Re: nettime Recent Gender Things on Nettyme digest [3x]
Dear nettimers, I think the following column , which appeared yesterday in nowhere more radical than the New York Times, illustrates why Kali Tal's response to Alan Sondheim deserved to be taken seriously, rather than responded to with the scorn it seems to have met, from Alan and some others. The column underlines that we do not live in a society where feminism has come close to triumphing. Best, Michael Why Aren't We Shocked? By Bob Herbert Published: October 16, 2006 (NYT) Who needs a brain when you have these?-- message on an Abercrombie Fitch T-shirt for young women In the recent shootings at an Amish schoolhouse in rural Pennsylvania and a large public high school in Colorado, the killers went out of their way to separate the girls from the boys, and then deliberately attacked only the girls. Ten girls were shot and five killed at the Amish school. One girl was killed and a number of others were molested in the Colorado attack. In the widespread coverage that followed these crimes, very little was made of the fact that only girls were targeted. Imagine if a gunman had gone into a school, separated the kids up on the basis of race or religion, and then shot only the black kids. Or only the white kids. Or only the Jews. There would have been thunderous outrage. The country would have first recoiled in horror, and then mobilized in an effort to eradicate that kind of murderous bigotry. There would have been calls for action and reflection. And the attack would have been seen for what it really was: a hate crime. None of that occurred because these were just girls, and we have become so accustomed to living in a society saturated with misogyny that violence against females is more or less to be expected. Stories about the rape, murder and mutilation of women and girls are staples of the news, as familiar to us as weather forecasts. The startling aspect of the Pennsylvania attack was that this terrible thing happened at a school in Amish country, not that it happened to girls. The disrespectful, degrading, contemptuous treatment of women is so pervasive and so mainstream that it has just about lost its ability to shock. Guys at sporting events and other public venues have shown no qualms about raising an insistent chant to nearby women to show their breasts. An ad for a major long-distance telephone carrier shows three apparently naked women holding a billing statement from a competitor. The text asks, When was the last time you got screwed? An ad for Clinique moisturizing lotion shows a woman's face with the lotion spattered across it to simulate the climactic shot of a porn video. We have a problem. Staggering amounts of violence are unleashed on women every day, and there is no escaping the fact that in the most sensational stories, large segments of the population are titillated by that violence. We've been watching the sexualized image of the murdered 6-year-old JonBenet Ramsey for 10 years. JonBenet is dead. Her mother is dead. And we're still watching the video of this poor child prancing in lipstick and high heels. What have we learned since then? That there's big money to be made from thongs, spandex tops and sexy makeovers for little girls. In a misogynistic culture, it's never too early to drill into the minds of girls that what really matters is their appearance and their ability to please men sexually. A girl or woman is sexually assaulted every couple of minutes or so in the U.S. The number of seriously battered wives and girlfriends is far beyond the ability of any agency to count. We're all implicated in this carnage because the relentless violence against women and girls is linked at its core to the wider society's casual willingness to dehumanize women and girls, to see them first and foremost as sexual vessels -- objects -- and never, ever as the equals of men. Once you dehumanize somebody, everything is possible, said Taina Bien-Aimé, executive director of the women's advocacy group Equality Now. That was never clearer than in some of the extreme forms of pornography that have spread like nuclear waste across mainstream America. Forget the embarrassed, inhibited raincoat crowd of the old days. Now Mr. Solid Citizen can come home, log on to this $7 billion mega-industry and get his kicks watching real women being beaten and sexually assaulted on Web sites with names like Ravished Bride and Rough Sex -- Where Whores Get Owned. Then, of course, there's gangsta rap, and the video games where the players themselves get to maul and molest women, the rise of pimp culture (the Academy Award-winning song this year was It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp), and on and on. You're deluded if you think this is all about fun and games. It's all part of a devastating continuum of misogyny that at its farthest extreme touches down in places like the one-room Amish
Re: nettime Recent Gender Things on Nettyme digest [3x]
Hello everyone. Given that I am indirectly responsible for the recent squabble about gender on Nettime, it's the list that is responsible, or would you mean a dead cow would reign on justice due to its approval silent ..or would you mean list member would be just some sort of pavlovian ectoplasm that need rectal massage for giving output This is not to deny that some of the general points raised by people on Nettime are not interesting or that I would not agree with them. ha there i completely agree wonder the fuck how uninterresting mails can go through moderation..so consider this post as just a test for knowing if it's certain sure # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
nettime Recent Gender Things on Nettyme digest [3x]
Table of Contents: gender thing Jonathan Marshall [EMAIL PROTECTED] Re: nettime pope-on-a-rope digest [x5: butt, tal, pentecost, miller, baldwin ( John Hopkins [EMAIL PROTECTED] Recent Events on Nettyme Charles Baldwin [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2006 13:27:58 +1000 From: Jonathan Marshall [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: gender thing Hello everyone. Given that I am indirectly responsible for the recent squabble about gender on Nettime, I thought it might be useful to say something about the recent events even though I am not on the List, and I hope peole will excuse me. I am currently editing a special issue of an ejournal which is about gender on the mailing List Cybermind, and the experiences of its members. I'm probably the main contributor. The idea was to try and overcome the problem of writing about gender from one person's perspective, and to have multiple presentations of views, disagreements, discussion and so on. I aimed at enabling a multi-voiced ethnography, hence the rather controlled focus; even though it will spread elsewhere because of people's interests. Submissions were to be either refereed or non-refereed. Alan, on my request, decided to submit to the non-refereed section. The point of this section was to encourage people, especially people outside the academy or students, to give their reflections, accounts of their experience, quick analyses and so on, without them having to risk being heavily trodden on by academics. In other words I wanted to attract into an academic environment, those people whose voices might not otherwise be heard, and who, if we to listened carefully might have something interesting to say. Especially, I wanted males to risk talking about their experiences of gender online rather than to have it analysed for them. As you might expect, other than myself, most of the academic contributors are female. Now perhaps it was a mistake for Alan to post an early draft of his piece to Nettime, but nevertheless I am hoping that his experience has not put too many people on Cybermind off contributing, and that it has not lead to the silencing of too many voices, and the undoing of some academic discussion of gender. This is not to deny that some of the general points raised by people on Nettime are not interesting or that I would not agree with them. However most of the points do not seem to me, to have been made in a way which would open up discussion. Some Nettimers also seem to have felt the same way. To some extent, as the 'debate' went on, some of the comments seemed to move into 'unreal' territory. This kind of reinforcement of identity, intensification of positions, and taking things in strange ways is, as you all know, very common online and it is always interesting, if painful to observe it, and especially to note that 'we' are not immune to it. I do it myself - hence the 'we' here. Thus, as a mild example, someone describes Alan's reflections as research findings, which is clearly not the case. For one it does not have the coding, or the references. Someone else seems to claim that Alan ignorantly insists on authorial intention and the lack of indeterminacy in the text, while at the same time the critic proclaims that (they as critic) know exactly what is text is really about. Another person seems to have read Alan as relying on the Holocaust as an excuse (for 'his' sexism?), when what he seemed to do was ask whether his Jewishness precluded him from writing about anything else than being a Jew. Someone else seems to have accused Alan, or people like him, of having particular power and privilege - something which to me, suggests a bizarre social theory at the least. This whole debate seems to show how online, or maybe everywhere, we react not to a particular text, but we react strongly to other texts and positions we have met elsewhere - we already seem to know what someone is saying, and don't actually put effort into reading, or questioning each other, at all. Certainly we don't have to reflect on how our words might be affect another or undo mutual presence and reflection. Maybe that is taken as good by some people? Those people who can't stand the heat, should leave, shut up etc... It's a standard net-libertarian position, after all. Anyway, in 'reality', as most of you possibly know, Alan is not only leading a precarious existence trying to do his work, but cannot be described as mainstream or representative of anything much other than the difficulty of trying to make a living nowadays if you want to think, or approach material, in truly different ways. The ongoing result, of his work over the last 12 or so years is the 'internet text' - some of which I
