Sex ed is a topic of discussion in our community right now as the school district takes input on updating the curriculum. The talk is, predictably, preoccupied with online predators and sexting. These are certainly valid concerns, but the conversations don’t get very structural.
#MeToo, #ChurchToo, #ShulToo, #EmptyThePews, and #WhyIDidntReport have revealed pervasive abuse, harassment, and misconduct through the depth and breadth of our society. Companies, churches, shuls, schools, and all of our institutions have failed girls and women. We need to teach inclusion and codes of conduct in K-12 and from the pulpit. We must stop raising MRAs, PUAs, incels, redpillers, ComicsGaters, and GamerGaters who reject inclusion and pluralism. These distillations of toxicity and resentment have turned social media into misogynist sties that harass and repel women. They have radicalized young white men into violent misogynists.
Contents:
- Toxic Masculinity
- Emotional Expression and Detachment
- Online Privacy
- Password and Identity Management
- Dress Codes
- Bodily Autonomy
- Purity Culture
Toxic Masculinity
Whether we’re talking about race or gender or class, popular culture is where the pedagogy is, it’s where the learning is.
Source: bell hooks – CULTURAL CRITICISM & TRANSFORMATION
When getting structural, start by taking a look at our media. The most popular TV show, Big Bang Theory, is driven by toxic masculinity and ironic lampshading for misogyny. The Pop Culture Detective has a great series of videos on toxic masculinity and emotional expression. Here are the episodes on Big Bang Theory.
And this is where ironic lampshading comes in, which is when media makers deliberately call attention to a dissonant or overly clichéd aspect of their own production. Rather than writing different punchlines the writers attempt to duck any criticism by pointing out the sexism inherent in their own jokes themselves.
The technique of making something super obvious to viewers meant to let us know that the writers are self-aware and to make us feel like we’re all in on the joke. Most comedy writers know that retrograde style bigotry is no longer acceptable on primetime television, but they still want to use sexist, racist and homophobic jokes as an easy way to get cheap laughs. Ironic lampshading provides a clever way for them to keep getting away with it.
The problem with this comedic device is that, by itself, it doesn’t critique or challenge sexism homophobia or racism. It’s simply acknowledges it in a humorous way. Acknowledging bigotry is not the same as critiquing bigotry, especially when the punchlines end up making light of serious social issues like sexual harassment.
Source: The Adorkable Misogyny of The Big Bang Theory
But it’s just TV, you say? Well, the President of the United States is a sitcom misogynist performing his act for rallies full of people. They applaud his toxic worldview like laugh tracks to a sitcom.
Setup, punchline, applause. What we’re applauding are the pathologies we see in our schools. Treating women as pieces of meat who primarily exist for male pleasure is a message that comes at us from every level of society, including the bully pulpit (giving a new connotation to the phrase). When misogynists like Trump watch TV, they see people laughing along with characters doing what they do in real life. Marginalizing and harassing women is mass entertainment played for yucks, and we see the effects. This is our national pedagogy.
Normalization: The cultural process by which a particular attitude, ideology, or behavior becomes established and entrenched in social life. It’s the cultural process through which we come to expect and accept something as natural and normal.
Source: Donald Trump: The Sitcom Misogynist
“Toxic masculinity,” on the other hand, is a loose term that’s used to refer to a subset of those behaviors which are harmful or destructive. It’s often used as a sort of shorthand to describe behaviors linked to domination, humiliation, and control.
It’s marked by things like emotional detachment and hyper-competitiveness.
It’s also connected to the sexual objectification of women, as well as other predatory sexual behaviors.
It’s also linked very closely with aggression, intimidation and violence.
Source: What Is Toxic Masculinity?
Emotional Expression and Detachment
The way we ‘turn boys into men’ is through injury: We sever them from their mothers, research tells us, far too early. We pull them away from their own expressiveness, from their feelings, from sensitivity to others. The very phrase ‘be a man’ means suck it up and keep going. Disconnection is not fallout from traditional masculinity. Disconnection is masculinity.
Anger often hides depression and profound sorrow. Depression often masks the inability to grieve. Males are not given the emotional space to grieve. … Males are still being taught to keep it in and, worse, to deny that they feel like crying.
Unable to cope with the loss of emotional connection, boys internalize the pain and mask it with indifference or rage.
Source: The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love by bell hooks | Goodreads
The open expression of vulnerability is extremely gendered in Western media culture. Being emotional, especially crying, is seen as stereotypically feminine, as “girl stuff.” We’re all familiar with the stereotype that women are “over-emotional” or “irrational” or “too sensitive.” Now of course, that stereotype is complete nonsense. Everyone has these emotions and everyone has these feelings.
We’re taught that young men should bottle up most of their feelings. That anger or aggression may sometimes be permissible for some men in certain situations, but that vulnerability is strictly off limits because it’s been culturally associated with weakness. But on Steven Universe vulnerability is not equated with weakness, instead it’s simply equated with being a human being.
The lesson here is that men and boys don’t need to protect their loved ones from things that might scare them. Men don’t have to weather the storm alone. Instead we can work through life’s struggles together with our friends, our lovers, and our families.
It’s going to take a long time for us to collectively unlearn these harmful notions about detached manhood. But Steven’s open and emotionally expressive version of masculinity, that’s an inspirational example for us all.
Source: Emotional Expression on Steven Universe
Long before he donned the mask of Darth Vader, Anakin Skywalker is instructed to wear another mask: a mask of emotional invulnerability.
I want to underscore the message being presented here. Anakin’s feelings of pain and loss are understandable and completely normal. But instead of getting the emotional support he so desperately needs, this child is instead publicly shamed for expressing his feelings of grief and sadness. And that’s because emotional detachment is valued above all else in the Jedi Order. Young Jedi are instructed to sever all close emotional connections to the people they care about. They must learn to hide their feelings from others, to deny their emotional selves, and to always present a stoic exterior to the world.
Jedi philosophy gets it entirely backwards. Emotional detachment doesn’t prevent men from turning to the Dark Side. Emotional detachment is the cause of men turning to the Dark Side. In the end it’s the Jedi and their philosophy of emotional detachment that’s ultimately responsible for the creation of Darth Vader.
Listening to the teachings of Yoda and Obi-Wan is a guaranteed recipe for creating lonely, angry, broken people.
Source: The Case Against The Jedi
Online Privacy
Living Privately. — Building and maintaining a sense of what to show in each social environment. — Discovering and creating new environments in which we can show more of ourselves. — Assessing where you can grow new parts of yourself which aren’t (yet) for public display.
Source: On Privacy – Human Systems – Medium
The Smart Girl’s Guide to Online Privacy by @violetblue is a great resource for staying safe on the internet written with the problems girls face online in mind. Here’s a selection from chapter 4, “Female Trouble”.
When a woman gets hacked, she’s got a lot more to lose, and if Mat Honan were a woman, you can be almost certain that his experience of getting severely hacked would have been different. Not only would a girl go through everything Honan experienced, but on top of all that, she would also be subjected to gender targeting and all the ugly stuff that goes along with it. Think about your intimate photos of yourself, ranging from swimsuit shots and selfies with cleavage to the photos and videos that are meant only for the eyes of a person you trust. Such photos, in the hands of someone who doesn’t care about you or your safety (or worse, someone who gets off on hurting women), are disastrous, no matter how proud you are of your body, how sex-positive you may be, or how comfortable you feel with being sexy and strong at the same time. In this chapter, I’ll show you how to take charge of a situation in which your private content has been posted online maliciously or an attacker has otherwise attempted to compromise your reputation. This happens to people of all genders, but not as much as it happens to girls. Our gender makes us targets. Being “online while female” isn’t fair, but it’s a fact. Here’s how you can fight back.
Find out:
- Why appearing on “People Finder” websites isn’t as harmless as it seems.
- What do do when a compromising photo of you ends up on the internet.
- How to keep your address and phone number private from exes, stalkers and that creepy guy who just hit on you at the bar.
- Why online privacy is just as important – if not more important – than your physical privacy.
- What websites you can trust – and those you can’t.
- The privacy holes that hurt working women most.
- Common personal information you didn’t realize was on the internet.
- How social media makes all those privacy questions on your bank/amazon/email recovery system moot.
- How to find out if someone has been on your computer or in your email.
This book is especially for:
- Women with online dating profiles.
- Anyone on a job search.
- Women looking to keep their personal life from leaking to their work.
- Independent business people.
- Parents – help show your kids what information they’re leaking.
- Anyone concerned about family, social sharing and privacy.
- Students facing social choices that might affect their future.
- Anyone who’s ever sent a photo to someone they wish they hadn’t.
Source: THE BOOK | The Smart Girl’s Guide to Privacy
There are a variety of ways to purchase the book. I recommend it highly. Buy it not just for your daughters, but for your sons.
Password and Identity Management
“Password reuse is what really kills you,” says Diana Smetters, a software engineer at Google who works on authentication systems. “There is a very efficient economy for exchanging that information.”
Source: Kill the Password: A String of Characters Won’t Protect You | WIRED
According to security experts, today the industry is dealing with a password reuse crisis. In the past few weeks, account breaches have been reported by LinkedIn, Tumblr, VK.com, Fling and MySpace – bringing the total number of compromised accounts to more than 642 million.
“We know that attackers will go for the weakest link and that is any user who reuses their passwords. It’s a major problem,”
Source: No Simple Fix for Password Reuse
Social media sites are littered with seemingly innocuous little quizzes, games and surveys urging people to reminisce about specific topics, such as “What was your first job,” or “What was your first car?” The problem with participating in these informal surveys is that in doing so you may be inadvertently giving away the answers to “secret questions” that can be used to unlock access to a host of your online identities and accounts.
Source: Don’t Give Away Historic Details About Yourself — Krebs on Security
At most schools, student identities are protected by weak passwords trivially derived from usernames and reused everywhere. Once someone gets ahold of your email password, they can reset your passwords elsewhere and pwn your life. When you reuse passwords, a data leak on a forgotten site can be escalated into a takeover of your email and your identity.
We’re teaching kids bad habits from the get-go. The adults in their life are not modeling good practices. My piece “Privacy and Passwords” has some suggestions. It cribs from Chapter 10, “I Hate Passwords”, of the Smart Girl’s Guide. The TLDR version is: Don’t give away historic details about yourself, use a password manager, turn on two-factor authentication (especially for email), and never reuse passwords.
Dress Codes
Does your school reinforce harassment and rape culture with its dress codes? Yes, it does.
“I am not a distraction.”
It’s the statement that’s become a rallying cry across the burgeoning movement against inequitable school dress codes, a movement propelled largely by the young girls who are so often targeted by policies that label the parts of their bodies ― whether covered by yoga pants, spaghetti straps, gym shorts, leggings or tank tops ― as “distractions.”
But recently, Evanston Township High School in Illinois gained accolades for releasing an updated dress code that explicitly forbids body shaming and aims to diminish marginalization of students based on their “race, sex, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, ethnicity, religion, cultural observance, household income or body type/size.”
Source: Sexist School Dress Codes Are A Problem, And Oregon May Have The Answer
Students, parents, and others have a number of concerns about public school dress codes and their impact on female students. One concern is that many dress codes are explicitly gender-specific, targeting girls but not boys, or are at least selectively enforced such that they impact female students disproportionately. Student discipline includes removal from class, receiving detention, being sent home, or forced to wear a “shame suit” indicating she has violated the school dress code. Female students are powerfully affected by these policies and many express a profound sense of injustice.” The consequences of being “dress coded” have a negative impact on student learning and participation. Beyond the immediate disruption resulting from removal, detention, and the like, studies suggest that a preoccupation with physical appearance based on sexualized norms disrupts mental capacity and cognitive function.
Consistent with the research on sexualization of girls, many are concerned about the larger symbolic messages that dress codes and their enforcement send to students and society. A common thread among school justifications for sex-specific dress codes is that provocative clothing will distract their male classmates or make male teachers feel uncomfortable. A number of commentators thus maintain dress codes communicate that girls’ bodies are inherently sexual, provocative, dangerous, and that harassment is inevitable. Dress codes and their enforcement can impose sexuality on girls even when they do not perceive themselves in sexual terms. Gender study scholars report that dress codes generally have negative ramifications for women, sending a message that exposing the female body is bad. Laura Bates of The Everyday Sexism Project characterizes the dress code phenomenon as “teach[ing] our children that girls’ bodies are dangerous, powerful and sexualized, and that boys are biologically programmed to objectify and harass them.” Thus, dress codes can constitute a type of “everyday pedagogy,” reproducing normative gender and sexuality preferences.
Source: Sexualization, Sex Discrimination, and Public School Dress Codes
- No student should be affected by dress code enforcement because of racial identity, sex assigned at birth, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, ethnicity, cultural or religious identity, household income, body size/type, or body maturity.
- School staff shall not enforce the school’s dress code more strictly against transgender and gender nonconforming students than other students.
- Students should not be shamed or required to display their body in front of others (students, parents, or staff) in school. “Shaming” includes, but is not limited to:
- kneeling or bending over to check attire fit;
- measuring straps or skirt length;
- asking students to account for their attire in the classroom or in hallways in front of others;
- calling out students in spaces, in hallways, or in classrooms about perceived dress code violations in front of others; in particular, directing students to correct sagged pants that do not expose the entire undergarment, or confronting students about visible bra straps, since visible waistbands and straps on undergarments are permitted; and,
- accusing students of “distracting” other students with their clothing.
Source: Back-to-School Information / Student Dress Code
We sexualize and racialize bodies through dress codes that target specific people while simultaneously maintaining that these one-dimensional standards are universal. All the while, do we ever consider exactly how a dress code benefits student success and the greater good of education? I was once suspended for wearing my hat in the hallway. I missed two days of school and the only learning I soaked in was that the school and the real world were two distinct places in which one of them pissed me off exponentially more than the other.
We should be thinking about ways to engage all learners in education. We should teach that there is a time and place for particular aesthetics, but I question whether or not that should be done through a dress code policy. Perhaps explicit teaching practice that fosters student awareness on the complexities of cultural appropriateness, spatial or social awareness, and for lack of a better term, “playing the game of school” (which translates into the “game” of life, at least, arguably, from a cultural standpoint) is a better route to take. If you think a dress code is appropriate, bring every stakeholder to the table and have an honest discussion. Do not rely on the so-called gaze of the powerful and privileged to dictate what is and is not acceptable. If we allow this, it is clear how and who such a policy affects.
Source: Decoding School Dress Codes – March For Public Education – Medium
Bodily Autonomy
Anything that erodes bodily autonomy reinforces rape culture. Bodily autonomy is a human rights and social justice framework that can unite movements.
Because I wrote a book about women’s sexuality, a journalist recently asked me,”What do women need, for really great sex?”
I said, “Basic bodily autonomy.”
But I want to amend that answer.
First, what do I mean by basic bodily autonomy?
It’s not just control over the decision of whether and when to have any kind of sex - though it is that; the conservative, low estimate is that one in four women will experience sex and relationship violence, compared to one in six men.
For great sex, women need basic bodily autonomy - not being punished (raped or mudered) or judged or shamed, either when we say yes or when we say no. And that will only happen fully when men stop measuring their own worth in terms of their access to women’s sexual bodies. So we need that, too.
Source: Me too – Emily Nagoski – Medium
Now, many sex ed programs venture beyond basic anatomy and biology (and condoms on bananas), to help young people understand healthy sexuality, from gender identity to bodily autonomy.
Backed by the momentum of #MeToo – which exposed the prevalence of sexual violence – many sex educators say programs should begin earlier and cover more emotional, intellectual and social elements of sexual health.
Source: Sex ed: Not what your parents remember. And #metoo may change it again
“Bodily autonomy,” as an abstract philosophical principle, dates back at least to the ancient Greek philosophers. Over the centuries, legal scholars and political philosophershave thought hard about the relationship between rights and laws, the individual and the group, and the sovereign state and the autonomous individual. In American activist circles, bodily autonomy is most often invoked around the fight for reproductive rights. But what I haven’t seen is an effort to harness this principle in a way that binds our seemingly separate movements together.
Let’s start with the disability piece. I’m the father of a boy with Down syndrome. My concerns for him and for the extended disabled community include opposition to institutionalization, forced sterilization and other eugenic practices, involuntary surgery, mandatory drug regimes, denial of rights for disabled parents, protection for disabled children from violent caregivers and teachers, and lack of accommodations for non-typical bodies. In each case, these issues require a government that refrains from coercing disabled bodies and protects disabled bodies from private coercion. Bodily autonomy extends over these seemingly quite disparate issues.
Source: My Body, My Choice: Why the Principle of Bodily Autonomy Can Unite the Left | The Nation
Purity Culture
And, finally, the big hurt: purity culture. “Purity culture is rape culture in its Sunday best.” I will let ex-evangelicals speak to this.
Evangelical churches, with their insistence on a God-given patriarchal system in which women are believed to be created as male helpmeets, are also facing a potential tsunami of online and private allegations about sexual abuse. After the Harvey Weinstein celebrity revelations prompted the #MeToo movement, two ex-evangelical women started a #ChurchToo movement. The women, Emily Joy and Hannah Paasch, both 27, told Newsweek that after they started the hashtag, they were inundated with thousands of public and private messages from women and girls describing abuse from pastors and at fundamentalist Christian schools and colleges, mostly swept under the rug.
Source: Trump and White Evangelicals: Support for President Grows, But Millennials Leave Movement
Any appropriate response to #ChurchToo and the problem of sexual assault and abuse in religious communities necessitates the total dismantling and rejecting of purity culture. Lest my words not be taken as radically as I mean them in my heart, what I mean is that we absolutely must stop believing in and teaching that:
A. Total sexual abstinence is morally mandated and required by God until marriage
B. Being heterosexual and cisgendered is “God’s best” and LGBTQ identities are a symptom of “broken” sexuality
C. Women have the responsibility to dress modestly to avoid causing others to stumble
D. Men are to be the leaders in the church and the family, and women are to follow their lead
The heartbreak, the dysfunction, the mental illnesses, the broken families, the lost lives of queer kids, the shame and self-loathing that sticks with you for life no matter how far away you get. Purity culture has blood on its hands – which is why calls to “reach across the theological aisle” are as offensive as they are ludicrous. You can’t “work for change” alongside those who don’t believe you’re fully human or that you’re fundamentally broken because you’re not like them – especially when they are so unwilling to admit that that is what they actually believe that they would rather call their hatred “love” than admit that their theology mandates behavior that is the farthest thing in the world from loving. We can’t agree on basic terms and definitions with Christians entrenched in purity culture – we are not even using the same words to mean the same basic and essential things. Concepts like “love” “God” “Jesus” “knowledge” “right” and “wrong” lose all meaningfulness in the rubric of purity culture that sorts the morality of actions based on whether they align with one’s narrow and limited interpretation of a holy text, not based on whether they contribute to greater human love and flourishing. And ultimately, if we don’t have that, then all we have is the empty promise of being rescued from a made-up hell in exchange for 70 years of being miserable and making others miserable here on earth. And that’s not good enough for me.
Source: What’s Purity Culture Got To Do With It? — Emily Joy Poetry
This purity culture has deep, oppressing consequences. When women fight for access to birth control by citing non-contraceptive uses-polycystic ovary syndrome, endometriosis, amenorrhea-as if a prescription for its use to simply enjoy sex without getting pregnant is a moral failing-we see the reach of this problem, of how we think about women’s sexuality. Women who’ve suffered female genital mutilation are victims of this virginity fetish, too.
Rape culture and purity culture are two sides of the same coin, where women lose no matter the outcome of the toss. And God forbid a woman find herself in a situation where there is no escape, where the safest option of the moment is submission: she’ll be whispered about and judged by both sides, and when she’s not dismissed as a liar, she’s considered a whore. There is no room for context or understanding-only guilt, shame, and blame. When the choice is between being physically or morally devalued, silence can seem the wisest, least threatening choice.
Source: It’s time we addressed our society’s toxic ‘purity culture’ – Macleans.ca
But the purity movement isn’t all witty underpants and daughters dancing on their fathers’ shoes. The same tenets that underpin purity culture-namely, rigid beliefs about gender and sexuality-are also the features that sustain rape culture. And the negative outcomes are as multifaceted as my purity ring: sexual shame, self-loathing, fear-based morality, and marked ignorance about sexual concepts.
One researcher describes the cost of purity culture as deep sexual shame and self-loathing so intense that she compares it to survivors of childhood sexual assault. An alumnus of a radicalized Christian college reports that the majority of women who graduate from the school cannot label their own anatomies or explain the basics of sex. For young adults kept woefully ignorant by abstinence initiatives, more advanced topics like consent and coercion are even more obscured.
In assessing the efficacy of purity vows, the findings are also grim. Researchers using those tallied pledge cards report no differences between virginity pledgers and control adolescents in terms of sexual behaviors. It turns out true love doesn’t wait-and it also doesn’t use condoms. Adolescents who sign virginity pledges are much less likely to use birth control or condoms and are at increased risk for both pregnancy and STIs.
One team of researchers, tasked with evaluating the arc of abstinence-only initiatives, decries abstinence programs as a threat to adolescents’ fundamental rights. They also note that the programs “reinforce gender stereotypes about female passivity and male aggressiveness,” highlighting a distinct similarity between purity culture and rape culture.
Source: Evangelical Christian Campuses Are Kissing Consent Goodbye | Bitch Media
Evangelical Purity Culture is an exercise in controlling female sexual desire.
Source: How Evangelical Purity Culture Sacrifices Female Pleasure — Fundamentally Free
Billy Graham gave misogynistic evangelical purity culture his considerably authoritative imprimatur, contributing to the psychological scars left on many ex-evangelicals who are now speaking out against the community we were raised in.
Source: In Billy We Trust? How “America’s Pastor” Birthed Our New Theocratic Wave | Playboy
I haven’t read this book yet, but I see it recommended in #exvangelical circles: A Lily Among the Thorns: Imagining a New Christian Sexuality