4 upvotes, 1 direct replies (showing 1)
View submission: Tuesday Check In: How's Everybody's Mental Health?
I get rather annoyed whenever I come across some men who act like they read the gospel when they talk Chris Rock’s quote about only men not being treated with unconditional love. I’ve yet to see such men treat the comment with nuance to address some aspects of being a man that many men experience and are negatively affected by. But more importantly, it often demonstrates how shallow an understanding that some men have about what it’s like being a woman or man with various marginalized statuses, and make note, I used the phrase “men with various marginalized statuses” because so often in discourse about men, even in this sub, people talk about men separately from marginalized groups that contain men.
One of the biggest issues I have is that frequently “love” is used rhetorically in a similar way as “free speech” when having a disagreement about various applications of and limits to free speech to someone who often wants to say what they want with no pushback. In the latter, people often talk about law, and often the person expressing displeasure at a consequence of free speech will start the discussion off with an example related to the law. When that gets dicey, they seem to pivot to “Oh, I’m talking about the broader idea of free speech beyond law.”
Something similar to that happens when discussing “love” to some of these men who cling to that Chris Rock quote. Most people discuss romantic and familial love and even platonic love among friends. When it becomes harder to defend that, some of these guys pivot to some broader concept of “love” that typically boils down to “all you groups we view as separate from men have resources and community specifically geared toward you that Men TM don’t have.” Of course, many people who actually live as those groups can give you examples of how even that isn’t “unconditional.”
What also mildly disturbs me about some of these men is what isn’t being said: why are they potentially loving women unconditionally? Taking them at their logical word (even though women and other men know damn well that women aren’t treated with unconditional love by men), men treat women with unconditional love. In many people’s conception of what unconditional love, it means loving someone no matter what they do. That sounds like a recipe for accepting all manner of bullshit and potentially abuse from a partner that no one should endure, and that’s not healthy, particularly in romantic relationships.
The reality is that, except when it comes to family for some (though not all) people, people attach conditions to whom they establish various types of relationships with. Some are upfront conditions that prevent any relationship from being established (e.g., if we’re talking romantic love, people you’re not attracted to are automatically removed from consideration), and some are maintenance conditions that I’ll define as conditions that must be met for us to continue having a healthy relationship.
I personally think everyone should have conditions in their relationships because of the aforementioned concerns about abuse and dealing with other bad interactions. Conditions vary in reasonableness, and frankly, we’re not all going to agree on the same levels of reasonableness for every single potential condition. Some of this can be attributed to double standards, cultural differences, individual differences, etc.
This is ultimately the kind of nuance I want to see but have yet to see from guys who find deep value in that quote. I want to see them demonstrate that obviously a pithy quote isn’t nuanced enough to get at the heart of what they’re feeling. I want them to be open to understanding that maybe other groups of people aren’t as unconditionally loved as these specific guys think those groups are. I want to see them be okay with acknowledging that maybe they need to articulate what they’re feeling personally view unconditional love to mean when they engage in discussion about the quote, and maybe they can acknowledge that it’s kind of a messy term in the context of this discussion.
Comment by Shrimpgurt at 18/01/2025 at 10:36 UTC
2 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Thank you for this. I have experienced similar frustrations here, among them being that the term 'man' here comes with the implication of cishet white man, and not any other kind of man.
And additionally, that there's this idea that other kinds of men, or people in other marginalized groups are just drowning in support and resources, when those resources have been made BY those communities FOR those communities, specifically because those communities lacked support in the first place.