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thescuspeaks.livejournal.comHave you ever noticed how when people talk about gender they
really are using gender as a euphemism for talking about women? So if you were to read a report entitled, “The effects of war in Afghanistan and gender” you’d really be really be reading a report about war and women. If you want
to talk about gender besides women it has to be snuck in the backdoor, guerilla style academic insurrection tactics. I have hijacked more then my fair share of classes. The problem of using gender as a euphemism for women is two fold: (1) It continues the idea that women qua women is not worth talking about. (2) It lessens analysis. It produces sloppy lazy answers to complex questions, and perhaps worse, fails to ask a whole host of questions that need answers.
Even when masculinity is discussed, there is a peculiar bent to the discussion. Masculinity seems to only be talked about in the ways that it relates to men’s feelings towards women. As way of example, I went to this conference on popular culture, and there was a panel discussing “Masculinity and Maxim”, so I naturally went. All the papers were focused on the same (true) thing, that Maxim constructed male sexuality in order to women as objects. The odd thing that was missing was what Maxim does to men. The whole point of Maxim is to make men feel like shit. The articles of Maxim follow a fairly similar format, in which the article basically goes: “You’re an stupid, insensitive jerk. Because you are such a loser, no girl will go out with you as you are, so we will teach you how to be something besides your loser self in order for women to like you.” At this point the man is instructed on how to do things, how to engage in certain psychic cosmetic surgeries. The man’s personality is tooled to an interchangeable object, a commodity, in which one engages women as if they are objects to be traded. (Cosmo works in a very similar way. Women are taught they are just objects, and that men are stupid insensitive jerks. Therefore, the only way to be happy is by staying in the realm of objectness). Both of these magazines use these techniques for two reasons: (1) In order to sell the products they advertise. In both cases these magazines want the readers to feel that objects can be a key to their happiness. And (2) they want to sell an image to which reading and buying the magazine is key to keeping. The first thing that all these magazines have to do is to make the target
reader (either male or female) feel sufficiently insufficient. (And none of this analysis even taps the heterosexual matrix [to steal a term from Wittiq] that undergirds all of this). Analysis of gender has to be more complex, more full, then what we usually find in theory land.
really are using gender as a euphemism for talking about women? So if you were to read a report entitled, “The effects of war in Afghanistan and gender” you’d really be really be reading a report about war and women. If you want
to talk about gender besides women it has to be snuck in the backdoor, guerilla style academic insurrection tactics. I have hijacked more then my fair share of classes. The problem of using gender as a euphemism for women is two fold: (1) It continues the idea that women qua women is not worth talking about. (2) It lessens analysis. It produces sloppy lazy answers to complex questions, and perhaps worse, fails to ask a whole host of questions that need answers.
Even when masculinity is discussed, there is a peculiar bent to the discussion. Masculinity seems to only be talked about in the ways that it relates to men’s feelings towards women. As way of example, I went to this conference on popular culture, and there was a panel discussing “Masculinity and Maxim”, so I naturally went. All the papers were focused on the same (true) thing, that Maxim constructed male sexuality in order to women as objects. The odd thing that was missing was what Maxim does to men. The whole point of Maxim is to make men feel like shit. The articles of Maxim follow a fairly similar format, in which the article basically goes: “You’re an stupid, insensitive jerk. Because you are such a loser, no girl will go out with you as you are, so we will teach you how to be something besides your loser self in order for women to like you.” At this point the man is instructed on how to do things, how to engage in certain psychic cosmetic surgeries. The man’s personality is tooled to an interchangeable object, a commodity, in which one engages women as if they are objects to be traded. (Cosmo works in a very similar way. Women are taught they are just objects, and that men are stupid insensitive jerks. Therefore, the only way to be happy is by staying in the realm of objectness). Both of these magazines use these techniques for two reasons: (1) In order to sell the products they advertise. In both cases these magazines want the readers to feel that objects can be a key to their happiness. And (2) they want to sell an image to which reading and buying the magazine is key to keeping. The first thing that all these magazines have to do is to make the target
reader (either male or female) feel sufficiently insufficient. (And none of this analysis even taps the heterosexual matrix [to steal a term from Wittiq] that undergirds all of this). Analysis of gender has to be more complex, more full, then what we usually find in theory land.
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