Posts by mark taslov
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
and oldier:
-
Up Front: Lighting the Dark, in reply to Emma Hart,
More specifically, I think it’s about teaching our kids to see all people as people first, and their gender well down the line. That means no gendered toys. It means encouraging your sons to play with girls, your kids to have friends of all genders from the earliest age. It’s about utterly rejecting “boys don’t cry” and “ha, you got hit by a GIRL!”. It’s about giving them media to watch that doesn’t reinforce gender stereotypes, and surrounding your kids with adults who are Good People, who don’t make sexist jokes at Christmas.
This is possibly my favourite paragraph you’ve written on the topic Emma. One thing that’s worth keeping in mind is that increasingly; it’s the kids who know and understand this and it’s the adults who are being left behind. A NZDoctor study last year found as many as 4% of Auckland high school students identify as transgender, this indicates far more acceptance and gender diversity in that age group than we see among adults in New Zealand.
Unfortunately the comments section, like so many we’ve seen, contains its fair share of gender essentialist and oppositional sexist stereotyping, and we never quite reach the point where older generations are prepared to accept that with regards to gender – you’ve largely been sold a pup.
So while people have the right ideas and focus we’re still seeing this gender divide presented by our media in what I would describe as an incendiary manner:
These men would like us to ignore the fact that racism and sexism not only deprive people of human rights. They kill.
Despite all Bernie Sander’s faults, I don’t believe this is one of them. English contains an extensive vocabulary to describe any issue we human beings face, and in recent years ‘men’ has been somewhat overused as a substitute for misogynists, rapists, murderers, abusers, institutional misogyny etc. and we’ve just witnessed an almighty backlash to this in the US.
There’s a real danger when reinforcing ideas like ‘all men are potential rapists’, or ‘more women are raped because they are physically weaker’ – especially among the youth – that we lose sight of the importance of consent and are simply mortaring over very real issues that people experience:
In other words, if being made to penetrate someone was counted as rape—and why shouldn’t it be?—then the headlines could have focused on a truly sensational CDC finding: that women rape men as often as men rape women.
These types of findings need to be acknowledged because these things happen to us, our outdated laws surrounding consent need to be addressed, and we need to wake up to the reality that there has been an overcorrection and although we may continue to throw around terms like "men” as a slur – it no longer means what some of us think it does:
“I have to be very careful to not be staring at kids,” says Gardner. “I can look at a mom and her baby, but I can’t look for too long. I miss being seen as not a threat.”
It’s a fine line:
see all people as people first, and their gender well down the line
-
For those jonesing their their next fix of the Devonport sound, an oldie:
-
Hard News: Taking the stage in Mount Albert, in reply to Russell Brown,
I’d be delighted to see Deborah Russell standing for Labour in New Lynn.
They made the right decision considering the week that preceded it, Deborah has been a strident spokesperson against New Zealand’s woeful foreign trusts set up, her expertise in this area is of immense value.
-
Up Front: Dropping the A-Bomb, in reply to TracyMac,
denying women agency
-
(NSFW) -
Access: Help needed! Deciphering the…, in reply to Sacha,
I keep coming back to these threads and I can never quite find the words to express the disgust I feel about this discriminatory dehumanisation. Where is the groundswell of support? where is the full scale media coverage beyond damage control? Where is the compassion? What happened to our country? As the state systemically pushes the most marginalised people – human beings – to the wall and then right on through it.
-
Hard News: The next four years, in reply to Russell Brown,
Applied to politics, the people who think that “interesting times” are interesting, probably aren’t thinking of the people for whom even minor extra difficulties could be enough to sink them.
I did mean it in the Chinese proverb sense :-)
One hope I have in this “post truth” era, is that people might begin to more deeply question some of the "truths" we habitually and culturally perpetuate:
Despite being widely attributed as a Chinese curse, there is no equivalent expression in Chinese.[2] The nearest related Chinese expression is “寧為太平犬，莫做亂離人” (nìng wéi tàipíng quǎn, mò zuò luàn lí rén), which is usually translated as “Better to be a dog in a peaceful time, than to be a human in a chaotic (warring) period."
Trump’s more or less unpresidented spurning of the protocols of US patriotism:
"There are a lot of killers. We have a lot of killers,” Trump said. “Well, you think our country is so innocent?"
immediately reminded me of Katharine’s prediction on page 5:
I have an uneasy feeling he might be a Pres that decides to deliver an ugly truth about certain things. He seems to have made a point of painting a very dismal picture of the more recent Washington establishment – I could see him using the office now to prove it to the people.
-
-
Labour MP Poto Williams has moved to smooth over her differences with potential Labour candidate Willie Jackson, saying she believes his apology was genuine.
Great and all but did Amy accept their apology? Or is she too far down the list? Who was it that they humiliated on air? Was it Poto Williams? Alison Mau? Or doesn’t it really matter any more? As long as someone in the party accepts an apology from someone else in the party?
Just some questions for the lads to swill over in the gentlemen's club.