About 'Alpha+Good'

Alpha+Good (a bad wordplay on Orwell's "double plus good" and old machismo - I'm the realest after all) is a side project that belongs to 'Onklare taal' ('Unclear' or 'Unripe language'), the umbrella of several literary projects in Dutch.

This section is almost exclusively in English and comprises my ongoing thoughts on progress, gender, politics and various other social themes. Why is this in English why everything else in Dutch? Because I want to gun for a much wider audience here. Also, my literary English isn't good enough, otherwise I would always write in English. In 2020, I released my debut novel 'Fragmentariërs' (it's written in Dutch, though who knows I may one day make an English translation).

Are you a little lost? This link will take you right back to my home page.

Saturday, March 22, 2014

Men at work (I)

While it is seductive, it is ultimately pointless to get sucked into debates about how we should (re)define masculinity. I wrote about this before. I've also already briefly discussed male privilege as well as patriarchy’s essentialisation of men as primitive savages and how it damages us and our relationships with others.

This time, I want to head into a little more detail on how the things men are told in patriarchy hinder their development as human beings, with some far-reaching social repercussions. Some of these things may be contradictory, but then women are also no strange to getting trapped into contradictory expectations.

For non-regulars: patriarchy is a shorthand for the type of society that dominates most of the world. It is a society that mostly favours a particular class of people: straight, heterosexual fathers or potential fathers, and limits others. But of course, even this class does not escape patriarchy undamaged. Men are groomed for a position of domination, and this is really not without danger. Read on.

Part II.