WomensStuff

Thanks for the detailed response!

I agree with the need to be welcoming to the men willing to change. I guess I’ve really only got 2 more things I’m sort of musing on.

The first is the role, if any, shame plays in motivating change. This is a tough one for me, both as a trans femme, and witnessing my mother going through the process of accepting me and by extension all trans folk. Shame played a huge, though perhaps unfortunate, part of both those processes. It took large swaths of the rest of my family getting good at name and pronoun shifts for her to finally start putting in effort. It took the shame of being left behind to motivate change. I’m not going to open the can of worms that is discussion of the role shame plays in my own trans experience at this time lol. I don’t have a real answer to anything here, just curious about folks’ thoughts on shame as a motivator.

The second (and longer) musing kind of builds off that, but looks at the linguistic nature of memes. I won’t go find citations right now, but there’s definitely research into how memes can be used to tackle tough issues through humor and irony and exaggeration. I think of it almost like ‘Adventure Time’ or ‘ Steven Universe’ both shows about young impressionable boys being guided into adulthood by a cast of people set on making them a good person. To be clear, they’re kids shows, they have goofy animation, and fart jokes, and just plenty of general stupidity. They use the lack of seriousness of the show to coax in people that are actively being socialized away from healthy masculinity by society, and get them learning to be better people. I think memes can have a similar effect.

Let’s say this meme gets seen by every single cis, straight man. I struggle to believe all of them, let alone a majority, would think Pedro Pascal is truly the only man maintaining women’s faith. So the hyperbole of the meme then gets people thinking about what makes someone make the exaggeration in the first place. What does Pedro Pascal do that has someone praising him like this? This ties back into the shame as a motivator point a bit. Feeling like an out group can be a good reason to learn to empathize with the in group. This happens in bad ways too, look at the invasion of queer nightlife spaces by straight folks. Straight people aren’t learning to empathize with LGBTQ+ folks, they just want to feel a part of the in group because we know how to throw parties.

I’m almost done, but wanted to play with your point about an equivalent meme. I think, in the right space the gold-digger joke could absolutely hit (femcelmemes, and the various 196s are the obvious examples to me, just general queer, femme leaning spaces). I also think a gold digger meme equivalent would lack the positive educational layer this meme has I mentioned before. I feel it amounts to the difference in search results of “why do people love Pedro Pascal?” and “are all women gold diggers?” Those two searches lead to wildly different parts of the internet, one of which is intent of pushing men further into hating women.

It’s super messy. Thank you so much for talking, and I’m still all ears because I do agree on including men in the conversation. I’m mostly curious about how that process should or shouldn’t have a way to filter in men that are willing to change, and willing to acknowledge the harm hierarchical patriarchy has caused, and that includes being able to laugh about it.