David Michael Newstead's Blog, page 120

Getting Drunk on Tea

By David Michael Newstead –

I love chai and a while back I realized that my nearest Starbucks is actually right across the street from a family-owned Indian restaurant. At the time, I stood there looking back and forth, finally putting two and two together. Why hadn’t I thought of this sooner? Instead of buying chai at an impersonal corporate entity, I could just as easily enjoy a more authentic experience, while also contributing to a local business. But it wasn’t until I started frequenting the place that I noticed it was open almost all the time. The restaurant was never empty, but it’s also never full either. When I go in, the lady brings me my chai and perhaps an appetizer and I sit there, lost in my cup of tea. I drink my drink and think my thoughts and stare at the artwork on the wall or the pages of the latest book I’m reading. I order another tea and eat samosas until there are no more samosas. Then somewhere in there, I stir my drink in hypnotic little circles and ask myself big life questions for which I have no definitive answers to: remembering old friends, wondering about a rough outline for the future. I just don’t know. It’s been said that there aren’t any answers at the bottom of a bottle and that’s true. But when it comes to cups of chai, I’m at least inclined to keep looking.

September

The Mighty Jack Kirby!

Human Trafficking and Gender

By David Michael Newstead                   

Bob Spires researches human trafficking in the U.S. and across Southeast Asia. He is a professor at Valdosta State University in Georgia and I was recently able to ask him a few questions. Below we discuss the complex issues surrounding a human rights crisis at home and abroad.

David Newstead: Who’s being trafficked exactly? Is there a typical profile of trafficking victims? Or common risk factors?

Bob Spires: Great question and very difficult to answer. To me, human trafficking is a symptom of economic, social and political power disparities. Human trafficking is a specific type of exploitation of disadvantaged people, one of many types of exploitation on a spectrum from legally sanctioned forms of exploitation, to forms that, for a variety of reasons, are considered so heinous as to be made illegal either in specific countries or internationally.

People who are trafficked vary by context, but are people who experience significant disadvantage in a political and economic society. In the U.S., one specific group would be undocumented immigrants. The circumstances are so that undocumented people are demonized in the media and the popular imagination. They feel, whether true or not, that they cannot go to the authorities if they are mistreated. They are at a disadvantage in terms of negotiating work terms, pay, and so forth. They are even further marginalized through cultural and linguistic barriers.

Another group in the U.S. is the female runaway teenager. In terms of your interest in gender, teenage girls who runaway from home especially if they are from disadvantaged backgrounds, are exploited, often by older men who through physical intimidation and psychological manipulation traffic them all over the country and prostitute them through Craigslist and Backpage.

Unfortunately, the common risk factors fit a few billion of the world’s population and vary by local dynamics. For instance, in Thailand, there has been a constant flood of undocumented migrants from Burma, Laos and Cambodia for decades. Guess who gets trafficked in droves onto Thai fishing boats and brothels. Cambodians cross into Thailand every day without documentation, often under the help of Cambodian authorities skimming fees from day laborers in exchange for turning an official blind eye. When the workers finish a day’s work on a Thai rice farm, or a construction site, they may or may not be paid the agreed upon amount, if paid at all. Is that trafficking? If there was force, coercion and transport, then its trafficking, and if not, its just plain old fashioned exploitation. It happens every day with day laborers outside the local home improvement stores around the U.S. That type of exploitation doesn’t look like the plot of Taken, it is much more mundane and sad. It’s not a sexy action movie, just a symptom of the extreme power and wealth differential we have in our world.

David Newstead: So, what are some of the larger causes of human trafficking in Southeast Asia?

Bob Spires: In Southeast Asia, you have very deeply entrenched poverty that is a result of slow and uneven development, colonization, war, despotic leaders and many other factors. Thailand is unique because it was never really colonized officially but taken advantage of throughout WWII and the Vietnam War in exchange for not being truly occupied by the Japanese or the U.S. Thailand is relatively wealthy in comparison to its neighbors, never had a real dictator like its neighbors, and friendly to foreigners and foreign investment. These things came at a cost, though and now has an entrenched sex industry built around foreign military men first, and now the world’s sex tourists and pedophiles. Relative wealth near severe poverty is a recipe for exploitation, and particularly human trafficking. Women are not particularly valued in many Southeast Asian cultures and girls are often morally obligated to earn, at any cost, for the parents, while boys can be somewhat obligation free at adulthood.

Notions of beauty are also problematic in Thailand. Sex work represents an exponentially higher income than most other options, especially for poor rural people with limited access to education and diverse social connections. Women and men in the sex industry adapt their image based on western ideals of beauty, and orientalism certainly plays a part in that image as well. Exaggerated numbers of transgendered and transvestite males work in the sex industry for the same reasons, as this work can bring in much more income than possible in the village.

Large numbers of relatively wealthy foreigners looking for sex, large numbers of undocumented or just extremely impoverished people, and negative attitudes toward women and migrants, all converge to make for a situation ripe for human trafficking and other forms of exploitation.

David Newstead: How would you describe the extent of the problem in human terms and in numbers? For instance, are there annual estimates for people being trafficked around the region? And how accurate do you think those estimates are?

Bob Spires: Estimates for the size and scope of human trafficking are problematic at best. Large scale quantitative data on trafficking are unreliable and incomparable across contexts, nation boundaries and international regions. Despite the over use and replication of data from several unfounded sources, estimates are still nothing more than guestimates of a subjective and rapidly moving and transforming target. It is my opinion that too many resources and too much attention has already been directed to estimating the number of trafficking victims and too little has been earmarked for addressing the root causes of economic disadvantage, extreme power differentials and development of marginalized people through education. Numerous NGOs are doing this work and all of them struggle to find the funding to do their work. Yet, millions are diverted to these estimation efforts, largely for political reasons so that mechanisms like the TIP report will be easier for the largely incompetent and ill-informed people responsible for writing that thing up. Meanwhile, countless children sit in real shelters with little to no resources, countless men and women cannot access education and skills training needed to change their situation.

David Newstead: So, are gender issues the critical factor in understanding human trafficking? And if so, how?

Bob Spires: Gender issues are major factors in understanding trafficking, but gender can also be a problematic lens that can also confuse and blur trafficking in many people’s minds. As I mentioned before, trafficking and exploitation are symptoms of bigger issues of power disparities, and certainly gender creates major power disparities around the world. Whether the disparities are created in relation to a religious group or society that somehow places women lower on a social hierarchy, or due to cultural and economic issues women are at a disadvantage, females are restricted and limited in many settings around the world. Women in Southeast Asia, depending on the local culture, are often valued less in the family, and thus in society. Patriarchal societies, even in the developed world, restrict women less than men, particularly in terms of who is responsible for bearing the brunt of the household and child-rearing responsibilities. Thus, in cases of extreme poverty like you see in the hill tribes in Thailand, Burma and Laos, women’s options for social mobility are boxed in by cultural norms, competition with men who are favored for most occupations, yet facing enormous social and familial pressures to provide economically for their families. Unscrupulous people, often very economically desperate themselves, use these social realities to manipulate and exploit women, particularly, but not solely, in the sex industry. Poor and marginalized men are exploited as well for similar but distinctly male oriented labor.

Sex trafficking is certainly a scourge of modern civilization, and I do not belittle the efforts to address this form of exploitation. However, in the popular psyche, sex trafficking has become the sole, or at least the dominant, symbol of extreme exploitation world-wide. There are many reasons for this. Western culture has distinct sexual morays that are associated with, and arise from, Christian conceptions of sexuality. When we find that other cultures, and even people within our societies, have different notions of sexuality, we are confounded with a mix of abhorrence and titillation. This is the case in Southeast Asia. Much like the concept of orientalism posited by Edward Said, where western colonialists developed sort of totemistic and patriarchal notions of what it meant to be ‘oriental’, and how the image of the Asian other was manipulated for the benefit of the colonial power, so has the concept of human trafficking developed over time.

If you have ever been to Southeast Asia, you won’t go too far without running into Western religious groups going on mission trips in matching t-shirts, or religious NGOs saving the souls of prostitutes on Soi 4. You will just as easily find the secular humanist activists swooping into notorious red light districts to rescue victims, or staging sting operations in the fishing industry or sweatshops. While these efforts may be effective in the short term, often the rescued victims of exploitation return to other exploitative situations soon enough. The cameras are off, and the donors aren’t watching, but the exploitation continues because the economic disparities still exist. Gender is one of those issues related to disparity because men and women, boys and girls, are treated disparately the world over. Then, when marginalized women turn to one of their last economic options, having sex for money, they often must choose to either go into these exploitative occupations, where they are even more at risk of mistreatment by bar owners and customers, or, in some cases, superficially adopt foreign morals or religious beliefs just to access avenues out of that work. They are exploited by the system, and then again exploited by the NGOs, some of which exchange minimal education for total cultural conversion.

David Newstead: Say more about the misconceptions surrounding human trafficking…

Bob Spires: Human trafficking is wrought with misconceptions, misinformed people, misdiagnosed social problems, inaccurate or decontextualized data, and perpetuated myths. The term has been used to mean so many things for so many reasons that the definition has become less clear despite international attempts to clarify it in policy.

The TIP Report is a great example of loss of clarity in the study of human trafficking. The State Department hires foreign service officers and puts them in charge of evaluating an entire country’s human trafficking prevention, protection and prosecution efforts, gives them minimal guidelines and oversight, and rotates them through embassies worldwide before they can really become human trafficking experts. The TIP officers use information provided by organizations most closely connected with the U.S. and local government, and then the U.S. government eventually makes a largely political decision when deciding which tier a country is ranked in the report. We have no methodological consistency in the report that is a decade old and still filled with misinformation, so how could we expect that the general public would be any less misinformed.

Here in the state of Georgia, and the South in general, most people assume human trafficking means forced prostitution. They are comfortably uncomfortable with the idea that poor women the world over are kidnapped and forced into prostitution. They are less comfortable with the idea that a disadvantaged woman would go into prostitution willingly unless she was clearly morally corrupt and needed to be saved by the word of Jesus. They are even less comfortable with the idea that Latin American immigrants working in the cotton, tomato, and tobacco fields in their communities may have been trafficked to work in their communities, or for the local lawn service company because the owner of the company doesn’t want to pay workers health benefits or minimum wage. That conversation, which is essential for our society to have if we are to truly solve extreme exploitation of people here and abroad, is too complex and nuanced, and involves too many uncomfortable realities of our contemporary circumstances.

I’ll give an example from Atlanta. About 7 years ago, I met with staff from a Christian NGO that was one of the only organizations in the Atlanta area that took in human trafficking victims identified by law enforcement. The NGO was supported by a church in a very wealthy suburb and the congregation of the church were clearly upper middle class professionals. Most of the victims of human trafficking in the Atlanta area at the time were underage runaway African American girls from the street in Downtown Atlanta. These girls had dropped out of high school, run away from dysfunctional and broken homes full of abuse and poverty, and ended up on the street selling themselves for money. They typically encountered an older male who would pimp them on the street, control and manipulate them through force, coercion and emotional abuse. The NGO provided online credit recovery high school courses for the girls, in exchange for their attendance in religious courses and religious group therapy sessions which focused on convincing the girls that the reasons that they ended up in these terrible circumstances was because they didn’t accept Jesus and the teachings of the Bible. If only they would accept these things, especially the idea that sex before marriage is wrong, all of these issues would disappear and life would be so much better in the future for them. At no point did the organization acknowledge the dire economic situation for African American women in the South, the impact of social marginalization and educational disparity for those in poverty in our state, or the fact that sex was one of the only economic options they had on the streets because homeless people have a tough time getting even the most menial jobs in the formal economy. I don’t tell that story to denigrate the efforts of religious NGOs at-large, only to illustrate an example of how government agencies, NGOs and individuals often interpret the issues through their own cultural lenses, to the detriment of the people most impacted by, and vulnerable to, exploitation.

David Newstead: With that in mind, what are some possible solutions to this crisis?

Bob Spires: As an educator and an education scholar, I feel that education is a key solution to exploitation, particularly human trafficking. Education is a broad concept and means different things to different people. The particular forms of education must be tailored to local economic needs, but also mindful of global realities. Universal education is one step, especially in Southeast Asia. All children and youth need access to free education. That education must extend beyond basic education and offer options for specialized training and high level skills acquisition. Schools should move away from rote learning to encouraging critical thinking, problem solving and community activism. Governments world-wide should be required to improve education in poor and remote areas and do away with school fees such as uniforms and books. Governments should commit to non-formal education and training for adults as well with a focus on improving marginalized people’s occupational skills and credentials, a notion that will improve the overall quality of life, and tax base, of an entire society.

Governments should be required to make significant efforts to support NGOs doing good work in their countries, not only through linking NGOs with local companies and wealthy elites as potential donors, but facilitating formal networks that encourage collaboration among NGOs, and use government resources to improve infrastructure needed by NGOs. Corporations should be encouraged to support human trafficking organizations and other social justice related organizations through CSR programs and fundraising efforts. Government could easily promote the efforts of corporations, whether through social media or mainstream media, who support social improvement through these organizations and efforts.

The key to reducing human trafficking is improving the economic and social situation of marginalized people. Certainly this is not an easy endeavor, but much more effort can be done to address these issues that is currently being done world-wide. We need to communicate more clearly that human trafficking is just one symptom of the wealth gaps world-wide, and unless we approach human trafficking as a part of a bigger issue of massive numbers of marginalized people in every society in the world who are socially, economically, politically and culturally at a disadvantage, the problem of human trafficking will continue, if not increase.

From The Economist: Wonder Women and Macho Men

“CRISTINA’S pleasure” blared the cover of a 2012 edition of Noticias, a tabloid news magazine in Argentina. A caricature of the country’s president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, seemed to show her in mid-orgasm, her head thrown back, her mouth open. “Every day she seems more confident, sensual and even shameless,” the story went on. For further enlightenment, readers were invited to watch an animated video online of the president masturbating.

Good taste is not how tabloids sell copies in any country, but it is hard to imagine a British red top describing a female politician quite so crudely. The treatment of Ms Fernández in Noticias points to a Latin American paradox. Women have made great progress towards equality with men, especially in schools, workplaces and politics. But social attitudes have changed more slowly. Women’s ambitions are often belittled; hostility towards them is common. Raw statistics tell a story of female advancement; machista culture has yet to catch up.

In the past quarter-century, the proportion of women in the workforce has risen more in Latin America than in any other region. True, they typically hold jobs that require little skill and pay low salaries: domestic work is the largest source of female employment. But women now spend more years in school than men, which suggests that their prospects will improve. A handful have climbed to the top of the corporate ladder. Women lead Rede Energia, one of Brazil’s biggest electricity companies, and B2W, its biggest online retailer. Isela Costantini runs General Motors’ operations in Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay.

Women are still scarce in Latin American boardrooms. Not in politics, however. A quarter of legislators in the region are women, compared with one in seven in 2003. Several countries, including Argentina, Brazil and Mexico, have adopted quotas for women on parties’ lists of candidates. In the past decade, voters have elected women to the presidencies of Brazil, Chile and Costa Rica as well as Argentina, where Ms Fernández succeeded her husband, Néstor Kirchner, who later died.

Yet Latin Americans are less likely than people in any other region to say that women are treated with dignity. Only a third say women are respected, around half the share who think so in the Middle East and Africa, according to a Gallup poll. In Peru and Colombia (where corporate bosses are more likely to be female than in any other Latin American country), just a fifth of people say women are appreciated.

The higher expectations of Latin American women may explain part of the difference with other regions. They are more educated than African and Middle Eastern women, and so are probably angrier about inequality. But it may also be that their success is provoking a backlash. Men have a “misconception that the pie is only so big”, says Louise Goeser, chief executive of Siemens Mesoamérica, a big engineering firm. They think that if they “give pieces away, there’ll be less for them.”

In 2009 48% of Latin Americans thought that women who earn higher salaries than men “would have problems”, according to Latinobarómetro, a polling group. That was up from 36% five years before. The share of people saying “men make better political leaders” and “a woman’s place is in the home” also rose slightly. The survey was conducted while Ms Fernández and Michelle Bachelet, Chile’s president, were serving their first terms. Electing women to high office is apparently no cure for sexism.

Mucho machismo

It can be found anywhere. In Latin America it feeds off a culture of machismo, a chest-thumping sort of masculinity that can either smother women in domesticity or degrade them. Successful women brim with tales of the insensitivity and cluelessness they encounter. Ms Goeser says that for years invitations to conferences came addressed to “Señor Goeser”. The boss of a Brazilian multinational recalls that earlier in her career higher-ups would ignore her at meetings until conversation turned to the cosmetics industry. Alil Álvarez Alcalá, a Mexican lawyer, worked at a firm for ten years before she plucked up the nerve to ask to be made a partner. Her boss looked befuddled and asked, “Is your husband’s job not going well?” She quit soon after and formed her own firm.

Working women bear the “double burden” of housework: on average, they do two to five times as much of it as their lazier mates. Even the most assertive women find themselves going along with convention. Hinde Pomeraniec, an Argentine journalist who co-founded Ni Una Menos (Not One Less Girl), an anti-violence movement, catches herself asking her daughter to help clear the table and clean the house before asking her sons.

Institutions reinforce such habits. Boys play football in after-school programmes; most girls go home. That matters. Girls who play sports get better grades and hold better jobs as adults than those who do not, according to a study by Barbara Kotschwar of the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

Machismo can terrify as well as discourage. “It’s hot here, but wearing a skirt or dress is asking for trouble,” says Nelsy Gutierrez, a middle-school teacher in El Salvador. Young women who venture out in cities on foot can expect a chorus of lip-smacking and shouts of “ay—how delicious” from motorists and construction workers. The problem is so widespread that legislatures in Argentina, Chile, Panama and Peru have passed or at least debated laws to ban catcalling.

The unruliest men kill and injure women as well as each other. Three-quarters of countries with “very high” murder rates for women are in Latin America and the Caribbean, according to the Small Arms Survey carried out by the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. El Salvador has the world’s highest “femicide” rate, of 14 per 100,000 women. In Bolivia 52% of married or formerly married women say they have been physically or sexually abused by their partners. In Colombia and Peru that rate was a hardly comforting 39%.

Few feminists

The flip side of machismo is a traditional notion of femininity, which many Latin women embrace. At 15 girls are swathed in silk for lavish quinceañera parties. Of the past ten women who have been crowned Miss Universe, six have come from Latin America (including Puerto Rico). Even politicians play up their girlishness. Ms Fernández talks often of her love of clothes. “I was born made up,” she once said.

Many women think femininity is at odds with a belief in women’s equality, though it need not be. Feminism is thus a marginal creed in Latin America. Even female leaders less coquettish than Ms Fernández are reluctant to declare themselves to be feminists, for fear of being branded man-haters. That may be one reason why they have done less for women than many feminists had hoped.

Ms Bachelet, who was head of UN Women after her first term as president, has tried harder than the others. Her government recently created a women’s ministry and introduced a law that would decriminalise some abortions during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. (Abortion is illegal in most cases in 18 out of 21 Latin countries.)

By contrast Dilma Rousseff, Brazil’s president, has introduced fewer pro-women laws than her (male) predecessor. Ms Fernández has been a bust, say feminists. Male politicians seem to have an easier time espousing policies they approve of. Uruguay passed one of the region’s most liberal abortion laws in 2012, under the administration of José Mujica.

There are signs, though, that attitudes may at last be starting to change. In Ecuador, young men who call themselves the Cascos Rosa (Pink Helmets) lead workshops in schools to encourage respect for women and girls. In Argentina, Varones Antipatriarcales (Anti-patriarchal Men) rally against violence (and for legal abortion). In June this year, hundreds of thousands of people in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay joined a day of protest against violence against women organised by Ms Pomeraniec and other Argentine journalists.

Governments are starting to do a better job of fighting violence and promoting women’s equality at work. At least 13 countries have established specialised police stations to encourage women to report assaults. This year Brazil enacted a law that stiffens punishments for men who murder their wives or girlfriends. Chile extended paid maternity leave in 2011 (under a male president) and Colombia’s Congress is considering a similar measure.

Businesses are beginning to improve conditions for working women. In a survey conducted by McKinsey, a consultancy, 37% of firms said gender diversity was a top priority in 2013, up from 21% in 2010. All this is encouraging. But it may be a while before Latin America’s culture catches up with the achievements of its women.

Read more at The Economist – http://www.economist.com/news/americas/21661800-latin-american-women-are-making-great-strides-culture-not-keeping-up-wonder-women-and?fsrc=scn/li/cp/pe/st/wonderwomenandmachomen

Classic Man

A Look at Mass Shootings in America

By David Michael Newstead    

Cliff Leek is a PhD candidate at Stony Brook University studying the phenomenon of mass shootings. Below we discuss his research and issues surrounding gun violence in America.

David Newstead: First, why did you start studying mass shooters? What about the subject stood out to you?

Cliff Leek: Well, mass shootings have obviously been in the news more and more frequently in recent years and as a scholar of men and masculinity the question that kept coming to mind after each shooting was “what might masculinity have to do with this?” Lots of conversations with Michael Kimmel and also reading the work of folks like Jackson Katz led to the concept of “aggrieved entitlement“, which you will see in writing by Michael and I on the topic. It really stood out to us that while nearly every single one of these mass shooting was perpetrated by men there was almost never any conversation about why that might be… and that is a question that we wanted to grapple with.

David Newstead: Mass shooters are almost exclusively white males, true or false?

Cliff Leek: To be honest, it really depends on what data set you use and how “mass shooter” is defined. If you define mass shooters as someone shooting strangers, then absolutely. A lot of folks who are critical of the work that Michael and I have put out point to gang violence and say that we are clearly wrong, but we consider that a different kind of violence. Still just as important to understand and examine, but it is a different phenomenon.

David Newstead: So, the critical difference might be that gang violence is between people who know each other? Rather than someone randomly shooting up a theater or a mall?

Cliff Leek: Yes, absolutely.

David Newstead: So, as you were studying this phenomenon, what was the most surprising thing you learned?

Cliff Leek: Well, I’ll give you two things. First, I was surprised just how many of these shootings there are. I knew there were a lot, but once you dig into the data you see that there are so many more that you never hear about or only hear about very briefly on the news and then quickly forget. We aren’t talking about a small handful of these incidences a year. I mean, this is happening far more than 3-5 times a year. This kind of violence is now happening dozens of times a year.

Second, I was surprised at our willingness as a society to ignore the trends in perpetration of this kind of violence and simply write this violence off as an issue of mental illness – over and over again.

David Newstead: What’s a ballpark estimate for the number of these incidents each year?

Cliff Leek: Well, again, that depends on how you define the parameters. How many people does a person have to shoot or kill for it to be considered a mass shooting? One of the data sets that we really appreciated was from Mother Jones and they report 71 of these shootings since 1982. But the Stanford Geospatial Data Center reports 42 so far in 2015 alone.

David Newstead: Quite a discrepancy. So, what’s behind these trends then? Shootings have gotten so common. They set off predictable news coverage, a predictable gun control debate, and then mental health discussions.

Cliff Leek: We don’t have a perfect answer to that question. Every time this kind of violence hits the news we have the usual talk of “too many guns,” “not enough mental health services,” etc. And we don’t claim that those aren’t part of the problem. I personally believe that they are, but they aren’t the whole problem.

The idea that Michael and I put forward, aggrieved entitlement, is basically that men, and white men in particular, have benefited from a tremendous amount of privilege and advantage throughout U.S. history and that the current violence is the result of the perception that that privilege is slipping away. Many white men in this country see the gradual leveling of the playing field as attacks on the lifestyle they were promised – a lifestyle of power and privilege. We argue that many white men are reacting to that perceived loss by lashing out violently.

David Newstead: Is there a solution to that?

Cliff Leek: I would argue that the best way to a solution that we have is education. Men wouldn’t feel this sense of loss if we didn’t acculturate them into feeling that the world is meant to serve them in the first place.

David Newstead: Would you say your research has been unpopular in certain circles? Meaning that some people want to perpetuate an idea of gun violence that’s drastically different.

Cliff Leek: I would say so, yes. I was shocked at the strong backlash that it received from folks who don’t want to even consider the possibility that this violence might have something to do with masculinity – and might have something to do with whiteness. When Michael and I were published in the New York Daily News we both very promptly received emails and messages on social media from folks with the Confederate flag and/or Swastikas on their profiles calling us all kinds of awful things. I wasn’t particularly surprised at the time that that element of the U.S. still existed, but I was surprised at how vocal and out in the open it was.

David Newstead: Isn’t that convoluted though? Reactionary men writing angry emails to say how wrong you are about some men being angry reactionaries.

Cliff Leek: Hahaha yes. There is a lot of irony there.

David Newstead: I’m trying to think of a good closing question, but I feel like this issue is still very open ended and with us for a while. Sadly.

Cliff Leek: I totally understand that feeling. We can only hope that we can eventually start to take it seriously. I am in the beginning stages right now of working with a team of researchers to examine the backlash against progressive gains in race, class, and gender. You might be familiar with Susan Faludi’s book, Backlash, where she talks about the regressive efforts to undermine feminism in the 1990s. We are hoping to take a similar look to see if we are experiencing a sort of inter-sectional backlash moment right now.

David Newstead: I look forward to hearing the findings. It’s definitely timely research.

From the NYT: A Master’s Degree in Masculinity?

By Jessica Bennett

Michael Kimmel stood in front of a classroom in bluejeans and a blazer with a pen to a whiteboard. “What does it mean,” the 64-year-old sociology professor asked the group, most of them undergraduates, “to be a good man?”

The students looked puzzled.

“Let’s say it was said at your funeral, ‘He was a good man,’ ” Dr. Kimmel explained. “What does that mean to you?”

“Caring,” a male student in the front said.

“Putting other’s needs before yours,” another young man said.

“Honest,” a third said.

Dr. Kimmel listed each term under the heading Good Man, then turned back to the group. “Now,” he said, “tell me what it means to be a real man.”

This time, the students reacted more quickly.

“Take charge; be authoritative,” said James, a sophomore.

“Take risks,” said Amanda, a sociology graduate student.

“It means suppressing any kind of weakness,” another offered.

“I think for me being a real man meant talk like a man,” said a young man who’d grown up in Turkey. “Walk like a man. Never cry.”

Dr. Kimmel had been taking notes. “Now you’re in the wheelhouse,” he said, excitedly. He pointed to the Good Man list on the left side of the board, then to the Real Man list he’d added to the right. “Look at the disparity. I think American men are confused about what it means to be a man.”

You’ve heard of women’s studies, right? Well, this is men’s studies: the academic pursuit of what it means to be male in today’s world. Dr. Kimmel is the founder and director of the Center for the Study of Men and Masculinities at Stony Brook University, part of the State University of New York system, which will soon start the first master’s degree program in “masculinities studies.”

No, Dr. Kimmel joked, the department title doesn’t just roll off the tongue. But it’s called “masculinities” (plural) to acknowledge that there is “more than one way to be a man.”

To read the complete New York Times article – http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/09/fashion/masculinities-studies-stonybrook-michael-kimmel.html?_r=1

To read my interview with Michael Kimmel – https://philosophyofshaving.wordpress.com/2015/03/21/angry-white-men-author-interview/

The Same Damn Shirt

By David Michael Newstead      

There’s this particular shirt from H&M and after I bought one it didn’t take long to realize that lots of other guys own this shirt too. It’s a checkered button-up: red, white, and black. And once you see how common it is, you can’t ever unsee that. I mean, this shirt is everywhere! On several occasions, that’s sparked conversations between myself and similarly dressed coworkers. Once, I even ran into a complete stranger who was my exact fashion doppelganger that day. The same checkered shirt. The same shoes. Same tie! We were like twins and both of us seemed very perplexed about it.

Anyway, all of that is a roundabout way of saying that there isn’t much variety in men’s professional attire. During lunch recently, I saw eight guys walk out of their office together, all wearing the same slightly blue dress shirt. And for the record, I also have one of those shirts too.

To me, the eerie thing about this is the idea that whole populations of men are going around looking like carbon copies of each other: same shoes, pants, ties, shirts. Not similar looking clothes either. Literally, these are the same items from the same stores worn on the same day like a standard issue uniform.

Best case scenario, this is just boring in my opinion. Perhaps, it’s reflective of a lack of imagination or effort. Maybe everyone’s too tired to care. Or the problem could be that corporate giants are now churning out mass quantities of sameness where there were once diverse options to choose from. At its worst though, this is really kind of creepy if you think about. It’s monotonous and conformist.

That said, I’m not proposing that you start dressing like an eccentric weirdo. And overall, your clothes should fit your setting. But there’s actually plenty that you can do to highlight your own individual style without appearing unprofessional or out-of-place.

Some solutions to the aforementioned lack of variety include:

Having an eye-catching accessory like a great watch or a sharp-looking tie
Incorporating select vintage clothes
Layering your clothes, depending on the weather
And consulting a tailor so that your wardrobe benefits from some outside perspective

Of course, at the end of the day it’s really up to the person. I mean, no one is going to make the extra effort for you, but that’s kind of the point. With clothes and in life, do you want to blandly go with the crowd all the time or do you want to stand out?

The goal is to look your best and to be your best and that doesn’t always involve blending in.

Introducing Postage

By David Michael Newstead       

Recently, some friends and I started a group writing project called Postage. Postage is a story told primarily through postcards and letters, revolving around multiple generations of one family in America. I think it’ll be interesting and it’s a good opportunity to be creative with snail mail. Today, I posted the first entry in the story and I hope you enjoy.

To Follow Postage – https://postageproject.wordpress.com/