Posts by mark taslov
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Hard News: The Long, Strange Trip, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
Trump won’t hurt the rich people or indeed New Zealanders who are most fastidious about these thing
If only the stigmatisation surrounding mental disorders and the required fastidiousness to combat that were limited to New Zealanders.
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Hard News: The Long, Strange Trip, in reply to tussock,
Narcissistic_personality_disorder
The second time you’ve done that in 4 posts. Don’t ‘diagnose’ Donald Trump, it’s not helpful.
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Hard News: The Long, Strange Trip, in reply to Angela Win,
overlooked by their own governments.
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Fairfax hosting here.
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Yeah, nobody wants to see an All Black cry…
Take it like a man? -
Up Front: Wonder Bi, in reply to ,
Oops, I inadvertently missed including this link
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Up Front: I Never Been ta Borstal, in reply to ,
Thank you so much for this Steven, I was so preoccupied with my own thoughts that I never got around to expressing my gratitude here.
But the watered-down, less serious, boys-will-be-boys “Young men get themselves into fights” dismissal statements persist, without considering that the majority of young men are not inherently violent human beings. They are just expected to be, for fucked-up cultural reasons.
I think this is so important Steven and is where a lot of our failure as a society lies. While I largely agree with the thrust of Christopher Dempsey’s post, where he said:
If we approach violence as a concept without gender
Reversing that and approaching gender as a concept without violence is incredibly problematic in a wider context, in that it rather requires us to ignore biology. Though we are a ‘civilised’ species, biological influence will persist to some degree.
Having been caught up in the cycle of violence until well into my twenties I’m all too familiar with the role acculturation plays in perpetuating these patterns. This “boys-will-be-boys” mantra was too often lazily prescribed by our elders as an endorsement of violence , ‘boys’ presenting a very limited range in terms of identity, essentially we have excused violence in our male population for decades. We desensitise people to violence and then celebrate our most desensitised.
New Zealand has had an all too long love affair with hard bastards. Every night both major networks deliver our daily 10 minute fill of homoerotic ball chasing. We love our boys, with their indigenous dancing and their topless ads, we find a whole boy squad’s inability to treat one woman with a modicum of respect and dignity "disappointing" but we’ll drop one of those boys for cavorting with a woman. To the uninformed observer of our media, New Zealand might appear to be one of the gayest patriarchal cultures on the planet. Jesting aside there are serious issues incumbent with that. In almost any given test match at some point the game devolves into a brawl, we see punches thrown and invariably no one is sent off, the commentators aren’t horrified, instead it is minimised, endorsed even as “a bit of biffo”.
LGBT stats indicate that domestic violence is not contingent on gender, in fact it would appear at face value to be more contingent on our sexuality. Women bear the biggest brunt of the vast majority of our country’s serious domestic violence incidents, but this is because we appear as a species to be predominantly heterosexual. At the heart of the issue is our inability to assert self-control with those we are closest to, regardless of our chromosones – at an individual level. Touting this cliche that “men can hit harder” largely ignores the ingenuity of the human brain. The violence doesn’t stop when the fist hits the eye socket, it stops when we successfully resist the urge to lash out.
Some of us will have heard the phrase “soften the fuck up”, it is amusing, but the humorous juxtaposition is in danger of obscuring the message. Rather more importantly it does appear that with regards to the intended audience: that horse has already bolted. If someone is in the habit of perpertrating violence it is resolve and self discipline that is often most neglected. Softening may even be dangerous if misconstrued as heightened self-regard at the expense of others.
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The first gig (for want of a better word) I attended was the Topp Twins. As a confused child drowning in an assigned gender identity they were and still are a revelation, they were like boys, highlighting that as people we can be who we are regardless of pressures to conform.
Visualising gender identity as a spectrum – and please excuse the primitiveness of this – with women at one end and men at the other, in New Zealand women are represented diversely occupying positions all the way across, while men, for the most part, appear bunched up on their side. Obviously this is a generalisation with gradations and exceptions, but in the media, excluding Laughing Samoans, male feminity in New Zealand is represented by the singular role model Mike Puru.
New Zealand is a violent place, and it may be many years before we can begin to shake that off meaningfully, society is as accomplished at self denial and delusion as any individual. Our national colours are a binary black and white. We pay lipservice to our diversity but for the most part we fear nonconformity as much as the next country. ‘boys will be boys’ is not something boys need be any longer.
While in some ways we may appear more egalitarian than most civilisations, there is very little equality in the maxim ‘boys mustn’t hit girls’ without its complement. We want people growing up equal, feeling cherished and being loved regardless of gender, race or any other box that comes along, because it is the absense of these emotional attachments that breeds the detachment that leads to atrocity.
So as a violent society, beyond prohibition we must find ways to harness this violence. I’d advocate including a traditional martial arts curriculum at school, not so much as a means of self-defence, but as a means of self-control. As a country it is our self-control that requires mindfulness, whether it be in our diets, our use of substances, our language or our actions. We don’t need to harden or toughen up, we need to smarten up, temper our prejudices, reach out and be more inclusive. Not every criticism is a bash, whether we regard ourselves as individuals or as members of a team, a fact of life is that we can always do things better, especially when our priority is to improve broken systems.
People are angry, and for good reason, we are routinely marginalised, victimised, beaten, raped, killed by other people, and more often than not as culprits we are perpetuating trauma induced cycles. Every assault is a failure of our society, not just our gender, or our chromosome configuration or our skin colour or our religious group: our entire society. Trauma victims need to be scouted out and helped meaningfully while young. For now there’s an insurmountable amount of work to be done in that regard, and wasting time dicking around with names for the relevant department or diluting our positive messages with transphobic myths that gender is an accident of birth is as clear an indication as any as to just how far off the pace we are.
I hope this wasn’t too much Steven, just some thoughts.
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Of course they should. Right now it still feels like a buck each way – the publicity for saying there are going to be LGBT characters, and then they turn out to be presented in such a way that the Million Moms aren’t going to notice.
Despite some notable departures this century, we are your psychos, your serial killers and your dolphin thieves, but usually we are just the punchline. It would be nice to see more transgender characters whose identities were incidental.
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Up Front: I Never Been ta Borstal, in reply to Lilith __,
the Dunedin Longitudinal Study has failed to distinguish between lack-of-impulse-control violence and violence in the context of abusive relationships.
Thank you in particular for this Lilith, it pinpoints for me why I felt the statement was left wanting. In neglecting to offer any reasoning as to why the research may initially have been rejected Moffitt failed to adequately account for the volatility of the climate in which such high profile incriminations would be received and could potentially be exploited.
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Up Front: I Never Been ta Borstal, in reply to Lilith __,
to feminist-bashing
I’m genuinely sorry I came across that way Lilith, I saw one academic calling out a specific group of academics, I found the claims noteworthy.