#women and girls have been murdered for turning down self-described 'incels'

[omgsomeonesomewhereonearth]

Personally i don't think it should take shrimp for you to start seeing women as people but whatever

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Pluralistic, your daily link-dose: 27 Feb 2020

Today's links

Ripping the window-dressing off the .ORG selloff: It's not even an ethos.

CDC guide to filter-mask-friendly facial hair: You're good to go with a Zappa, Villain or Hitler, but stay away from the Dali, Hulahee and the dread F(l)u Manchu.

Don't trust Google to build Toronto's Smart City: Sidewalk Labs's sleaze has disqualified it.

A "girls-only" social service wants to analyze your facial bone structure: "It's science!"

Norman Rockwell turned into a radical civil rights activist: His last painting was of Nixon, too.

Gmail's filters are blocking opt-in election emails: Mayo Pete and Andrew Yang are winning the spam-filter primary.

Talking Radicalized with The Next Chapter: Shelagh Rogers is a national treasure.

Neoliberalism kills, the coronavirus edition: And you thought capitalism would kill us all with climate change!

Bernie Sanders and Public Enemy LA rally this Sunday: With Sarah Silverman and Dick van Dyke!

Venezuelan women's "army" break into dead factories to reboot them: "Only the people can save the people."

Meet Akil Augustine, voice of the Raptors…and Radicalized: A fighter in my corner.

This day in history: 2019, 2015, 2005

Colophon: Recent publications, current writing projects, upcoming appearances, current reading

Ripping the window-dressing off the .ORG selloff (permalink)

The latest on ISOC's shameful attempt to flog off .ORG to a group of sketchy billionaires: Ethos Capital's promises concerning its stewardship are pure window-dressing.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/02/empty-promises-wont-save-org-takeover

Its binding promise not to increase prices for .ORG domains? Still allows it to DOUBLE prices in 8 years, then allows UNLIMITED increases afterwards. Its "Stewardship Council"? Handpicked by Ethos's own bagmen, & only empowered to rule on very narrow questions of de-anonymization and censorship, AND Ethos can simply ignore its rulings by declaring them to be required by a government or consistent with anti-abuse policies.

In an open letter in the Nonprofit Times, Cindy Cohn of EFF and Amy Sample Ward of NTEN break it down:

https://www.thenonprofittimes.com/npt_articles/commentary-org-still-wouldnt-be-safe/

"Your proposal cabins the council's authority by placing anything construed as 'advice or recommendations regarding day-to-day operational, financial or budgeting matters, or pricing out of bounds. It would be trivial to categorize harmful practices as 'operational.'"

CDC guide to filter-mask-friendly facial hair(permalink)

The CDC has an infographic enumerating the effect of various styles of facial hair on filtering respirators.

You're good to go with a Zappa, Villain or Hitler, but stay away from the Dali, Hulahee and the dread F(l)u Manchu.

https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/npptl/pdfs/FacialHairWmask11282017-508.pdf

Don't trust Google to build Toronto's Smart City (permalink)

Google is planning to turn a vast swathe of Toronto into a high-tech "smart city" through its Sidewalk Labs division. They've been incredibly misleading and opaque about their plans, and yet the city keeps greenlighting through successive phases.

The latest phase is the publication of the Digital Strategy Advisory Panel's report, a wide-ranging critical report from technologists and tech experts on Google's plan to instrument the city and extract its data.

https://quaysideto.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/DSAP-Supplemental-Report-on-Sidewalk-Labs-Digital-Innovation-Appendix-DIA-Appendices-FINAL.pdf

It's pretty sharp stuff. Michael Geist's introductory letter gives a taste of things.

https://quaysideto.ca/blog/dsap-releases-supplemental-commentary-on-the-digital-innovation-appendix

But far more pointed is Andrew Clement's Appendix D, a kind of minority report that makes it abundantly clear that Google has totally disqualified itself from this project.

Question One: Does Sidewalk have a strong track record as an urban innovator appropriate for Toronto?

Short answer: No

(Sidewalk lied, omitted other projects that were terrible, and literally followed a grifter's playbook called "BOLD")

Question Two: Can Sidewalk Labs' core claims be relied on?

Sidewalk "consulted" with 21,000 Torontonians, but it hasn't shown that it's willing to take any of that consultation advice to heart ("corporate self-defense").

Sidewalk claims it's not "tech for tech's sake," but the whole plan reeks of it.

Sidewalk claimed it's not about extracting data, but the plan is totally about extracting data.

Question Three: What does experience with Sidewalk to date in this project indicate about its reliability as a partner? In particular, has Sidewalk respected its contracts and other commitments?

Nope. For example, it held its expert panel to NDAs after promising it wouldn't.

Question Four: Can Sidewalk be treated as independent of its parent Alphabet/Google and its wider enterprise?

Obviously not! "In business strategy, financing and overall managerial control, there are clear indications that Sidewalk is unlikely to diverge from Alphabet/Google."

"Nearly all Alphabet revenues are earned by Google and they have the same CEO, Sundar Pichai, and same CFO, Ruth Porat."

Question Five: What are the risks of partnering with an Alphabet enterprise?

"It has been fined a combined $9.5 billion since 2017 by EU antitrust regulators while facing further significant government investigations for its anti-competitive behaviour."

"It will be challenging to make a positive determination absent public evidence of a thorough, independent risk-benefit analysis of the prospective partnership or other contractual relationship."

A "girls-only" social service wants to analyze your facial bone structure (permalink)

Well, this is the most "now you've got two problems" moment in recent memory. "Giggle" is an all-girl social network. To be "all-girl" they have keep men off of the platform. How do they do that? With FACIAL BONE STRUCTURE scans.

"It's science! Just like archaeologists do with mummies."

JFC.

The impulse to start a girl-only social space is a potentially fine one, but deploying what amounts to eugenics – heavily borrowed from the incel movement's obsession with facial bone-structure – is idiotic.

"Unfortunately it doesn't verify trans-girls."

No shit. Also, it doesn't verify people whose bone-structure fails your digital phrenology tests. And it WILL verify men and boys who generate false positives in the system.

https://pipedreamdragon.tumblr.com/post/611048332070109184

I can't believe I need to say this, but: The goal of making girls feel OK with who they are cannot be attained by subjecting their facial bone-structure to algorithmic femininity assessments.

Norman Rockwell turned into a radical civil rights activist (permalink)

I hadn't known that at the end of his career, Norman Rockwell became a political radical, breaking with the Saturday Evening Post over his desire to depict the civil rights struggle.

https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2020/2/19/21052356/norman-rockwell-the-problem-we-all-live-with-saturday-evening-post

Writing in Vox, Tom Carson describes how Rockwell's personal tragedies – the death of his wife – and the advice of his therapist helped him transform into an acerbic, radical painter, the opposite of who we remember him as.

Switching from the Post to Look Magazine, Rockwell depicted such subjects as 6-y-o Ruby Bridges being escorted into an all-white school by federal marshalls who led her past howling mobs of white supremacists.

He went on to paint a depiction of the imagined last moments of civil rights workers Mickey Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney, who were tortured and murdered by white nationalists.

http://www.nrm.org/MT/text/MurderMississippi.html

A staunch anti-war activist, he pestered LBJ with an endless stream of telegrams demanding negotiations, not bombings, in Vietnam (ironically, he voted for Nixon in the hopes that he would end the war).

Further irony: the last substantial painting he completed was of Nixon after his election win: "This time around, he managed what he'd once said was impossible. His subject looks like a nice man who is, nonetheless, unmistakably Richard Nixon."

It's the only Rockwell painting in the National Portrait Gallery.

https://npg.si.edu/object/npg_NPG.72.2

Gmail's filters are blocking opt-in election emails (permalink)

Gmail's spam filters perform very differently when it comes to fundraising emails from Democratic leadership contenders: Mayo Pete evades filters 63% of the time, Yang lands 46% of the time. EVERY Warren campaign email tested got filtered to spam.

https://themarkup.org/google-the-giant/2020/02/26/wheres-my-email

These are all emails that Gmail users have opted to receive, too, but most are filtered to the "promotions" inbox, rather than "primary." In all only 11% of emails from "candidates, think tanks, advocacy groups, and nonprofits" reached primary.

It's turning email — the last federated platform on the internet — into Facebook, a filternet whose rules are set by unaccountable algorithms operated by a secretive monopolist.

Goog has a conflict of interest here: "While Gmail does not sell ads in the primary inbox, advertisers can pay for top placement in the social and promotions tabs in free accounts."

This was Facebook's media-killing strategy: when you started your media outlet's FB presence, the company delivered 100% of your posts to your followers, then, once you depended on that, it dialed delivery down unless you paid for "reach."

The pretense of Big Tech is that you they connect you to the stuff you ask for (this is also the premise behind Net Neutrality). The reality is that they decide, unaccountably, invisibly and inexplicably, what you may see.

While the overfiltering might in error, it's an error Goog is incentivized to wontfix: "'You're not precluded from buying an ad in the promotions tab, or offering a deal,' said Lee Carosi Dunn, who at the time led election sales, political outreach and policy for Google."

Talking Radicalized with The Next Chapter (permalink)

My book Radicalized is a finalist for Canada Reads, the CBC's national book prize

https://www.cbc.ca/books/canadareads/meet-the-canada-reads-2020-contenders-1.5433115

That means all kinds of good stuff, but one of the highlights was talking with Shelagh Rogers for The Next Chapter. I grew up listening to Shelagh, and she's so incredibly smart about books.

The interview came out great! (How could it not, given the interviewer). We ranged widely over "Canadianness," "Americanness," literary forms, anxiety and creativity, and the substance of the stories themselves.

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thenextchapter/full-episode-feb-22-2020-1.5469642

You can get the MP3 here:

http://16523.mc.tritondigital.com/CBC_THE_NEXT_CHAPTER_FROM_CBC_RADIO_P/media-session/fecd5192-14ef-43b6-b9a7-7c125875d93b/nextchapter-0I9Y1liD-20200226.mp3?ttag=season:12

It's also been included in my podcast feed, which you can subscribe to here:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/doctorow_podcast

Neoliberalism kills, the coronavirus edition (permalink)

Neoliberalism kills, a play in two acts

Act I: UK employers are not required to offer sick pay to asymptomatic potential coronavirus carriers, even if those workers' doctors have ordered them to "self-isolate" to avoid spreading pandemic.

https://memex.naughtons.org/self-isolation-and-employee-rights/28723/

Leaving workers with a stark choice: perform your duty to the public health and lose your wages or even your job, or turn up for work and infect your co-workers and customers.

Typhoid Mary vs Moral Hazard in action, there.

Act II: Alex Azar, the US Health and Human Services secretary, has ruled out price controls for a coronavirus vaccine, arguing that pharma companies need "incentives" to produce.

https://twitter.com/mmcauliff/status/1232784696792297472

"Alex Michael Azar II (/ˈeɪzər/ born June 17, 1967) is an American attorney, politician, pharmaceutical lobbyist, and former drug company executive who serves as the United States Secretary of Health and Human Services."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Azar

This former pharma lobbyist, whose industry gobbles public subsidies like a tweaker gobbles bennies, firmly believes that his once-and-future paymasters must be permitted unlimited gouging, and if they choose to leave those who can't pay to die, that's "the market."

Lambert Strether, 2014:

"I propose two simple rules to which neo-liberalism can be reduced. They are:

"Rule #1: Because markets.

"Rule #2: Go die!"

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/03/neo-liberalism-expressed-simple-rules.html

It turns out that all those people who thought late-stage capitalism would exterminate the human race through climate change were wrong! It's going to kill us all with pandemics, instead.

Herd immunity has a well-known leftist bias.

Bernie Sanders and Public Enemy LA rally this Sunday (permalink)

Angelenos! Bernie Sanders is doing a gig with Dick Van Dyke (!), Sarah Silverman (!!) and Public Enemy (!!!) this SUNDAY (Sunday Sunday Sunday!) at the LA Convention Center.

Admission is free, but you need to RSVP here. Doors open at 3, rally starts at 5, ends at 7. Word of warning: the last Sanders rally I attended (in 2016) started REALLY late, like 2h.

https://events.berniesanders.com/event/252466/

Campaigning presidential candidates have hard-to-predict schedules apparently (but warn your babysitter).

Venezuelan women's "army" break into dead factories to reboot them (permalink)

The "Productive Army" is a Venezuelan women's collective that has been operating since 2017. They visit shuttered factories, get workers to explain what's needed to reopen them, break in and start them up again.

https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.elsaltodiario.com%2Fmapas%2Fbatallas-ejercito-productivo-obrero-venezuela-guerra-no-convencional

They organize themselves like military units, with captains, etc, and the units generally have to beg their bosses for time off to roam the country, putting it back on its feet. Operations typically run for less than a week, and incorporate weekends to minimize time off.

They describe themselves as carrying out the Chavismo doctrine of "workers' control of factories," which even Chavez largely treated as a slogan, and which his successors have been even less committed to.

They remind me of the elite Chinese students whom Xi ordered to read Marx and Lenin, who then decided Xi was a bourgeois sellout and took to the road to support wildcat workers' strikes against Xi-aligned factory owners.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/28/world/asia/china-maoists-xi-protests.html

The Productive Army's slogan is "Only the People Can Save the People." Its missions are "productive battles." A productive battle might involve repairing the furnace in a sardine canning factory to get it running again, then turning it over to workers: "In the EPO they say that they not only repair machines but, above all, consciences."

One of the crispest definitions of "rightism" came I've heard came from Steven Brust: "Ask them what's more important: property rights, or human rights? If they answer, 'Property rights are human rights," they're on the right." (I quoted this in Walkaway).

When people want the things the factory produces, and workers want to produce those things in the factory, but the spreadsheet says the factory isn't viable, the problem is with the spreadsheet, not the people.

Meet Akil Augustine, voice of the Raptors…and Radicalized (permalink)

In the #CanadaReads national book prize, each book gets a "champion" – a defender who speaks for the book in a series of televised debates. My champion is the incredible Akil Augustine, voice of the Toronto Raptors.

Akil and I met in Toronto last month when they announced that my book Radicalized was a finalist for the prize, and the CBC sat us down for a rollicking joint interview.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=duL6rZeNJY0

I love that Radicalized connected with Akil, given how divergent our interests are (I can't even name a single basketball goalie!). I love even more how competitive he is. As someone who grew up at hippie summer-camp playing "co-operative volleyball" I'm very grateful to have a fighter in my corner who plays to win!

This day in history (permalink)

#15yrsago Halle Berry accepts "Razzie" for Catwoman, calls it a "piece of shit" https://web.archive.org/web/20050306093431/http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?storyID=7748301&type=entertainmentNews

#5yrsago Mass surveillance hip-hop from the director of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee https://shadowproof.com/2015/02/26/after-hearing-capitol-police-arrest-lawyer-for-shouting-question-at-clapper-about-nsa-surveillance/

#1yrago Bunnie Huang's tour-de-force explanation of how hardware implants and supply chain hacks work https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=5519

#1yrago AOC grills Equifax CEO: the Congressional record now contains the obvious, infuriating truth that everyone else already knew https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/02/11/rep-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-takes-aim-equifax-credit-scoring/?utm_term=.cbab554db359

#1yrago Fox hit with $179m (including $128m in punitive damages) judgment over shady bookkeeping on "Bones" https://variety.com/2019/biz/news/fox-bones-arbitration-emily-deschanel-179-million-1203150879/

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources: JWZ (http://www.jwz.org/blog/), Pipe Dream Dragon (https://pipedreamdragon.tumblr.com/), Metafilter (https://metafilter.com/), Karl Bode (https://twitter.com/karlbode), RCB Leon (https://twitter.com/rcbleon), Naked Capitalism (https://nakedcapitalism.com/).

Hugo nominators! My story "Unauthorized Bread" is eligible in the Novella category and you can read it free on Ars Technica: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-near-future-tale-of-refugees-and-sinister-iot-appliances/

Upcoming appearances:

Canada Reads Kelowna: March 5, 6PM, Kelowna Library, 1380 Ellis Street, with CBC's Sarah Penton https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/cbc-radio-presents-in-conversation-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-96154415445

Currently writing: I just finished a short story, "The Canadian Miracle," for MIT Tech Review. It's a story set in the world of my next novel, "The Lost Cause," a post-GND novel about truth and reconciliation. I'm getting geared up to start work on the novel now, though the timing is going to depend on another pending commission (I've been solicited by an NGO) to write a short story set in the world's prehistory.

Currently reading: Just started Lauren Beukes's forthcoming Afterland: it's Y the Last Man plus plus, and two chapters in, it's amazeballs. Last week, I finished Andrea Bernstein's "American Oligarchs" this week; it's a magnificent history of the Kushner and Trump families, showing how they cheated, stole and lied their way into power. I'm getting really into Anna Weiner's memoir about tech, "Uncanny Valley." I just loaded Matt Stoller's "Goliath" onto my underwater MP3 player and I'm listening to it as I swim laps.

Latest podcast: Gopher: When Adversarial Interoperability Burrowed Under the Gatekeepers' Fortresses: https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/02/24/gopher-when-adversarial-interoperability-burrowed-under-the-gatekeepers-fortresses/

Upcoming books: "Poesy the Monster Slayer" (Jul 2020), a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Pre-order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627?utm_source=socialmedia&utm_medium=socialpost&utm_term=na-poesycorypreorder&utm_content=na-preorder-buynow&utm_campaign=9781626723627

(we're having a launch for it in Burbank on July 11 at Dark Delicacies and you can get me AND Poesy to sign it and Dark Del will ship it to the monster kids in your life in time for the release date).

"Attack Surface": The third Little Brother book, Oct 20, 2020.

"Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a very special, s00per s33kr1t intro.

Posted on February 27, 2020Tags 2020, akil augustine, apple, basketball, bernie sanders, books, canada, canada reads, cbc, cdc, cdnpol, chavismo, coronavirus, democrats, dick van dyke, dotorg, dweb, eff, elections, ethos, facebookification, facial hair, federation, filternet, gmail, google, hip hop, isoc, los angeles, onpol, pir, politics, private equity, public enemy, radicalized, sarah silverman, science fiction, sidewalk labs, smart cities, surveillance, toronto, torpol, venezuela, walkawayLeave a comment on Pluralistic, your daily link-dose: 27 Feb 2020 Edit "Pluralistic, your daily link-dose: 27 Feb 2020"

[moonwalkertrance]

Florida Yoga Studio Shooting Suspect Was A Far-Right Misogynist

Scott Beierle, 40, ranted about the “collective treachery” of women on his YouTube page.

The man who police say walked into a Tallahassee, Florida, yoga studio and opened fire on Friday evening was a self-identified misogynist who ranted against women and spewed racist beliefs in videos and songs posted online.

Tallahassee police say Scott Beierle, 40, shot six people, killing two of them, and struck another with his gun after posing as a patron of the studio. The women killed were Dr. Nancy Van Vessem, 61, and Maura Binkley, 21.

Some at the studio attempted to stop the shooter as he fired, police say.

Beierle posted several videos to a YouTube channel in 2014 that painted himself as the victim of “treachery” by many of the “females” he has wanted to “court.” BuzzFeed News was first to report on the shooter’s social media presence Saturday.

“Those who engage in treachery will ultimately be the victims of it,” Beierle said in a video titled “The Rebirth of My Misogynism.”

At other points, he names girls and women he has known since eighth grade,  complaining about their “collective treachery” and saying they can “justify anything if you offend their sensibilities.”

Beierle lamented in a video titled “The Dangers of Diversity” what he viewed as the rise of “foreigners” in the U.S. and praised nations that maintain one “ethnic character.” In a video he dubbed “The American Whore,” Beierle said interracial relationships were “a betrayal of blood,” and that women in them have a mental illness.

It was unclear Saturday evening whether YouTube had suspended the account. Beierle also had a SoundCloud account that is still active. On it, he posted songs with lyrics describing violence against women, with one song, complaining about “the girl I can’t get in the sack,” posted just hours before the shooting.

The gunman took his own life at the yoga studio before police arrived. Police have yet to officially disclose a motive in Friday’s shooting.

Court records viewed by The Associated Press show that Beierle had previously been arrested for groping women from behind, and was once banned from Florida State University’s campus.

Through his videos, he appeared to identify as an “incel,” shorthand for “involuntarily celibate,” a misogynistic label used primarily on the internet to describe men who cannot convince women to have sex with them. In one video viewed by BuzzFeed, Beierle reportedly said he related to Elliot Rodger, the man who wrote a manifesto detailing his hatred of women before embarking on a shooting rampage in California, where he killed six people. In the “Misogynism” video, he spoke about a woman who kept canceling and rescheduling dates, saying he “could have ripped her head off.”

Beierle, a military veteran, also spoke angrily about the idea that women can press charges for his being “aggressive” in his pursuit of women, which he considered a typical “male characteristic.”

“Can I press charges for being evasive?” he asked.

Beierle also spoke of another series of women who turned down his invitation to a concert, acting as though he were entitled to romantic attention.

“I’m trying to live my life here. You’re not helping,” he said of the women.

The Tallahassee incident appears to be the second incel-related mass murder in 2018, after a man killed 10 people in Toronto by driving a van into a crowd in April.

[thegloober]

How Parents Can Teach Boys to Deal With Rejection

Stories of men responding to rejection badly are an online literary staple, a genre of micro-nonfiction. Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook are piled high with brutal recollections. “When I turned a guy down for a 2nd date, he became angry, telling me he ‘knew’ I was into him,” @I_Am_StephanieD recently wrote on Twitter. “For the next 8 months, he showed up at my office and home repeatedly. Each time insisting he was ‘giving me a chance’ to change my mind [sic] bc I was ‘so stupid’ not to go out with him again.”

That’s far from the worst of it. “I was out at a concert with a friend,” an anonymous Tumblr user wrote in September. “Some guy approached me and started talking to me and trying to make advances; I tried to make it clear I wasn’t interested. He didn’t get the message so I blatantly told him I wasn’t. He got angry and punched me in the face.”

ADVERTISEMENT

The worst stories aren’t told in the first person. In August of this year, a 14-year-old boy from Oklahoma stabbed a girl after she rejected him romantically. In August, a Tennessee woman declined to give a man at the gas station her phone number, prompting him to jump on top of her car, punch through her window, and drag her out by her hair. In 2014, a Connecticut teen was sentenced to 25 years after stabbing his 16-year-old classmate to death after she rejected his prom proposal. In April of this year, a 25-year-old self-described “incel” by the name of Alek Minassian ran over a dozen women in Toronto, killing them all. He said he was inspired by Elliot Rodgers, another “incel” who perpetrated a mass shooting in 2014 to “get back at women who had rejected him.”

Data suggests parents of daughters should be scared. More than half of American women who are murdered are murdered by men. More than 90 percent of those are perpetrated by men that women already know, most commonly a current or former romantic partner. For women, men who know them are more dangerous than men who are strangers.

Featured Video

Loading Video Content

That women are at risk of being murdered by the men in their lives is not news. But what often goes unstated is that those same statistics — and all these stories — should trigger action on the part of parents raising boys. Clearly, young men are failing to understand or cope with rejection. Giving them the tools to do so and demanding better not only protects girls and women from men, but men and boys from their own worst impulses.

Rejection is crushing. We all know this. And dealing with rejection is difficult. That’s why parents need to have (and re-have) conversations about weathering emotional blows and why it’s important to provide context for kids confused by messaging around rejection they might get from popular culture.

Part of this messaging comes from the commonly-held idea that women don’t know what they want, that no may mean yes, and that if a man tries hard enough, he can change a woman’s mind, either through persuasion, persistence, or downright deception. How many families have a story where persistence was a key trait in the getting together of two grandparents? And there are classic and well known examples of this like Say Anything, The Notebook, 10 Things I Hate About You, and Sixteen Candles. But even seemingly innocuous movies often teach weird lessons about rejection, potentially communicating to boys that women don’t get to have the final say.

ADVERTISEMENT

Wedding Crashers is a prime example. When Owen Wilson’s character, John, meets Claire, played by Rachel McAdams, he continues to make moves on her despite the fact that she is engaged to another man. He even goes so far as to poison her fiance (played by Bradley Cooper) to get time alone with her, all the while lying about his true identity. When, in a turn of events, Claire realizes she can’t marry her fiance, Cooper’s character then gets belligerent and angry and tries to order Claire back onto the altar. The entire movie is men acting about women, and not asking what women want, and somehow, despite engaging in the same nefarious and upsetting activities that Cooper’s character does, Wilson is the good guy.

So what’s a parent to do? The rather obvious and also correct answer is this: Talk about it.

“We can’t control everything, and we shouldn’t,” says Dr. Steve Silvestro, a pediatric doctor who runs an expert-driven podcast on raising healthy and thoughtful kids. “But by ignoring it, or by hoping that our kid won’t pay attention, or that your kid will stick to something you talked about in the past as their guiding principle, these open a lot of opportunities for their thoughts and feelings to be swayed in a way that probably isn’t the best for them.”

There are, per Silvestro, a couple of ways for parents to tackle this particular issue. The big one: time and time again, parents need to tell their boys one thing: if a woman rejects you, you respect her decision and you move on. You can be her friend, but you don’t have to be. You can cry if you want, but you don’t have to cry, and you don’t do it to make them feel bad. You can be upset, but that girl is not the focus of your upset. You are upset because you are hurt, because you put yourself out there — and that’s the bravest act of all. And you hammer that home with empathy.

ADVERTISEMENT

As conversations around masculinity are changing, long-held beliefs about male aggression have never been so hotly contested by the cultural zeitgeist at large. It is no longer culturally acceptable for men to behave poorly in response to rejection, either by ignoring the wishes of the women who rejected them or by responding with violence. In order to clearly state to those reluctant to change, the world at large, and specifically parents, need to change the way we talk about romance. Women are not sending secret messages with their words. They are simply saying what they want.

The pop cultural trope of men continually propositioning women after they’ve said no, or even following them and manipulating them into relationships, or being angry and vindictive after rejection, is rampant in rom-coms. It’s even rampant in popular music. Miguel’s How Many Drinks ft. Kendrick Lamar reads: “How many drinks would it take you to leave with me/Yeah you look good, and I got money/But I don’t wanna waste my time/Back of my mind, I’m hoping you say two or three.” The suggestion that the right amount of alcohol might lower a woman’s defenses and have her engage in sexual activity is problematic for a number of reasons, largely due to the fact that it suggests that consent is a blurred line, one that can be manipulated.

Most adults know that these tropes are not how real life goes. But kids don’t.

If parents listen to a Miguel song with their kid and it features a boy chasing a girl who keeps saying no, parents should ask their kid what they think about that. When they watch a rom-com that features a boy who is relentlessly pursuing a girl who is not interested, they should ask their son how they would feel if someone was doing that to them. These conversations shouldn’t only happen when a kid is already in trouble for doing something bad. They should be proactive, and constant. If the messages a kid gets from the boys around him and from the tv and the music and the radio say that reacting with violence is okay, then it’s a parent’s job to make sure their kids know it’s not.

ADVERTISEMENT

So why did this attitude take hold? Why, at any point, was male aggression normalized and even tacitly accepted to the point where it became a pop cultural norm? And what is there to do about it?

A study by University of Kansas researchers on male aggression in the face of female rejection posits a theory: Long ago, particularly in the American South, men had to protect themselves and their families from perceived economic and existential threats (the two often being interchangeable). A man in the South couldn’t let a thief steal his horses, not only on principle, but because they represented his family’s livelihood. The power and aggression of his defense was what made him a capable defender of his home, someone to be feared and someone worth the respect of his peers.

What emerged from a culture in which defensiveness was more valued than the ability to bind together a community? What researchers call Masculine Honor Culture, a social system in which men respond to any form of “emasculation” with aggression. The problem now is that we no longer live in a system where the ability to protect one’s home is more important than the ability to make friends and influence people. But culture has lagged. This leads to men profoundly overreacting to minor forms of perceived emasculation, notably romantic rejection.

Why a woman’s rejection is seen as emasculating is another question entirely. There’s not a clear answer there other than that it represents a manner in which men are not only told that they cannot have what they want, but are informed of this by women. This rankles those who see being bossed around by a woman — even one they admire — as a humiliation. That’s a significant population.

ADVERTISEMENT

The best thing parents can do is help their sons recognize that people reject others for a whole number of reasons; yes, maybe it is them, but it’s not because of their manhood. Or maybe it’s because they’re seeing someone else, or maybe it’s because they don’t want to date. Maybe it’s just because they don’t like their personality. But whatever the reason is, it doesn’t matter. That’s the whole point: what other people think of you is not what defines your worth. But a lot of men today — especially those who cling on to their sense of identity as something that must constantly be proved — haven’t understood that yet.

Parents have no choice but to help their boys understand this. Otherwise, sons’ sense of self-worth — and what it means to be a man — might lead to them equating rejection with inadequacy and not taking no to an answer. There are already enough stories like that being told by frightened women and myopic screenwriters. We don’t need any more.

Source: https://bloghyped.com/how-parents-can-teach-boys-to-deal-with-rejection/