Posts by B Jones
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Hard News: Cultures and violence, in reply to Sacha,
I'd expect something calling itself analysis to reach a conclusion rather than just open up a conversation. Drama sometimes does this, sometimes not.
-
Hard News: Cultures and violence, in reply to Keir Leslie,
I think the idea that men don’t talk about the construction of gender is pretty insupportable
I'm in the middle of a Breaking Bad marathon at the moment, and that seems entirely to be a discussion over the construction of what it is to be a man, and it's done very much from the man's point of view - it's littered with insults traded between the characters over who wears the pants etc, alongside more serious points about a man's job being to provide. I'd stop short of calling it analysis though.
-
Hard News: Cultures and violence, in reply to Megan Wegan,
But if that’s centres around the things that the scary feminists and the civil rights movement took away, it’s not going to get anywhere. And it’s dangerous.
Yes, it is.
-
I guess there's a social cost in not knowing whether to start a conversation with a stranger with smalltalk about the rugby or whether Kate is showing yet :-/
-
I'm amazed by the number of people I know who assert "boys do x, girls do y" at very little provocation. I'm not shocked that people believe it, but by the frequency it comes up. It's like they're having an argument with the hypothesis that boys and girls are exactly the same, even though nobody's said it. People are really invested in the idea. It's hardly shocking that boys who get told off for behaving too femininely take up more aggressive styles of play.
-
Hard News: Cultures and violence, in reply to Bart Janssen,
some of the failure is because we don't properly understand and account for the effects of testosterone and the male biology on behaviour
Do you mean because we make excuses for and ignore a large amount of problematic male behaviour? Our legal system is designed mainly by men, largely to deal with male offending, which makes up the bulk of most kinds of crime. I think taking into account male biology is more likely to be implicitly built in to that, than somehow excluded.
-
Hard News: Cultures and violence, in reply to Lucy Stewart,
And also makes men between the ages of about fifteen and twenty-five really good at getting themselves killed in various ways, compared to their female counterparts in the age cohort.
I'm in the stage of my life when the majority of my peer group is procreating, and the consensus seems to be, for some reason, that girls will be the hard ones to raise. Maybe it'll be different after 20 years experience, but the amount of worry in advance seems disproportionate since girls are by and large more likely to make it into adulthood.
Perhaps there's something to that - we worry less about boys doing dodgy stuff, and we therefore do a worse job of protecting them.
-
Hard News: Cultures and violence, in reply to BenWilson,
Armed, it's a different matter, but domestic violence is something that erupts, rather than being planned.
To a point. Some people resort to violence (physical or verbal) as a loss of control; others use it to maintain control. Abusers are often calculating enough to hide it - not leave bruises, not do it in front of witnesses etc.
There are a bunch of cases of women killing their abusive partners and being unable to use a provocation defence because of the amount of planning they had to do to be sure of success - acquiring a weapon, poison or the like. Provocation as a defence is more designed to let people off for losing it than to let people off for escaping from a slow-burning life-threatening situation. There's an argument that provocation is functionally sexist in doing so.
-
Up Front: Or It's Who We're Drinking With..., in reply to BenWilson,
She reckoned it was a big part of why old ladies get their hair done so frequently - it's a legitimate excuse to be touched by someone.
I still remember how amazing it was to get my hair washed by someone else after having three days at home alone with no company a few years back. Like chocolate after a fast. Different when you're at home with little kids, because while they're not the best conversationalists they're usually stuck all over you one way or another.
-
Field Theory: Man Moments, in reply to Tristan,
I'm trying to have a polite discussion and I don't think that's fair. Enjoy the rest of the discussion with out me
What, all of a sudden it's the height of rudeness to point out that men are affected differently by sexism and may not be as well attuned to it?