I’d like to talk a bit more about masculinity and boxes, because it’s come up this week.

But first, let’s define masculinity. This is harder to do than it might at first appear. We could, of course, go for the easy definition. According to Google that would be “maleness: the properties characteristic of the male sex.” Except that doesn’t actually tell us anything. You’d have to already know the definition of masculine for that definition to mean anything.

The first thing to understand is that masculinity has no single definition. It’s different in different times and different cultures. There are differences not only between American masculinity and Mexican masculinity, but even between White American Masculinity and Black American Masculinity, or Rich American Masculinity and Poor American Masculinity. Masculinity is also defined by the people participating in it. By that I don’t just mean men, I mean all the people in a particular group collectively and continuously define, redefine, and create masculinity. It’s a collective abstract construct that by itself has no inherent meaning. As a bonus, femininity is defined exactly the same: a collective abstract construct with no inherent meaning.

The second thing to understand is that multiple masculinities exist alongside each other, and are hierarchical. The dominant masculinity in any given time/culture/group is called hegemonic masculinity. This would be the ideal masculinity, or what you might call a “real man.” It’s also the masculinity that gets the largest share of male privilege.

Oh noez! I said male privilege! Abort! Abort!

See, male privilege isn’t a thing that all men get equal shares of. It’s more like a pie. Those at the top get the most, and as you go down, you get less and less, until the poor, black, gay men are scrabbling over the remaining crumbs. It’s all tied up with intersectionality and a whole lot of other complicated stuff I don’t want to get into right now.

Suffice to say that not all masculinities are considered equal or share equally in their privilege.

I’d like to switch tracks, now, and talk about masculine spaces. Many men (not just MRAs) discuss a lot about a lack of male spaces, feminists don’t tend to get the point. After all, a lot of spaces are male dominated. They’re all over the place. You can’t swing a dead cat without getting kitten guts on a man-in-charge-of-some-space. While looking for old-timey photographs of men being cuddly for my last post, however, I came across The Decline of Male Space.

Now, keep in mind that as far as I can tell, the man(men) behind this site are not MRAs, and seem, in fact, to be perfectly nice (even feminist-leaning) guys. This ain’t the screaming manosphere I’m linking to. But notice how he defines male space. A masculine space is not defined as a space where men can be men or masculinity can be discussed, or fly fishing and boxing can be practiced. Male space is defined by the absence of women. The suburban living room, you’ll note, is not some exclusive domain of the lady of the house. Men can and do congregate there. Men can and do practice the art of manliness there. It ceased being a male space when women were allowed in. Any half-versed MRA in the screaming manosphere will tell you the same thing. Masculine spaces cease being masculine when women are allowed in.

The women did not run the men out on rails. There was no kidnapping, no waving guns, no violence of any kind. The mere fact of existance inside the space is what changed it. Women were able to take over all male spaces simply by stepping inside. Any space with a woman in it became women’s space.

This point, that I and the screaming manosphere agree on (sort of), is an important point, so I’ll repeat it:

Masculine spaces cease being masculine when women are allowed in.

The smart asses in the back of the theater are already going ‘I know what you’re doing!’ but I’ll keep going for the sake of the rest of the audience.

Now, masculine spaces (traditionally masculine) never actually had an absence of women. They were just invisible, quietly doing whatever was expected of them and then retreating when the job was done. Women still scrubbed the floors, did the washing, (danced on the tables), and other womanly duties, and were accepted as long as they called no attention to themselves. This is even true in more modern “traditionally masculine” places — it was pointed out today that 4chan and XBox live were traditionally masculine spaces (Bwuh? But I digress). Those spaces were never exclusively male either, the women were just invisible or called no attention to themselves and thus were allowed to exist inside without threatening the masculinity of the space (or the men inside).

Ahhh, yes. The men inside. Masculinity, you see, is also defined by the absence of the feminine.

Masculinity itself ceases to be masculine when women are allowed in.

And thus we come back to the box, and the reason I’m writing this. Masculinity being defined by the absence of the feminine was fine, when females were stuffed into a (small, cramped, musty) box of their own, over there on the other side of the line graph, with a somewhat comforting buffer zone of third-genders between them. (Don’t know third gender? It’s a thing. A third gender thing. Look it up.) But then the great sundering happened (at least in the US) and women started doing that willy-nilly-woo-hoo-yelling running all over the masculine space in the line graph.

You heard me. Women existed inside the masculinity in the middle of the graph. The sheer fact of their existence, of course, made those spaces feminine, and the men retreated. No violence, never a shot fired. Women chased men out of the middle of the line graph simply by stepping out into it. Not on purpose, of course. As I mentioned, feminists still don’t quite understand that the existence of a woman negates all the masculinity, or why that should be. The men just up and left, retreating farther and farther into their boxes as more and more women show up and exist.

Femininity repels the masculine. Like oil and water. Many insist they can’t be mixed, they can’t be fluid, they can’t be collective abstract constructs. Their sense of self, again, is dependent on there being a clear divide. Male and female. Black and White. Same and opposite. The idea that these things can be shuffled, mixed up, tossed around and put back in any old order we want is anathema. The one thing hyper masculine men are afraid of is the feminine.

Now, you can get into all kind of feminist thought on why, but it doesn’t really matter why. The only thing that matters for our purposes is that traditional men will retreat, en masse, from any feminine encroachment. The easiest way to force one of these men to do something is to convince them that not doing it makes them, somehow, feminine.

Now let’s talk Reddit. Reddit.com is a glorified message board that is something like 80-90% male. It’s actually impossible to find a subreddit without at least a good percentage of men (Sure, SRSWomen will ban men, but only if they can find them — good luck with that). I say this so you’ll understand the bwuh reaction this blog post provoked. (Note: Dude is actually racist and misogynistic, read the comments or the rest of the blog at your own risk.) Now, ostensibly it’s something about all women wanting the cock. Whatever, I didn’t really read it. The point was, men create a space, then the women show up and ruin it.

This spawned a couple of threads, but the one I want to talk about happened on /r/Game0fDolls, or GameZero as the locals call it. The author shows up to “answer questions and take criticism.” I’ll note that he never actually addressed any of the criticism, but that’s not really what I wanna talk about. The one conversation he did take active part in starts here:

Note that he assumes that TheBluePill is all women. This is almost impossible on reddit, as mentioned, and cojoco corrects him. He’s corrected again, farther down, which leads to the money quotes:

At which point he exits the conversation.

He recognizes that gender roles are (at least partially) constructed, and explicitly puts all men not conforming to his idea of masculine into the feminine gender. This, of course, made my ears perk way up, because this is how the man box shrinks. It’s happening, in real time, right there in plain text. The men of TheRedPill have defined a masculinity that recognizes two categories of men (Alpha and Beta, beta being not quite as bad as female, but might verge on the third gender I mentioned above), and ceded the entire rest of the field to “women’s space.” This is, thus far, the most extreme shrinkage of the man box I’ve become familiar with. I won’t get into detailing all the ways in which they hate women, because I don’t have that kind of time and this post isn’t actually about women.

The important point is that anything outside of his definition of masculine (certainly including a parody of his masculinity, but not limited to that) is labeled feminine, and between the two subreddits, only the “real men” are in TheRedPill. The other men may as well be women. This is a very real pressure exerted on men who do not conform to TheRedPills ideas of gender and dating and women and romance and … well, anything else. The particular men he was engaged with are probably not swayed by this — they already know that he and his ideas are toxic, and are possibly more sure in their own brand of masculinity, but to someone reading this, who may or may not agree that RedPill ideas are toxic, who may be lonely, who may be discouraged, who may be searching for a way to define himself in an increasingly complicated world, this is a threat. A threat, and a clarion call. RedPill can *teach you* how to be a man, and coincidentally, save you from being a pussy.

And the traditionalists are the only ones talking. While there are plenty of men in the real world talking about how to “be men,” you’ll find very few on reddit who are not traditionalists. The ones you can find are also dismissed as part of the feminine, now (manginas, white knights, pussy-whipped, there are lots of words for them). There’s a vast wasteland somewhere in the middle, and the choices seem to be the comforting, if tiny, cramped, and musty man box, or with the terrifyingly feminine-accepting manginas.

When you define masculinity by the absence of anything deemed feminine by anybody, you can’t help but have a dwindling supply of it, in a world where women are everywhere, and none of us are okay with invisible.