[ra88it]

You make a lot of interesting (and colorful) points, but I'm not sure crisis is the right word. When you write:

> Masculinity has always been in crisis and that crisis has been used reliably to sell men all kinds of stupid shit for a century and if we're honest, probably a LOT longer than that.

...I feel like I could change it like this and it would be equally "true":

> Femininity has always been in crisis and that crisis has been used reliably to sell women all kinds of stupid shit for a century and if we're honest, probably a LOT longer than that.

I'm not sure what it is other than some general insecurity common to humanity.

[mandevil]

I vaguely recall a line from a sociology lecture, to the effect that masculinity is always in crisis because it has to be refashioned every generation and culture to fit the current situation. Femininity doesn't change as much because babies are pretty much the same everywhere.

Until quite recently (~100 years?), child-rearing was the socially approved center of female life in most cultures (obviously many women avoided it, just like many men avoid the tropes of masculinity, but it was where social pressure would move you) and babies and children are an enormous amount of work (1). So as the economic, cultural and material world changes what it means to be a "man" can change, but what it means to be a woman didn't start to change until much more recently. So Masculinity has been in crisis for millennia- always worried about lack of manly virtues (2)- because it has to be constantly changed to fit with the times.

1: Personal experience, 2016-present.

2: See, e.g. https://acoup.blog/2020/02/07/collections-the-fremen-mirage-... for a discussion of how people of Caesar's day viewed their decadence

[ToucanLoucan]

I mean, I used the word "crisis" because that's what men use when discussing it. This is a pretty good writeup I found: https://parisinstitute.org/on-the-crisis-of-white-masculinit...

And you're absolutely correct that the lions share of it can be directed at women too, though they tend to use different words. Women take down other women for being too sexually available, or not sexually liberated enough; they take them down for dressing to impress men, or trying to seduce other women; for wearing the same dress to multiple occasions, etc. etc. etc. It's an equally irrational set of made up rules to justify people being shitty to one another.

I would argue the masculinity crisis is unique only in that it occurs in a largely privileged and advantaged group, which prevents a lot of the "rallying" that one sees in actually oppressed groups of people and causes a lot more infighting.

And I mean, all of this could be led into quite easily a discussion about capitalism's ongoing alienation of everyone from everyone and everything, because when you feel that yawning chasm in your soul, you're much more primed to consume products to try and fix it. But that's a whole other topic and HN usually doesn't like those kinds of discussions.