobody will read except maybe the one person I send it to. Because obviously all non-understanding is trolling/sealioning. "Literally everyone understands the rules except you, so just fucking understand them" I'm sorry for being a fucking idiot, but I can't force myself to not be a fucking idiot, I AM NOT PRETENDING TO NOT UNDERSTAND PLEASE STOP REPEATING THE SAME SENTENCE AND REPHRASE IT. I DO NOT UNDERSTAND THE MEANING OF THE SENTENCE. IT IS NOT POSSIBLE TO BELIEVE WORDS. IT IS ONLY POSSIBLE TO BELIEVE MEANING, WHICH IS COMMUNICATED THROUGH WORDS. AND I DO NOT UNDERSTAND THE MEANING SO TRY NEW WORDS.

WHY THE FUCK ARE HUMANS THIS WAY

WHY IS WHAT I AM SUPPOSED TO ASPIRE TO LOOK LIKE OBJECTIVELY DISGUSTING TO ANYTHING THAT DOESN'T HAVE A RAIL THROUGH ITS HEAD