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Weiye Loh

Nature, nurture and liberal values | Prospect Magazine - 0 views

www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/...nz-david-eagleman-neuroscience

Culture Nature Nurture Gender Stereotype

shared by Weiye Loh on 02 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • If we follow the evolutionary biologists, therefore, we may find ourselves pushed towards accepting that traits often attributed to culture may be part of our genetic inheritance, and therefore not as changeable as many might have hoped: gender differences, intelligence, belligerence, and so on through all the characteristics that people have wished, for whatever reason, to rescue from destiny and refashion as choice.
  • Weiye Loh on 02 Feb 12
     
    culture is an adaptation, which exists because it conferred a reproductive advantage on our hunter-gatherer ancestors. According to this view many of the diverse customs that the standard social science model attributes to nurture are local variations of attributes acquired 70 or more millennia ago, during the Pleistocene age, and now (like other evolutionary adaptations) "hard-wired in the brain." But if this is so, cultural characteristics may not be as plastic as the social scientists suggest. There are features of the human condition, such as gender roles, that people have believed to be cultural and therefore changeable. But if culture is an aspect of nature, "cultural" does not mean "changeable." Maybe these controversial features of human culture are part of the genetic endowment of human kind.
Weiye Loh

All Man's Land - Rakesh Mani - Project Syndicate - 0 views

www.project-syndicate.org/...English

Gender Equality Infanticide India Culture Capitalism

shared by Weiye Loh on 17 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • Indian couples have a strong cultural preference, bordering on obsession, for sons over daughters – despite the strides in education and employment that women have made over the last few decades. Education and wealth have nothing to do with it – in fact, some of the worst-affected areas are in India’s wealthiest cities. However discomfiting a possibility, the real culprit might be Indian culture and tradition itself.
  • The expenses and pressure of the dowry system, and the fact that, in most joint families, only sons inherit property and wealth, contribute to this favoritism. Perhaps just as important is that sons typically live with their parents even after they are married, and assume responsibility for parents in their old age. Daughters, who live with their in-laws after they marry, are viewed as amanat – someone else’s property. In short, sons represent income and daughters an expense.
  • Many have argued that Indian women should stand up to their families and refuse to abort their daughters. But Indian women want male children just as much.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Hindu religious law, for example, allows a woman to claim an equal share in her parents’ wealth, but few exercise this right. Culturally, she feels that she does not have an equal claim on her father’s property.
  • “What should be done when a woman uses her power over her own body to discriminate against female fetuses?”
  • (Interestingly, the state of Kerala, whose people adhere to matrilineal inheritance, has among the most equal sex ratios and literacy rates in India.)
  • Weiye Loh on 17 Aug 11
     
    "What should be done when a woman uses her power over her own body to discriminate against female fetuses?"
Weiye Loh

Balderdash: Researching the Rape Culture of America - 0 views

gssq.blogspot.com/...g-rape-culture-of-america.html

Culture Rape Gender Equality Class Inequality

shared by Weiye Loh on 31 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • "There was some pressure-at least I felt pressure-to have rape be as prevalent as possible . . .. I'm a pretty strong feminist, but one of the things I was fighting was that the really avid feminists were trying to get me to say that things were worse than they really are"
  • One obvious reason for this inequity is that feminist advocates come largely from the middle class and so exert great pressure to protect their own. To render their claims plausible, they dramatize themselves as victims-survivors or "potential survivors." Another device is to expand the definition of rape...
  • The common assumption that rape is a manifestation of misogyny is open to question... American society is exceptionally violent, and the violence is not specifically patriarchal or misogynist... The incidence of rape is many times lower in such countries as Greece, Portugal, or Japan-countries far more overtly patriarchal than ours...
Weiye Loh

Culture, Power and Sexual Violence - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...-culture-power-and-sex-collide

Relativism Sex Culture Rape Gender Stereotype Gender Equality Power

shared by Weiye Loh on 09 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • The more thorny question is whether relativism is relevant to those domains we generally want to put in the non-benign category: harassment, sexual coercion, even sexual violence. Could it be that offensiveness is relative to the perspective of the recipient, based on her own cultural sensibilities? More troubling, could it be that our very experience of an encounter might be significantly affected by our background, upbringing, culture, ethnicity, in short, by what Michel Foucault called our discourse?
  • date rapes, statutory rapes, and many instances of harassment can be subject to multiple interpretations, which has given rise to the new term popular on college campuses — “gray” rape. The writer Mary Gaitskill famously argued some years back that the binary categories of rape/not-rape were simply insufficient to classify the thick complexity of her own experience. In this netherworld of ambiguous experiences, can understanding cultural relativism be useful?
  • Whether workplace pornography is experienced as threatening or a reminder of the sexual power of women is simply relative to one’s expectations and prior predilections, some might say. Those who take offense are simply operating with the “wrong paradigm.” This has the danger of returning us to pre-feminist days when women’s own first person reports and interpretations of their experiences were routinely set aside in favor of more “objective” analyses given by doctors, psychiatrists, and social scientists, inevitably male.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The slide toward a complete relativism on these matters can be halted on two counts. First, there is the question of the physical body. Sex, as Lenin correctly argued, is not akin to having a glass of water. It involves uniquely sensitive parts of the body around which every culture has devised elaborate meanings, from adulation to abomination. The genitals are simply unique in the role they play for reproduction and physical ecstasy, and no discourse can operate as if this is not true. A light touch on the shoulder and a light touch  on the genitals elicit distinct sensations. The body is not infinitely alterable by discourse.
  • Second, there is the question of power. Differences in status and the capacity for economic self-sufficiency — not to mention the capacity for self-regard — compromise the integrity of consent, no matter the culture.  Status differences can occur along the lines of age, class, race, nationality, citizenship and gender (all of which apply to the alleged rape by Strauss-Kahn of an immigrant housekeeper). Power differences alone cannot determine whether something is benign or harmful, but they do signal danger. It cannot be the case that cultural context can render power differences completely meaningless. Obvious power differences in sexual relations  should raise a red flag, no matter which color one’s culture uses to signal danger.
  •   Sexual violations should be universally defined, and universally enforced.
  • Weiye Loh on 09 Jun 11
     
    The recent events swirling about the ex-next-president of France, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, has revived old tropes about how culture affects sex, including sexual violence. Before this scandal, many continued to believe that Americans are still infected by their Puritan past in matters sexuel, while the French are just chaud lapins: hot rabbits. The supposed difference consisted of not only a heightened sexual activity but an altered set of conventions about where to draw the line between benign sexual interaction and harassment. The French, many believed, drew that line differently.

    One needs to be a cultural relativist to know when one is being hit upon.
    The number of women speaking out in France post-scandal calls into question this easy embrace of relativism.
Weiye Loh

Powerless to protect our kids? Oh, do grow up | Barbara Ellen | Comment is free | The O... - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...en-sexuality-naipaul-kate-moss

Parenting Sexaulity Children Sex Culture

shared by Weiye Loh on 06 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 06 Jun 11
     
    This idea that we are powerless against a cultural tsunami - come on! Once late teenage hits, many parents learn the hard way about powerlessness, but not in the age range under discussion here. As the mother of an eight-year-old, I'm finding it easy to keep her away from padded bikinis, Nuts, internet porn, violent video games and sexy music videos. I did think The X Factor routines were too much for "little eyes", but it wasn't difficult to flick the channel over for a few minutes. It wasn't as if I was trapped, Dr Who-style, in a child-sexualised force field, unable to reach the TV remote.

    Indeed, as much as David Cameron seems to be enjoying waltzing around, looking all gung ho and "concerned father-ish", he must know that, without hands-on parental involvement, there is only so much the coalition can achieve. Popular culture does not exist to babysit our children. As always, parents have to step in where appropriate, too. So let's stop the sub-McCarthyist hysteria about child sexualisation and get some perspective - no one is going to steal your child's childhood, unless you let them. "Porn star" knickers for children are creepy, but they can't jump into underwear drawers all by themselves.
Weiye Loh

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown: Asian men, white women and a taboo that must be broken - Yasmin A... - 0 views

www.independent.co.uk/...at-must-be-broken-2146251.html

Rape Racism Gender Stereotype Culture Religion

shared by Weiye Loh on 04 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • when I ask myself was a greater crime committed by the Asian molesters, the honest answer has to be yes. Conscientious Asian community activists in Derby have said that these criminal acts were nothing to do with race or religion. The perpetrators were bad men who did terrible things. That is surely self-delusion or a cover-up.
  • The Cornwall and Derby villains who used girls as sex toys believed that their victims had "asked for it", which in our permissive age is an easy excuse. Very young girls are sexualised in the social environment, so paedophiles must feel they are only helping themselves to the goodies that are on offer. But in the case of the Asian men, disgusting cultural beliefs further validate their acts and their uncontrollable lechery is, in part, a symptom of repressed sexuality and sick attitudes.

  • an alarming number of Asian individuals, families and communities do believe that white females have no morals, are free and available, deserving of no respect or protection.

    Up in Bradford a few years back, I met Muslim pimps, some wearing mini Koran pendants on heavy, gold chains. "Not our girls," they reassured me, "just them white girls from the estates, cheap girls. They love it man, all the money they make! What else will they do with their lives? We're helping them make a career."

    Much laughter, until I asked them what they would do if a white pimp groomed their daughters. They would kill the pimp and the girls too, they said. They would too.

  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Then there was an 18-year-old white boy from Manchester who said he was lured and raped at the age of 10 by an Asian scoutmaster and his Muslim mates, who would, in public, hysterically denounce homosexuality. The double standards enable the Asian rapists to feel good, and that makes it doubly bad.
  • When deeds destroy professed religious principles, when nefarious abusers claim to be true worshippers, people rightly feel more animus and deeper repugnance. That is why paedophile Catholic priests arouse such fury. What abominable secrets and lies nestle beneath the sheets of godly and "ethnic" self-righteousness!
  • The injuries suffered by child victims are not determined by race or religion, but their sense of injustice is understandably much greater when their fiendish attackers believe themselves to be morally superior and therefore entitled to corrupt young flesh.
  • Miranda, now in her twenties, who was repeatedly raped by a British Asian pimp in Rotherham. She was also abused by her own dad when she was 11 : "Ahmed told me I was making him do it because I was sinful, not a true believer. That he would never do it if I was a Muslim. My dad would cry afterwards. I hate them both, but Ahmed was worse".
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