racism

Why London School of Economics Should Consider Dismissing Satoshi Kanazawa

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Mon, 2011-05-23 14:03

Note: Satoshi Kanazawa used the generic catchphrase "black" in the post I'm about to discuss.  Since it's not clear from his context whether his racism was directed at people of African, or African-American origin, or even just anyone with skin he determines to be darkly pigmented, in this particular I'm just going to use his terminology and say "black."

Usually when anybody types the words "Satoshi Kanazawa" my eyes start to glaze over. For obvious reasons. When I see him he's cited approvingly my blood also boils, but that's been happening less and less, so mostly when I see him referenced I just move on.

But last he became so extreme that even Psychology Today (the Cosmopolitan Magazine of science journalism) woke up enough to yank one of his posts. (After altering the title from Kanazawa's original "Why Black Women Are Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women" to "Why Black Women Are Rated Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women" because that made it better.)

And now it sounds like (finally!) his employers at the London School of Economics might have been moved to action -- if not for his overt racism, sexism, and homophobia then at least for his really capricious methodology.

So anyway, there having been such an awesome uproar this time I had to take a look. And... yeah, he's pretty special that guy.

You sort of have to admire his serenely confident but argumentatively gratuitous shot that while “black women are on average much heavier than non-black women” that’s not why black women are uglier. Oh no, he's scientifically controlled for that so they're still just ugly even when you take into account that they're fat.

Next he blithly asserts that blacks on average are stupider (have lower intelligence) than all non-blacks… but that’s not why, quoth he, black women are uglier. Oh no, because, see, even though black men are just as stupid as black women they’re still significantly more attractive than non-black men. (Or, one supposes from his amended version, black men are rated more attractive. Which I guess is supposed to be less racist.)

But wait! Maybe they’re not gratuitous structural arguments: he may have brought them up by way of eliminating the factors most favored by his superficial racist stereotypes to get to his more fundamental ones: “well, you’d think black women were uglier because blacks are fatter and stupider but no, even filtering out their fatness and stupidity black women are still ugly.

Oh, and then there's this lovely bit!

[B]ecause they have existed much longer in human evolutionary history, Africans have more mutations in their genomes than other races. And the mutation loads significantly decrease physical attractiveness (because physical attractiveness is a measure of genetic and developmental health). But since both black women and black men have higher mutation loads, it cannot explain why only black women are less physically attractive, while black men are, if anything, more attractive.

He says that black male attractiveness eliminates as a reason the “fact” that since blacks “have existed much longer in human evolutionary history, blacks have more mutations in their genomes than other races.” And, you see, purer races prefer lower “mutation loads.” But once again, despite those preferences (and, don’t forget, men’s seed-spreading willingness to screw anything that moves… er… to make lower genetic “investments”) and all those icky mutations make black men “if anything, more attractive.”

(Speaking of “objectivity,” one can imagine that were Kanazawa of black heritage he'd instead have have concluded not that rather than having more “mutations” blacks have robust genetic diversity, which instead would be superior to those icky “inbred” races with their “evolved” aversion to replenishing their degenerate gene pools. He could even use same "objective" statistics to back back up that claim! But I digress.)

(Also speaking of “objectivity,” one can imagine that black people have more “mutations” because, as you say Rob, “black” is only a race in the sense that “black” people have darker skin, with the result that while “black” people descended from populations recently indigenous to north Africa, south Africa, central, east, and west Frica, south Asia, the Pacific Islands, Australia, parts of India, and so on are, yeah, a $@^%@ of a lot “older” and racially “mutated” since some of them are likely more genetically similar to what ever relatively genetic monoculture Mr. Kanazawa calls homeland than they are to each other. But I digress again...)

But nope, nope. Instead he says he's factored that out too: “mutations” don’t make black women uglier either. In fact, says he,

The only thing I can think of that might potentially explain the lower average level of physical attractiveness among black women is testosterone. Africans on average have higher levels of testosterone than other races, and testosterone, being an androgen (male hormone), affects the physical attractiveness of men and women differently.

Yup, that’s probably the only other thing that could possibly explain the difference. (If he'd said they had less oxytocin we could all go home.)

It’s also the point at which he stops being a racist asshole using raw statistics and becomes a… free-wheeling racist homophobe "evolutionary psychologist" of the sort that gives evolutionary psychology a really bad name.*

See testosterone, Kanazawa believes, makes everybody look more manly. And black women have more testosterone. Which makes them look more manly. And it's looking manly that makes them ugly.

And so by inference that makes anyone who’s attracted to black women Teh Gay Takei. And, as we all know, Teh Takei is an evolutionary dead end. So all right-minded, offspring-maximizing men recognize that black women are ugly: QED.

And does he present any graphs or charts to back up these assertions? No. Does he bring up any counterarguments? Not at all. Does he cite any prior research? Nope. Does he cite anyone else's research? Not that either.  And does he bring up any other possible reasons why black women might be singled out as less attractive?  Not a bit.  Did he even stop check his arithmetic to make sure that, you know, the data he was using says what he wanted it to?  Evidently not(!)

Nope, nearly all the preceding crap is just Kanazawa being an unencumbered racist doing what racists are really good at doing -- selectively using the tools of a still-emerging field of science to advance his foregone conclusions. He happens to use evolutionary psychology much the way early 20th-Century racists and classists used Darwin to advance "social Darwinism," the way Dick Army, Paul Ryan, and Brian Caplan use economics to advance their defense of the status quo, the same way Dinesh D'Souza and Charles Murray use statistics to defend segregation, and just the same way Donna M. Hughes uses feminism as sheeps clothing for her neoconservatism.

With any luck, though, this time next year Kanazawa will be publishing from The Spearhead or National Vanguard and working lecturing at Bob Jones University or Liberty University. Which, his nominal Darwinism notwithstanding, should welcome him with open arms.

* I.e. he starts pulling shit out of his ass and saying "it must be evolved because it gives me such a woodie" and leaving it at that. Evolutionary psychology itself isn't objectionable in principle -- it would be hard to argue that nothing about human behavior has been influenced by natural selection. And most practitioners are actually fairly moderate people and many of them are outright Unitarian, Birkenstock-wearing, old-school liberals. And as far as I know none of them actually like, let alone admire Satoshi Kanazawa. But! Up till now he's been the closest thing to a Carl Sagan EP has had. And... yeah... how's that been working?

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Ever Notice How Much the Anti-Abortion Debate Relies on Racial, and Often Racist Stereotypes?

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Wed, 2011-03-02 17:45

Photo via Sociological Images. Cached as a bandwidth-conserving courtesy
Photo via Sociological Images.

So when I saw the billboard model anti-choicers picked for their “most dangerous place for an African American is in the womb” anti-abortion campaign -- a late-elementary school girl in a light top with a wary, kind of stunned look on her face -- it really bothered me but I couldn't quite put my finger on it.  She seems pretty old for their usual cutesy baby poster-child pics.

Amanda Marcotte gave me the clue I was looking for.

Sean Hannity, yelling at Juan Williams for suggesting it’s a good thing if women can choose when they give birth: “I’m pro-choice in this sense, Juan.  If you choose to get in the back of the car with someone, if you choose to make out with them, if you choose to grab, grope and fondle, if you choose to take one article of clothing off after another, guess what? You made a series of choices, Juan.”

What I enjoyed was the realization that Hannity thinks people stop fucking when they get old enough to have apartments of their own, and don’t have to make out in the back seats of cars.  Is this a widespread assumption on the right?

Source: Pandagon

I thinks she's exactly right.  Adult women pretty much don’t have sex in cars.  For one thing, last I checked you pretty much can’t have sex in a car.  Unless it’s sex in a mini-van (not that uncommon but not what Hannity is imagining) or... sex in back of the kind of large “pimp-mobile” American sedans I suspect he is imagining.

That’s what Hannity thinks abortion is all about: teen pregnancy.  Early teen pregnancy.  At the hands, no doubt, of “big black studs” driving around in welfare Cadillacs.  Who thanks to Planned Parenthood's enabling are able to, like, totally get away without paying "the wages of sin."

This African American pimp/teen-whore stereotype is a total fixation for ‘wingers.  It’s no coincidence that Lila Rose got actors to pretend to be pimps for her failed video sting of Planned Parenthood.  Same, of course, with James O’Keefe’s sting against ACORN.  (Even when they used white actors, as when O'Keefe himself pretended to be a pimp, their attire and demeanor was straight out of 1970s-style urban-black exploitation iconography.)

I’d just add that the right almost has to demonize stereotypes of very young African American girls and older, underworld partners because the alternative is confronting the majority of women who actually do get abortions.  Because the reaction when a lower-middle-class working or college-bound woman in her late teens or early 20s gets an abortion, or a married woman who doesn’t want any more kids gets an abortion, or an even older married woman who's amniocentesis or ultrasound reveals profound disabilities the reaction is a lot less, um, viscerally satisfying.  Instead, when it comes to their own daughters, friends, sisters, mothers, and wives it tends to be almost... sympathetic.

Don't get me wrong.  They could debate the issue on its actual merits.  Hard to imagine it ever occurring to them.

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Acknowledging Kyriarchy and its Consequences in Progressive Politics

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Sat, 2010-09-18 16:49

Cool post by Suzie at Echidne of the Snakes. The overall post is about "intra-party" criticism in feminism, though much the same things could be said about all manner of progressive social activism. At one point Suzie gets a little meta and raises a pretty good point…


In her column, [historian Christine] Stansell discusses the racism of white feminists, and in her book, she criticizes the condescension of white women who wanted to help their “inferiors.” But what's the explanation for white feminists who express more anger at the racism and classism of white women than they do about the bad behavior of other oppressed people? One possibility is that they hold white women to a higher standard. Is that not condescending to others? Will there come a time when black male scholars write with equal disgust about forefathers who were condescending, and thus, sexist, in their desire to protect and help women? Who conducted business without women present? Who put more emphasis on their rights than women's rights? I look forward to those books. In the meantime, I’m happy with Stansell’s, despite my quibbles. Read the quote in context here.

... that I'd like to take just a little bit further. I'm actually pretty sure that, say, Fredrick Douglass was genuinely remorseful for not following through on his promise to his predominantly white 19th-Century-feminist allies to push for a "16th Amendment" after pressing them to drop their bid to have women named, and thus included, in the 14th and 15th Amendments that extended and protected the vote for African American citizens. (His loss of enthusiasm for their cause earned considerable animosity from his erstwhile allies.) I'm not sure (meaning really not sure) if he ever acknowledged that in sinking his allies' chances he also denied African-American women a right to vote… for what turned out to be another three generations. There's a deeper point, though: by failing to help extend the franchise Douglass, countless African-American men, and the equally large number of white progressive men who's votes actually made the difference on the first two amendments cost themselves considerable electoral support in pursuit of causes all had in common. For instance in the same NYT Op-Ed Stansell said in the context of the ratification of the 19th Amendment that eventually did give women the vote


The logic of women’s disenfranchisement helped legitimize relegating blacks to second-class citizenship. Female voters would also pose practical difficulties, described bluntly by a Mississippi man: “We are not afraid to maul a black man over the head if he dares to vote, but we can’t treat women, even black women, that way. No, we’ll allow no woman suffrage.” Stansell said it here.

And no, that's not saying it would have been great to have set African American women up as cannon fodder during the Jim Crow era. More likely the inclusion of women's voices, all women's, would have forestalled, mitigated, or at least brought an earlier end to those laws. And others. The point being that empowering everybody generally empowers everybody! Just as leaving some people in defined-second-class status disempowers not only the victims, and their allies, but (as we can, for instance, see in the U.S. with immigrants, Israel with Palestinians, Christians in Indonesia, women in the middle-east, Shia in Sunni-dominated areas of the middle-east, everybody in Burma and North Korea, etc.) those who nominally benefit from that oppression as well. As… um… some orator I can't recall said during the pre-Civil-War era, in order to keep others down in the ditch one must one's self be in the ditch to make sure they stay there. And, kyriarchy being what it is, that extends through layers and layers of people too busy keeping their own boots on someone else's neck to notice the boots on their own necks. (Returning to Suzie's original point, by the way, that would include the back and forth oppression between what Stansell the historian has decided to term "mother" and "daughter" groups in feminism, and others have more recently decided to call "2nd-" and "3rd-wave" feminists.)


Point being that when it comes to demographic power politics, to the extent someone needs to acknowledge their oppression of others or their failure to empower others they need to acknowledge the consequences such oppression has also brought upon themselves.

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In Defense of Bob McDonnell Gail Collins Frames Slavery as Mainly a Concern of "Purple State" Perverts

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Sat, 2010-04-24 07:48

Via a news roundup on Daily Kos, Gail Collins, a columnist at the New York Times attempts to rescue extremist Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell with a subtle but vicious slur against his opponents. Check this out (emphasis mine.)

The country may have moved to the right, but conservatives tend to underestimate the amount of blue that’s still out there. The new Republican governor of Virginia seemed stunned that his state reacted badly to his call for a Confederate History Month that did not mention slavery. But really, the very definition of a purple state is a place where, when you devote an entire month to recalling the glories of the confederacy, you have to give some time to the bondage angle.

She said it here.

Let’s read that last sentence again, this without that middle clause. “But really,the very definition of a purple state is a place where … you have to give some time to the bondage angle.”

If you’ve got access to Nexis or Lexis could you do me a favor and look for historical references to slavery as “the bondage angle?” Because when I Googled the phrase at 8:00 AM Pacific Time it was pretty much wall-to-wall references to BDSM. (Google suggested I instead try “bondage-angel,” for which there are 1,400,000 matches compared to “bondage-angle” for which there are only 84,000!)

There you go. Some four centuries of slavery reduced to an eyeball roll for the offended sensibilities of perverted New York and San Francisco liberals. Talk about the “very definition of a purple state!”

Instead I’m… pretty sure that in addition to insulting men who wear chaps and vote for Barney Frank, Gail Collins may also have insulted oh, say, any number of the 41 million U.S. citizens who’s ancestors were brought to labor as slaves in McDonnell’s beloved Confederacy.

Her column was titled “Running on Empty,” but Collins is so full of it she should wipe her nose with toilet paper.

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The No-Sex Class: A Chilling Confirmation From Slavery Apologists Before the American Civil War

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Sun, 2010-02-07 22:52

Well here’s an interesting tidbit on maintenance of the two-sphere model of gender that I stumbled across on a coffee-shop “library.” The book is called Unruly Women: The Politics of Social and Sexual Control in the Old South. In a coffee-shop setting I’ve only been able to read the introduction but the rest of the book looks interesting as well.

Here’s an eye-opening couple of paragraphs from the introduction though.

To link female honor to purity would have proven sexually inconvenient for southern white men, however, had they not bifurcated the sexuality of white and black women. The creation of Jezebel provided the rationale for allowing sexual relations between white men and black women. Southern proslavery ideologue William Harper made no apology for the sexual degrading of black women by white men. He simply extended his theory that “slavery anticipates the benefits of of civilization and retards the evils of civilization” into the realm of sexual relations.

By regarding black women as a “class of women who set little value on chastity,” he argued that slavery protected black women by saving them from the alternative of being cast out of society in the manner “justly and necessarily applied to promiscuous free women.”

Harper further argued that the sexual access to enslaved women discouraged white men from debauching “pure” white women and provided them with “easy gratification” for their “hot passions” without violating the code of southern honor. Finally, he reasoned, such sexual access made white men “less liable to those extraordinary fascinations, with which worthless [white] women sometimes entangle their victims.”

Source: Introduction, pg #9

What’s really boggling is that Harper, like Aquinas, Augustine, and countless others who’ve endorsed this view of heterosexuality imagined they could endorse this outlook and still go to Heaven when they died.

This would sound more shocking if virtually the same sentiments didn’t turn up in the Middle Ages and even earlier: a relatively small number of “jezebels:” prostitutes, slaves, and occasionally even boys are sacrificed at the alter of, well, unalterable male lust in order to… what? To preserve the nigh-unto-asexually disinterested sexual “purity” of “true womanhood.

One can only imagine how actual true women felt about it… all of them obviously — both the “bad,” “debauched,” or “fallen” ones were overborn sexually, and the “pure,” “true,” and “virtuous” who were allowed no sexual expression at all.

Anyway, it’s a totally horrifying but also very tidy encapsulation of the dominant paradigm of women as the obligatory no-sex class and men as the compulsive sex class.

Anyway, knowing nothing else about the book (though I’ll see if I can get back to the coffee shop to read more of it) the very quick skim I was able to give it looks like a seriously interesting look at a usually seriously overlooked population and the dynamics women of all social and economic classes were subject to before, during, and after the Civil War.

On the very off-hand chance anyone else has read more of it feel free to let me know what you think in comments.

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Species Assumptions: Neanderthals, Being Another Species, Might Have Preferred to Stroll With Another Troll

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Wed, 2009-11-04 20:57

Paleoanthropologist John Hawks picks up an unconsciously but hugely man-hating comment on Slashdot.


Slashdot picks up the Svante Pääbo “Humans had sex with Neandertals“ story.

Hilarity ensues.


You do not need any DNA analysis to figure that out. What do you think the troll did to the captured the [sic] princess, once he took her back to his mountain cave? And they did not call it the Stockholm syndrome if she ever was freed; it was called bergtatt (literally: taken into the mountain) or bewitched.

Mod skepticism +5…
He said it here.


We have no, zero, none idea whether the sexual behavior in Neanderthals, or Cro Magnons, or any other species in our genus would be that much like ours. We have very little reason to believe that other species would be more attracted to members of our species — presumably Neanderthals would prefer to meander down the the Neander with a man or woman with a nice bell-shaped rib-cage and undershot jaw instead of the weirdly hourglass-shaped, pointy-chinned “princess” the slashdot commentator imagines would be more “hawt.”

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HedonisticPleasureSeeker on Muslims, Secret Muslims, Circumcision... and Funny Women

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Tue, 2009-08-25 20:14

Hedonistic Pleasureseeker points out a secret flaw in Freeper plans to somehow humiliate verify President Obama’s citizenship by forcing him to show his penis in court. Or something. She says…

I confess: I’d like to see Barack Obama drop his pants for me too, but really. Their plan doesn’t even make any sense: Circumcision is addressed in the Islamic Hadith, which instructs muslims AND secret muslins to be circumcised.

She said it here.

Doh! Those wiley, Jehovah/Yaweh/Allah-worshiping People of the Book! How far back can this nefarious conspiracy to put an American citizen in the White Hose go?

Compounding her violation of Rule of Desire #1 in the preceding paragraph her introduction violates the Women Have No Sense of Humor rule with a knife-twisting play on words.

Since white racists are already obsessed with black men’s sexual equipment I’m sure they presume the President is circus-sized, but is he circumcised?

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Excellent Reasons to Fear (and Find Ways Around) Fear Itself

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Mon, 2008-11-17 16:37

Kevin Drum of Mother Jones passes on a tidbit that helps make sense of the peculiar, even egregious mindset of the largely dominant classes.

TALK RADIO....Via Digby, here is Dan Shelley, former news director and assistant program director at Milwaukee’s WTMJ, telling us about his career working with his station’s right-wing talkers:

To succeed, a talk show host must perpetuate the notion that his or her listeners are victims, and the host is the vehicle by which they can become empowered. The host frames virtually every issue in us-versus-them terms. There has to be a bad guy against whom the host will emphatically defend those loyal listeners.

He quoted it here.

Got that? However on top or in charge they might be they generally don’t feel that way. For instance…

The stereotyped liberal view of the talk radio audience is that it’s a lot of angry, uneducated white men. In fact, the audience is far more diverse. Many are businesspeople, doctors, lawyers, academics, clergy, or soccer moms and dads. Talk show fans are not stupid. They will detect an obvious phony. The best hosts sincerely believe everything they say. Their passion is real. Their arguments have been carefully crafted in a manner they know will be meaningful to the audience, and that validates the views these folks were already thinking.

That doesn’t mean they’re not dangerous either

[The] enemy can be a politician – either a Democratic officeholder or, in rare cases where no Democrat is convenient to blame, it can be a “RINO” (a “Republican In Name Only,” who is deemed not conservative enough). It can be the cold, cruel government bureaucracy. More often than not, however, the enemy is the “mainstream media” – local or national, print or broadcast.

Sometimes, it can even be their own station’s news director. One year, Charlie targeted me because I had instructed my midday news anchor to report the Wimbledon tennis results, even though the matches wouldn’t be telecast until much later in the day. Charlie gave out my phone number and e-mail address on the air. I was flooded with hate mail, nasty messages, and even one death threat from a federal law enforcement agent whom I knew to be a big Charlie fan.

And here comes the first crux, applied by Shelley to ‘winger talk-show hosts but applicable to all such members of the “superior” class

This brings us to perhaps the most ironic thing about most talk show hosts. Though they may savage politicians and others they oppose, they fear criticism or critiques of any kind.

And then the final, dangerous irony

It is foolish to enter into a dispute with someone who has a 50,000-watt radio transmitter at his or her disposal and feels cornered.

Thing is, the people with their hands on very real levers of power are dangerous not because they’re ubermensch harboring Nietchziean beliefs that the weak exist merely for the amusement and exploitation of the strong. They’re dangerous because they imagine themselves at the bottom of the heap, only one law, one regulation, one immigrant, one heterosexual proposition declined, one homosexual proposition tolerated, one woman’s promotion, one foreign competitor, one adherent to another religion, away from social, cultural, even physical annihilation.

I remember sitting in the lobby of a progressive Portland, OR, publisher’s office back in 1980 or 1981, waiting for a friend to conclude a meeting, and reading a report (of all things) about volunteer burnout in progressive organizations. The article cited another study about anxiety among white-collar workers. Allegedly more than 75% of all white-collar workers surveyed in this cited studies believed there was some single question that could be asked that, by their inability to answer, would reveal them as frauds and cost them their jobs. Seventy-five percent!

And yet, even by the lax standards of the 1970s, dominated by the Peter Principle that everyone rises to their level of incompetence** and by stagflation and chronic layoffs, it simply wasn’t the case that everyone was separated from the street by only a single question.

That’s just what people… still mostly men back then… believed. Of themselves far more than of others. Remember, the fear was, and I think is, real. The basis for that fear was not.

Again, that doesn’t make that illusory fear less dangerous. Remember, death threats for publishing tennis scores! Just as today you see immigrants, in the land of the free and the home of the brave, murdered by cowards goaded by a culture of cowardice. Just as you see unassuming Unitarian churchgoers murdered in their pews not like cornered rats but by self-imagined cornered rats, goaded in turn by those who imagine themselves just as cornered.

I mention all this not as some kind of call for compassion (which would be received only as condescension anyway) but as an admonition to understand the peculiar mechanics of contemporary oppression, misogyny, racism, xenophobia, religious intolerance, homo- and transphobia in order to more effectively address it rather than exacerbate it, to mitigate it instead of magnify it.

[** Not as harsh as it was made out to be: restated more generously, you’d keep getting promoted until you reached, or barely exceeded, your full competency — in other words till you reached a maximum, not optimum, equilibrium of skill and workload. Naturally nobody saw it that way. —fl]

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Twit Patrol

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Fri, 2008-06-13 08:36


Screenshot via Feministing, hosted by PhotoBucket.

I first noticed the Right Wing’s decision to demonize Hillary Clinton some time in very late 1991 or early 1992. Although it must surely have begun warming up before then I associate it with the moment of their collective ZOMG-end-of-the-world flip-out over her post-election name change from “Hillary Clinton” to the scary-fezemeninist “Hillary Rodham Clinton”

And as I fretted last month they’ve wasted no time trying to smear Michelle Obama just as they would have Elizabeth Edwards, or Jill Tracey Jacobs (Joe Biden, not sure if she’s taken his last name), or Barbara Flavin (Bill Richardson, ditto), Elizabeth Kucinich or even long-shot Rita Gravel.

As I’ve said, um, a lot since at least 1992, if you want to be a twit attack someone for her gender, or race, or orientation, or whatever instead of something substantive. The right wing, intellectually as well as morally bankrupt since ketchup as a vegetable, have nothing but twit.

This has worked because, evidently, until at least 2004 the center and left have had nothing but doofus. Not so much any more.

Jessica Valenti of Feministing says

Fox’s Senior Vice President of Programming Bill Shine told the Politico that the producer responsible for labeling Michelle Obama “Obama’s baby mama” in a segment “exercised poor judgment.” Uh, yeah, I’d say so. (So much for a heartfelt apology.)

Via the newly-launched Michelle Obama Watch, created by What About Our Daughters. (Add it to your blogrolls, and get involved in keeping tabs on the media!)

I copied her entire post from here.

I’ve added the site to my blogroll. Even if you’re not a fan of the Obamas, if you’d rather they were engaged on a policy rather than personal level you might consider doing likewise. (Twittery, by the way, is not limited to ‘wingers — the left is starting to become disgracefully twittish about John McCain’s age and I’d hate for that to interfere with his enormous lapses and gaps in substance.)

[Oh yeah, and “baby momma?” Seriously? What’s worse is a lot of people are arguing “but they’re married,” and “but she’s educated,” and… and… and… yeah, and they’re playing into the FOX News frame. Instead “baby momma” is only, and entirely, and inextricably a) racist and b) sexist. No other “talking points” are necessary whether you’re talking about… well… anybody! —fl]

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Son, that's not what I meant by "aiming high."

Posted by Kochanie | Tags:
Tue, 2008-05-20 04:11
pissing_over_a_fence.jpg

After I read Melissa Bruen’s acccount of her assaults at the University of Connecticut, I kept returning to the same questions. How would the parents of these young men react if they learned that their son grabbed and dry humped this young woman? Or that their son had responded to this young woman’s outrage by exposing and grabbing her breasts before a crowd of spectators? Or that their son or daughter stood by and did nothing except laugh?

While I am not in favor of shame as a tool to control sexual behavior, I hope that at least a few of the young men in question felt a vestige of that emotion. If nothing else, I hope these students would have cause to fear the loss of financial support if their parents learned of their acts or their failure to act. After all, The acorn does not fall far from the tree. But as soon as I thought of that old adage, I realized that if we want to understand what happened to Melissa Bruen, we have to find the source of this sickness. And it’s not just the acorns that are diseased, but the entire tree.

In a discussion thread at Feministing, one commenter recommended that the University of Connecticut require all new freshmen to enroll in a mandatory course on aggression against women. Another commenter, Blue Cat, explained why college level training does not work:

I hate to say it, but my college out in the midwest tried to do that sort of education with entering freshman…starting in 1990. Unfortunately, by then it’s too late. It had no effect on crime at all. In my experience, it doesn’t matter how much of a “stand up guy” he is, there is a strong possibility that his attitudes are different when he’s around the guys, ESPECIALLY if he’s drinking. I’ve unfortunately seen it too often. The only way to affect these attitudes is a change in how children are raised in our culture, both genders. This has to start with the parents. In my view, the best way for us to combat it is to raise our sons to not need to follow the pack to validate their manhood, and for our daughters to learn that it’s OK for women to be aggressive, as much so as men (especially if danger lurks). And we must be as vigilant in monitoring our sons’ activities as our daughters, to make sure that they behave well and are around good influences. If you’ve done all of that, then likely you won’t see this idiocy happening later when they’re let loose.

Consider the controversy that occurred at the prestigious Horace Mann School in New York. In mockery of a student organization called the Women’s Issue’s Club, Horace Mann students created a Web page for a Facebook group named the “Men’s Issues Club.” Forty-four of Horace Mann’s students were members of the group, included children of prominent families and trustees on Horace Mann’s board. The online conversations included insults of teachers such as “crazy ass bitch” and puerile boasts from boys of “banging a teacher in the music dept. bathroom” and “beating up women when drunk.” According to the members of Men’s Issues Club, the answer to the question where women belong was, “IN THE KITCHEN!! IN THE KITCHEN!!” The club’s mission statement:

For too long men have not had a way to express themselves and their beliefs in society. Men need to have a voice, we aren’t meant to be seen and not heard. Let freedom ring, bitches.

One of the slandered teachers, Danielle McGuire, logged into the H.M. Facebook group using her married name. McGuire found that her liberal politics had earned her the title “Official Minority Rights Officer and Head of Protection for Feminist Society” and “Representation of Oppressed ‘Indians’ of America.” But the worst was

... the crude illustration of Tituba, whom she had lectured on last year. Tituba as Aunt Jemima, she thought. The artist had painted a racial slur. In every word on the page, McGuire saw herself depicted as a witch or a bitch.

While the administration of Horace Mann announced that the punishments for students in the group would be severe, the teachers who had viewed the Facebook group pages were told that their employment contracts were under review. One trustee, who was also the parent of a member of the Facebook group, confronted McGuire in public about viewing the site under a false name. When McGuire claimed that she had the right to protect herself against defamation, the trustee countered that the illustrations and insults were nothing more than students “just blowing off steam…[t]hey’re very stressed; it’s not unusual for them to say racist and sexist things.”

[You can read the entire article here, which I found courtesy of Ann Bartow of Feminist Law Professors].

Some have criticized the article which appeared in New York Magazine as staging the conflict between the teachers and the privileged students and their influential parents. Horace Mann will accumulate a debt of $339 million for new construction and other improvements and, as a result, the composition of its board has changed to include lawyers, investment bankers and real estate developers rather than academics. However, the bigger issue here is the ease with which the parents and trustees could overlook the misogyny and racism displayed by their children.

In November 2007, Thomas E. Ford, a psychology professor at Western Carolina University, and his graduate student co-authors published an article detailing the results of two projects designed to determine the effects of sexist humor. According to Ford,

Sexist humor is not simply benign amusement. It can affect men’s perceptions of their immediate social surroundings and allow them to feel comfortable with behavioral expressions of sexism without the fear of disapproval of their peers…Specifically, we propose that sexist humor acts as a ‘releaser’ of prejudice…Our research demonstrates that exposure to sexist humor can create conditions that allow men – especially those who have antagonistic attitudes toward women – to express those attitudes in their behavior. The acceptance of sexist humor leads men to believe that sexist behavior falls within the bounds of social acceptability.

...just blowing off steam…[t]hey’re very stressed; it’s not unusual for them to say racist and sexist things.

Indeed.

But they’re not as stressed as the Horace Mann teachers whose employment contracts were not renewed.

I doubt that they’re as stressed as Yale student Jessica Sverndson on one January night when a group of 20 frat boys stood in front of the Yale Women’s Center chanting “Dick! Dick! Dick!”

Nor will they ever be as stressed as 80% of the victims of sexual assault, like Melissa Bruen, who may suffer chronic physical or psychological problems over time.

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