One of the Intrinsic Paradoxes of Machoism

[airportkid]

One of the features of machoism is disdain for emotion.  Betraying emotion is just not done.  Never frown; never crack a smile.  Makes a person look "weak".

YET ---

Emotion is most trusted for making decisions.  Trust the gut.  Go with the gut.  In decision mode, emotion is "strength".

More reason to toss machoism onto the scrap heap of human folly, but I guess that's just being emotional. 

[no one]

I just build walls. It's a lot more work, but, at least you don't have to look at me.

[Thumpalumpacus]

Machismo is a fairly reliable indicator of insecurity.

[Cavebear]

One of the features of machoism is disdain for emotion.  Betraying emotion is just not done.  Never frown; never crack a smile.  Makes a person look "weak".

YET ---

Emotion is most trusted for making decisions.  Trust the gut.  Go with the gut.  In decision mode, emotion is "strength".

More reason to toss machoism onto the scrap heap of human folly, but I guess that's just being emotional. 

I agree, but what brought THAT on? Just curious...

[Vera]

The thing I find hilarious is that people who spout stuff like this rarely stop to think (guess that's not macho enough either ;-)) that anger - often to the point of aggression - is, you guessed it, an emotion as well.

I guess it doesn't really count though, as it's not a lowly, sissy, girly kind of emotion, but a real, manly one.

That stunted manchild in Rio who'd accuse me of crying to easily (imagine this, crying when supposed friends heap abuse on you) had to to go to the ER for stitches after he broke his door and cut his hand when hitting during a fight with his then bf... and was in the habit of pushing (and probably hitting) people, incl. me once... But *I* was the emotional one.

As for looking down on emotion - we so poorly understand how we even make decisions, claiming that we, personally, keep emotion out of it, is nothing but a ridiculous self-delusion.

Also, I've quoted this before, but these are the words of Rudolf Hoess, the longest-serving commandant of Auschwitz:

“I had to appear cold and indifferent to events that must have wrung the heart of anyone possessed of human feelings. I might not even look away when afraid lest my natural emotions got the upper hand. I had to watch coldly, while the mothers of laughing or crying children went to the gas chambers. On one occasion two small children were so absorbed in some game that they refused to let their mother tear them away from it. Even the Jews of the Special Detachment were reluctant to pick the children up. The imploring look in the eyes of the mother, who certainly knew what was happening is something I shall never forget. The people were already in the gas chamber and becoming restive and I had to act. Everyone was looking at me. I nodded to the junior noncommissioned officer on duty and he picked up the screaming struggling children in his arms and carried them to the gas chamber, accompanied by their mother who was weeping in the most heart rending fashion. My pity was so great that I longed to vanish from the scene; yet I might not show the slightest trace of emotion.”

Lack of emotion really will lead to a better world. For sure.

[Alan V]

One of the features of machoism is disdain for emotion.  Betraying emotion is just not done.  Never frown; never crack a smile.  Makes a person look "weak".

YET ---

Emotion is most trusted for making decisions.  Trust the gut.  Go with the gut.  In decision mode, emotion is "strength".

More reason to toss machoism onto the scrap heap of human folly, but I guess that's just being emotional. 

I'm all for scrapping hyper-sexualized behaviors like acting macho, and no one who actually knows me would ever accuse me of being macho.

However, as I have said before in this forum, experiencing emotions is one thing but making public displays of emotions is another.

Public displays of emotions, when they are not merely expressions or entertainments, are often intended to manipulate other people by circumventing their reasoning capacities.  Consider emotional displays in churches, for example.  I consider such practices a variety of entertainment rather than anything profound, yet many people are still persuaded by them.

I personally don't trust my emotions in making decisions, except for those pertaining to my own likes and dislikes.  Gut reactions take far too many perceptual shortcuts, and so are often inaccurate.  Trusting one's emotions in all cases therefore strikes me as intellectually lazy.

[SYZ]

I take it that machoism is an Anglicised version of the Spanish machismo.

My late father was a very pragmatic individual, appearing to be
undemonstrative and usually impassive in the face of emotive
issues, but he certainly could never be described as machismo.

I don't believe then that a lack of visible emotions is any singular
indicator of a typical macho man.

In Spain and a lot of Latinx communities it's regarded as a lot more
than simply a lack of emotion. Machismo is seen as a culture that puts
masculinity as the standard, and therefore puts men in positions of
dominance and superiority over women.

[GenesisNemesis]

And very often these same "tough" and "manly" people will refuse to do basic things like cook meals for themselves. They rely on women to do that. It's just pathetic.

[airportkid]

I take it that machoism is an Anglicised version of the Spanish machismo.

"Machoism" is me being ignorant and forgetting that "machismo" is the correct term.  A regrettable result of my being too macho to check my vocabulary. 

[SYZ]

"Machoism" is me being ignorant and forgetting that "machismo" is the correct term.  A regrettable result of my being too macho to check my vocabulary. 

No mate; you're fine.      One of my dictionaries defines the word machoism  as "a strong
or exaggerated sense of traditional masculinity placing great value on physical courage, virility,
domination of women, and aggressiveness".

[Dom]

Machismo is a fairly reliable indicator of insecurity.

Some is general insecurity, some is narcissistic, some is fear of females. I can't think of a single positive thing about machismo.

I have seen a lot of macho group-think - the other boys try to be dominant, so the kid grows into that. The movie actor you like is macho. And, some cultures are more infested with it than others.

I think it's primitive and goes back to cave men - the strongest gets to have the woman/women they want.

[Dancefortwo]

The thing that ticks me off is that being macho is the default position of all political leaders.  They have to put up a strong masculine, macho image to be elected.  Even the women.   I can't remember who it was but back in the 1970's a senator running for president was caught (maybe) crying just a little over something.  I think it was during a new conference and it was snowing.  Anyway, he was ridiculed for showing emotion and that was the end of his run for the presidency. 





Well, I looked it up and it was Senator Edmond Muskie of Maine and it was in response to a drity-trick letter the Nixon campaign people published.  


https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2...s-primary/

Anyway,  politicians aren't supposed to cry. That's a big no-no.  Be macho no matter what.

[Thumpalumpacus]

Some is general insecurity, some is narcissistic, some is fear of females. I can't think of a single positive thing about machismo.

I have seen a lot of macho group-think - the other boys try to be dominant, so the kid grows into that. The movie actor you like is macho. And, some cultures are more infested with it than others.

I think it's primitive and goes back to cave men - the strongest gets to have the woman/women they want.

I tend to look at it as a continuation of the great-ape tendency for dominance hierarchies, but I'm sure there's several factors playing into it.

[Dom]

I tend to look at it as a continuation of the great-ape tendency for dominance hierarchies, but I'm sure there's several factors playing into it.

Well, the dominant cave man may also control more territory, have others cater to him, and generally enforce his will. The more logical choice for an alpha male would be intelligence, since Alpha is a leading position. Unfortunately, we'll need a whole lot more evolution until we get there. If ever.

[Thumpalumpacus]

Well, the dominant cave man may also control more territory, have others cater to him, and generally enforce his will. The more logical choice for an alpha male would be intelligence, since Alpha is a leading position. Unfortunately, we'll need a whole lot more evolution until we get there. If ever.

Sure, I was just pointing out that this behavioral pattern has antecedents in our evolutionary heritage, suggesting something deeper-seated than just being an asshole.

[Dom]

Sure, I was just pointing out that this behavioral pattern has antecedents in our evolutionary heritage, suggesting something deeper-seated than just being an asshole.

I totally agree.

[Bucky Ball]

What's all this about machoism ?
What does how fast you're going, mach-1 or mach-2 have to do with anything ?
Never mind.

[Thumpalumpacus]

What's all this about machoism ?
What does how fast you're going, mach-1 or mach-2 have to do with anything ?
Never mind.

Real men go faaaaaaaast.

[Rhythmcs]

Hit fast, hit hard, hit often. There's probably some kind of line between emotion and intuition, so thinking like this may not be intrinsically paradoxical. It probably does speak to circumstances that we no longer find ourselves in, though, and so seems less and less applicable to our modern lives. There was a time, however, that it helped us mobilize ourselves in a grand war against...well...the whole earth to put it bluntly.

-and now here we are.

We don't have much evidence for why we do this in some far-distant context, before civilization. The closest potential analog is chimpanzees. Dominant males and dominant females are consensus builders, firstly. They need to form coalitions to challenge the status quo. Jane Goodall watched two brothers come up and make it big. Freud was a groomer and a friend collector. His power base was made out of mutual dependence and intimacy. His little brother Frodo and all of their juvenile playmates, male and female, were the engine of Freuds climb up the Gombe social ladder. However, upon gaining control of their troop - Frodo and a number of their coconspirators managed a coup..and Frodo had a very different way of running things. Beaty beat..pop-pop. This was all well and good to Freud as he was angling for the top spot, but as with so many human dictators, the last man standing when the knives come out, is also the last target of those same knives...and the person who finally plunged it in was a brother.

Dominant females also enforce and subvert the social structure as it's beneficial to them. The dominant female involved above, for example, stayed through the first two power shifts. Frodo had his own girlfriend, an active participant in two coups, and she ended up with the top spot. Additionally, it seems as though being the offspring of a dominant female...rather than a dominant male, fast-tracks a chimp for future leadership.

All of which is to say that, when a behavior seems out of place or out of time to us - we also tend to criticize those behaviors in the context of our contemporary circumstances, and in the context our our contemporary cultural conventions. Machoism or machismo is simply the masculine expression (or exaggeration) of a common human trait. We didn't get here by being nice. The only difference, imo, between chimps and ourselves in this regard, is that we're more effective at exporting our violence out-group and even conceptualizing non-hominids as appropriate targets for warlike mobilization. Chimps do go to war for all of the same reasons that we do...but it's mostly ad-hoc headhunting (which we definitely used to do, and not so long ago)..rather than systematic annihilation - and it's almost entirely intra rather than inter-species, as in our own case.

[Dancefortwo]

Well, the dominant cave man may also control more territory, have others cater to him, and generally enforce his will. The more logical choice for an alpha male would be intelligence, since Alpha is a leading position. Unfortunately, we'll need a whole lot more evolution until we get there. If ever.

A month ago or so I was reading an archaeological paper that suggests that ancient pre-history people shared tasks between genders more than we'd like to think.  I'll try to find the paper but it indicated that sometimes females also hunted and the men sometimes gathered.  It was more of a mixed bag and the line between gender tasks was more blurred than previously thought.    For so long we've imagined that the male of the species was always the macho hunter and that was it but apparently ancient humans shared the workload a little more than we think.  Anything to survive, and if that meant the males also searched for plants to eat then that's what they did. 

Things seemed to change when humans started living in larger communities.

Edit to add: Here's some information. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/scien...ssumptions There is a link in the article to the original study.

Another edit: Here's the original abstract the National Geograhic article is based on, if you're interested. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abd0310

[Vera]

A month ago or so I was reading an archaeological paper that suggests that ancient pre-history people shared tasks between genders more than we'd like to think.  I'll try to find the paper but it indicated that sometimes females also hunted and the men sometimes gathered.  It was more of a mixed bag and the line between gender tasks was more blurred than previously thought.    For so long we've imagined that the male of the species was always the macho hunter and that was it but apparently ancient humans shared the workload a little more than we think.  Anything to survive, and if that meant the males also searched for plants to eat then that's what they did. 

And this is exactly why (among many other things) evopsych is such utter bunk. We don't know near enough about the life of our distant ancestors, yet, some *cough*peterson*cough*otherwoopeddlerslikehim*cough insist on drawing extremely dubious conclusions from something we know precious little about.

More often than, in order to explain away their own primitiveness and aggression.

Oh, but this reminded me of something I came across on twitter some time ago when a self-proclaimed "carnivore" got eviscerated after he posted the "lessons" he learnt while hunting with the Hadza people in, you guessed it, the country of Africa:


"I hunted, killed, and ate a wild baboon (brains and all) with the indigenous Hadza tribe in Africa. Here are the 13 things I learned about human health along the way.

Wild humans with their full genetic expression are nearly extinct. We are now zoo inhabitants. So last year [friend's name] and I went to Tanzania, where humans first evolved, to see our species in our natural habitat.

Show ContentSpoiler:

1. Meat > Plants.

The Hadza prize hunted meat over all plants. In fact, they barely eat any plants. They chew on roots and spit them out, boil them for soup, and eat small amounts berries and baobab. The men dream about big game hunts. Not huge salads or leafy greens.

No jogging. Sprint or walk. Even though you see chubby modern humans beating their joints up jogging on pavement for hours on end for "cardio," we didn't see anything remotely similar with the Hadza.

They walk. A lot. Then sprint intensely around, under, and over trees.

Water is overrated. The Hadza rarely drink water and are free of chronic disease & have high energy. Even though we were sucking down bottles of water after 15km they remained unfazed and were happy to dig into a dry creek bed to take a few sips of mud. Then back to hunting.

We're chronically stressed. The only time I saw the Hadza in a heightened state of stress was the five hectic minutes of chasing down and killing the baboons. Instead of "being chased by a lion" it was "chasing a screaming baboon." Otherwise? Extreme happiness and leisure.

The Hadza men "work" for about 3-4 hours a day hunting or making bows and arrows, the women about the same time maintaining the camp. The rest of their time is spent laughing, telling stories, sleeping, or playing music. No rushing, no stress, no worry.

We have no practical skills. The Hadza can start a fire in under a minute & make tools out of branches in seconds. They even made a bandage out of boiled leaves that healed an enormous gash a dog got from the baboon within days. They live in abundance with their environment.

They even know what branches can be snapped as an anti-itch cream for bug bites. Throw me and all my friends in the woods for a few weeks and we'll likely all die. I get the sense this is another reason we're so chronically stressed. We actually have no idea how to survive.

Fasting before feasting. This goes without saying, but when you need to actually find and hunt all of your own food, you fast before you eat. There is no snacking even though they could on berries, baobab, roots, etc. Fast, then walk/sprint/physical exertion, then feast.

Eat slow, in communion. Americans eat the opposite way. Fast, alone, and in front of  screens. Even though the Hadza hadn't eaten in over 24 hrs before this baboon, they were present, relaxed, and eating very slowly. No wonder the science says this is good for digestion.

High fiber diets are a myth. The Hadza are celebrated for their diverse gut microbiome. Studies claim to have connected it with their "100s of grams of fiber/day consumption. This is a LIE. The scant roots they harvest are chewed up and spit out. They barely eat fiber.

So why do the Hadza have such good microbiomes? Maybe drinking mud, living outside, not washing their hands, and eating things with dirt all over them have something to with it rather than eating the mythical hundreds of grams of fiber..."

Now, if you haven't choked on all that "noble savage described by big white explorer" bull, here's a rebuttal (there were loads others on twitter but it's more consuming to post and read them). But the number of people who though this privileged white I-have-way-more-money-than-brains joke was introducing them to some profound wisdom, was scary.


"Years of careful ethnographic observations and interviews with community members reveal what a short tour cannot: The Hadza have a diverse diet of tubers, berries, meat, baobab, and honey. The relative importance of each fluctuates with the changing seasons. Only about 15 percent of community members rely on hunting and gathering, with the majority opting for a predominantly agricultural diet. (Digging for tubers, an important fallback food and continuous source of calories, is primarily a task for women and sometimes children, who are conspicuously absent in Gustin’s narrative.)"

It's a long but fascinating article about anthropology, pernicious myths, like noble savages and a whole lot other interesting stuff.


So yeah, drawing conclusions about ourselves based on what our distant ancestors were like is very often little more than guesswork.

[Rhythmcs]

A month ago or so I was reading an archaeological paper that suggests that ancient pre-history people shared tasks between genders more than we'd like to think.  I'll try to find the paper but it indicated that sometimes females also hunted and the men sometimes gathered.  It was more of a mixed bag and the line between gender tasks was more blurred than previously thought.    For so long we've imagined that the male of the species was always the macho hunter and that was it but apparently ancient humans shared the workload a little more than we think.  Anything to survive, and if that meant the males also searched for plants to eat then that's what they did. 

Things seemed to change when humans started living in larger communities.

Edit to add:  Here's some information.    https://www.nationalgeographic.com/scien...ssumptions    There is a link in the article to the original study.

Another edit:  Here's the original abstract the National Geograhic  article is based on, if you're interested.      https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abd0310

Much more.  Not just on the basis of what remains we find, but on the basis of experimental archeology as well.  There are only so many hours in a day, only so many people in the encampment, and many hours of labor that are non negotiable. If and when you have the opportunity to specialize, you're going to pick the best adapted at conflict, for conflict. It always has to be remembered..that anytime we find little human monsters - their mothers actively raised them to be little monsters. Machismo is nurtured from the cradle to the grave. Anecdotal - but in my family, hunting is a kitchen chore. My females encouraged me and taught me how to shoot and how to hunt and how to poach ( my males would not have had the patience..I had to come in with some knowledge). I was thirty years old before I cleaned a fish, even. Service in combat arms is the sole expectation for little boys in my family. We're not even head of household, lol. It's a matriarchal structure. Our job is to provide negative space, and plausible deniability.

It's in the complicity sink, imo, that any "don't listen to or express emotion" has it's greatest utility. Dumping every questionable thing onto one actor (or set of actors, gender defined in so many contexts) that will never provide any material for continued grievance gives the other set of actors room to move in further (and after-the-fact) consensus building - domestically and between households or groups. If dads THE hitter, mom can be THE consoler without hitter baggage. If mom is the consoler..and that doesn't work, dad hits - also without the baggage..such as any hope or expectation of remorse or hesitation.

[Percie]

Lefty guys are a bunch of pussies! 

[Rhythmcs]

Pure projection. The ad buys tell the tale. As they bite their nails over the brown invasion and leftist™ sabotage, reich wing nutters are chiefly concerned with their abysmal T and low sperm count. Their main social complaint being that they're unfuckable compared to their long haired multiply pierced well read well groomed well educated well moneyed metrosexual peers.

Fears of cultural and biological impotence swirl together and turn into a "No you!"... that no one else even realized was a thing.

To that effect, if a leftist™ man made love to a reich wing nut..that would only make the reich winger gay. They just can't quit us.

[eider]

One of the features of machoism is disdain for emotion.  Betraying emotion is just not done.  Never frown; never crack a smile.  Makes a person look "weak".

Let's cry our tears, show our cares, tell of our fears,  offer our friendship and be ourselves.

Then, if others show their disdain and disgust at our openess, we will know who and what they are, and beware of these impostors.