Boy books. You’re thinking The Boys’ Book of Trains and The Hardy Boys, right? I’m thinking most of the books I took in high school English. Consider Knowles’ A Separate Peace. Separate indeed. It’s set at a boys’ boarding school. The boys are obsessed with jumping out of a tree. This involves considerable risk of …
Category: gender issues
Feb 05 2012
The Superbowl: knock yourself out
So does anyone think someone’s going to get knocked out during this year’s Superbowl? It’s happened before. And frankly, I’m surprised it doesn’t happen more often. Just like that latest disgrace with our prisoners of war. I mean, consider the similarities:
Jan 17 2012
The Other Sex
Men, I mean. After all, they are the ones who define themselves in relation to us: to be a man is to be whatever is not to be a woman. If women are graceful, then to be graceful is feminine. A graceful man is effeminate. A real man is not graceful. He’s not necessarily clumsy, …
Dec 24 2011
Bang Bang
Ya gotta love Christmas. Peace on earth, goodwill toward men, and record sales of toy guns. But, my friend says, her son, and all of his friends, will make a gun out of any old thing. The problem isn’t the toys. Okay, so it’s the boys. Seems they’re hardwired with a propensity toward killing. Why …
Nov 29 2011
Smile!
If I had a dollar for every time someone (i.e., a man) told me to smile, I’d be rich. (And if I had five dollars for every time that same someone did not tell a man to smile, I’d be really rich.) Why is it that women are told, are expected, to smile a lot? …
Nov 14 2011
King of the Castle
Octavia Butler got it right in Xenogenesis when the aliens identified one of our fatal flaws as that of being hierarchy-driven (they fixed us with a bit of genetic engineering) – but she failed to associate the flaw predominantly with males. And Steven Goldberg got it right in Why Men Rule when he explained that …
Oct 22 2011
Leadership?
Some time ago, I attended a “Women in Leadership” conference put on by one of Ontario’s larger unions. Wheat I learned there disillusioned two parts of me: the labour part and the feminist part.
Oct 05 2011
“Daddy, daddy, the house is on fire!” “Not now, sweetie, the game’s on.”
So about this guy in Taiwan who drops his child in order to catch a foul ball at a baseball game… I don’t know whether to be more appalled at the man’s action or at the media’s framing of it. Am I appalled that we condition our males to value sports over parenting? That they’d …
Oct 01 2011
“And son? Take care of your mom while I’m gone.”
Excuse me? I don’t need a child to take care of me. I know, he might reply, I’m just trying to – trying to what? Teach him to be a man? Teach him that grown women need looking after? And that he, as the one with the penis, is just the person to do it? …
Sep 19 2011
The Sexism Compensation Index (SCI)
I suspect that even with today’s rigorous interview and job performance appraisal techniques, which require that all applicants be asked and scored on the same questions, multiple standards still interfere with merit as the sole criterion for hiring and promotion. How? Well suppose
fiction
