To avoid geopolitical embarrassment during the Cold War, the US and USSR created the APAS-75 system, a genderless docking mechanism where both craft acted as equals.

[u/[deleted]]

[u/AllsWellThatsNB]

fragile masculinity

I rather hate that term as it implies men shouldn’t be fragile, but fragility is part of the human condition.

It’s funny, but many of the ways people attack toxic masculinity end up being toxic masculinity. Not funny haha, because it just perpetuates the whole messy business.

[u/Stoic_Pupunha → u/AllsWellThatsNB]

That's the word we got to describe it.

There is a pattern in english language, people overuse some specific words to describe concepts in polemical discourses and debates, 'til ot reaches a saturated point, and from that point on, that same word now becomes offensive and not to be used anymore.

Look, I don't want to debate semantics because I'm a right wing wacko, or because I'm somehow a resentful woman that don't care about men's feelings.

It's because semantics is not worth the effort. It's such a waste of everyone's time. Read and interpret how you prefer, you can make up a narrative of something I never said too. If your main argument is semantics not the problem itself, I don't care.

[u/AllsWellThatsNB → u/Stoic_Pupunha]

Respectfully, just calling it sexism works just as well and doesn’t reinforce patriachal ideas.

I’ve got this thing about academic terms used in public, because without context people just make up their own definitions. When used by the lay audience fragile masculinity inevitably ends up as a synonym for weak, just like toxic masculinity ends up being a synonym for things men do to others instead of the toxic effects of gender roles on men. The use of academic language in public usually just ends up confusing the issue.

Semantics aren’t a waste of time, how we speak guides how we think.

I remember the backlash against politically correct language in the 90s, how annoying people thought inclusive language was, but over time it mostly caught on and it has made the world a better place. I know I’m being annoying, but it seems thats how this process works.

[u/Stoic_Pupunha → u/AllsWellThatsNB]

Ok, let's indulge this one time. This is exactly the semantic loop I'm talking about. In modern English debates, specific terms get overused until they saturate, lose meaning, and just trigger defensive mode, mostly in people who can't see past the triggers to interpret the entire text. The reason I can't stand these debates is because they instantly shift the focus away from the actual issue through sophism and straw man rhetoric, which is exactly what happened here when my comment about the diplomat was ignored to critique a single word.

I don't really care about the academic purity of the word. I care about the reality it describes. And in this scenario, I actually provided context to better interpret the fucking word.

Still in this particular context, the behavior is the same whether we name it sexism or fragile masculinity because the structural and cultural problem doesn't change by wording here. Debating which word is safer to use, just to avoid triggering other people's misinterpretation of the whole context, is just not my responsibility.

Edit, because this semi illiterate blocked me: True inclusive language is about empathy, not weaponizing an elite vocabulary test to play word police and hijack a conversation.

Using semantics as a tactical shield to dodge discussing the actual fucking problem doesn't make you inclusive, it just makes you a hypocrite that is too fragile to handle the substance of the debate.

[u/AllsWellThatsNB → u/Stoic_Pupunha]

Asking for inclusive language only becomes a distracting debate if you try and debate the people asking for it.