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Most recent 100 posts

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  • techno-promiscuities: speculative currency and digital sexuality
    “Qandeel [Baloch]’s life and death provide a sober reading of the biopolitical and necropolitical management of femininity that first propelled her to stardom and then punished her by death. Qandeel’s broken English, her allegedly “fake” American accent and her insistent invitation to “luk” made her a national laughing stock. For… Continue Reading →
  • Fag Discourse as a Disciplinary Mechanism
    “Fag is not necessarily a static identity attached to a particular (homosexual) boy. Fag talk and fag imitations serve as a discourse with which boys discipline themselves and each other through joking relationships. Any boy can temporarily become a fag in a given social space or interaction. This does not… Continue Reading →
  • Hernandez v. Texas and SAISD v. Rodriguez
    Hernandez v. Texas (1954) is the first and only Mexican-American Civil Rights case in the contemporary era. The Texas court of criminal appeals ruled that since Mexican-Americans are racially classified as “white.” Therefore, the court ruled, it would not be unconstitutional for someone Mexican-American to be convicted of an all-white… Continue Reading →
  • But what about the shifting demographics, YouTube videos, and “cluster outbreaks” of “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria”?
    “… trans/LGBTQ+ people are highly stigmatized, face harassment, and our perspectives are largely discounted and not readily accessible in society at large. This is what leads trans/LGBTQ+ folks to seek one another out (regardless of age) for mutual support, shared understanding, and the exchange of relevant information and ideas.”
  • Work–Family Decisions Given a Weak Social Safety Net
    “School closures place a major institutional constraint on families to cover additional childcare. While the primary function of schools is children’s education, they also provide an expansive infrastructure of care, especially for elementary school–age children.[1] Never before have schools closed to the extent or duration that we have observed during… Continue Reading →
  • Surgeons Experience with Regret of Gender-Confirmation Surgery
    “Regret after gender-affirming surgery is considered a rare outcome. Among the 46 surgeons surveyed, a cumulative number of approximately 22,725 transgender patients were treated. 49% of respondents had never encountered a patient who regretted their gender transition or were seeking detransition care. Only a total of 62 patients [0.27%] regretted… Continue Reading →
  • On “Law and Order”
    “The rhetoric of “law and order” was first mobilized in the late 1950s as Southern governors and law enforcement officials attempted to generate and mobilize white opposition to the Civil Rights Movement. In the years following Brown v. Board of Education, civil rights activists used direct-action tactics in an effort to force reluctant Southern states to desegregate public facilities. Southern governors and law enforcement officials often characterized these tactics as criminal and argued that the rise of the Civil Rights Movement was indicative of a breakdown of law and order. Support of civil rights legislation was derided by Southern conservatives as merely “rewarding lawbreakers.” …”
  • What’s something that was designed for the use of one sex but is now predominantly used by the other?
    As a sociologist of gender, I was really fascinated by the following thread. User hodgepodge282 on r/AskReddit asked the important question, “What’s something that was designed for the use of one sex but is now predominantly used by the other?” There are a couple of ones that people may already… Continue Reading →
  • how to be a good advisee
    Originally posted on scatterplot:
    Edit 2/6/20. I just linked to this old post. Re-reading, I’d give more overt attention to issues of student marginality and abusive profs. But I’ll let this essay otherwise stand as it was written nearly 12 years ago. As I suggested in response to the thread…
  • Language, the Manosphere, and Networked Harassment
    “The manosphere is an aggregate of diverse communities brought together by a common language that orients them in opposition to the discourse and rhetoric of feminism. Vocabulary contributes to a sense of common identity. Men’s rights communities use the term [misandry] to signify a form of undesirable feminism that they… Continue Reading →
  • Preface to the Jubilee Edition of The Souls of Black Folk (1953)
    “I sense two matters which are not so much omission on my part as indications of what I then did not know or did not realize: one is the influence of Freud and his co-workers in their study of psychology; the other is the tremendous impact on the modern world… Continue Reading →
  • The Gender of Cheerleading
    “At its inception in the mid-1800s, cheerleading was an all-male sport. Characterized by gymnastics, stunts, and crowd leadership, it was considered equivalent in prestige to that flagship of American masculinity: football. As the editors of the Nation saw it in 1911: The reputation of having been a valiant “cheer-leader” is… Continue Reading →
  • The Wild Scholarship of Max Weber
    “Weber himself was reported as saying: ‘I couldn’t care less about style; I just cough up my thoughts.’[1] In his attitude to work, periods of depressive aversion evidently alternated with ones of euphoria when he would be overwhelmed by the rush of ideas and ‘intellectual voraciousness,’[2] but when, at the… Continue Reading →
  • The Apartheid Wall
    Two days ago marked the 30th anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall. However, in the West Bank, there is a wall twice as high and four times as long. Once construction finishes, it will stretch over 440 miles. While the West Bank does not belong to Israel, Israel… Continue Reading →
  • The Pink Dragon is Female: Halloween Costumes and Gender Markers
    Originally posted on Sociological Fragments:
    “The marketing illustrations for children’s Halloween costumes remains largely anchored in traditional gender roles, images, and symbols. The symbolic representations of gender contained within Halloween costumes may, along with specific costume titles, refurbish stereotypical notions of what women/girls and men/boys are capable of doing within…
  • A Pragmatic Argument Against High Inequality
    “It is important not to think that pragmatic arguments about inequality always support the status quo. There are also strong pragmatic arguments against high levels of inequality. Excessive inequality can have all sorts of undesirable practical consequences. Two considerations are particularly important here: the impact of inequality on the costs… Continue Reading →
  • Batterers, Abandonment, and Love Addiction: Jimmy’s Story
    Originally posted on Sociological Fragments:
    “Jimmy, like most of the male batterers I have encountered, suffered from both forms of addictive intoxication: the need for merger with an abundant other and the need to wrestle nature, as represented by his wife, into submission. Shirley helped me see the connection between…
  • Does Undocumented Immigration Increase Violent Crime?
    “At a minimum, the results of our study call into question claims that undocumented immigration increases violent crime. If anything, the data suggest the opposite.” Michael T. Light and Ty Miller “Our findings suggest that undocumented immigration over this period is generally associated with decreasing violent crime. The negative association… Continue Reading →
  • “You can’t handle the truth!”
    “Even though most men are not perpetrators, they nonetheless contribute to–and derive pleasure from–a sexist cultural climate where women are put down and sexually degraded. Thus they have little motivation to examine it critically, and a lot of incentive to look away.” Jackson Katz, The Macho Paradox (2006) “One of… Continue Reading →
  • “Does the child support program make money? No…”
    Does the child support program “make money” for either the federal government or the states? The answer to this question, simply put, is no. Like most other social programs, the child support system provides to families a service that upholds a strong value-system of parents providing for their children, but… Continue Reading →
  • Critical Tasks in Transforming Gender Inequality
    “Many men have something to lose from further advances in gender equality. But it is also true that in certain important ways, men potentially have much to gain from deeper and more robust forms of gender equality in American life. In a world of real gender equality, men would have… Continue Reading →
  • Trump’s 2016 Presidential Campaign and Adorno’s Psychological Technique: Content Analyses of Authoritarian Populism
    Using Adorno’s understudied textual analysis of the radio addresses of Martin Luther Thomas and Trump’s 2016 US presidential campaign, this study extracted three rhetorical devices that Adorno uses to characterise Thomas and his authoritarian populism and transposed them to Trump. The first device was the lone wolf device amounting to anti-statism… Continue Reading →
  • The New Jim Crow: Mapping the Parallels
    The New Jim Crow: Mapping the Parallels “Those cycling in and out of prisons today are members of America’s new racial undercaste. …”
  • The Antichrist
    “True life, eternal life, has been found—it is not promised, it is here, it is in you: as a living in love, in love without subtraction and exclusion, without regard for station.” Jesus Christ, as quoted by Friedrich Nietzsche in The Antichrist The very word “Christianity” is a misunderstanding: in… Continue Reading →
  • The New Forms of Control
  • A Colossal Wreck; July 22, 2001
    “You can see why George Bush doesn’t believe in global warming. Having grown up in West Texas summers he doubtless believes it can never get any hotter.” “George Bush Sr. arrived [in Texas] in 1948, later recalling that ‘We all just wanted to make a lot of money quick.’ The… Continue Reading →
  • The Sociological Imagination
    “The sociological imagination enables its possessor to understand the larger historical scene in terms of its meaning for the inner life and the external career of a variety of individuals. It enables them to take into account how individuals, in the welter of their daily experience, often become falsely conscious… Continue Reading →
  • The New Micro-Politics of Child Contact
    The fathers’ movements … have obscured the structural basis of the gendered division of labour that supports and sustains women’s greater role in child care, and have turned mothers’ objections into an apparently self-interested, child-harming defence of the status quo. … In framing the issues as ones of justice, they… Continue Reading →
  • Has China Turned to Capitalism?—Reflections on the Transition from Capitalism to Socialism
    “It is very clear which weapons will be used to fight in the country that has emerged from the greatest anti-colonial revolution in history to engage in a long-term process of building a post-capitalist and socialist society. Which side will the Western left take?”
  • The Meaning of Fatherhood
    “…In Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas’s analysis of 165 in-depth interviews with single mothers in the same Philadelphia and Camden communities from which we drew many of our fathers, the women had little motivation to stave off early childbearing, as young women in this environs see children as their chief… Continue Reading →
  • The Elusive Traditional Family
    “Whenever people propose that we go back to the traditional family, I always suggest that they pick a ballpark date for the family they have in mind. Once pinned down, they are invariably unwilling to accept the package deal that comes with their chosen model. Some people, for example, admire… Continue Reading →
  • “It was really a book about scared men who were afraid of women.”
    “A decade ago, Strauss was a notorious figure: the guy who wrote that book The Game, the one about seduction, which seemed to endorse all manner of queasy notions about what it was OK for men to do on the pull. The Game promised to teach its readers how to become… Continue Reading →
  • Bringing Gender into the Equation of Domestic Violence
    “What is missing, oddly, from these claims of gender symmetry is an analysis of gender. By this, I mean more than simply a tallying up of which biological sex is more likely to be perpetrator or victim. I mean an analysis that explicitly underscores the ways in which gender identities… Continue Reading →
  • The Way We Wish We Were: Defining the Family Crisis
    “Like most visions of a “golden age,” the “traditional family” my students describe evaporates on closer examination. It is an ahistorical amalgam of structures, values, and behaviors that never co-existed in the same time and place. The notion that traditional families fostered intense intimacy between husbands and wives while creating… Continue Reading →
  • Homophobia Is Still Prevalent: Evaluating the Validity of Inclusive Masculinity
    “Finally, McCormack’s (2012, 61) largely unqualified disdain for Stonewall[1] aside, what larger surveys show is that there are still high rates of assault and abuse targeted at lesbian, gay, or bisexual (LGB)-identifying individuals, which do not paint the same optimistic picture. In 2012, a report conducted by the UK Home… Continue Reading →
  • Is the traditional family the foundation of democracy?
    “‘Is the traditional family the foundation of democracy?’ It depends what kind of traditional family you’re talking about. Throughout most of European and American history, the family was organized around a patriarch with power over slaves, servants, poorer neighbors and his sons and daughters. Those families were the foundation of inequality. Our founding… Continue Reading →
  • Neither justice nor protection
    ‘‘‘Why doesn’t she leave?’ is probably one of the most frequently asked questions for those who witness a woman suffering domestic violence. Implicit in this question is frustration and mystification that women are failing to ‘look after themselves’, and often their children, by remaining caught in a web of violence and abuse. This individualizing… Continue Reading →
  • Seduction
    “The patterns of intimate relationality enumerated in the seduction industry [or “pick-up artistry”], and the willingness with which many men buy into them, further evidence the production of distinctly antisocial forms of sociality and subjectivity within neoliberalism. Exacerbating this situation are postfeminist imperatives of ‘liberation’ and ‘empowerment’ which imbue women… Continue Reading →
  • One Word Away from Nuclear War
    The confrontation finally came down to two basic issues: (1) Would Kennedy pledge that the US would not invade Cuba? And (2) would he make a public announcement that the US would withdraw its Jupiter nuclear missiles from Turkey, on the border of Russia and aimed at its heartland? On… Continue Reading →
  • New Babylon: The Export of Production
    “The unoccupied zone of Mexico, just south of the artificial [U.S.] border, provides a clear example [of the growing integration of the entire Third World into the U.S. economy is increasing national dislocation and misery]. There, in 1982, some 128,000 Mexicano women labored in the maquilas, the factories set up… Continue Reading →
  • “They just don’t get it.”
    “One of the ways in which these dualities affect people’s lives is through the (often unconscious) ideology, imagery, and associations that mediate our perceptions of and relations with each other. Let me provide a concrete, contemporary example here. The fall and winter of 1991-92 brought several dramatic and controversial rape… Continue Reading →
  • The Missing Feminist Revolution in Sociology: Functionalist Co-optation
    “In the United States the sociological study of gender originated in functionalist family sociology and has been deeply shaped by the concepts developed by Talcott Parsons. […] Early on, contemporary feminists recognized the influence and limitations of functionalism as a framework for understanding gender. Several of the founding works of… Continue Reading →
  • Men are the primary perpetrators
    “Contrary to the disinformation promulgated in recent years by the so-called “men’s rights” movements, the most important statistics about violence against women do not lie. The vast majority of credible researchers in sociology, criminology, and public health confirm that men commit the most serious intimate-partner violence and the overwhelming amount… Continue Reading →
  • How the Vietnam War Created America’s Modern “White Power” Movement
    Sean Illing: The core claim of this book is that the modern “white power” movement really began as a response to the aftermath of the Vietnam War. What happened? Kathleen Belew: It helps to explain how I came to this project. I was researching truth and reconciliation commissions and came… Continue Reading →
  • The Soviet Woman — a Full and Equal Citizen of Her Country
    “It is a well-known fact that the Soviet Union has achieved exceptional successes in drawing women into the active construction of the state. This generally accepted truth is not disputed even by our enemies. The Soviet woman is a full and equal citizen of her country. […] From the very… Continue Reading →
  • The American Revolution and the revelation of an embarrassing truth
    “The self-styled champions of liberty branded taxation imposed without their explicit consent as synonymous with despotism and slavery. But they had no scruples about exercising the most absolute and arbitrary power over their slaves. This was a paradox: ‘How is it’, Samuel Johnson asked, ‘that we hear the loudest yelps… Continue Reading →
  • “Fathers’ Rights” and the Realities of Men’s Family Labor
    “Fathers’ rights activists, who are predominately white and middle- or working-class, tend to ignore how work and family institutional relations benefit them, both before and after divorces. Instead, they focus entirely on the economic and emotional costs that are attached to these masculine privileges–among them, the common legal assumption after… Continue Reading →
  • 25 Common Dangerous Mistakes Caused by Failing to Use Current [Domestic Violence] Research
    25 Common Dangerous Mistakes Caused by Failing to Use Current [Domestic Violence] Research: Asking abuse victims to just “get over it.” Minimizing the full harm caused by domestic violence and child abuse. Assuming the end of a relationship ends the risk from an abuser. Assuming abuse that is not recent… Continue Reading →
  • Anarchist Communism
    “When you go into a public library, the librarian does not ask what services you have rendered to society before giving you the book. In the same way, those who man the lifeboat do not ask credentials from the crew of a sinking ship; they launch their boat, risk their… Continue Reading →
  • Revolution and counterrevolution in Afghanistan
    Originally posted on Allow Me To Explain:
    In 1978 the Saur Revolution swept across the central Asian country of Afghanistan uprooting backwards social and property relations and liberating women from domestic slavery, abuse and extreme oppression. Background Afghanistan is a country with a long and complicated history. Throughout the years,…
  • #Notallmen, #Menenism, Manospheres and Unsafe Spaces: Overt and Subtle
    “While feminists have long emphasised the extent to which constructions of gender impact negatively on men[1], the same message as engaged by the alt-right, MRAs and the manosphere does so with an explicit or tacit support of essentialised gender hierarchy and male supremacy. This allows them to critique feminism for… Continue Reading →
  • Men’s Health: A Critique of Men’s Rights and Anti-Feminist Claims
    “Men’s rights advocates (MRAs) and anti-feminist men’s groups claim that men now are the victims in our society, of both women and feminism. MRAs claim that men’s health is a particularly important area of male disadvantage, that men’s health issues and shorter life spans are evidence of discrimination and oppression… Continue Reading →
  • The Monogamous Family
    “THE MONOGAMOUS FAMILY […] is founded on male supremacy for the pronounced purpose of breeding children of indisputable paternal lineage. […] Monogamy, then, does by no means enter history as a reconciliation of man and wife and still less as the highest form of marriage. On the contrary, it enters as… Continue Reading →
  • The Myth of Sexual Symmetry in Marital Violence
    “Research focusing on specific violent events shows that women almost always employ violence in defense of self and children in response to cues of imminent assault in the past and in retaliation for previous physical abuse. […] Studies of actual cases lend no support to the facile claim that homicidal husbands and… Continue Reading →
  • Aspects of Sociology – Ideology
    “Political liberalism in its late period with its concept of freedom of opinion, which in any case possesses a certain affinity to relativism, insofar as everyone is to be allowed to think what he wishes, because they are only thinking what is most favorable to their interest and self assertion,… Continue Reading →
  • The Continuing Struggle
    “[F]reedom of speech is by no means a deeply entrenched tradition even in the United States, which by comparative standards is quite advanced in this regard. The same is true of other rights. […] As is well known, even the right to vote was achieved in the United States only… Continue Reading →
  • How to Avoid the Kisses of Death in the Graduate School Application Process
    Personal statements Avoid references to your mental health. Such statements could create the impression you may be unable to function as a successful graduate student. Avoid making excessively altruistic statements. Graduate faculty could interpret these statements to mean you believe a strong need to help others is more important to… Continue Reading →
  • Introduction to New Departures in Marxian Theory
    “. . . As earlier anti-slavery movements eventually went beyond reformist demands for slaves to be treated better to arrive at the fundamental demand to abolish slavery per se, so Marxists go beyond the reformist critics of capitalism to demand its abolition as a class structure. If human beings must… Continue Reading →
  • Wanted: Vulnerable, Debt-Burdened College Students for U.S. Imperialism
    The other day, I received a notification of an army recruiter hoping to increase the numbers of college students enrolled in the reserves.[1] Repeated on roughly every paragraph by the recruiter was how little stress and time it would take and how enlistment would lead (eventually) to student loan repayment… Continue Reading →
  • Debunking Hayek’s Road to Serfdom: Economic Planning and “Totalitarianism” (Part 3)
    Originally posted on Anti-Imperialism.org:
    Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 Chapter 6: Planning and the Rule of Law As the title would suggest, Hayek begins chapter six by promoting what he refers to as the ‘Rule of Law’. While many legal and political interpretations exist of the ‘Rule…
  • Individual and Institutional Racism
      “Racism is both overt and covert. It takes two, closely related forms: individual whites acting against individual blacks, and acts by the total white community against the black community. We call these individual racism and institutional racism. The first consists of overt acts by individuals, which cause death, injury… Continue Reading →
  • “The public is not sovereign over the media . . .”
    “The public is not sovereign over the media–the owners and managers, seeking ads, decide what is to be offered, and the public must choose among these. People watch and read in good part on the basis of what is readily available and intensively promoted. Polls regularly show that the public… Continue Reading →
  • A Propaganda Model
    “The mass media serve as a system for communicating messages to the general populace. It is their function to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society. In a world… Continue Reading →
  • Fake News on Russia and Other Official Enemies: The New York Times, 1917–2017
    Edward S. Herman, best known for developing the propaganda model of media criticism (with Noam Chomsky), died a few weeks ago on November 11, 2017. Below is a section from a piece he wroted titled, “Fake News on Russia and Other Official Enemies: The New York Times, 1917–2017,” that appeared… Continue Reading →
  • Judith Butler on Being Attacked in Brazil
    “I understand that the puppet/poster representing me included both a witch’s hat and a bright pink bra, signifying gay or trans life in some way. I am not sure they thought about what it meant to accuse me of being both a witch and trans. If I am trans, then… Continue Reading →
  • Emasculated Men Refuse to Do Chores—Except Cooking
    “For some men, these are scary times. Men lost jobs in the recession, and women outnumber them on college campuses. (Some are predicting, in fact, that we’re witnessing the end of men.)As I’ve written, one way some men are responding to their slipping place in the social hierarchy is by supporting Donald Trump,… Continue Reading →
  • Babies, Blood, and Power
    “In fact, men often report feeling left out of family life and other things close to the life process. As Sam Keen recounts his experience as a father, for example, the birth of his children left him feeling not only awestruck but profoundly inadequate: In that hour, all my accomplishments–books… Continue Reading →
  • The Masculinity Problem
    “Scholars who study masculinity and mass shootings have consistently drawn attention to the fact that mass shootings are not only a uniquely American social problem; they are a problem with American men. We’ve argued before that there are two questions that require explanation related to gender and mass shootings. First, why is it… Continue Reading →
  • Existentialism and the Origins of Male Supremacy
    “While women demand a new status, says [Simone] de Beauvoir, they are far from achieving it and the institutions of patriarchy are still largely intact. Not only have ‘abstract rights’ not been granted to women everywhere; abstract rights themselves have never sufficed to assure women a definite hold on the… Continue Reading →
  • Men’s Interests in Contemporary Patriarchy: A Draft Balance Sheet
    “Treating ‘men’ and ‘women’ as undifferentiated categories, it is possible to draw up a collective balance sheet for men showing both the gains and losses, or benefits and costs, from contemporary gender arrangements. […] The model distinguishes four major dimensions (or structures) in gender relations. This discussion focusses on the… Continue Reading →
  • Overdoing Gender: A Test of the Masculine Overcompensation Thesis
    “The 1964 film Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb depicts the initiation of World War III as a great act of overcompensation by a sexually impotent general [General Jack D. Ripper]. […]     The masculine overcompensation thesis asserts that men react to masculine… Continue Reading →
  • The racial dimension of mass incarceration is its most striking feature . . .
    “The racial dimension of mass incarceration is its most striking feature. No other country imprisons so many of its racial or ethnic minorities. The United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid. In Washington, D.C., it is estimated that… Continue Reading →
  • Beyond the Big Names of the Civil Rights Movement
    “It was Jo Ann Robinson and E.D. Nixon, not Dr. King, that led the spark that created a successful Montgomery Bus Boycott. This story of grassroots activists, of unnamed women and men who made a critical difference, was duplicated a thousand times across the South. […] So, the Civil Rights… Continue Reading →
  • The Alt-Right: Reactionary Rehabilitation for White Masculinity
      “Crises of national masculinity are a dominant and recurring feature of mainstream political discourse in the United States, but their political utility for jingoistic and authoritarian campaigns bears particular relevance in the modern day. 9/11, and the subsequent war on terror, enshrined a very particular version of masculine crisis… Continue Reading →
  • The Strife between Workman and Machine
    Today marks the day where Marx’s influential and widely-read book Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1: The Process of Production of Capital (1867) was published 150 years ago: “But machinery not only acts as a competitor who gets the better of the workman, and is constantly on the… Continue Reading →
  • The Biggest Myth about our Brains is that they are “Male” or “Female”
    “I realized that if certain areas of the brain could change from the typical ‘female form’ to the typical ‘male form’ under stress, there was no point in talking about the female brain and the male brain” “We take for granted how often laymen and even researchers use science—and specifically… Continue Reading →
  • No Excuses for a Racist Murderer
    “Each year on the 19th of January, there is renewed effort to canonize Robert E. Lee, the greatest confederate general. His personal comeliness, his aristocratic birth and his military prowess all call for the verdict of greatness and genius. But one thing–one terrible fact–militates against this, and that is the… Continue Reading →
  • … the more masculinity asserts itself, the more it calls itself into question.
    “The closer we come to uncovering some form of exemplary masculinity, a masculinity which is solid and sure of itself, the clearer it becomes that masculinity is structured through contradiction: the more it asserts itself, the more it calls itself into question.” Segal, Lynne. 1990. Slow Motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing… Continue Reading →
  • Robert K. Merton, “Foreword to a Preface for an Introduction to a Prolegomenon to a Discourse on a Certain Subject
    “There can be no doubt, I think, that the subject we are about to consider is one of the profound importance to us all. Indeed, this hardly needs to be said. Surely, the significance of the issues we are to examine here is almost self-evident. And yet, there are indications… Continue Reading →
  • The Irresponsibility of Guilt
    “Change and learning occur most readily when you (a) recognize that an error has occurred and (b) develop a strategy for correcting the problem. An attitude of self-love and relaxation facilitates this, whereas guilt often interferes. . . .”
  • Men at Bay: The ‘Men’s Movement’ and Its Newest Best-Sellers
    “Therapy of course has value for dealing with situations of crisis and despair. In less dramatic situations it often helps with sheer survival. But to transform emotional relationships, and a complex emotional structure like ‘masculinity,’ is inherently a collective project not an individual one. It must involve large numbers of… Continue Reading →
  • Feminist Masculinity
    Originally posted on Sociological Fragments:
    “Feminist masculinity presupposes that it is enough for males to have value, that they do not have to “do,” to “perform,” to be affirmed and loved. Rather than defining strength as “power over,” feminist masculinity defines strength as one’s capacity to be responsible for self…
  • Combatting Toxic Masculinity In Our Schools – Un-Teaching Gender Stereotypes For Boys
    “All of this matters. All of these subtle and not-so-subtle messages are how we teach masculinity and femininity to children. It is important to remember that there is no biological reason why boys should not play with dolls or wear dresses. There is no biological reason for boys to like… Continue Reading →
  • The Language of Gender Violence, Jackson Katz
    “[Men and masculinity] have been rendered invisible in much of the discourse. Dominant groups often go unchallenged in society, and their power and privilege goes unexamined. [Gender violence issues] affect women at every level, but I am here to say that the very fact of just calling these issues ‘women’s issues’… Continue Reading →
  • Mike Riggs on “Real Men”
    “Some thoughts on macho talk regarding the Montana incident. The idea that real men occasionally hit, and that real men hit back, is bad for men. I say this as someone who was much bigger than other humans starting at around age five, and who used his fist from an… Continue Reading →
  • Imposter Syndrome
    “I just look at all these people, and I think, what the heck am I doing here? They’ve made amazing things. I just went where I was sent.” And I said, “Yes. But you were the first man on the moon. I think that counts for something.” And I felt a… Continue Reading →
  • Boys and Their Toys
    Contemporary self-making often requires dramatic reinvention. Left: A shy midwesterner, Marion Michael Morrison, transformed himself into John Wayne, the most readily identifiable masculine icon of the decades following World War II. (Publicity photography) Bottom: And President George W. Bush, son and grandson of aristocratic New England bluebloods, who repped at… Continue Reading →
  • Teaching Men to Be Emotionally Honest
    “His voice quavering, the young man stammered something […] about how women can be as insensitive and hurtful as guys. He sounded like a victim himself. But afterward, when I asked him if he had reached out to any of his guy friends for advice or solace, he stared at… Continue Reading →
  • Invisible Laws of Capitalism
    “In capitalist society individuals are controlled by a pitiless law usually beyond their comprehension. The alienated human specimen is tied to society as a whole by an invisible umbilical cord: the law of value. This law acts upon all aspects of one’s life, shaping its course and destiny. The laws… Continue Reading →
  • Setting Out
    “I hate travelling and explorers. Yet here I am proposing to tell the story of my expeditions. But how long it has taken me to make up my mind to do so! It is now fifteen years since I left Brazil for the last time and all during this period… Continue Reading →
  • We’ve been labelled ‘anti-sex difference’ for demanding greater scientific rigour
    “[W]e and our colleagues have been named as “anti-sex difference”, and thus some of the prime culprits in creating this situation. This is like accusing the people who invented airbags as being “anti-seatbelts”. We are all aiming for better science.” “Some of the errors and traps we identified included human… Continue Reading →
  • Faking It
    “So how does this discussion help us to make sense of women faking orgasm? We have argued that what is demanded of women in the technique/work narrative is proof of the value of the man’s work, of the soundness of his technique. Thus, women are expected to experience orgasm. But… Continue Reading →
  • Visualizing Deviance: The Promiscuous (Heterosexual World of Sport)
    Before I was married, I truly lived the bachelor’s life. I’m no Wilt Chamberlain, but as I traveled around NBA cities, I was never at a loss for female companionship. . . . There were just some bachelors almost every woman in L.A. wanted to be with: Eddie Murphy, Arsenio… Continue Reading →
  • In an ideological world . . .
    [I]n an ideological world . . . words rarely have unambiguous meanings, where notions are inexact, and have political value precisely because they are inexact and hence capable of suggesting a range of possible interpretations . . . . [T]his inexact world . . . of dreams and illusions …. Continue Reading →
  • Men Talking About Violence. Effects of Violence: Emotional Effects
    “It is not possible to endure repeated physical attack, to sustain repeated injuries, and to live in an atmosphere of fear of repeat victimization without experiencing anxiety and emotional tension. While the long-term effects of violence and permanent emotional damage cannot be assumed, there can be little doubt that such… Continue Reading →
  • Ideology Interpellates Individuals as Subjects
    Ideology Interpellates Individuals as Subjects This thesis is simply a matter of making my last proposition explicit: there is no ideology except by the subject and for subjects. Meaning, there is no ideology except for concrete subjects, and this destination for ideology is only made possible by the subject: meaning,… Continue Reading →
  • “One Day I’m Going to be Really Successful”: The Social Class Politics of Videos Made for the “It Gets Better” Anti-Gay Bullying Project
    “The individualism built into IGB [It Gets Better] and the lack of structural critique makes problematic social class narratives particularly likely. Social class is fundamental to IGB because one of the primary ways in the US for LGBT people to document how they have improved their lives is through extensive… Continue Reading →
  • Orientalism Now: Popular Images and Social Science Representations
    “Here are a few examples of how the Arab is often represented today. Note how readily “the Arab” seems to accommodate the transformations and reductions–all of a simply tendentious kind–into which he is continually being forced.” (p. 285) “[…] after the 1973 war the Arab appeared everywhere as something more… Continue Reading →
  • Preface to “Intimate” Violence against Women
    “As class sizes have increased and more and more of our graduates have chosen professions dedicated to helping victims of intimate violence, there are moments when we muse about the day when books like this will no longer need to be written. We try to imagine what it would be… Continue Reading →
  • Gloria Steinem, Preface to “Women Respond to the Men’s Movement”
    “Make no mistake about it: Women want a men’s movement. We are literally dying for it. If you doubt that, just listen to women’s desperate testimonies of hope that the men in our lives will become more nurturing toward children, more able to talk about emotions, less hooked on a… Continue Reading →

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