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Cake day: March 23rd, 2025

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  • Nothing I say has anything to do with who shows up, but who the organizers target and attract. As I said above, Earth Day had diverse attendee groups but one clear framing. As did, seemingly, your protest. Congrats!

    Clear example, if you look at just this year’s mass protests by 50501/indivisible in the US, for “Hands-Off” they had a plethora of defined goals ranging from foreign policy over trans rights to social policy. Meanwhile “No Kings” was just vaguely positioned against autocracy and Trump’s regime in general. “Hands-Off” had a global turnout estimated between “hundreds of thousands” according to international press and “three to five million” according to the organizers, while “No Kings” reached over 5 million in the US alone according to independent census.

    And this is just the ones from the US that made their way over here, I could give you a dozen more crass examples of protests against the extreme right in Eastern Germany that don’t even manifest because the organizers can’t agree on where they stand on the Gaza conflict - which of course has nothing to do with opposing the extreme right.












  • A little out of the blue but I watched an episode of a German cooking show today where strangers are coupled in groups of five for a week and every day one of them has to cook for the rest of them. They then vote who was the best host.

    This week was ALL 30-38 year-old straight Dads. Nobody talked about football.

    Nobody chestbumped anyone. Nobody was mansplaning anything. Instead, they were all swooning over each others’ cooking skills, making each other cry over how much they love their kids and hugging each other for feeling insecure about their cooking. In other words it was the most realistic and “manly” portrayal of the male reality that I have seen in the media ever.

    It’s easy to blame the media and the “culture war” for male alienation but I strongly believe that our perception of ourselves is largely influenced by our peer group’s portrayal in society. In other words: if I feel antagonized, I tend to overreact. If I am being told by Hollywood or social media to “stop being a mansplaning patriarch” I will be imprinted with the very idea to identify as such.

    So long story short: non-toxic masculinity needs more representation AND it needs to come from a place of positivity, not judgement or condescension.