Friday, June 6, 2014

End-of-Week News Roundup: Venus, Mars, Ongoing Discussion of Misogyny and Gender Roles in American Culture



More links — these, to recent articles and commentary continuing the discussion of misogyny in the U.S (and other cultures) in the wake of the Isla Vista shootings, as well as ongoing discussions about gender roles and double standards:



Even the recent massacre by a 22-year-old man in Isla Vista, Calif., who announced his planned slaughter of women as collective punishment for a life of sexual rejection, proves that we all live somewhere within the spectrum of misogynist culture that stretches from California to Calcutta and beyond.


"I keep hearing the word modesty' thrown around. So the girls are supposed to be modest while the boys are supposed to be 'studs?' That’s a huge double standard," Melissa Milam, a parent of a male student at the high school, said in an interview with the Salt Lake Tribune.


When it comes to women in leadership positions, evangelical nonprofits lag behind their secular counterparts, according to the first wave of results of a first-of-its-kind study by Wheaton College sociologist Amy Reynolds and Gordon College provost Janel Curry. 


For all of his talk of giving feminists credit for their work, Douthat is not interested in having a serious conversation about misogyny or male sexual entitlement. The norms he clings to rest too heavily on both.

And so it goes, at the end of this week following the death of Maya Angelou, who informed those intent on seeing her trodden into the dust as an African-American woman from nowhere Stamps, Arkansas, that she would rise and rise again, no matter how others sought to write her down, to ignore her presence in the world and pretend it was of no importance at all.

(Both in this posting and the one preceding it, I'm indebted and grateful to Fred Clark at his Slacktivist site for links I've cited.)

The video of Maya Angelou reading and commenting on her poem "And Still I Rise" was uploaded to YouTube by mohitbahi.

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