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Showing posts from September, 2014

Wounds and last charge before complete kaput, or renewal?

Andrew O’hehir writes: Is traditional masculinity — assuming for a moment that we have any idea what that term means — under attack? Some of its defenders certainly feel that way. … If the panicky, defensive identity crisis of America’s declining white majority is a principal driving force in our nation’s bitterly divided political and cultural life (as I discussed here a few weeks ago, in the wake of Ferguson), so is the rearguard defense of masculinity. When Rush Limbaugh complains that nanny-state regulations on conduct are “feminizing” football, or the national leader of an elite fraternity writes an op-ed blaming drunken young women as the real villains in a perceived campus rape epidemic (rather than, say, rapists), it’s hard to say which feels stronger — the cluelessness or the desperation. As with the Caucasian rush to define the cop who shot Michael Brown as simultaneously the hero and victim of that tragic episode, this circling of the wagons around em...

Recent comments of mine at Salon.com

Original Article: Feminism’s ugly internal clash: Why its future is not up to white women WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 24, 2014 11:45 PM Oliva Does It danaseilhan I don't know of a single feminist group or site that doesn't seek to be inclusive.  I agree, but that doesn't mean that they aren't. My guess is that it owes to part of their psyches not being able to shut out the fact that women of colour tend to be more conservative than they are -- Brittney Cooper's discussion of childrearing "styles" brought this out in full bloom last week.  Their conscious selves may be blithely insisting that they are no more progressive than other "sisters," but their unconscious awareness of it as fact is why there is fight to institutionalize their own voice and ultimately arbitrate what feminism is to be about -- i.e. whitesplain.  Original Article: Feminism’s ugly internal clash: Why its future is not up to white women WEDNESDAY, SEPT...