Social Democrat wrote: I don’t know if Robert would allow this comment, but whatever.
This is a problem of American culture and it has nothing to do with the Queers
Russian, Italian and French men still wear speedos. I live in EU, and heterosexual men can wear short shorts, pink shirts and tight shirts/pants
I know some of you see EU men as less masculine than the American alpha, so I won’t debate it as you won’t change your minds.
Again, this is an problem of American culture.
European men still kiss and hug each other in France, Italy, Spain and Portugal. Don’t believe me?
Even the most alpha neo-nazi soccer thug cries, hugs and kisses his buddies during soccer matches. I live in medium size city of 700k with 2 fútbol teams and when one of them wins a match, perfectly masculine shirtless alpha males celebrate it hugging and kissing their buddies.
Another example: we do not a have a distance when we talk with each other, that’s an american thing. Here it’s totally normal to touch the face of another men, his belly or his back, an example: some days ago I was walking my dog, as he looks so old -he is 11 years old- a man asked about his health and then put his arm over my shoulder and start talking about his own old dog. Again, this behavior is normal here, as he was with his wife and children.
Try to open a bank account in Spain or Portugal, if you are a young man, the male bank clerk will slap your back o even put his arm over your shoulder. This is because they celebrate a young man is finally opening a bank account.
There are exceptions, of course, but this behavior is widespread.
America culture and the fabric of civil society is broken. That’s the reason you cannot do male bonding anymore.
Curious stuff: opposition to gay rights in EU has been minimal.
There’s no way that the degeneration of US culture, if it is even occurring (I say it is) would have anything to do with males not bonding. Why would cultural decline cause men to not bond anymore? Even in nations completely destroyed or significantly destroyed by wars, males bond as well and as intensely as ever, possibly even more so because the increased violence means that women spend more time at home and have relinquished the street to men. Yemen, Iraq, Eastern Ukraine, Libya, Afghanistan, Syria, Palestine are all war-destroyed, and it has not harmed male bonding. In fact, it probably increased it. Turkey and Saudi Arabia are partially war-wrecked, and males bond as closely as ever in those places.
So this argument is simply not valid.
The truth is that as gays got more and more open, flaunting and out, the spaces for straight men’s clothing, grooming and behaviors progressively shrunk. It’s almost a linear curve.
The commenter is half-right and half-wrong.
It’s has all to do with the queers. And it has to do with US society.
I would say that it has to do with US straight male society’s reaction to increasingly out gay men and open homosexuality. I told you that when they were more closeted, straight men had so many more freedoms. And as gay men got more and more out, straight men reacted to that by becoming more and more hypermasculine. I would hate to be a young man nowadays. There’s no way I could live up to modern standards of masculinity. Nowadays your average male looks like a tatted up street thug, biker, truck driver or parolee, often with behavior to boot. I’d be called gay and accused of being not masculine enough more than ever. It looks like a total nightmare.
It’s also the fault of gays though because gay men have bought into the whole project, and like straight men, they assume that all men who are not hypermasculine are gay. So straight male society has gone increasingly hypermasculine as a result of more open gay rights, and both straight and gay men have reacted to that by radically restricting the behaviors by which straight men must uphold. Gay men demand that straight men act hypermasculine also, and if you don’t, they will insist that you are gay, and no amount of evidence or arguing will convince them otherwise.. So the gays are at fault here too. I am not letting gay men off the hook here.
Gay men have been in on it! And they stole a lot of our clothes, grooming styles and behaviors and made them gay-only and punished any straight men trespassing on what is now gay territory by accusing those straight men of being gay.
