re: #201 LeftyRambles2413 (HappyWarrior)

And even if gay people are more effeminate. So the hell what. I’m supposed to look down on Pete because he doesn’t act like a retrograde idea of masculinity? These guys really are not comfortable with their sexuality or how they present themselves. It’s why they constantly have to mock gay men as being from the most absurd anti gay caricature. I have problems with Pete but it’s got nothing to do with him being gay.

When you consider that most of these people live like soft French dukes and are built like the portrait of Dorian Gray, realize that it’s not even that they value the manly masculinity they bray about. Manliness, like whiteness, actually doesn’t have any definition, because any definition with hard boundaries would exclude them.

I mean, I’m talking a lot about the hollowing out of meaning, but: seriously, consider how little “manliness” means when it can expand to encompass these syphilitic blanchemanges and their Louis XIVth repro. And the believers are fine with it, because fuck no they’re not going to live up to any of the positive attributes of old-school manliness; they’re just willing to dabble in the concept when it gives them license to be shitty or cruel.

The slightly more nuanced version of this is how they view soldiers as “manly” because they have license to kill, but don’t like the complexity, and someetimes tragedy, of actually being a soldier. A guy who shoots because he’s having fun being cruel is their idea of what a solider is, so Gallagher is one of the good ones. Any person who’s served and come away with “that was hard, and killing is terrible, maybe we should think about how we make the call to fight very carefully” is weak.