You know, it’s really sad that the use of God by humans so often is about an “ultimate power” or an unbeatable force to be used to ultimately harm those one hates, whether as a force of righteousness (like the western interpretation of Karma) or as a force of justice (salvation and punishment). The punitive vision of God is such an ugly, harmful side of humanity.

But the idea of a greater purpose, a common goal or spirit, that I totally jive with. I think we need more common visions. Not because I think people need to be followers more. That’s what’s wrong with the whole authoritarian view of God and why it gets confused. But I think people can choose mutual aid, health, a common social purpose actively, of their own will and decision, not as an act of following but of purpose.

This is why I think social choice is so important, and why I think ultimately our choice to lift each other up equally is, in our social contract, a promise of equal power, or direct democracy.

Anarchists have a long, struggling relationship with social choice. Sometimes, it is for more caricature reasons like the egoists, with weak individualist arguments that pretend no shared consequence. But there are a lot of really deep objections based in the relationship of hierarchy to structures of organization and organism that are subtle and require longer analysis and respect.

Ultimately, though, I think it’s good when we get along and build a common vision and there are healthy notions of organization and healthy views of organism. I think we gotta find ways to get along and I think formalization is just a way for us to be clear to each other what our intentions are. A formal process of social choice is only a net benefit.

I was watching the latest vlog from @biggestjoel last night and was honestly surprised at where he was on his journey.

https://nebula.tv/videos/bigjoel-men-contrapoints-and-prageru/

I do recognize some of my past beliefs in his commentary and “understand” his reflexive desire to degender positive traits and where his general confusion comes from around what a New Masculinity may mean, but I had thought he had enough exposure to queer theory and generally enough interaction with the trans community to understand some of the nuance around this. Particularly when directly addressing Natalie’s work. So maybe some comments are in order.

There appears to be a feeling of identity inside people that couples with gender. That sense of identity in many cases appears quite rigid, in that the coupling is strong and fixed in alignment with gender categories like the common gender binary. In some people, it may be more fluid and changing, but even in such cases it can often be the case that such changes are not under conscious control of the individual.

This can often be confusing when one first starts thinking about the space because gender, particularly in the areas of presentation and social roles, is largely socially constructed and varies both temporally and spatially across human societies. Wearing dresses and skirts has been, at times and places, both very masculine and very feminine. How can something associated to something that varies be rigid?

The resolution is perhaps more obvious when we think of a different dimension of variation: sexual attraction. Across the animal kingdom, sexual dimorphism presents in a vast variety of ways, from the plumage of different birds, to size (in different directions!), to body shape, … We don’t appear to have genes that specify “you are attracted to sex characteristic X” for every sex characteristic that has ever existed. Instead, it appears more general tendencies around attraction stabilize (when rigid) around presentations of sex in a given environment during development.

And this association through presentations is how social animals construct social concepts around gender, providing the common bimodal statistical connections of sex and gender that form the predominant structure that guides sexual attraction and identity. When the analysis includes fluidities and enby presentations outside the bimodal, we get our standard models of gender and sexuality.

Okay. Big breath. I think Big Joel would agree with much of this framework.

But I think if he had grounded his framing here, he wouldn’t be so confused about what a positive masculinity would mean because in this framework, your sense of identity determines whether you are a man, a women, or somewhere else in the diversity of identities. So the cases that confuse him in the video, like “what does it mean if we say a new vision for masculinity means being kind when women can be kind too?” are easy to explain here. Gender roles, traits, and behaviors don’t need to be exclusive to binary categories. They most certainly do not need to be oppositional across the binary.

In other words, it’s perfectly fine to say things like “the kind of masculinity I appreciate is open and friendly to diverse presentations of manhood, and widely kind to those who are also kind” and that’s very meaningful even though a woman may say the same thing about femininity. How else would it even be possible to have spaces for enbyism if everything was exclusive? And obviously, as Natalie mentions, these are really for the people with these identities to define, or the whole enterprise opens up to power plays of control (which is a deep undercurrent of the PragerU vids).

Think of how femininity changed in the 20th century. Women now pursue careers, they participate in science, they are major creators of artistic works, all which had been mainly forbid them centuries prior. These are positive traits of femininity that they claimed through hard struggle. Even those who rigidly identify as women hold these traits because society shifted, and it would be deeply offensive (and factually wrong) to claim that the majority of women who want these things are simply transmasc.

Again, though, I want to stress that I understand where the confusion comes from. As an autistic geek growing up in the 70s and 80s, I did not feel any connection to the masculinity portrayed to me. I thought it was all BS, and by the time I entered college in the 90s I was arguing for a linguistic enbyism that took out all the he and she references for people doing things to help strip away gendered associations being passed around society and perpetuating toxicity. At the time, I couldn’t understand people who wanted to reform masculinity and I thought they were all misguided by assumptions. It took getting close to some trans friends for me to accept that gender is a real sense people have, and it is not in itself a bad thing. Indeed, over time, I recognised that I too have a sense of identity that largely falls in the binary, even when I don’t like the toxic elements of the current social constructs.