The Handmaid's Tale...or something very like

[DanaC]

I try not to get too down about gender inequalities, on the whole. I used to feel so riled up by much of what I read or heard as a young woman. It honed my beliefs and it directed some of my academic interests, but I really had to work to let go of the anger. It's not a good way to live.

But now and again I read or see something that puts that gnawing sense of iniquity right back in my gut. Sometimes its something truly tragic, like the recent murder of a teenager by her parents for the crime of looking at a boy. Sometimes it's just the sheer scale of it, when the figures show an apparent holocaust of girl babies in some parts of the world. Sometimes it's the theoretical, the sheer unfairness of a mode of thinking that says girls are less valuable than boys. Sometimes it's the still present slights in my own society, like the apparent assumption recently that of course the new head of the BBC would be a man. Or the way the gaming industry and community still treat women as a decorative extra to the real characters' stories. Or the outright assault on women's reproductive freedoms in countries that shold know better, and the denial of the same in countries that are overdue some serious change.

Or maybe the fact that women are the most deeply affected by recession and the ones most likely to do work that society has deemed private and valueless in market terms. That they are several times more likely to face domestic violence than their male counterparts and that the majority of women have either experienced sexual assault or violence, or know someone who has.

All this stuff gets me at a gut level. I get that feeling again, that I used to get when I was 14 or so and had friends whose parents expected them to do housework whilst their brothers were exempt simply on the grounds that they were male. Or reading fiction set in periods where women were less free and had less autonomy. The way all the sport on TV was male, and girls' sports were like a novelty act. And the way in all the American movies (God, I loved American movies ;p) the boys played football and the girls cheered them on. The underlying assumptions that i saw all around me growing up, that girls were peculiarly vulnerable, and that boys were peculiarly entitled.

But most importantly, the fact that none of it made any kind of sense to me at all. Why were the experiences of the world and the expectations of boys and girls so differentiated? I didn't feel overburdened with emotionalism and under endowed with logic. I knew from my own homelife that men could and would do housework, and mums could and did follow a career. My brother and I both washed the pots and hoovered the carpets, we both were expected to pitch in equally. If anything, I got away with less because of general health problems and being the baby of the family. I was raised in a family that believed and practiced (to an extent, for the time ;p mum still did most of the housework and childrearing, and her career didn't start until her 30s after both kids were in school) in gender equality. It wasn't spoken of in those terms, it just was what it was.

So I was always baffled by what I saw in wider society and in history. Baffled and slightly threatened. I felt the contingency of my freedoms very keenly. An accident of birth that put me in one of the few societies, and cultures in the history of humanity in which those freedoms were even possible.

I saw this piece of news this week. And it just made me want to throw up:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-20469486

A discovery that Saudi male guardians are automatically getting text messages about cross-border movements of female dependants has caused a Twitter uproar.

yes, you read that right.

They've brought misogyny and female infantilism right slap bang into the modern world.

Attention was drawn to the system when a man travelling with his wife got an alert as they left Riyadh airport.

Saudi women are denied the right to travel without their guardian's consent and are also banned from driving.



Saudi men earlier had the option of requesting alert messages about their dependants' cross-border movement, but it appears that since last week such notifications are being sent automatically.

[eta] I should point out that this has met with a storm of criticism and that a lot of people in the country think it's ridiculous.

[footfootfoot]

Originally Posted by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_of_honor_(Southern_United_States)

The prevailing culture of the Southern United States is said to be a "culture of honor", that is a culture where people avoid unintentional offense to others and maintain a reputation for not accepting improper conduct by others.

One theory to explain why the American South has this culture is that a willingness to resort to retribution to enforce one's rights is important for a man in any region where gaining resources and keeping them depends on the community’s belief that the man can protect those resources against predators. Toughness is a strong value in such a culture because of its effect on the deterrence of such predators from one’s family, home and possessions.

The concept was tested by social scientists Richard Nisbett and Dov Cohen in their book Culture of Honor,[1] and it was repopularized by a discussion in Chapter Six of Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell.

Read the rest of the entry. I just finished reading Outliers, one of the aspects of cultures of honor is that they arise from nomadic and herding peoples where competition for resources drives behaviour. Conversely, agricultural societies depend on cooperation and can't afford to be cultures of honor.

Despite the south being agricultural, it was settled not by farmers as much as by herders. (cf Albion's Seed Borderlands to Backcountry)

Even more interesting as an explanation not an excuse, is somewhat recent research that shows how certain behaviors and ways of thinking are genetically encoded into a person.

Originally Posted by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Haidt

Moral Foundations Theory

Haidt is best known for what he dubs "Moral Foundations Theory", which has been reported in publications such as The Atlantic,[5] Boston Globe,[6] and The Huffington Post.[7] It is the basis of his first TED talk.[8]

Moral Foundations Theory considers the way morality varies between cultures and identifies five (later revised to six) "foundations" that underlie morality in all societies and individuals. He names them using pairs of opposites to indicate that they provide continua along which judgments can be measured.[9] These are:

Care/harm for others, protecting them from harm.
Fairness/cheating, Justice, treating others in proportion to their actions, giving them their "just desserts".[10][11] (He has also referred to this dimension as Proportionality.)
Liberty/oppression, characterizes judgments in terms of whether subjects are tyrannized.
Loyalty/betrayal to your group, family, nation. (He has also referred to this dimension as Ingroup.)
Authority/subversion for tradition and legitimate authority. (He has also connected this foundation to a notion of Respect.)
Sanctity/degradation, avoiding disgusting things, foods, actions. (He has also referred to this as Purity.)
Haidt found that the more politically liberal or left-wing people are, the more they tend to value care and fairness (proportionality), and the less they tend to value loyalty, respect for authority and purity. Conservatives or right-wing people, tend to value all the moral foundations somewhat equally. Similar results were found across the political spectrum in other countries.[12]

Haidt has also described the liberal emphasis on care as "one foundation morality", contrasting with the conservative moral balance.[13][14]

The TED lecture is worth watching.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Saudi men earlier had the option of requesting alert messages about their dependants' cross-border movement, but it appears that since last week such notifications are being sent automatically.

It silly that a country that rich can't come up with a system to notify the husband/father when the women leave the kitchen.

OK I'm kidding, but when I read that story yesterday, it made me think this is one of the smaller problems women have in that neck of the woods.

[Griff]

It does shine the light of day on what is essentially a slave society. Communication technology could be the wedge that finally cracks open their world but as shown it can be easily adapted for oppression.

As far as the football jock/cheerleader nonsense goes, outside of Texas and Florida Title VIIII has gone a long way towards reducing that. I remember teachers in my time trying to create that mentality / culture where it didn't naturally exist. Those kids still exist but the culture around them changed. Lil' Griff had a friend cheer-leading but she wasn't comfortable with the stripper routines so she's focusing on soccer and lacrosse. She has team-mates from field hockey who do it but they are the "boy crazy" types. Even cheer-leading itself tries to cover its nonsense by claiming to be a sport now.

[BigV]

minor point, it's spelled Title IX.

second, slightly less minor point, I think it's fair to call cheerleading a sport as school sports go. the members of the squad engage in some very athletic moves, they perform/compete for all three seasons, they travel with other teams, etc. I doubt you'd quarrel that gymnasts are athletes, they have lots of the same moves, etc.

Now.

There are some silly young people who are on the cheer squad. There are posers and benchriders in lots of sports. The cheerleaders do attract a lot of attention, though. And the silly ones usually more than most.

[Griff]

Heh, I looked at XIIII and thought wtf is wrong with that? Duh!

We'll have to agree to disagree on whether it's a sport. The cheer culture is most definitely not about athleticism at Lil' Griff's school.

[BigV]

fair enough.

[Clodfobble]

Definitely depends on the local culture. In Texas, cheerleading is serious business. You couldn't even get on the high school team unless you could do a series of back handsprings, and the ones who were REALLY serious about it trained at private facilities.

[DanaC]

My niece is in a cheer leading squad. Very athletic. I see it as a sport. But... At its core the concept is that of an auxiliary to the real (male) sports. It's become something more and taken on a life of its own separate from the sport it originally adjoined, but its roots annoy me.

[Griff]

I was probably in the wrong on this. My reflexive position is for girls to do something not cheer for others, but it looks like its a respectable activity elsewhere. Then again some guys should stick to cheer leading.

[BigV]

Me and GWB. Like this

[footfootfoot]

Originally Posted by Griff

I was probably in the wrong on this. My reflexive position is for girls to do something not cheer for others, but it looks like its a respectable activity elsewhere. Then again some guys should stick to cheer leading.

Last of the great megaphone crooners...

[SamIam]

Speaking of The Handmaiden’s Tale, and for those who didn’t catch the spoof of this on The Colbert Report, I loved the following from Fox (who but?) writer Suzanne Venker. In an article titled “The War on Men,” she writes in part:

To say gender relations have changed dramatically is an understatement. Ever since the sexual revolution, there has been a profound overhaul in the way men and women interact. Men haven’t changed much – they had no revolution that demanded it – but women have changed dramatically.

In a nutshell, women are angry. They’re also defensive, though often unknowingly. That’s because they’ve been raised to think of men as the enemy. Armed with this new attitude, women pushed men off their pedestal (women had their own pedestal, but feminists convinced them otherwise) and climbed up to take what they were taught to believe was rightfully theirs.

Now the men have nowhere to go.

It is precisely this dynamic – women good/men bad – that has destroyed the relationship between the sexes. Yet somehow, men are still to blame when love goes awry. Heck, men have been to blame since feminists first took to the streets in the 1970s.
But what if the dearth of good men, and ongoing battle of the sexes, is – hold on to your seats – women’s fault?

You’ll never hear that in the media. All the articles and books (and television programs, for that matter) put women front and center, while men and children sit in the back seat. But after decades of browbeating the American male, men are tired. Tired of being told there’s something fundamentally wrong with them. Tired of being told that if women aren’t happy, it’s men’s fault.

- more ad nauseum

Damn those feminists, anyway! And yes, this was actually a for real, serious article. You just gotta love those right wing evangelical types. Not.

[Lamplighter]

This was one of my favorite threads, so I'll add a link which may be only distantly related.

This kind of article is one of the main reasons I enjoy the NY Times.
I'm fascinated by cryptography and the things people do in their unpublicized lifetimes,
and here is the sometimes truth in: "behind every successful man..."

NY Times
By MARGALIT FOX
May 11, 2013

Alice E. Kober, 43; Lost to History No More
I RESCUE lost souls.

As an obituary writer at The Times, I have the great, improbable pleasure
of reconstituting the lives of interesting people. And few people,
it turns out, are as interesting as the influential obscure.<snip>

The woman was Alice Kober, an overworked, underpaid classics professor at Brooklyn College.
In the mid-20th century, though hardly anyone knew it, Dr. Kober,
working quietly and methodically at her dining table in Flatbush,
helped solve one of the most tantalizing mysteries of the modern age.

The mystery centered on a long-lost script from Aegean antiquity known as Linear B.
Inscribed on clay tablets around 1450 B.C., Linear B was unearthed in 1900 on Crete,
amid the ruins of a lavish Bronze Age palace. The script, which teemed with pictograms
in the shape of arrows, chariots and horses’ heads, resembled no writing ever seen.

No one knew what language it recorded, much less what it said.
An unknown language in an unknown script is the linguistic equivalent
of a locked-room mystery, and despite the efforts of investigators around the globe,
Linear B endured for more than 50 years as one of the world’s great unsolved puzzles.<snip>

It was Dr. Kober who cataloged every word and every character of Linear B
on homemade index cards, cut painstakingly by hand from whatever she could find.<snip>
Sorting the cards night after night, Dr. Kober homed in on patterns of symbols
that illuminated the structure of the words on the tablets.
For as she, more than any other investigator, understood, it was internal evidence
— the repeated configurations of characters that lay hidden within the inscriptions themselves
— that would furnish the key to decipherment.<snip>

DR. KOBER and Mr. Ventris met only once, and by all accounts did not like each other.
But through her few, rigorous published articles, which together form a how-to manual
for deciphering an unknown script, she handed him the key to the locked room.
After her death, using the methods she devised, he attacked the mystery
with renewed vigor and brought about its solution.
<snip>