On gender roles and the past

1. Danny :
   What do males want?
   As for me I want the freedom to express masculinity in any (reasonable) way I wish free of people constantly trying to police me.

   Well that’s the thing — and this is emblematic of identity politics as such — people want to stop time and kind of make history over, so that everybody has an ideal set of relationships. That’s never going to work. Sure, life was more predictable in some ways, in the past.  Rigidly defined gender roles made some aspects of life easier, although life as a whole wasn’t easier in the past. 

   We all want to express ourselves without others policing us. We have a society more like that today than the one in the past. Believe me, I COME from the past, so I should know. In the past, everybody had their allocated place in society, and this couldn’t change. Everybody knew how to talk to you, because they were addressing the position, not the person.

   Identity politics seems to be appealing to this olden days state of affairs when it demands of others: “You need to address me as a ‘masculine’ entity. Okay, now! Go ahead and do it!”

   Well, we are on modern terms these days, and there is no way I can address you solely in terms of an identity. I’d need to learn more about you, first. What makes you tick? What is it about you that is particularly ‘masculine’ — and in what ways does this necessitate that I respect you?”

   All the questions become a little more nuanced, under the force of individualist psychology. Perhaps this makes relationships harder, for some people. In general, though, life will never be as hard as it used to be when rigid gender roles were enforced. (You only have to look at some of the war movies I’m fond of viewing, to see that ‘masculinity’ was largely impersonal and self-sacrificial, in the past, for the majority of men.)
2. 
   

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism