I don't know how to protect kids from their peer groups

[rinue]

I continue to be horrified by contemporary American teen boy culture. I stepped out of the paint store and a group of white boys in a car started yelling "hey pussy, hey pussy, hey pussy, look at you pussy." The five women on the street immediately tensed up - but no, they continued with "does that P stand for pussy," at which point I figured out they were catcalling the one guy on the street, who had a P on his shirt that I'd guess represented some sports team or school. When one of them women was obviously upset, the boys' response was a defensive "it's okay, he's our friend." As though by yelling they weren't also talking to everyone else on the street.

It actually makes it worse that it didn't occur to them to take into account the five women present, that we were invisible to them. It's the ultimate misogyny, the ultimate entitlement, to not bother to notice who is on the street with you. What luxury to not think other people have feelings, or ears. What privilege to assume they can't or won't hurt you back. And this is Winchester. You can bet every one of the women had graduate degrees, money, lawyers, and some measure of political influence.

I don't remember it being this bad when I was younger. I don't remember white guys from 16 to 80 feeling free to call me out or shout sexual profanity without a sense that it was transgressive. Some measure of that has to come from good luck, and from being something of a hermit; I'm sure that played a factor. But I don't think that explains it all the way. I don't understand how macho culture can be so resilient, or who is passing it down, or why we seem to have decided again that it's not important. There was a moment in the late 70's and early 80's when we were going to change things. And then we didn't. Maybe it's because the Cosby Show ended. Maybe it's because Jim Henson died. I don't know.

Comments

[liquidmorpheme.livejournal.com]

I should also add that I don't think the main issue with Third Wave was how it regarded men—even if you decide it treated them primarily as antagonists, it must be noted that that was a fairly accurate description of majority male behavior, and that a certain amount of rising up to slay your oppressor is always necessary. I actually think its main weakness was how it regarded women—essentially "female" (a word and construction built under patriarchal authority), natural victims/prey, and limited to womanly powers and powers rooted in mystical metaphors about sex (even if you stretch the boundaries of "womanly," or titillate with female grease monkeys and female soldiers, you're still agreeing with the algorithm of misogyny—you've just replaced some of the variables).

Harraway's main point is the abolition of essentialism, but even more interesting than that is how she understood that in order to correct misogyny/patriarchy/gender-divide, you have to completely change your understanding of what it means to be human, to interrogate the accepted relationship to your own biology, to expand the sphere of the argument well outside men and women, to abandon philosophic underpinnings (teleology, Plato, etc) that are in many ways unrelated to sex or gender and therefore never make it into discussions of gender equality. You also have to address culture with methods that culture understands — bra burning and so forth are simply too blunt.

[rinue]

Okay, this makes more sense. The Haraway FTW was throwing me off because I thought you were saying that Haraway had won and caused this, which didn't make sense to me, when you were in fact saying "this is why one must operate according to Haraway to beat this."

It occurred to me the other day - and I don't think this is unique, and it isn't unique even to me but is something I keep turning over in my head and rediscovering - is that any individual bad actor is stronger than any individual good actor (if we are thinking of "good" as basically compassionate and "bad" as essentially selfish) because the good actor will move slower and have access to fewer options. (Fewer options in this case doesn't speed anything up, because you're still having to take into account many more people who will be affected than the bad actor does.) So the only way the good guys win is either through sheer numbers or through sheer persistence, which work out to roughly the same thing if you think of them in terms of man-hours.

In that context, it becomes vitally important that you don't have attrition among the good guys, because the only way to not drown is to have overwhelming numbers on the good guy side. Which makes controlling the culture and the cultural really, really, really important. (Also, I'm tired of people talking about Hollywood as liberal. They may donate to Democrats, but they are not liberal or they would be making different movies and TV shows.)

[liquidmorpheme.livejournal.com]

I think that last parenthetical belongs on t-shirts and bumper stickers.