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Tweet Critique

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Tweets today are even sillier than usual. See this one, for example:

@rdfrs: “My Take: ‘I’m spiritual but not religious’ is a cop-out” by Alan Miller – CNN http://bit.ly/V6veEQ

I don’t use the word “spiritual”, but I can very easily understand people who believe in God but find every single organized religion completely disgusting. Many people develop religious beliefs not because they seek group acceptance and a place to hang out but because this is their way of answering the great, deeply personal questions about life and death. If you are too stupid to understand that a search for answers doesn’t need to imply dissolving your individuality in the great collective, then that’s your problem.

Who is this Alan Miller and why is he stupid?

@hugoschwyzer: Boys and men drop out not because they can’t compete but because in the modern world, slackerdom has become the new talisman of masculinity.

I’m sick to death of this ridiculous obsession with the completely invented myth of male slackerdom, laziness, and immaturity. Has anybody really met any men who say, “I will be a total slacker and will never do anything because that’s super manly”? No? I didn’t think so. As an educator, I meet crowds of young people every day and I can assure you that there is absolutely no gender divide in terms of achievement and slackerdom among them.

8 responses to “Tweet Critique”

  1. thevenerablecorvex Avatar
    thevenerablecorvex

    “I’m sick to death of this ridiculous obsession with the completely invented myth of male slackerdom, laziness, and immaturity. Has anybody really met any men who say, “I will be a total slacker and will never do anything because that’s super manly”? No? I didn’t think so. As an educator, I meet crowds of young people every day and I can assure you that there is absolutely no gender divide in terms of achievement and slackerdom among them.”

    I’ve always suspected that this is rooted mainly in older men not liking the way that younger men keep playing video games well into adulthood. This at least is the example that they always end up citing.

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    1. bloggerclarissa Avatar
      bloggerclarissa

      The fixation on video games as a sign of male immaturity is nothing short of idiotic. Crowds of very mature, ultra successful men and women play video games. Why should this inoffensive hobby bother anybody?

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      1. thevenerablecorvex Avatar
        thevenerablecorvex

        Because they didn’t get to do it when they were young?

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        1. bloggerclarissa Avatar
          bloggerclarissa

          I always suspected that sheer unadulterated envy is behind all these grumblings against the “horrible, rotten” younger generation.

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  2. JE Avatar
    JE

    Usually it seems that men who make negative claims about “men” do so because they’ll compare better to the image they try to create than they do to real men. Take Hugo Schwyzer, known for once trying to kill his girlfriend constantly presents all women’s problems as being caused by all men not being as moral as him. Right.

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    1. bloggerclarissa Avatar
      bloggerclarissa

      So true! I couldn’t agree more with this comment. This is an effort to remove competition, in a way. There is a well-known equivalent of this attitude among women that consists of women saying, “I sont know why it is but women just don’t like me. . .”

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  3. el Avatar
    el

    RE myth of male slackerdom, Feministe links to Stephanie Coontz’s article (I read her books and loved them) and destroys spme myths, like that young women without children outearn young men (people actually believed that), saying thus of “male laziness”:

    Men’s irresponsibility and bad behavior is now a stock theme in popular culture. But there has always been a subset of men who engage in crude, coercive and exploitative behavior. What’s different today is that it’s harder for men to get away with such behavior in long-term relationships. Women no longer feel compelled to put up with it and the legal system no longer condones it. The result is that many guys who would have been obnoxious husbands, behaving badly behind closed doors, are now obnoxious singles, trumpeting their bad behavior on YouTube.

    Their boorishness may be pathetic, but it’s much less destructive than the masculine misbehavior of yore. Most men are in fact behaving better than ever. Domestic violence rates have been halved since 1993, while rapes and sexual assaults against women have fallen by 70 percent in that time. In recent decades, husbands have doubled their share of housework and tripled their share of child care. And this change is not confined to highly educated men.

    Among dual-earner couples, husbands with the least education do as much or more housework than their more educated counterparts. Men who have made these adjustments report happier marriages — and better sex lives.

    In general, Stephanie Coontz seems like a feminist you could support to me. he even talks of masculine mystique in this article!

    http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2012/10/01/the-myth-of-male-decline/

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    1. bloggerclarissa Avatar
      bloggerclarissa

      I was very interested in this concept of male gender mystique. This is not a phenomenon I have observed anywhere and I see no socio-historic reasons for such a mystique to arise (if you are the first sex, the standard against which everything is measured, a mystique seems out of place). I also see that the author slips into the passive voice the moment she alights at this issue. But I’d be interested in seeing the idea developed.

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