WillCameron

“The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.” Facing the Cloud of Unknowing Tom Murray’s paper is best exemplified in Thomas Lawrence, the protagonist of the movie Conclave. Thomas’ greatest strength is his willingness to face doubt and uncertainty. That doesn’t necessarily mean he enjoys the process. In fact, the virtue of his doubt is the pain he’s willing to wrestle with. The gift of this virtue is captured in the 14th century book, The Cloud of Unknowing: “I urge you, go after experience rather than knowledge. On account of pride, knowledge may often deceive you, but this gentle, loving affection will not deceive you. Knowledge tends to breed conceit, but love builds. Knowledge is full of labor, but love, full of rest.” While it could be easy to read this as religious dogma’s attack on knowledge, science, and reason, I think it is far better to read it as call for epistemic humility. Murray defines epistemic humility as: “the blunt confrontation with how, when it comes down to it, the certainty that one holds for much of one’s beliefs and knowledge is bewilderingly undeserved.” To face the cloud is to become conscious of how the way in which we construct knowledge defines how we relate to our own ignorance. This leads Murray to a deep analysis of different stages of development that humans go through. For example, if we’re a Conformist, then we construct knowledge in a way deeply influenced by our culture. As such, we’re likely to fear our ignorance most when we risk ostracism and to feel most certain when what we’re saying aligns with our group. Epistemic humility is possible for any stage of development, but so is epistemic arrogance. Development happens within the cloud, at the edge of our knowledge and understanding. One must love oneself not despite one’s ignorance, but precisely because one has discovered one’s ignorance. As difficult as it can be, especially at first, you want to cultivate a love for unknowing. Here, unknowing is not simply knowing that we do not know, but learning to shed beliefs that are wrong or unfairly certain. Murray writes the following: “Negative capability […] includes the ‘informed and active humility’ […], in which the sources of indeterminacy are better understood so that knowledge can be more adaptive and resilient. It is not enough to acknowledge that ‘the map is not the territory’ […], but we must understand as precisely as we can how/where/when/why our maps differ from the territory” When we’ve come to love unknowing enough to walk willingly into the cloud, we find ourselves in a quiet place to rest. What is this paper for? This paper not only serves as a good introduction to developmental psychology, but gives you many ways to look at how stages actually work. It covers paradoxes, biases, and virtues that stages experience in a way that is incredibly actionable. Development takes time no matter what. The process of moving from one stage to the next is a multi-year endeavour. With this paper you can at least understand better where you are, where you’re going, and how you can take the first steps. That said, development is something that must happen through living your life and speaking with people. It’s easy to get stuck in an ivory tower built atop the judgment of others. That is a way we use dev-psych to limit our own development. We cultivate a deeper love for ourselves through cultivating a deeper love for others. We do that by meeting them in the marketplace as the flawed human beings we all are. How does this fit into my project? Developmental psychology is one of the pillars of my work and, if you’ve been reading my other essays, you’ve likely grown weary of my continual call for us to face the open horizon of romantic possibility. Put concretely, the fact that the manosphere settled on evolutionary rather than developmental psychology was one of the worst tragedies of post-patriarchal masculinity. I’m certainly not against evo-psych. I think there are very real biological constraints and affordances that must be accounted for. However, dev-psych is not only a way that we can understand what lies on the open horizon, but how we make sense and meaning about the horizon itself. Understanding why evo-psych has been so limiting for the manosphere requires a complex enough perspective to see how we’ve reified, perhaps even deified, the primordial man. Murray’s very project is to deconstruct and reconstruct such reifications in an iterative process that converts them into the tools we use to carve new paths toward better selves that make better futures that make better selves. He and I invite you to walk with us on that journey. ------ If you'd like to follow me on Substack, you can find this article here.

If you don't find balance now, you will have far more difficulty when you're so successful and have contracts, fans, and media breathing down your neck. I've gone through the workaholic, "I'll actualize when I have the money, I'll hangout with friends when I have the money", etc., etc. If you really want to make that sacrifice, then that's your choice. The fact is that success takes sacrifice no matter what, but recognize that it is sacrifice. Understand that you won't realize the profundity of those sacrifices until it hits you like a brick and you're frozen with grief at how for granted you took what you've lost. You have to make the decision now what you're willing to sacrifice knowing you won't understand the gravity of it until much later. Even you reading this now will not prepare you for that moment. Maybe it'll all be worth it, but it will still be a sacrifice. My own path has led me to seek balance now rather than later. I'm not trying to sprint to success, but become the person I want to be in the process of seeking success. I've also reconstructed what success means beyond achievement, money, or recognition. I would of course be lying if I said these things didn't still matter, but they're far less potent than they use to be and other values have come to take priority.

At the same time he's also very motivated by unresolved trauma, or at least has been. Given his books it seems like he's resolved some of it, but at the same time he's pushed his body to the point that it's literally falling apart. Barring medical advancement he will likely be immobile in the next decade and in constant pain. Sure, he may be one of the most resilient people who have ever lived, but he also clearly demonstrates the consequences of unresolved trauma in self-destructive behaviour and putting too many of your skill points in one domain. Ironically, pure resilience has destroyed his body. He is someone to learn from, but not to imitate.

Glad to see you talking about Vervaeke, Leo. I'm currently going through his After Socrates series and it's quite good too. A nice rounding out of Awakening that gets more into the practical side of things while offering some more theory. I'm surprised you haven't interacted more with the metamodern/liminal web.

It took me a long time to move beyond the paradigm Owen gave me. Your work was a big part of keeping myself from ever getting too deeply into it, but it was definitely my primary paradigm for most of my 20s. I'd say reading Byung-Chul Han and Rachel O'Neill's ethnography on the pickup community were the last nails in the coffin. It's necessary to learn pickup to a certain extent, but it's a toxic strategy for a toxic terrain. Owen is likely among the most sophisticated and ethical that the worldview can offer.

The issue isn't necessarily status. It's how a specific culture defines what deserves status. Western culture, especially in the US, defines status in a very materialistic fashion. Other cultures may value the most collaborative or most giving. Status seeking behaviour can be beneficial at a certain stage of development, you just want to be conscious of which status games you're playing. Play the status games that move you beyond status seeking.

What exactly do you think Owen gets wrong? Just curious what your perspective on him is. Thank you.

I think the range of attractive behaviour is larger than pickup can often make it seem to be. It is one process for getting sex fast, but that can sometimes fall for goodhardt’s law. Sex as a measure of quality relationships is only a good measure for sex. Queer theory, feminism, and postmodernism more broadly can help round a lot of overly modernist pickup theory out.

The Integral Stage with Layman Pascal and Bruce Alderman. I think they’re two fantastic mystic philosophers who use Integral Theory while not being contained by the business of Integral and the leadership of Ken Wilber. They primarily have conversations with various people aligned with or adjacent to Integral, or who have a roughly 2nd tier perspective. This is a conversation of them talking about their respective metatheories:

If you want me to delete this I can. I make videos about post-patriarchal masculinity using neo-piagetian psychological development, Jungian psychology, metamodernism, and solarpunk. In this playlist I discuss my model of masculine conformity in our culture. The conformism of traditional masculinity fights the anti-conformism of progressive masculinity, powered by Epithymia, the algorithm-driven nihilistic hedonism that has us addicted to stimulation and outrage. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEIR0Pct14Ek2nkKOkwXKBAnP0SgfB-48&si=BtgTk8pPilY5nzr9 In this video I finished a multi-part critique of Red Pill using Cook-Greuter’s model and Gilligan’s work on sex differences in moral reasoning. https://youtu.be/e1JGk266P9c?si=QIZqGrOGcXmR57Sl

Mind if I share my own? I make videos about post-patriarchal masculinity using neo-piagetian psychological development, Jungian psychology, metamodernism, and solarpunk. I’ve very much been influenced by your thinking.

I got into an exchange in my youtube comments. I was talking about the interaction of science and myth, and the commenter criticized that view. Their perspective was that science is an empirical process and attempting to talk about myths of science doesn't do justice to how the process actually comes to discover truths about the world. There view was that viewing science as a process is not a myth about science, as you'll see below I disagreed with this. I wanted to share what I said to get your perspective on whether or not my understanding is actually up to par. I appreciate the help! Here it is: The idea that myths are value-laden stories is not my original redefinition, but comes from the work of many from disparate fields that have converged on something to the effect of the following idea. We have to remember that the human mind is narratological, and so we construct meaning about the world in the form of narratives. Values are what arranges the landscape of things into a forum for action. If I am hungry I value food and so signals of food are going to be highlighted within the landscape of things so that it can become a forum for useful action. Whether through the use of images, tastes, and scents, or with actual language, the organism will then remember the trail and process applied in a narrative sequence so that it can get to that food again in the future. Myths then are not merely collections of allegorical and symbolic fantasy, but specific representations of a specific forum of action given a specific set of higher order values. I can have a myth involving the symbolism of the Hero, but the superficial features of that Hero can change drastically depending on the culture I'm in. From heroic dictator who uplifts our noble people through conquest of "barbarian" peoples to low-born rogue who steals from the rich oppressors. The purpose of such myths, or value-laden stories with symbolic representations, are again, to guide us through the landscape of things such that it becomes a useful forum for action toward the fulfilment of certain goals. If I seek a heroic dictator I am going to be inspired toward very different ends than if I seek a liberator from the dictator. What's more, the scientific process, however empirical, is going to be used for very different ends. Think about how that might change the funding of various areas of research. Sure our science is discovering provisional truths, but of the provisional truths it could discover, it has now been directed in a very different direction. With this definition then we can better understand how both science as absolute truth and as process are myths - value-laden stories with symbolic representations for transforming landscapes of things into useful forums for action. You've said that I am conflating myth and science, but I am differentiating and then re-integrating them. Yes, science is not myth, but the moment we begin to use science we have inevitably re-engaged science with myth. We need to distinguish between them if we want our science to work well, but my point is that they do inevitably interact. For example, if I value reliability, accuracy, and falsifiability then those are turning the landscape of empirically observable things into a forum for action as scientific inquiry. We then have not-entirely-true symbolic representations such as the atom as a solar system, we also have heroes as the humbly exploring scientist, villains as the plagiarizing data fabricator, and even god as the objective, material world that exists beyond our rational view-from-nowhere and can be accessed unmediated for the discovery of truth (not saying every scientist believes exactly that, but just making a point). However empirical, rational, and scientific that myth may seem, it is still a myth - a value-laden story containing symbolic representations meant to transform the landscape of things into a forum for useful action. And that's really my point in making this series - to highlight how we are a mythologizing species and however empirical our methods, our cognition is mythological. We have to reckon with those aspects of our mind if we want our science to work as intended because we inevitably shuttle our myths into the process of science. Even though they should be thought of as different things (notice the value statement there), you can never remove the scientific process from myth as long as humans are using it. Thanks again for reading. How could I be less wrong?

Ah my apologies. I use a proxy. I didn't realize it would link that.

For the past year I've been using the plus version of ChatGPT to have it measure short to long essays on their complexity using the Model of Hierarchical Complexity. You can find out more about that here - https://metamoderna.org/what-is-the-mhc/ The prompt I use is - Using the model of the hierarchical complexity, please identify the highest stage of performance that is demonstrated by the following: As to what it's reliability or accuracy is, I don't think it's the best. Unfortunately at this juncture you have to take its word with a grain of salt. However, it can give you a general sense of what you're looking for. Engage it in conversation to get a sense of what is missing, what could be added, and to argue with you about your position. The point is to increase the complexity of your reasoning by having more nuanced and well-thought out understandings of things. Another note is that this is only enhancing cognitive development in the form of essays. This may not necessarily track with "lived development", as in what you're able to produce on the fly or in other domains. I think there is slow crossover over time, but don't take this as gospel. It's one exercise among many that you should be engaging. I also recommend having an embodiment practice like yoga or something similar, along with other spiritual practices. Cognitive development is obviously important, but it is only one facet of development. The most effective development is holistic. You can have the biggest brain but be incapable of going out into the world and enacting that increased capacity. In that situation, what is the point of all that cognitive development? You may as well not have it.

Somebody already talked about this today in this thread - actualized.org/forum/topic/103971-women-don’t-love-you-they-love-the-life-style-you-can-provide/?__cpo=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuYWN0dWFsaXplZC5vcmc My response to their post follows: I think the mistake that people often make when discovering tragedy is that they start thinking everything is "really" tragic. One of the ways that the neuropsychologist Iain McGilchrist has talked about the left brain hemisphere's dominance in our culture is in the left hemispheres need for perfection. So for example, the Platonic Forms are envisioning some metaphysically "more real than our reality" realm in which the perfect form of everything we see exist. All chairs we see are the baser instantiations of the perfect Platonic form of "chair". How this manifests in our culture can often be seen in terms of morality. People realize that perfect altruism can't exist because even in the case of self-sacrifice you do it because you believe it is a good thing to do, and so you feel good knowing you sacrificed yourself for a worthy cause. This realization makes them nihilistic because they think that at base everyone is selfish. The issue here is that we've become so hooked on the "perfect" altruism, that anything less is interpreted as being the worst opposite. We're either perfectly altruistic or we're all the basest form of selfish, which makes sense because it is the mirror image of perfect. It's like the anti-Platonic form or anti-perfection. The truth is that this perfection that the left hemisphere is focused on cannot exist and so comparing ourselves to an impossible perfection we can never reach is foolish. The reality is that true altruism cannot exist, but that doesn't take away from the very real ways in which people asymptotically approach altruism. If someone does something good for you they didn't just do it because they were selfish, but because they actually wanted to help you, even if they also benefitted from that. While selfishness is one motivator, reducing all of our motivators to mere selfishness is to deny the complex reality of all the various reasons we do things. Again, it is the left hemisphere that breaks the world down into parts and hyper-fixates on the one that it believes matters most. It is the right hemisphere that is able to hold reality at complexity, and see that just because one motivator is selfishness, doesn't mean there aren't other motivators that matter just as much and sometimes even more. We have to take in the gestalt, the whole, if we want to understand human motivation. So applying that to the question you have, yes women obviously have standards, but so do you. Are there women whose physical appearance would have you reject them no matter how good of a person they were? Does that mean you love the beautiful woman you marry any less? Our standards create the conditions by which we can create a good, satisfying relationship and it is within that context that "true love" can flower. However much there were standards that needed to be set, that love is no less real because what you consider "real true love" is a perfection that cannot exist. Why create resentful, bitter ideologies around non-existent realities?

It can't be forced, but it can be cultivated. Here's a simple exercise I did when I was recovering from body image issues. I'd stand in front of the mirror after weighing myself and say, "I love you no matter how much you weigh" or "I love you no matter what you look like". A negative thought would arise and rather than hating or rejecting that thought, I'd say, "thank you, I love you even if that's true. I appreciate you trying to help." You have to recognize that even the most hateful thoughts in your head are just trying to help. They have been splintered off and given self-negative or other-negative roles based on the experience that fragmented them. From that perspective then, they really do deserve your love, appreciation, and forgiveness. In some cases you must even ask them for forgiveness. We think we should respond to self-hate with hate, but that just becomes more self-hate. Love your self-hate and you are adding more love. That doesn't mean you agree with those parts, but you just calmly thank them and love them, and then continue to love whatever part you feel you can't love, whether that's weight, a lack of money, a lack of social skills, a lack of intelligence, a lack of whatever. One thing to be careful of is whether or not this exercise becomes overwhelmingly dysregulating for your body. If you find that this happens then take a break and go meditate, trying your best to recenter yourself and calm your agitated body down. It'll be hard work no matter what, but know and honour your limits. Self-love is a verb, so do the actions that make you feel more loving of yourself. One thing I do is take a hot bath with a book and relax as best as I can. Learning to love yourself won't make your dating struggles magically go away, but when done in tandem with nose to the grindstone action, this self-love will absolutely help you improve faster, and help you attract and be attracted to value-aligned, conscious women. By the way, I just wanted to commend you for your response to this thread. You put yourself out there to express your concerns and when people responded to you in sometimes hostile ways you kept your cool and took in their criticisms. Definitely feel proud and self-loving for that. Being assertive and standing up for your perspective is an indispensable tool in life, but so is knowing when to soften and integrate the perspectives of others. I think you've demonstrated that well here.

I feel like that would be spiritual bypassing. Not all problems can be solved through ego dissolution. Sometimes concrete solutions like going out and learning how to meet value-aligned women is the best approach.

You can't take everything any dating guru tells you as true, but someone like Todd V can help you get a better skillset at meeting women. Remember that cold approach advice is for the section of dating including "meeting and sleeping with" not "in a relationship with". That confuses a lot of guys. Once you have that skillset to a good enough degree it will not only help you meet a woman who aligns with your values, but also help you earn more money in pretty much any field that has even a tiniest sliver of a requirement for soft skills. A friend of mine was literally the first University student intern a company had ever hired after the internship because he had the soft skills. His starting wage is 80k immediately after graduation. Don't discount the power of rapidly connecting with people in a socially and emotionally intelligent way.

Great response, Marshall Rosenberg would be proud. To add to this point, I just released an article that goes into the psychology of the succubus and how it has defined a lot of how we think about sex. Myths are the stories cultures use to explain their reality and orient them through that reality, and even when that mythic language is gone the way they shaped our cognition remains. The manosphere is in many ways a response to the history of the Goddess being murdered by a male hero God, how that is reflected in agricultural societies becoming increasingly dominated by elite males, and the fertility Goddess being recast as a sexual demon. When viewing women through the lens of the succubus much of the manosphere's advice makes sense. For those interested you can read it here - https://metamasculine.substack.com/p/psychology-of-the-succubus

I'd like to hear your response to my own.

I think the mistake that people often make when discovering tragedy is that they start thinking everything is "really" tragic. One of the ways that the neuropsychologist Iain McGilchrist has talked about the left brain hemisphere's dominance in our culture is in the left hemispheres need for perfection. So for example, the Platonic Forms are envisioning some metaphysically "more real than our reality" realm in which the perfect form of everything we see exist. All chairs we see are the baser instantiations of the perfect Platonic form of "chair". How this manifests in our culture can often be seen in terms of morality. People realize that perfect altruism can't exist because even in the case of self-sacrifice you do it because you believe it is a good thing to do, and so you feel good knowing you sacrificed yourself for a worthy cause. This realization makes them nihilistic because they think that at base everyone is selfish. The issue here is that we've become so hooked on the "perfect" altruism, that anything less is interpreted as being the worst opposite. We're either perfectly altruistic or we're all the basest form of selfish, which makes sense because it is the mirror image of perfect. It's like the anti-Platonic form or anti-perfection. The truth is that this perfection that the left hemisphere is focused on cannot exist and so comparing ourselves to an impossible perfection we can never reach is foolish. The reality is that true altruism cannot exist, but that doesn't take away from the very real ways in which people asymptotically approach altruism. If someone does something good for you they didn't just do it because they were selfish, but because they actually wanted to help you, even if they also benefitted from that. While selfishness is one motivator, reducing all of our motivators to mere selfishness is to deny the complex reality of all the various reasons we do things. Again, it is the left hemisphere that breaks the world down into parts and hyper-fixates on the one that it believes matters most. It is the right hemisphere that is able to hold reality at complexity, and see that just because one motivator is selfishness, doesn't mean there aren't other motivators that matter just as much and sometimes even more. We have to take in the gestalt, the whole, if we want to understand human motivation. So applying that to the question you have, yes women obviously have standards, but so do you. Are there women whose physical appearance would have you reject them no matter how good of a person they were? Does that mean you love the beautiful woman you marry any less? Our standards create the conditions by which we can create a good, satisfying relationship and it is within that context that "true love" can flower. However much there were standards that needed to be set, that love is no less real because what you consider "real true love" is a perfection that cannot exist. Why create resentful, bitter ideologies around non-existent realities?

Yeah I would agree with that. I don't think that masculinity or attraction are purely socially constructed, and biology definitely matter. As I said in the third paragraph of the essay, there is evidence of biological causes for psychological sex differences and the final section on transperspectivalism also states that. However biological the definition of masculinity may be it is not purely biological, nor are our attractions. Sure there are biological constraints and affordances on what we might find attractive, but again, we can't reduce to the biological. Our attractions are the effect of a complex system of causes that can be described by Integral Theory's quadrants.

In today’s culture we often hear messages about masculinity being toxic or positive, or even as oppressive, limiting men in all of these ways, but, in other ways, being the very force that liberates them. To be able to understand and make our way through the complex conversations around masculinity we need to understand how it actually develops over our lifespan. In this essay I’m going to use the movie Boyhood (2014), which chronicles the life of Mason, as an example of how masculinity develops. I then offer the very powerful framework of the MetaMasculine, which will help you understand your own life narrative in regards to masculinity. If you haven’t watched the movie already you can still benefit greatly from this piece, but I do recommend going to watch the movie afterward because it’s amazing. Two important features of masculinity that I think will help guide us are agency and sexuality, and how they often become incredibly tangled up as we develop through childhood. In fact, one of the key stereotypes that separate the genders is agency vs. communion1. Men, being agentic, are seen as being assertive, independent, and rational, whereas women, being communal, are seen as considerate, relational, and emotional. There is even neuroscientific evidence to suggest that these are not just roles given to us by some patriarchal society, but are instead a part of our nature as male and female animals. Masculinity as Agency, Power, and Domination Like each of us, Mason is taught from an early age to abide by these stereotypes. One of the first scenes that illustrate this takes place at a bowling alley with his dad and sister, Sam. Sam is celebrated by her father for her skills whereas Mason is lectured. An obvious explanation for why this happens is just that she’s better than him at bowling, and her victory won her celebration. However, I think if we can look a little deeper, it serves as good example of what I’m talking about. She’s congratulated, she’s supported, she’s given care and consideration. Her father is treating her well and with relational warmth. Mason on the other hand, is immediately given a certain role to fill, be a man who takes responsibility for himself. When Mason asks for bumpers to help him bowl, his father teaches him that, “bumpers are for kids.” Even at the age of 6, he’s not allowed to be a kid. He has to take ownership of his ability to do better through his own actions. Again, we can chalk this up to Sam doing well and Mason not, but this serves as a good visual example of how a difference in how their father relates to them can lead to two different strategies in how they approach life. In the context of an entire childhood of such messages, it makes sense that the stereotype of agency would develop. And what do we see once his dad’s back is turned? Sam supports Mason relationally. As a girl, she is considerate, kind, and compassionate. Thus, reinforcing that this is how she should behave as a girl. The difference was created by the father, but then maintained by the children themselves. While Mason’s dad may teach him the difference between agency and communion, it’s his stepdad, Bill, who really drills that message in. When Mason is playing golf with his stepbrother, Randy, and his stepdad, he learns another very powerful message about agency. By definition, agency is about separating oneself from others, which means it often requires competition with others. Mason’s dad didn’t have him compete with his sister, he was competing with his own agency or lack thereof. Mason’s stepdad blatantly puts him in competition with his stepbrother, putting Randy down and explicitly telling him to look at how Mason is doing better. Think about how this affects the stepbrothers’ relationship. Mason and Randy likely consider themselves brothers and friends. They spend most of their time being together, playing together, learning together, and growing up, together. Now, one of the most important role models in their lives is forcing them into a new role where they have to compare themselves relative to one another, and whoever comes out the victor will get more support. When they play, they are going to be figuring out who does things better. What was once just a game to have fun, now becomes another avenue to see who is more deserving of this man’s love. This doesn’t merely paint their relationship with the colour of competition. It also feeds into their agency itself. Like I said, agency is separating oneself from others, and now we know that we do this by competing with them and being better than them…or else our father won’t love us. To top all of this off, we then see the stepdad fail. A string of curses is ended with a violent attack on the ground, a demand for his children to get his things, and a drive to the liquor store. Unpacking this sequence of events, the boys learn that upon failure, a man should react with aggression. They’ve already learned that only doing well is acceptable, but now they’ve learned how to deal with their own inability to do well – get angry and take it out on something. Remember, being a man is being an agent, and when they are commanded to get his things, they are given a message about how agency is exercised. I am a man, I am an agent, and I exert my power over those who are beneath me. You are submissive to me, so do as I say. We can see how, through agency and how we are taught to express it, masculinity becomes tied with competition with others, power over others, aggression, and an inability to accept personal failures. And finally, we end the day with alcohol. To be clear, it isn’t necessarily the case that the children will learn to deal with their day, their problems, and their lives with alcohol. The fact that the stepfather is an alcoholic, and is later shown to be abusive, may actually be a reason for why they learn to be careful with alcohol. However, what children learn from an addict, is that they deal with problems not by dealing with them, but by escaping from them. The stepdad is a man, by his every action he is teaching them how to be men. The girls are going to learn how to deal with their problems from an addict, but the boys are also learning that masculinity itself is intimately woven with the very characteristics that are associated with being an addict. I’m going to talk more about how this ties into addiction later, but the final stepdad lesson that I want to talk about is Mason’s haircut. This is such an important memory for Mason because it solidifies everything we’ve been discussing so far. Mason has long hair, and his stepdad forces him to buzz all of it off. During the haircut itself, the stepdad acts with his trademark lack of empathy and makes fun of Mason, who is very clearly upset. Again, this reinforces masculinity as agency, agency as power, as treating the submissive in a certain way. It’s not just that he’s taught to be powerful as a man, but that being powerful as a man means being an asshole. Being powerful means disregarding the emotions of others when you hurt them. What’s more, being a man certainly means NOT being a woman and that’s precisely why he’s getting his hair cut. The stepdad tells him, “you’re going to look like a man instead of a little girl.” With that simple phrase, he’s given a vision of what a man is, which specifically includes not being a woman, and as such, women are seen as less than a man. The reason women are seen as less is because Mason is given a vision of the ideal man, something he should aspire to be, and is then told that everything that is “woman” is something that doesn’t fit that ideal. Mason may begin to interpret anything that is associated with femininity as being worse than the ideal, and thus inferior. When he sees this behaviour in women or men, he will view that behaviour as inferior in some way. Even if he doesn’t agree that femininity is inferior, the fact that this association has been made means that it may become automatic. He will have to be conscious of the ways it might infect how he defines certain behaviours if those behaviours have been associated with femininity. Again, he doesn’t even need to make the association clear by thinking, “oh that behaviour doesn’t fit the ideal, therefore it’s not masculine, therefore it’s feminine, therefore women are inferior.” He may simply see a woman perform that behaviour, and think that specific woman is less than him, without making all of those leaps. If women have been taught to perform that behaviour more than men, then he’ll simply be more likely to believe that certain women are inferior more often. The fact that this is all being defined by emotional pain makes it all the more powerful. To give a specific example, think about what he’s learned from his stepdad. Men are agentic, powerful, and dominate others. When they make someone submit to them and that makes them angry and upset, their emotions are meant to be laughed at without empathy. What does all of that mean? If women are empathetic, emotionally vulnerable, and willing to listen, then they’ll be assumed to be weak because each of those things violate the definition of power and dominance he’s been given. If a woman displays any of those behaviours, he is far more likely to just roll his eyes or ignore her because these strategies are “ineffective.” More will be posted tomorrow!

I think one of the mistakes of privilege discourse is that it wrapped privilege in a normative hierarchy where it became easy to think of those with privilege as bad people, especially if they refused to acknowledge their privileges. Part of accepting their frame means that you would be incentivized to climb the moral hierarchy by proving that you weren’t as privileged as you appeared to be, otherwise you were a bad person. If you wanted people to acknowledge their privileges so that they would be more empathetic for those who did not have such privileges, at least enough to be willing to invest in these groups, then it completely backfired. Again though, people were now incentivized to downplay their privileges and focus on their disprivileges as a means of demonstrating themselves a good person. “You don’t know how hard things were for me,” became a way to demonstrate one’s virtue, which unfortunately, prevents someone from acknowledging that others might have less privileges, which in turn prevents them from empathizing in the hoped for way. An expected rebuttal would be that privilege discourse was never about accusing people, but systems that afforded people privileges based on group identity. Fair enough, but in practice, people have difficulty understanding issues at a systemic level, and so what people heard (and were often told) was that it was the individuals that were responsible, rather than the system itself. Thanks for reading, in what ways could I be less wrong?

I welcome criticism that is specific and constructive, which is what you have provided, so thank you. I actually agree with what you're saying, as I stated here, "Masculinity is the way in which men see themselves, engage in the world, and are seen, in turn, by that world." I would include femininity in "world". Is this what you meant or am I missing something? Thanks again for engaging with my essay. I appreciate that very much.