30 December, 2006
“Privilege” and “Disadvantage” as sexist framing devices.
(Originally posted at Creative Destruction.)
Both here, and at Alas, Barry has been responding to criticism of his “Male Privilege Checklist“. Most of these criticisms have been directed at particular items on the checklist, which regardless of the merit of the substantive objection, opens his critics to the countercharge of not seeing the wood for the trees. The most cogent objections, in my opinion, apply to the list as a whole and seem to have been missed by these recent critics.
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Evidence of Male Dispensability Part 1 – the News Media
(Originally posted at Creative Destruction. I still haven’t got around to writing part 2.)
In preparing my response to Jeff’s comment to my recent post on Women and the Draft, I seem to have wondered rather far from the topic.
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Denying, Dismissing, Minimising, and Ignoring the Harm to Men
(Originally posted at Creative Destruction.)
Me (in the context of the war in Iraq):
[F]eminists typically do view the harm solely in terms of its impact upon women, while denying, minimising, and ignoring the harm to men.
I should also have said “dismissing“. I should clarify that by “feminism”, I mean mainstream feminism, as exemplified by the bloggers and typical commenters at Alas. I also mean radical feminism, as exemplified by the bloggers and typical commenters at the Margins. I do not mean to include such individuals as Christine Hof-Sommers, Wendy McElroy, and Cathy Young. I think that’s a fair exclusion, because mainsteam feminism itself appears to reject these people, and their ilk.
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29 December, 2006
Feminism and Media Representation of Gender-Selective Atrocities
(Originally posted at Creative Destruction. Here slightly edited.)
Look at this headline on Boston.com
Men in Iraqi police grab kidnap scores in raid
Notice how the perpetrators are gendered, but the victims are not. In fact there’s no mention of the victims’ sex anywhere on the first page. It’s not until you get to the second that you find out what happened:
The gunmen speedily weeded out the men from the women. The women were taken to a room and locked up, witnesses said. The men were pushed into the trucks and driven away. The kidnapped included employees and visitors to the agency, janitors, and PhDs, even a deputy general director of the agency. Some were blindfolded and tossed into the backs of pickup trucks, said witnesses.
The Women and Children of Haditha
(Originally posted at Creative Destruction. Here slightly edited.)
In the headline of his Sunday Herald story, Neil Mackay characterised the atrocity as follows:
Haditha: the worst US atrocity since Vietnam … Iraqi women and children massacred by American marines.
After giving a little background, including a comparison with the My Lai massacre during the Viet Nam war, (“mainly women, children, and the elderly”), he gives the following summary of the events in Haditha:
Minutes after Terrazas died, the remaining 13-strong unit of marines went on a bloody rampage, wiping out whole families, killing women, children and an elderly man in a wheelchair, and hurling grenades into homes. In all, 24 Iraqi civilians were murdered by American troops.
Let’s parse the entire story, to see how many of these women and children were actually men.
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