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I’ve never heard anyone say that phrase, is it possible that people use that expression to mean “a man likes to feel like a man… not a machine”? Ie he has thoughts, emotions, and priorities. He is not a commodity, his worth is more than just profit he can produce.
Not that women don’t also have those attributes, just that “man” is being used as an outdated shorthand for humanity.
I’ve always thought the least manly quality you can have is caring about how manly you are.
I thought “feeling like a man” meant eating a lot of meat and losing money on sports betting.
Idk I don’t do traditional man things.
I do do traditional man things: woodworking, maintenance on the family vehicles, and I’ve been thinking of getting into machining as a hobby because I have a lot of hand-me-down yard equipment that’s showing its age and I might need to start making my own parts because eBay is looking kind of barren.
Anyway, none of these activities have ever made me feel “manly” I never understood what that means. I feel like myself doing either something I enjoy, or something that needs to be done. My wife always says that she likes that she married such a manly guy who can fix all this stuff and make furniture, but anyone with functioning hands and a brain can do this stuff, it’s not exactly hard. Having a penis doesn’t make you an expert carpenter or mediocre mechanic, working with wood and old engines does that.
From somebody named “geekandmisandry”.
That just shows you how impartial they are to the whole thing
Or maybe we are just sick and tired of fighting the world and don’t want that kind of drama at home with our partner.
Is this a real thing? I don’t believe I’ve ever encountered this. I suspect they’re actually being demeaning to men in general, or men who don’t fit their idea of masculinity. I’ve encountered people like that. Though the opposite is more common (men, and women, demeaning women who don’t fit their idea of what a woman should be like, or just demeaning women in general).
I also have never encountered this, although i didn’t reach the same conclusion (or any conclusion apart from this is rare or not a thing).
Now im thinking about it you’re probably right
Every man is by definition a man and feels like one.
i wish that were true
Empowerment is for women only. Noted.
How are you empowered by “feeling like a man”? What does that even mean?
Why would it matter what it means? There is someone asking for validation and is ridiculed for it.
The source of women’s empowerment isn’t men pretending that women are strong. It’s women who changed.
This whole “like a man” thing sounds to me like an extension of the toxic cultural BS where “men” are not just humans with emotions and needs like every other human. It reeks of men who are too scared or ignorant to be self-aware and figure out what life really means to them, and thus they need the people around them (especially the partners) to play along in their power/masculinity fantasy.
What a man needs is to realize he’s just another human, and that for humans happiness and fulfillment can ultimately only come from within. Relationships with others are crucial, and you might even need some medication to get your brain chemistry unfucked, but neither of those are independently going to make you happy with yourself and “feel like a man.”
“A man” can refer to roughly half the adult population. It’s not exactly an exclusive club. Why not leave gender out if it and try to be “a good person” and see where that gets you?
Having the people around you walking on eggshells to keep your manly ego intact, whether it’s out of fear or pity, is the exact opposite of what a good person should strive for. What if the people around you instead trust you, feel safe with you, laugh with you, and are better off with you in their lives?
Source: Am man. Went through some stuff. Figured some things out. Made some things better. Have wife and child who enjoy life.
Did the first person just translate “like a man” as “superior to you”? They done failed their own little word game.
Only if you’re completely unwilling to unpack what things like “be a man” and “like a man” generally mean in the anglosphere, and how phrases like that have often been employed to reinforce the worst and most destructive aspects of masculinity.
Recent results show this is exactly what is happening.
A wife would know exactly what it means and how to do this.
Mine puts up with my dad jokes and tell me I look handsome when Im all gross and covered in dirt after a long day working outside. That’s more than enough for me.
When I come in sore and cold from shoveling the latest buttload of snow and she tells the kids to go cuddle daddy and warm me up? Yeah that makes me feel pretty good.
Contrary to what some people claim, a lot of women do find men attractive that can get themselves dirty and are crafty. That is, if it doesn’t come with manners like a cavemen.
we are simple beings.
Two people who care about each other will provide all forms of validation and support that someone needs. This is kind of the point of being in a relationship, a partner who makes you feel like [insert thing you want to feel like] when you need it, and you give that validation back to them as they require it.
We seem to have gone severely off-course when we started expecting a world full of uncaring strangers to give us all kinds of validation for things.
What is a man?! Nothing but a miserable pile of secrets. But enough talk… Have at you!
As a biological male and someone who identifies as a man, it’s pretty weak, IMO, to need someone else to make you feel a particular way.
Are you in control of your feelings, or do you constantly need someone else to reinforce, or induce a feeling in you?
Personally, I’m in control of my feelings, and bluntly, nobody else has control over me. Neither for how I feel, or what I think/do; with the only exception to what I do being governed in part by legality. Eg. If I know a thing isn’t legal to do, then I won’t do that thing. Beyond the rule of law, I do, think, say, and feel, whatever, and however I want.
To me, having that much control over my own self is what makes me a person living in a free country. Anyone who does not have the ability, like I do, to think, feel, do, and love, whomever and, whatever they want, is someone who I want to support in gaining that right.
This seems …um… naive. I love my wife and her opinion of me affects my feelings. And the more I care about my wife, the more I love her, the more her opinion of me matters. Humans are social creatures and we look for positive feedback from the people we care most about. To pretend like this doesn’t matter is silly.
I understand your point here.
People we care about should be people we care to make happy, and who we want to make us happy.
I’m speaking more about agency. I use my own agency to limit whose opinion can even move the needle to my emotions. I decide whether their comments are something I should “take to heart” or disregard as an outburst.
Personally I separate myself from most situations and emotional involvement and look at things from a neutral, logical standpoint before I allow myself and my own feelings to be affected by what may, or may not be said in the moment.
I don’t need anyone to do anything to make me feel happy, or like a man. I control that. I’m not going to blame anyone for how I feel.
If you don’t feel happy, or you don’t “feel like a man” (whatever that means to you), the answers to why you feel that way, or how you inspire those feelings in yourself are entirely within your power to control. You have agency over your feelings.
My SO, when she compliments me, makes me feel good, but I don’t need her to constantly placate me with compliments in order to feel valuable, appreciated, happy, or “like a man”.
It is emotionally healthy to look inward for happiness and satisfaction. Relying on the acceptance and platitudes from others to feel okay is codependent. I don’t understand why anyone would want to give their agency over their feelings and emotions, wholly and completely over to others.
The idea of controlling your feelings seems laughable. If you have control they aren’t feelings, just thoughts. You cant really control thoughts either, just control what you do with them. Except we know that humans in general don’t have great control of our actions either. We just have to live in this comfortable little lie where we have control over ourselves despite all evidence to the contrary in order to maintain a remotely reasonable society, but it’s not real any more than your belief that you control your feelings.
There’s a saying that stuck with me: “feelings are never wrong”.
Your feelings are a fact of your continued human existence. Unless you’re a psychopath or sociopath (or whatever) and you literally don’t feel, your feelings simply are.
From there I determined that feelings can be inspired incorrectly from a given happenstance. While you may initially feel offended by something that is said, it’s neither necessary to continue being offended, nor is it necessary to always have that reaction to that given happenstance. Accepting yourself as you are is vitally important in restructuring who you want to be.
This is all borderline cognitive behavioural therapy. Training yourself to be the best version of you that you can be. I’ve been dabbling in CBT techniques for most of my life. I wasn’t aware that it was CBT when I started working on myself in this capacity, but I’ve recently learned that a lot of the techniques I’ve been using to better myself, and increase my agency and control over my own mind and emotions, is used in CBT.
I would agree that some thoughts are not controllable. We all get intrusive thoughts and impulses that we choose whether we want to act on them. Whether that action is to open your mouth and speak those thoughts aloud, or type them out, or to take action based on those thoughts.
The thoughts and actions you describe I understand to be system 1 thinking. Aka, thinking fast. There’s a great book on this called “thinking: fast and slow” which covers the ideas. Basically system 1 is your “fast” thinking, heuristic/instinctual/“muscle memory” systems. It’s your “knee jerk” reactions and your first thought on something. System 2 is your contemplative and analytical systems, aka, “thinking slow”. System 2 can educate system 1, which is how we form habits and “muscle memory”
System 1, we have little immediate control over since the majority of our sapience is fully embedded in system 2.
I would agree that there’s a nontrivial number of people going around under only the learned behaviors from system 1, and doing very little analysis of what’s happening by utilizing system 2.
While I don’t think anyone has complete control of their own emotions, I do think some measure of control is possible through manipulation of one’s own facial expression, posture, breathing & thought patterns.
Right you can hack your lizard brain with deep breathing to calm yourself down, but that seems like even more proof the you you think you are is only barely in charge of this mess we call a brain. If you can’t calm down you can trick your body into calming down which then calms “you” down. Personally I tend to think the you you are is just a verbal processing system that retroactively analyzes what the rest of your brain does. If the reaction is slow enough, you can sometimes take charge and we call that modicum of authority “self control”.
The whole microexpression thing, if valid, takes the facial expressions thing off the table.
Posture is…I guess controllable as a bulk coordinated muscle movement but tbh no clue why that’s relevant.
Personally I tend to think the you you are is just a verbal processing system that retroactively analyzes what the rest of your brain does.
I seem to remember reading that research of certain brain disorders has shown exactly that… Basically, without a functional corpus callosum, one side of your brain does something, then the other side (that had nothing to do with it) comes up with a reason why “it” did it.
People in general like receiving positive feedback. There is no need to assign feedback to gender roles.
I agree.
If I may ask, did you feel the need to post this because you felt that I was portraying the opposite, or are you building on the point?
I’m hoping it’s the latter, but if it’s the former, please tell me what I said that made you feel that way. I’m always trying to improve my communication.
When first reading “a man likes to feel like a man”, i thought it was about trans men
Lol yeah I’ve never heard an adult male say this so that’s the route I was going down too
That’s the perfect answer, IMHO.
More in general, it’s not up to others to change the way they act to feed somebody else’s self-delusions of having some kind of quality they do not have.
I’ve actually had to deal with something somewhat parallel to this when I moved from The Netherlands (whose people are known for being blunt) to Britain (were everything is sugarcoated and people are evasive, the higher the social class the worst it gets) and then proceeded to go around unknowingly insulting just about every insecure person I met in that place by giving them my blunt opinion on what they cared about, without evasiveness or sugarcoating.
The balance I found was to stop giving my opinion unless asked and if asked by somebody who didn’t know my ways yet, give them a notice (“I used to live in The Netherlands so just point out ways in which things can be improved, but that doesn’t mean I think they’re bad”) and then proceed to give them my blunt opinion.
