But in other, more mainstream quarters of the movement, the heated, and hateful rhetoric […] became replaced by a new frame: abortion hurts women. Given that by the early 1980s, about 40 percent of American women were estimated to have an abortion during their reproductive years (the number now is about 33 percent), arguably such hate speech was counterproductive for the opponents of abortion: too many Americans either themselves had had an abortion or knew someone who did. Thus, antiabortion rhetoric shifted to professed sympathy for women, and abortion providers—those doing the hurting—became the main objects of demonization.
[…]
…it has become far easier for mainstream actors in the antichoice movement to see a split world, in which good women do the “right thing” when faced with an unwanted pregnancy and bad women don’t. This deeply stigmatized view of abortion recipients enables the “respectable” opponents of abortion—the legislators, the Church officials and so on—to go a rhetorical place where their extremist colleagues have always been.
(male) liberation 0.1: violence
A full and more extended (male) liberation might never happen, without the transformation of (male) violence into something positive. Or at least it should be understood, accepted (!) and included in a form that does no or fewer damages.
The (male) violence is the major factor of separation between the genders.
Abortion is violence as well. It is the necessary and justified murder of a person, one (!) act of violence we might have to accept.
It is not the acceptance of the violent act itself, it is the acceptance of the violent aspects of a human being. The instinct of self-preservation or self-protection of the freedom of one person, not the protection of a nation.
i ask the male population to understand and reflect on their violence. I don’t ask for the acceptance of rape.
i don’t ask “what is justified or not”, i ask for the reasons and motivations, i ask for the influences and structures that support violence. How does violence influence male identity? What aspects of the normal daily life are (indirect) violent?
This reflection might be the only way to solve the current victim-hood situation of the male/female conflict.
But it is not just that. I posted this in contrast to the extract from susie bright’s book, because of the direct connections between sex and violence. Both of them play a major part in (male) liberation.
Sex lie #1
Men aren’t looking for liberation, they’re looking to get laid.
Not many people of either sex are actually looking for liberation, at least not until they get to the end of a very weary road of dissatisfaction. That usually takes a decade or two.
Liberation, per se, is not the sort of thing people count as tops on their to-do list, right up there with finding a certain kind of job or partner or new home. Maybe that indicates our lack of concern for our personal growth, but it’s certainly not limited to men.
Men are expected to be horny; they are acknowledged as “natural” for wanting to have sex, but that desire is tainted with weakness, as if their fantasies are an Achilles’ heel that will betray them when they need their strength the most. The “little head” of the penis will lead the “big head” above the shoulders, and won’t we all laugh when we see the results! We grant men sexual feeling as if it were unavoidable, but we make fun of them for what we believe will be their inevitable undoing.
I say, let’s give this wish to get laid a decent shake. What is this desire, after all? The wish to feel sexual ecstasy with another person, to feel yourself completely inside another person’s body, to feel your own body open and single-minded and wanting? That’s a pretty intense experience to yearn for. It deserves respect.
But it’s not always like that, you might be thinking. Some people are totally distant when they’re having sex; it’s just an ego trip, a notch on their belt. And that’s true—there are some cold SOBs out there, whipping it out and walking away. What’s so poignant about their condition is that even their stunted efforts are a search for a connection—for that fleeting moment when the ego disappears and they feel something bigger and more complete than either of their “heads.”
If men can’t express that longing to their lovers, openly and without trepidation, it’s not because their sexual desire is in the way; it’s that little rat cage in their mind that shames them and shuts them up. Yet every time they get laid, there’s that opening again, the chance to be intimate.
A man who wants to get laid is a man who wants to stay in the human race. Let’s treat that as a positive sign and look more carefully at the nature of his sexual connections.
Often the first erotic bridge that men and women cross is the discovery that someone else wants them—and that always seems like a miracle when they’re convinced that they will be forever alone and unloved in the world.
Then when you do get laid, and then it happens again and again and again, the confidence you acquire leads you to some new questions about the value of sex, about a lover’s companionship in your life, about your own sense of adventure and mystery in your erotic body.
At that point, we’re experiencing sexual liberation, whether it’s given that name or not. Some men will start to question all the things a male is “supposed” to do or feel in the threering circus of sexual relationships—and no doubt they will find much of it unnecessary and regressive. They don’t want to sacrifice their emotions and expressiveness on the altar of compulsory masculinity. These men are on the first platform of sexual revolution: they’re not buying the late model of The Omnipotent Man, all polished and ready to go. Refusing to buy into all the blue-label baloney is a sexual revolution right there. I’m happy to meet such a man; he has hope that there’s something better out there—and he’s right.
— Susie Bright, Full Exposure - Opening Up to Sexual Creativity and Erotic Expression , Page 75
Finally, the penguin became the symbol for open relationships!
Source: socialsignal.com
False perceptions
I was going through the presentation “code of our own” that talked about woman and code and different ways of learning programming. Under the pictures of slide 14 it says:
“Boys tend to be incompetent together and figure stuff out in the early teenage years without shame. Consider starting a band as an example. Girls are socially rewarded at that age for demonstrating competence, maturity, not looking stupid. We can work on that skill now, as adults, with respect.”
Beside the wide range of very different (social) issues mentioned here, (the major one being puberty?!), the named incompetence between teenage boys made me wonder about the perception.
So how did some nerdy boys from the 80’s learn all the fancy assembler skills, cracking game copy protections and writing code? Short answer: With a friend.
If i ask around in my male coder circles, the majority of people had the following introduction into the world of computers.
- First encounter: Father got a computer, a class mate’s father had a computer etc…
- Playing around with the machine, being interested in the machine itself and what it can do. Reading manuals and books, spending hours and hours in front of it.
- Play around with the computer together with a good friend. This usually became a major peak in the learning curve and you often exchanged experiences, new features, functions and other findings.
After one or two years of programming in different languages, you gained enough basic knowledge about the computer, how it works and how everything builds upon each other. This became the base for every new learning process in the future.
These two years are usually filled with exchange. With, “can you try if this runs on your computer?”, “did you try this version?”, “did you notice this feature?”. Developing software always involved other people, even so the coding itself was something you did alone at night - the lack of distractions helps to concentrate.
The presentation also mentions the fear of exposing the “not knowing” to a larger group of people. This totally applies for all genders and might be the main reason for learning with a good friend - because you could ask the questions and exchange without any embarrassment.
I totally see that working in a small group is a very efficient way of learning. Writing an application together, to have a specific task that everyone can work on. I spent the last week at a wonderful hacker squat. The exchange is always astonishing, to inspire each other, to share and gain knowledge, to meet new people. It’s no surprise that hackerspaces become so successful.
However, in the context of the current discourse of woman in open source, i sincerely ask for more differentiations. I totally agree with the existence of all issues. But there are multiple questions to ask:
- What are gender issues?
- What are social issues?
- What are group issues?
- What are the specific issues with “male hackers” and their behaviors?
A clear separation is needed. I fear that in the process of getting more genders into the IT world, we might build up more walls between them. Please, let us tear them down instead.
ps: Yes, i am afraid i did not see the related actual talk of that presentation :(
Two Families Grapple with Sons' Gender Preferences : NPR
As his pile of toys dwindled, Carol realized Bradley was hoarding. She would find female action figures stashed between couch pillows. Rainbow unicorns were hidden in the back of Bradley’s closet. Bradley seemed at a loss, she said. They gave him male toys, but he chose not to play at all.
“He turned to coloring and drawing, and he just simply wouldn’t play with anything. And he would color and draw for hours and hours and hours. And that would be all he did in a day,” Carol says. “I think he was really lost. … The whole way that he knew and understood how to play was just sort of, you know, removed from his house.” His drawings, however, also proved problematic. Bradley would populate his pictures with the toys and interests he no longer had access to — princesses with long flowing hair, fairies in elaborate dresses, rainbows of pink and purple and pale yellow. So, under Zucker’s direction, Carol and her husband sought to change this as well.
Source: NPR
Generals, right-wing politicians, and religious fundamentalists would cite menstruation (“men-struation”) as proof that only men could serve God and country in combat (“You have to give blood to take blood”), occupy high political office (“Can women be properly fierce without a monthly cycle governed by the planet Mars?”), be priests, ministers, God Himself (“He gave this blood for our sins”), or rabbis (“Without a monthly purge of impurities, women are unclean”).
Source: haverford.edu
Privacy Wars
Kink on tap had an interesting podcast about the privacy wars. It showed the point of view from a group of people, that have to take care of their privacy. However, i feel that it was lacking some crucial aspects that came up since the development of social networking.
Real names
Using a real name on the internet is an interesting topic and highly depends on your background, and the initial goal for a certain platform.
Before the massive use of the word wide web, most of the public communication was happening over the usenet. Many newsgroups asked the subscribers to provide a real name as a matter of good manners.
With the information stored in the usenet and public mailing-list archives, you can create social networks of the participants. It often exposed key members of the network, core people who play a crucial role of keeping a community running.
Also developers for the Debian GNU/Linux distribution are asked to provide their real name, in progress of the integration into the community. The whole process comes from the need to manifest responsibilities for crucial elements of the operating system.
On of the first programs, that answered the need for a “web-of-trust”, is “pretty good privacy” aka PGP. However it was providing encrypted eMail communication, the key-signing feature also exposed the social network to the public. A long time before sites like Facebook. This problem was addressed by providing a local-only storage of that information. Later, GnuPG became a GPL equivalent of PGP.
The public pgp key of any Debian developer, would directly show how well established a person is in the community. The whole GnuPG based web-of-trust became the essential base of the Debian developer and maintainer network.
Anonymity
In the more radical and political movements, you would hardly find anyone without a nickname of sorts, unless they have to represent a NGO or other official organizations. Massive repression from the state and police or threads from right wing groups make it almost impossible to be known under the real name. Many people even used a separate nickname for this community only.
Facing stalkers and employers is an aspect of the users privacy on the internet. Facing the repression of the state and police brings up a couple more crucial questions that still matter for everyone, whether you fight against the state or not.
Who has access to the data? Where is the data stored? Who owns the data? And how willing is a company or group to share the information with third parties, state and police? The very recent anonymous release of the “compliance guide for law enforcement” of some social network providers, stress the importance of these questions.
The outer edge of this discussion are projects like Wikileaks, Indymedia, Tor and other networks and services that intentionally stand up for freedom of speech and anonymous publishing of any material. Networks that work on the technical and social infrastructure to guarantee as much anonymity as possible. The refusal of indymedia.us to give out the users IP-Address logs show that web services could protect their users privacy.
Your data
There is no question that sharing and the “social net” are the key applications on the internet today. There will most likely be a point when the western world will no longer be able to live without it. Just avoiding social networks will not solve the problem.
The simple answer to many of these problems are that the user needs direct control over their data, at best, stored on their own computers.
With that we come back to the very basic horizontal ideas of the internet, that every node, every computer can provide services and share data. Opera Unite for example, is trying to make this fundamental feature of the internet accessible to the average user.
Also projects like open-id, foaf-ssl and the semantic web in general, work on technical solutions, for a more diverse and decentralized social network, that allows the user to have more direct control over their data.
What is needed are services and desktop applications that combine the features of decentralized social networks, the web-of-trust and encrypted communications.
But it’s not only the technical aspects, it’s about the consequences of horizontal and direct communication in times when people move away from one-way mediums like the television.
Back in 2001, Wau Holland said, that we more and more “need to learn to filter”.
We are no longer just consumers, where other people make the choices for us. The social networks we are exposed to is one of our filters and it is what we want to see in this world.
In 2007 Andreas Pfitzmann held a little speech at the German Federal Constitutional Court, that stresses the need for direct control over our data.
He points us to the possibility that computers are no longer just going to be desktops or laptops separated from us, they will become part of our body. They become a extension of ourselves, provide us with additional memory and give us unique and extended access to these memories, to our data.
The very interesting documentary The Cyborg Revolution from 2007 shows what the current developments are. From artificial vision for blind people to the digital replication of the neurological brain structure of the rat.
It’s only a question of how fast the interface between humans and computer will develop. Augmented reality today, is a little application on your mobile phone. In 10 years it might sit on your nose as part of your glasses, in 20 years it is part of your eye.
Independence
Many social networks like Facebook work with the commercial strategy of binding the customer to their service, to create a dependency, up to the point where they make the choices for you.
This is contrary to the idea of a horizontal communication, to the old idea of “power to the people”, contrary to diversity and independence. Make sure the choice is yours.
occam, 2009-12-27
The right to obscene thoughts
Professor Stephen Guest: This lecture discusses how genuine freedom must include all manner of thought, including the irrational, the bad, and the obscene, and how the recent new offence of possessing extreme pornography has breached this principle.
Source: ucl.ac.uk
It’s a fearful heart that builds a wall and it is a fearless heart that can live without it. And coming into contact with someone with a fearless heart, disarms you. You lay down your arms in the presence of a fearless heart, a wall-less heart.
And it is a very solitary decision to have a fearless heart. It’s the real freedom.
Hunter S. Thompson
Then, on February 16th, Hunter decided to leave a goodbye note. Scrawled in black marker, it was appropriately titled “Football Season Is Over.” Although he left the grim missive for Anita, his young wife, Hunter was really talking to himself. Here, published for the first time, are perhaps his final written words:
“No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun — for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax — This won’t hurt.”
At the bottom of the page, Hunter drew a happy heart, the kind found on Valentine’s cards. Four days later, on February 20th, he committed suicide by firing his pistol into his mouth.
Source: Rolling Stone
