#I was raised in a strict religious home that pushed gender roles so as an AFAB person I learned to cook things from scratch for my family

[drunkexmormonsexplain-blog]

My first salty exmo post

Alright so I’m at the wedding of one of my Mormon friends (sitting outside with the kids because as a non-mormon I’m not allowed to actually go to the ceremony) and I have some Thoughts. Over the past couple of days I’ve hung out with my newly married or about to be married Mormon friends a lot more than I usually do, and I am so sick of the hetero, getting married young, Christian bullshit that I’m seeing in their lives. Of course this is particularly directed at Mormonism but I think it can also apply in many conservative Christian religions.

For those who don’t know, Mormons are not allowed have sex or live with their significant other until they get married. Mormonism also encourages getting married as soon as possible and having children right away no matter what. And on top of that it adheres to strict gender roles in every aspect of life, including marriage. From a young age, girls are taught that being a wife and a mother, taking care of a house, and raising children are the most important things a woman can do. Women are generally encouraged to pursue career paths that they can work at part time or not at all, as opposed to choosing more successful or desirable opportunities. Men on the other hand are equally pressured to be single income providers for their households, and are generally not taught many at home duties like cooking and cleaning. Men are the “heads” of household and usually represent their entire family at church functions. Only men can become any sort of leader in the church.

Before getting married today, my friend expressed to me that she wasn’t fully processing the fact that she was going to be married. She said that she was trying to put the thought of her actual wedding out of her mind and that probably once she got to the temple (where the wedding was happening) was when she’d “have her breakdown”. A little concerned, I asked her why - because she would be so excited and relieved that all the planning was over? She said no, that’s when she’d break down and wonder what on earth she was doing.

Of course hearing that my first response would have been “Maybe that’s a sign you’re not ready to get married.” But throughout the weekend, as my friend expressed feelings of anxiety and nervousness way more often than feelings of joy and excitement, the other recently married Mormon women around her would respond with “Oh that’s totally normal!”

What?

Ok - I am an unmarried atheist who lives with her girlfriend, so I will admit that my lifestyle is very far removed from a typical young married Mormon. But telling women that feeling overwhelmingly nervous and anxious instead of certain and excited is normal, right before they make one of the hugest commitments of their life? That seems like a recipe for disaster.

But think about it - of course they’re nervous. They’ve never lived with the person they’re about to get married to. They have no idea what their husbands will be like day to day. And following the trend of most Mormon boys, it’s likely that they won’t be as clean, organized, or self reliant as the women they marry. The young married Mormon women I know are constantly bemoaning the fact that their husbands never think to clean the house or run simple errands without their prompting. It’s the type of imbalance that gets laughed off in a lot of heterosexual relationships - “I’m going away for the weekend, better leave some freezer meals for my husband so he doesn’t starve!” Because of course the husband would be totally lost having to do simple house duties while the wife is away. The idea of an equal, balanced relationship seemed to be totally absurd to my Mormon friends. Picking up after and managing your man child husband is totally normal!

On top of that, all Mormon women know that they’re expected to have sex on their wedding night - something that most of them have no experience with. Since the church taboos even mentioning or talking about sex, and most Mormon children are pulled out of sex ed, these Mormon women probably don’t even know what sex really is, let alone how to make it enjoyable. They’ve likely heard myths that the first time will hurt, that it won’t be as good for them as it is for men, and that it’s their duty to their husbands. How is that a recipe for having a healthy sexual relationship with the man they are pledging their entire life to? Communication is essential to having a good sex life, and growing up in a religion that forbids even thinking about sex means developing that communication is going to take time that I’m sure most couples don’t take on their wedding night.

It makes me so angry to see Mormon women throwing their lives, careers, and potential happiness away because they’ve been indoctrinated since childhood that their only worth comes from being a wife and a mother. And what makes me extra angry is that the Mormon church normalizes this type of relationship! “Oh some days you won’t be able to stand your husband, push through it!” “Isn’t it hilarious when you go away for the weekend and your husband hasn’t bothered to clean the house?” Even though this may be common in a lot of religious people’s relationships, it shouldn’t have to be “normal”!

Maybe I’m some sort of radical new age bisexual feminist who believes that relationships can be equal, that you should marry your best friend, and that you should be happy on your wedding day, but I personally don’t want to get married unless that’s the case. And I know that a lot of Mormon relationships and relationships like them do work out, but I’m sure it’s easier to make the relationship work when it’s based on really knowing what you’re getting into before it happens. I just hope that religious young women know that they have that choice.

-North

[poohbearnova-blog]

Final Report

Chris Layne

COMM 300 International Sojourning

Host Country Report

Let the following questions guide you as you prepare your report.

What is the name of your host country? Spain

In what region is it located? Spain is on the Continent of Europe.

Which countries border it?

France and Andorra to the North, Portugal to the West, Morocco and Gibraltar to the South

Which countries are close to it culturally? Portugal

What is the capital and most important cities? Madrid is the Capital. Barcelona, Seville, Pamplona and Valencia, which is a historical port city.

What are the 10 most important historical moments for your country?

1339 Treaty of Madrid signed

1493 colonization of the Americas begins

1554 English Queen Mary 1st of England marries Prince Phillip of Spain

1761 Seven Years war between Spain and Britain

1778 Spain supported US in Revolutionary war with UK

1936-1939 Spanish Civil war

1976 Spanish transition to Democracy

1992 Summer Olympics held in Barcelona            

2004 Madrid train bombings

2010 Spain wins soccer FIFA World Cup

   What languages are spoken there?

Spanish or Castillan(only official status) 99% . Aranese, co-official in Catalonia. It is spoken mainly in the Pyrenean comarca of the Aran Valley (Val d'Aran), in north-western Catalonia. It is a variety of Gascon, which in turn is a variety of the Occitan language.

Basque, co-official in the Basque Country and northern Navarre (see Basque-speaking zone). Basque is the only non-Romance language (as well as non-Indo-European) with an official status in mainland Spain.

Catalan, co-official in Catalonia and in the Balearic Islands (sometimes referred to as Balearic). It is recognised—but not official—in Aragon in the area of La Franja.

Valencian (variety of Catalan), co-official in the Valencian Community. Not all areas of the Valencian Community, however, are historically Valencian-speaking, particularly the western side. It is also spoken without official recognition in the municipality of Carche, Murcia.

Galician, co-official in Galicia and recognised, but not official, in the adjacent western parts of the Principality of Asturias (as Galician-Asturian) and Castile and León.

 How would you describe the political system? How recent or ancient is that system?

Spain's current government is a parliamentary constitutional monarchy that is based on the Spanish Constitution, which was approved in 1978 and establishes a government with three branches: Executive, legislative, and judicial. The head of state is King Felipe VI, a hereditary monarch. But the actual leader of the government is the president, or prime minister, who is the head of the executive branch of government.

He is nominated by the king but must be approved by the legislative branch of government.

 What are the dominant religions in your country? In what proportion?

Catholic Christianity is the largest religion in Spain, but practical secularization is strong. About 3% of Spaniards consider religion as one of their three most important values, even lower than the 5% European average.  The Spanish Constitution of 1978 abolished Catholicism as the official state religion, while recognizing the role it plays in Spanish society. As a result, there is no official religion and religious freedom is protected.

According to the Spanish Center for Sociological Research, 67.5% of Spaniards self-identify as Catholic Christians, 2.9% as followers of other faiths (including Islam, Protestant Christianity, Buddhism etc.), and 26.8% identify as atheists or non-believers as of September 2018.  Most Spaniards do not participate regularly in religious worship. This same study shows that of the Spaniards who identify themselves as religious, 61.0% barely ever attend mass, 16.0% attend mass a few times a year, 7.0% few times per month, 13.3% almost every Sunday, and 1.9% multiple times per week

What is the relationship between religion and politics?

The Catholic Church has a radio network (Cadena COPE) and a TV channel (13tv). Though not belonging to the church, right wing papers like ABC and La Razón seem to be very influenced by its doctrines. The church also has all the pulpits in each of the churches of this country; and some of its members have been so politically blunt as to ask its parishioners to vote for a certain political party: see here and here. Not surprisingly, because this party has strong ties to the Catholic Church: see here for one example.

So I would say that religion does influence Spanish politics, even if only through the opinions pushed from these media outlets.

What social classes exist in your country? Spain has a high-class middle-class and lower-class much like we do. The upper 20% of the higher class has 7 times the wealth of the lower 20%. They have differed throughout the country’s history. How is social class defined? Social class in Spain is mainly defined by wealth, much like the rest of the modern societies. How open or closed is the class system? Just like most places, there is resistance from the upper class to rub elbows with the lower class. On the other hand, it is pretty open for the middle classes to dip into the lower classes. The economy is partly to blame,

In general, what are the gender roles in your country? Being that the Spanish Language is primarily gender based, it is not a surprise that the culture is described as biased. Gender roles in Spain have changed drastically within a short period of time. From the 1930's to the 1970's, Spain had strict rules concerning women in the work force and even marriage. Wives were prohibited from working, owning property, or traveling without their husband's permission. Women were required to participate in a 6-month long class to prepare to be mothers. All marriages in Spain had to be sanctioned by the Catholic Church, and annulment is the only option out of a marriage (Spain). I think that the gender roles in these years were strict and seemed just a bit unwarranted. Forcing all women to attend a class to be mothers is not only time consuming, but also a bit excessive. If a woman decides to have a baby, then they are well aware of the changes that need to be made when preparing for it.

The creation of the constitution in 1978 and the civil code of 1981 gave women more rights. Although they were then allowed to work, they were still expected to be housewives and full-time mothers as well. This has led to more marriages later in life so that women are able to have a career as well as a family (Spain). It would be extremely difficult to balance house work as well as a full time job. Although this is a step forward in women's rights, it doesn't seem to be an effective approach. They basically still have to choose between work and a family. This explains why so many young adults are pushing off marriage to be able to pursue a career.

There has also been a shift in the perceptions of gratification. These days it is more common for young people to make decisions based on what they want now, instead of looking ahead to what might be better for their future (Spain). There has been an increase in unemployment, and without government aid, it is necessary for women to work as well as their husbands. With the lack of child care services, it is difficult for both parents to work, especially the mothers, since it is seen as their responsibility. Since many women are choosing to work instead of staying home the fertility rate has fallen significantly (Spanish Families).

Since women now have to choose between a career and motherhood, children are now seen as a hardship or burden. This can affect the views of children, from positive to more negative (Spanish Families). This is sad and also concerning. Women don't deserve to be backed into a corner and forced to think of child rearing as a burden. They should be able to have a career without having to give up on the prospects of having a family as well

How rigid are those roles?

Today more equality in the younger generations with household chores work, raising children and other things. Fathers are also granted more paternity leave than before, and mothers of newborn could take up to three months of maternity leave free of obligations to work, if they so desired  

What are the most important newspapers,

The sport focused national daily newspaper, Marca, had the greatest readership with around 1.7 million readers. Marca is published in tabloid format and owned by Spanish publishing group Unidad Editorial, which is part of Italian multimedia publishing conglomerate RCS MediaGroup. Madrid-based daily newspaper El País and Diario AS, another sport-based paper, came second and third in the ranking of the most read Spanish newspapers.

television stations, Monthly viewing shares in August 2018 (Top 10 individual channels):[3]

Position

Channel

Group

Share of total viewing (%)

1

Antena 3

Atresmedia  Televisión

12.1%

2

Telecinco

Mediaset  España Comunicación

11,9%

3

La 1

Televisión Española

10.0%

4

La Sexta

Atresmedia  Televisión

6.1%

5

Cuatro

Mediaset España  Comunicación

5.7%

6

FDF

Mediaset España  Comunicación

3.1%

7

La 2

Televisión Española

2.9%

8

Neox

Atresmedia  Televisión

2.6%

9

Nova

Atresmedia  Televisión

2.5%

10

Divinity

Mediaset España  Comunicación

2.2%

 radio stations?

The following groups operate commercial radio networks broadcasting across Spain:

Prisa Radio[edit]

Cadena SER - Generalist radio station featuring mostly news, talk and sports.

Los 40 - Contemporary hit radio station.

Cadena Dial - Spanish adult-contemporary radio station.

Los 40 Classic - Oldies music station dedicated to the hits from mostly the 80's and 90's.

Máxima FM - Electronic dance music station dedicated to a wide variety of its sub-genres.

Radiolé - Music station dedicated to copla, rumba, flamenco and sevillanas.

Radio Popular[edit]

Cadena COPE - Generalist radio station featuring mostly news, talk and sports with a religious appeal.

Cadena 100 - Adult-contemporary radio station. Comparable to BBC Radio 2.

MegaStar FM - Youth-focused hybrid pop/dance music station that includes limited recurrent rotation. Comparable to Radio Disney.

Rock FM - Classic rock music station.

Atresmedia Radio[edit]

Onda Cero - Generalist radio station featuring news, talk and sports.

Europa FM - Contemporary hit radio station dedicated to pop-rock hits since the 2000's.

Melodía FM - Oldies music station dedicated to the hits from the 70's, 80's and 90's.

Kiss Media[edit]

Kiss FM - Oldies music station dedicated to the hits mostly from the 80's and 90's, sometimes from the 70's and 2000's, and sporadically from today.

Hit FM - Youth-focused mostly-current contemporary hit radio station.

Unidad Editorial[edit]

Radio Marca - Sports radio station. Comparable to ESPN Deportes Radio.

Libertad Digital[edit]

esRadio

Intereconomía Corporación[edit]

Radio Inter

Radio Intereconomía

 Is there a viable film industry? The art of motion-picture making within the Kingdom of Spain or by Spanish filmmakers abroad is collectively known as Spanish Cinema.

In recent years, Spanish cinema has achieved high marks of recognition. In the long history of Spanish cinema, the great filmmaker Luis Buñuel was the first to achieve universal recognition, followed by Pedro Almodóvar in the 1980s. Spanish cinema has also seen international success over the years with films by directors like Segundo de Chomón, Florián Rey, Luis García Berlanga, Juan Antonio Bardem, Carlos Saura, Julio Médem and Alejandro Amenábar. Woody Allen, upon receiving the prestigious Prince of Asturias Award in 2002 in Oviedo remarked: "when I left New York, the most exciting film in the city at the time was Spanish, Pedro Almodóvar's one. I hope that Europeans will continue to lead the way in film making because at the moment not much is coming from the United States."

Non-directors, like the cinematographer Néstor Almendros, the art director Gil Parrondo, the screenwriter Rafael Azcona, the actresses Maribel Verdú and, especially, Penélope Cruz and the actors Fernando Rey, Francisco Rabal, Antonio Banderas, Javier Bardem and Fernando Fernán Gómez, have obtained significant recognition outside Spain.

Only a small portion of box office sales in Spain are generated by domestic films. The Spanish government has therefore implemented measures aimed at supporting local film production and movie theaters, which include the assurance of funding from the main national television stations. The trend is being reversed with productions such as the €30 million film Alatriste (starring Viggo Mortensen), the Academy Award-winning Spanish film Pan's Labyrinth (starring Maribel Verdú), Volver (starring Penélope Cruz and Carmen Maura), and Los Borgia (starring Paz Vega), all of them sold-out blockbusters in Spain.

Another aspect of Spanish cinema mostly unknown to the general public is the appearance of English-language Spanish films such as Agora (directed by Alejandro Amenábar and starring Rachel Weisz), Ché (directed by Steven Soderbergh and starring Benicio del Toro), The Machinist (starring Christian Bale), The Others (starring Nicole Kidman), Miloš Forman’s Goya's Ghosts (starring Javier Bardem and Natalie Portman), and The Impossible (starring Ewan McGregor and Naomi Watts). All of these films were produced by Spanish firms.

What is the dominant cuisine of your country?

Spain has a diverse culinary menu, depending on what part of the country we are in. Although the typical dishes of Castilla -La Mancha are heavy stews and soups, like the cocido madrileno, pisto manchego is one of the most well-known regional dishes, popular all over Spain and with many variations. Of Arab origin, the traditional pisto is made simply with red and green peppers, tomatoes and squash, although it is common to add onion, ham or eggs. Sopa de Ajo or garlic soup is another Manchego dish that is now popular everywhere in Spain and is made of garlic, broth, oil, paprika and dry bread.

What is the relationship between food and the broader culture?

The midday meal or la comida, as it is called in Spain, is the largest meal of the day. It is definitely a big meal and typically includes multiple courses and wine. Since Spanish lunches are always large, and courses come one at a time, it is important to pace yourself. Like Italians, Spaniards believe in taking their time and enjoying their meals. That is why you can expect lunch to last an hour and a half or longer. Traditionally, Spaniards have a two- to three-hour break from work or school in order to enjoy lunch. They also take a short nap or siesta. Essentially, the entire country closes up shop from about 1:30 to 4:30 p.m. The siesta is a tradition that goes back centuries from the days when most people worked in agriculture and air conditioning did not exist. It is easy to understand why folks needed fuel from a large meal as well as a rest from the hot Spanish sun before returning to work. Everyone in Spain enjoyed this afternoon break from school kids to shop workers and government officials. Most Spaniards still enjoy a break and large meal, but life in Spain is changing. In larger cities like Madrid and Barcelona, many people spend over an hour commuting to and from work, making it impossible to go home for a meal and siesta. Because of this, Spanish government employees in Madrid now work a standard eight-hour day with a one-hour lunch break. Many large supermarket and retail chains in large cities do not close for lunch anymore, either. Most small shops still close to enjoy their meal and a break before re-opening in the late afternoon.

 How do friends greet each other in your country?

Relatives and Friends - In general, friends and relatives greet each other with a kiss or a hug. When a male greets a female or a female greets another female here is what happens. They will gently touch both arms and move together until they are about six inches apart. Then they cock their heads, put their cheeks together, and make a light kissing sound.

How do you greet strangers?

Personal pride and individualism are highly valued, as are character and breeding. Modesty is valued over assertiveness. Flaunting superiority, intelligence and ability is not appreciated. People strive to project affluence and social position. Personal appearance, image and human relationships are very important. Shake hands with everyone present--men, women and children--at a business or social meeting. Shake hands again when leaving.

Men may embrace each other when meeting (friends and family only).

Women may kiss each other on the cheek and embrace.

What is the currency used in your country? The Euro

How new or traditional is that currency?

The Euro is new as of 2002. The peseta was introduced in 1868, at a time when Spain was considering joining the Latin Monetary Union (LMU). It replaced the old Spanish peso currency. Spain eventually decided not to formally join the LMU, although it did achieve alignment with the bloc. The Spanish Law of June 26, 1864 decreed that in preparation for joining the Latin Monetary Union the peseta became a subdivision of the peso. The peseta replaced the escudo. The political turbulence of the early twentieth century (especially during the years after the World War I) caused the monetary union to break up, although it was not until 1927 that it officially ended. In 1959, Spain became part of the Bretton Woods System pesetas. In 1967, the peseta followed the devaluation of the British pound. The peseta was replaced by the euro in 2002, following the establishment of the euro in 1999.

    Try to discover where to place the culture you plan to visit (in general) on the following dimensions:

High – Low Context Communication

Most of my day to day interactions plan to be in a high context communication. I do speak Spanish so hopefully it is in good enough standing that I don’t have to draw a picture, because I suck at drawing…. lol but I can write Spanish as well, so it isn’t out of the question for either.

Synchronic or     Synchronistic Time Orientation

I want to believe that  most of the country is pretty liberal in the ways time is looked upon, For instance it can be “normal” to be 30 minutes late to an event, with no one batting an eye. My military training always gets me somewhere 15 minutes early or I am late. So I am sure I will probably be waiting alot in Spain, but that’s ok; I will in my dream country!

Affective     Communication or Neutral Communication

I am pretty easy going and outgoing, hopefully that will take a long way when trying to communicate. I do understand that not everyone is like me and there have been time where my approach has been rejected and that’s ok too. I realize I am a little aggressive sometimes, but not in a mean way, I just don’t have many filters or walls to hind behind.,

What kinds of nonverbal communication is important for you to consider?

All of the ways of communication listed are important. Spanish people are known for close personal space invasion when talking, so hopefully I will conform somehow to not let that be an issue for me, I think any type of communication is important in a foreign place. I can only imagine being lost and feeling completely isolated because of not being able to find someone to speak your native language!

[trendingnewsb]

The crisis in modern masculinity

Around the world, luridly retro ideas of what it means to be a man have caused a rush of testosterone from Bollywood bodybuilding to nuclear brinkmanship

On the evening of 30 January 1948, five months after the independence and partition of India, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was walking to a prayer meeting at his temporary home in New Delhi when he was shot three times, at point-blank range. He collapsed and died instantly. His assassin, originally feared to be Muslim, turned out to be Nathuram Godse, a Hindu Brahmin from western India. Godse, who made no attempt to escape, said in court that he felt compelled to kill Gandhi since the leader with his womanly politics was emasculating the Hindu nation in particular, with his generosity to Muslims. Godse is a hero today in an India utterly transformed by Hindu chauvinists an India in which Mein Kampf is a bestseller, a political movement inspired by European fascists dominates politics and culture, and Narendra Modi, a Hindu supremacist accused of mass murder, is prime minister. For all his talk of Hindu genius, Godse flagrantly plagiarised the fictions of European ethnic-racial chauvinists and imperialists. For the first years of his life he was raised as a girl, with a nose ring, and later tried to gain a hard-edged masculine identity through Hindu supremacism. Yet for many struggling young Indians today Godse represents, along with Adolf Hitler, a triumphantly realised individual and national manhood.

The moral prestige of Gandhis murderer is only one sign among many of what seems to be a global crisis of masculinity. Luridly retro ideas of what it means to be a strong man have gone mainstream even in so-called advanced nations. In January Jordan B Peterson, a Canadian self-help writer who laments that the west has lost faith in masculinity and denounces the murderous equity doctrine espoused by women, was hailed in the New York Times as the most influential public intellectual in the western world right now.

The west has lost faith in masculinity self-help writer Jordan Peterson. Photograph: Carlos Osorio/Toronto Star via Getty Images

This is, hopefully, an exaggeration. It is arguable, however, that a frenetic pursuit of masculinity has characterised public life in the west since 9/11; and it presaged the serial-groping president who boasts of his big penis and nuclear button. From the ashes of September 11, the Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan exulted a few weeks after the attack, arise the manly virtues. Noonan, who today admires Petersons tough talk, hailed the re-emergence of masculine men, men who push things and pull things, such as George W Bush, who she half expected to tear open his shirt and reveal the big S on his chest. Such gush, commonplace at the time, helped Bush, who had initially gone missing in action on 11 September, reinvent himself as a dashing commander-in-chief (and grow cocky enough to dress up as a fighter pilot and compliment Tony Blairs cojones).

Amid this rush of testosterone in the Anglo-American establishment, many deskbound journalists fancied themselves as unflinching warriors. We will, David Brooks, another of Petersons fans, vowed, destroy innocent villages by accident, shrug our shoulders and continue fighting.

As manly virtues arose, attacks on women, and feminists in particular, in the west became nearly as fierce as the wars waged abroad to rescue Muslim damsels in distress. In Manliness (2006) Harvey Mansfield, a political philosopher at Harvard, denounced working women for undermining the protective role of men. The historian Niall Ferguson, a self-declared neo-imperialist, bemoaned that girls no longer play with dolls and that feminists have forced Europe into demographic decline. More revealingly, the few women publicly critical of the bellicosity, such as Katha Pollitt, Susan Sontag and Arundhati Roy, were mounted on poles for public whipping and flogged, Barbara Kingsolver wrote, with words like bitch and airhead and moron and silly. At the same time, Vanity Fairs photo essay on the Bush administration at war commended the president for his masculine sangfroid and hailed his deputy, Dick Cheney, as The Rock.

Some of this post-9/11 cocksmanship was no doubt provoked by Osama bin Ladens slurs about American manhood: that the free and the brave had gone soft and weak. Humiliation in Vietnam similarly brought forth such cartoon visions of masculinity as Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger. It is also true that historically privileged men tend to be profoundly disturbed by perceived competition from women, gay people and diverse ethnic and religious groups. In Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siecle (1990) Elaine Showalter described the great terror induced among many men by the very modest gains of feminists in the late 19th century: fears of regression and degeneration, the longing for strict border controls around the definition of gender, as well as race, class and nationality.

In the 1950s, historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr was already warning of the expanding, aggressive force of women, seizing new domains like a conquering army. Exasperated by the castrated American male and his feminine fascination for the downtrodden, Schlesinger, the original exponent of muscular liberalism, longed for the frontiersmen of American history who were men, and it did not occur to them to think twice about it.

These majestically male makers of the modern west are being forced to think twice about a lot today. Gay men and women are freer than before to love whom they love, and to marry them. Women expect greater self-fulfilment in the workplace, at home and in bed. Trump may have the biggest nuclear button, but China leads in artificial intelligence as well as old-style mass manufacturing. And technology and automation threaten to render obsolete the men who push and pull things most damagingly in the west.

Many straight white men feel besieged by uppity Chinese and Indian people, by Muslims and feminists, not to mention gay bodybuilders, butch women and trans people. Not surprisingly they are susceptible to Petersons notion that the ostensible destruction of the traditional household division of labour has led to chaos. This fear and insecurity of a male minority has spiralled into a politics of hysteria in the two dominant imperial powers of the modern era. In Britain, the aloof and stiff upper-lipped English gentleman, that epitome of controlled imperial power, has given way to such verbally incontinent Brexiters as Boris Johnson. The rightwing journalist Douglas Murray, among many elegists of English manhood, deplores emasculated Italians, Europeans and westerners in general and esteems Trump for reminding the west of what is great about ourselves. And, indeed, whether threatening North Korea with nuclear incineration, belittling people with disabilities or groping women, the American president confirms that some winners of modern history will do anything to shore up their sense of entitlement.

Rear-guard machismo Vladimir Putin on holiday in southern Siberia in 2009. Photograph: Alexey Druzhinin/AFP/Getty Images

But gaudy displays of brute manliness in the west, and frenzied loathing of what the alt-rightists call cucks and cultural Marxists, are not merely a reaction to insolent former weaklings. Such manic assertions of hyper-masculinity have recurred in modern history. They have also profoundly shaped politics and culture in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Osama bin Laden believed that Muslims have been deprived of their manhood and could recover it by obliterating the phallic symbols of American power. Beheading and raping innocent captives in the name of the caliphate, the black-hooded young volunteers of Islamic State were as obviously a case of psychotic masculinity as the Norwegian mass-murderer Anders Behring Breivik, who claimed Viking warriors as his ancestors. Last month, the Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte told female rebels in his country that We will not kill you. We will just shoot you in the vagina. Tormenting hapless minorities, Indias Hindu supremacist chieftains seem obsessed with proving, as one asserted after Indias nuclear tests in 1998, we are not eunuchs any more.

Morbid visions of castration and emasculation, civilisational decline and decay, connect Godse and Schlesinger to Bin Laden and Trump, and many other exponents of a rear-guard machismo today. They are susceptible to cliched metaphors of soft and passive femininity, hard and active masculinity; they are nostalgic for a time when men did not have to think twice about being men. And whether Hindu chauvinist, radical Islamist or white nationalist, their self-image depends on despising and excluding women. It is as though the fantasy of male strength measures itself most gratifyingly against the fantasy of female weakness. Equating women with impotence and seized by panic about becoming cucks, these rancorously angry men are symptoms of an endemic and seemingly unresolvable crisis of masculinity.

When did this crisis begin? And why does it seem so inescapably global? Writing Age of Anger: A History of the Present, I began to think that a perpetual crisis stalks the modern world. It began in the 19th century, with the most radical shift in human history: the replacement of agrarian and rural societies by a volatile socio-economic order, which, defined by industrial capitalism, came to be rigidly organised through new sexual and racial divisions of labour. And the crisis seems universal today because a web of restrictive gender norms, spun in modernising western Europe and America, has come to cover the remotest corners of the earth as they undergo their own socio-economic revolutions.

There were always many ways of being a man or a woman. Anthropologists and historians of the worlds astonishingly diverse pre-industrial societies have consistently revealed that there is no clear link between biological makeup and behaviour, no connection between masculinity and vigorous men, or femininity and passive women. Indians, British colonialists were disgusted to find, revered belligerent and sexually voracious goddesses, such as Kali; their heroes were flute-playing idlers such as Krishna. A vast Indian literature attests to mutably gendered men and women, elite as well as folk traditions of androgyny and same-sex eroticism.

These unselfconscious traditions began to come under unprecedented assault in the 19th century, when societies constituted by exploitation and exclusion, and stratified along gender and racial lines, emerged as the worlds most powerful; and when such profound shocks of modernity as nation-building, rural-urban migration, imperial expansion and industrialisation drastically changed all modes of human perception. A hierarchy of manly and unmanly human beings had long existed in many societies without being central in them. During the 19th century, it came to be universally imposed, with men and women straitjacketed into specific roles.

In the 19th century, the ideal of a strong, fearless manhood came to be embodied in muscular selves, nations, empires and races

The modern west appears, in the western supremacist version of history, as the guarantor of equality and liberty to all. In actuality, a notion of gender (and racial) inequality, grounded in biological difference, was, as Joan Wallach Scott demonstrates in her recent book Sex and Secularism, nothing less than the social foundation of modern western nation-states. Immanuel Kant dismissed women as incapable of practical reason, individual autonomy, objectivity, courage and strength. Napoleon, the child of the French Revolution and the Enlightenment, believed women ought to stay at home and procreate; his Napoleonic Code, which inspired state laws across the world, notoriously subordinated women to their fathers and husbands. Thomas Jefferson, Americas founding father, commended women, who have the good sense to value domestic happiness above all other and who are too wise to wrinkle their foreheads with politics. Such prejudices helped replace traditional patriarchy with the exclusionary ideals of masculinity as the modern world came into being.

On such grounds, women were denied political participation and forced into subordinate roles in the family and the labour market. Pop psychologists periodically insist that men are from Mars and women from Venus, lamenting the loss of what Peterson calls traditional divisions of labour, without acknowledging that capitalist, industrial and expansionist societies required a fresh division of labour, or that the straight white men who supervised them deemed women unfit, due to their physical or intellectual inferiority, to undertake territorial aggrandisement, nation-building, industrial production, international trade, and scientific innovation. Womens bodies were meant to reproduce and safeguard the future of the family, race and nation; mens were supposed to labour and fight. To be a mature man was to adjust oneself to society and fulfil ones responsibility as breadwinner, father and soldier. When men fear work or fear righteous war, as Theodore Roosevelt put it, when women fear motherhood, they tremble on the brink of doom. As the 19th century progressed, many such cultural assumptions about male and female identity morphed into timeless truths. They are, as Petersons rowdy fan club reveals, more vigorously upheld today than the truths of racial inequality, which were also simultaneously grounded in nature, or pseudo-biology.

Scott points out that the modes of sexual difference defined in the modernising west actually helped secure, the racial superiority of western nations to their others in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. White skin was associated with normal gender systems, dark skin with immaturity and perversity. Thus, the British judged their Kali-worshipping Indian subjects to be an unmanly and childish people who ought not to wrinkle their foreheads with ideas of self-rule. The Chinese were widely seen, including in western Chinatowns, as pigtailed cowards. Even Muslims, Christendoms formidable old rivals, came to be derided as pitiably feminine during the high noon of imperialism.

Gandhi explicitly subverted these gendered prejudices of European imperialists (and their Hindu imitators): that femininity was the absence of masculinity. Rejecting the western identification of rulers with male supremacy and subjecthood with feminine submissiveness, he offered an activist politics based on rigorous self-examination and maternal tenderness. This rejection eventually cost him his life. But he could see how much the male will to power was fed by a fantasy of the female other as a regressive being someone to be subdued and dominated and how much this pathology had infected modern politics and culture.

Its most insidious expression was the conquest and exploitation of people deemed feminine, and, therefore, less than human a violence that became normalised in the 19th century. For many Europeans and Americans, to be a true man was to be an ardent imperialist and nationalist. Even so clear-sighted a figure as Alexis de Tocqueville longed for his French male compatriots to realise their warlike and virile nature in crushing Arabs in north Africa, leaving women to deal with the petty concerns of domestic life.

As the century progressed, the quest for virility distilled a widespread response among men psychically battered by such uncontrollable and emasculating phenomena as industrialisation, urbanisation and mechanisation. The ideal of a strong, fearless manhood came to be embodied in muscular selves, nations, empires and races. Living up to this daunting ideal required eradicating all traces of feminine timidity and childishness. Failure incited self-loathing and a craving for regenerative violence. Mocked with such unmanly epithets as weakling and Oscar Wilde, Roosevelt tried to overcome, Gore Vidal once pointed out, his physical fragility through manly activities of which the most exciting and ennobling was war. It is no coincidence that the loathing of homosexuals, and the hunt for sacrificial victims such as Wilde, was never more vicious and organized than during this most intense phase of European imperialism.

One image came to be central to all attempts to recuperate the lost manhood of self and nation: the invincible body, represented in our own age of extremes by steroid-juiced, knobbly musculature. Actually, size matters today much less than it ever did; not many muscles are required for increasingly sedentary work habits and lifestyles. Nevertheless, an obsession with raw brawn and sheer mass still shapes political cultures. Trumps boasts about the size of his body parts were preceded by Vladimir Putins displays of his pectorals advertisements for a Russia re-masculinised after its emasculation by Boris Yeltsin, a flabby drunk. But shirtless hunks are also a striking recent phenomenon in Godses rising India. In the 90s, just as Indias Hindu nationalisation got into gear, formerly scrawny or chubby Bollywood stars began to flaunt glisteningly hard abs and bulging biceps; Rama, the lean-limbed hero of the Ramayana, started to resemble Rambo in calendar art and political posters. These buffed-up bodies of popular culture foreshadowed Modi, who rose to power boasting of his 56-inch chest, and promising true national potency to young unemployed stragglers.

This vengeful masculinist nationalism was the original creation of Germans in the early 19th century, who first outlined a vision of creating a superbly fit people or master race and fervently embraced such typically modern forms of physical exercise as gymnastics, callisthenics and yoga and fads like nudism. But pumped-up anatomy emerged as a natural embodiment of the evidently exclusive male virtue of strength only as the century ended. As societies across the west became more industrial, urban and bureaucratic, property-owning farmers and self-employed artisans rapidly turned into faceless office workers and professionals. With rational calculation installed as the new deity, each man, Max Weber warned in 1909, becomes a little cog in the machine, pathetically obsessed with becoming a bigger cog. Increasingly deprived of their old skills and autonomy in the iron cage of modernity, working class men tried to secure their dignity by embodying it in bulky brawn.

Indias prime minister Narendra Modi rose to power boasting of his 56-inch chest, and promising true national potency. Photograph: Danish Ismail/Reuters

Historians have emphasised how male workers, humiliated by such repressive industrial practices as automation and time management, also began to assert their manhood by swearing, drinking and sexually harassing the few women in the workforce the beginning of an aggressive hardhat culture that has reached deep into blue-collar workplaces during the decades-long reign of neoliberalism. Towards the end of the 19th century large numbers of men embraced sports and physical fitness, and launched fan clubs of pugnacious footballers and boxers.

It wasnt just working men. Upper-class parents in America and Britain had begun to send their sons to boarding schools in the hope that their bodies and moral characters would be suitably toughened up in the absence of corrupting feminine influences. Competitive sports, which were first organised in the second half of the 19th century, became a much-favoured means of pre-empting sissiness and of mass-producing virile imperialists. It was widely believed that putative empire-builders would be too exhausted by their exertions on the playing fields of Eton and Harrow to masturbate.

But masculinity, a dream of power, tends to get more elusive the more intensely it is pursued; and the dread of emasculation by opaque economic, political and social forces continued to deepen. It drove many fin de sicle writers as well as politicians in Europe and the US into hyper-masculine trances of racial nationalism and, eventually, the calamity of the first world war. Nations and races as well as individuals were conceptualised as biological entities, which could be honed into unassailable organisms. Fear of race suicide, cults of physical education and daydreams of a New Man went global, along with strictures against masturbation, as the inflexible modern ideology of gender difference reached non-western societies.

European colonialists went on to impose laws that enshrined their virulent homophobia and promoted heterosexual conjugality and patrilineal orders. Their prejudices were also entrenched outside the west by the victims of what the Indian critic Ashis Nandy calls internal colonialism: those subjects of European empires who pleaded guilty to the accusation that they were effeminate, and who decided to man up in order to catch up with their white overlords.

This accounts for a startling and still little explored phenomenon: how men within all major religious communities Buddhist, Hindu and Jewish as well as Christian and Islamic started in the late 19th century to simultaneously bemoan their lost virility and urge the creation of hard, inviolable bodies, whether of individual men, the nation or the umma. These included early Zionists (Max Nordau, who dreamed of Muskeljudentum, Jewry of Muscle), Asian anti-imperialists (Swami Vivekananda, Modis hero, who exhorted Hindus to build biceps, and Anagarika Dharmapala, who helped develop the muscular Buddhism being horribly flexed by Myanmars ethnic-cleansers these days) as well as fanatical imperialists such as Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Scout movement.

The most lethal consequences of this mimic machismo unfolded in the first decades of the 20th century. Never before and never afterwards, as historian George Mosse, the pioneering historian of masculinity, wrote, has masculinity been elevated to such heights as during fascism. Mussolini, like Roosevelt, transformed himself from a sissy into a fire-breathing imperialist. The weak must be hammered away, declared Hitler, another physically ill-favoured fascist. Such wannabe members of the Aryan master race accordingly defined themselves against the cowardly Jew and discovered themselves as men of steel in acts of mass murder.

This hunt for manliness continues to contaminate politics and culture across the world in the 21st century. Rapid economic, social and technological change in our own time has plunged an exponentially larger number of uprooted and bewildered men into a doomed quest for masculine certainties. The scope for old-style imperialist aggrandisement and forging a master race may have diminished. But there are, in the age of neoliberal individualism, infinitely more unrealised claims to masculine identity in grotesquely unequal societies around the world. Myths of the self-made man have forced men everywhere into a relentless and often futile hunt for individual power and wealth, in which they imagine women and members of minorities as competitors. Many more men try to degrade and exclude women in their attempt to show some mastery that is supposed to inhere in their biological nature.

Frustration and fear of feminisation have helped boost demagogic movements similar to the one unleashed by the locker room bully in the White House. Godses hyper-masculine cliches have vanquished the traditions of androgyny that Gandhi upheld and not just in India. Young Pakistani men revere the playboy-turned-politician Imran Khan as their alpha male redeemer; they turn viciously on critics of his indiscretions. Similarly embodying a triumphant masculinity in the eyes of his followers, the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoan can do no wrong. Rodrigo Duterte jokes, with brazen frequency, about rape.

Misogyny now flourishes in the public sphere because, as in modernising Europe and America, many toilers daydream of a primordial past when real men were on top, and women knew their place. Loathing of liberated women who seem to be usurping male domains is evident not only on social media but also in brutal physical assaults. These are sanctioned by pseudo-traditional ideologies such as Hindu supremacism and Islamic fundamentalism that offer to many thwarted men in Asia and Africa a redeeming machismo: the gratifying replacement of neoliberalisms bogus promise of equal opportunity with old-style patriarchy.

Susan Faludi argues that many Americans used the 9/11 attacks to shrink the gains of feminism and push women back into passive roles. Petersons traditionalism is the latest of many attempts in the west in recent years to restore the authority of men, or to remasculinise society. These include the deployment of shock-and-awe violence, loathing of cucks, cultural Marxists and feminists, re-imagining a silver-spooned posturer like Bush as superman, and, finally, the political apotheosis of a serial groper.

This recurrent search for security in coarse manhood confirms that the history of modern masculinity is the history of a fantasy. It describes the doomed quest for a stable and ordered world that entails nothing less than war on the irrepressible plurality of human existence a war that is periodically renewed despite its devastating failures. An outlandish phobia of women and effeminacy may be hardwired into the long social, political and cultural dominance of men. It could be that their wounded sense of entitlement, or resentment over being denied their customary claim to power and privilege, will continue to make many men vulnerable to such vendors of faux masculinity as Trump and Modi. A compassionate analysis of their rage and despair, however, would conclude that men are as much imprisoned by man-made gender norms as women.

One is not born, but rather becomes a woman wrote Simone de Beauvoir. She might as well have said the same for men. It is civilisation as a whole that produces such a creature. And forces him into a ruinous pursuit of power. Compared with women, men are almost everywhere more exposed to alcoholism, drug addiction, serious accidents and cardiovascular disease; they have significantly lower life expectancies and are more likely to kill themselves. The first victims of the quest for a mythical male potency are arguably men themselves, whether in school playgrounds, offices, prisons or battlefields. This everyday experience of fear and trauma binds them to women in more ways than most men, trapped by myths of resolute manhood, tend to acknowledge.

Certainly, men would waste this latest crisis of masculinity if they deny or underplay the experience of vulnerability they share with women on a planet that is itself endangered. Masculine power will always remain maddeningly elusive, prone to periodic crises, breakdowns and panicky reassertions. It is an unfulfillable ideal, a hallucination of command and control, and an illusion of mastery, in a world where all that is solid melts into thin air, and where even the ostensibly powerful are haunted by the spectre of loss and displacement. As a straitjacket of onerous roles and impossible expectations, masculinity has become a source of great suffering for men as much as women. To understand this is not only to grasp its global crisis today. It is also to sight one possibility of resolving the crisis: a release from the absurd but crippling fear that one has not been man enough

Pankaj Mishras Age of Anger: A History of the Present is published in paperback by Penguin. To order a copy for 8.49 (RRP 9.99) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over 10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of 1.99.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/mar/17/the-crisis-in-modern-masculinity

from Viral News HQ https://ift.tt/2pNfdID via Viral News HQ