“Try to understand this at any rate: if violence began this very evening and if exploitation and oppression had never existed on the earth, perhaps the slogans of non-violence might end the quarrel. But if the whole regime, even your non-violent ideas, are conditioned by a thousand-year-old oppression, your passivity serves only to place you... Continue Reading →
“Even in the advanced centers of civilization, violence actually prevails: it is practiced by the police, in the prisons and mental institutions, in the fight against racial minorities; it is carried, by the defenders of metropolitan freedom, into the backward countries. This violence indeed breeds violence. But to refrain from violence in the face of... Continue Reading →
“Within relationships, forms of male violence such as rape, battering, and what Meg Luxton calls the “petty tyranny” of male domination in the household [1] must be understood both “in terms of violence directed against women as women and against women as wives.”[2] The family provides an arena for the expression of needs and emotions... Continue Reading →
“When Jimmy lashed out at Shirley, he was, as one abuse expert terms it, “offending from the victim position.” This is perhaps the most common pattern of male violence toward women. Flooded with depression and feelings of victimization, Jimmy used rage to physiologically pump up his sense of deflation. Research shows that rage simultaneously releases... Continue Reading →
“If women, subjected to a labour of socialization which tends to diminish and deny them, learn the negative virtues of self-denial, resignation and silence, men are also prisoners, and insidiously victims, of the dominant representation. ... Being a man ... implies an ought-to be ... which imposes itself in the mode of self-evidence, the taken-for-granted.... Continue Reading →
“Aggression is the building of a precarious structure of internalized violence. The continual conscious and unconscious blocking and denial of passivity and all the emotions and feelings men associate with passivity—fear, pain, sadness, embarrassment—is a denial of part of what we are. The constant psychological and behavioral vigilance against passivity and its derivatives is a... Continue Reading →
“Most men aren't violent, but 90% of violent crimes are committed by men. The question is why? For too long we've identified masculine strength with violence. But true strength comes from challenging the myth that being a real man means putting up a false front, disrespecting others, and engaging in violent and self-destructive behavior. Let's... Continue Reading →
“The incident in Orlando was a homophobic attack, and whether [Omar] Mateen [the shooter] was (a self-hating) homosexual himself or whether he had been “radicalized,” neither of these things detract from the fact that homosexuality challenges notions of masculinity in the modern world. Using homophobia as the frame to understand what happened in Orlando, one... Continue Reading →
Sociological Fragments 