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Weiye Loh

Balderdash - 0 views

gssq.blogspot.com/...rony-has-kept-more-hearts.html

Violence Equality Stereotype

shared by Weiye Loh on 24 Nov 09 - Cached
  • November 25th is "The International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women".
  • With the emphasis on men's violence against women, this campaign discursively reinforces the stereotype of men as iniquitous aggressors and women as helpless victims and threatens to replace the complex picture violence between and within genders with a simplistic view.
  • ndeed, it has been suggested that "Men create more damage, but women hit more than men do".
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • Yet, "hitting" is a potentially broad term that could encompass many forms of physical activity, from bashing with a cudgel to punching with fists to slapping with the palm.
  • Now, there're many people who will say that a man should never hurt a woman - but most of these would cheerfully go on to endorse women slapping men, or perhaps even hitting them in the groin
  • Indeed, when women engage in physical violence against men, most people assume the man must've done something wrong and thus deserves it. This view probably comes about from men being seen as subjects and aggressors, and women as objects and victims. If an aggressor is the victim of his erstwhile victim's aggression, he must have deserved it as he was violent himself, and for an object to turn on its subject would be like an ass mounting a lion.
  • hitting can also be playful, low-intensity and/or not unwarranted. Sometimes you can see girls pulling their (presumed) significant others around by the ears - this potentially falls into some or all of these categories, yet if all forms of hitting are considered undesirable forms of "physical violence", this behavior would surely qualify too.
  • A definition of unacceptable hitting thus has to include criteria of intensity, duration, regularity and provocation; in short, you shouldn't hit people hard, many times, often and when they've done nothing wrong.
  • Sexual violence - usually committed by a boyfriend, husband, trusted adult, or family member". I don't have too much to say on this aspect in particular, at least based on the poster, except that it has been reported that reports of women carrying out sex attacks on children have soared in the last five years, and it is clear that this is because men are pigeonholed as sexual aggressors whereas women are sexual victims. I will also note that date rape is another problematic concept.
  • WHC defines "Emotional Abuse" as "sexual harassment at work or on the street, stalking, jokes that demean women, and controlling behaviour"
  • controlling behaviour is very much more contestable a term. The fact is that we control other people's behavior all the time. For example, a woman might refuse to cook her boyfriend his favourite dish until he fixes the plumbing. Again, similar to hitting, a working definition of "controlling behaviour" has to include criteria of intensity, regularity, complicity and reasonableness. In other words, in the example above, we would not sensibly call this "controlling behaviour" if the woman did not lock her boyfriend out of the house, it only happened occasionally, the man sighed and went "yes, dear" with a half-smile and the damaged plumbing was causing the bathtub to leak.
  • The point not being that we cannot make any jokes, but that we should lighten up and stop getting offended over every little thing.
  • male genital mutilation, on the other hand, is ignored - nay, socially sanctioned, and even celebrated in many quarters.
  • One wonders if a campaign targeting men and focusing on male-on-female violence has many more merits than a campaign targeting anybody condemning violence against anyone. I would be less uncomfortable with an effort by the world of men to end violence (period), or an effort (period) to end violence (period) against women, but the combination narrows the scope far too much.
  • In some cases, a targeted approach might make more sense than a general one. For example, "working with Malay and Muslim organisations to spread the anti-drugs message to Malay youths" seems to have been very effective in reducing drug abuse in the Malay community in Singapore (but do note that this was against the backdrop of a strong anti-drug message targetted at the entire population). Yet, I do not see how this might apply with the WHC.
Weiye Loh

Why Are Men So Violent? | Psychology Today - 0 views

www.psychologytoday.com/...why-are-men-so-violent

Biology Violence Gender Stereotype Evolution

shared by Weiye Loh on 16 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • To reduce male violence, it is not sufficient to reform men, as the defenders of the male warrior hypothesis recommend. Nor will it suffice to empower women. This will reduce domestic violence, but not war, because women can be as aggressive as men. Warfare did not decline precipitously with women's suffrage, and during recent conflicts with Russia, 43 percent of Chechen suicide bombers have been women. Crucially, we must reduce the incentives for violence.
  • Weiye Loh on 16 Feb 12
     
    biological contributions to violence may be greatly outweighed by the sociological.
Weiye Loh

Balderdash - 0 views

gssq.blogspot.com/...rvive-everything-nowadays.html

Gender Stereotype Gender Equality

shared by Weiye Loh on 07 Feb 10 - Cached
  • Once a week the medical world turns to the authoritative Journal of the American Medical Association to find out what’s important in health care research.This week, the editors have devoted the entire issue to trends in violence of various sorts: mistreatment of the elderly, teen-age murder, battered wives, even violence against public health workers.But nowhere in the 90 pages is there any mention of domestic abuse in which the victim is male.
  • some people fear that publishing a study about battered men might shift much-needed attention away from the abuse of women, the scope of which researchers agree is underestimated.
  • many people believe that battered husbands are practically nonexistent. Or they believe that they’re such a minute fraction, compared to the numbers of battered women, that they don’t represent a trend that needs attention.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • But family violence expert Murray Straus says that abused men do exist, in higher numbers than we care to acknowledge. “I’ve interviewed guys who have been stabbed by their wives,” says Straus. “One guy had his teeth knocked out when his girlfriend threw a brass crucifix at his face. But when you ask them if they were being beaten, they say no.”
  • In 1985, Straus and colleagues Richard Gelles and Suzanne Steinmetz reported a groundbreaking study of 6,000 Americans that contradicted conventional wisdom about domestic abuse. They found that 12 percent of men—and 11.6 percent of women—reported having hit, slapped or kicked their partners. Contrary to the common preconception that women hit back only in self defense, the survey also found that women initiated the violence just as often as men.Nonetheless, Straus points out, the men’s injuries generally weren’t as severe as the women’s injuries. “Women are overwhelmingly the ‘victim,’ he says. “They are injured more and are afraid for their lives more often. We don’t need shelters for battered men, but if we ever want to stop this cycle of abuse in families, it requires nonviolence by all parties.”
  • Jacquelyn Campbell, Johns Hopkins University nursing professor and lead author of the violence against females survey in this week’s JAMA, points out one of these statistics: For every man battered by a female partner, eight women are battered by male partners.Why such a massive discrepancy in the stats?Patricia Pearson, author of When She Was Bad: Violent Women and the Myth of Innocence, explains it this way: “When battered women’s activists talk about abuse, they focus on the most extreme statistics, the 3 to 4 percent of domestic violence in which women are beaten severely.”
  • Doing that gives us a skewed view of what’s really going on in families, Pearson says. “We need to realize women are capable of physical aggression,” she says. “It’s not just a masculine trait.”Despite more than 100 epidemiological studies demonstrating the existence of female aggression against men, no major government research arm has ever looked at the pattern.But as Pearson points out, the fastest growing group of violent criminal offenders today is teen girls. Given that, the time to study “battered men’s syndrome” may have finally arrived.
  • Weiye Loh on 07 Feb 10
     
    A 1998 article from ABC: Women Aren't the Only Victims: Beating Up on Battered Men
Weiye Loh

I was Jordan Peterson's strongest supporter. Now I think he's dangerous | The Star - 0 views

www.thestar.com/...now-i-think-hes-dangerous.html

Academic Politics Freedom of Speech Social Order Social Justice Religion Psychology

shared by Weiye Loh on 30 May 18 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 30 May 18
     
    "Jordan has a complex relationship to freedom of speech. He wants to effectively silence those left-wing professors by keeping students away from their courses because the students may one day become "anarchical social revolutionaries" who may bring upon us disruption and violence. At the same time he was advocating cutting funds to universities that did not protect free speech on their campuses. He defended the rights of "alt right" voices to speak at universities even though their presence has given rise to disruption and violence. For Jordan, it appears, not all speech is equal, and not all disruption and violence are equal, either. If Jordan is not a true free speech warrior, then what is he? The email sent through his wife's account described Bill 28, the parenting bill, as part of the "transgender agenda" and claimed it was "misleadingly" called "All Families are Equal." Misleading? What same-sex families and transgender people have in common is their upset of the social order. In Maps of Meaning, Jordan's first book, he is exercised by the breakdown of the social order and the chaos that he believes would result. Jordan is fighting to maintain the status quo to keep chaos at bay, or so he believes. He is not a free speech warrior. He is a social order warrior."
Weiye Loh

More than 40% of domestic violence victims are male, report reveals | Society | The Obs... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...men-victims-domestic-violence

Violence Gender Stereotype Gender Equality

shared by Weiye Loh on 17 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 17 Nov 13
     
    "About two in five of all victims of domestic violence are men, contradicting the widespread impression that it is almost always women who are left battered and bruised, a new report claims. Men assaulted by their partners are often ignored by police, see their attacker go free and have far fewer refuges to flee to than women, says a study by the men's rights campaign group Parity."
Weiye Loh

Balderdash: Links - 30th July 2015 - 0 views

gssq.blogspot.sg/...links-30th-july-2015.html

Gender Stereotype Gender Discrimination War Violence National Service

shared by Weiye Loh on 09 Aug 15 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 09 Aug 15
     
    "Amused that "structural violence" can be ended by celebrating violence. I guess anything is alright to combat stereotypes"
Weiye Loh

Solange and Jay-Z: it's simply not the same if a man is hit by a woman | Barbara Ellen ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...lt-domestic-violence-men-women

gender Gender Equality Gender Stereotype Violence

shared by Weiye Loh on 30 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 30 Apr 15
     
    A woman momentarily lashing out at her brother-in-law at a social event does not count as domestic violence. Perhaps it could have been assault had the bodyguard not intervened. However, even unprotected, would Jay-Z have felt under genuine physical threat from his sister-in-law? Not that women should feel entitled to attack men, but this is a distinction that needs to be made. The differences in physical size and/or strength between the sexes mean that most men are simply not physically scared of most women.
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

Balderdash: Negligence of Male Rape: what you get when you're obsessed by Privilege - 0 views

gssq.blogspot.com/...of-male-rape-what-you-get.html

Rape Victim Gender Equality Gender Stereotype

shared by Weiye Loh on 19 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • Another commenter points out (in response to an affirmation that "the perpetrator class *is* monolithic. In these countries, in these war situations, it *is* exclusively composed of men, acting out masculinity's obsession with the use of sex as violence and power over"): "Women also use sex as a means of violence and power. Research conducted in the US show that 95% of male victims in juvenile detention centres are abused by women http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/mar/11/the-rape-of-american-prisoners/ and that another report highlighted that women raped in US prisons were more likely to be raped or sexually assaulted by another woman than a man"
  • when some UK Rape Crisis centres began to accept and help male rape victims they received death threats and even threats of having their offices fire bombed. Apparently these threats came from volunteers at other rape crisis centres
  • Of course there's someone accusing them of "liberal condescension, which habitually appears in their reports on developed countries", but that's another problematic matter...
Weiye Loh

The Long-Run Effects of Disruptive Peers - 0 views

www.nber.org/w22042

Education Inequality Social Capital Sociology Childhood

shared by Weiye Loh on 01 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 01 Mar 16
     
    A large and growing literature has documented the importance of peer effects in education. However, there is relatively little evidence on the long-run educational and labor market consequences of childhood peers. We examine this question by linking administrative data on elementary school students to subsequent test scores, college attendance and completion, and earnings. To distinguish the effect of peers from confounding factors, we exploit the population variation in the proportion of children from families linked to domestic violence, who were shown by Carrell and Hoekstra (2010, 2012) to disrupt contemporaneous behavior and learning. Results show that exposure to a disruptive peer in classes of 25 during elementary school reduces earnings at age 26 by 3 to 4 percent. We estimate that differential exposure to children linked to domestic violence explains 5 to 6 percent of the rich-poor earnings gap in our data, and that removing one disruptive peer from a classroom for one year would raise the present discounted value of classmates' future earnings by $100,000.
Weiye Loh

I Saw Disturbing Racism at Yale After 9/11 -- It Seems Little Has Changed | Alternet - 0 views

www.alternet.org/...11-it-seems-little-has-changed

Racism Education Academia

shared by Weiye Loh on 22 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 22 Dec 15
     
    Several student organizations criticized the light punishment. They believed that the university's policy of suppressing the names of perpetrators of incidents of violence and harassment, including sexual violence, on campus endangered other students and prevented true accountability. Levin defended the policy, saying, "To publicize is to convert what could be a learning experience in life to a permanent scar-why would we permanently tarnish the reputation of a 19- or 29-year-old? We're a humane institution." That statement tells us everything we need to know about the precarious position that students of color, and even white women, find themselves in at Yale even today. Yale values us as props. We are there to provide a learning experience for young white men. We are there to help smooth out their rough edges before they go out into the real world. At Yale, they can learn valuable life lessons firsthand, like the fact that it's bad to try to break into a woman's bedroom at night with a weapon. At Yale, they can wear offensive Halloween costumes and have a real-life person of color politely teach them about cultural appropriation. Yale provides them a safe space to make these mistakes, without it leaving a "permanent scar." But what about the students of color and women relegated to the role of teacher/victim in this training ground for America's leaders? Where is our safe space? What about our scars? Being a student of color at Yale is a hostile experience. Our "bright college years" are collateral damage in this learning experience for white men.
Weiye Loh

Alternative Narratives: The Danger Of Romanticising The Other - 0 views

www.eurasiareview.com/...f-romanticising-the-other.html

Otherizing Narratives

shared by Weiye Loh on 25 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • Alternative narratives do lend a more balanced view but romanticising the other is a potential pitfall.
  • Clarissa Oon highlighted the growing interest in Singapore’s alternative history and posed the big question ‘does it really matter’. In answer to this, several academic historians posited that there is a necessity to come to terms with the complexities of Singapore’s history that includes alternative narratives to the state-centric version of events. While recognising the complex diversity of Singapore’s multi-layered and multi-faceted leftist past, Singaporeans should also remember that the Malayan Communist Party (MCP) later known as the Communist Party of Malaya (CPM) was responsible for acts of violence and subversion that undermined the security and independence of post-colonial Singapore and Malaysia.
  • Singapore’s left-wing movement was a complex milieu of actors ranging from labour unionists to intellectuals and student activists. This does not, however, hide the fact that the CPM did attempt to overthrow the Malaysian Federation through armed violence and prepare the ground in Singapore for an urban insurrection during the so-called ‘Second  Emergency’ (1968-1989).
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • The crafting of alternative narratives is necessary to inject greater breadth and depth into Singapore’s historical landscape. But we should be careful in romanticising the actions of those that employed violence in their attempt to overthrow the elected governments of Singapore and Malaysia -- and in so doing took and threatened the lives of innocent civilians on both sides of the Causeway.
  • Recently declassified British and Australian archival material suggests that despite certain reservations, the British and Australian governments recognised the necessity of the counter-insurgency, counter-subversion and nation-building efforts adopted by the Singaporean and Malaysian governments to contain the CPM threat. Many of these documents have yet to be thoroughly analysed but when they do, chances are that they would be read against the grain by academic historians seeking to challenge the narrative of the state.
  • Academic Trends: The Right Benchmark?In academic history, alternative narratives have become the norm rather than an exception.  For example, research councils in the United Kingdom and the United States are more likely to fund projects that look at marginal or alternative narratives instead of those with state-centric agendas. In the field of historical scholarship, challenging the state up to the point of post-modern fragmented incoherence has become the intellectual ‘in-thing’.
  • This intellectual fad in looking between the interstices and challenging state-centricity, however, does not always challenge what we already know. Moreover, even renowned academic historians are not immune to character-assassination of political figures and romanticising the deeds of their opponents. In short, just like the official state version of events that it seeks to challenge, mainstream academic history does possess its own set of credibility problems.
  • Alternative histories written by academic historians do not come with a ‘bias-free’ guarantee. Like official histories, academic works do carry the biases and the agendas of their authors. More often than not, young Singaporean historians are prone to the intellectual trend of challenging the state-centric narrative albeit in a critical way. This trajectory however presents an important question: Should scholars in Singapore be given a free rein in the crafting of alternative histories?
  • Should scholars in Singapore be given a free rein in the crafting of alternative histories?
  • Should scholars in Singapore be given a free rein in the crafting of alternative histories?
  • Critical alternative narratives do enrich the understanding of Singapore’s past and goes a long way in explaining what it means to be Singaporean. In this endeavour, academic historians play an important role in plugging the gaps left by the state. The state however has to be the gatekeeper on contemporary historical issues that still present a threat to national security or social cohesion. The conviction of David Irving in 2006 under Austria’s Volksverhetzung (incitement of the people) law for his trivialising of the Holocaust is an example of how shoddy historical scholarship can be contrary to national interests and social cohesion.
  • Critical academic freedom is a privilege to be respected, but it cannot be at the expense of national security and social cohesion. Singapore’s historical narrative would be poorer without a more nuanced view of the leftist heritage in its nation-building past. But any attempt to romanticise the actions of violent revolutionaries that claimed the lives of Singapore and Malaysian security personnel and civilians alike would demean the sacrifices of those who gave their all to protect the independence and security of their respective countries.
  • Weiye Loh on 25 Sep 10
     
    Alternative Narratives: The Danger Of Romanticising The Other
Weiye Loh

Ban homophobic clerics from mosques, gay rights campaigners urge | World news | The Gua... - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...gay-rights-london-mosques

Homosexuality Religion Activism Violence Extremism

shared by Weiye Loh on 11 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 11 Jun 11
     
    Gay rights campaigners have urged mosque leaders in east London to ban homophobic clerics from using their premises, following a 21% rise in gay hate crime in the area. Activists, including journalist Julie Bindel and Pride trustee Colm Howard-Lloyd, said some preachers at the East London Mosque and the London Muslim Centre had "created an atmosphere in which hate is socially acceptable; they have spread a message in which maiming and violence is the most dutiful, honourable, devout thing to do". Their concerns follow the £100 fine given to Mohammed Hasnath, who put up "Gay-Free Zone" stickers in the area; the case of Oliver Hemsley, who was paralysed from the neck down in August 2008 following a vicious attack; and Metropolitan police figures showing that gay hate crime had risen in the borough of Tower Hamlets - where the mosque and adjoining centre are located - from 67 attacks to 81 in a year.
Weiye Loh

The rape of men | Global development | The Observer - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...the-rape-of-men

Rape Victim Gender Equality Gender Stereotype

shared by Weiye Loh on 18 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • Margot Wallström, the UN special representative of the secretary-general for sexual violence in conflict, insists in a statement that the UNHCR extends its services to refugees of both genders. But she concedes that the "great stigma" men face suggests that the real number of survivors is higher than that reported. Wallström says the focus remains on women because they are "overwhelmingly" the victims. Nevertheless, she adds, "we do know of many cases of men and boys being raped."
  • But when I contact Stemple by email, she describes a "constant drum beat that women are the rape victims" and a milieu in which men are treated as a "monolithic perpetrator class".
  • "The UN Security Council Resolution 1325 in 2000 treats wartime sexual violence as something that only impacts on women and girls… Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently announced $44m to implement this resolution. Because of its entirely exclusive focus on female victims, it seems unlikely that any of these new funds will reach the thousands of men and boys who suffer from this kind of abuse. Ignoring male rape not only neglects men, it also harms women by reinforcing a viewpoint that equates 'female' with 'victim', thus hampering our ability to see women as strong and empowered. In the same way, silence about male victims reinforces unhealthy expectations about men and their supposed invulnerability."
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • As part of an attempt to correct this, the RLP produced a documentary in 2010 called Gender Against Men. When it was screened, Dolan says that attempts were made to stop him. "Were these attempts by people in well-known, international aid agencies?" I ask."Yes," he replies. "There's a fear among them that this is a zero-sum game; that there's a pre-defined cake and if you start talking about men, you're going to somehow eat a chunk of this cake that's taken them a long time to bake." Dolan points to a November 2006 UN report that followed an international conference on sexual violence in this area of East Africa."I know for a fact that the people behind the report insisted the definition of rape be restricted to women," he says, adding that one of the RLP's donors, Dutch Oxfam, refused to provide any more funding unless he'd promise that 70% of his client base was female. He also recalls a man whose case was "particularly bad" and was referred to the UN's refugee agency, the UNHCR. "They told him: 'We have a programme for vulnerable women, but not men.'"
  • wives who discover their husbands have been raped decide to leave them. "They ask me: 'So now how am I going to live with him? As what? Is this still a husband? Is it a wife?' They ask, 'If he can be raped, who is protecting me?' There's one family I have been working closely with in which the husband has been raped twice. When his wife discovered this, she went home, packed her belongings, picked up their child and left. Of course that brought down this man's heart."
Weiye Loh

No, Seriously, What About the Men? - The Good Men Project - 0 views

goodmenproject.com/...o-seriously-what-about-the-men

Feminism Gender Equality Gender Studies

shared by Weiye Loh on 22 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • 1) Whatabouttehwimmin? Any academic treatment of gender has been focused on the disadvantages faced by women and how women have been “omitted” from research, arts, literature, history, etc. An example of this assumption can be found in another book published in 1994, Angela McRobbie’s Postmodernism and Popular Culture. The book has many discussions of women, girls and “femininity,” but look for “masculinity” in the index, and you will draw a blank. She justifies this glaring omission with statements such as this one: It is in buying and selling clothes that girls and young women have been most active. The male bias of subcultural analysis has relegated these activities to the margins (McRobbie 1994:163). [My emphasis.]
  • when I have looked at contemporary books, journals, and web-based media that deal with the subject of gender, I have found no evidence of this so-called “male bias” at all. In the Internet age, there are large numbers of websites/online publications in particular, such as Jezebel, Sociological Images Feministing, Feministe and The Frisky, which look at representations of women in popular culture, for example. But there is no comparable critical consideration of how men and masculinity are portrayed in the media and culture. If anyone dares to question this imbalance, and the fact that feminist “gender studies” analyses of the media tend to only consider women as subjects, they are often met with the playground style taunt: whatabouttehmenz?
  • 2) Men are Monsters Heterosexual masculinity, in particular, has been “pathologized” by some feminist gender academics—with heterosexual men being portrayed as the oppressors of everyone else: hetero women, queer women, queer men. The idea that straight men have power that they use to oppress women, in particular, has been used by feminist writers such as Elaine Rapping, an American media and film analyst, to justify statements such as this: Everywhere you look there are books, movies, discussions and news reports about male violence … faced with the deadly serious question: “why are men such creeps?” (Rapping, 1993:114). This idea that men are “such creeps” is born out by the fact there is so much research and data on men’s violence against women, but very little about men as victims of violence, especially not at the hands of women. Is this because men are just thugs? Or is it due to the bias of gender academics? Even the name of this website, The Good Men Project, suggests to me that men are not ‘naturally’ good, but that they have to work hard to overcome the negative aspects of their ‘masculinity’ in order to become ‘Good Men.’
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • 3) “Masculinity” is Gay The only aspect of masculinity that gender studies seems to have allowed to be considered, without completely dismissing its value, has been “queer” masculinities, and this has been left to “queer theory.” Simpson, for example, tends to be categorized as a “gay” writer on “gay” men’s issues, and when he is mentioned in books about masculinity, it is often in relation to his work on gay pornography. Some feminist writers have suggested that there is a definite line between “straight” and “gay” men, and in doing so they are endorsing “gay” men as somehow better than straight men, suggesting they deserve consideration as people, not just “oppressors.” But at the same time, they are marginalizing any positive representation of masculinity into the box of “queer theory.” In other words, this suggests that taking an active interest in men and masculinity is “gay” in itself.
  • Male Impersonators is an interesting case study then, because, far from actually ignoring it, certain feminist academics have, in fact, taken its ideas, and co-opted and manipulated them and then failed to cite his work in their bibliographies. A number of feminist academics have made it clear they must have read Male Impersonators, but have not acknowledged just how much the book has “inspired” them, and in some cases have not mentioned Simpson at all. The most well-known of these is probably Susan Faludi. Her book Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, published in 2000, certainly draws on the themes introduced by Simpson in Male Impersonators. In particular, Faludi’s chapters on “hood ornaments”—men’s newfound “decorative” role in culture—and “waiting for wood”—on men in pornography—seem to owe a great deal to Simpson’s Male Impersonators. Anecdotal evidence tells of an interview with Faludi, where Simpson’s name was brought up, and she declared, ‘Oh, Mark Simpson. I’m his biggest fan!’ But not such a big fan that she could include his book in her huge bibliography. Other academics who have obviously drawn on Male Impersonators, with little or no reference to Simpson, include Susan Bordo, who wrote The Male Body (1999) (more on that here), Germaine Greer (2003), Ros Gill et al, (2005), Harris (2007), Eric Anderson et al (2009), and Hall (2010).
Weiye Loh

Simone de Beauvoir on Ambiguity, Vitality, and Freedom | Brain Pickings - 0 views

www.brainpickings.org/...imone-de-beauvoir-on-ambiguity

Agency Lack 'Simone de Beauvoir Philosophy Constrain Identity

shared by Weiye Loh on 25 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • sensitivity is nothing else but the presence which is attentive to the world and to itself. The reward for these spontaneous qualities issues from the fact that they make significances and goals appear in the world. They discover reasons for existing. They confirm us in the pride and joy of our destiny as man.
  • those unable to fully inhabit their freedom attempt to make it more manageable by committing themselves to choices and causes not entirely their own, often resulting in deformities like bigotry and violence
  • [The sub-man] is afraid of engaging himself in a project as he is afraid of being disengaged and thereby of being in a state of danger before the future, in the midst of its possibilities. He is thereby led to take refuge in the ready-made values of the serious world. He will proclaim certain opinions; he will take shelter behind a label; and to hide his indifference he will readily abandon himself to verbal outbursts or even physical violence. One day, a monarchist, the next day, an anarchist, he is more readily anti-semitic, anti-clerical, or anti-republican.
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  • From one point of view the collapsing of the serious world is a deliverance. Although he was irresponsible, the child also felt himself defenseless before obscure powers which directed the course of things. But whatever the joy of this liberation may be, it is not without great confusion that the adolescent finds himself cast into a world which is no longer ready-made, which has to be made; he is abandoned, unjustified, the prey of a freedom that is no longer chained up by anything. What will he do in the face of this new situation? This is the moment when he decides. If what might be called the natural history of an individual, his affective complexes, etcetera depend above all upon his childhood, it is adolescence which appears as the moment of moral choice. Freedom is then revealed and he must decide upon his attitude in the face of it.
  • Moral choice is free, and therefore unforeseeable. The child does not contain the man he will become. Yet, it is always on the basis of what he has been that a man decides upon what he wants to be. He draws the motivations of his moral attitude from within the character which he has given himself and from within the universe which is its correlative. Now, the child set up this character and this universe little by little, without foreseeing its development. He was ignorant of the disturbing aspect of this freedom which he was heedlessly exercising. He tranquilly abandoned himself to whims, laughter, tears, and anger which seemed to him to have no morrow and no danger, and yet which left ineffaceable imprints about him.
  • “Character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life — is the source from which self-respect springs,” Joan Didion famously wrote in 1968, and it was perhaps De Beauvoir reverberating through her words.
  • Weiye Loh on 25 Dec 12
     
    "Every man casts himself into the world by making himself a lack of being; he thereby contributes to reinvesting it with human signification. He discloses it. And in this movement even the most outcast sometimes feel the joy of existing. They then manifest existence as a happiness and the world as a source of joy. But it is up to each one to make himself a lack of more or less various, profound, and rich aspects of being. What is called vitality, sensitivity, and intelligence are not ready-made qualities, but a way of casting oneself into the world and of disclosing being. Doubtless, every one casts himself into it on the basis of his physiological possibilities, but the body itself is not a brute fact. It expresses our relationship to the world, and that is why it is an object of sympathy or repulsion. And on the other hand, it determines no behavior."
Weiye Loh

Russia Shows What Happens When Terrorists' Families Are Targeted - NYTimes.com - 0 views

mobile.nytimes.com/...casus-terrorists-families.html

Family Terrorism Sociology Ethics Community

shared by Weiye Loh on 02 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 02 Apr 16
     
    "There is systematic abuse of the family members of insurgents," Ekaterina Sokirianskaia, an analyst at the International Crisis Group, and an expert on the Caucasus, said in a telephone interview. "There can be short-term results, but I wouldn't call it success," she said. "You can prevent some episodes of violence at the moment, but you are radicalizing whole communities." "When innocent Muslims are targeted for the expediency of security services, this legitimizes the jihadist cause," she said.
Weiye Loh

Feminism's Big Daddy Syndrome « Guardian Watch - 0 views

graunwatch.wordpress.com/...feminisms-big-daddy-syndrome

Feminism Freud Psychology Hysteria Gender Stereotype

shared by Weiye Loh on 25 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • In a piece that states how women are diagnosed with and treated for mental health problems in greater numbers than men, she ‘blames’ theorists such as Freud for pathologising women as ‘hysterical’: ‘Sigmund Freud’s notion of penis envy. The Austrian psychiatrist claimed that women are batshit because, well, they just aren’t men. The result? Little girls would all grow up to become masochists with daddy complexes. The proof, supposedly, was rooted in the “phallic” way they liked to plait hair’.
  • Apart from the complete misunderstanding of Freud, and later Foucault, (you know, Freud doesn’t exactly present men as without their problems. Oedipus, masochism, perversion, neuroses- these are not merely attributed to women by Freud), the  writer is doing exactly what she says Freud did. She is giving women a ‘Big Bad Daddy’ to have a complex about – male dominated medicine and psychiatry, and the big bad wolf of ‘rape culture’.
  • this is a reversion to 1970s victim feminism
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • The author ignores some very important facts such as how men commit suicide in much larger numbers than women, possibly in part because men just do not think to go for help. And also the fact that mental health is a complex arena and is not simply a case of ‘post traumatic stress’ due to gendered violence. And. to say something feminists will hate, isn’t it worth thinking that men who commit violence against women may actually have a few mental health issues of their own?
Weiye Loh

Sex Workers: We're Not a Rescue Project, Not Trafficking Victims | Bustle - 0 views

www.bustle.com/...roject-not-trafficking-victims

Sex Sex Work Trafficking

shared by Weiye Loh on 01 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • #NotYourRescueProject helped sex workers across Twitter voice their opinions. But soon enough, a counter-hashtag was trending: #RealJobsNotBlowjobs. It wasn’t coordinated specifically by the rescue industry but rather by a loose group of anti-sex work feminists. 
  • Weiye Loh on 01 Feb 14
     
    "Rhee says too often, people assume sex work cannot be the result of a conscious decision. She is very sympathetic to the plight of trafficked individuals - particularly underage youth - and advocates intervention for them. But the purpose of #NotYourRescueProject was to make a distinction between who needs intervention and who doesn't. "Every time someone talks about human trafficking, many conflate human trafficking with sex work…When you say sex work is all violence against women or is all sex trafficking, it really ignores agency for women who chose sex work," Rhee says. "I didn't fall into sex work. It was something that I chose out of my own volition." Desi, who works as an escort, is highly critical of anti-trafficking NGOs.  "I believe it is very important for sex worker voices from the emerging world to be heard unmoderated by any special interest," Desi says. "I believe enabling sex workers with rights and especially the right to organize their own resistance is what is most needed.""
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