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The concern over mannish girls being concern trolled en masse with no recourse looks like concern trolling to me. If the Obama transpiracy is anything to go by, cruel childish insinuation is quite bad at masking itself.
From what I see, young men that look a bit gay have not been smothered by concern trolls who insinuate they're actually gay and do it so cleverly that they can't be rebuked. Those are the benefits of a culture that promotes accepting people as who they say they are.
This is generally how ex-women are created (tomboy erasure). Some ex-men are created this way as well (there's a reason guys with long hair tend to be either effeminate or real tough with little in between)- the symptoms can take a while to show up, but they eventually do.
What do you think this is, the '70s? And that was only because the culture had no choice.
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I'd say the main trade-off to our contemporary Western settlement on The Gay Question is that it has cast in suspicion huge swathes of male friendship, more than it has caused effete men to have a particularly harder time than they would have otherwise
It's a commonplace observation that male friendship outside the West can look pretty gay to modern Western eyes. Men holding hands, openly prioritising male relationships ahead of their romantic one with a woman, openly declaring love for one another, a warmth and intimacy that seems gay as hell to me, frankly, as a typical Western man.
It's also a commonplace observation that there's a crisis of loneliness in the West, more acutely among men, and downstream increases in depression, misery, suicidality and addiction and all the rest.
I don't think these two facts are unrelated, and I think that's quite a heavy burden that all Western men, and the women that like them, have borne for the ostensible liberation of our irrepressibly-gay brothers
To add to this in a different direction, there's the issue of malicious ambiguity and suggestion.
I was once at a viewing of Y Tu Mama Tabien at a campus "art house" while in college. I was there because the girl I was trying to sleep with was there and I was more than willing to sit through that mindless nonsense if it meant appearing "deep" and "thoughtful" to her.
As I remember it, during the movie's climax, the female lead has sex with both of the male leads (consecutively, not concurrently) and then, for some reason, the two male leads have a homosexual encounter. The two male leads, up until this point, are pretty typical - albeit Mexican - BroDudes. So, it's kind of an abrupt and hamfisted tranisition. I think it's supposed to be a message about the "blurry lines" between male bonding and homosexual acts? I don't know. There was a similar vibe around the whole Brokeback Mountain thing (which, funnily enough, was completely and obviously rehashed by The Power of the Dog - which one a bunch of awards).
In the "discussion" that followed the viewing of the movie, some freshman of ambiguous gender and obvious lack of ability related an emotional and oh so brave personal anecdote about "experimenting" with his childhood best friend before matriculating to college. He told us, the captivated audience, that although he is definitely straight, it was still an amazing and tender experience.
I thought the speaker was probably gay as hell - Not That There's Anything Wrong With That (TM).
Looking back on these various movies and the "discussion" that followed Y Tu Mama Tambien in particular, I think there's some level of subtle support for homosexual activity among straight men that can accompany otherwise anodyne discussions about gay people / culture etc. I can't put my finger on the reason for this. I think it's far short of hardcore grooming (as it mostly occurs in adult groups, for one). Perhaps it's just a "personal expression" thread pulled too far. Maybe light-grade fetishism? Sexualize virtue signaling on the part of practitioners? Again, I'm not certain about the why but I am closer to certain that it does happen.
Reasonable people can assert, "Suggestion isn't coercion. It's not like these people are forcing you to commit sexual acts of any orientation!" Which is true. But consider the social repercussions your average DudeBro might face if he were to go around casually chortling, "I dunno, Stacy, maybe you should go get naked with Brenda and just kinda see what happens. Could be pretty fun!" Or, as another comparison, change the independent variable from sexual orientation to race - "Yooooo! You gotta go try asian P*ssy!" or "Jewish guys always lay pipe well" -- all received outrage would be more than expected.
Yet, as that clip from Atlanta points out, the de-facto response from The Party of Science (TM) is "sexuality is a spectrum you can really do whatever you want." It's not coercion, it's support so subtle that it's eternally deniable, but there is a there there.
I believe the Roman word for this behavior was 'insidias'. Female-type anti-social behavior is generally difficult to punish on an individual level; that's why the average human society seeks to punish it pre-emptively.
Yeah, that's what the priests, teachers, and scoutmasters of years gone by said too, arguably even accurately. How'd that work out for them?
It's all over the schools. The "conservatives" have the right of it- it is a destructive thing- they just don't have the tools to describe it properly (which is why the tendency of its proponents to intentionally play stupid evolved in the first place).
It's just the distaff counterpart to that ass-slapping and casual harassment the '70s (and before) were famous for [which is what your counterexamples pattern match to]. Either both of them are OK, or neither are.
Thanks! This actually aided my understanding.
Would it be your opinion, then, that the hard-to-define behavior patterns I described, and you expanded, actually do fall on a contiuum that includes outright grooming? That is, they are different in magnitude, but not in kind.
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I recently rewatched the Lord of the Rings trilogy and was reminded of how much people were claiming that Samwise was obviously in love with Frodo, rather than that they had a fraternal love for each other as friends, which I saw a bunch in the 2010s. Watching it again now, I can kinda see it that way if I squint, but it definitely strikes me as the modern audience projecting something onto what was likely something inspired by the type of brotherhood that someone like Tolkien probably experienced among men in the early 20th century.
Of course, to a lot of the types of people who see homosexuality in Lord of the Rings, that's just proof that a huge proportion of the men back then were actually in-the-closet homosexuals who just couldn't express their inner innate homosexuality due to the repressive society in which they resided.
That's actually a really great example of what I meant yeah
Of course, the motivation for a lot of retro-homo-spotters is more often a fervent desire to see boys kiss than homophobic revulsion at same
These are generally all women. Men are attractive to the average woman, so 2 of them kissing is even more attractive.
These are generally all men. Men are not attractive to the average man, so 2 of them kissing is even less attractive.
Compare/contrast the generally-positive male reaction to lesbianism, though it's overall tilted a bit towards positive on lesbianism and negative on gayness because women are (correctly) perceived by both genders to be, on average, more aesthetically pleasing than men.
This is, I believe, a part of why races of people that are less sexually dimorphic than the average have a better cultural relationship with gayness.
Women love to claim this because reasons, but we know from the pornography available and popular at that time that this is... uh, not exactly true.
Woman here. I find nothing arousing about men kissing. Women who are into gay anime do exist but this is far from universal.
I find myself in the weird position of introducing Yaoi to the Motte. Or, not actually introducing, because a lot of Mottizens are far more acquainted with Japanese pop culture than I.
Yaoi, for those who do not want to click:
I have known some (Japanese) girls in the past who were into this genre. They were without exception very feminine in appearance, often wearing frilly dresses, a good deal of makeup, etc. The one girl I asked about this type manga explained that the love expressed was "pure," whatever that means. I have no further insight.
Edit: I disagree with the Wikipedia pronunciation of this term, as Japanese has no stress on syllables, so it should be something more like YAH OH EE. But then I could be wrong because I don't know if I've ever heard it pronounced.
Edit 2: See also Shojou manga
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Oh boy, ‘faggy’ or ‘gay-looking’ men absolutely have it bad. It’s just 1) no one cares about the problems of low status men and 2) not in polite company.
They have solved this in Japan by creating musical dance groups and cultivating hundreds of thousands of screaming female fans.
Even ignoring cultural differences in what is considered 'faggy' or 'gay-looking', you are mostly talking about men who happen to otherwise be extremely conventionally attractive (including personality traits like confidence and gregariousness). I don't think that generalizes well to the larger group.
There is a certain fey demeanor in many of the young guys who join these bands, which one cannot directly relate to physical weakness--they go through extremely rigorous training or, in some cases, vetting because they've applied to an agency, to reach a level of dance skill that is deemed acceptable. I would, in most cases, disagree that many of these guys are what you are calling conventionally attractive (at least physically) unless you are including in that net the conventional attractiveness of the feminine.
I once grew my hair out long, because I was young and influenced by films at the time. My buddy used to look at me and say: "Never go to prison."
There's a prettyboy look to the boybands that is not masculine, and is decidedly, at least in my view, more feminine. And as I say, it's not just the make-up, it's their way of laughing (covering their mouths, a very female gesture in Japan), of moving as they walk with what is clearly an affected swagger that has more in common with actresses in Takarazuka who are pretending to be men than an actual man. There's a particular gesture of using one's hand to lightly brush away one's bangs or forelock from the eyes that I have noticed common in these guys, that is to me very marked as female (the guy gesture would be to run the hand through the hair straight back and clear the bangs, not wipe them with one hand very delicately, as if parting a bead curtain.)
As for gayness, there was a scandal a few years ago regarding one of the main companies that produces these bangs, alleging that the owner/mastermind--who had perhaps conveniently died four years earlier--had forced young boys into sexual acts with him. He obviously never faced any prison time or trial because he was dead, and to me at least this was less of a scandal than a revelation of an obvious process that had been covered up for years. The man who had arguably begun the boyband trend in Japan by manufacturing many such groups had been cultivating, if not the actual members of the groups (but maybe also those guys) but applicants, as his personal catamites.
To your point that these guys demonstrate gregariousness and confidence, I concede. At least in public or in publicized interviews they're pretty happy and, cough, gay. <-- Note that in this interview, with the group named "King & Prince" when there were several members (all but two have "retired") they are dressed in more traditionally masculine clothes than what you often see.
A final thought: Despite my distaste for these bands I've noticed almost all the guys have enviably really deep speaking voices.
What women find attractive in men /= what men think women find attractive in men.
To be sure. I'm simply expressing my own distaste, not projecting on women. Many times I've seen dudes way different than I am and suspected, "well he wouldn't be looking or acting like that if it weren't getting him laid somehow."
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I was really thinking about more gender neutral signifiers of conventional attractiveness--eg, facial symmetry, straight teeth, etc--than specifically masculine or feminine ones. For example, consider the three stereotypically "gay-looking" burglars from Survive Style 5+. I don't think it is very controversial to say that the pretty boys you linked are more conventionally attractive than Yoshiyuki's character, even when judging by masculine standards. As for feminine mannerisms, I think some kinds of performative femininity in men should be considered masculine because it is puffery that signals confidence and fitness rather than signaling weakness or true vulnerability.
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Apparently you are either blind or living in a very different bubble than me, as I see this quite a bit and know a number of men who definitely have felt smothered by such insinuations.
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