The #MasculinitySoFragile hashtag took off yesterday after a Buzzfeed article highlighted a bunch of products being marketed to men with some of the most cartoonish evocations of old-school masculinity you could possibly imagine, from grenade-shaped shower puffs for men to Man Chocolate.
The point of the hashtag was fairly obvious: to look at, and mock, the ways these ads try to capitalize on male insecurities and suggest ways men can free themselves from destructive stereotypes of masculinity.
Because, as these ads make clear, masculinity and femininity aren’t inscribed in our genes the way eye and hair color are; they are to a large extent cultural constructs, ways of seeing, ways of thinking, ways of acting that we learn from parents, peers, and, increasingly, the media — hence the insecurity many men feel about their masculinity, and the ease with which advertisers are able to play on these insecurities to make money.
Talking about these constructs as constructs can help us to free ourselves from aspects of masculinity and femininity that are toxic or unnecessarily restrictive.
The #MasculinitySoFragile hashtag, like the Buzzfeed article that got the conversation going, broaches the subject in a funny way, telling guys that, yes, it’s ok to buy yourself a pink shower puff for $3 instead of shelling out twice that much for an Axe Detailer Shower Tool that looks like it came straight out of Gears of War.
So, naturally, the hashtag was quickly flooded by antifeminists and anxious men who saw the whole thing not as a deconstruction of the sort of toxic masculinity that’s making them anxious in the first place, but as an army of evil feminazis calling them a bunch of wusses.
Not realizing that the feminists were talking about the surprising fragility of cultural definitions of masculinity, the critics of the hashtag assumed the feminists were accusing men of being fragile. I don’t know the last time I saw such a colossal outbreak of not-getting-the-point.
As one observer sympathetic to the original aim of the hashtag noted,,
If you want to lol at dudes comically misunderstanding the premise of a joke, then check out #MasculinitySoFragile
— John Dagen (@JohnDagen) September 23, 2015
How did the “critics” of the hashtag get it so wrong? Let me count the ways.
1) They declared that it wasn’t MEN who were fragile, but FEMINISTS so there.
https://twitter.com/Bayonethics/status/646646983617175553
https://twitter.com/alWPWtom/status/646657930574569472
https://twitter.com/Luisedgm/status/646657724852342784
2) They offered to fight any feminist comers, to show the world just how unfragile they are.
I challenge any female tweeting unironically with #MasculinitySoFragile to last three rounds against me in a fight. We'll see who's fragile.
— Mech of Justice (@MechofJusticeWZ) September 23, 2015
3) They accused feminists who weren’t shaming men … of shaming men.
Men made women 2nd class for centuries, to make themselves feel powerful. Today, feminists do exactly what they hate. #MasculinitySoFragile
— Rebecca K. (@Rebeksy) September 23, 2015
Tell me feminists, how does tearing men down build up women? #MasculinitySoFragile
— Caroline Craig David (@CarolineCDavid) September 23, 2015
https://twitter.com/The_Extrange/status/646646321563176960
Dear smug feminists: Maybe #MasculinitySoFragile cuz you spent the last 40 years emasculating men.
— Michelle Malkin (@michellemalkin) September 23, 2015
4) Meanwhile, others in their camp tried to shame women for being (allegedly) inferior to men at pretty much everything.
#MasculinitySoFragile NEVER in history will "ANY 5 Woman" equal or beat the Los Angels #Lakers in a series of 5 games – Females never equal
— Mr Jeffery Stone (@MrJefferyStone) September 24, 2015
https://twitter.com/subhamlawrence/status/646804483133976576
5) Sometimes they forgot to make an argument and just said “suck it.”
#MasculinitySoFragile any Bitches this Uses this HashTag can Suck My Dick you #FeministFuck
— Gregory Carter (@cgrgry) September 23, 2015
6) Others fell back on random insults.
https://twitter.com/scrowder/status/646664405124521984
https://twitter.com/matthewhummel/status/646783223867965440
https://twitter.com/_Jiggz/status/646830406885507072
#Masculinitysofragile – a mocking hashtag made by #feminist morons who claim to want equality-but bleat "misogyny" when mocked. #Waronstupid
— AgentofGaytriarchy (@PoliticalCynic) September 23, 2015
I like how feminists lecture men about behaving like men.
Soon, the only ones listening will be your 52 cats. #MasculinitySoFragile
— I Am Leah (@Bossy_Leah) September 23, 2015
7) They cast aspersions on the motivations, and the masculinity, of feminist men participating in the hashtag.
https://twitter.com/PolitiBunny/status/646816129902510080
https://twitter.com/AVoiceForMen/status/646843565478309888
https://twitter.com/LucasTemple/status/646832952702140416
8) Some of them decided to take the opportunity to cast aspersions on Barak Obama’s masculinity as well, because isn’t he like a feminist or something?
https://twitter.com/HensleywkAo/status/646664691146694656
9) A few used the hashtag to promote white supremacy, because why not?
https://twitter.com/UncuckTheRight/status/646887485566377984
https://twitter.com/ElStatelo/status/646752815168233472
10) They warned feminists that if they kept talking about how men are fragile — which, again, they weren’t doing — well then, these women wouldn’t be getting any more help from men with stuck jelly jar lids, and they could forget about having doors opened for them ever, much less having dudes treat them to dinner!
https://twitter.com/NotOne2bPC/status/646831693643542529
#MasculinitySoFragile. Because you can't open the door for a feminist without issues. Only a real woman would thank you for the respect.
— George (@stevets) September 23, 2015
https://twitter.com/ThinkingWeasel/status/646769296899764224
https://twitter.com/juhawh/status/646829131175448576
Ladies: You have lost a POWERFUL ALLY today.
Never again will you have a nice dinner. Or eat jelly.
Tauriq Moosa probably did the best job of summing up the whole parade of nonsense.
https://twitter.com/tauriqmoosa/status/646799858293194754
https://twitter.com/tauriqmoosa/status/646800819707342849
Yep, that pretty much covers it.
@spacelawn
The answer is either “Fucked if I know” or “Roosh’s unwiped ass,” depending on how snarky I’m feeling.
Careful, dude, your fragile is showing…
Actually, this feminist (who IS a real woman, because the only fake ones are the inflatable kind) has thanked her share of door openers.
And if you really respected women, you wouldn’t be singling any of us out as having “issues” for not liking to be beholden to your fragile male ego, dude.
And a feminist who opens her own damn doors IS “without issues”, because there is nothing wrong with women opening their own damn doors without a man’s “help”. Oops, looks like another fragile masculinity has made our point for us!
They covered just about everything but Hitler. Usually there is a Hitler or nazi reference in at least one tweet. The Obama leap made me laugh.
It’s just Lewis’ Law all the way down, isn’t it?
I know since Thursday is my “loose all hope for humanity” day, I’m delighted to have gotten such an early start on it. The “rebuttal” hastag #femininitysofragile is so vile… David, a wealth of misogyny, violence and racism there for you as a follow up article.
I just don’t know where to start with it. It’s immediately the worst.
Oh, Michelle Malkin. The very concept of feminism emasculating men just proves the point. Have you ever heard women say a man is defeminizing her simply by having a differing opinion? No, because it’s masculinity we’re socialized into thinking is superior and must be protected.
They really missed the point of the hashtag. And demonstrated exactly what it is about, all at the same time. If only they were self-aware enough to realise that.
Book of triggering
You are a fragile lil snowflake, your ego is as weak as f***.
*triggered*
A blow up doll doesn’t technically count as a girlfriend…
*triggering intensifies*
If these guys are so easy to emasculate, what’s holding back the “savage foreigners” in the first place?
Re: Opening doors: as a feminist not only have I opened doors for myself, thanked others for opening doors or holding doors open for me, I myself have opened doors for others and been thanked for doing so, most recently by an older gentleman this morning at the post office. But the way these guys act you’d think if I held the door for a dude bro (I have), their nuts would drop off from shock (they didn’t).
Why is being a decent human to other humans so hard for these humans?
IRT “Open your own fucking jelly jar”
Just so you know, they sell tools specifically made for opening stubborn lids (some are even automatic). They’re primarily for people with arthritic hands, but they’re pretty handy for anyone with a weak grip.
So yeah, don’t need your strong manly hands after all, but thanks for the concern.
Did that come out somewhere? Last I head, which is admittedly years and years ago, they’d collaborated on some projects.
As a short woman with very slim wrists I learned a good trick for stubborn jars, just take a screwdriver and use it to lever under the lid, not enough to bend the metal, just enough to break the vacuum. I also keep a small foot stool in the kitchen for those high shelves. Remind me how helpless without a man I am again?
I remember when amazon was full of joke reviews in response to ridiculously gendered products like ‘For Her’ pink biros, I don’t seem to recall any angry feminists thinking those reviews were undermining anyone’s sense of womanhood, they were more annoyed at those condescending products. What these manbabies are proving on twitter is that they need their ‘Man Soap’ and ‘Man Sweeties’ in order to feel properly masculine.
@Bina:
I open jars by wrapping a rubber band or a rubber glove around the lid. 90% of the time, that creates enough friction to move the lid. Works on containers with sticky, dried material, too! — such as nail polish, honey, preserves, etc. The other 10% to the time, I slip the blade of a butter knife under the lid and wiggle it around trying to disrupt the airlock. My menfolk are pretty strong, but in those rare instances when I can’t open a jar, they can’t either.
So this whole thing hit http://cheezburger.com/637701/gender-norms-hashtag-masculinitysofragile-twitter-trending#comments – and I’m cracking up at the guys in the comments on the article mansplaining to each other and getting it completely wrong. It’s amazing.
Opening doors and jars is, in my theory, a symbolic thing. It represents a man doing trivial acts of kindness for a woman (that women themselves can do) not because it’s nice to be kind to others but because of an unwritten cultural “contract” between men and women as a whole. If women stop coddling the male ego, men will stop putting in a minimal effort to help women. Or, they may stop the “protecting you by not killing you” thing they expect to be lionized for.
They missed the point of #MasculinitySoFragile, just like in #1, they missed the point of trigger warnings. That’s just like them.
What really sucks is that MRA types should be annoyed as shit at the whole fragile masculinity thing.
It seriously sucks for us men. To have to constantly reinforce your masculinity to meet an arbitrary and backward social standard. But feminists hate it for good reasons(i.e. toxic, abusive, and patriarchy attitudes) too, so the MRAs decide they have to love it.
I have arthritis and haven’t been able to open jars in years. My wife does all the jar-opening around here. :p
David. C’mon now. You know better than this. The pink puff isn’t the cheapest option. The cheapest option is the grey blobby one that sort of disappears after a few washes from the dollar store. You have to pay for style. And the right to actually have it in your shower for more than a few days before the ether swallows it.
Lewis’s Law prevails once again.
As a man, I also do that. It’s much more energy-efficient.
I just want say Michelle Malkin is a terrible person. She rights for the terrible Vdare, the premier platform for blatantly racist paleoconservatives, and wrote a terrible book defending the WW2 Japanese internment that’s a crime against history. She also founded the terrible website/train wreck Twichy, which cherry picks random tweets in order to denounce the all powerful, yet impossible stupid, liberal cabal that’s ruining America.
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Michelle_Malkin
Two comments for what it’s worth.
(1) Way to totally misunderstand what triggering is or what trigger warnings are for, dude. I bet this guy totally rocks logic: “Hey, stupid totally deserved the rape because her skirt was too short/she had drunk a cocktail/she was walking down the street at night! … What? Why are you upset?!! It’s only LOGICAL!” “Hey, deserved the bullying/beating because it’s NOT NATURAL! …. what? Why are you upset?! This is totally reasonable! First amendment! Free speech! You’re the real sexist/racist/homophobe/transphobe for trying to shut down my speech!”
(2) Who is actively ignoring boys’ education? Is it just because we don’t have articles and op-eds addressing education for boys? It’s not in the headlines therefore we’re “actively ignoring” it? Newsflash: we don’t write headlines about what’s going well. There are no articles about all the planes that landed safely yesterday. There are no op-eds about my peaceful and uneventful street. Just like we don’t need a “white history month” in the US because every month is white history month, just like we don’t need a “special caucus on getting rich white men into politics” or “conference on getting more people to watch men’s sports”, we don’t need special dialogue around boys’ education.
Strap wrenches do a good job on jars too. Plus they can be used on oil filters (wash ’em afterwards if you want to go back to jars), pipes, even tight bottlecaps if you can adjust them down small enough…
Sadly wordpress removed two key parts of my first comment… I guess I used the wrong parens. It should read:
I bet this guy totally rocks logic: “Hey, stupid [gendered slur] totally deserved the rape because her skirt was too short/she had drunk a cocktail/she was walking down the street at night! … What? Why are you upset?!! It’s only LOGICAL!” “Hey, [transphobic/homophobic slur] deserved the bullying/beating because it’s NOT NATURAL! …. what? Why are you upset?! This is totally reasonable! First amendment! Free speech! You’re the real …
the knife or screwdriver under the lip of the lid is a great tip… I learned it from my ex-husband. But I always try to give it a twist first, they don’t all need it.