Masculinity

This talk was given in the Feminist Thinking Will Save the Planet session at #FiLiA2021. The article originally appeared on the FiLiA website. By Susan Breen Any of you who know me will be aware that I’m a recovering mainstream environmentalist and left wing political candidate, for any of you who are active in either sphere I’m sure you have shared many of the same frustrations and demoralisations as I have done. I became an activist in my teens but despite being involved in the movement since then I had been pretty much politically homeless for my entire life. ...

This story first appeared in Global Voices. Protestors highlighted the increasing femicide and violence rates in Turkey By Arzu Geybullayeva Hundreds of women took the streets in Istanbul to mark the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women on November 25. However, protestors were met with police violence, including tear gas and rubber bullets, as they tried to break through barricades to march on a busy pedestrian street. Similar protests took place across other cities, including the capital Ankara. ...

Originally published on Nature Communications, this is an excerpt from an article describing scientists’ warning on affluence by Thomas Wiedmann, Manfred Lenzen, Lorenz T. Keyßer & Julia K. Steinberger. Super-affluent consumers and growth imperatives Growth imperatives are active at multiple levels, making the pursuit of economic growth (net investment, i.e. investment above depreciation) a necessity for different actors and leading to social and economic instability in the absence of it. Following a Marxian perspective as put forward by Pirgmaier and Steinberger, growth imperatives can be attributed to capitalism as the currently dominant socio-economic system in affluent countries, although this is debated by other scholars. To structure this topic, we will discuss different affected actors separately, namely corporations, states and individuals, following Richters and Siemoneit. Most importantly, we address the role of the super-affluent consumers within a society, which overlap with powerful fractions of the capitalist class. ...

Editors note: Gerda Lerner (1920-2013) was a historian, author and teacher. She was a professor emeritus of history at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a visiting scholar at Duke University. Lerner was one of the founders of the field of women’s history, and was a former president of the Organization of American Historians. She taught what is considered to be the first women’s history course in the world at the New School for Social Research in 1963. This excerpt comes from the final chapter of the book The Creation of Patriarchy (1983) , and summarizes portions of the preceding chapters. While some of Lerner’s claims may in retrospect be overly optimistic (for example, she could not have predicted the explosion in internet pornography as a primary sex-education tool of patriarchy), the book as a whole is a excellent introduction to the topic of patriarchy and its origins. ...

Featured image: Jollene Levid (Photo: AF3IRM LA Coordinator Roxanna Avila). National chairperson of AF3IRM, Jollene Levid, speaks with Meghan Murphy about rise of white nationalism in the US, how the alt-right is connected to male supremacy, and what movements can do to better address violence against women of colour. by Meghan Murphy / Feminist Current While the rise in white nationalist activity in the U.S. (and the recent death of a woman named Heather Heyer, who was killed when a car plowed into a crowd of people protesting a white supremacist rally) has sparked discussions, anger, and protests against the alt-right and the white supremacist movement, what has been discussed less is the role of male supremacy. Male violence against women of colour is too-often ignored both in the media and by leftist groups. In order to discuss the connections between misogyny and racism, and what the feminist movement and other progressive movements can do to better address those connections and that violence, I spoke with activist and feminist Jollene Levid. ...

by Derrick Jensen / Deep Green Resistance The man box is full of proof. Except that there is no man box, the man box can never be filled, and real men don’t need proof. Let’s start with Abraham and Isaac. You know the story. God tells Abraham to slit his child’s throat. Abraham ties up his son, raises the knife, and at the last moment God says it was a test. End of story. Lesson? Abraham shows, by his willingness to violate his child, the proof of his worth. And Isaac learns that his father was willing to kill him rather than act against the cult of masculinity, against the rules of the man box. ...

by Jonah Mix, Deep Green Resistance Some days, queer theory feels like an elaborate practical joke. I’m writing this after a good four hours spent in a marathon Twitter exchange, so forgive me if I’m a little short. The man in question was your average trans dude, berating women for their refusal to accept his identification as female; he did not take well to the news that, black choker and bad haircut aside, he wasn’t actually a woman. Over dozens of obnoxious Tweets, he accused so-called “TERFs” of “gatekeeping femininity,” “denying him womanhood,” and deciding that he wasn’t “worthy of the feminine.” Yes, he was actually claiming that his inability to wear fuck-me pumps was 1) due to the heartless machinations of radical feminists, and 2) evidence of oppression. Amazingly, all of this was said with a straight – and heavily painted – face. ...

By Ernesto Aguilar for Feminist Current When they find out, people ask me incredulously if I regret not attending my father’s funeral. I had no relationship with my father for all of my adult life. I lived a childhood where he hit my mother often. I could never reconcile it and fought him as a boy. As an adult, I never forgave him. He died a stranger, someone in my past I never talked about. ...

In 1993 Michael Carter was arrested and indicted for underground environmental activism. Since then he’s worked aboveground, fighting timber sales and oil and gas leasing, protecting endangered species, and more. Today, he’s a member of Deep Green Resistance Colorado Plateau, and author of the memoir Kingfishers’ Song: Memories Against Civilization. Time is Short spoke with him about his actions, underground resistance, and the prospects and problems facing the environmental movement. The first part of this interview is available here, and the second part here. Time is Short: You mentioned some problems of radical groups—lack of respect for women and lack of a strategy. Could you expand on that? ...

By John Stoltenberg This article was originally published by Feminist Current, and is republished here with permission from the author. I understand—I really do—why a lot of people raised to be a man are seeking a gendered sense of self that is separate and distinct from all that has been called out lately as toxic masculinity. These days a penised person* would have to be really clueless not to notice all the manhood-proving behaviors that have been critiqued as hazardous to well-being (one’s own and others’). However much that penised person accepts the mounting critique of standard-issue masculinity, he might reasonably be wondering what manhood-authenticating behaviors are exempt from it: What are the ways to “act like a man” that definitively keep one from being confused with “men behaving badly”? Or, put more personally: What exactly does one do nowadays to inhabit a male-positive gendered identity that feels—and is—worthy of respect (by oneself and others)? ...