Your Theories on the Neo-Nazi/MRA/Incel/Alt-Right/Fascist to Trans Pipeline?

MaleFriedanFan · 2022-01-17T15:48:16+00:00

It is a byproduct of gender mystiques. If we go back to when The Feminine Mystique was published, the Problem with No Name was that women felt as though they couldn't possibly be women because they were so unlike the depictions of women in magazines, who found deep contentment out of vacuum cleaners, always looked glamorous even when exhausted. Everything that brought them personal joy was deeply weird by magazine standards, and they had no outlet. There were even incels back then, as a common piece of advice was that all a woman's problems could be solved through the fulfillment of being a wife and mother.

Incels today are often men who are gender-nonconforming, even when they try to compensate. Reddit picked up on this by naming them neckbeards -- even when they try to conform to what they think are the gender norms, they fail somehow, like the beard on their face. Without the language to process these feelings, they are stuck in the same loop as the women before Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique.

The political activism is a way of trying to escape these feelings of frustration. This is actually something that is done by others as well -- a good book on the subject is The True Believer by Eric Hoffer, who noticed the same thing studying who became a Nazi and who became a Communist in the 1940s, and realizing it was the same type of person, someone struggling through personal failure who wanted a cause that would let them escape from themselves.

MaleFriedanFan · 2021-07-26T03:03:55+00:00

Sometimes it is hard to gauge a person's seriousness because they are uncomfortable revealing the extent of the crisis. For some people, transitioning is their alternative to suicide. They have trouble seeing a way out of what they are struggling through, so when transitioning promises a solution it is very compelling.

So whatever you go with, it's important to provide another way out.

As you pointed out, she is considering this despite it causing family problems, which means that to her, the problem she is currently struggling with is big enough to make it seem worth it.

MaleFriedanFan · 2021-06-21T00:59:33+00:00

I do not. I usually agree with Betty Friedan, who was a second-waver but not a radfem. From my limited understanding, she believed that many women still wanted to start families along with their other aspirations, it was just the suffocating expectations of the feminine mystique that transformed this into something harmful.

I don't know that I can speak about political lesbianism, but maybe I can offer my thoughts on the male equivalent. I think that sometimes what happens is that a man accumulates enough bad experiences with women that they give up on women categorically, despite having sexual attraction towards them. In that way, it could be considered a form of misogyny. While some of these men do seem actively hateful towards women, others seem more tense and avoidant, almost as though they had developed a phobia. Sometimes it does mesh with their politics, but in my limited experience it does not start from politics but rather from painful experiences.

MaleFriedanFan · 2021-06-06T15:16:22+00:00

The trick to understanding this is that they see separate things as related things. Like if you asked what made someone look "manly", many people would list off different physical characteristics. The smartass would say that they showed them their dick. The distinction is that many of the men in those online communities would also list off social and economic characteristics. So to them, there is a general manliness level for each man, and the manly man will have the good job, and the nice girlfriend, and the extroversion, and the big muscles, and the deep voice in equal measure, as though after every raise you get a thicker beard. :) So women become symbolic -- they figure if they can solve their struggle with women, it will magically solve everything because in their minds these are all fundamentally connected, and that if women thwart them, they aren't just showing their personal disinterest, but are causing all the other struggles.

MaleFriedanFan · 2020-12-28T15:49:30+00:00

Cosplay is a form of high fashion, so it can produce the same internal and external pressures (comparing yourself to artist's illustrations, the strange dynamics between a model and an audience, etc.) I think what makes this less obvious is that for many years it was largely non-commercial high-fashion, the models making their own copies of clothes that were never available for sale and that were created by a character-designer not a fashion-designer.

The original idea behind cosplay was that it was a way for the model to show appreciation for a character; sometimes the character did not have the same sex as the model. Crossplay was initially a positive influence because it made models less anxious about things that are difficult to change, such as their physical structure, when cosplaying as a character that they loved but did not really look like. Everyone laughed at "Sailor Bubba", but it was more of a relief sort of laughter; if a fat man can be Sailor Moon for a day, why can't you? However, fashion can be very competitive, so competitive crossplay also developed.

Much like with traditional high-fashion, many of the models are young, and may not know how to cope with these sort of pressures. When they reach out for help, these ideas are what they receive. :(

MaleFriedanFan · 2020-12-06T18:37:48+00:00

Thank you for your response! It encouraged me to re-read the OP carefully -- I am not sure, but think maybe I see where I became confused.

In the original post, OP asks a question, "Why is it that they all want to look cute, have long hair, wear makeup, and sexy feminine clothing?" I took this to be an earnest question (perhaps the other poster did as well), but after your explanation, I realize that this was a rhetorical question, and, as you pointed out, the actual purpose of the post was not to get an answer to that question but for the other purposes you outlined.

I see now that I was misunderstanding. I should have realized as this happened once in reverse, with a male friend who was trying to have a "Women, am I right?" where I did not get the drift that he wasn't really looking for help solving a problem.

I apologize for the misunderstanding.

MaleFriedanFan · 2020-12-04T17:36:35+00:00

I apologize for being a poor communicator.

Friedan created the term "the masculine mystique", I believe. She talks about it using that name in her second book, "It Changed My Life", a collection of her articles written after The Feminine Mystique and essays explaining the context in which they were written.

I think I should have said "the men of the present who need one don't have a Betty Friedan", to clarify that I was not talking about men in general from the era the book was written, but was trying to address the original topic of trying to understand the mindset of the subset of men today who decide the solution to their problems is transitioning, which some people want to understand because while they don't believe it is the right choice, those men are close friends, spouses, or family.

I think maybe another form of confusion is that I had trouble understanding how the examples you gave were examples of being liberated, having a voice, being free or unburdened (I think these would be opposite words for oppressed, voiceless, constrained, or put upon). Feeling powerless at work so screwing your secretary to feel powerful doesn't sound like it fits in there, but maybe I am misunderstanding again. Could you help me understand what you mean?

Friedan talked about women who started affairs because it was the only thing that made them feel alive when they were trapped at home, but she didn't seem to see the affairs as a sign of liberation but as a coping mechanism for a problem that hadn't been solved.

I think maybe an equivalent to "The Lonely Crowd" might be "The Second Sex". Ms. Friedan was inspired by this book, but when she got to meet Simone de Beauvoir, she was frustrated that Ms. de Beauvoir did not seem especially interested in concrete actions, only big ideas.

I think the quote from the second book was:

the authority with which she spoke about women seemed sterile, cold, an abstraction that had too little relationship to their real lives. I felt almost like a fool, struggling with those mundane questions that women have to confront in their personal lives and in movement strategy. Those questions did not seem to interest her at all. Somehow she did not seem to identify with ordinary women trying to make something new of themselves, or to feel at all involved with their everyday problems.

I agree that I don't have a clue about women's experience; after all, I can't experience being a woman. However, I do believe that the issues Ms. Friedan wrote about in regards to women can help people to understand similar struggles in others, which is why I thought she might be worth a look.

This has been an interesting conversation, thank you for taking the time to write to me.

MaleFriedanFan · 2020-12-03T16:24:21+00:00

Men of the era Betty Friedan's book focused on had famous men like Hugh Hefner, Larry Flynt, Normal Mailer, Pablo Picasso, John F Kennedy, Ted Hughes, Roman Polanski and a zillion more championing men's right to devote their lives to the selfish pursuit of their own sexual desires, career ambitions and personal fulfillment. They didn't need a male version of Betty Friedan.

Maybe I am misunderstanding here, but I don't think that Betty Friedan championed women's right to devote their lives to the pursuit of their own sexual desires, career ambitions and personal fulfillment at the cost of others -- that seemed to be part of the problem, being forced to make these false choices. She seemed to hope that there would be a way that a woman could explore her sexual feelings without needing to become a Playboy Bunny, have career ambitions without needing to abandon marriage or children, not to be forced to choose between personal fulfillment and the happiness of others, but to find a more stable identity that encompasses all of these hopes as a full human being rather than defining oneself as a choice from a set of lifestyle brands a magazine created.

I guess why I said, "never had a Betty Friedan" rather than "never had a Feminine Mystique" is that she didn't just write a book and move on, like William Whyte with The Organization Man, who was more interested in urban design. Unlike the academics like David Riesman who wrote The Lonely Crowd, she saw intellectualization of the problem as a dead-end; after the release of The Feminine Mystique, there were government task forces, and academic round-tables on "The Woman Problem", but they never seemed to go anywhere. So she went back to her readers to try to understand a path forward. David Riesman kept writing on the "Lonely Crowd Problem", but seemed content to merely be a public intellectual, and because of this the books never really turned into anything concrete.

MaleFriedanFan · 2020-11-29T17:52:23+00:00

I am biased here, but I think that something that might help is to look at the first of the Second Wavers that Betty Friedan wrote about. Many of these were women around his age, who, after their children were grown up, realized how desperately unhappy they were, and that they had no idea how to fix it. While it will depend on your partner's career, there's a good chance that at 37 to 40 that their trajectory is fixed. Maybe other aspects of their life as well. Comparing their own lives to that masculine mystique and not having "give it time..." to fall back on anymore can leave some men feeling just as trapped as those 60s housewives struggling with The Problem With No Name, stuck between the reality of their lives and the ideals that they did not create and yet feel they must live up to.

Men never had a Betty Friedan, though. So the idea of just adopting another mystique that seems more doable, rather than questioning why this burden has been placed on them to be something other than their honest selves, whatever it may look like, is very tempting.

I find it helps to ask, "When they were surrounded by bad choices, was this the worst choice?" For some people, this was their alternative to suicide; so while there are other choices you would hope that they could make, at the time they couldn't see those choices.

Things get complicated when you involve social media because of how powerful advertising is nowadays. The Cold War and battles over hearts and minds changed things for the worse, I feel. People like to assume that they are rational, but sometimes it seems sort of like "I'm a rational person, I won't fall for advertising" is the same as "I'm an athlete, I won't get sick". Maybe that is normally so, but there are limits to anybody's physical or psychological immune systems.

I guess the best place to start is to try to find a common ground that doesn't involve you or them compromising or fearing that one will drown out the other. That becomes a place where you can start before figuring out what to do next. There is an old book I quite like on this subject called "Getting to Yes" by Roger Fisher and William Ury; it is their attempt to translate the tactics that diplomats used for managing relationships between countries into principles individuals can use in their day-to-day lives.

MaleFriedanFan · 2020-11-29T17:19:43+00:00

Sorry for the delay, I took a short internet break. I wouldn't feel comfortable speaking for Betty Friedan, so I can only point back to her own words.

Older feminists were those who the process was being marketed to; those who had experienced menopause.

Thank you for the suggestions and context -- I really appreciate the advice.

MaleFriedanFan · 2020-10-11T19:31:52+00:00

Cosplay is high fashion designed by nerdy Japanese shut-ins, so it has a lot of weird stuff going on. "Crossplay" was originally supposed to be a positive thing, because cosplay was starting to take on the fashion ideal that you should only dress to your body type rather than your interests. So if you are a fat woman, you should only cosplay as fat women in anime rather than as characters from an anime that is your escapist pleasure. So you had people like "Sailor Bubba" ironically crossplaying as Sailor Moon despite not looking remotely like Sailor Moon because (I think) he liked Sailor Moon, which made it a little easier for people to not fret so much about their physical suitability for a character, as they could always point to Sailor Bubba as being a worse fit.

However, this has sort of opened up the perverse incentive of "crossplay to your body type rather than your interests". So if you are a woman with broad shoulders and no boobs, well...

MaleFriedanFan · 2020-10-11T19:06:15+00:00

Pure luck. I read the first half of The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan and didn't get around to the rest until later, so I didn't have to grapple with her own struggles to understand homosexuality, while still getting to absorb her other ideas. I also got into blogs when it wasn't quite clear if they were supposed to be public newsletters or semi-anonymous diaries, so I read a lot of young women's semi-anonymous diaries, which helped make them seem more like me rather than being Women with a capital W, a strange other group. These combined together to help me realize that The Problem With No Name was a problem we all shared.

I was also lucky in that I am a bad photographer who struggled to understand hashtags, so I wasn't on a lot of the social media sites where the influencing was heaviest. I also found a Facebook filtering plug-in because I was annoyed that Facebook no longer showed posts from my friends in chronological order, and I happened to check the "no memes" box because I'd seen some annoying ones. This reduced one of the main probable vectors to much lower levels of risk for me.

If none of these things had happened, I would have been the exact same; the building blocks are all there, after all.

MaleFriedanFan · 2020-09-27T21:25:12+00:00

I think maybe it is a form of "false consciousness". Anime has a lot of gender nonconforming women in positive roles that I think helps some men start to change their perspectives about women. However, without added support, it is easy for that to become, "Wow! If only I could be that anime woman -- it would be so much better than being reality man", rather than being a jumping off point about talking about gender roles and how they can cause people difficulties no matter what their birth sex.

MaleFriedanFan · 2020-09-24T13:34:22+00:00

I re-read the Feminine Mystique but replace the struggling women with involuntarily gender non-conforming men. There is a masculine mystique that is just as poisonous as the feminine mystique. The sort of person who would have been described in old literature as "a little man" often operated under the same sort of constraints, battered on every side by their failures to live up to what was expected of them, but without any framework to deal with this. I imagine the sort of woman described in Betty Friedan's Feminine Mystique, and then imagine that the book was never written. Day-drunk, seeing a therapist and on tranquilizers, struggling with their weight, in a constant cycle of failure when compared against the women they saw in the social media of the day. What would the outlet have been? Friedan describes women who decide that sex is the only thing in life that matters, the only thing that makes them real women. She describes women who on reaching menopause have total breakdowns. When people are despairing, they grab on anything that seems like it will help them.

MaleFriedanFan · 2020-09-20T16:31:05+00:00

I liked a book called "Getting to Yes", which could also have been titled "We'll never agree, but we have to somehow."

MaleFriedanFan · 2020-09-20T15:53:41+00:00

There is a cultural loophole being exploited. In Japan, there is a common feeling that dreams are dreams and reality is reality; not being able to tell the difference is a sign of mental illness. Because of this, there is no filter on what you can create imaginary stories about, because it is imaginary; it is a temporary escape into fantasy like a daydream, and is not dangerous.

In many countries, dreams are not viewed this way. Dreams are things that you follow, or bring into reality, and that is a sign of achievement rather than a sign that something is wrong. Because of this, there are some things that are usually considered off-limits for fantasy, because of the risk of inspiring copycats in reality.

So when you put the media of a "dreams are just dreams" culture in front of consumers of a "dreams are for following" fanbase, now there are complications.

Hopefully not to imply that one attitude or another is the best here; there are some dreams in Japan that would probably improve the happiness of people if they were followed.

MaleFriedanFan · 2020-09-20T15:35:51+00:00

Suggest they read The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan. A lot of involuntarily gender non-conforming men are suffering from their own version of "the problem" that she writes about. While it is not a perfect book (she spends the first half rejecting Freud and then finds herself forced to rely on him while struggling to understand male homosexuality) maybe it will be easier for your friend to relate to her now.

MaleFriedanFan