Stop thinking?

In this ad from Wrangler men who are looking to pump up their hegemonic masculinity are encouraged not to think because as they say it : "we are animals". I always thought that (critical) thinking was seen in late capitalism as a queer or feminine trait, a big No in face of re/production, efficiency, control or consumerism. Something that has to be stopped or discouraged. "Being a smart guy"/ "Thinking too much" / "Reading is boring" / "Too much theory" are definitely phrases that represent worries connected to a crisis of masculinity. Now the lack of thinking is taken un-subliminally as a marketing message to sell some products for male audiences in search of their lost masculinities. What do you think about it?

"that's so gay": reactions on bullying

In New York Times, Judith Warner writes an amazing article on bullying and homophobia. The facts that bring in the discussion are deadly serious:

Early this month, Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover, an 11-year-old boy from Springfield, Mass., hanged himself after months of incessantly being hounded by his classmates for being “gay.” (He was not; but did, apparently, like to do well in school.)

In March, 2007, 17-year-old Eric Mohat shot himself in the head, after a long-term tormentor told him in class, “Why don’t you go home and shoot yourself; no one will miss you.” Eric liked theater, played the piano and wore bright clothing, a lawyer for his family told ABC news, and so had long been subject to taunts of “gay,” “fag,” “queer” and “homo.”

Teachers and school administrators, the Mohats’ lawsuit now asserts, did nothing.

If in Eastern Europe, bullying in school is not treated as a relevant case in media, in US violent events such as Columbine demand an important analysis. But apparently, the critique and direct action on bullying is not so engaged. The main ingredient of this type of reactivity is generated by a more structural process besides homophobia, the pathologization of femininity:

I’m only partly talking about homophobia, which, though virulent, cruel and occasionally fatal among teenagers, is not the whole story behind the fact that words like “fag” and “gay” are now among the most potent and feared weapons in the school bully’s arsenal.

Being called a “fag,” you see, actually has almost nothing to do with being gay.

It’s really about showing any perceived weakness or femininity – by being emotional, seeming incompetent, caring too much about clothing, liking to dance or even having an interest in literature. It’s similar to what being viewed as a “nerd” is, Bennington College psychology professor David Anderegg notes in his 2007 book, “Nerds: Who They Are and Why We Need More of Them”: “‘queer’ in the sense of being ‘odd’ or ‘unusual,’” but also, for middle schoolers in particular, doing “anything that was too much like what a goody-goody would do.”

It’s what being called a “girl” used to be, a generation or two ago.

“To call someone gay or fag is like the lowest thing you can call someone. Because that’s like saying that you’re nothing,” is how one teenage boy put it to C.J. Pascoe, a sociologist at Colorado College, in an interview for her 2007 book, “Dude, You’re a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School.”

The message to the most vulnerable, to the victims of today’s poisonous boy culture, is being heard loud and clear: to be something other than the narrowest, stupidest sort of guy’s guy, is to be unworthy of even being alive.

This type of interaction is so popular in the most opened environments that it really makes me wonder what the best tools to fight it are. I can only think of two very special environments where I experienced this type of discrimination: theatre schools and gender studies departments in different countries. What starts as funny jokes on particular gestures, outfits, ways of talking or interests becomes dangerous hate tools for exclusion in a very concrete manner. All guided by an internalized path to hegemonic masculinity or even hyperfemininity that is endangered by some particular attitudes that can challenge and subvert such hard earned positions:

It’s weird, isn’t it, that in an age in which the definition of acceptable girlhood has expanded, so that desirable femininity now encompasses school success and athleticism, the bounds of boyhood have remained so tightly constrained? And so staunchly defended: Boys avail themselves most frequently of epithets like “fag” to “police” one another’s behavior and bring it back to being sufficiently masculine when someone steps out of line, Barbara J. Risman, a sociologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago, found while conducting extensive interviews in a southeastern urban middle school in 2003 and 2004. “Boys were showing each other they were tough. They were afraid to do anything that might be called girlie,” she told me this week. “It was just like what I would have found if I had done this research 50 years ago. They were frozen in time.”

Pascoe spent 18 months embedded in a Northern California working-class high school, in a community where factory jobs had gone south after the signing of Nafta, and where men who’d once enjoyed solid union salaries were now cobbling together lesser-paid employment at big-box stores. “These kids experience a loss of masculine privilege on a day-to-day level,” she said. “While they didn’t necessarily ever experience the concrete privilege their fathers and grandfathers experienced, they have the sense that to be a man means something and is incredibly important. These boys don’t know how to be that something. Their pathway to masculinity is unclear. To not be a man is to not be fully human and that’s terrifying.”

By trying to achieve some strongly gendered identities imposed by family, pop culture, school hierarchies, standards of coolness, they have to make the difference between them and those who don’t fit the narrow standards. And the best way to keep those standards is to discriminate, use hate speech and direct violence.

Malina Saval, who spent two years observing and interviewing teenage boys and their parents for her new book “The Secret Lives of Boys,” found that parents played a key role in reinforcing the basest sort of gender stereotypes, at least where boys were concerned. “There were a few parents who were sort of alarmist about whether or not their children were going to be gay because of their music choices, the clothes they wore,” she said. Generally, she said, “there was a kind of low-level paranoia if these high-school-age boys weren’t yet seriously involved with a girl.”

It seems it all comes down, as do so many things for today’s parents, to status.

“Parents are so terrified that their kids will miss out on anything,” Anderegg told me. “They want their kids to have sex, be sexy.”

This generation of parents tends to talk a good game about gender, at least in public.

In US as in Eastern Europe, family plays the major role in promoting this type of status, in offering legitimacy for hate and bullying. And the future of bullying looks rather dark, with the public and private discourse on gender roles becoming more conservative and bigoted. The examples are numerous, the two dead kids are just the most obvious ones.

photo via deviantart

a Great War postcard

Dated 18 August 1915

more Great War postcards at greycat

Reclaiming masculinity..not again!

Tyler Retherford, a "sophomore anthropology major from Springfield, Mo.", writes an article on redefining masculinity. Even if his argument is clumsy and so patriarchal, I stopped for a sec. I heard this type of redefinition of masculinity so many times that it makes me sick. Coming from anthropologists "interested in masculinity" or even teaching it or from my male colleagues in gender studies. Let's hear it:

Obviously gender studies should incorporate studying both genders, but stereotypically that's just not the way it tends to work out. It made me think about just how little masculinity is discussed. It's not something that comes up in conversations with my friends, and as evidenced by the name of the "women's and gender studies" minor offered at the University, it's not something widely discussed at an academic level either. It seems masculinity in popular culture is defined more by an avoidance of typically feminine behavior than by any actual definition of masculine behavior. The few stereotypical masculine behaviors such as hunting, working on cars and fighting aren't actually that popular among the majority of guys. However, participation in feminine activities such as watching "Gossip Girl," shopping or talking openly about feelings is much more likely to earn negative reactions.Popular media is starting to subvert this structuring of masculinity. One example is the growing "bromance" film genre. The recent movie "I Love You, Man" and a plethora of Judd Apatow films feature male characters who share their feelings about one another in a typically un-masculine way. In the television world, characters like J.D. from "Scrubs" act in stereotypically feminine ways, like carrying around a unicorn diary in one episode. It certainly isn't the norm, and usually these
characters are supposed to draw laughs rather than make a statement about the way we look at masculinity, but it is a step toward guys being more accepting of male participation in typically feminine activities. Even the new James Bond movies portray the ultimate "guy" as a little more emotional and less of a womanizer. Weakening arbitrary gender divides in popular culture is eventually going to cause a restructuring of the way we define masculinity. Unfortunately, gender studies tends to fall within the feminine realm of interests, meaning that working to develop a healthier definition of masculinity is, by its very nature, un-masculine. Guys need to make it OK to talk about what it means to be a guy. Even more importantly, having a better discussion of what it is to be a guy is a vital step in building a healthier view of men with differing lifestyle choices.

For the sake of "developing more inclusive notions of masculinity and making the discussion of gender more accessible to a wider audience" we are witnessing a major backlash. Weren't we always talking about this masculinity for hundreds and hundreds of years? Open your TV or a philosophy book and see what is discussed: masculinity as the norm, humanity as masculinity, universal as harmonious masculinity. Do you want to just name it positively and claim it? Go ahead, no one will stop you. The problem is when this positive claim of masculinity is related to gender studies as a form of inclusiveness and softening of the feminist discourse. I know that privileges have to be kept by white heterosexual men by any means but don't come with this bullshit that poor guys are marginalised and discriminated in gender studies departments controlled by lesbian terrorists. Or that we already leave in post-patriarchy and it's safe now. Or that egosyntonic masculinity can be subversive and empowering for women. As long as femininity is still pathology, masculinity is the norm and the healthy way to live in society, I see all these initiatives as dead ends. And for Godsake, try to be a little bit more modest!

Pedar (1996)

director: Majid Majidi

Yesterday morning we watched an Iranian movie, Father (Pedar), directed by Majid Majidi in 1996. Looking around on the net afterwards I was surprised to only find positive and extremely praising reviews, since my experience of the movie was quite the opposite. The story is set in contemporary (I guess) Iran, and the overtly Oedipal plot revolves around 14-year old Mehrollah who goes away to work in order to support his widowed mother and three sisters, only to find her hastily remarried to the local policeman upon his return. Unwilling to accept the new man in his mother’s life as a father, in fact, unwilling to accept a man other than himself in his mother’s life, he unrelentlessly goes about harassing her and the new husband, with male ego outbursts that the director seems to admire as heroic, but that end up being pretty annoying for the spectator who does not have much investment in patriarchy. The storyline doesn`t have much else going for itself, it`s a back and forth between the policeman and Mehrollah`s masculinities, climaxing with the boy managing to steal the policeman`s gun (his gun, get it?) and making a run for it. In the end, quite predictably, the two are brought together by their constant chase and the cheesy ending suggests that Mehrollah will finally be able to accept the policeman as a father figure.
Now, this movie could have been done in a way that is actually meaningful and interesting, given that the theme offers a lot of room for giving depth to the characters and their circumstances. However this movie is made from a normative male perspective, anchoring itself in its biases and conditions uncritically, and presenting them to us as if they were universal values we should understand and sympathize with. Why should I be moved by a deeply patriarchal story in which the crisis is triggered by the absence of the father (an absent presence metaphorically, and literally in the photo that the boy is sporting around) and is solved by finding another male to fill in this position? The character of the mother is completely subdued, she is given very few articulate lines (her token appearances are marked by gasps, cries and tears), and seems to exist only as a pretext for more male existential angst . To be fair, the mother is not presented without a certain degree of condescending compassion, but her gestures and feelings are not conferred with the heroic, tragic dimension that her sons` are. For whom, of course, the challenge is even greater now that she is married to the representative of a very phallic institution, the police, that requires Mehrollah to bring out the big guns of his alpha male kit. In the end, it seems to me that this is movie is a game of whose dick is bigger, an obsession that is apparently not restricted to Western patriarchy.

Boys and their plastic toys

Say no to GUNS! the whole imaginary argument is such a hoax. give them a pink truck or a barbie doll and their imagination will trully explode :)

an article from BBC News, Toy weapons 'help boys to learn'