Gendered images, the history of marriage and bromance

[greenie_breizh]

A couple of serious links for tonight:

Jean Kilbourne's Killing Us Softly 3 about images of women in advertising - it's worth watching even if there are no groundbreaking points that are being made in there, and there's some funny. :)

The one quote I really liked was one when Jean was talking about the fact there's been a rise recently in images that objectify men, as well. And how sometimes that's used to say, look, men are treated just as badly as women.

The problem? Apart from the fact it doesn't happen with as much frequency, it is that the structure doesn't work the same for men and women. "There are no consequences to men for being objectified." The images that we circulate that perpetuate an image of masculinity as necessarily violent and unemotional have much more power, and are much more dangerous.

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An interesting post, An exegesis on same-sex marriage, in particularly because it goes over the history of marriage as an institution.

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And I'll throw a lighter link in there, Nathan Fillion and Joss Whedon being adorable together. RL bromance FTW. :D

Comments

[terra-placidus.livejournal.com]

Hmm
A few things to add....
First of all, I, personally don't believe that in mainstream Canadian society, it is accurate to call women and oppressed group and men a dominant group. Certainly, there are a few remaining areas where women are treated with less preference, or yes, even discrimination (fewer women CEOs, administrators, managers, some political offices, a small but still lingering wage inequality for women etc) but there are so many more arenas where equality has been established firmly enough ( for example more than 50% of post secondary students, even in areas formerly considered male-dominated - ie med school etc - are female.)
Oppression, to me, is a much stronger word that speaks to widespread daily injustice, and a limiting of basic freedoms, and it has been years and years since this was the case. I do not consider women in Canada as an oppressed group, and I do not consider men a dominant group.

Now, the problem with seeing women as aggressors is that such behaviour does not fit with the stereotype of women that many of us hold however unconsciously - that is, women are the weaker of the two genders, passive, gentle, easy victims etc. Numbers asserting that women are about as aggressive as men are questioned because it's contrary to what we expect, or counter-intuitive. Why is it counter-intuitive? Because it's against the stereotype. Why else are we so eager to find excuses for the women, with questions like, 'well, who started it,' 'why did they start it', 'self defense' etc. Things like this look dangerously like victim blaming, and would be unthinkable if directed towards situations where the victims is female.
It's actually been well documented and well understood by experts in the field since the mid seventies that women are just as violent as men. There are huge longitudinal studies in several countries, including the US and New Zealand. Why isn't it common knowledge than women and men are equally violent? To quote Dr Dutton (my prof last year, an internationally recognized expert on domestic violence)

'[The last chapter] reviewed data that have been troubling feminists since the first US National Survey of 1975: women are as violent as males. Because this findings contradicts feminist theory, it has been suppressed, unreported, re-interpreted or denied. The female violence rates have been portrayed as self-defensive violence, less serious violence, or a result of reporting differences. In fact they equal or exceed males, they include female violence against non-violent males, and they have serious consequences for males.'

These self- labeled feminists who are supposedly activists for the belief in equality, seem to want women to remain in the victim role, vilifying men as the perpetrators of severe unilateral violence, which is at best, self serving, at worst, actually intends slander and hate towards men.

The idea that men are more violent than women, and any arguments about dominant men abusing oppressed women, are just blatantly false. There is a robust body of research on the topic, and anyone who claims otherwise is either uninformed, (which is excusable) or, like certain radical feminists, has a political reason to deny scientifically evaluated behavioural data (which is inexcusable).

There are only two types of violence that men use more than women, and those differences are generally less then one percent. Men are more likely to 'batter' a woman (by .2 percent in one study), it's true, but women are more likely to use a weapon (only by .5 percent though) and, perhaps most surprisingly, women are most likely to hit, kick punch, bite, slap or otherwise strike a man than the other way around. The difference with hitting is a full ten percent.

If a couple is violent towards each other, and say, each partner slaps the other across the face, the intent to cause harm is the same, the violent act is strictly the same, but if the man is larger than the woman, the same action will leave and brief red mark on the face of the man, but possibly a bruise or black eye on the face of the woman. Who was more violent in this situation?

I would definitely recommend you take a look at the chapter of my textbook from last year about the domestic assault of men. It is an eye opener.

[terra-placidus.livejournal.com]

It made me cut off some of my words! I didn't know that lj responses had a maximum character response limit. :P

[terra-placidus.livejournal.com]

The last couple things I wanted to add were that domestic violence is an interaction pattern. You can't have an interaction with only one partner. Both partners are responsible for the way they relate to one another. An author (whose name is probably in my notes) who wrote a number of books about violence against women was embraced by the feminist community until she wrote a book about the dynamics of violent relationships, talking about these interaction patterns. She was totally shunned by the so called feminists, because she suggested that both partners have a role in the patterns that lead to violence. Never once did she say that violence was an acceptable response in any way - all she said was that abused women were not passive entities in these relationships.

Stats and numbers do not, to me, erase meaning, they erase bias, and they erase excuses.

Also, it's important to note that over many studies, gender is not a predictor of violence. Personality disorder is the main predictor of violence, and overall, I think the gender rates are similar. There are gender differences for specific personality disorders - men are more likely to have anti-social personality disorder, whereas women are more likely to have borderline personality disorder, but in sum, they're pretty equal.

Okay. Off to the lab.

[greenie-breizh.livejournal.com]

Woah woah woah. Just quickly - I don't have time to really get into the other stuff - women are not equal to men today in Canadian society. They graduate in greater numbers but they are still HIGHLY segregated in female-dominated fields such as education or nursing. Forestry and engineering are two examples of fields that are extremely male-dominated still despite efforts to improve female improvement. If I still have the table at home, I'll show you tonight. I also don't have the numbers with me, but: there's still a salary gap that disadvantages women; women still face vertical segregation (the lack of women in positions of power) but horizontal segregation as well, by being concentrated in fields that are less well-paid; women are also disproportionately likely to be the single head of a household (single-headed households do less well in almost every socio-economic aspect for the obvious reason that the remaining parent has to take on everything) and compared to male-headed single household, they are worse off. I know for sure in France the sharing of household tasks still greatly disadvantages women as well, and I don't see why Canada would be excluded from that. And these few things are only the most obvious aspects, a little bit of poking around data would probably show other variables I didn't think to mention. I'm not even going to go into the fact that we still value female qualities less, thus generally making the category "woman" less valuable than "man"; a very simple example of that is that it's a compliment to say of a girl "oh, look her climbing around like a boy" while to say "stop acting like such a girl" to a guy is about the most offensive thing you can say.

[terra-placidus.livejournal.com]

Wait a second. I think you misconstrued my meaning. I certainly did not say that women were treated equally. I know that there are still many biases, unfair division in household labor in a lot of countries, (I know there is data on this for the US, not sure on Canada, but surely they are similar), and I also mentioned several inequalities in employment. Also, like I mentioned above, women receive poorer health care, because signs and symptoms are normed on men. Higher education, in terms of its organization is also organized in a way that makes it easier for men to achieve advanced degrees (with childbearing age getting in the way for women and all). You are right, there are inequalities, and I'm certainly aware that there's a great deal of sexism both ways as you alluded to in the last few lines above with the compliment/insult thing.
It's unfair and unjust, and our society would be much better of without these things. There is certainly discrimination, and there is certainly inequality, and it would be a mistake to think otherwise. The point I am trying to make, however, is that I think it's wrong to call this 'oppression'.
Oppression, to me is, women being forbidden from holding certain jobs, not having the right to vote, or to have property rights, or the opportunity to attend school, or even being subject to draconian laws and practices (ie, stoning a girl to death because she was raped, female genital mutilation, etc). This is simply not the case here. If Canadian women are oppressed, then how do we describe Afghan women under the Taliban? There is a clear difference here.
I am not trying to minimize the injustices that women still face here in Canada, but I think using the word 'oppression' to describe these injustices cheapens the experience of women both historically in North American culture and in other cultures today. I suppose it's really just semantics in the end, but I certainly believe that it's inaccurate to call women in this society victims of oppression and men in this society dominant from my understanding of the meanings of these words.

[greenie-breizh.livejournal.com]

Sorry I misunderstood :)

For oppression, you make a good point that it's probably a difference in the way we understand the meanings of the words. I'm going to try and find a way that explains what is oppression to me. Of course the idea is not to imply women in Canada are not better off than women under patriarchal authoritarian regimes, but it doesn't take away from the fact that men are still a dominant group today in society, just like white people, people from the middle and upper class, and heterosexuals are all dominant groups that gain privilege from the simple fact that they belong to these categories. But! I will be back with an attempt at a definition when I'm not about to go to class. ^^