As a man, I have never been “proud” to be a man, I mostly feel ambivalent about it, it is who I am, I’d rather be proud about my actions than my gender.
In case you get any odd responses, while many people use ambivalent to mean they don’t care, it actually means you have contradictory feelings, i e., you are both for and against something.
It’s degrees. Some may really enjoy parts of their masculinity and other may be really uncomfortable with parts of their masculinity. Some may have so much apathy toward their masculinity that they prefer to avoid the label of man because, though that may most adequately describe them from the outside, they have no desire to apply that label to themselves. The concept and performance of gender is a hodgepodge of various qualities that are complicated, often contradictory, and dependent on tons of external factors.
Those labels are there to assist people while they engage with the nuances of one of the most intrinsic and complex qualities of our subjective experiences in life. It’s messy, but it’s also beautiful that more people are inspecting their lives on such a fundamental level and practicing self determination.
Man is a perfectly fine label for many, but others may not have the same opinion about the term despite sharing similar feelings to OP and many of the people in this thread; and there’s something uniquely human about that which is worth exploring
This. I think it’s kinda ridiculous to be proud of something you haven’t done anything for. I’ll much rather be proud of the thing I did than about shit like where I’m born or as what I’m born.
The only time I would say that doesn’t apply is when you’re part of a traditionally marginalized group. Black pride, or queer pride or indigenous pride all make sense to me. Because it’s a collective pride thing more than an individual pride thing.
And in that case I think it’s best to think of the pride as coming from the action of resilience. When the term gay pride first appeared it was controversial but the argument was that society had been telling us to be ashamed for so long and we weren’t going to take it anymore and in fact we’ll be proud to be queer instead. And I maintain that if queer phobia had stopped before I grew up it would definitely be very emotionally different, because there’s also the pride of just being different from the norm. You can see that in stuff like in people who are proud to be a redhead or people who are proud of the area they come from but aren’t anymore (I’m planning to move out west and I’m already noticing myself get more Midwestern in anticipation).
Depends on your context of “proud”. Pride movements for instance aren’t nessisarily about being specifically proud of your gender / sexual orientation in the same way one is of your accomplishments. The movement co-opted the word to mean something subtly different. When some says “I am a proud gay man” for instance the statement does not imply “I think I am particularly special given this trait and am worthy of praise because of it” what is actually being implied is "I am not ashamed by this trait and will not be treated as if I should be. "
The movement has it’s own language and “Pride” specifically was chosen as being the opposite of shame which was the affect people were expected to have by society. The people who created the idea did so out of participation in gay support groups at the time where the social norm was always that you had to perform a performative regret like being gay was a habit akin to a drug addiction. You were reinforced to adopt a narrative that you were unhappy and struggling - even when actually your partner and community might be a source of great joy. Gay Marches were shirt and tie events where one soberly asked for people to see you as a human that passes for straight, all the culture and actual proclivity tucked behind a neat mask where that undercurrent of shame was still at play.
True Emancipation, according to the Pride movement, was fighting the narrative that there was anything shameful about being happy. They decked themselves in rainbows as an allusion to the joy they wanted to show the world, modeled Pride events on Independence day events and affected instead of performative shame performative pride. Something that would allow them to be unapologetic in their fight for actual rights to exist in the light of day as opposed to the former affect of shame that turned them into pitiful beggars asking for scraps of patchy tolerance to exist in the shadows as people who would treat their own way of being as a failure state.
As a man, I have never been “proud” to be a man, I mostly feel ambivalent about it, it is who I am, I’d rather be proud about my actions than my gender.
Same. I’m no more proud of being a man than I am proud of having a nose.
But what a fine nose it is.
I worked hard to achieve my nose as it is today.
YES, I have a nose,
YES, I smell things,
DEAL WITH IT
Fuck those woke liberals and their smellings!
You weren’t born with that nose, it’s a lifestyle choice
In case you get any odd responses, while many people use ambivalent to mean they don’t care, it actually means you have contradictory feelings, i e., you are both for and against something.
Which is true, there are parts I like about being a man, and there are parts I dislike about being a man.
In general I am comfortable
…and these days there is probably some specialized label to describe that that isn’t merely “man” because that would be too easy.
Heaven forbid people try to describe themselves outside of the binary. 🙄
It’s degrees. Some may really enjoy parts of their masculinity and other may be really uncomfortable with parts of their masculinity. Some may have so much apathy toward their masculinity that they prefer to avoid the label of man because, though that may most adequately describe them from the outside, they have no desire to apply that label to themselves. The concept and performance of gender is a hodgepodge of various qualities that are complicated, often contradictory, and dependent on tons of external factors.
Those labels are there to assist people while they engage with the nuances of one of the most intrinsic and complex qualities of our subjective experiences in life. It’s messy, but it’s also beautiful that more people are inspecting their lives on such a fundamental level and practicing self determination.
Man is a perfectly fine label for many, but others may not have the same opinion about the term despite sharing similar feelings to OP and many of the people in this thread; and there’s something uniquely human about that which is worth exploring
This. I think it’s kinda ridiculous to be proud of something you haven’t done anything for. I’ll much rather be proud of the thing I did than about shit like where I’m born or as what I’m born.
The only time I would say that doesn’t apply is when you’re part of a traditionally marginalized group. Black pride, or queer pride or indigenous pride all make sense to me. Because it’s a collective pride thing more than an individual pride thing.
And in that case I think it’s best to think of the pride as coming from the action of resilience. When the term gay pride first appeared it was controversial but the argument was that society had been telling us to be ashamed for so long and we weren’t going to take it anymore and in fact we’ll be proud to be queer instead. And I maintain that if queer phobia had stopped before I grew up it would definitely be very emotionally different, because there’s also the pride of just being different from the norm. You can see that in stuff like in people who are proud to be a redhead or people who are proud of the area they come from but aren’t anymore (I’m planning to move out west and I’m already noticing myself get more Midwestern in anticipation).
No one should be proud of a demographic quality like race, gender, sexual orientation, etc. You should be proud of accomplishments .
Depends on your context of “proud”. Pride movements for instance aren’t nessisarily about being specifically proud of your gender / sexual orientation in the same way one is of your accomplishments. The movement co-opted the word to mean something subtly different. When some says “I am a proud gay man” for instance the statement does not imply “I think I am particularly special given this trait and am worthy of praise because of it” what is actually being implied is "I am not ashamed by this trait and will not be treated as if I should be. "
The movement has it’s own language and “Pride” specifically was chosen as being the opposite of shame which was the affect people were expected to have by society. The people who created the idea did so out of participation in gay support groups at the time where the social norm was always that you had to perform a performative regret like being gay was a habit akin to a drug addiction. You were reinforced to adopt a narrative that you were unhappy and struggling - even when actually your partner and community might be a source of great joy. Gay Marches were shirt and tie events where one soberly asked for people to see you as a human that passes for straight, all the culture and actual proclivity tucked behind a neat mask where that undercurrent of shame was still at play.
True Emancipation, according to the Pride movement, was fighting the narrative that there was anything shameful about being happy. They decked themselves in rainbows as an allusion to the joy they wanted to show the world, modeled Pride events on Independence day events and affected instead of performative shame performative pride. Something that would allow them to be unapologetic in their fight for actual rights to exist in the light of day as opposed to the former affect of shame that turned them into pitiful beggars asking for scraps of patchy tolerance to exist in the shadows as people who would treat their own way of being as a failure state.