buzzfeed article on aerie REAL campaign is here.
the huffington post has some more commentary on the campaign, and the presentation of the campaign is from a different slant.
interesting to me is that the second article also emphasizes that those models with tattoos are also not having their tattoo photo-shopped out.
Tuesday, January 28, 2014
Richard Sherman Article
http://grantland.com/the-triangle/stanford-man-richard-sherman-and-the-thug-athlete-narrative/
"What Am I?"
'What Am I?' - Michigan Daily
In the middle of working on my white and male privilege lists, a friend of mine at the University of Michigan, who is of Indian and Norwegian heritage, wrote this piece about her experiences as a mixed race woman. It's a really interesting account of how people of color, especially mixed race people, constantly have their ethnicity questioned by others as well as themselves, something that white people are rarely, if ever, subject to.
In the middle of working on my white and male privilege lists, a friend of mine at the University of Michigan, who is of Indian and Norwegian heritage, wrote this piece about her experiences as a mixed race woman. It's a really interesting account of how people of color, especially mixed race people, constantly have their ethnicity questioned by others as well as themselves, something that white people are rarely, if ever, subject to.
Sunday, January 26, 2014
Friday, January 24, 2014
Change and Incentive
Why are we so slow to change? One of the earliest cultures to adopt hierarchical social stratification was the late Vedic civilization; this stratification was maintained until about a century ago. Social thoughts have always necessarily been placed in their historical context because a thought never really arrives in complete independence. Reactionary or not, a thought is a product of the historical patterns of thinking which precede it. Such is the nature of social progress: we are taught to copy the most recent past and either make improvements upon aspects of social architectures or, more drastically, dismantle them. In the context of the caste system, dismantlement took over 2,000 years.
The interpretation of the word "improvement" in the paragraph above proves to be a little subjective, so I will define it in this post to mean movement towards full psychological autonomy. So again, if we're constantly trying to improve, why are we so slow to change? Well, simply put, because improvement is at odds with the "copy" phenomenon earlier described. Improvement (or dismantlement) is an active phenomenon, where copying is a passive one; social norms are learned by just existing in a society. This passive process is a necessary component of structural functionalism. In other words, ideological conservatism is a property through which a society defines itself.
But a society doesn't actively try to create or define itself; it is an emergent property from a dynamic system of individuals. So what motivates individuals to promote ideological conservatism? Honestly, I don't know if I can elucidate a good answer to this question. But I think it can be given that people like people with similar opinions as them and view their and others' behaviors as relative to a normativity, an averaging. If opinions fluctuate relative to normativity and are hereditary, then it's no wonder why change is so slow.
Every generation, we inherit our notions of normativity and maybe budge our "average" ever so slightly in a fight against ideological conservatism. But is ideological conservatism necessarily always something to fight against? Not quite. If the existing ideology leaves no room for improvement, as earlier defined, then there exists no force for it to fight against. Now, let's specifically hone in on the topic of sexism, where current social ideology clearly has plenty of room for improvement as illuminated in our readings.
Without discussing the topics of oppression or (dis)advantage, I've talked a little bit about why I think structural components are maintained systemically through not a subset of society but rather society in its entirety. Now I would like to briefly speak about power and the two main subsets of the population before I pose a broad question. The process of empowerment to a group necessarily categorizes it in opposition to the unempowered or the groups where the powerful has dominion or advantage over. However, as discussed here and in-class, all members in a power relation have influence in maintaining it. What's taken me back through personal experience and discussion in class is how much women, the oppressed, unknowingly act as their own oppressors in every day life. But clearly, the unempowered sex, women, have a clear incentive for breaking this power relation, this conserved social ideology: they are no longer subjugated and can expand their psychological autonomy. Thus, to break women from directly or indirectly promoting this ideological conservatism, I believe women need to be educated on these matters at a young age, so they may be able to defend themselves from passively acquiring this ideology and maintaining it in the future. Education is the key for women. And it's also important for men too. But I don't think it's enough for men. When one has power, especially with disregard to locality or temporality, over half of the population, that's a lot of power to give up. Assuming acknowledgement of one's power, the easiest way to defend it is to claim that it's intrinsic by relying on anecdotes, biology, anthropological history, etc... Easiest perhaps is to use observations of the modern day that have associative properties with phenomena emergent from power relations. However, this is fallacious thinking because critiquing a system requires looking at it from outside the system. Using evidence that is emergent of or within the system to justify the system itself is self-validating logic. Regardless, a man will try to defend his power unless he has a good enough incentive to give it up. Morality seems to work as an incentive for some but not most. So the overall question which I'm stuck on is this: how do we incentivize oppressors with power (read: men) to dismantle the very structures which validate their power in the context of change being slow?
The interpretation of the word "improvement" in the paragraph above proves to be a little subjective, so I will define it in this post to mean movement towards full psychological autonomy. So again, if we're constantly trying to improve, why are we so slow to change? Well, simply put, because improvement is at odds with the "copy" phenomenon earlier described. Improvement (or dismantlement) is an active phenomenon, where copying is a passive one; social norms are learned by just existing in a society. This passive process is a necessary component of structural functionalism. In other words, ideological conservatism is a property through which a society defines itself.
But a society doesn't actively try to create or define itself; it is an emergent property from a dynamic system of individuals. So what motivates individuals to promote ideological conservatism? Honestly, I don't know if I can elucidate a good answer to this question. But I think it can be given that people like people with similar opinions as them and view their and others' behaviors as relative to a normativity, an averaging. If opinions fluctuate relative to normativity and are hereditary, then it's no wonder why change is so slow.
Every generation, we inherit our notions of normativity and maybe budge our "average" ever so slightly in a fight against ideological conservatism. But is ideological conservatism necessarily always something to fight against? Not quite. If the existing ideology leaves no room for improvement, as earlier defined, then there exists no force for it to fight against. Now, let's specifically hone in on the topic of sexism, where current social ideology clearly has plenty of room for improvement as illuminated in our readings.
Without discussing the topics of oppression or (dis)advantage, I've talked a little bit about why I think structural components are maintained systemically through not a subset of society but rather society in its entirety. Now I would like to briefly speak about power and the two main subsets of the population before I pose a broad question. The process of empowerment to a group necessarily categorizes it in opposition to the unempowered or the groups where the powerful has dominion or advantage over. However, as discussed here and in-class, all members in a power relation have influence in maintaining it. What's taken me back through personal experience and discussion in class is how much women, the oppressed, unknowingly act as their own oppressors in every day life. But clearly, the unempowered sex, women, have a clear incentive for breaking this power relation, this conserved social ideology: they are no longer subjugated and can expand their psychological autonomy. Thus, to break women from directly or indirectly promoting this ideological conservatism, I believe women need to be educated on these matters at a young age, so they may be able to defend themselves from passively acquiring this ideology and maintaining it in the future. Education is the key for women. And it's also important for men too. But I don't think it's enough for men. When one has power, especially with disregard to locality or temporality, over half of the population, that's a lot of power to give up. Assuming acknowledgement of one's power, the easiest way to defend it is to claim that it's intrinsic by relying on anecdotes, biology, anthropological history, etc... Easiest perhaps is to use observations of the modern day that have associative properties with phenomena emergent from power relations. However, this is fallacious thinking because critiquing a system requires looking at it from outside the system. Using evidence that is emergent of or within the system to justify the system itself is self-validating logic. Regardless, a man will try to defend his power unless he has a good enough incentive to give it up. Morality seems to work as an incentive for some but not most. So the overall question which I'm stuck on is this: how do we incentivize oppressors with power (read: men) to dismantle the very structures which validate their power in the context of change being slow?
Read This Post, It's About Cute Little Kittens
So this week a friend and I each got a kitten, brother and sister. Here is a picture of mine under a pile of socks.
Anyway, until yesterday, she was under the impression that she had the male and I was under the impression that I had the female, but after checking all of the requisite holes (which with kittens is a lot harder than you might expect), we found out quite the opposite. This caused me to reevaluate the ways that I had treated it, considering our inevitable anthropomorphization of pets based on their presupposed biological sex.
For example, when the two would play together, he would be more aggressive and physically dominated his sister. Someone observing, believing him to be biologically female, commented that “she’s really aggressive, for a girl.” The commenter, being female herself, had unconsciously implied via anthropomorphization that her sex was inherently more passive and that males were more active. In retrospect, this statement struck me as particularly evincing of one of Bartky’s conclusions (as well as one of Paulo Freire’s) that oppressed individuals internalize the viewpoints of their oppressors to the point that they seem normative. Obviously nothing insidious was implied by the commenter in this situation (it’s about kittens playing, after all), but all the more so it should cause us to notice how deeply the vines of oppressive mentalities have seeped into our collective subconscious. My first thought when I found out that Copkilla (that’s his *gender neutral* name) was male was that I should have been giving him fist-bumps instead of hugs. I’m part of the problem, you guys.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)