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Guys who drop out of freemasonry tend to do so because their girlfriends/wives disapprove (or would) of the social status of the other men involved. I'm in the
by motohagiography 4y ago
Guys who drop out of freemasonry tend to do so because their girlfriends/wives disapprove (or would) of the social status of the other men involved. I'm in the middle of this issue now, and I can say it's because a generation of men (boomer/X) grew up depending on their girlfriends/wives to manage their social lives. There are actually guys who bring their wives/girlfriends to meet new male friends to vet the guys for approval. It's a generation of men who lack normal adult boundaries with the women in their lives. GenX men are largely codependent and needy owing to pressure to be "sensitive," being largely raised in broken homes, so their ideal relationship now resembles what is effectively sexual cannibalism elsewhere in nature. They don't identify as men because they think men are who hurt their mothers, the source of their belief in a perfect infant self. They're unweaned.
The knock on effects to millenials make forming male friendships really fraught. Add the hyper-mainstreaming of gay culture, and suddenly male friendships have all the absurdity of how badly boys cling to women and hang around as "friends" hoping for more, but now they're doing it to straight male friends, and it undermines the trust in the fabric of male social networks. Can gay men have close straight male friends without holding out hope for more? Some, not all etc, but I would say the confluence of straight men codependently outsourcing their social lives to their wives/girlfriends because once they have one of those they're somehow made, and the complexities of normalized gay culture where boys-being-boys, they're hanging on for hope has really frayed the fabric. We're all still trying to navigate a radically new (and arguably, devastated) landscape without a lot of ground rules.
- skinnymuch 4y agoThis sounds…unhinged, homophobic, and like black pilled toxic masculinity. Stuff like: > GenX men are largely codependent and needy owing to pressure to be "sensitive," > being largely raised in broken homes, > so their ideal relationship now resembles what is effectively sexual cannibalism elsewhere in nature. > They don't identify as men because they think men are who hurt their mothers, the source of their belief in a perfect infant self. What?
- legerdemain 4y agoUncorrected personality traits that seem whimsical in a child may prove to be ugly in a fully grown adult.
- skinnymuch 4y agoWhat? Obsessing over men being men and worrying about made up gender norms is the most childish binary way of thinking.
- legerdemain 4y agoLack of involvement with the father or over-involvement with the mother may result in lack of ability to relate to sexual peers.
- dang 4y agoMuch as I value a Robyn Hitchcock reference, please don't troll on HN. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- dang 4y agoIt's a quote from a song which satirizes this way of thinking.
- motohagiography 4y agoIt's 2023, we're adults, we can have conversations about how we relate. Given the original topic was about how men demographically have trouble forming relationships - where they did not for literally centuries, the meaningful question is what has changed. I had direct experience with the growth issues facing a traditional fraternal organization. We can't really use the words we mean when we talk about the jargon this comment uses, but suffice it to say, among the scores of men I know socially, the people who use that jargon are punchlines.