Other Voices / Our Take, Posts from Dr Beth

What About the Men

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This article has wonderful takeaways. The new dreams of being significant decision makers that young girls can cherish. The importance of balance in the legislature. The participation of women who have a less combative cultural paradigm boding well for less partisanship.

But the article inadvertently and tragically reinforces the very problem it is written to address. Why doesn’t it start with the question, “where are the men?” Maybe these women can do what they do, because their husbands are at home full-time. These men are the fathers of the children, the people who live in the home that is well run, the sons of the elderly. Men make up almost 50% of the Vermonters. Why does the article assume that “women have two jobs”. How many jobs do the men have? It assumes the men only have one job. Isn’t that the problem?

The article itself is a stereotype. The presumption is that women can’t get double the work done. Of course they can’t. The unconscious paradigm in this article of what the level of care should be and which gender is doing that care is pulled directly from the 1950’s. The standard consists of a full-time invisible mom at home and an invisible dad at the office also full time. The 50’s workload was a division of labor completely based on gender.

In the modern world, the workload has to be based on available time for partners. While there are many single moms and dads, there are many more people who have partners. Instead of supporting the cultural paradigm that women double up on work, each couple needs to make a list of jobs – the ones that earn money and the ones that provide the care for dependents.

The assignments should be based on availability, earning power, number of dependents, hours at work and all the practical logistics of modern life. They should not be based on some division of labor organized by a patriarchal culture that still haunts us. If it is the case that the care for children and seniors and paid work are overwhelming for partners, then it is realistic that both men and women will be older when they choose to step into public service.

Stop thinking gender for job assignments. Change the paradigm. The men are the solution and they are right there.

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Vermont has put women at legislative helm. Where will they steer?
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2021/0302/Vermont-has-put-women-at-legislative-helm.-Where-will-they-steer

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

Other Voices / Our Take, Posts from Dr Allison, Posts from Dr Beth

Misandry the Destruction of Boys and Men

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Author Terry Ward is right on spotting the use of “simp” as a specific piece of a bullying patriarchal culture. The author is also correct that boys are being whipsawed by the emergence of a new humanistic culture.

In that new culture they will be called on to partner in domestic chores and in the working world with women who they may also report to. If the boys want an adult and work life, they will have to take turns with girls. As if middle school wasn’t tough enough, the mixed messages on what should be punished and what will be rewarded are brutal.

Why this disconnect? The hangover is from another era in which little boys grew up to join a man fort, a group of “bros” who were warriors together. The boys ranked each other in real and play bullying, testing for the best, seeing who would lead and who would follow.

This early rite of passage for boys set up their life chances. Little girls on the other hand survived by attaching to the most successful of these boys, doting on them and worshiping them. Each little girl sought out the man she would orbit for the rest of her life as he bonded with his team. Adult men and women in the patriarchal world would never intersect one another.

The word misogyny is well known as the hatred of women. This is not quite accurate. We think that women are often honored for being homemakers and wives. Where we really see hatred of women, is hatred of women who are doing what the men can do. Just look at what is happening to Kamala Harris online these days. Misogyny is more often the hatred of women doing what used to be an exclusive domain of men, acting with agency. Women who lead, who pick their sexual partners, who work to bring home the paycheck are slammed as bitches, sluts and bad moms.

A much less known but equally brutal word, misandry, is the bullying of boys. The same applies, that this is more often with boys and men who do jobs that used to be assigned solely to women. Boys who are kind to their partners, seek non-brutal or authoritarian jobs, or help with domestic chores are seen as wimps, pussy-whipped, or flakes. This type of misandry and misogyny is specific to a gender siloed patriarchy culture that puts down any person who does not stay in their gender lane: women are subordinate and men are the ones in charge. Women are kind and caring, and men are leaders and strong heroes. Girls are denied normal human agency and boys are denied normal human emotions.

Mothers and fathers can be helpless in the face of this middle school peer pressure. Here is where boys and girls start to seek out the team that they will work with in the world and the partner with whom they will form a new family. Their peers become exquisitely important. Someone who is a good friend with both boys and girls, someone who loves his partner, does indeed have a brave new world of people that will work with him in his future life. It is the bullies who are facing the head winds of an egalitarian society, but in middle school they are a patriarchy force for misery.

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The new slang teens use to insult boys who are ‘too nice’ to girls
https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/19/health/what-is-simp-teen-slang-wellness/index.html

Photo by Morgan Basham on Unsplash

Other Voices / Our Take, Posts from Dr Beth

Japan – The national commitment to crushing women’s voice

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Japan is literally dying from sexism and the symbolic crushing of women’s voice is just a poignant metaphor. Women have simply stopped reproducing because there is no point to it in a society with no voice for women.

By 2050, Japan’s population will shrink by 25% and those who remain will be overwhelmingly older. The cost of childcare in all industrial societies depletes the birth rate. The ferocious patriarchal culture profoundly puts down women’s agency, women’s power and leadership, and strips women of entering into the policy discussions that would change society and support a higher birth rate.

Patriarchal culture suffers from the “invisible wife” syndrome and none more so than Japan. The assumption is that women are invisible and subordinate support workers, reproducing and creating the next generation with all the work of the world in the hands of men. The men are oligarchs, running enterprises that are purely made of men – man forts. The creation of male identity is based on women never dominating a man and therefore never controlling the public conversation. Literally never being visible or having a voice.

In the modern world this has created a terrible catch-22 for Japan with no end in sight. The problem is that women must remain invisible or the patriarchy changes. This means women’s needs and standing in the workplace must be treated as if it doesn’t exist. With women able to make their own living, albeit with a severe wage gap, women have decided the payoff of having children with no societal support isn’t there.

So Japan quietly dies from crushing women’s voices and the man fort men would rather kamikaze the country than listen.

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Japan’s LDP party invites women to look, not talk at key meetings
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-56095215

Photo by Jezael Melgoza on Unsplash

Other Voices / Our Take, Posts from Dr Beth

Understanding and Promoting Inclusive Feminism

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Author Tembe Denton Hurst nails it when she points out that the second wave feminists were white alpha, mostly privileged women fighting for equal access to high paid decision making positions in the enterprises that run our society. They had been closed out of those jobs by their literal brothers who used the endless tropes of the put down patriarchy to isolate them from power. White women continued to discriminate, along all of the intersections, putting down women of color, LGBTQ+ women, older women, disabled women, working class women, and non-Christian women.

However, the issue is not to throw out an understanding of the unique structure of the put down patriarchy used against women and how to counter them in order to understand intersectionality. A woman herself will experience any put downs as a whole, but society has a very particular tool kit used against all women that needs to be understood.

The bedrock of patriarchy is separating men and women into two different camps with men controlling the decision making and women working as the support staff and exercising no power, no agency. Black men have controlled the preacher’s roles in Black churches. This is sexism. Gay men earn more than Lesbian women, this is sexism. Older men get more acting roles than older women, this is sexism. Steven Hawking had terrible disabilities but also Nobel Prizes, this is sexism.

The tropes that strip a woman of agency, women who are exercising agency, are straightforward. We have heard them all. Women who exercise agency in enterprises (leaders), are bitches. Women exercising agency and working to support their family are bad moms. Women exercising agency making their own sexual choices are sluts. These tropes destroy women’s agency and affect all women. Destroying women’s decision making agency is the mission of the patriarchy.

Let’s define feminism as the fight against the put down patriarchy, a battle we all share. Let’s look at what can be done to counter women being stripped of agency. This is not a white woman’s fight. This is a fight that everyone who is identified as female has to fight in a culture which still is haunted by the patriarchy.

Let’s fight the fights brought to us by the problem of the other intersections: ageism, religious bigotry, racism, homophobia, disablism, and classism. Each of these has unique challenges and needs to be dealt with in its own right. When combined, all of these discriminations need to be fought in the name of establishing a humanistic culture, an acceptance of everyone as a person, and not the rigid authoritarian exclusionary practices of the patriarchy.

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Why feminism is still failing so many women
https://apple.news/A2rlzVwr4T8SIgCsKF3bkjg

Photo by chloe s. on Unsplash

Other Voices / Our Take, Posts from Dr Beth

The new 15% glass ceiling

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New research has found that while changing corporate board policy has increased diversity, it doesn’t necessarily change company cultures.

With only one or two women on a corporate board, the culture doesn’t have to stop being a man fort, the women just do a “Kabuki dance” of navigating the men.  At the 30-40 % level of participation, women would be making better headway. 

The boardroom is its own universe. The innards of the company are a separate fight. But better to have some women members than none. Known as “tokens” or “mascots,” these brilliant women are generally not included in the actual decision making. That is carried on by an informal clique of men. 

The phrase “Smurfette Principle” was coined by Katha Pollitt in 1991 referring to the little blue female character in the otherwise all male group of little boys.  This is a clear message that the action was organized around the boys and she is an accessory to the main story. 

Women need to be at critical mass to have an impact on the culture and move it from a man fort to an equal playing field. A playing field where board members are treated as members of the policy making team and not members of their gender silo. 

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What Happened When India Mandated Gender Diversity on Boards

https://hbr.org/2021/02/what-happened-when-india-mandated-gender-diversity-on-boards

Photo by Benjamin Child on Unsplash

Other Voices / Our Take, Posts from Dr Beth

Chilling

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While the country is riveted on the racism implied in the impeachment trial of our former white supremacist President, we can’t forget that the greatest terror most of these men carry is fear of women exercising agency.

If women are decision makers men will have to obey the direction of women. Most importantly, the men will have to take turns. The essence of taking turns is that each member of the group trades off, in rotation, the role of being in charge of the conversation whether in a workplace or a household.

For healthy men and women, this is a natural process in modern mixed gender teams. You know you are in the presence of the pervasive white supremacist mysogyny, the hatred of women exercising power in the same way as men, when you see the demeaning tropes hurled at a chosen female target.

Nancy Pelosi is treated as a powerless little girl in the ugly theater of using the phrase “Naaaancy” as a taunt. Reminiscent of “The Shining,” she is treated as a fearful little girl – a child – cowering and running from powerful male predators. It would be pathetic if it weren’t so real that this tool kit of humiliating slams is still lurking in the dark places in our culture and it was on full display on January 6th.

Supposed “real men” protect women and children. These men attempt to kill a woman whom they treat as a child. Fortunately, Speaker Pelosi is the fearless leader that epitomizes the women and the country which will lead us out of these dark days.

__________

Capitol rioters searched for Nancy Pelosi in a way that should make every woman’s skin crawl
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/nancy-pelosi-capitol-insurrection-footage-impeachment-trial/2021/02/10/34bb843c-6bec-11eb-9f80-3d7646ce1bc0_story.html

Photo by Luis Villasmil on Unsplash

Other Voices / Our Take, Posts from Dr Allison, Posts from Dr Beth

Jezebel

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Two Texas pastors have not backed down after comparing the new Vice President to Jezebel — which scholars say is both racist and sexist.

The put down language of patriarchy is used as an assault weapon against Vice President Kamala Harris. It is intended to defeat her from becoming a role model for women who legitimately exercise power and agency in our society.

Harris is not attacked as an individual incapable of leadership. She is attacked precisely because she is an archetype, a trope. If she were to be accepted as a leader then the flood gates would open. Women and everyone of color would suddenly be eligible for legitimate authority, approved ahead of time as a candidate for senior leadership. If this were to happen in the mind of Southern Baptist evangelicals all hell would break loose, literally.

The standing of white men as the sole decision makers and women as the invisible support workers is the bedrock of this religious society. God dominating man, man dominating women and whites dominating everyone is their vision of what creates cosmic order. White grievance politics are being driven by the changes which rightfully are making this view obsolete.

One heartbeat away from the Presidency, Harris could not be more emblematic of legitimate senior leadership.

The put down culture attacks women’s agency by proving they are “bad women” in three simple ways. First, they are proven to be bad moms, killing babies through abortions. Next, they are sluts with dark sexual powers who take over men’s minds and corrupt them. Finally, they are bitches who just seek power for themselves and not to serve the community. According to the Bible, Jezebel was all three and therefore the worst woman in the bible, deserving of shame and scorn.

Jezebel, the story goes, was from another culture and kingdom (she was Phoenician, not an Israelite). Reading the story from her perspective would be quite different. The bottom line is that the writers of this part of the bible wanted to make a point, that freedom of religion (worshipping the gods from your culture) is idolatry. There is no way a woman can have agency, even if she is a queen. This meme fits as a great Harris put down for evangelicals who do not have tolerance for freedom of religion or women’s agency. There is no way a black woman can have agency, even if she is the Vice President.

We need the build up language of a modern humanistic culture, that honors agency across the diverse peoples and cultures of our diverse country. We need to open the floodgates of great women leaders who are equal citizens waiting to serve.

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Southern Baptist Pastors Compare Kamala Harris To Bible’s Queen Jezebel
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/kamala-harris-jezebel-pastors_n_601d967fc5b68e068fbe2c22

How bad was Jezebel?
https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/people-cultures-in-the-bible/people-in-the-bible/how-bad-was-jezebel/

Other Voices / Our Take, Posts from Dr Beth

The Country Will No Longer Support White Superiority

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NY Times opinion columnist Paul Krugman describes the current state of the GOP as a “Doom Loop of Bizarro.” But this “Doom Loop of Bizarro” is perhaps our only answer to getting out from under the collateral damage that the death of the Republican cult will cause. We are actually lucky and making progress the more the Republicans self-destruct. Cults can be weakened by outsiders but it is their own inherent self-destructive loop that is their downfall. Unfortunately, it is grim to watch and the collateral damage can be terrifying.

The Nazis fell in 1945 but Berlin was a parking lot of rubble. The good news is that Oregon, Arizona and California have all entered the Q-Anon insanity phase for the Republicans. The sooner the cult surfaces in all its self-destructive fury and the rest of us fight back, the sooner this chaos will recede into the rear-view mirror. A true center right party will emerge again but not from this Republican cult.

What Paul Krugman should explore is that this movement is a continuous thread from 1619 to the Civil War to Jim Crow to the Civil Rights movement. After the Civil Rights law was passed in 1964, Nixon, Roger Ailes and Lee Atwater and crew proactively recruited the members of George Wallace’s American Independent Party to become the new grass roots of the Republican Party.

I was a Republican candidate for Congress on the California Central Coast in 2002. I also had a PhD in Political Anthropology with training in political cults and an MBA with my own business and service on the State Chamber of Commerce. This unique resume gave me a bleacher seat to watch the takeover of the Republican Party by a True Believer movement. The forces in the late 80’s and early 90’s was a cookie cutter of the fanatical mass movement described by Eric Hoffer in his surgically precise study of the Nazis and the structure of political cults.

White identity is core to the personality structure of roughly 60% of the whites in America. Whites are currently only 60% of the population and shrinking. The 40% of the population that is of color is at a critical tipping point.

The country will no longer support white superiority. There are many systemic social injustices backed not only by white supremacists , but the federal government such as white only GI Bill mortgages in good neighborhoods leading to unequal assets for whites, and inadequate social and health care services for those in the federally produced disadvantaged neighborhoods. These injustices need a systemic disassembly starting with the dissolution of the Republican cult and changes in federal and state policies. The 40% of white Americans for whom white identity is not a lynch pin when combined with the Americans of color can save our democracy. This is the coalition of just plain Americans that did just that in 2020.

We must do it in 2022 if we are to have a country for all of our children. America will be saved. Republicans will eat themselves up and deservedly perish.

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The G.O.P. Is in a Doom Loop of Bizarro
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/28/opinion/republican-lies.html

Other Voices / Our Take, Posts from Dr Beth

Exercising Agency as a Necessary Survival Skill

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Author Madonna King from her book “Ten-Ager” concludes that girls as young as ten years old are shutting down the activities they think they are no good at.

Culture must start early. In foraging societies, girls were skilled by the age of ten. They understood the zoology and botany of their area, had craft-making skills, were good at tracking, cooking – you name it. By ten girls would need to have “read” and “learned” from their environment.

Unfortunately that means a girl is seeking an upper class husband in the patriarchal world where marriage to a high ranking man and having his legitimate babies was the best “ticket” to ride. So being beautiful, docile and deferential is her chance to win the marriage lottery. We end up with body shaming, feeling like an imposter, and adopting a cowered persona. This is tragic.

Changing the acculturation of kids will probably come last because culture is “conservative.” In the old days you died if you didn’t learn your parents’ tool kit. We are all afraid of being bad moms, so we repeat the acculturation patterns. Additionally, the kids learn these patterns in their same-sex teams while growing up.

We have a long haul to train girls from birth that having and exercising agency is a necessary survival skill in the modern world. It is a skill to be admired, not a drawback in the hunt for a non-existent prince charming.

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Limiting potential from age 10: how girls pigeonhole themselves

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/jan/31/limiting-potential-from-age-10-how-girls-pigeonhole-themselves

Other Voices / Our Take, Posts from Dr Beth

Women Hunters

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How and why would scientists miss that prehistoric women were hunters? More importantly how does the narrative change if we view early hunters through a realistic lens?

Young girls suddenly see themselves as active and important agents in early societies if they know that women were important hunters. An equally important part of this is for young boys to see themselves as caregivers and not just active hunter athletes in the public arena. Humans do both – have agency and tender emotions.

The science of early human cultural evolution began in the 19th century and was soaked in a patriarchal culture that portrays us in terms of the paradigm and assumptions used in looking at these groups. These assumptions leaked into the 20th century and still haunt us.

The purpose of the patriarchy was to honor men for doing public sector jobs and reward them as “athletes in training” to be warriors and sports competitors. Men were not to display or share tender emotions. Women were to have no agency and be invisible in the public arena and be caregivers and support workers exclusively. Men and women were shamed and ostracized from the community if they acted out the other gender’s job.

Women who tried to lead were bitches and men who cared for children were wimps. Early foragers lived in an entirely different reality. For instance, research on the modern Kalahari desert bushmen, the !Kung San, have shown that people in a forging environment simply focus on getting the job done. Chores need to be completed and the genders are not important. They are not job snobs.

When it comes to the athleticism of hunting large game in ancient times, scientists were blind-sided by the foolish idea of competitive athleticism.

Modern athletes are truly physical specimens occupying the far end of the bell curve. An NFL football player at 6 feet 7 inches and 350 pounds is as rare as a 108 lb 5-foot 9 supermodel. These are not your average humans. They are the result of culling millions of people to find the perfect specimens.

Early foraging groups had no such luxury. They would have dealt with who was genetically available. All humans needed only to be healthy and fit to participate in the hunt. On average, men are only 15% larger than women which means there were a whole lot of competent girls available to hunt as effectively as men.

What everyone needed was protein, and clearly humans worked on mixed gender teams to get it. Much more difficult to find in the archaeological record, we presume many foraging men cared for the children when that job needed to be done, much like the modern !Kung San men who provide childcare.

The modern world with its hundreds of job descriptions needs to get on with a humanistic culture that honors the work that is done. We are more like our foraging ancestors. Talent is spread across the genders, everyone is earning a paycheck and everyone is caring for kids.

It’s natural, and it is how we became who we are.

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Ancient remains prove women have been running shit for at least 9000 years
https://www.mic.com/p/ancient-remains-prove-women-have-been-running-shit-for-at-least-9000-years-41857542