[FRIAM] Mansplaining the ManSplainOverse: 2024 Rusty Razor award

[steve smith]

Glen -

Avoiding my usual hydra-expansion of larded point by point responses and 
tangents I'll try two succinct (hah!) points I take from what you said 
here while extending lots of implicit nods and tacit agreements and a 
few stifled quibbles:

1) Testosterone:  As an "old man" who is not (as) plagued by the 
hormonal drives which at one point felt grounded out in "Fight or F*ck", 
somewhat rooted in my olfactory/pheremonal level I think. And a pet 
familiar (dogs, dogs, dogs, cats, cats, chickens, geese, fish, 
arachnids, insects, worms, foster-horses, mules, goats) over the years, 
I've never kept amale *mammal* intact past one year, and the one who 
kept his manhood to death had some pretty difficult habits or 
propensities that came with/from that.  I do not recommend.  I know few 
people including/especially livestock people who think maintaining an 
intact male mammal is generally a good idea.  I think Kristy Noem had to 
kill a dog and goat because she didn't realize what she'd 
created/allowed/failed-to-raise-right.  Many things *can* be solved with 
a bullet it seems.   If you want to be a bull or bronc rider, sure, keep 
one or three around to compete with in that way... go ahead... it's your 
male birthright to dominate other males who would in fact stomp your 
useless monkey ass into the dirt if you weren't so upright, opposably 
thumbed, clever and having of tools (like braided horse hair nooses or 
bridles, etc).   Or if/when/as you want to manufacture more of the 
beasts through natural procreation and need a sperm donor (I think most 
Bulls and Race/Show horses are not even allowed the benefit of 
exercising their God given right to mount and hump, it is handjobs and 
turkey basters all the way?)   I'm sure I'm off base in some fundamental 
way and most of the men (which are most of the constituency here) might 
cross their legs and turn their backs when I say this, but I 
suspect/wonder at whether we (humans) will be able to achieve the 
peaceful, egalitarian, collective aspirations we claim while we still 
have so much testosterone (and it's familiars) coursing and spiking in 
our bodies and brains. Perhaps if men were only allowed (by whom 
exactly?  some fascist govt/society, "liberal self loathing principle"?) 
to remain "intact" past puberty if they and their community, more to the 
point had a good plan to manage them (as farmyards and ranches with 
intact male animals do or should).   Some (not just RadFemmes I have 
known) might think Lorena Bobbit had the right idea (only she mistook 
the offending organ next door for the real "root" of the cause...  I 
doubt that compulsory or widespread eunuch or drone-creation will be in 
our future but I find it a confrontational hypothesis to offer in some 
circles.  I want to believe this circle of circles (jerkers? sorry, 
wordplay not passive-aggressive attack)  is a venue who can take it for 
what it is intended (at least the few who can/do read this deep into my 
rambles).    China had their one-child, the first world has our ZPG, 
techbros have their meritocratic technophilic procreationism (while LDS 
and Catholics have or have-had their own variant), Japan (and parts of 
the West) have a spiraling (to the point of being problematic 
demographically?) population, so I don't feel like my "proposal" is that 
far out of line for both population and collective attitude control?

2) (redoubling attempt to be succinct) Is anyone an "integrated self" 
without therefore/also being a psychopath, narcissist or both?   I do 
think something about the "distributed self" might well be more 
(w)holistically healthy in the same way worshiping a pantheon of 
god(desse)s to try to understand human and Gaia nature might be a better 
fit than the typical Ibrahamic Yahweh, Allah, God-the-Father.  Even the 
Catholics (and other sects) try to do the Trinity thing 
Father/Son/Holy-Ghost-Toasty thing to allow for more nuance?  Minsky's 
/Society of Mind/ touched on this from a cognition/intellect aspect, why 
not emotional/spiritual as well?  Even the Moon Lander (apocryphal?) had 
3 computers who had to agree to make any decision (error 
detection/correction in a high cosmic-ray flux environment)?

BTW has anyone helped Gil?  I don't really feel able... not grounded or 
focused enough to fully understand his plight?   Since this is my fray 
from the thread, I suppose I could ask: Gil, /Mansplain ;^) us your lost 
data/archive.org-recovery-aspiration-problem again in other terms?/

- Steve

On 10/21/24 1:32 PM, glen wrote:
> Along these same lines (I think, anyway), I heard Candice Owens 
> strawman "toxic masculinity" such that the descriptor "toxic" 
> translates across all masculinity. I.e. she thinks when people use the 
> phrase, they're saying that all masculinity is toxic. Of course, 
> that's not what they're saying. But if it *were*, her inference is 
> reasonable, if vapid: Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
>
> To me, mansplaining is the same as it ever was boorish behavior of the 
> know it alls we all know ... and love. I've come to lump all this 
> deceptive fine-graining under the concept of the (Jungian?) 
> "integrated self". We've trod this road before with Strawson's Against 
> Narrativity. But people just don't seem that well integrated, to me. 
> And when I meet someone who does seem to have it all together in that 
> way, they exhibit narcissistic or psychopathic tendencies ... like 
> their natural intra-personal diversity has been sacrificed to some 
> unitary ideal of some kind.
>
> Given that, some lecturers are fantastic and I could listen to them 
> all day long rant their gospel. Some are good, but insist on explicit 
> consent. Once you say "Yes, that's what I'm here for ... to listen to 
> you drone on for hours", the string is pulled and they do what they're 
> good at. So the key to the denigrating use of "boor" and 
> "mansplaining" has something to do with implied consent and 
> Dunning-Kruger. There's a sweet spot in there somewhere that's 
> difficult to hit. And continuing in the Gellmann amnesia vein, when 
> you navigate these waters a lot, you're gonna be sensitive to the 
> uncanny valley. E.g. while Curtis Yarvin sounds, to the untrained ear, 
> just like any other blathering dork, if you spend a lot of time around 
> *competent* blathering dorks, you can hear the difference.
>
> On 10/21/24 09:55, steve smith wrote:
>> glen sed
>>> Yes. It can be frustrating. My latest pet peeve are the foodies. No 
>>> matter where I go, what group I'm hanging out in, the discussion of 
>>> food absolutely dominates. They'll talk about which pizza place is 
>>> the best in town for like, an hour. Or they'll talk about risotto 
>>> for a half an hour then move on to some other obscure dish. It's 
>>> exhausting. It's even worse when the foodies start mansplaining beer 
>>> to me. I've been home brewing longer than most of these people have 
>>> been alive. But they'll yap to no end about it while I remind my 
>>> self of Gellmann amnesia 
>>> <https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_Amnesia_effect>
>>
>> (apologies to Gil for (also) not helping to answer his original plea 
>> for help with archive.org and lost-data retrieval, and kudos to Glen 
>> for offering the Gell-Man reference, new to me)
>>
>> Let me offer some mansplaining about mansplaining:
>>
>> My favorite 3rd wave feminist (my numbering scheme, starting from 1 
>> not 0) is Rebecca Solnit and I credit her both with the mansplaining 
>> adjacent precedent in an essay ( circa 200x) titled "Men explain 
>> things to me" where she recounts the experience of attending a 
>> cocktail party invited by a friend (in San Francisco I think) where 
>> the hostess introduced her to a man who had just read the (first?) 
>> book she had published on Edward Muybridge. The man was head over 
>> heels in love with the subject and the book but didn't listen to the 
>> introduction well enough to realize he was being introduced to it's 
>> *Author*, and proceeded to explain everything he had learned from the 
>> book about Muybridge and his work.   My understanding of Solnit is 
>> that she is nobody's fool an anything but a wallflower, but being 
>> "third wave" not known to be a "firebrand" styled feminist.   I don't 
>> know if she deliberately kept paying out rope to hang himself with or 
>> not but by the time she extracted herself from the conversation, I 
>> think she never interrupted him (effectively?) enough to correct or 
>> inform him on the nature of his travesty of the moment.
>>
>> I do believe that "mansplaining" as a verb grew popular out of that 
>> incident/recount (maybe not, "all anecdotes are wrong, few are 
>> interesting, none are useful?")
>>
>> She also coined (FWIW, more self-fact-checking indicates she did not 
>> coin but merely amplify) the hashtag #yesallwomen in response to the 
>> #notallmen hashtag of roughly 2013(fact-check sez 2014)... I was not 
>> a hashtag-kinda-guy but knew the idiom at the time... it was after 
>> the (before the name existed?) incel living with several 
>> (asian-american?) roomates (he being pasty-white) knifed three to 
>> death, drove to a sorority house (where he had been 
>> ignored/excluded), shot several women, then went on a 
>> shooting/hit-run rampage until he self-anhillated.
>>
>
>
>
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