tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12310464.post7258666722865605439..comments2024-02-26T13:34:55.746-06:00Comments on Comrade Kevin's Chrestomathy: Contrary to Some Voices, Masculinity is Not Under AttackComrade Kevinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11393718048145784837noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12310464.post-68818998551155894802010-02-09T10:27:54.063-06:002010-02-09T10:27:54.063-06:00Part of the problem is that as many women buy the ...Part of the problem is that as many women buy the stereotypes as men. It was Spartan women who told their sons and husbands, "come back with your shield, or on it." It was women who wandered the city streets in the world wars handing white feathers to any man not in uniform. It was women who recorded, and bought, songs saying things like, "Johnny be angry, Johnny be mad... I want a brave man, I want a cave man..." and "When you asked me out and I turned you down, Never thought that'd stop you from askin' now. Why'd you go and give up so easily? I thought you'd see ... When I say no I mean maybe, or maybe I mean yes." And women still swoon over "bad boys", and then are amazed when they act like bad boys.<br /><br />Maybe it's different today- though when I watch music videos I doubt it- but when I was coming of age, boys learned their male stereotypes as much from the behavior of the girls around them as from anything else, and what they were learning wasn't very enlightened- and this behavior usually continued well into the 20's. If feminists were more successful teaching young women about sexist behavior, it would end much faster; but somehow, the implication always seems to be that men's attitudes are formed in a vacuum, and women's part in their formation is rarely addressed.Joel Monkahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10631333436948102576noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12310464.post-25865244448310370782010-02-09T10:06:34.737-06:002010-02-09T10:06:34.737-06:00This post has something in common with both the ad...This post has something in common with both the ads you describe and a lot of academic feminism: detachment from the lived experience of, well, everybody else. Who besides a few intellectuals in the world’s wealthiest societies goes around critiquing Paternalism and meditating on abstract reform schemes? <br /><br />It seems bleakly comical that some Americans can fret about their masculinity being under attack while others worry that their young men are being destroyed by violence. <br /><br />On the specific subject of manhood and how it’s created, I’ve recently stumbled on the writing of <a href="http://books.google.com/books?q=Geoffrey+Canada" rel="nofollow">Geoffrey Canada</a> and am humbled by his insights, however theoretically uninformed. He's the founder of the <a href="http://www.hcz.org/" rel="nofollow">Harlem Children’s Zone</a> and has inspired some Obama administration policy. <br /><br />I’ve also been reading about the ways men in the ante-bellum South gained social status through mad boasting and senseless fighting that often ended in disfigurement or unpunished killing. No one planned for or desired these customs, but it’s possible to point to social and political facts that helped create them. Once they are in place, it’s very difficult for males not to participate in them, as Canada also explains about his South Bronx childhood. <br /><br />The state <em>can</em> do things to prevent, e.g., gun manufacturers from marketing affordable, pocket-portable killing machines to insecure young men. That’s the kind of development that leads male status contests onto a rising spiral of deadly violence. Yet because of other political facts, the state can’t do much in this line without stirring paranoid fears in another segment of the populace. (<a href="http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Podcast.aspx" rel="nofollow">This American Life</a> has a good hour on “guns and the people who love them” in this week’s <a href="http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Podcast.aspx" rel="nofollow">podcast</a>.)Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com