Posts by giovanni tiso
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Maybe Tiger's schlong is also a derivative.
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I'm not trying to make an absolutist argument, I'm responding to one. JT had sexuality and gender roles as "total social construct".
And I'm saying that in this thread we (myself included) have been using sex, sexuality and gender as if they were interchangeable. They are not, and I think different understandings of what they mean may be the reason why there has been some talking at cross purposes. The social sciences treat "gender" (but most emphatically not "sexuality") by definition as the socially constructed portion of what it means to be male as opposed to female, so in that respect JT was right, although it remains hardly unproblematic, since as you note how do you even abstract gender from sex in the first place? But it's a thinking tool, and not without its usefulness.
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Case in point, yes. I made the mistake of reading that article first thing this morning. Christ.
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It's a biological reality of gender that I cannot breast-feed my children.
No, it's a biological reality of sex that you cannot breastfeed your children. Gender is in fact socially constructed, which is why it varies so much between different societies, although the basic biological constraints of sex dictate some boundaries and constants.
I can sort of breast-feed my children these days, with milk expressed by my partner, because there is a technology that enables me to do it but also because gender roles as they are defined in my society allow me to take on that particular nurturing activity.
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To be honest, putting all that on Tiger Woods' wandering meat putter is giving the man's penis a damn sight more power than it deserves.
I'm still cheered by it because it shows how poorly we understand the economy and the staggering fictions we tell one another when it comes - for instance - to the role of endorsements and sponsorships.
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OK, so you didn't actually read it
I did, actually, I still wasn't very clear on what you meant or how it translated in a NZ context, which is why I asked the particular questions that I asked.
Rather than just saying stop wining, the feminist approach to male victims of sexual abuse is all sugar and spice and things nice.
It's not what I meant. There just seemed to be an implication at that point in the thread that rape isn't a issue pertinent to feminism, and I was responding to that. And at least in my culture and for what I know I stand behind the assertion I made - for my parents' generation sexual abuse of all stripes barely registered as a thing to frown upon, and we owe it first and foremost to feminists and their struggles that it is no longer the case. Which means among other things that we have a set of words now to describe what happened to a male very close to me (I'm not taking a breath as deep as Emma's) for whom at the time the experience was just nameless, therefore quite impossible to even process or describe to others. That is a contribution that I think needs to be acknowledged, without any sort of prejudice whatsoever to your experience, or Emma's or the situations that TracyMac has described.
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actually, human males can lactate
Now you tell me!
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Goodbyeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
Bloody hell, Paul, that was six different kinds of awful.
Please don't take it personally. It just irks me when anyone (including Julie Bindel) makes an absolute statement about gender and sexuality that is palpably false.
You're right, of course, but I think that to the extent that those positions are ever worth defending, is that at their time in history they had some honesty and served a purpose: to show that gender and sexuality are in important respects in fact socially constructed, and that they can therefore be changed. I wonder sometimes if it is a function of how public and academic discourses work in the Anglo-Saxon world and especially in the United States that the opposite extreme had to be occupied in order for the point to be made at all (see also under American Postructuralism, Home of the Crazy).
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And with a very deep breath...
Emma, that's awful - all the more so for being a "quiet word" as opposed to official policy open to scrutiny and challenge.
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Are you saying that paedophilia and childhood abuse are invisible phenomena in New Zealand? Or that their reporting tends to focus on female victims only? Or to the extent that they might be under-reported and under-recognised, it is because of feminists? We just went through the repeal of section 59 and women and feminists were right at the forefront of that particular battle, beginning obviously with Sue Bradford. Beyond that I don't have any direct experience, in Italy I think the lifting of the veil on the abuse suffered by males - especially adult males - still struggles to take place, but it seems to me that feminists have been an ally there, by and large. Has the history been different in NZ?