Archive for the 'Masculinity' Category

The big issues

Published
by
Anna Winter
1 month, 1 week ago
in Feminism, Masculinity, State/Territory Elections and Women
. 22 Comments

On a day when speculation ran rife that WA had lost the nation’s biggest resource development project, the Inpex Liquefied Natural Gas project in the Kimberley valued at $25 billion, Alan Carpenter announced yesterday he would be closing the bars at Parliament House.

That announcement, aimed at wedging Colin Barnett over his predecessor Troy Buswell, was pretty typical of how this election has gone in the first two weeks and might explain why at the halfway mark of the campaign Labor finds itself in a tight contest against a crisis-ridden Opposition that only settled on a leader the day before the election was called.

Barnett may be obsessed with Brian Burke, but the Labor campaign is a little too fond of the Buswell jokes they had prepared to let them go this quickly. There are many valid points to be made about Buswell’s continued political success, in particular the effect it’s had, and will continue to have, on women in the Liberal Party, which translates to the women whom they seek to govern. But stunts like this impress nobody, and they belittle the real issues that Buswell’s behaviour brings to light. The problem with Buswell, and the boys’ clubs on both sides, is not that there are bars in parliament house.

Continue reading ‘The big issues’

WA Labor takes aim at the Liberals’ “boys club”

Published
by
Kim
1 month, 2 weeks ago
in Advertising, Feminism, Masculinity, State/Territory Elections and Women
. 12 Comments

I suspect none of the major parties federally or in any of the states and territories could entirely escape the accusation of being a “boys club”, but I’m very interested to see - for the first time I can think of - gendered cultures within a political party being raised as an election issue in Australia. The WA Labor Party is running a radio ad which you can listen to here. The ad highlights the disparity in female representation between the two major parties, and it’s reminds voters of some of the appalling behaviour associated with former leader (and current Shadow Treasurer) Troy Buswell. But aside from the ikkiness of the boy culture exposed by Troy “I did not have intercourse with that quokka” Buswell, there’s clearly something in the accusation - the way that “star” candidate Deirdre Willmott was casually elbowed aside to accommodate the resurrected Colin Barnett really seems to have been appalling from a story in the weekend Fin Review quoting Willmott at length. Apparently Barnett met her two days before, and mentioned nothing, and she wasn’t told what was going on even before the press conference at which Buswell resigned. A range of other female Liberal MPs resigned from the party in the last term, and some are recontesting, with independent Liberal Liz Constable being co-opted into a frontbench role by Barnett to try to soften the damage.

I’d be watching any gender breakdown in the polls in WA very carefully.

Elsewhere: More from William Bowe aka The Poll Bludger for subscribers in Crikey.

On Rage: Raging against Germaine

Published
by
Mark
1 month, 3 weeks ago
in Books, Writers & Writing, Culture, History, Indigenous, Masculinity, Media, Politics and Race
. 232 Comments

As a bit of a follow up to the discussion of Germaine Greer’s latest book On Rage here, I was interested to see Gary Sauer-Thompson observe that most of the reaction (and there’s been tons of it) to her writing and various speeches and appearances in the press has completely avoided the issues she actually raises, and concentrated on interweaving loud denunciations of her - and claims that she’s irrelevant - with already well established “media narratives”. If she’s in fact got nothing of relevance to say, as one of our commenters observed, you have to wonder why all the energy expended.

Her book hasn’t hit the shelves in Brisneyland as far as I can tell, but I’m awaiting it with interest. There’s a taste of what’s to come at Public Opinion.

Continue reading ‘On Rage: Raging against Germaine’

Grammatical gender

Published
by
Kim
1 month, 3 weeks ago
in Books, Writers & Writing, Culture, Language, Levity, Masculinity, USA and Women
. 29 Comments

It’s well known that grammar stoushes can get a tad heated.

A very curious article in the Boston Globe reflecting on punctuation wars surrounding the semicolon, with the tag line “the punctuation mark that makes men tremble”, shows something rather interesting about language in use aside from its ostensible casus belli: how quickly heated arguments lead to the invocation of gendered abuse.

Consider this:

Real men, goes the unwritten rule of American punctuation, don’t use semi-colons.

And Kilpatrick, in a 2006 column, restated those sentiments at a higher pitch, calling the semicolon “girly,” “odious,” and “the most pusillanimous, sissified, utterly useless mark of punctuation ever invented.”

Nevertheless, the semicolon has been suffering. Paul Collins, in a recent Slate article, cited a study showing “a stunning drop in semicolon usage between the 18th and 19th centuries, from 68.1 semicolons per thousand words to just 17.7.”

You’d think a victory like that would satisfy the anti-semicolon crowd. But no, they keep worrying that those girly, prissy, hermaphroditic punctuation marks will somehow infect their sturdy prose. If semicolons are masculine enough for Melville and Irving, why should they unsettle Barthelme and Vonnegut? Are today’s male writers just more insecure than yesterday’s about the manliness of their vocation?

Guest post by Aaron Darc: Morgan and the Multiplex

Published
by
Guest Poster
2 months ago
in Consumerism, Culture, Film, TV, Video etc, Food, Foreign policy, Life, Masculinity, Relationships, Religion, Sociology, Terrorism, USA, Urbanism and War
. 193 Comments

Aaron Darc, whose work will be familiar to LPers from his incarnation as Eye on Big Brother, recently interviewed film maker Morgan Spurlock. Spurlock came to prominence with Super Size Me and his new film Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden? will be released in Australia next week. You can read more of Aaron’s writing at Pop Psychology for Beautiful People.

MORGAN & THE MULTIPLEX

From fat to fatwah, Murgon Spurlock has lost the pounds he gained for his smash-hit, Super Size Me, and hired himself a camel, for his latest film, Where In The World Is Osama Bin Laden? I caught up with Morgan, this week, on his press tour of Sydney.

My 20 year old brother, Glenn, lives in a distant galaxy from me, on a planet called Regional Suburbia. He likes football, easy girls and fast cars. His favourite film is The Fast & The Furious; he calls it “wicked sh*t.” It would never have dawned on me, it goes without saying, to peruse my brother’s DVD collection. I knew it would be large, and I knew it would have been entirely purchased at JB Hifi; I know probably more than I should about Revolution Plasma and its disturbing power to appeal to the working and middle classes, and replace what would once have been their lives; draining whatever connection to the real world they had, by offering their unconscious longing to escape, a glistening, mostly poisonous, apple. Here, everybody! Plug into this - you’ll find it… easier. You will have a purpose. You will own that 42″ plasma, even if you f*ck yourself up on credit to do it, and you will build thyself a DVD Tower. There, thy shall easily access The Fast & The Furious; it shall keep the company of Face Off, Rush Hour, the Terminator Trilogy and, but of course, the Die Hard Box Set. Got plasma? check. Got plasma tower? Check. Okay, then, you’re all set to waste a good deal of your life plugged right into consumer oblivion. Isn’t modernity just fabulous?!

I only neared my brother’s DVD tower, out of that familiar desperation to escape the reality of my awkward bi-monthly family visit. Somewhere, in between the time your mother has once again implicitly let it be known you’ve not amounted to what you should have, and the moment following eight meaningless remarks about the state of recent weather, you look around the room, and you think, quite simply, “What can I do, here, to pass the time without having to sincerely engage my family?” My brother’s DVD tower seemed like a pretty good idea.

Continue reading ‘Guest post by Aaron Darc: Morgan and the Multiplex’

What’s Sam got to do with it?

Published
by
Darlene
2 months ago
in Culture, Masculinity and Victoria
. 87 Comments

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Poor Paula Wriedt is obviously having a difficult time at the moment. It’s hard enough to endure such times without media interest, so it must be even tougher with the media lurking about. Imagine how hard it must be when the reason for much of that media interest has come from the fact that you were the subject of one of Sam Newman’s comments. Newman just has to open up his ugly juvenile gob and he gets press in Victoria.  While some of the attention is negative, there’s often a ”Sam’s just a good ol’ boy with a sense of humour” thing not far from the surface.

Here’s some of the headlines from a couple of mainstream news sites about Ms Wreidt’s plight:

Sam Newman sexism row MP in health crisis

Sex slur MP rushed to hospital

MP at centre of Sam Newman ’sex slur’ controversy in hospital

Cognitive dissonance in the Seduction Community

Published
by
tigtog
2 months, 1 week ago
in Feminism, Levity, Masculinity, Relationships and Sexuality
. 54 Comments

This (long) post is inspired by the tapes of self-styled seduction guru Dimitri The Lover (AKA James Sears) that are being discussed on blogs all over at the moment (or at least linked to with a LOLOLOL!!1!), and the arguments as to whether they are genuine recordings of a creep or performance art from a guy engaging in viral marketing for a movie. I’ll get to them later, but first a little about the background of the “seduction community”, because Sears claims to be a different kind of seduction guru.

There’s been a lot written about the seduction community (AKA players/PUAs (Pick Up Artists)) in the last few years, and it’s worth emphasising here that most men join these (largely online) communities because they are simply looking to gain more confidence when interacting with women, that there’s nothing wrong in principle with seeking sex without commitment for either men or women as long as everybody’s being emotionally honest and physically safe/sane, and that most of these men probably do ultimately want a committed relationship one day. These points are usually clouded by the best-known Community gurus emphasising cynical bedpost-notching above all (and making a lot of money talking about the ways that their special techniques allegedly make women powerless to resist them).

One of the aims of the Community is to correct a common problem for inexperienced men - an overly romantic view of women as sweet, pure and sexually demure that makes these men overly hesitant and overly eager to please. The Community doesn’t tend to mention that this package usually includes a belief that sex is inherently dirty, resulting in a side-serve of self-loathing for their desire to defile women, which is the part of their attitude that is most offputting, rather than the common plaint that the men are just “being too nice”.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with correcting the pernicious stereotype that sex sullies women and that men must supplicate and compensate women for their dirty male desires. Done properly it can lead to a more realistic, relaxed and confident style of social interaction that both sexes can appreciate. Unfortunately, instead of moving away from gender-stereotypes to view women as people with highly individual wants and needs (that often do actually include sex for fun with the right person at the right time), what tends to happen in the Community is that one gender-stereotype is replaced with another: women as fickle, emotional, selfish and easily manipulated. The idea that sex demeans women remains, but is recast as sluts deserve to be demeaned. Then the Community wonders why folks (not just feminists) find fault with their collective wisdom. Continue reading ‘Cognitive dissonance in the Seduction Community’

Michael Savage is a drongo

Published
by
tigtog
2 months, 2 weeks ago
in Authoritarianism, Disability, Feminism, Levity, Masculinity, Parenting, Philosophy, Politics, Relationships, Science and Women
. 29 Comments

I could have used many harsher terms, but I was exhausted from outrage and despair after reading his latest, and couldn’t really give him my best invective.

Apparently, despite decades of study from medical and childhood health professions, Michael Savage knows better than all of them when it comes to autism. (Like so many of his fellow cultural warrior pundits, an awful lot of it boils down to WIMMIN R DOIN IT RONG (AS USUAL (COZ WIMMIN R LOOSRS)), but there’s a nasty side-dish of JUST SNAP OUT OF IT)

That’s what autism is. What do you mean they scream and they’re silent? They don’t have a father around to tell them, ‘Don’t act like a moron. You’ll get nowhere in life. Stop acting like a putz. Straighten up. Act like a man. Don’t sit there crying and screaming, idiot.’” Savage concluded, “[I]f I behaved like a fool, my father called me a fool. And he said to me, ‘Don’t behave like a fool.’ The worst thing he said — ‘Don’t behave like a fool. Don’t be anybody’s dummy. Don’t sound like an idiot. Don’t act like a girl. Don’t cry.’ That’s what I was raised with. That’s what you should raise your children with. Stop with the sensitivity training. You’re turning your son into a girl, and you’re turning your nation into a nation of losers and beaten men. That’s why we have the politicians we have.

Basically? F*ck you and that ablist, misogynist high horse you’re riding, Savage. Continue reading ‘Michael Savage is a drongo’

World Youth Day: The dark side of the force?

Published
by
Kim
2 months, 3 weeks ago
in Australiana, Culture, Film, TV, Video etc, Levity, Masculinity, NSW Government, Photography and Sydney
. 33 Comments

Elliott Bledsoe reminds us not to take men wearing robes all that seriously. Make sure you look at this photo very carefully indeed.

Note: If you don’t like what you see - tough - it’s now legal to be annoyed.

Continue reading ‘World Youth Day: The dark side of the force?’

“The bitch from Prada”

Published
by
Kim
3 months ago
in Books, Writers & Writing, Culture, Fashion, Levity, Masculinity, Media, Sexuality and Women
. 27 Comments

There’s been some (rather entertaining) discussion on a recent thread about alternative names for mainstream media blogs. After all, they really are a different sphere, aren’t they? Coincidentally, and it’s a happy coincidence, a guest Hoyden at Hoyden About Town has posted a very comprehensive guide to how to attain that bloggy success you’ve always hankered after. And the rules aren’t all that complex. One of the important tips - men blog about sport and politics, and women blog about dating. However, some things transcend the gender of the writer:

Now whether a male or female writer, one simply *must* make all sorts of gender generalisations, mostly about de wimenz.

The really comforting advice is that you don’t need to write all that much at all. Continue reading ‘“The bitch from Prada”’

Now that Pamela Bone is dead…

Published
by
Kim
3 months, 2 weeks ago
in Activism, Apocalypse, Crime, Culture, Developing world, Donation challenge, Ethics, Feminism, History, Howardia, Imperialism, International, Iraq, Masculinity, Media, Politics, Polls, Race, Religion, Sexuality, Sociology, USA, War and Women
. 46 Comments

Yeah, you might have noticed already. I’m in a Truthiness mood tonight, as Stephen Colbert might say. Remember all the loud denunciations I copped from Harry Clarke, Tim Blair et al et al etc. - all the feminists of total convenience - for not denouncing the female genital mutilation loudly enough? Coz it’s all about teh Islam and threats to Western Civ, etc., and that mob are all on the side of women’s rights, and that manly man of steel John Howard is taking us to war to free Afghani women from burqas. And George W. Bush is going to hunt those Al-Qaeda evildoers down. (And Islam is not a race, and some of my best friends… oops, hang on?) While Laura and Condi look after the oppressed women. Or something… Oh yeah, it isn’t 2003 any more… Remember that word fistula - you might not have read that on teh Blair blog - being a word of three syllables and all. And in Latin.

But I talked about it at the time. Now that Pamela Bone is dead (and God rest her soul, may she be blessed with eternal rest, and may perpetual light shine upon her), where are the voices with the loud condemn? What’s with that Australian crusade for women’s rights in benighted Islamic Middle Eastern countries? After all, we - Dolly Downer and John Howard and Tim Blair and Andrew Bolt and Planet Janet told us so - are all (post?) feminists now. It’s on the citizenship test, dude - and dudette a la 50s pinup style no doubt. (Ps - don’t use that politically correct, activist judge f-word though…)

Well, never mind. Here’s a post from The Global Sociology Blog for the benefit of anyone who wanted to continue highlighting the horrors perpetrated on women in the developing world even if there’s not a convenient culture wars damn the left angle in it. (And that’s not to say that women in the developed world don’t still cop a lot - but there’s something to celebrate about a very large majority of Australians agreeing - at least in theory when asked by pollsters - that women have rights over their own choices and bodies - even if that masks continued gender inequality in oh, so many ways…).

You can donate to Medicins San Frontieres here.

And you might be interested in the fact that rape has finally been recognised by the UN as a war crime, something I wrote about last year, but something the keyboard warriors seem to… well, gloss over is far too kind. Because the fact that women are overwhelmingly the victims of war seems to be recognised neither by the pro-war Right nor the “humanitarian intervention” so-called Left. Continue reading ‘Now that Pamela Bone is dead…’

“Sacred institution of marriage” may have something to learn from same-sex relationships

Published
by
Kim
3 months, 4 weeks ago
in Feminism, Lesbian and Gay, Masculinity, Relationships, Sexuality and Women
. 31 Comments

There’s a really fascinating article in the New York Times‘ health section by Tara Parker-Pope - accessed via Feministing:

For insights into healthy marriages, social scientists are looking in an unexpected place.

A growing body of evidence shows that same-sex couples have a great deal to teach everyone else about marriage and relationships. Most studies show surprisingly few differences between committed gay couples and committed straight couples, but the differences that do emerge have shed light on the kinds of conflicts that can endanger heterosexual relationships.

The findings offer hope that some of the most vexing problems are not necessarily entrenched in deep-rooted biological differences between men and women. And that, in turn, offers hope that the problems can be solved.

Aggregating a number of studies, the article suggests:

Continue reading ‘“Sacred institution of marriage” may have something to learn from same-sex relationships’

Climate change denialism - why now?

Published
by
Kim
4 months, 1 week ago
in Climate change, Culture, Masculinity, Media, Politics and Science
. 158 Comments

Time was when it was easy to see where climate change denialism was coming from - corporate astroturf and the big biz of energy politics refracted through the media and the political sphere. What’s been puzzling me for some time is why there’s still a relentless drum beat of (increasingly nonsensical) climate change denialist posts coming from the likes of “Australia’s most talked about columnist”, Andrew Bolt. When he’s not in a tizz about those pervs in the yartz, Bolta repeats and repeats and repeats the climate change denialist message. Sometimes this is valorised as being a “contrarian”, a line we also get from folks like Keith Windschuttle - as if stupidity were one of the Great Western Virtues. But it’s not obvious at all to see - beyond the “bash the Greens and teh left” angle - why this mob think this stuff still has legs.

Continue reading ‘Climate change denialism - why now?’

Do economists buy food?

Published
by
Kim
4 months, 2 weeks ago
in Economics, Feminism, Government, Masculinity, Media and Women
. 47 Comments

A lot of the debate about inflation targeting has been obscured by the Libs’ petrol bowser politics (and as well as it being dumb potential policy, I think it’s been dumb politics for Labor to start playing this game - however tentatively - as Mr Denmore said in comments, there’s a very simple political answer to the bowser tax wars the ALP should be employing). But I still think there’s a valuable point to make about the dissonance between elite discourses about the economy and perceptions about lived experience of the economy. The ALP, in government if not in opposition, has to keep both the policy wonks and the punters happy. And they were trying to with their claims about the budget being anti-inflationary in its fiscal impact and that much of inflation’s causes were from factors quite extraneous to influence by government policy. Even if they shot themselves in the foot by joining Brendan Nelson at the petrol pump. And I think it’s a direct result of an own goal from Kevin Rudd, when he said that he’d done “everything… possible” to address the price of petrol, and this was instantly characterised as being “complacency”, being “out of touch” and so on in the hyper-media cycle we all now deal with, including very clever Prime Ministers.

But what I wanted to raise was a thought inspired by this guest post at John Quiggin’s blog, where his guest poster Bruce Bradbury examines the much higher rate of inflation in staples rather than consumer durables:

This gap perhaps explains some of the divergence between the expressed concerns of consumers and the complacency of economists. Though consumers know that their next TV will be much better than their last one for much the same price, they are still struggling to meet their weekly supermarket and petrol station bills.

Continue reading ‘Do economists buy food?’

Questions on the Bill Henson “sexualisation of children” debate

Published
by
Kim
4 months, 2 weeks ago
in Art, Consumerism, Culture, Ethics, Masculinity, Media, Parenting, Photography, Politics, Sexuality and Women
. 251 Comments

Image by Bill Henson - sourced from DailyServing.com

I’ve made my interpretation of Bill Henson’s images of adolescents clear in a previous post, and I want to talk here about some of the issues raised by and about the “debate” on Henson’s photography and the subsequent charges laid against him and the Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery owners.

The first point to make is that whatever the “debate” is now about, it’s not about Henson’s images as such. They literally disappeared from view on Thursday afternoon, and the interpretation of the image that’s attracted the most angst has been heavily slanted by its reproduction in numerous tabloid media outlets, with black bars over the subject’s breasts which have made it a sexualised image no matter what Henson’s (or the subject’s) intentions or its original context might have suggested. For what it’s worth, you can see the photo here at Junk for Code. The interpretive context for this image has been shifted, and violently reinscribed as the invisible or altered focus of a media circus where the battle lines have been drawn between “the arts community” (some of whose spokespeople have been doing the debate and themselves no favours, incidentally) and “society” - as represented in part by agents of vigilance such as Hetty Johnson and in part by the instigators of the talkback outrage, the Miranda Devines of this world. As soon as they get up and running, you’ve got zero chance in the so-called public sphere of making any sort of nuanced point, as nuance is immediately equated with “condoning pedophilia” or whatever heights of absurdity we’ve reached.

Continue reading ‘Questions on the Bill Henson “sexualisation of children” debate’