DagSeoul: Positions, Populations, Punk, Poetics

You may wish to read the short blog on NRO before reading my analysis.

As we have come to learn, conservative men and women simply cannot keep their fucking mouths shut when it comes to rape, assault, and sexual harassment. They will do whatever they can to shame victims who publicly suffer their abuse and seek help. For conservatives, an innocent victim is one who silently bears their abuse and associated trauma; one who can cope while remaining a productive employee and without retribution, rehabilitation, or reparation. To speak out and to seek aid is to illustrate guilt and the trauma becomes the result of poor decision making skills that can be blamed on feminism and prurient and permissive culture.

Heather MacDonald, in her recent blog for National Review Online’s blog, The Corner, attempts to explain what occurrences of Military Sexual Trauma (MST) actually signify: that many women who are raped are feminist sluts who are nothing more than the victims of their own poor decisions.

First, MacDonald bemoans the recognition of yet another syndrome.

So now there’s a name and, inevitably, an acronym for it: military-sexual-trauma syndrome or MST. Military-sexual-trauma syndrome is that debilitating condition that befalls female service members who have allegedly been the victim of sexual assault by their fellow service members. According to the New York Times, female veterans are becoming homeless and involved in street life because of the post-traumatic stress that results from having been victimized in a military “that failed to protect them.”

Right? UGH. The medical profession in cahoots with the government is always coming up with another illness and acronym for that illness. How droll. What is it with conservative rhetoric that insists one must introduce any and all social and political arguments with a tone of disgust and ennui? Worse, MacDonald blows her progressive-mischief dog-whistle by attributing the reasons for the new syndrome to the New York Times, when it’s actually the result of work with the Department of Veterans Affairs. However, baselessly attacking veterans and their support services is difficult; it’s much easier to shit on the New York Times and its imagined readers.

McDonald, having focused her readers’ attentions squarely on liberal filth, excuse politics, and the lazy, social-welfare-loving collectivists who read the New York Times, provides us an example of one veteran who suffers from MST:

Tiffany Jackson is the Times’ lead example. She says that she was savagely raped in the ladies room of a bar in South Korea by a fellow serviceman. She held a job “fleetingly” after leaving the military, but

Two years later, she had descended into anger and alcohol and left her job. She started hanging out with people who were using cocaine and became an addict herself, huddling against the wind on Skid Row here… . She grew up in a tough section of Compton, Calif., and served as a heavy equipment operator in the Army, exhilarated by her sense of mastery in a male-dominated environment. But after the rape — which she kept to herself, not even telling her family — her behavior changed. She assaulted a sergeant, resulting in disciplinary actions. Back home, she lost her job in sales after she passed out, drunk, during a business phone call. “It looked like I really had my stuff together,” she said. “But I was dying inside.”

She served three years in prison for drug dealing and finally confided in a prison psychiatrist, who helped her see that many of her bad decisions had been rooted in the sexual trauma.

Ms. Jackson now is on full disability compensation for her MST, though she was at first denied benefits.

The framing of Tiffany Jackson’s story is clear. MacDonald is going to explain how social welfare rewards laziness and poor decisions.

Now here is a tentative alternative hypothesis: Some of these women come from environments that made their descent into street life overdetermined, whether or not they experienced alleged sexual assault in the military. To blame alleged sexual assault for their fate rather than their own bad decision-making is ideologically satisfying, but mystifying. Having children out of wedlock, as a huge proportion of them do, also does not help in avoiding poverty and homelessness:  

Monica Figueroa, 22, a former Army parachutist, lived in a family member’s auto body shop in the Los Angeles area, bathing her baby, Alexander, in a sink used for oil and solvents until, with help, they found temporary housing.

Michelle Mathis, 30, a single mother of three, has bounced among seven temporary places since returning home in 2005 with atraumatic brain injury. Ms. Mathis, who served as a chemical specialist in Iraq, relies on a GPS device to help her remember the way to the grocery store and her children’s school.

Don’t overlook the persuasive other-ing in the passage: “Having children out of wedlock, as a huge portion of them do, also does not help…”. MacDonald implements two kinds of composition in her blog. First she composes (invokes) a traditionally-ideal woman : a responsibly employed and/or married mother who is middle class and owns property. It’s easy for readers to miss this composition of an ideal American woman and the heteronormative demands such pleas make for the disgusting tone and claims of MacDonald’s argument. Explicitly, she composes victims of sexual assault and harassment who suffer MST and single mothers. Implicitly, she’s rewarding readers who identify with her.

More egregious, though, is an insensitive and silly error in reasoning. MacDonald insists, “To blame alleged sexual assault for their fate rather than their own bad decision-making is ideologically satisfying, but mystifying.” Suffering post-traumatic stress is not a fate. This stress is the result of a traumatic event that, by definition, is unnecessary. It’s no wonder MacDonald doesn’t understand MST as a result of assault and/or harassment; she believes veterans suffering MST earned their trauma as a just reward for their behavior prior to being harassed and/or raped. In other words, having a child out of wedlock earns poverty and sexist abuse.

MacDonald even projects her grotesque sense of social determinism onto veterans who suffer MST. She writes, “Some of these women come from environments that made their descent into street life overdetermined, whether or not they experienced alleged sexual assault in the military.” It doesn’t matter whether or not these veterans were, in fact, raped. MacDonald has overdetermined her position to the extent that coming from non-traditional environments is enough to earn or expect a future of victim-hood. It’s as if it’s only a matter of time for these women. MacDonald clearly doesn’t understand she creates two categories for women: women who will be assaulted and deserve it, and women who shouldn’t be assaulted.

And this is a rather gobsmacking problem with MacDonald’s argument, isn’t it? Not only does she not seem to understand what a disorder that results from persistent trauma is, she doesn’t seem to understand that she’s applying her admittedly conservative and demanding sense of propriety onto others who may or may not see the world the way she does. She really doesn’t seem to understand that a syndrome is not a made-up narrative that individuals can use to garner unearned rewards. The MST syndrome is a verifiable state of affairs that must be treated for the patients to be well. It’s clear MacDonald has never witnessed PTSD nor experienced anything traumatic in her life.

Following her alternative hypothesis that such trauma doesn’t exist but only “bad decisions” do, MacDonald flexes her con-muscles by criticizing college-campus feminists and her “tough as nails” approach to them. Basically, she knows a woman who was raped three times who doesn’t suffer trauma. So, feminism is wrong.

Feminists claim (speciously) that a whopping one-quarter of college co-eds are sexually assaulted by their fellow students in college; I am not aware of comparable claims that huge numbers of female college graduates are as a result ending up on the street. (The difference between the outcomes for college graduates and vets does not lie in the relative availability of services: College rape crisis centers and hotlines are barely used.) I am not even aware of claims that victims of stranger rape are more likely to end up dealing drugs and homeless, but that evidence may in fact be out there. (I recently wrote about a tough-as-nails, pro-police building superintendent in the Bronx who was raped three times, including by her mother’s boyfriend as a child; she is only one case, obviously, but she was not on disability benefits or on the streets.) 

I’m just going to leave that paragraph alone because MacDonald saves her worst work for last. I’m so frustrated by it that I decided to write this post just so I could get to this last bit. Everything up to this point is boilerplate conservative, anti-feminist hate. Pure contempt and smug sanctimony. You’ve all likely heard it before. But her last paragraph is simply nuts.

But let’s say that for these homeless female vets, it really was their sexual experiences in the military that caused their downward spiral into, as the Times puts it, “alcohol and substance abuse, depression and domestic violence.” Why then have those same feminists who are now lamenting the life-destroying effects of “MST” insisted on putting women into combat units? Arguably, coming under enemy fire or falling into enemy hands is as traumatic as the behavior one may experience while binge-drinking with one’s fellow soldiers or as scarring as being “bullied and ostracized” by a female superior. Are women on average going to be more able to emotionally handle the former than the latter? Isn’t there a contradiction in expecting the military to “protect” you while it also sends you out to face mortal risk? And do the feminists believe that there will be fewer of these alleged rapes in combat training and duty? Perhaps they think that with enough multi-million-dollar gender-equity training contracts showered on the gender-industrial complex, the problem will go away. Or perhaps they think that keeping before us proof that the patriarchy is alive and well is more important than protecting women from “MST,” especially if that image can serve as grounds for remaking the military.   

Apparently, there’s no editors for The Corner. First, MacDonald thinks so poorly of certain kinds of women, the them she’s referring to throughout the blog, that rape and assault is sex for them. MacDonald sexualizes harassment and assault as a characteristic of sexuality for certain kinds of women: namely, women who don’t abide by patriarchal traditional family values. It’s not often a conservative would conflate having sex—even of the loose variety that social conservatives are always whining about—with being raped, but MacDonald pretty much does in the first sentence of her closing argument. Is it so hard to imagine that a woman who is raped also has positive sexual experiences? Isn’t it a problem to define an victim of assault by the assault and the oppressive associations that have been improperly attached to it? Not for MacDonald. It’s another horrible association and assumption based in prejudice and misrepresentation that receives prominence in rhetoric over cool-consideration of facts, events, medicine, and evidence.

The rest is just hyperbole. I have no clue what female service members fighting in combat has to do with women being assaulted while on active duty. Nor was I aware of the “gender-industrial complex”. What the fuck is that? In conclusion, MacDonald’s reference about patriarchy is instructive. Nobody having anything to do with treating MST is talking about The Patriarchy, but conservative pundits like MacDonald will always bring it up because it is a sine qua non for conservative ethos.

Fuck You, Adbusters. “We here in North America gave birth to something weird and wonderful…”

Adbusters has always been full of shit, in my opinion; it’s radicalism for the privileged classes. But this “tactical briefing” entitled “What is Occupy morphing into?” takes the cake:

As our first anniversary passes we can see that our indignation, the nascent revolution, the calls for new ways of being, are just one part of the global insurrectionary jam. Tunisia, Tahrir, Indignados, Casseroles, Pussy Rioters, Libya, Syria, Bahrain, Russia, Chile, China, Spain, Greece, Quebec, Indonesia and beyond … the world political compass hasn’t wobbled like this since 1968. The ecstatic confusion points to global seismic shift … a new point of collective reference is appearing on the horizon.

So what can we make of all this? Yes, we here in North America gave birth to something weird and wonderful that swept the world last year, but now as the global heartbeat thumps ever louder, the fire in our bellies is smoldering and we are just one of a myriad of revolutionary forces pulsing through the world. We must get over our obsession with ourselves, our neurotic micromanaging of our GAs and encampments and learn to rumble anew.

This is a delicious moment … the world is morphing into something new … don’t miss it! Get in there and do what you’ve always wanted to do.

Who are they kidding? —Themselves. I know. We know. But, really, look at the photo they stuck to this self-congratulatory crap:

It’s exactly how white liberals and progressives see themselves. All the brown people everywhere are waiting for us to give them a signal. This is as stupidly jingoist as say the scene in Independence Day where all the armies of the world are in a desert waiting for the POTUS and his army to start a true rebellion against the alien hordes. It’s just horrible meat.

How can you read something like this and not be incredibly offended? I’m not being precious. I want to know who reads this briefing and thinks, “Wow, we did this! Hooray!” It’s racist, sexist, and colonialist, in my opinion. It caters to how “North Americans” like to kid themselves about leadership. It’s horrible propaganda: the photo has nothing to do with the text. And it’s incorrect.

Moreover, where is the world morphing into something different? Culture Jammer Headquarters must be a mess of narcissism and satisfaction.

You want proof that North Americans forget they’re relatively isolated from the rest of the world? Here it is:

Hey all you redeemers, reckless dreamers and radicals out there,

Look!… look! … look! Regimes are being toppled, leaders thrashed, embassies stormed, movements and masses are rising. One by one all the old paradigms, power structures and civilizational norms are biting the dust … Capitalism, infinite growth based economics, the sacred morality of Western leadership, the invincibility of totalitarian and corporate driven regimes, the cult of individualism — all the sacred touchstones of our civilization are reeling under attack like never before.

Our civilization? Come on!

I give it you, Adbusters. You are, in fact, reckless dreamers. Too bad you are anything but radical.

It’s a voluntarist contemplating the state of the ron paul revolution.

The male gaze engineering pleasure for itself—it’s the perfect metaphor for vulgar libertarianism. Even down to the guy looking like some jerk from Reason.

(Source: negativepleasure)

thepeoplesrecord:

How NYC’s plutocrat mayor made 20,000 children homeless
December 9, 2012

There are 20,000 kids sleeping in homeless shelters in New York City, according to the city’s latest estimate, a number that does not include homeless kids who are not sleeping in shelters because their families have been turned away. Up to 65 percent of families who apply for shelter don’t get in, and their options can be grim.

“Some end up sleeping in subway trains,” Patrick Markee, senior policy analyst at Coalition for the Homeless, tells AlterNet. “Some go to hospital emergency rooms or laundromats. Women are going back to their batterers or staying in unsafe apartments.”

Families that make it into shelters are taking longer to leave and move into stable, permanent housing. Asked by reporters why families were staying 30% longer than even last year, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said, “… it is a much more pleasurable experience than they ever had before.”

“Is it great?” he elaborated a day later in response to outcry over his comments. “No. It’s not the Plaza Hotel … but that’s not what shelter is supposed to be and that’s not what the public can afford or the public wants.”

That deep-seated empathy for the poor also runs through the mayor’s policies, which have helped create a crisis that The New York Times has called ”an emergency.” Since the mayor took office, promising to slash the rate of total homelessness by two thirds in five years, the homeless rate in New York City has ballooned to 46,000 people sleeping in shelters, an increase of almost 40 percent. The administration blames the financial crisis, but as it turns out, there are ways to make the lives of the very poor tougher in the middle of a recession: you just need to subscribe to a governing philosophy that assumes the poor are both too lazy to get on their feet and working hard day and night to cheat the system.

Here is a guide to how the Bloomberg administration managed to increase family homelessness while using up a lot of public money.

1. Cut access to federal aid

For decades, Republican and Democratic mayors kept family homelessness down by giving homeless parents and their kids priority access to federal housing subsidies and rental vouchers. But in 2004, as part of the mayor’s five-year plan to combat homelessness, the administration knocked homeless families from the top of the massive waiting list for federal rent subsidies. Administration officials, offering no empirical proof, claimed that poor people were scamming the system by moving into shelters in order to get Section 8 vouchers. (Like many conservative fantasies involving scheming minorities, it’s no doubt true that someone, somewhere, cheated - but studies show this was not a widespread problem straining the system.)

The rate of homeless families who used federal subsidies fell to the low single digits. According to Giselle Routhier, policy analyst for Coalition for the Homeless, “In fiscal year 2010, at a time of then record homelessness, homeless families received only 2 percent of the 5,500 available public housing apartments and only 3 percent of 7,500 Section 8 vouchers.”

In place of programs that gave them access to permanent housing, homeless families got the gift of personal responsibility! First the administration introduced Housing Stability Plus, a subsidy that fell by 20 percent each year. HSP was mired in controversy following revelations that families were being exposed to hazardous conditions in their new digs: “[M]any formerly homeless families and their children have suffered from lead poisoning, lack of heat and hot water, vermin infestation,” according to a Coalition for the Homeless report.

The Advantage program, introduced in 2007, helped with a percent of families’ rents (requiring they work or take job training) but cut aid after either one or two years. When their subsidies ran out, families were supposed to find their own way into permanent housing. Instead, many found their way back to the shelter, because, as homelessness advocates point out, rents did not magically go down in New York. One out of three families whose Advantage assistance expired applied for shelter in 2011, according to city numbers crunched by Coalition for the Homeless.

2. Cut and run

Still, the administration touted the program as a success, defending it against homelessness advocates and city officials who pushed the mayor to give families priority in federal housing assistance. So it was strange that when the governor of New York cut half of Advantage’s funding in March 2011, the Bloomberg administration refused to make up the difference and just killed the program. Around that time the mayor suggested that poor families were pretending to be homeless to scam Advantage subsidies.“You never know what motivates people,” he said on his radio show. “One theory is that some people have been coming into the homeless system, the shelter system, in order to qualify for a program that helps you move out of the homeless system.”

When the city officially cut the program, 15,000 families who relied on Advantage to make rent were informed by letter that they had exactly two weeks to find other arrangements. An emergency court order forced the city to continue helping families in the program, but when the order was lifted in February 2012, the city abruptly cut off aid to tenants, saddling 7,000 households with full market rent for apartments they’d struggled to pay 30% to 40% on.

The inevitable return to the shelter of many former Advantage families helped push the number of homeless people sleeping in shelters up to 43,000 in 2012. “In the last 18 months, there has been no housing plan,” Markee tells AlterNet.

3.Spend money on temporary solutions

Instead, the administration is just frantically opening up more and more emergency shelters. The AP reports that 10 new shelters for single adults and families have opened in recent months to deal with the crisis. The administration plans five more before the year is over.

The problem with that is everything. Putting up a family in a shelter costs $3,000 a month — way more than a rental subsidy. Beyond that, studies have shown that not having a permanent place to live is destabilizing and harmful to kids, even if they end up in one of those NYC shelters that so impressed the mayor with their luxury. Homeless kids get sick more often and with stranger and more serious ailments than poor kids who have homes, suffering respiratory infections and digestive infections at significantly higher rates. The lack of safe, permanent housing delays normal development and homeless kids have higher levels of anxiety and depression, which often manifest in behavioral problems.

“If homelessness is hard on adults, for the young, it can be disastrous, starting a slide into a lifetime of problems,” a NYT editorial put it. (It’s not entirely clear what the long-term impact of Hurricane Sandy will be on the city’s homelessness rates. Right now, families who lost their homes in the storm are staying in hotels paid by the city and reimbursed by FEMA.)

4.Refuse to change course

The New York City Council has outlined a plan to revive programs proven to reduce homelessness. As Christine Quinn, Annabel Palma and Coalition for the Homeless director Mary Brosnahan wrote in a Huffington Post op-ed, “That means returning to the proven strategy of setting aside a reasonable share of open slots in public housing and marshaling valuable federal housing vouchers for those trapped in the shelter system. In addition, a new rental assistance program, modeled on the successful federal voucher program, must be created.”

An assessment of the plan by the City of New York’s Independent Budget Office found, “if a total of 5,000 families a year were moved out of shelter through priority referrals for NYCHA and Section 8, family shelter costs would be $29.4 million lower, of which $11.0 million would be savings of city funds.”

So far, the administration has rebuffed the plan. At a hearing in September, Department of Homeless Services commissioner Seth Diamond pointed, improbably, to job training programs as the way to address the city’s skyrocketing homelessness. One council member called it a “head-in-the-sand” approach.

Diamond reiterated the administration’s position that shelter residents should not be prioritized for housing aid.

Source

This job-training argument is a capitalist ruse much like the “right to work” ruse that merely reinforce the traditional, classed order because they insist that homelessness, among other problems poor people face, is the homeless individuals’ faults and that only their efforts should earn a place to live, and so an authorized place in the free market. So, this is a moral claim about how to handle the homeless and homelessness. Let’s always be clear. It’s a sexist and racist claim, as well as one that disables the working classes. Moreover, it’s a moral code that disproportionally injures women of color and their children.

(via trotskitty)

Massholes for Scott Brown:

(Source: queerkhmer, via heckyeahwhatever)

From the article:

The bias was pervasive, the scientists said, and probably reflected subconscious cultural influences rather than overt or deliberate discrimination.

Female professors were just as biased against women students as their male colleagues, and biology professors just as biased as physics professors — even though more than half of biology majors are women, whereas men far outnumber women in physics.

We shouldn’t be surprised that both male and female professors are “just as biased”. This desire to look for biased individuals is the problem. The bias is the result of a corrupt system.

All this focus on individuals and their acts is the fucking problem.

"And Kaling, as a woman of color, faces even more unique challenges. When Lena Dunham launched Girls, Dunham was praised for creating and portraying a character not typically seen on TV screens: a young, post-college, average-looking, single woman with romantic woes, whose flaws and insecurities are on display. Kaling portrays a similarly flawed character, but has not received the same praise. Bloggers and critics hailed Dunham’s characters as relatable, real women."

RACIALICIOUS: A Reaction To The Backlash Against Mindy Kaling

Her writing quietly makes a statement about race without needing to explicitly on screen. One of the most striking anecdotes in the New York profile details a moment in production when Kaling sees a computer screen on set at her fictional OB/GYN office, filled with photos of white babies, and says to the crew: “Weren’t we going to have some babies of color? We’re going to have all white babies?”

By creating characters that are just people first, whose race is not used as a punchline or central to their character’s storyline, Kaling gives voice and representation on TV to a whole generation of Americans who very rarely see anyone like themselves on screen. In an interview with HitFix’s Alan Sepinwall, she said she hopes we get to a place where her race, and the race of her characters, isn’t the first thing people think of. “I don’t really think of myself so much as in terms of being Indian,” she said.

In its own way, Kaling’s work blazes an important trail for Asian-American women in television.

Asian women on television and film are typically exoticized, portrayed as either submissive, model minority or “tiger mom” types. Roles for Asian women on television are few and far between – but Kaling, by starting out as a writer and now as a showrunner, has played a big part in shaping more realistic portrayals of Asian American women on television by creating her own roles. I can’t think of another scripted television show – certainly no comedy – that has had an Asian-American female lead. Kaling deserves to be lauded for breaking down that barrier, for improving the way Asian women are portrayed on television – and she has certainly earned the right to be proud of such trailblazing success.

(via le-kif-kif)

Know what’s really grotesque about Romney’s and Christie’s speeches? I know it looks like they were trying to express their love for women, but they were actually both addressing their fidelity to masculine love and men. The GOP conservative base is so deeply misogynistic that two speeches meant to cheer women and drive conservative women to vote were written in a manner that their husbands and boyfriends would authorize. And both were much more interested in respect. 

Republicans cannot talk about love. Ann Romney had to first address her love for her husband before talking to women and Chris Christie led with a trite and clichéd memorialization of his deceased mother before talking about respect. The paean to respect is about earning and value, and that’s capitalist cultural crap. Where is the address to love?

Haters. Every one.

arielnietzsche:

bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center

(Source: jayaprada, via basedhuey-deactivated20121207)

Sexism in political discourse: What Are Women For?

Have you read James Poulos’s Daily Caller editorial? It’s pretty fucking thick. The title alone is enough to inspire me to throw a brick at the person asking it. It’s explicitly sexist. What are women for (for or to whom)? In other words, women are composed as subjects in relation to men and the question suggests that they are present to others to serve specific purposes in addition to fundamental biological services for men. It’s just an awful question framed from awful assumptions. And as the video below illustrates, Poulos was not simply trolling. He sees it as an important question.

We can talk about this if you want, but I wanted this clip and link to the original article on my wall for future use.

The purposeful conflation of religious liberty and women’s health in service of social conservative policy

OR

The House Oversight and Government Reform Hearing on Religious Liberty and the Birth Control Rule

"Liberty is lost through complacency and a subservient mindset. When [white men] accept or even welcome automobile checkpoints, random searches, mandatory identification cards, and paramilitary police in our streets, [white men] have lost a vital part of our American heritage. America was born of protest, revolution, and mistrust of government [by white men]. Subservient [white] societies neither maintain nor deserve freedom for long."

Ron Paul (via LA “Andrew Sullivan is a leftist” Liberty)

I fixed the quote so that it would more correctly reflect Ron Paul’s actual views. We know he doesn’t believe women deserve the same liberty as men. And he sure as shit doesn’t give a shit about liberty for people of color.

"Why don’t they quit once the so-called harassment starts? Obviously the morals of the harasser can not be defended, but how can the harassee escape some responsibility for the problem?"

Ron Paul, in his book Freedom Under Siege (via shitthatronpaulsays)

From Ron Paul’s bushel of common sense.

(Source: shitthatlibertarianssay, via anticapitalist)

On “Save Second Base”: Your slogan/joke is an insult to survivors.

Throughout this argument you guys are having, I’ve tried to consider how sexualizing an illness could possibly help educate people about the illness itself rather than idealize the people who haven’t suffered the illness. It can’t.

I can’t think of one reason it would actually encourage participation via donations. I can’t think of anyone who’d want to wear that T-shirt. Well, hipster wannabes who aren’t survivors, sure. But there’s not much they won’t sexualize for profit. Can you imagine a teacher showing up to school in a shirt with that slogan in effort to encourage boys to learn about breast cancer? Who’d want that as a bumper sticker? If you like to cop a good feel, then support breast cancer research. Really?

In addition, the slogan caters to a sort of scopophilia that resists healthy sex and sexuality. Our language often lies about our feelings about an event, an occurrence, an emotion, an illness, a line even, say in a punchline. I mention punchline because that’s what the second-base slogan is all about. It’s a joke about men (and women, I suppose, but it’s a rather heterosexist cliche,) groping breasts as a mark of achievement on a date. You know, on their way to a home run, which is ultimate bragging rights. I suppose the joke about saving second base implies that a good second base grope is necessary for a successful home run, which is nonsense. Unfortunately, the joke is all about male sexual pleasure.

But let’s take this joke to its logical extreme. Let’s test just how funny the premise is. Rather than inserting the ideal image of sexualized breasts, let’s insert the image that we’re really addressing—precisely, the image of a woman’s body post-mastectomy. And since the image of the idealized woman’s body is the favorable image, then we immediately see that, in this joke about second-base, we are actively denegrating the surgically altered body. The joke is at the expense of women who have undergone mastectomies.

The slogan about second base actually insults women who have had mastectomies by devaluing their bodies. Why not just post a photo of a survivor’s chest with text something like, “Isn’t this a shame?”

(Source: feminist-tips, via ghost-of-algren)

Sexism and Gender Inequality Across 57 Societies

will have to wait until a reader gets a pdf online to share, unless you have a subscription to the journal.

Sexism and Gender Inequality Across 57 Societies

Abstract:

Theory predicts that individuals’ sexism serves to exacerbate inequality in their society’s gender hierarchy. Past research, however, has provided only correlational evidence to support this hypothesis. In this study, I analyzed a large longitudinal data set that included representative data from 57 societies. Multilevel modeling showed that sexism directly predicted increases in gender inequality. This study provides the first evidence that sexist ideologies can create gender inequality within societies, and this finding suggests that sexism not only legitimizes the societal status quo, but also actively enhances the severity of the gender hierarchy. Three potential mechanisms for this effect are discussed briefly.