We should not be surprised to learn that the subjugation of women, alternative masculinities, and the environment are fueled by the same dominant masculine ideologies. As batterer-intervention counselor Lundy Bancroft concludes in his book, Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men, abusive men have internalized cultural beliefs about what it means to be a man that legitimize their behavior. One of the central issues at work in the construction of these ideologies is characterized by an initial sense of entitlement. “Entitlement,” according to Bancroft, “is the abuser’s belief that he has a special status and that it provides him with exclusive rights and privileges that do not apply to his partner” (Bancroft 54). When we consider the ways in which men have similarly legitimized their control over the natural world, we might understand that “the attitudes that drive abuse [of women, alternative masculinities, and the natural world] can largely be summarized by this one word” (Bancroft 54). Consider the roots of men’s sense of entitlement over the natural world in one of the oldest and, arguably, most influential texts, The Bible.

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. (Genesis, chap. 1, v. 26)

The most problematic word in this passage of The Bible is the word, “dominion,” which is defined as “lands or domains subject to sovereignty or control,” thus the derivative, “domination.” Thousands of years of identifying the environment in this way has had, as we have seen, devastating effects for the natural world. Further, identifying the natural world as one giant smorgasbord, whose purpose lies in the service of men, has brought with it the comforts and privileges we’ve grown accustomed to. This dominant ideology, however, similarly fuels the kind of battery and abuse that Bancroft describes. “Over time, the man grows attached to his ballooning collection of comforts and privileges” (Bancroft 152). This “attachment” is primarily in relation to the ideology that produces these comforts and privileges. Therefore, in the same way one must be defined in opposition in order to justify inhuman treatment of them, the ideologies that characterize the dominant masculine ideology must similarly never be questioned because of the comforts and privileges such an ideology produces for those in power.

As the question in the title of Bancroft’s book suggests, as long as women ask, “Why does he do that?” the emphasis is on the victim to change her behavior to avoid the abuse. As long as the victim of abuse is questioning his or her own actions, s/he remains blind to the systemic violence that underlies entire relationship. This also exemplifies a strong disconnection between the ideology and action. “Power, like property, like land and water, has become privatized and concentrated. And it’s been that way for so long that we believe it to such an extent that we think that’s the natural order of things” (Jensen 42).

Similarly, the discourse surrounding sustainability right now challenges us only to ask questions that do not question the entire abusive, destructive, and inherently, unsustainable system. “Global timber harvesters are squeezing more and more fiber out of a hectare of forest and yet deforestation proceeds unabated” (Princen 33). Similarly, our culture is feverishly examining alternative fuels such as hydrogen fuel cells, ethanol, bio-diesel and scores of others, but because the discourse surrounding sustainability is focused on the question of “how are we going to run our cars, sustainably?” it is rare that anyone considers the underlying premise that questions whether or not cars can ever truly be sustainable in the first place. “The outcomes, the goals of the institutions, are to ‘improve’ the environment, to use the resource more efficiently, to ‘green up’ consumption,” without questioning the culture of consumption itself (Prinsen 33). In this way, the dominant masculine ideology has us identify with its creations and its needs, which produce the comforts and privileges gained through a sense of entitlement, instead of identifying with real world needs.

Bancroft, Lundy. Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men. New York: Berkley Trade. 2003

Jensen, Derrick. Endgame: Volume 1: The Problem of Civilization. New York: Seven Stories Press. 2006

Princen, Thomas. “Principles for Sustainability: From Cooperation and Efficiency to Sufficiency.” Global Environmental Politics. Vol. 3, No. 1. 33-50. 2003

Despite the fact that I’ve never written about women and body hair, there has been a rush of comments from men, lately, who always seem to bring up the way they feel about this topic. I’ve dated women who don’t shave their body hair. I’ve dated women who do. It honestly doesn’t make a difference to me whatsoever. 

Men who are immediately turned off by women with body hair are always quick to make unsubstantiated claims about these women. They’re “dirty,” their “hippies,” their “dykes” are all common responses. Women who do not shave their body hair are exactly that: they are women who do not shave their body hair. A lot of men do not shave their body hair (remember when hairy chests were popular?…I’m waiting for that day to come back. Damn you Hasselhoff and Bon Jovi with your overkill!). We do not think these men are strange. 

There is an interesting history lesson regarding the socially constructed image of the “hairless woman,” one that made a refusal to shave perfectly justifiable in my mind. Long ago, in our culture, when it was nearly impossible for a woman to make a living without the support of a man (not that it’s a piece of cake now for many women), many women resorted to prostitution. The strongest market for prostitution was in younger girls. Therefore, when women got older—or rather, when they began to look older (ie body hair)—they weren’t as marketable. So these prostitutes, in an effort to remain independent, began to shave their body hair.  As the decades went by, the removal of body hair became an acceptable and widespread social construction. Now it’s expected.

Other cultures whose female members shave their body hair have other stories. This is ours.  Of course when a woman shaves her legs today, most likely she is not doing it for these reasons and I don’t want to be accused of calling women who shave their legs prostitutes, nor am I accusing the men who are specifically attracted to hairless female bodies of engaging in prostitution. I just think it is interesting and a history worth noting. 

Further, men (and women) who are grossed out by body hair, have learned to be grossed out by body hair and they can unlearn it just as easily. And where people learn things, it is because they are being taught. Our media reproduces the ideal body for women (and, of course men) as an archetype, from which there is little to no deviation.  When there is the slightest bit of deviation from this norm, when women with hairy legs are asked, as one man put it so eloquently in my comments, to “cover that shit up,” they are viewed as a threat. These women, who do not shave their legs are a threat to our world-views, our understanding and adherence to the way in which women “should” look.  As one theorist put it: “Perhaps it is because the division between masculine and feminine hair growth is physiologically arbitrary yet socially and psychologically rigid that any amount deviating from hairlessness is threatening. A woman never knows when she may have crossed the boundary” (p. 231). 

In a relationship between a prostitute and a man (which isn’t much of a “relationship” at all), the man is paying and is in control. Similarly in a patriarchal society, where beauty is understood through men’s eyes, women who do not shave are not only challenging the strictly defined gender roles and body image archetypes, but the entire power structure that creates them. 

And to me, that is very sexy.    

In composing/researching this thesis, I learned more about myself as a writer and thinker than through any other project I’ve ever undertaken. For those that don’t know, I wanted to figure out a way to discuss rhetoric, masculinities, and the environment within one central theme: I chose pickup truck advertising. There are still a lot of problems with it, I think. Though I’m going to work this semester to glean material from all of this to produce two solid scholarly journal articles: masculinities will be the focus of one, and environment (greenwashing, sustainability…etc.) will be the focus of the other.

With this project, I was able (hopefully) to illuminate the ways in which feminist and environmental activism are constrained and affected by the same power structures, the same issues of entitlement, control, and dominance. This year, I’m hoping to put some of this into action, forming coalitions between my work with The MARS Project (men against rape and sexism) with local environmental groups. If, for some reason, there is anyone who wants to read the whole thing (like 95 pages), I’d be happy to send it through email as long as all the copyright stuff is respected.

The entire thesis is called: Power Under the Hood: Pickup Truck Advertising, Hyper-Masculinities, and Denial in the Age of Ecological Apocalypse

Members of American culture would be hard pressed to imagine an advertisement for a pickup truck that didn’t display a rugged individual behind the wheel, navigating his new mud-splattered F-150 through towering canyons, his truck clawing its way over jagged boulders and rapid streams—spitting up water and gravel along the way—only for it to rest at an impossibly jagged cliff among the desolate, pristine wilderness that lays before him. The other dominant image depicted in these advertisements, of course, is a construction site. In this advertisement the viewer catches up with the same rugged individual as he finishes loading his new Silverado with 2 x 4’s; he hops into the cab, leaving the construction site in a cloud of dust, just in time for a catchy, masculine slogan to run across the screen such as “built Ford tough,” “size matters,” “like a rock,” or “high performance starts here.”

In this world, pickup trucks—and the men in them—are invincible. They are in the driver’s seat, paving their own destinies. They are in control, they are steadfast, they are confident. Such a man is just as much a part of the truck as the truck is a part of him. There is nothing a man and his truck cannot conquer in the world created by pickup truck advertising. It is a world not affected by the environmental impacts of combustion engines, or the destructive wake of heavy off-road tires. It is a world where men are fueled by aggression and sustained by power, control, and dominance over alternative masculinities, women, and the natural world.

Analyzing the rhetoric of pickup truck advertising reveals intersections between rhetoric, masculinity, and the way our relationship to the natural world is constructed. An analysis such as this is crucial in that it allows us to rediscover what it means to be authentic, autonomous, and fully human members of a culture outside of generic and confining gender roles. Once we sift through the negative effects of the cultural norms, deep-seated within the rhetoric of advertising, we can begin to uncover what it means to be fully human and, thus, interact with one another and the natural world in a way that is truly meaningful and reciprocal. In order for this to happen, a careful examination surrounding the discourse on sustainability and so-called “green” automobiles must be interrogated as well. If our culture is, indeed, in the process of a transformation to a sane and sustainable way of life, the disconnection between ideology and action must be united. The world illustrated in the rhetoric of pickup truck advertising gives members of American culture false and harmful representations of masculinity. By portraying the dominant masculine ideology as virtuous in the rhetoric of pickup truck advertising, a myth is further propagated that, through the implementation of domineering technology, man can transcend the needs of the natural world. In the narcissistic world of pickup truck advertising, violence, aggression, control, and domination are portrayed as innate, as natural and predictable as the setting sun.

Meanwhile, in the real world, nearly one-third of American woman will “report being physically or sexually abused by a husband or boyfriend at some point during their lives” (Katz 21). Approximately one in four or one in five women will experience an attempted or completed rape in college (Katz 21). Over 99% of the perpetrators of rape are men (Katz 5). But men don’t just attack women; “Between 50 and 70 percent of men who abuse their female partners also abuse their children” (Katz 21). The dominance of patriarchy—and particularly a masculinist ideology— also fuels a strong sense of homophobia in our culture. In 2005, 13.8% of all reported hate crimes were motivated because of sexual orientation (FBI). Of the 1,213 victims targeted because of sexual orientation bias, 61.3 percent of the victims were homosexual men (FBI stats). Though the FBI doesn’t list statistics on how many of these crimes were perpetrated by men, “the Bureau of Justice Statistics say that over 85% of violent crimes in the U.S. are committed by men” (Katz 79).

We also live in a world where roughly three percent of old growth forests remain intact in the United States (San Francisco Chronicle). An average of 150 species of animals go extinct every single day (BBC News). According to the U.S. Geological Survey, there are carcinogens in every single stream in the United States (U.S.G.S.). Ninety percent of all the large fish in the sea are gone (National Geographic News). It is predicted that by 2030, a quarter of all the earth’s mammals will be gone, forever (Podger). There are, of course, many systematic and institutional reasons for these striking figures, but most of them can be summed up as due to increasing loss of habitat. This is particularly true if, in the definition of habitat, we include drinkable water, breathable air, and sustainable food sources. Much like the trucks described above, as our culture has extended its colonization of wild habitats, it has destroyed, in whole or in part, everything in its path.

In short, our culture is very violent. Statistics support the notion that this violence can, in part, be attributed to the dominant masculine ideology, which functions as a cycle from which narrow, and, indeed, harmful interpretations of what it means to be a man are encouraged throughout development, reproduced in the media—particularly through advertising—and ultimately rewarded in the capitalist society at large. Like a fish unaware of its own liquid environment, it is important to recognize the difficulty inherent in questioning the impact of one’s surroundings and how these surroundings influence behavior, world-views, and motivations. This project is particularly concerned with the role that advertising in the mainstream media plays in the construction of world views. Long after the marriage between production and promotion, products have been linked symbolically to the “world of social values,” whereby accepting the “selling message is to accept the values it presupposes” (Wernick 23). By looking critically at today’s advertising, we can begin to understand what is being “sold” or “promoted” beyond the product itself.

So why, one may ask, have I chosen pickup trucks and not, say, SUVs? I am deliberately omitting SUVs, insofar as I can, from my analysis and, instead, focusing specifically on pickup trucks for two main reasons. First, though many women do drive pickup trucks, advertising, by and large, is generally geared towards men. In fact, a Chevrolet marketing campaign from 2005 called, “Long Live the Truck,” was according to the marketing director, “aimed at men, who make up 87 percent of the full-sized pickup’s buyers” (Geist 1). Rob Schwartz, creative director for Nissan, specifically identified the full-sized truck market as a “male-dominated category” (Halliday 2). Further, SUVs are a relatively recent phenomenon while pickup trucks represent a long tradition of masculinity and men’s roles in American culture.

Before such a formal analysis of these commercials as cultural texts can take place, however, it is important to get a sense of the way advertising works and how the focus of advertising has shifted from logically-based appeals to those that attempt to exploit our deepest emotions. Further, it is crucial to understand how these appeals to emotion specifically reinforce, and thus promote, traditional gendered stereotypes and worldviews characterized by false and limiting dichotomies. This will lead into a demonstration of the way in which this mindset negatively affects men’s relationships with women and alternative masculinities. In addition, I shall examine how the consequences of this hegemonic gendered identity alongside the rhetoric of pickup truck advertisements converge in a manner that justifies the on-going destruction of the environment.

Learn more here.

I really need to update my calendar

A few weeks ago, I posted a handout from The MARS Project on how homophobia hurts us all. To compliment that post, I wanted to post a paragraph from Michael Kimmel’s essay on “Masculinity as Homophobia.”

Homophobia is more than the irrational fear of gay men, more than the fear that we might be perceived as gay. ‘The word “faggot” has nothing to do with homosexual experience or even with fears of homosexuals,’ writes David Leverenz (1986). ‘It comes out of the depths of manhood: a label of ultimate contempt for anyone who seems sissy, untough, uncool’ (p. 455). Homophobia is the fear that other men will unmask us, emasculate us, reveal to us and the world that we do not measure up, that we are not real men. We are afraid to let other men see that fear. Fear makes us ashamed, because the recognition of fear in ourselves is proof to ourselves that we are not as manly as we pretend, that we are, like the young man in a poem by Yeats, ‘one that ruffles in a manly pose for all his timid heart.” Our fear is the fear of humiliation. We are ashamed to be afraid.

Why is everyone afraid to say this?
JERUSALEM

President Moshe Katsav pleaded guilty on Thursday to committing sexual crimes against women employees, signing a plea bargain that will keep him out of jail, Israel’s attorney-general said.

They call it “sexual crimes” or “sexual offences”…If we’re going to actually address the problem here, this institutional violence against women, at the very least, we need to call it what it is: rape.

President Moshe Katzav needs to be properly charged and their government needs to change the patriarchal climate so it doesn’t happen again. Talking around the issue and pretending it is something else, or something less, functions to keep other victims quiet…which I suppose is the point here.

On June 14, four African-American women — Venice Brown (19), Terrain Dandridge (20), Patreese Johnson (20) and Renata Hill (24) — received sentences ranging from three-and-a-half to 11 years in prison. None of them had previous criminal records. Two of them are parents of small children.

Their crime? Defending themselves from a physical attack by a man who held them down and choked them, ripped hair from their scalps, spat on them, and threatened to sexually assault them — all because they are lesbians.

Read about the attack and what a worthless douche bag their attacker is.

Philosophical Encounters of the Third Kind

Philosophical Encounters of the Third Kind is an up-close and personal encounter with this educator and author. The film features interviews with Butler - including reminiscences of her formative childhood years, illustrated by family home movies, as a “problem child”-shows her in classroom sessions in Berkeley and Paris, at public speaking engagements, and in discussion with Gender Studies professor Isabell Lorey…

…the first film profile on Judith Butler, will serve to popularize her insightful analysis of sexual identity and gender roles at a time when the cultural and political debate over these issues pervades American society.

Judith Butler rocks my socks, for sure, and I will certainly go see this film. I haven’t heard much about it, but it’s been my experience that documentaries about famous academics are usually pretty bad. I could be wrong on this one, like I said I haven’t seen it.

I do hope the filmmakers took some time to translate Butler’s dense, inaccessible writing so that the discourse she encourages actually leaves the academic community. That’s my problem with a lot of academics. Don’t get me wrong, I think Butler is a genius, an insightful and necessary figure whose books have helped inspire me to get into the anti-sexist work that I do. I just have a problem with academic writing that critiques and talks about the larger mainstream public, but excludes them at the same time. We can all write and talk about what’s wrong with society, but if the public is not engaged in the discussion, the discourse won’t leave the classroom.

I brought this issue up in class a few semesters back. My professor, who totally agreed with me, told me about a conference she had just attended where she brought up the inaccessibility of academic writing to another well-known social theorist (no names!). Her response was, and I’m not making this up, “I try not to make a fetish out of understanding.”

And we wonder where all this anti-intellectualism stuff comes from…

PHOENIX

A woman had the word “snitch” burned into her face with a branding iron in apparent retaliation for helping police in a domestic violence case, authorities said.

The brand singed into her flesh during a June 13 attack is 4 to 6 inches long and stretches across her left cheek from lip to earlobe, Mesa police Sgt. Chuck Trapani said Friday.

A good friend of mine recently started her own blog. She is a talented writer and very passionate about her content. I suggest everyone check it out. Here is her description:

This is a blog about navigating the narrow lines and spaces between victim and survivor, between survivor and activist.