Don’t expect all guys to retreat sullenly to video games, flirt with radicalization and mass shooting fantasies, or be able to participate in the last great patriarchal show: securitization and financialization of everything. The majority will attempt entryism by masculinization.
Conversation
“Bro” anything is entryist masculinization of a traditionally feminine activity.
Growth hacking = bro-marketing/PR was an early example.
1% genuinely different male approach, 9% rebranding, 90% survival desperation energy showing up in a placid place.
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The essential femininity of “bro” behaviors hit me forcefully when I caught a random episode of the Bachelorette a few years ago. I was racking my brains trying to tag the dynamics and then it hit me: the word I was looking for was “catty”. The guys were competing like girls.
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I was thinking recently of Virginia Woolf’s line that to write “a woman must have money and a room of her own”.
Increasingly true for men. The era of big-dick-energy male novelists writing 800 page tomes in nice wood-paneled studies while being waited on by women is over.
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Replying to
If work gets shallower/less meaningful and home becomes more central, the superficially “traditional” model means that men get sent out into the bullshit fray and women stay back doing everything important, no revolt necessary
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It depends on persistence of certain kind of masculinity for men to keep believing that breadwinning per se no matter how bad the job is good though
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Replying to
I think it is oppression if there’s not much leverage, agency, or discretion in the spending and it’s largely a bill-paying chore. What’s changed is that spending has become strategic, with a lot of room for creative imagination, lifestyle choices, etc.
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Amazon is freedom - “we” spend ungodly amount there every month but no way for my husband to tell what any of it was 😂
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This in contrast to presumably then-generally-relatable I Love Lucy episode where Lucy gets taken in by door to door vacuum salesman, panics when she realizes Ricky will be made, hilarity ensues.
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I’m in the same boat as Byrne 🙂
I pick the occasional battle, but generally trust my wife to turn every $1 I earn into $2 worth of lifestyle value through spending strategery alone. It’s at least a 2x multiplier today.
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