Posts by Russell Brown
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Hard News: Cultures and violence, in reply to Danielle,
In part that’s because it can feel really quite perilous to do so.
Because… feminists are so mean?
I tried half a dozen responses to that and the best that I could come up with was that I’d be sure to let you know when I’d stopped beating my wife.
But that wouldn’t be a good-faith response, and I’ve been off and had a bike ride, so …
As Keir noted, part of the problem for men discussing gender is that it will almost always be a discussion framed by women, and by women who have the benefit of a particular academic background, and will use a particular related vocabulary. (I don’t really know what “performative” means.)
As Bart said, even if you’re talking about your own feelings, the risk of being informed that you’re doing it wrong is quite high.
In some settings, it’s also really important to steer clear of the idea that women and men are biologically and neurologically different and their responses to their environment may consequently differ, even though that’s an uncontroversial fact anywhere outside the humanities. (In an area I know something about, the experience of autism appears to be profoundly different in women and men. The same appears to be true of depression.) It will likely cause a a shitfight. It’s really only safe to talk about gender as a social construct, and that can seem suffocating.
The risk of being deemed an asshole in such a discussion is also considerably higher if you’re male. You can’t fall back on privilege arguments.
In sum, it’s a discussion that’s structurally difficult for men to have on their own terms, and it can be hard to feel safe doing so on someone else’s. It’s a lot easier not to go there.
PS: This has come out more about discussing gender on blogs like this one, but I think the point holds about it being a discussion often not readily available to men.
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Hard News: Cultures and violence, in reply to tussock,
2: The news this time has been damned kind to we few with Aspergers. They are never so kind to the Psychopaths. Privilege in it’s own little way.
A very good point. If you're schizophrenic, people are going to feel much more comfortable about calling you "Evil" than if you're an Aspie. Even if that doesn't necessarily make any sense.
But Aspergers people can become deeply obsessed with just one topic in life, and near-oblivious to anything else. If his Mum made his preparing for the imminent collapse of society and killing everyone who came for their tinned food, that’s just not something I can see an isolated Aspie handling well. Perhaps he was saving them all from the impending doom?
Hard to know. I'm inclined to think the choice of a school (apparently the one he attended) has some significance too. But yeah: the fact that she stockpiled guns and habitually took her son out shooting them just for giggles probably has something to do with it too.
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Hard News: Cultures and violence, in reply to Danielle,
That can be almost entirely attributed to another problem, which is that the construction of gender roles is a topic “marked” as a chick thing. A *feminist* chick thing. When in actuality it could be so much more than that. So men end up not having any practice in talking about their own gender as a category.
In part that's because it can feel really quite perilous to do so.
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I meant to say: thanks to Hugh Sundae and the Herald Entertainment team for making their video premieres embeddable.
I had to consult with Hugh and tweak the code to turn off autoplay on those two clips, but I've had a report of autoplay happening anyway in IE9 on Windows 7 Pro.
It's sweet for me in Chrome/Mac OS. How's it working for y'all?
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Hard News: Music: In before Christmas, in reply to Grant McDougall,
Is the bar in the Street Chant clip an actual bar in Auckland or just a studio mock-up ?
Reminiscent of Whammy, but I'm pretty sure it's a mock-up.
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Hard News: Cultures and violence, in reply to BenWilson,
I’m still struggling to grasp it. Your boy was a real eye opener for me.
It's been hard work for him to understand the impact of his behaviour on others. When I grasped that I was able to to stop whining "why are you doing this to me?" which helped quite a lot. Why don't you see this my way? Oh. Because you can't.
I also think there's a neurological level on which he sometimes doesn't distinguish between people and objects. That's a weird thing, from my point of view.
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Any, thanks everyone: this is a difficult, complex and emotional range of topics we've covered here.
Matt Frost has offered me a guest post from an Aspie perspective, which I'll hopefully publish tomorrow, and my son says he'll write something about blaming video games for public violence.
I'm struck by how many layers a story from another country has proven to have.
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Hard News: Cultures and violence, in reply to BenWilson,
I’m still struggling to grasp it. Your boy was a real eye opener for me. The thing about non-neurotypical is that there’s 500 million flavors. It’s really hard to make generalizations about what works for them and what doesn’t, or what they might be capable of. The same goes for everyone else too, but in a much tighter range.
Good observation. I've said more times than I can recall in talks about this that the great gift of learning to understand how my boys were different was learning along the way how everyone is different. That people may respond differently because their actual experience of the world is different.
I actually regard that insight as a significant professional benefit in my line of work.
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Hard News: Cultures and violence, in reply to Danielle,
Yes, I saw that, but since you were so busy accusing me of making shit up it got a bit lost in translation. ;)
I said sorry. I just thought you’d made an unfair paraphrase when you hadn’t. Soz again.
I have to go and do an interview about drug law reform in Latin America now. Bizarrely.
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Hard News: Cultures and violence, in reply to Martin Lindberg,
The stripey shirts, who were led to believe that the world owes them a debt simply by virtue of their maleness
But these are not the boys who turn to mass shootings.
No, and they're not the lost poor white trash either. I didn't see the stripey shirts anywhere in the Wampole column, which is why I read it differently to those who did.