Pretty sure that it’s part of Putin’s propaganda to try to portray himself as some supposed super masculine alpha-male as opposed to the supposedly ‘soft’ Westerners. These photo-ops always seemed a bit sad/comical to me, but apparently there’s an audience for that.
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I’ve had conversations with Russians along those lines. They often have a strong inferiority complex and overcompensate with expressions of toughness. It would be pathetic if it wasn’t so dangerous.
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Like Brazilian fart porn?
(Southpark - Internet episode)
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You just want me to google that, don’t you?
Maybe make sure you’re not using a work computer…
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Probably yes, but let’s have a look at it: which part in us likes to rattle with sabres, play war and resolve conflicts through violence?
I think there is something in this. Look at how little boys play together, compared to little girls. It’s like night and day. I’ve a son and a daughter, and when very young, the ways how they behaved when interacting with their friends was stunningly different. The lad loved to go and measure himself physically with his friends, play with pseudo-weapons, simulate wars and conquests, fight, etc. Later on, he loved playing simulation games of conquest and war. The lass played mother, cared for her puppets, and interacted in a completely different way with other girls.
There will be exceptions of course, and I’m conscious that this will be interpreted as caricatural stereotypes, but nevertheless, what I could observe with other children has always confirmed what I saw with my own. I’m quite sure that this is the experience of most parents when observing their children. Children play out stereotypes, consciously or not.
FWIW, I don’t think that this is merely a cultural phenomenon induced by education (it also plays a role of course), but that there is also a biological element to it.
As for Putin, he has always played out that hyper-masculinity in his public image because he wanted to convey the message to his population and to the west that he’ll apply typical manly expedients in order to resolve potential conflicts: use of force and violence, dreams of conquest and ultimately, war. The message has always been there, we’ve just underestimated the full extent of it.
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Since you say you don’t think this is the case, do you have any evidence to back this up with that doesn’t rely on anecdotes?
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No evidence, just empiric observation. 
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… which are entrenched in society. The simple thing of buying vests for our children (when they are at the baby/toddler stage) is a case and point. All of the ones for boys were blue and for the girls were pink. There were some yellow ones but they were very rare and more expensive. Similarly, there is a vast array of other such “simple” things that insidiously creep into how kids are supposed to behave. For example, how many movies or fairy tales are out there where the hero is a woman or a girl? Even Harry Potter, a modern tale, where though there are strong female characters, the main “heroes and anti-heroes” are male. How often do parents look at the growth charts of their children and brag about being the 95th or 99th percentile…? These things (and many more) are so engrained I’m not sure how you go about concluding one way or the other.
It is easy to lay the blame on biology but we, as a society, do not look to really explore alternatives to any great extent.
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That leads to the point I was trying to make. Admittedly it was just a single module, but the one conclusion that I got from my course was that there really is no way to make a generalisation about whether it’s an inherent biological trait, or whether it was the effect of societal conditioning. Children are very effective observers, and we often provide social reinforcement in ways that we are completely unaware.
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A contrast is to look towards societies which are traditionally matriarchal, where women take on the dominant roles.
Which now can be used in all debates without question!!
Eh? I never asked anyone to take my word without discussion.
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Oh God
It was a joke comment on the calls for empirical evidence in other topics, such as bias/corruption etc.
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In part yes, but there are other aspects at work. A part is observation and imitation of how adults act, but there is also a biological aspect.
The difficulty is to determine what is the part of education/imitation, and what is inherent. At a wild guess, I’d say it’s roughly 50-50, but don’t take my word for it!
Yeah, that’s interesting. I’d expect women to play out their dominance in another way than men, and men to react differently to their inferior role. I’d like to know more about that though.
Mmmmm, you guys are beating all the fun out of this topic … 
Came across this here:
Save.org gives some scary statistics but the prevalent one is, “Suicide among males is 4x’s higher than among females. Male deaths represent 79% of all US suicides.”
They forgot to mention injuries caused by sitting on keys because you’re too manly to carry a bag.
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This reminds me of an argument I got into with a male empowerment group Facebook, bizarrely, recommended I look at.
The group was called ‘suffragents’ and was the biggest bunch of self-obsessed, unaware, clueless fucking man-babies you have ever seen.
There position was that men were oppressed by a society that routinely discriminated against them, and women are evil, scheming, conniving cunts who want nothing more than to get their hooks into a poor innocent man and bleed them dry. It was really that extreme.
To think that men have a worse time of it than women in society is quite the position to take, but they did seem to genuinely believe it. They would very often talk about Paternity Rights (of which I take a particularly dim view), divorce settlements, and suicide rates as a examples of male oppression, but totally disregard any examples of female oppressed, including particularly nasty stuff like suggesting most women who are raped are secretly begging for it. Really out there stuff.
I thought I’d have a go, and if nothing else it would be a laugh. So I had quite a few back and forths, pointing out the flaws in their arguments, explaining how their assertions that society in run for the benefit of women and men were the victims were absolute bollocks, and pointing out why they were acting like toddlers.
The one that got me eventually thrown out was a post describing why I’m a feminist - in so far as a man ever can be - in response to being called a feminist (pejoratively). It went like this.
I’m a feminist because I’m clever enough to recognise that, not only is it the pathway to an equal society, it is also the correct position in response to problems in society that impact on men. The way women are treated in custody disputes, the way it is assumed (with some justification) that a women now entitled to support from a divorced husband, the way suicide rates overwhelmingly impact on men etc (insert your own issue here) are in large part due to the fact that we live in a patriarchal society that place men in prescribed roles just as much as it does women. If you care about those things, then you should support feminists and their cause because they are trying to create the society you say you want.
However, what I’ve often found is that a lot of men don’t want this at all. They don’t want an equal society. They want to tackle the often small things that inconvenience them, while aggressively protecting the all the advantages and privileges that come with being a man. That’s why men’s empowerment movements and groups and the like are a fucking joke.
So it’s my stock response to stuff like suicide rates for men. Yes, it’s awful - but maybe if we lived in a society in which men didn’t feel the need to conform to a gendered stereotype of stoic, strong, emotional suppressed manhood, it wouldn’t be as big a problem as it is. We basically need a more equal society, and we need it for men and women.
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