ABOUT CHILD ABUSE

(Postcard by Hayden Kay)

From GenerationFIVE:

Our goal of ending child sexual abuse cannot be realized while other systems of oppression are allowed to continue. In fact, systems of oppression and child sexual abuse have an interdependent relationship: a power-over system that benefits some at the expense of others and uses violence, creates the conditions for child sexual abuse (i.e. gender inequality, class exploitation, racism, violence and threat for difference), while in turn the prevalence of child sexual abuse fosters behaviors (obedience to authority, silence, disempowerment, shame) that prevent people from organizing effectively to work for liberation, healing and change systemic forms of violence.

'Radical simply means grasping things at the root.' ~Angela Davis.

Generation FIVE works at the roots of child sexual abuse and holds a vision of liberation, justice and sustainability for all of our futures.

It is estimated that 1 in 3 girls and 1 in six boys is sexually abused before the age of 18. For each of these children, there is an offender and the affected family and community surrounding them. For each circumstance of abuse, there is also circle of people who can play a part in allowing or preventing abuse.

It is estimated that only 10-20% of CSA gets reported through our public systems. Still, in Public Health terms these numbers are epidemic. This means they are impacting the general population in such high numbers that it is a major pubic health issue. When we look at the number of children and families affected and the number of offenders, we have to start asking different questions. There are not just a few 'bad' people sexually abusing children, the behavior is wide-spread. This is not solely individual mental health issue. We need to ask questions that go beyond the individual to our communities and broader society to find both the causes and solutions to child sexual abuse.

To address child sexual abuse, we need to look at the bigger picture…the social norms in which it is happening. By social norms we mean the beliefs and practices regarding power, sexuality, the ideas about children and ownership, etc. and then the institutions that perpetuate these ideas and practices. We need both an individual and systemic understanding of CSA to be effective in our response and prevention strategies.

Here are some new questions for us to consider:

What do the high numbers of victim/survivors and offenders of CSA tell us about our family and community beliefs and practices? What do we pass on that let's child sexual abuse continue generation to generation?

What is it in our social norms and institutions that creates this many offenders, survivors and bystanders to child sexual abuse?

What are our public systems and institutions missing- so that child sexual abuse rates are not decreasing? What mistakes are we repeating?

We are living in a broader social context that teaches power-over relations, private ownership (parents/family) of children, a dismissal of children's accounts (legal), mixed messages and little education about human sexuality (it is bad, shame based, and it is used to sell us everything from cars to deodorant), and the ongoing mixing of sex and violence. We are not taught to address pain and trauma deeply, but rather mask symptoms or blame the individual for their distress. Child sexual abuse is about having power over another person and using that power sexually. The norms that allow for this behavior are sadly, ever-present in our society.

To this I will add:

1. Those who abuse children in any fashion were themselves abused as children. It's a learned behavior, not innate to human beings.
2. Abuse takes many forms: The ownership of children by adults; gender conditioning; racist conditioning; poverty or denial of basic needs for class reasons; teaching children g*d will send them to hell for any reason; neglect; ridicule; as well as what we traditionally call abuse.
3. To stop abuse we will need to redefine how we raise children and create family on a fundamental level. We cannot allow the Right's definitions to continue to damage further generations.
4. The numbers mean we are all in close contact with child abuse: Our own families, our friends. and/or children we know are contending with it right now. Overwhelmingly it is done by people who claim to love or actually do love that child and are in close, regular contact with her/him. Strangers are not the problem.
5. The overwhelming risk of abuse for any child comes from a man or boy close to them. This is NOT because men and boys are inherently abusive -- it is a direct result of male gender conditioning which demands emotional dissociation, demial of healing outlets, and the right/mandate to project upset onto others perceived as lesser status. Masculinity is an incomplete version of inhumanity that fosters abuse: Not maleness, but the rigid, culturally created concept of masculinity. To rehabilitate this concept to the point where it is no longer toxic will mean restoring to it all the humanity which renders it indistinguishable from femininity. Ergo, it has no future in a free and equal world.
6. People can and do heal from child abuse. All the time, no matter how bad it was.
7. Breaking silence is always a first step. The corollary to that is bearing witness helps repair the world.

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STEPPING OUT OF THE FRAME

I have a geek question in search of a serious answer or a fresh theory: I just read this article at Eureka! Science News about how the genome of an entire family has been sequenced to track how genetic mutations are handed on. The article states "Scientists long had estimated that each parent passes 75 gene mutations to their children." However, the actual rate of passing on was less than half of what had been estimated -- "By comparing the parents' DNA sequences to those of their children, the researchers estimated with a high degree of certainty that each parent passes 30 mutations — for a total of 60 — to their offspring."

My question is, why was the erroneous estimate so high to begin with? What were they observing that caused them to attribute a passing on of mutations at this level? And if the mutations are present but not being transmitted via our parents' DNA (which seems likely), then what IS causing the mutations?


I'm theorizing it is genetic reconfiguration that is the result of environment in early development. Cultural biological mutation, a la epigenetics. Which biological determinists and essentialists of all stripes do NOT want to admit is the case -- especially all those among us obsessed with "masculinity" as if it has authentic biological reality, instead of being a pathological cultural construct in the midst of epic fail. I am as interested in hearing "examinations of masculinity" as I am in hearing about exploring white supremacy -- i.e., it has shot its wad and we can't afford to waste any more time pretending it has value to impart. Yes, my generation looked at "femininity" which had been crammed down our throats (sometimes literally) as part of girl conditioning, but we quickly understood it was a bogus binary and instead began focusing on what was HUMAN -- and reclaiming humanity for women.

I feel this morning as if we have lost an entire generation to the rabbithole of feminist denial and a lopsided, desperate clutch at keeping the gender binary alive through the pretense of "subverting" it.

The silver lining is that money has been poured into scientific studies which hope to bolster biological determinism, and the vast majority of them (except for the tiny ones done on selected populations of adults) keep proving that culture and environment are the major factors in determining "identity". Truth will out, even if it is funded by the boys (and boy fetishists) who want to prove their definition of boy is triumphant.


NOTE: Here's another recent article from The New York Times, Human Culture Plays A Role In Natural Selection, which states that genetic adaptation to sustained cultural change "works more quickly than other selective forces, 'leading some practitioners to argue that gene-culture co-evolution could be the dominant mode of human evolution'". Yep.


[Cross-posted at Group News Blog.]

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SUPER BULLSHIT

There will be no scores reported at this blog today, and no team colors displayed.

I love the Olympics, I love people who engage in physical activity for work or play, and, within limits, I can see the value of team sports. But what appears on television is entertainment, not a reflection of character or even regional pride. Organized sports in this country is part of the hired entertainment complex. It has no meaning beyond that, and it has no place being part of news broadcasts. It is no more news than what's on sale at Wal-Mart or what color Britney wore today.

Many people close to me have argued that playing sports offers a healthy outlet for natural human aggression. Well, first of all, I don't feel that kind of aggression or the need to slam my body against that of another, and I think I'm a natural human. Second, I see no evidence that men who play sports for a living are less aggressive or violent than other men, and plenty of evidence indicating they are more so.

As I see it, organized sports serves eight main functions:

(1) It offers the daydream of "getting rich" to entire classes of folks who would never have a hope otherwise of lifting themselves from poverty and foreshortened hard-working lives. It's as much a fantasy as the notion of becoming a "star" is. Feeding that myth doesn't just keep American Idol and ESPN on the air, it also keeps a huge number of people from realizing how rigidly class stratified our culture is and maybe doing something about it.

(2) It offers a way for men, mostly white men, to funnel a great deal of money directly into the educations and pockets of other men, almost entirely bypassing women (Title IX notwithstanding).

(3) It gives white bigots everywhere an excuse to claim they are not racist. "I love Michael Jordan, man." Uh-huh. Dating your daughter? Moving his less affluent cousins onto your block? Hanging with his buddies on the street corner? Running as your President?

(4) It gives men who are terrified of their own feelings and terrified of the company of other men an excuse to hang out, pretend they are close, and have something to talk about with no requirement that they engage their intellect or their emotions.

(5) It has given these same men an excuse to not spend time with their families on weekend or holidays.

(6) It gives men a pretext for feasting their gaze on the bodies of other men. Exaggerated shoulders via padding, cup-enhanced codpieces and pants that cling lovingly tight to buttocks, all without a clearly visible face or the need for conversation: A pederast's dream but also a safe haven for the ordinary longing men and boys have (but are denied) for basic human touch with their own kind.

(7) It affords a pretend way for men to be smart: Memorizing statistics as a substitute for thinking. Once a game is over, the stats involved in its playing are of no consequence whatsoever. Time marches on. But men who cannot remember the birthdays of their own children or parents can tell you inning by inning numbers of a game thirty years ago, and get jobs based on that ability. It also offers dumbed-down "truth is simple" metaphors as a replacement for the real complexity of social organization and struggle. If you've heard one athlete post-game try to explain why they won or lost, you've heard them all. It's nonsense to ask them the question. It's delusional.

(8) Most of all, it maintains the cult-like worship of masculinity as what separates men from all Others. Jock is a key synonym for masculine. A few women dare to interlope, and get called dykes or nappy-headed hos as a result.

I lived a dozen years without Super Bowls occurring, and let me assure you, people still had good, productive lives before 1967. I can remember when the evening news had actual speeches from politicians in them, and interviews with concerned citizens that lasted longer than 1.7 seconds. If you couldn't attend a game, you missed it, buddy. You could read the scores next day in the paper but there were more important things to think about. Like disaster preparedness, climate change, genocide around the globe, rape, inequality, child abuse -- when did we vote on removing those from the news in favor of watching grown men toss balls around?

As long as we're taking on the massive imbalance in this country, I'd like to see sports returned to playing fields where it is funded locally, with team slots and scholarships open to all regardless of ability. It should be relegated to "fluff for the fluffy-brained" TV as surely as specials about Natalee Holloway and Anna Nicole Smith (who are, like the Elvis T-shirt says, "Dead. Really dead.")

And if you're having trouble seeing this objectively, here's a few questions for ya:

What would you do with your sons if you didn't have school sports to babysit them?

How would your relationship with your spouse fare if watching sports on TV was reduced to one game a week?

What if sewing became a competitive event, with every stitching lingered over in close-ups? (Way more interesting than golf or most of what goes on in a baseball game.) What if folks memorized the cost of Butterick vs. McCall's patterns back into the early part of last century and could reel off the minute changes in styles at hard-drinking "sewing" bars? What if using steroids to increase hemming and basting speed was thought to merit Congressional investigation? At least with a sewing competition, you'd have usable garments at the end instead of Gatorade stains and future orthopedic bills.

I'm now going to dare turn on my TV and see if the crapfest is over yet.

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BROAD CAST 4 DECEMBER 2007: SPEAKOUTS AND GREAT CONVERSATIONS

The first publicly gay man to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate as a U.S. Ambassador, Michael Guest, has retired his post because of anti-gay discrimination within the State Department and at his farewell party told the truth in a startling fashion:

“Most departing ambassadors use these events to talk about their successes . . . But I want to talk about my signal failure, the failure that in fact is causing me to leave the career that I love. For the past three years, I’ve urged the Secretary and her senior management team to redress policies that discriminate against gay and lesbian employees. Absolutely nothing has resulted from this. And so I’ve felt compelled to choose between obligations to my partner — who is my family — and service to my country. That anyone should have to make that choice is a stain on the Secretary’s leadership and a shame for this institution and our country,” he said.

Mr. Guest, a Republican who was appointed Ambassador to Rumania by President Bush in 2001, went on to say "“Unlike heterosexual spouses, gay partners are not entitled to State Department-provided security training, free medical care at overseas posts, guaranteed evacuation in case of a medical emergency, transportation to overseas posts, or special living allowances when foreign service officers are assigned to places like Iraq, where diplomatic families are not permitted. This is not about gay rights. … It’s about equal treatment of all employees, all of whom have the same service requirements, the same contractual requirements."

Think Progress reporting on this concludes "he did what few people do — displayed uncommon courage and threw a rhetorical hand-grenade into his own party."


The Portly Dyke has a post up called at Shakesville that begins "Trying to Get White People to Talk About Racism is Like . . . . well, like trying to get white people to talk about Racism." She offers three reasons as to why this may be so -- which I'll condense (perhaps incompletely) as (1) Lack of awareness about their white privilege; (2) Fear -- of being offensive, of being found out, of having the tables turned; and (3) The lie out there that racism is no longer an issue in our country.

She goes on to say:
"I know that racism is still an issue, because there are white people -- white people who think of themselves as liberal/progressive -- who will say racist things to me when people of color are not around -- even after I have confronted them in the past about racist remarks that they have made.

"I know that racism is still an issue because white people seem so fucking uncomfortable about discussing it -- so uncomfortable, in fact, that they avoid discussing it, even when it is clearly brought to the table by someone that they consider an ally.

"I know that racism is still an issue because people of color can disappear and nobody seems to notice."

She coming out immediately as not willing to listen to horseshit about "revere racism" or "quotas", and she sets up crisp margins for the discussion to follow. Which is EXCELLENT. Go read.


Another reco for Pandagon, this time for Amanda Marcotte's Feminist Friday post about an end to masculinity. It covers, in part, Robert Jensen’s new book Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity, and as such both the post and the discussion has a lot of talk about pornography, so if that triggers you, be advised.

Here's one excerpt to give you a flavor:

"The construct of masculinity is largely responsible for everything from rape to the propaganda push leading up to the invasion of Iraq. But masculinity victimizes the true believers, as well as women and men who find themselves on the wrong side of dudes on a masculinity trip...Masculinity is extremely stressful to men, since it’s not something you ever get to have, but something that you’re always fighting to prove, a battle that’s never completely won but has to begin anew every day."

I very much appreciated the understanding exhibited by Marcotte and some of the commenters that:

Masculinity is a construct which has no rational connection to being male.
Any embrace of a binary like masculinity and femininity is dehumanizing (dividing human attributes into groups which cannot all be demonstrated by the same person within that binary) and inherently discriminatory (because it promotes opposites which are separated from each other and "separate but equal" is a myth).

The working definition of masculine is "NotFemale". I'd argue that is the working definition of male as well. "Female" gets assigned most of the non-privileged aspects of existence as it relates to what is defined as gender in our culture. Thus, in the target/nontarget dynamic, nontarget for gender is male, and target is everything else -- female, queer, and trans.

The argument that "sexism" (like racism) is so poorly understood and resisted, it's better to use the terms "patriarchy" and "white supremacy". Hear, hear. I also use "woman-hating" when it applies -- and anything that attempts to dehumanize me is hate-full.

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BROAD CAST AND UPDATES, 29 OCTOBER 2007

(People by Mollicles4)

Since my days of fever with the flu last week, I've had a series of dreams in which all of the principal "characters", including me, have the following:

*A main identity by which they are generally known
*A secret identity by which they know themselves, which may or may not coincide with the above
*A public identity known by one or more other people, which may or may not coincide with the above AND which may be perceived differently by the individuals who know them
*A "twin" identity they same with someone else who is "identical" to them based on one of the above identities but which may not be obvious to anyone else

The first time I woke up from one of these saga, I thought WTF?!! Makes my head swirl. Talk about costumes.

First, some updates via little gator. We had wondered about the conflicting information concerning Captain Laurences Oates' departure from the tent of the Scott Antarctic Expedition's trek home, i.e., if he left willingly and "under cover" in order to allow his companions to go on without him, why did he take his sleeping bag with him? One account indicated his bag was found some distance away from the tent by the rescue party which arrived too late to save any of the expedition.

(Photo from Christies Images Unlimited 2007)

However, little gator found a news piece about how a sleeping bag case belonging to Captain Lawrence Oates during his ill-fated South Pole expedition went on sale this week at Christie's auction house. This article stated:
"The sleeping bags were earlier presented by schools to each member of the team, led by Captain Robert Scott, and all the bags were named. Oates' was named Trafalgar and presented by Trafalgar House School, Winchester.

"His bags were dumped eventually by the surviving members two or three days day after he had walked out of the tent. They were later found by a search party.

"The bag case is being sold by a private collector. Oates' sleeping bag is now at the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge. "

A follow-up news brief stated "The case did not meet the reserve and was withdrawn from sale at Christie's. It had been expected to fetch up to £40,000 at the sale. "

To complete the answer of this question, little gator forwarded an online Project Gutenberg excerpt from the book South with Scott by Baron Edward Ratcliffe Garth Russell Evans Mountevans.

Now, on to Broad Cast. There was recently a long, at times maudlin thread on another blog I read concerning the public announcement by a formerly gay-bashing Republican elected official in California who decided to acknowledge that gays and Lesbians were human beings, after all, because his daughter was a Lesbian. This man wept on camera, which was apparently regarded by most folks as profound evidence of his change of heart.

My take on it was somewhat different than the general reaction. In the first place, I tend to associate with people who allow themselves to cry and it's not a media-worthy event. I like seeing people cry, but it doesn't tend to bring up own unshed tears because, frankly, I try to shed my tears as I go along. Secondly, while I absolutely acknowledge that knowing someone personally in a group targeted for oppression can (and often is) a catalyst for change of heart, I don't find that especially commendable as a mechanism for change. I am much more impressed with folks who can comprehend the humanity of others without requiring personal, family-based examples. It's a developmental stage of maturity, being able to grasp the value and rights of others on a symbolic and general level -- admittedly, a stage of maturity not generally demonstrated out there in the public eye. Still, I can dream.

And, thirdly, I don't have unresolved Daddy issues. My buttons cluster around Mama.

More importantly, however, a lot of the to-do was rooted in the conditioning which sees male tears as somehow more exceptional and "moving". One commenter, Liza Cowan, tried to point out the sexism implicit in this, but few seemed to comprehend it.

Part of the claptrap assigned to masculinity in our white patriarchal middle-class-aspiring culture is that they be "unemotional", which in specific means that "real" males are allowed to exhibit only anger or anger-tinged vehemence as emotions. Femininity is accorded the remaining human range of motion -- sadness, tenderness, fear, etc. -- but NOT anger, and this emotionality is labeled "weak". It's a brutal, completely non-biologically-based slicing of human expression into two ridiculous spheres that begins at birth (or before birth, if the gender of the baby is known in advance) with nonstop, heavy-handed conditioning -- a conditioning which eventually remaps the brains and likely other physical structures of the individuals so manipulated.

To briefly address all you biological determinists out there who are going to want to jump in with some tiny study which claims to prove a chemical basis for gender roles: (1) No study to date has been conducted on individuals who were raised without gender roles, so there is no control group, kids; (2) If there is ONE culture in the world or in time who have demonstrated a conflicting definition of gender roles (and there is, if you can step outside your own ethnocentrism far enough to look), then either those "other" people are not "quite human" or your argument falls apart; and (3) the influence of culture and enforced behavior on structure of the human brain is where the real discoveries are being made, not in the Watson-esque, Right-wing funded labs looking for validation of the blue/pink divide.

The story of humanity is the story of culture creating alternatives to DNA and instinct.

Back to crying: On top of the gender crap, it's also generally true in white, Northern-European-descended cultures that crying per se is frowned on. This appears to predate the assignation of weeping as a "girl thang" -- I mean, yes, we females got dealt all the lesser-status behavior, but it was already "uncool" to our whitebread ancestors to cry. Our mainstream culture is annoyingly stupid about how to behave if someone starts crying. We tend to immediately insert our own ego and act as if we are supposed to "do" something, and with that inevitably comes judgment.

So, turns out, it's complicated. (I'd apologize to those of you who want to view the world in butch/femme terms for once again pointing out that reality is complicated, but I know you haven't read this far, anyhow.) A recent article,The crying game: males vs. female tears, following up on the crap Ellen Degeneres is getting for public weeping, states "Some who study this most basic expression of feeling will tell you that in this day and age, it can be easier for a crying man to be taken seriously than a crying woman."

"In a recently published study at Penn State, researchers sought to explore differing perceptions of crying in men and women, presenting their 284 subjects with a series of hypothetical vignettes.

"What they found is that reactions depended on the type of crying, and who was doing it. A moist eye was viewed much more positively than open crying, and males got the most positive responses.

"Women are not making it up when they say they're damned if they do, damned if they don't," said Stephanie Shields, the psychology professor who conducted the study. "If you don't express any emotion, you're seen as not human, like Mr. Spock on 'Star Trek,'" she said. "But too much crying, or the wrong kind, and you're labeled as overemotional, out of control, and possibly irrational."

So, to that recently published Popular Mechanics woman-hating list of "25 Things Every MAN Should Know", in addition to dumping the sexist language, I'd add a 26th: How to be around someone who's crying. It's easy. Look kind. Listen. Don't interrupt, trying to silence them, try to "fix" it unless they ask you to help, or dive inside your own feelings. Hand them a tissue when they're done, thank them for sharing, and notice how much better they feel afterwards.


And, since I've raised the issue of the damage done by sexist language, and in partial follow-up to my earlier post about Evolution's Secret Weapon: Grandmas, I want to recommend the recent post of Reclusive Leftist Researchers discover that early Homo sapiens were all male. (It's sarcasm, campers.)

After dissecting yet another male-centered anthropological study, she states "The great reassessment happening in anthropology is the realization that the complex of behaviors that seem to mark the emergence of highly intelligent Homo are those activities that have always been associated with women: plant gathering and processing, communal resource acquisition and provisioning — including shellfishing.

"More and more, when anthropologists think about intelligent hominids making the transition to modern humans, they’re thinking about women — women figuring out how to dig up tubers and prepare them so they’re edible, how to smash hard seeds and grind them into a mush the baby can eat, how to roast shellfish and turtles so the meat is easy to get to. How to get along with each other, talking things over, sharing tasks. How to work out the provisioning so new Mom can nurse the baby while Grandmother and Aunts pitch in with the tuber-digging and babysitting. How to exploit the environment and harness the power of group effort in a way our simian cousins never do.

"Women’s work, people. Women’s work."

In its biggest definition, something we're going to need more than anything else to solve the planetary crises we're currently facing.

(Archie beats off three guys)

A post by Josiah over at Maoist Orange Cake raised questions of when is male protectiveness sexist and when is it not. A great thing to ponder, and one that I asked myself yesterday when writing a comment about Halloween costuming -- I believe that if anybody adopts masculinity without parody or overt contradiction of its lies (including women, especially including Lesbians), we're just reinforcing the conditioning. What people take away from public encounters is overwhelmingly anything they can to validate the values they were raised with and which they have not successfully sorted through/cleaned up. Subtle doesn't work.

(Women at work -- Nu gong ping)

Drag is a one-trick pony that's done nothing, in 2000+ years, to change the ferocity of enforced gender divisions in attire. The loosening up of clothing for women in the 1970s, begun by "unisex" fashions and kicked into high gear by feminists and Lesbians, occurred not from women who tried to dress "like men" but by women who pointedly said "I'm dressing like a woman, this is how women dress" as they rejected the boxes. The fact that those boxes are now being reconstructed of brick and have infiltrated the so-called queer movement is just an indicator of how successful we were. All backlashes come to an end; this one's about to sputter out.

Likewise, with behavior, it does no good to embrace/sexualize/deconstruct masculinity if any part of your behavior acts like it's not the toxic joke that it is. But sister-alive, there is some good work going on out there. And some of it is being done by straight white men, g*d bless 'em. Here's Robert Jensen again, writing with great personal honesty about The Quagmire of Masculinity.

And, concerning another box for women (we must be skinny), Queen Latifah this week "says the definition of beauty is changing. 'Beauty is not just a white girl. It's so many different flavors and shades,' the 37-year-old rapper-actress tells People magazine in its latest issue. 'It's good for regular girls because the meter (for beauty) has been a slim white girl.'"

(Page from Why Mommy Is A Democrat)

Proceeding on thematically, there's a new children's book out called Why Mommy Is A Democrat. You could order it through your local women's bookstore as holiday gifts. Sample pages follow.

(Page from Why Mommy Is A Democrat)

(Page from Why Mommy Is A Democrat)

Lastly, I KNOW you've seen this elsewhere, but still, I have to link to this Science Daily article which offers another duh moment: "Contrary to popular opinion, feminism and romance are not incompatible and feminism may actually improve the quality of heterosexual relationships, according to Laurie Rudman and Julie Phelan, from Rutgers University in the US. Their study also shows that unflattering feminist stereotypes, that tend to stigmatize feminists as unattractive and sexually unappealing, are unsupported."

(Hat tip to Feministing for a lot of the news clips making me think this week.)

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WHEN JOHNNY COMES MARCHING HOME AGAIN

The more eloquent soldiers being interviewed for The War are able to convey how they changed from being an ordinary man into someone who could kill easily. Several of them have spoken of the point at which they realized they were "expendable". Of course, the ones we're hearing from are the ones who survived, not just physically but also mentally. America's entry into the war was marked by failures and close calls because our troops were not "ready", which in some instances is code for "the ones who couldn't become killers had not yet been weeded out".

As Joan Baez once said, "If it's natural to kill, how come men have to go into training to learn how?"

There are a lot of figures being floated around about the cost of our current war, as another supplemental comes up for vote. Progressives include the cost of caring for our wounded, not just over there but back home with rehabilitation, mental health services, and disability pensions. But even those figures are inadequate because, again, they deal with those who are concretely, measurably injured.

The fact is, though, the aftermath of World War II saw a number of social changes that were all a direct result of sending 12% of the population into inhuman conditions, then bringing them home to resume normal life without any sort of organized, effective emotional processing. "When the boys came home", they demanded (and were given) the best-paying jobs (if they were white), college loans, housing loans, and a violent shove backwards for women and non-whites. The post-war repression led directly to the near-revolution of the 1960s. My generation are the children of those returned soldiers, and while they deserve respect for their sacrifice -- the whole nation deserves respect for its effort -- that doesn't mean I'm going to pretend they weren't seriously fucked up by how they spent their adolescence and young adult years.


Especially the men. The cult of masculinity that feminism addressed and is now waxing again arose as a result of male conditioning during and after World War II. Masculinity is an incomplete version of humanity, a carefully carved-out portion -- in precisely the same way that "white identity" is divorced from the actual reality of being alive on this multihued planet, and carrying the same degree of illusion and disease.

I personally believe that masculinity has offered everything it possibly could to humanity, and it's time to retire this bastard notion, thank you very much. (Along with femininity, but you don't find the same worship of it these days.) We can do better, and if we don't, the planet is going to die from "masculine" approaches to our problems.

Which has nothing at all to do with being male, or female. If you don't understand the difference, this essay is not for you.

"Happy Days" existed only for white boys with enough to eat. For the rest of the population, the majority, the post-war period sent people into depression, into ghettoes, into subservience, into shame -- and into the arts trying to find a means of expressing themselves. At least a third, and perhaps as much as 50%, of the children raised in those post-war families were the victims of sexual abuse. We'd be stupid to deny a connection behind the dehumanizing training of battle and the failure to see children as anything more than objects. Child abuse and sexualization has been with us for millenia, but we don't have the statistics to prove it didn't take a big spike after 1945.

The numbers returning from Iraq (when and if that occurs) will be far less, only about 1% of the population, but in some respects far more damaged. These folks will have spent years on end in urban settings, viewing civilians (not just other soldiers) as their chief threat, including children. They will be aware they were lied into this war, and it's only human nature to feel ashamed of having been duped, even if you were clearly part of the majority. Further, most of them are working class, people who turned to military service as a means of economic survival or advancement. There's a working class ethic against therapy, and having been royally screwed by the authority who sent them to Iraq, it's easy to guess many of them won't trust "professionals" who seek to help them. If help is even offered.

Masculinity stripped of civilized veneer, taught how to kill in urban settings, isolated and devalued economically once they're back home. What will "support for the troops" look like then? It will get dumped back onto their communities of origin, is my guess.

I want to see us, as progressives, getting ready to address this problem. It will mean recognizing the sources and making sure to neither blame nor idealize the victim. Naming and draining the cesspool of male conditioning is what will make everybody safe, including women and children.

Outside of academic enclaves, where creating deconstructed theories are what earn income and advancement rather than having to adjust to a brutally conforming corporate structure, and small self-selecting queer communities with rigid strictures on what is said and believed, the conditions for women as fully-recognized human beings are deteriorating. Indirectly, the heavy-handed emphasis on masculinity and "boi"-ness even within allegedly feminist communities proves this trend. For example, drag kings select only certain kinds of masculinity to perform -- that of the sexually dimorphic working class stereotype. Much of the overwhelming classism of these shows arises from the wedding of male-conditioned incoherence, numbness and narcissism to power-based sexuality, thus conditioning yet another generation of young women to project their own humanity onto the inexplicably romanticized icon of selfish meathead.

But those of us who exist in real communities with working class men know they are being eviscerated by these standards of masculinity, driven to substance abuse, distanced from their own families, chewed up and dying young. It's most definitely not "hot". And -- they're not the ones in charge of the decisions being made about who goes to war, who gets the big salaries, who has control of their own bodies. It's the "other" masculinity, the "non-sexy" version, who are really fucking us all.

You know, it's not just Barbie who doesn't resemble any living woman. GI Joe doesn't look like a single soldier in any of that World War II footage, either.

This time, instead of "buying bonds", let's stop buying the lies. Judy Grahn said "What you will do matters. All you need to do is to do it." Here they come: Are you ready?

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DEEP DIALOGUE OR WATCHING O.J.: CHOOSING TO LISTEN AND SPEAK IN A T-DRIVEN WORLD

(Image from Rashani Rea's Dharma Gaia Cards)
In his brilliant rant during the Emmys, Lewis Black stated that in 1968, the average length of a candidate's sound bite on television newscasts was 42 seconds. Today, the average length of a candidate's sound bite is about 8 seconds. Look who we're electing as a result.

This is your brain on IM attention spans -- demanding that meaningful public discourse be reduced to fast shiny











Okay, ready for some antidotes?

Check out this amazing cartoon from Transparency, who create graphical explorations of the data that surrounds us.

Central Kings Rural High School, Halifax, Nova Scotia students David Shepherd and Travis Price -- photo taken by Ian Fairclough, Valley Bureau
Two high school men choose humanity over the idiocy of masculinity in I've stood around too long.

Cleek helps us decipher a briefing slide from General Petraeus's Pony show (we were all asked specifically not to steal this graphic, go look at the original).

(From Spirited Away by Hayao Miyazaki)
Following up on a New York Times story, I discovered YourMorals.org, where you can learn about your own morality while contributing to scientific research on moral psychology. You do have to register to take their tests, but the array of measurements is rich and the results fascinating. For those more interested in a self-examined life than haircuts, of course.

Street Prophets has a great article on Presidential religiosity, race, and gender.

I'm always up for promoting the work of ISNA, the Intersex Society of North America. Currently up is a great post which begins "A recent article entitled “Adult Genital Surgery for Intersex: A Solution to What Problem?” by Mary E. Boyle, Susan Smith, and Lih-mei Liao suggests that genital surgeries among adult women with intersex conditions present dilemmas similar to those involved with infant surgeries." As a member of the disabled community, I am always interested in busting the practice of medical solutions for social ills and the tyranny of trying to appear "normal".

(Tomato and Salt Shaker by Kelly Cameron)

And -- another great, makes-you-think cartoon by Tengrain presents "Pickles Von Strap-On in 'Feminism'".

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