There’s a really fascinating post at scatterplot from sociologist Tina Fetner. She reports on research with Bob Andersen just published in the American Journal of Political Science. Their interest was sparked by a sudden shift in Canada and the United States towards more accepting attitudes towards same-sex relationships and lesbians and gays - among people from all ages contrary to the usual stickiness of attitudes formed early in the lifecourse. (Note that the shift was from a smaller base in the US than Canada.) They wondered whether the post-materialist thesis - the idea that when material wealth increases, other issues come to the foreground in such a way as to promote greater tolerance. The new study found:
Never let it be said that this blog lets a good idea from its commenters go to waste. Even when that good idea emerges in response to a monotonous manifestation of the enormous ego of one of the blogosphere’s most ubiquitous hydra headed trolls. While Pavlov’s Cat is no doubt right that basing one’s entire orientation to life on a film is somewhat superficial, on the other hand, as a number of commenters indicated, it might be a neat thought experiment. For there is a serious point here - the mass medium of the film does actually provide something of a socialising phenomenon in modernity. (Whether that’s still true in late or post modernity is perhaps another debate.) For instance, I was recently alerted - through reading Israeli sociologist Eva Illouz’ Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism - to a really huge project conducted in America in the 1930s - the Payne Fund Studies. Chicago School sociologist Henry Blumer asked adolescents about the impact of movies on them (and in many ways the 30s was the height of Hollywood dreaming). He found that a lot of teens modeled their dating behaviour consciously on film scripts, as it were:
When I saw “The Pagan” I fell harder than ever for Ramon Navarro. All my girl friends talk about is these wonderful love stories. When I see a picture like that it makes me like my steady boy friend all the more… it happens that through the movies I have learned to close my eyes, and I use that “Deep Bend” pose.
From watching love scenes in the movies I have noticed that when a girl is kissed she closes her eyes; this I found that I also unconsciously do. When [boys] go to make love, to kiss or hug, I put them off at first, but it always ends in them having their way. I guess I imitated this from the movies because I see it in almost every show I go to.
Well, as I noted on another thread about Germaine Greer, I’ve bought and now read On Rage. I’d like this post to stick to discussion of the merits of her arguments, which I continue to think has been something largely absent from most of the debate to date. I also think that very few people who’ve rushed into print have actually read her book, and instead taken the odd comment here or there that she’s made in the course of promoting it and projected all sorts of things onto her.
Even those who have seem to be reacting to parts instead of the whole - for instance, Marcia Langton, describing the remarks about her in the book as an “astonishing attack on me”. That’s quite odd, because Langton is being challenged rather than attacked in the book - challenged to agree with Greer’s view that - on the basis of the evidence - the literal appropriation of Indigenous women’s bodies by white men, something Greer documents with footnoted citations from both historians and contemporary sources - is part of the reason for Indigenous male rage. All the rest of what Langton says - accusations of “a 1970s style argument”, a “panoply of protest slogans deployed as social theory” and so on - unless I’m missing something, appears misdirected, or at least based on inference rather than the text itself. On p. 88 of the book, any reasonable reader would see that Langton is not the one being accused of “collusion” with the state, what she took umbrage at, and that in fact the point being made is that the differential impacts of gender on the colonised is still used by whitefellas as a lever to avoid responsibility and to divide people. There’s a disagreement of view, but not an accusation, and it hardly justifies Langton’s claim that the essay is “racist”.
What Greer is doing in On Rage is a provocation to the degree that it’s asking a range of people differently positioned within Australian culture to reflect on the totality of what has occurred and how ineffectual slogans are - and there are slogans within the talk of the “responsibilities” crew as well - in the absence of both understanding and a genuine coming to terms with the parade of extraordinary horrors that is the story of Indigenous dispossession. Greer’s essay doesn’t make for comfortable reading, and that’s the point. Langton may be justified in taking umbrage at some of the things Greer has said in the course of promoting it, and I can quite understand that, but I think in this instance it’s vital to separate the force and quality of the argument in the text itself from the personality of its author. Much of what has been published and said elsewhere, for instance in Greer’s Sydney Morning Herald op/ed adds to (and in a way detracts from) the argument in the book, rather than reproduces it. Greer might be her own worst enemy in this case, but that doesn’t absolve her interlocutors from reacting with their own rage, or at least spleen.
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’
We’ve featured a couple of posts here about the upheavals in the Anglican Church over conservative bishops’ hatred of teh gay, and the farce that is the Lambeth Conference, where openly gay American Episcopal Bishop Gene Robinson has been prohibited from attending - alone of all the 800 something bishops worldwide. At the earlier conservative meeting in Jerusalem, GAFCON, where Sydney’s own Archbishop Jensen was among the movers and shakers, the pr line was that the conservative African bishops were only concerned with the purity of the biblical faith, standing against all the terrible first world postmodern relativism.
In fact, the story of Nigerian Christian gay rights activist Davis Mac-Iyalla, who has just been granted asylum by the British government, goes a long way towards demonstrating what is actually at stake in the alleged Christianity of the Nigerian church’s hierarchy. As does their attitude towards legislation proposed in Nigeria last year. All this is very far from some genteel doctrinal dispute, or a culture war only violent in its rhetoric.
Just a quick post to update some of the stories we’ve been following around the ecclesiastical traps - Irfan Yusuf, writing in New Matilda, contrasts the treatment doled out to Sheikh Al-Hilaly with the response (or lack thereof) from media and political figures to Bishop Anthony Fisher’s comments about survivors of sexual abuse. In an article on the same theme in Crikey, Yusuf links to a rather damning take at Media Watch on the News Limited coverage and commentary of accusations of church indifference to the victims of sexual abuse day raised during the World Youth Day event they were paid sponsors of.
Meanwhile, at the Lambeth Conference, conservative Anglican bishops are taking every opportunity to interrogate their fellow prelates about their ideological soundness on the loud condemnation of teh gay. Probably heretically, the Archbishop of York has suggested that there might just be more important issues for Christians than the ordination of gay bishops.
As a bit of a segue from my link to Eye on Big Brother’s last post, I was thinking a bit about Bianca and her body image issues, something I’ve discussed before. At one stage during Big Brother 2008, the narrative centred on Bianca’s breasts - her worries about her own body shape, her ambivalence about breast reduction surgery, and her displacement of her own troubled embodiment into criticism of Brigette and Rebecca and the other surgically enhanced FHM wannabes the show loved to cast over the last few years. She also had a bit of an awareness of how the womens’ bodies on the show functioned as signifiers of potential celebrity, and as objects to be scrutinised and traded among the men on the show - and implicitly the male viewers, though she didn’t really thematise this as such. Partly what was going on here was her own self-image and character work as “the smart chick”, but it’s also, when you reflect on it, I think, a classic example of how “society” is conceived in popular culture. I mentioned Rebecca Wilson’s comments on all the boob talk:
I think it was on the very first Big Brother Big Mouth this year that Rebecca Wilson asked whether it was normal for teenage and twenty-something women to talk so much about their breasts. She said that she couldn’t recall such discussions occurring when she was in her twenties.
It was a very easy contrast to make for the media - while World Youth Day 2008 has been acclaimed as a success by the Catholic Church in Australia, Anglicans were tearing themselves to pieces, with the decennial Lambeth Conference reduced to a farce. A large number of quasi-schismatic conservative bishops boycotted, having earlier set up a quasi-church outside the Anglican Communion’s traditional structures at GAFCON in Jerusalem.
I’m not sure if it’s in the BBC’s charter, but the venerable public broadcaster is allegedly trying to reach out to people with disabilities, and to increase social awareness of disability issues. Through such charming initiatives as their online Paris Hilton like trash celeb persona - “Disability Bitch”:
“Hi, I’m Disability Bitch. I’m disabled and I love it. Everyone should be disabled. Everyone should be like me.
“I own an extensive collection of colour-coordinated wigs and an even more extensive collection of colour-coordinated mobility aids, all of which complement my natural beauty…
Whatevs, darl. But there’s more. She’s not an all purpose disability bitch, but part of a reality tv franchise. In pursuit of its social inclusion agenda, the BBC is running a reality tv show - “Britain’s Missing Top Model” - the premise of which is that chicks missing limbs or in chairs can also be teh hotness and get to be in glossy fashion mags. It’s “Stylish, sassy, chic … disabled?”… The idea, I guess, is supposed to be that disability is no barrier to objectification. Continue reading ‘Disability and body image and reality tv’
It’s no secret that “the sectarian strand” is one of the less attractive aspects of Australian history, and interestingly, probably not one featured highly either in the so-called “black armband” or triumphalist narratives so beloved of our home grown Antipodean culture warriors. That may be because the deep cleavages - overlapping but not identical to class and ethnicity - around Catholicism and Protestantism needed to be elided and to be buried in order to construct the “Anglo-Celtic” identity which came into its own at the same time that the state aid controversy was settled into its grave and multiculturalism launched on its career. And not coincidentally. “Anglos” and “Celts” were on different sides of the political and cultural coin in the Great Southern Land of the Holy Spirit for most of its whitefella history. In a way, Gough Whitlam is probably the progenitor of the “mainstream” Anglo-Celtic Australian. But sectarianism typically rears its head as a defensive accusation whenever the Catholic Church is particularly prominent in public debate, and whenever criticism is directed at the Church’s institutional power.
It may well be that a residue of sectarian anti-Catholicism might be in play on the margins of all this, but one of the big ironies is that while Tony Abbott and others speculated that Pope Benedict’s message might not be communicated effectively, the Pope himself has seemingly become a football to be kicked around by the usual suspects in distinctly Australian culture wars which often have only a tenuous connection with his concerns. But are there not genuine issues - of public interest - that can and should be raised at a time when Catholicism is top of the pops in the media stakes?
Irfan Yusuf has the money quote on all the World Youth Day imbroglios, writing in today’s New Matilda:
I guess it really boils down to values. Cardinal Pell once accused Muslims of having difficulty separating Church from State. Unless he openly distances himself from (and not just denies involvement in) increased police powers designed to protect pilgrims from annoyance, his own secular credentials might look compromised.
On Lateline last night, in the context of new revelations about the crimes of Father Terrence Goodall, and George Pell’s casuistry in dealing with clergy abuse victim Anthony Jones, and his avoidance of any admission of culpability and therefore responsibility for the consequences of his actions, host Tony Jones interviewed prominent Catholic journalist and author Robert Blair Kaiser.
And I think that model can be applied to modern times and we can be a much more responsible, accountable church in a local situation where the bishop is not appointed by the Pope but elected by the people.
In referring to the democratising forces unleashed by Vatican II, Kaiser was suggesting that the root cause - not just of clergy abuse but also of cover-ups and grossly inadequate responses to its “horror” - is a deeply authoritarian tradition and its accompanying mindset and culture. George Pell is one of the leading lights of the Catholic “restorationists” who want to put all the genies of Vatican II back in the bottle, and return to a “Father Knows Best” model which has given us Catholics a Church marred and contaminated by misogyny and authoritarianism. Pell’s attitude to political power (which has been on show with World Youth Day) and his treatment of those whom some priests and brothers have monstered is cut from the same cloth - a desire to protect the institution and its power above all else. Continue reading ‘Annoyed! III’
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.
To be fair to Morris Iemma and his bunch of clowns masquerading as a government, New South Wales isn’t alone in imposing risible and over the top security regulations for major “public events”. We’ve seen similar things in finance talkfests with Melbourne and CHOGM in Queensland saw Peter Beattie invent preventive detention for “known public nuisances”, as well as going to ludicrous lengths to prevent protest. But Iemma’s mob seem to have made it an art form, perhaps because as I’ve speculated before, their sense of authoritarianism compensates for their total ineffectuality in governing just about anything else than public events. (Compare - “public services”.) But the latest bunch of regulations for the Pope Fest really take the cake. It’s more or less private governance. Where’s the public benefit in preventing pilgrims attending World Youth Day in Sydney this month from being annoyed? Will their world really come to an end if someone hands them a condom or wears a t-shirt with an anti-homophobia message? What possible public justification does the NSW government have for denying basic rights to freedom of expression at the instance of the fragile petals in Cardinal Pell’s hierarchy?
I can’t think of anything in particular to add to Senator Bartlett’s summary, and totally agree that the best recommendation of the report is the one advocating “more comprehensive education programs on sexual health and relationships”.
Implementation of such comprehensive education would do more than just help address the way in which children are sexualised, it would also help people generally be more rational in weighing up their options in pursuing sexual liasons and relationships, which should also improve matters such as STDs, unplanned pregnancies, and maybe even the separations and divorces that are due to the disappointment of unrealistic expectations.
The report also offers recommendations for industry guidelines and ethical codes, but Bartlett, while acknowledging the importance of particular aspects of our media culture, is not so sure that they are the most important arena for tackling the problem. His major points that aren’t being discussed enough in the overall debate: Continue reading ‘Senate report on the sexualisation of children in the contemporary media’
Larvatus Prodeo is an Australian group blog which discusses politics, sociology, culture, life, religion and science from a left of centre perspective. more»
Well, as I 
As a bit of a segue from 
I’m not sure if it’s in the BBC’s charter, but the venerable public broadcaster is allegedly trying to reach out to people with disabilities, and to increase social awareness of disability issues. Through such charming initiatives as their online Paris Hilton like trash celeb persona - 
There’s been some (rather entertaining) discussion 
To be fair to Morris Iemma and his bunch of clowns masquerading as a government, New South Wales isn’t alone in imposing risible and over the top security regulations for major “public events”. We’ve seen similar things in finance talkfests with Melbourne and CHOGM in Queensland saw Peter Beattie invent preventive detention for “known public nuisances”, as well as going to ludicrous lengths to prevent protest. But Iemma’s mob seem to have made it an art form, perhaps because as I’ve speculated 
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