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http://offourchests.com/taking-care-of-each-other/
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MANLINESS:
[theory] Questions I Want To Ask Entitled Cis Het Men
I wrote this piece in 2009. It was the culmination of years I'd spent thinking about masculinity, manliness, and men's gender role. I was relatively new to blogging, and I hadn't yet established myself. I thought that the most controversial things I would ever write would be about S&M. I was wrong.
I published this in three parts, and it got a huge response. The major feminist blog Alas! A Blog asked to repost it, for example, but there was a much bigger reaction among non-feminist and anti-feminist men. Some wrote responses with titles like "Answers for an Entitled Feminist." Others actually came over to my blog and engaged me, with varying results. It kicked off a long, dense discussion in my blog Comments section, which lasted for over a year and thousands of comments. I wrote a number of followups, including some that got me labeled "brainwashed by the patriarchy" by other feminist women.
Some of the guys I was talking to got me interested in the "pickup artist subculture" or "seduction community" -- a group of men who trade tips, tricks, and tactics on how to seduce women. Eventually, I did an in-depth investigation of that subculture and wrote the book Confessions of a Pickup Artist Chaser: Long Interviews with Hideous Men, which contains some of my best work on masculinity, communication, and sexuality. You can buy that on Smashwords at this link:
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/144451
One thing I've discovered over the last few years, as I learned more about the history of feminism, is that there are excellent reasons why most feminists are unwilling to talk about men's problems. There's a ton of politics involved, and a lot of very justified fears about the political ground we could lose. We still have a long way to go when it comes to gender equality. But I do believe that those fears are often overblown.
And I've also discovered that there's a subgroup of feminists that's much more likely to be open to talking about men's experience: it's the sex-positive feminists, especially the S&M feminists. To be sure, there are exceptions. Plenty of S&M feminists see no reason to discuss men's experience, and of course, plenty of S&M feminists don't like my writing in particular. But most feminist essays I've found about masculinity were written by women who openly admitted that they were into S&M -- Gayle Rubin, author of the pioneering sexuality essay "Thinking Sex," is one good example. Maybe the S&M feminists are the ones most likely to intuitively understand that power is never a one-dimensional picture or a one-way street.
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