Events like the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh and the accusation of Christine Blasey Ford momentarily pull back the curtain to expose the domination of toxic men. But we often overlook elements (other than government) that underpin this toxic domination because they are normal everyday life. Wikipedia creates toxic masculinity. So does Youtube, Paypal, museums, academia, and glaciers.
Patriarchy is defined as a social system, not as individual men or gangs of men secretly plotting to dominate women. However, this definition misses that everything in our society revolves around the white heterosexual male as an individual and as a social group. News, art, finances, government, morality, legislation all arise from the white man’s view. Men’s names are assigned to diseases, landforms, highways, and organisms. Feminist theory has defined this perspective as “the male gaze,” historically referring to visual arts. But this lens of entitlement extends beyond visual arts and includes all the institutions and systems that rule our lives, institutions created and enforced by men, as individuals and as gangs.
Women work to make this system visible, to point out associated problems with a world formed through the lens of white hetero men. Every time an event brings aspects of our patriarchal society into the news, women share their stories, reliving traumas over and over. People examine our stories and judge believability, asking “Why didn’t she?” and women explain (over and over) the myriad reasons. Too often, the stories are then dismissed or woman are penalized for speaking (like this high school girl in Texas).
Each acute flare of sexist awareness recedes as accountability theatre is played out — men deny or belittle the accusation, sometimes give a show of regret (they regret being named or are “sorry you felt that way”) and perhaps withdraw from the public eye momentarily. In a short time they emerge unscathed, assert they’ve suffered enough or act as if nothing ever happened (Louis C.K.), and patriarchy’s stifling dome closes over us again. Yet sexism and misogyny are chronic debilitating life-threatening conditions that permeate society. We treat the flares (slap on a bandage) but the pathogenic causes are untouched.
Women don’t feel freed by each acute event. We might experience a brief pressure release from momentary truth-telling, but the price of our stories often is more suffering and loss. We continue our habitual style of dodging troubles, living as if we are under threat because we are. The threats remain constant — physical assault, professional sabotage, diminution, marginalization, and erasure.
We see over and over that oppressive individual men and gangs hold power and perpetuate a patriarchal society. It isn’t just in the actions of government and institutions, it is how the world is recorded and represented. Wikipedia is sexist. So are some glaciers.
Tonight, I’m throwing down markers that denote how the male gaze forms our era, The Manthropocene. The white hetero male view dominates society and all our individual lives, not just those of women.
now
is not the time
to be quiet
or make room for you
when we have had no room at all
now
is our time
to be mouthy
get as loud as we need
to be heard
rupi kaur
government ~
When Brett Kavanaugh accuser Christine Blasey Ford is questioned next week by Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee, it is these 11 people. No Republican woman has been a member in the 202 years the Committee has existed. Currently, of the 10 Democratic Senators on the committee, 4 are women.
For decades, women in the Forest Service and U.S. Department of Agriculture have been trying to bring justice to those who have discriminated against them. A new investigation reveals that the inaction is due to a much larger problem: a system set up to make their complaints go away.
“After reporting the rape, my entire career in the military went from excelling to ultimately being discharged with a personality disorder.” ~ Liz Luras, military sexual assault survivor
Thousands of United States service members who lost their military careers after reporting a sexual assault live with stigmatizing discharge papers that prevent them from getting jobs and benefits….
Architects are overwhelmingly male and pale, young and privileged, and there are legitimate concerns about them designing our cities in their image. Fewer than one in every 10 architects is black, Asian or minority-ethnic, and less than a third of UK qualified architects are women. And the numbers are not improving.
When your main references are Wikipedia, you are grounding your understanding in and perpetuating the Manthropocene. It’s more than famous women are absent from Wikipedia, the majority of the volunteer editors are male. The “male gaze” of Wikipedia shapes how we view events and facts.
Marie Curie is one of the most famous women in science. But her first page on Wikipedia was shared with her husband — until someone pointed out that, perhaps, her scientific contributions were notable enough to warrant her own biography. [...]
Studies have found that somewhere between 84% and 91% of Wikipedia editors are male. While some might argue that an editor’s gender shouldn’t affect their ability to participate, the fact remains that only 17.7% of Wikipedia biographies written in English are about women.
youtube ~
Weaponized misogyny or women seem wicked when you’re unwanted — this story is beyond weird. It’s sexism arising out of a misguided view of how to combat pornography. The porn is due to how men are viewing these women not in how the women are acting, a common theme of the Manthropocene.
The women who make ASMR videos are not being intentionally sexy and they aren’t aiming at the porn market. So how did these women get caught in the Youtube and Paypal anti-pornography trap? Apparently a small number of men use ASMR videos for sexual stimulation. The obvious (toxic masculinity) solution is to ban all the ASMR women content creators and eliminate their ability to profit from videos of crumbling up paper or whispering.
ASMR, Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, is offered via Youtube videos created primarily by women and used by viewers to ameliorate pain, insomnia, depression, anxiety and other distressful situations. Research has shown this to be effective.
ASMR involves repetitive sounds like whispering, crinkling of paper, and other sound effects “in a variety of scenarios that are geared toward evoking a sense-memory of tingling sensations from the back of the head. If anyone ever played with your hair and you felt a funny but calming shiver, you get the idea. The performance artists in these videos do things to create sounds like playing with hair, brushing microphones with makeup brushes, chewing ice and lots of other things that evoke a feeling for viewers.”
In June, China banned and excised videos of sound effects while claiming to cleanse its internet of pornography. YouTube had already demonetized the genre in a sex panic; now PayPal is banning people for life and holding individuals' funds, ignorant of the facts and marching lockstep to the tune of 8chan trolls enacting a campaign to punish "whores."
Movement to restore ‘lost’ historical figures to prominence gathers pace with new investigations and events. [...]
“I want people to realise that women have always been so active and involved in society at all levels,” said Horwell. “They were doing all sorts of jobs across the spectrum from sheer heavy-duty work, without any mechanical aids, to revolutionary humanitarian work and leading entrepreneurial roles.”
academia ~
The “meritocracy” of academia fails women repeatedly; it fails to account for the many negative career impacts of harassment, including mental and physical health impacts, decrease in scientific output, career sacrifices and potential retaliation from harassers and others in power. People in positions of power are complicit in the rampant sexual harassment in academia, whether they are harassers themselves or whether they choose to turn a blind eye to the harassment at their institutions. And academic institutions are complicit in creating and perpetuating a system that does little to protect victims, thereby severely damaging the integrity and quality of scholarly work
Institutions have hired men with predatory reputations and retained them, despite complaints from women students and faculty. All because women haven’t had a strong enough voice in the system.
technology ~
WIRED worked with Montreal startup Element AI to estimate the diversity of leading machine learning researchers, and found that only 12 percent were women.
That estimate came from tallying the numbers of men and women who had contributed work at three top machine learning conferences in 2017. It suggests the group supposedly charting society’s future is even less inclusive than the broader tech industry, which has its own well-known diversity problems.
For every $1 in company equity held by men, women hold 47 cents, according to a study released this week by Carta, a Silicon Valley firm that helps start-ups manage their equity shares. The study finds that women tend to be disadvantaged in the amount of equity they hold at almost every stage of a new start-up’s life.
museums ~
- Natural history fed to us with misogyny
literature ~
But the fact remains: only 16% of the people studying computer science in the UK are women. And this imbalance, which has an undeniable impact on the design of the devices, platforms and systems driving our future, has an equally poisonous literary twin.
Science fiction is famously male-dominated, both in its writers and its readers. It’s also famously rubbish at offering nuanced female characters; any doubters would do well to read Liz Lutgendorff’s blistering take-down of the misogyny permeating NPR’s 100 best sci-fi and fantasy books list.
Professional meetings/organizations ~
These groups are dominated by men who prefer they not be held to a code of conduct.
I’m going to let Serena Williams serve as the carrier for all the toxic male problems that women athletes experience. But don’t forget how sexist the Olympics games are!
[The rules of tennis are written] for a sport that, until Williams and her sister came along, was dominated by white players, a sport in which white men have violated those rules in frequently spectacular fashion and rarely faced the kind of repercussions that Williams — and Osaka — did on Saturday night. [...]
“This has been the ask of women, and most especially, of nonwhite women, since the beginning of time: Take the diminution and injustice and don’t get mad about it; if you get mad, you will get punished for it, and then you will be expected to fix it, to make sure everyone is comfortable again.” [Emphasis added]
Glaciers ~ Naming landforms after white men is both racist and sexist
Would you choose a field study site named to honor a professor who sexually harassed his grad student? Vacation on a mountain named for a male explorer who contributed to genocide?
Are you angry yet? What are you doing with your anger?
Women have been angry for centuries but we’ve been trained from childhood to turn our anger into sadness and wear masks of courtesy. Women are valued for our ability to get along, to avoid conflict, to make sure everyone is comfortable. Our survival has required this because women who speak out attract trouble.
Girls do not feel safe in the outside world. Let’s name why: male violence.
Let’s use our anger to shake up the power structure.
Rebecca Traister’s new book, Good and Mad, examines the revolutionary power of female anger and how it transmutes into political revolution.
….the reason these men (politicians) are getting so upset is that the force of female protest right now feels like it has the potential to shake our power structure to its core. [...]
The idealized vision of what this country might be was born of the virtuous, and sometimes chaotic, fury of the unrepresented. We are taught it as patriotic catechism — give me liberty or give me death; live free or die; don’t tread on me. We carve our Founders’ anger into buildings, visit their broken bells, name contemporary political factions after the temper tantrums they threw, dressed in native garb, dumping tea in a harbor. We call these events a revolution.
This is the anger of white men, of course. Their anger is revered, respected as the stimulus for necessary political change. Because they’ve always been the rational norm, the intellectual ideal, their dissatisfactions are assumed to be grounded in reason — not the emotional muck of femininity. [Emphasis added]
Use your anger to fuel actions!
Here’s the deal - Fake Clinics (AKA Crisis Pregnancy Centers) advertise as real medical providers... who in reality lie about pregnancy, especially about abortion. We’d love your help reviewing every single one! How? It’s super easy!
1. Visit exposefakeclinics.com/callandreview. Pick a fake clinic from the list, call them and ask nicely about abortion help. Script prompts will help you with the call.
2. Write an honest, non-flaming review on yelp, facebook or google+. This isn’t a sting, it’s just telling the truth. It can be short and sweet. Something like, “I called XXX and asked if they provided abortion, abortion referrals, or birth control. Although the website makes it look like they do, they said they do not. If you are looking for abortion services, birth control or referrals for where to get either one, they will not help you.”
3. Post a screenshot of your review OR the picture below, and tag 5 friends to do the same! (name 1), (name 2), (name 3), (name4), (name 5).
Dr. Christine Blasey Ford courageously came forward to tell her story of being sexually assaulted by Trump's Supreme Court pick, Brett Kavanaugh.
Now, his supporters will do everything they can to discredit, shame, and punish her for speaking out. We must show her and the rest of the country we have her back and we believe her and all survivors.
Show your support by signing this card, and we'll make sure she gets each and every message.
THIS WEEK IN THE WAR ON WOMEN PROVIDES A WEEKLY SUMMARY OF NEWS ON WOMEN'S ISSUES AND INFORMATION ON CURRENT POLITICAL ACTIONS.
WE WELCOME ALL WHO ARE INTERESTED TO JOIN, TO WRITE FOR US, AND TO PROVIDE RELEVANT LINKS AND STORIES. SIGN UP IN THE COMMENTS OR SEND US A MESSAGE.
|
|