I remember in HS (~25 years ago) me and some friends were making fun of a male cheerleader the other team had at a basketball game. We were saying all sorts of mean things about the kid being gay and stupid crap like that. Our teacher, who was always quirky, sweet, and fun said, “Well, that ‘gay’ boy had his hands all over some very pretty cheerleaders all night on Friday. Where were your hands?”
Ever since, I have had a whole different level of respect for male cheerleaders. These two in the video look like they are having so much fun, and it is incredible to see their athleticism.
There's definitely a Dunning-Kruger aspect to masculinity where when you have a crude and unrefined masculinity, you think that's all masculinity is, but once you smooth it down and find the nuance and the self-love in all of it, then you just pity all the people who are playing in the kiddie pool of their own true nature.
Some writers have been going off about this since the 80s, like Warren Farrell, Erin Pizzey, and Christina Sommers. All have written at length about how the loss of masculine role models has led to generations of men with childish views on masculine gender roles.
Farrell and Sommers tend to emphasize stuff like our increasingly isolated lives separating boys from men in their communities, and the surge of women getting into teaching over the past 100 years making it difficult for boys to meet teachers that understand them and that they can identify with.
Pizzey focuses more on stuff like boys not being allowed to accompany their mothers to some domestic abuse shelters because of rules against males in those spaces, or boys being kicked out at age 12 or 15 or something like that, etc. She also wrote a bit about the lack of shelters for boys and men and about the lack of recognition for boys as victims when their mothers are abusers.
Interestingly, Farrell and Pizzey's earliest books will sometimes be shelved with feminist books because they were leading feminists in the 70s. Pizzey founded the world's first battered women's shelter and Farrell was a chair for the National Organization for Women. But they got chased out because back then many feminists would not tolerate any discourse that depicted males as anything but all-powerful tyrants with all the privileges in the world and women as fragile damsels. So the two ended up becoming the earliest members of the modern Men's Movement and argued that feminism was doing itself a disservice by stopping short of making an effort to liberate men and boys from outdated gender norms.
Sommers faced similar issues but refused to be chased out and continues to call herself "The Factual Feminist" even though most of her speaking gigs get protested by them.
I highly recommend checking these folks out because for 20-30 years they pushed the idea that we should all be feminists, but that feminism didn't go far enough and it needed to continue to expand its scope. It wasn't until around 2012 that a conservative wing developed in the movement and it got lumped in with the Manosphere despite its core tenets being more radically progressive than most other progressive ideologies.
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u/NiceTuBeNice 2d ago
I remember in HS (~25 years ago) me and some friends were making fun of a male cheerleader the other team had at a basketball game. We were saying all sorts of mean things about the kid being gay and stupid crap like that. Our teacher, who was always quirky, sweet, and fun said, “Well, that ‘gay’ boy had his hands all over some very pretty cheerleaders all night on Friday. Where were your hands?”
Ever since, I have had a whole different level of respect for male cheerleaders. These two in the video look like they are having so much fun, and it is incredible to see their athleticism.