#michael kimmel

[quotesfromtheblue]

Single parents - both women and men - can play as critical a role as the traditional two-parent family, and gay and lesbian parents can, and do, raise happy, resilient children. When it comes to family life, form is not merely as important as content. Feeling loved and supported, nurtured and safe, is far more critical than the 'package' it comes in.

-Michael Kimmel-

[non-pursuitofhappiness]

So I'm reading a book on the history of masculinity in the US and the very first chapter was an incredibly relevant section that described the transformation of early American manhood due to the rapid explosion of industrialism and commerce that happened right as the Revolution was hitting and got really big in the early to mid 1800s. I got a whole history on labor and work and then it went into Andrew Jackson as an angry response and the beginnings of the politics of class resentment and I was not expecting so much relevance from a book published in 1996, y'all. I was shook.

[sergeant-angels-trashcan]

Yet the truth is that white men are the beneficiaries of the single greatest affirmative action program in world history. It's called 'world history'

Michael Kimmel, Angry White Men

[currahee]

That world, now passing into history, is a world in which white men grew up believing that they would inevitably take their places somewhere on the economic ladder simply by working hard and applying them. It is the American Dream, the ideal of meritocracy. And when men fail, they are humiliated, with nowhere to place their anger. And today, many white men feel that they know why their dream is being deferred. As Carly Fiorina, the former CEO of Hewlett-Packardand the first woman CEO of a major corporation in our history, put it, ‘There is no job that is America’s God-given right anymore.’ It is that ‘God-given right’ that seems to be evaporating. What links all these different groups- rampage shooters and the Patriots, the Minutemen and the vengeful dads, Rush Limbaugh and Joe the Plumber, and Tom Metzger and the neo-Nazi minions- is a single core experience: what I call aggrieved entitlement. It is that sense that those benefits tow hick you believed yourself entitled have been snatched away from you by unseen forces larger and more powerful. You feel yourself to be the heir to a great promise, the American Dream, which has turned into an impossible fantasy for the very people who were supposed to inherit it. And where did they get the idea that it actually is their god given right to begin with? ‘Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true,’ asks Bruce Springsteen in The River, perhaps his darkest song, ‘Or is it something worse?’

Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era by Michael Kimmel

[thesociologicalcinema]

Equality will always feel uncomfortable for those who once benefited from inequality.

Michael S. Kimmel, The Gendered Society

[socialjusticeprincesses]

Privilege is invisible to those who have it

Michael Kimmel

[breakingtheboycode]

We found a striking pattern from the stories about the boys who committed violence: Nearly all had stories of being constantly bullied, beat up, and … ‘gay-baited.’ Nearly all had stories of being mercilessly and constantly teased, picked on, and threatened. And most strikingly, it was not because they were gay…but because they were different from the other boys—shy, bookish, honor students, artistic, musical, theatrical, non-athletic, ‘geekish’ or weird. Theirs are stories of ‘cultural marginalization’ based on a criteria for adequate gender performance, specifically the enactment of codes of masculinity.

Michael Kimmel, quoted by Pamella Bettis and Brandon Sternod, “Anakin Skywalker, Star Wars and the Trouble with Boys,” Journal of Boyhood Studies