but she saves the day

the work that inspires and challenges me

[touchthefarthestmoon]

This is an instance where conservatives are the real postmodernists. In the sense that they're the ones who want to destablise and unsettle meaning. Democrats want to talk about facts and truth and science, but conservatives understand the power of language games, they understand that these ideas are socially constructed, or that facts are socially constructed, and they understand that it's about power. So, one of the interesting things that's going on with conservatives right now is they keep saying 'let's keep discussing this'... It sounds very John Stuart Mill, it's very clashing hostile combatants under banners clashing, but really it's about postponing agreement and postponing consensus and unsettling agreement. It's not about reaching agreement, it's about unsettling and postponing political agreement. And I think it's very interesting that the people who critique moral relativism are in fact the people playing it so effectively on the public stage.

Cristina Beltran discussing climate change politics on the Melissa Harris Perry Show.

[touchthefarthestmoon]

We Must Not Shut Up About How Women Are Treated on the Internet

I regularly see anti-woman trolls celebrating when they think they've successfully driven a woman off the internet. This isn't a joke or an abstraction—it is a direct politically-motivated action to silence women's voices. The volume and intensity of harassment is only magnified for women of color and disabled women and trans women and other intersecting identities. And when you complain, you're told you're being "oversensitive" or "focusing on the negative" or "letting the trolls win" or, the classic, "destroying freedom of speech."

[touchthefarthestmoon]

A Man Is Facing Jail for Harassing Women Online, and It's a Big Deal

It's a heartening development for women whose professional and personal lives are heavily taxed by the specter of online abuse. Traditional law enforcement channels (not always on the cutting edge of new social media technology) often don't take internet-based harassment seriously, because it seems to exist only in an intangible playground and because our culture's "boys will be boys"/"don't feed the trolls" apologia is so aggressive. The line where online attacks cross over into real-life danger is muddy and ill-defined for most people—even, quite often, victims themselves. Is this real? Am I being oversensitive? Am I installing an alarm system in my house because some 13-year-old boy in Ohio is bored? How many rape threats is too many? Should I get a dog? Should I tell people why I got a dog?

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Regardless of your stance on prosecuting online hate speech and/or explicit threats, we, as a society, need to start accepting the fact that the internet is real. The internet is not a fantasyland without consequences—it's a real place of real joy and real danger where real flesh-and-blood people exchange real ideas and real threats. Figuring out how to regulate that (especially in America, a nation with freedom of speech built so deeply into its fundament) is going to be a long, messy road.

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This is an immensely complicated, multifaceted, ethically cloudy issue and I'm sure many a Master's thesis will be written on it in the coming years. But, for now, I think we can agree on some things. Direct, violent threats are not "disagreements." Harassment is not a "discussion." "I am going to come to your house and rape you" is not an "opinion." Whether it's through private enterprise or government intervention, that shit has to change.

[touchthefarthestmoon]

Well, in a world where Twilight was universally adored by teenage girls for a brief period of time and universally hated by their male counterparts, I want to celebrate the part of this culture that encourages women to fantasize and dream and write, just as I want to criticize the parts ofTwilight that are bigoted or simply foolish. I want to give Delirium, The Vampire Diaries, and The Zombie Romances (I may have made this series up) their place in feminism, and I want to encourage us to critically engage with these texts at the same time.

I asked my friend Rachel if she had any thoughts about feminism and YA romance novels and she immediately pointed out that romance is the one genre that really truly celebrates women as both subject and in practice, since the vast majority of both readers and writers of romance novels are women, and that often YA romance novels are the only places where teenage girls can get frank discussions of sex, gender, and sexuality. She also points out that while it may be slow going, more queer and diverse romance is starting to pop up in YA. My own favorite author in that category is Malinda Lo, who has written lesbian fairy tale romances with nonwhite heroes as well as science fiction.

This column started out as a place where I was going to list the good and the bad of feminist romance novels, where I was going to pick your brain about what makes a romance novel feminist or not. But then I realized I was starting to sound like just another angry, authoritative voice telling teenage girls what they can and cannot like. Sure, there are YA romances that are more feminist and more well-written than others. I can suggest YA novels that feature both romance and feminist themes, if you want. My friend Rachel likes Graceling, Divergent, and theFifth Wave, and for those who don’t love fantasy or dsystopian or science fiction romance, she suggests authors like Sarah Dessen and Gail Carson Levine.

But there are also the Twilights of the genre that may not necessarily be giving girls the patriarchy-destroying narratives we want, but they are giving them a place where it is safe to have girly emotions, safe to want to kiss a boy like Edward or even a girl like Bella. Teenage girls don’t need a lecture; they need every ounce of support we can give them in a world that tells them their emotions are stupid and their thoughts don’t matter. If you’re a teenage girl reading this, I want you to know that I support your right to read Twilight just as much as I support your right to read The Hunger Games, and I hope the rest of the world understands why.

[touchthefarthestmoon]

It has been argued that rape constituted a form of social control in so far as it represented a means of keeping women ‘in their place’, a way of constraining their behaviour. … It is not rape itself which constitutes a form of social control but the internationalisation by women, through continual socialisation, of the possibility of rape. This implicit threat of rape is conveyed in terms of certain prescriptions which are placed upon the behaviour of girls and women, and through common-sense understandings that ‘naturalise’ gender appropriate forms of behaviour. Both the implicit threat of rape, couched in terms of prevalent social stereotypes, and the conventionally accepted ways to avoid such an experience, being in some places rather than others, doing some things but not others, adopting only specific attitudes, etc., are conveyed, and continually reinforced along with a whole range of cultural values concerning female (and male) sexuality. ... The cumulative effect of press reports of rape is to remind women of their vulnerability, to create an atmosphere of fear and to suggest, as a solution, that women should withdraw to the traditional shelter of the domestic sphere and the protection of their men. … In other words, women are to limit their freedom in order to avoid rape. The irony of this kind of advice and the related representation of rape in the media is that they are based on a false premise. Namely that rape is an isolated, socially unstructured phenomenon which affects specific categories of women in special social circumstances. The reality is significantly different, however, for rape may take place within the domestic sphere, among family and friends, as much as amongst strangers. Hence rape becomes a form of social control in a dual sense, first, inasmuch as it is a form of physical coercion and violence, and second, in so far as the fear or threat of rape, as communicated by the media, in literature, on film, and in the press, serves to socialise women into tacitly constraining and limiting their own forms of behaviour and social activity.

Women, Sexuality and Social Control: Accounting for Rape: Reality and myth in press reporting - Carol Smart and Barry Smart

[touchthefarthestmoon]

These two simultaneous developments – the home becoming private and the land becoming public – were not inconsistent. Increasingly the home was being separated from the land on which it stood and from productive activity. The factory system destroyed family industry, and the home lost its character as the centre of work and became instead a place of rest and reproduction. The home was domesticated, as was the role of women in it. Women’s work in the home became an end in itself, extolled for its own sake and incorporated by men into the myth of femininity. The domestication of the home drastically reduced women’s public influence, and converted relatively independent wives, whose contribution to production had given them a strong position within the family, into totally dependent housewives.

Women, Sexuality and Social Control: The Myth of Male Protectiveness and the Legal Subordination of Women - Albie Sachs; edited by Carol Smart and Barry Smart

[touchthefarthestmoon]

Male ideology denied the existence of inequality in the treatment by men of women, and rationalised legal disabilities imposed on women in terms of each sex having dominion in its separate sphere. In the context of actual and legal domination, however, the theory of complementarity was merely a gracious way of explaining female subjugation. This rationalisation was not something invented by upper-class Victorian males. There was any amount of literature on which the judges and others could draw to testify to the subordination of women through the ages. The specific contribution they made was to place a halo over domesticity, granting to it a special virtue, and pushing it to an extreme.

Women, Sexuality and Social Control: The Myth of Male Protectiveness and the Legal Subordination of Women - Albie Sachs; edited by Carol Smart and Barry Smart

[touchthefarthestmoon]

The indifference of the legal system to women’s need for protection is partly a result of scepticism regarding the ‘worthiness’ of the victims. However, women themselves will also often prefer to not press charges against their husbands and bring ‘internal’ conflicts to court. This attitude should be viewed as a reflection of both the victim’s bondage to the economic basis of her life-support and of social indoctrination which transforms the beatings into a personal failure. Marital violence is thus seen by women as shameful – or as their own failure – all of which makes it embarrassing and degrading to seek help. ... Family members’ disapproval of turning to external methods of social control, welfare agencies’ non-response and battered women’s lack of perception of themselves as a collectively abused group has veiled the magnitude of domestic violence. Moreover, men in power define and enforce definitions, therefore, in line with their interests, wife-battering has not been regarded as a social problem. … The privatisation of a social problem such as wife-abuse is not a single isolated phenomenon in the private sector. Rather women’s problems are generally viewed as personal difficulties appropriately solved through private reactions. … Both persons involved and outsiders neglect the social aspect of the crisis and therefore a public issue is defined as only a personal concern.

Women, Sexuality and Social Control: The Coercion of Privacy - Tove Stang Dahl and Annika Sachs; edited by Carol Smart and Barry Smart

[touchthefarthestmoon]

The distinction between the ‘private’ and the ‘public’ sector has a material base and this division influences all areas of ordinary life. Through their bonds to the institution of the family, women are primarily relegated to the private sector; on the other hand, men spend much of their life in paid production, working outside the home a woman with a family is frequently considered to be engaged in a temporary and non-essential activity, an activity that is secondary to her domestic labour. In general, any one of the increasing number of women entering the workforce (by choice or material necessity) is regarded as belonging to the reserve labour pool. She carries a marginal labour status as reflected in insecure employment contracts and low wages. But specifically the notion prevails that the married woman’s paid employment is of a supplementary nature and she usually continues to carry the home responsibilities. With or without such double work women’s participation in any activities of the public section is low. They do not ‘belong’ there and in regard to the labour market women are considered transient. In turn, domestic work and wage labour have distinctly different degrees of visibility. By being in the private sector women’s social contributions, needs, and problems are relatively invisible. House-keeping is not considered the basis for estimating the level of national production and economy theories take little account of the kinds of labour that women provide in society. Moreover, domestic work is only to a minimum degree regulated by law and, in fact, is often forgotten in public policies. We will return to these two points after considering an exception to the lack of official attention paid to home production. This exception is the ‘Kinder-Küche’ role which receives hegemonic glorification. But this ideological visibility has not advanced women’s emancipation, rather the real socio-economic position of women has been veiled and exempted from public scrutiny. The general privacy of the domestic household is a form of cover-up making for the preservation of the ‘status quo’, for what is invisible is extremely difficult to change.”

Women, Sexuality and Social Control: The Coercion of Privacy - Tove Stang Dahl and Annika Sachs; edited by Carol Smart and Barry Smart

[touchthefarthestmoon]

The distinction between work and home, the public and the private, is grounded in the structure of the capitalist society. The development of the capitalist mode of production required the socialisation of the basic processes of commodity production, the development of large-scale factory production and work outside the home. … The consequence for women of this separation is that their work, domestic labour, has been consistently depreciated within the community, the economy and the political system. The traditional tasks of housework and child-rearing have not been considered in relation to production because they do not represent a source of surplus value. The division between home and work has had a further consequence for women in that it has given rise to the belief in a ‘woman’s place’ being in the home rather than in the world of work and production; this, despite the fact that in reality many women are engaged in both housework (and the reproduction of labour power) and wage labour. The ideology of women’s place being in the home has served to perpetuate the existing sexual division of labour and to effectively limit the forms of women’s participation in the public domain (e.g., part-time, short-term or ‘temporary’ employment), making withdrawal into, and a predominant preoccupation with, or concern for, the home and family seem natural for women.

Women, Sexuality and Social Control: An Introduction - Carol Smart and Barry Smart

[touchthefarthestmoon]

The limited effectiveness of recent legislation serves to reveal the extent to which the primary sources of women’s oppression are outside, or even beyond, judicial influence, that is to say rest within, or arise from, prevailing material conditions, cultural values, customs and social practices, such as the differential socialisation of male and female children within the family, schooling, forms of speech and language, media propagated stereotypes and numerous other seemingly innocuous social processes. We do not deny the relative importance of legislation, but wish to distance ourselves from those who perceive the solution to women’s oppression to lie in piecemeal legislative reforms rather than in fundamental social and economic change. However, before one can begin to talk about transcending or eliminating the forms of oppression and social control to which women are subject, an understanding of the several dimensions of social division between men and women is necessary. It is to particular aspects of the latter, to analyses of specific forms of social control to which women are subject, that the papers in this volume are directed. The social control of women assumes many forms, it may be internal or external, implicit or explicit, private or public, ideological or repressive. Now although it may no longer be appropriate to talk of ‘the problem that has no name’ when referring to the discontents of women, the Women’s Movement having provided a voice and a language with which women may articulate their manifest grievances, there remains the problem of showing the existence of specific covert forms of oppression and control, and of revealing that their location lies in the public sphere rather than in the individual psychologies of individual women. The forms of social control to which women are subject vary from primary socialisation within the family, secondary socialisation (by peer groups, the education system, the media, etc.), which reinforces the ways of acting, thinking and feeling ‘characteristic’ of the female role, femininity, and womanhood, to the more formal processes of institutional intervention through legislation by the State, the implementation of the law, the penal system and the criminal process. It is within the public and ‘visible’ areas of social control that women have been most active in fighting for greater equality. Undoubtedly, however, the more difficult forms of social control to address, especially with the eclipse of more manifest forms of sexual discrimination, are those that arise implicitly through socialisation.

Women, Sexuality and Social Control: An Introduction - Carol Smart and Barry Smart

[touchthefarthestmoon]

Of course I think all people, female and male, child and adult, must be alert and on guard against the warning signs of criminal violence and should take care in potentially hazardous situations, such as a dark, unfamiliar street at night, or an unexpected knock on the door, but to impose a special burden of caution on women is no solution at all. There can be no private solutions to the problem of rape. A woman who follows this sort of special cautionary advice to the letter and thinks she is acting in society’s interest – or even in her own personal interest – is deluding herself rather sadly. While the risk to one potential victim might be slightly diminished…, not only does the number of potential rapists on the loose remain constant, but the ultimate effect of rape upon the woman’s mental and emotional health has been accomplished even without the act. For to accept a special burden of self-protection is to reinforce the concept that women must live and move about in fear and can never expect to achieve the personal freedom, independence and self-assurance of men. That’s what rape is all about, isn’t it? And a possible deep-down reason why even the best of our concerned, well-meaning men run to stereotypic warnings when they seek to grapple with the problem of rape deterrence is that they prefer to see rape as a woman’s problem, rather than as a societal problem resulting from a distorted masculine philosophy of aggression. For when men raise the spectre of the unknown rapist, they refuse to take the psychologic responsibility for the nature of his act.

Against Our Will: Women Fight Back - Susan Brownmiller

[touchthefarthestmoon]

The wonder at all this female activity, decentralised grassroots organisations and programs that sprung up independently… is that none of it had been predicted, encouraged, or faintly suggested by men anywhere in their stern rules of caution, their friendly advice, their fatherly solicitude in more than five thousand years of written history. That women should organize to combat rape was a women’s movement invention. Men are not unmindful of the rape problem. To the contrary, their paternalistic codes reserved the harshest penalties for a violation of their property. But given an approach to rape that saw the crime as an illegal encroachment by an unlicensed intruder, a stranger come into their midst, the advice they gave (and still try to give) was all one piece: a set of rules and regulations designed to keep their property penned in, much as a sheepherder might try to keep his flock protected from an outlaw rustler by taking precautions against their straying too far from the fold. By seeing the rapist always as a stranger, never as one of their own, and by viewing the female as a careless, dumb creature with an unfortunate tendency to stray, they exhorted, admonished and warned the female to hide herself from male eyes as much as possible. In short, they told her not to claim the privileges they reserved for themselves. Such advice – well intentioned, solicitous and genuinely concerned – succeeded only in further aggravating the problem, for the message they gave was to live a life of fear, and to it they appended the dire warning that the woman who did not follow the rules must be held responsible for their violation.

Against Our Will: Women Fight Back - Susan Brownmiller

[touchthefarthestmoon]

The theory of aggressive male domination over women as a cultural right is so deeply embedded in our cultural value system that all recent attempts to expose it… have barely scratched the surface. As I see it, the problem is not that polarized role playing (man as doer; women as bystander) and exaggerated portrayals of the female body as passive sex object are simply ‘demeaning’ to women’s dignity and self-conception, or that such portrayals fail to provide positive role models for young girls, but that cultural sexism is a conscious form of female degradation designed to boost the male ego by offering ‘proof’ of his native superiority (and of female inferiority) everywhere he looks.

Against Our Will: Women Fight Back - Susan Brownmiller

[touchthefarthestmoon]

these wings are made to fly

Hey everybody! Sorry for how quiet things have gotten around here lately. I've been away, but I didn't forget you - I've got all sorts of quotes and links I've been collecting to post. I just wanted to give you all an update, and thank everyone who has continued to share the posts and follow the blog! (I'm always amazed when I continue to see new notes and follows when I haven't posted in a while.)

To give you an update on my life - I completed my pass degree majoring in Sociology and Political Economy in November, and have accepted an offer to do Honours in Sociology this year, which I'm super excited about. I'm preparing by reading about sociological theory and methods, as well as starting to research the topic I want to do - which is giving me lots of great material for the blog too! =)

Hope you're all doing well, looking forward to continuing to share the Sociology love with you! xx

[touchthefarthestmoon]

Why Tumblr fosters deep and enduring forms of intimacy online

Recent media reports have depicted Tumblr as no more than a ‘dark space’ in which young people can access dangerous information on body image or self-harm. However, a delicate balance between risk and opportunity is required by users, with recent research showing that the relationship between risk, harm and safety is complex.

Risk does not equate to harm, and users require some exposure to risk in order to develop the digital literacies required to engage online safely. To leverage the potential benefits of social media for vulnerable young people’s wellbeing, we now need a more finely grained understanding of how young people are engaging online, and what meanings they attach to their online practices, particularly around intimacy and community.

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Preliminary research by one of the authors (Hart) has suggested that sociality and intimacy are being practised in novel ways by young people on Tumblr. Young people on Tumblr are engaged in experiencing deep and enduring forms of intimacy online, in spaces that are seen as ‘safe’ from the potential judgement of their ‘real life’ friends or family.

Sites like Tumblr fulfil a crucial role in helping young people find and receive the peer connections they need at this age. New forms of intimacy are emerging online, and our established conceptions of intimacy need to transform in order to take account of these shifts. While sexual relationships are a common focus in the empirical literature, this research shows that there are vast numbers of supportive communities that welcome people with marginalised or alternative identities on Tumblr, giving isolated or at-risk young people a sense of belonging through the opportunity to network and share their experiences with others like themselves.

[touchthefarthestmoon]

Sociological theory does not tell us what parties to vote for, what religion to profess - if any - or what moral values are right. But it does enable us to make systematic and informed judgements about what politics will promote the values we hold dear and which will be likely to undermine them. Among its main contributions is assistance in being systematic in assessing social phenomena and proposals for social change. It also helps us to be systematic in working out our own ideas, to see when there are tensions between different values we hold. In many cases, sociological theory does not settle arguments, but helps us to see more clearly what is at stake in them.

Classical Sociological Theory: Introduction - Craig Calhoun, Joseph Gerteis, James Moody, Steven Pfaff, and Indermohan Virk