I hope you see the irony in asking me to provide journal citations to dispute what is easily the least scholarly TED talk I've ever seen.
Tony belongs on the View not TED.
The man was trying to help open a public dialogue on masculinity that we are around forty years late in opening. He was not attempting scholarship; there is plenty of that, if one wishes to go looking for it.
I never said women prefer "jerks." That was Basket Case's choice of words (specifically: "tough brutish jerks") and yeah he has problems.
Fair dos.
I said women prefer men who fit in "the Man Box," i.e. show aggression and dominance, are protectors, are courageous, and are decision-makers. None of that implies being a brute, a jerk, a bully, a control freak, etc.
I don't particularly believe in "nice guy/bad guy" narratives. The truth is that positive masculine traits can be found in association with either or both types of guy.
"Bad guys" are men who exhibit the "dark triad" of personality traits IN ADDITION TO strong masculine features. The dark triad is
narcissism (self obsession)
machiavellianism (controlling, manipulative)
psychopathy (amoral, no empathy)
Women may fantasize about or have 1NS with such men but ultimately they prefer the caregiver which is why courage, "being a provider/protector," and emotional maturity are prized by women who are looking to actually settle down.
But all of those characteristics come with the territory, being, as they are, distortions of many of the key masculine "virtues". When traditional masculinity begins to break down or to become inapplicability, as in the examples suggested by Tony, the dark side of masculinity- strength without humility, assertiveness without empathy, stoicism without sensitivity- comes through. One cannot maintain such traditionally "masculine" virtues without the secondary "feminine" virtues, just as humble, empathetic and sensitive women are rendered weak and subservient because of their prescribed lack of "masculine" virtues. As Lone Wolf said previously, "good" and "bad" qualities really know no gender.
Once again, it is machismo NOT masculinity, that mandates that men have to be sullen, emotionally opaque, stoic blocks of granite.
The way Tony and his father behave (as far as Tony reports it) is not very healthy at all. It is dysfunctional machismo inculcated by their own dumb culture.
You don't think that working class machismo (and it's largely an issue of class, not of ethnicity) is to some extent a product of traditional masculinity, and, specifically, that the distorted form so common today is a result of the inapplicability of traditional masculinity to modern life, particularly given the breakdown of working class communities over the course of the last few decades? Perhaps you come from a more well-adjusted culture, but Tony's discussion of the emotional stuntedness of his working class father is far from unfamiliar to me. Perhaps the British are just exceptional in their emotional maladjustment, but it is a fact of British life, and particularly working class British life, that it is only acceptable for men to publicly express grief when so utterly blutered that they are not held to be fully responsible for their actions; that men can only cry when they are "not themselves". That's certainly dysfunctional, but it is also the lived reality of many if not most men, and that's not something we get to ignore because we, personally, have reached a point at which we feel comfortable watching a
True Blood marathon. (Hey, shut up, it's a fun show.
)
Remember, for the vast majority of men, the perhaps more flexible terms of upper middle class masculinity are at least somewhat alien, and their lack of class and economic privilege often leads to an over-investment in what forms of privilege they do posses- male, straight, white, whatever- which can become very, very toxic when the social institutions supporting those privileges begin to break down. I feel that this is something that we need to address as societies, no matter what individual pedestals we may chose to place ourselves upon.
Anyway if you want to expand the conversation, maybe we should touch on that pyramid he flashed on screen for a few seconds at the end of his lecture. First he assigns all men collective responsibility for violence against women, then he says that porn is equivalent to harrassment and domestic abuse? Andrea Dworkin would applaud that I guess... sane people not so much.
I don't think he was suggesting that all men have a collective responsibility for domestic violence
per se, but that domestic violence against women is primarily a product of a misogynistic culture, and that men, by sustaining that culture through their support, explicit or implicit, of misogyny and male privilege. You don't get to harvest the fruits of male privilege without acknowledging the damage it does.
Also, yeah, the "porn" bit threw me off too. I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt and suggest it was an ill-chosen shorthand for a cultural of sexual objectification, which at least makes a bit more sense in context. As I said, he was opening a discussion, and I can support that without having to fall behind every detail of his personal position.
Aye, and you seem to have picked you side on them...
All the crit-theory debates over gender and social norms run into one insurmountable obstacle - that humans are, first and last, biological creatures. Human behavior and intelligence are means that serve the end of reproduction.
And yet we are not bound to that end, because our evolution, ironically enough, put us in a position to overcome such compulsions and to live our lives for our own sakes, and not for that of the "selfish gene". Presumably you're acquainted with both birth control and the suicide bomber?
People who talk about sexual liberation never mean liberation for men - liberation from being portrayed in our culture by an endless parade of Peter Griffins and Will Ferrells, liberation from the incredible bias in family court, liberation from the presumption that only men can be abusers and rapists, etc.
Nope instead the new front of "liberation" is to force all men to admit that we are collectively responsible for 19 year old Black Harlem rapists.
When I say "liberation", I do genuinely mean universal liberation- and, being the red-and-black-flag-waving sort that I am, I have a pretty broad interpretation of "universal" and a pretty comprehensive conception of "liberation". Thus, I am well aware that universal liberation demands the liberation of men from both the confines of imposed gender roles, the harmful effects of these impositions, and the negative stereotypes that such impositions produce. However, most of these negative effects are the results not of some man-hating straw feminist, but of a system of misogyny and male privilege that demands men and women both render themselves half-full. It is that which progressive men and women should challenge, because it is that which is the source, at whatever level, of our ills.
however it is more applicable to what BasketCase and some other... basket cases in this thread have been saying. 
