Funny

some basis in reality

To be clear, these aren’t based in a physical reality. We’re not giving names to things that just naturally exist. These are based in social reality, like money or laws — things that exist only in the sense that we are able to cooperate in a shared make-believe space and maintain mutual understanding of what we’re talking about.

The appearance aspect is not that there is an intrinsic predetermined connection between “manly” traits and looking a certain way; it’s that we tend to look for communication across every available channel, so we will always tend to use appearance to try to convey some sense of our traits to others, since we know other people will tend to interpret whatever the appearance is.

Also, given the downvotes I’ve caught, maybe I should’ve tried harder to make it clear that I’m not making a moral claim about the creation of the concept of “manliness”?

Like, I’m not a fan. But it’s here. So what do we do about that? (Edit: To say something is useful is not to say that its creation was ethical or that it has only (or even net) positive effects. Fuck, generative AI is a case study for that.)

I think sometimes people think you can dismantle a social reality by boycotting it. That has never really worked, because social realities tend to persist because they help navigate some physical reality that people need to keep interacting with, and so they will keep that social reality alive as a side-effect until a new one comes along that offers an alternative.

You have to engage in the same kind of make-believe, and build a new construct that interacts with the old one in some way before it can really be dislodged.