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Ozy Frantz is a student at a well-respected Hippie College in the United States. Zie bases most of zir life decisions on Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, and identifies more closely with Pinkie Pie than is probably necessary. Ozy can be contacted at [email protected] or on Twitter as @ozyfrantz. Writing is presently Ozy's primary means of support, so to tip the blogger, click here.
And anyone is able to start a blog, write stuff on the internet, etc. If you see a gap, then fill it!. That was not aimed at you personally, L. As I said, I think you brought up a valid point. I personally don’t feel qualified to write about the perspectives of people of color or marginalized minorities, but I read a lot of other people’s writings and link to them whenever possible. I too have been following the Trayvon Martin case with a knot in my stomach. Ta-Nehisi Coates has written some really powerful stuff about this at his… Read more »
@Ozy: That’s good to know, and thanks for clearing things up. I’ll admit that the stuff going on with the Kony shit and the Trayvon case have gotten me particularly riled up because of how my friends reacted (or in the case of Trayvon, not reacted). I posted this up on FB where I’d gotten into a heated argument with one of them about white saviorism with the Invisible Children, and got no reply from them: “I mean, it was only two weeks ago when almost every white person I knew was tweeting about stopping a brutal African warlord from… Read more »
L: Congratulations, you noticed the thing I freak out about constantly about NSWATM. 🙂 I try my best to be intersectional. I’m trying to balance two things: on one hand, I know intersectionality is incredibly important and painting men’s problems as being JUST about privileged men is ridiculous; on the other hand, I am incredibly privileged myself and don’t want to say, through ignorance, things that are offensive or wrong about other people’s identities, which means that a lot of the time I steer away from saying things about them at all. In the future I will try to be… Read more »
PS- The murder of Trayvon Martin happened in this country.
You can actually meet cis, trans, genderqueer, vanilla, kinky people, right here and now, without moving 20,000 miles across the sea to interview people, you know. That’s the thing. My god, since when did raising awareness about the existence of a subject equate to investigative journalism on par with some of the most traveled, learned, and experienced talent in the publishing industry who dedicate their careers to doing just that? Christ, you’d think asking for a little more inclusivity as the subject of the blog lends itself to would merit is something horrible and impossible and I should just shut… Read more »
And anyone is able to start a blog, write stuff on the internet, etc. If you see a gap, then fill it! 🙂
“How can Ozy write about issues that cismen face if zie isn’t a cisman? How can Noah write about issues that monogamous, vanilla, genderqueer men face if he isn’t monogamous, vanilla, or genderqueer? It’s a really bad argument, and one that just doesn’t belong in any social justice circle of any stripe, IMO.” You can actually meet cis, trans, genderqueer, vanilla, kinky people, right here and now, without moving 20,000 miles across the sea to interview people, you know. That’s the thing. Trans-cultural things can be interesting if say, someone from India comes and lives here for 20 years. Ask… Read more »
We can only ever be aware of where we live. See though, that’s bullshit too. It’s the same as saying “I don’t know what it’s like to be black or blind or homeless or trans or Muslim in this country, so I’m just never going to talk about any of those things, and don’t blame me for never being aware of any experience that doesn’t fall squarely in the realm of my reality. Even though I’m going to claim to speak for a group that those minorities are technically part of.” How can Ozy write about issues that cismen face… Read more »
“It is presented as universal, intersectional, and kyriarchically-aware, when in fact it rarely ever touches on any of those things ever.” We can only ever be aware of where we live. And much of what applies to the US also does to Canada, except the religiosity, and all government positions that are tied to religion (abortion, same-sex marriage). We can name the violence or events happening in say, South Africa. Cite articles. And talk about it at length. But we are not there. We don’t know the culture. We don’t know how intersectional stuff works there. Going by rape relief… Read more »
I think it’s safe to say some idiot comments got deleted which is why the conversation doesn’t make as much sense near to the end here? So I guess I’ll just address this diddy of WTFery: Look up where it says “COM = US Commercial.” It’s an American website, clearly indicated by the URL. Why wouldn’t you assume that everyone will talk about things as if they were in America when you’re on an American website? I’m saying this as a European citizen. Because American exceptionalism is bullshit and our history of assuming the rest of the world should/does work… Read more »
@Suturexself, yes it does. But having sex with a woman also makes a man “dirty.” Read all about it in a holy book of your choice. Look, these concepts came around before people understood the principle of mass/energy conservation and thought they could turn lead into gold, too. It didn’t need to add up. But there’s actually no real evidence that women get slut shamed more than men. Honestly, I mean that from a scientific perspective. It’s just confirmation bias. We’re taught that slut shaming is wrong for women, so we look for and remember examples of it easily. We… Read more »
I’ve said that one before my self suturexself. I recall a while back where I think it was a sex ed class or something that talked about a girl and how her being a virgin was like some object. And the example went that as she had sex that object in question got dirty until she would reach a point where she was so dirty that no man would want to marry her. Now of course most people will recognize the slut shaming of girls in this example and stop cold. And as a result what gets sorta overlooked is… Read more »
Had a thought, recently. Doesn’t slut shaming women inherently imply that men are dirty? As a dude, I’m tempted to feel a bit offended by that.
@L, please get off it. Feminism is far from “there,” and never really has been anywhere near “there” to begin with. Your smarmy comment comes off as if the only problem that anyone besides men have ever had with feminism boils down to happy little things such as the arbitrary and capriciously self-congratulatory use of the pronoun “zir.” And for the record, the only real gender neutral pronoun is “it,” and its plural form “they.” Not my fault if people get all freaked out and offended by it. Dang dungone. While its certainly true that problems with feminism are not… Read more »
Dungone: the arbitrary and capriciously self-congratulatory use of the pronoun “zir.”
Excuse me, but I’m curious: what is “arbitrary and capriciously self-congratulatory” about addressing people the way they have explicitly asked to be addressed?
Why is that a “happy little thing” in your high-minded judgment?
http://www.thrall.org/domains.htm
Look up where it says “COM = US Commercial.” It’s an American website, clearly indicated by the URL. Why wouldn’t you assume that everyone will talk about things as if they were in America when you’re on an American website? I’m saying this as a European citizen.
@DaisyDeadhead:
Ok, you want more about older men, I’ll give it a go.
a bit about retirement, depression and suicide
http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/men-and-depression/depression-in-elderly-men.shtml
old men die alone
http://www.japantoday.com/category/kuchikomi/view/no-of-people-dying-alone-rises-in-no-relationship-society
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1025312/How-half-million-lonely-old-men-paying-price-divorce-boom.html
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/jan2008/aged-j29.shtml
homeless old men are more likely to be perceived as crazy drug addicts, while older women as least likely to use handout money for drugs and alcohol instead of food and shelter
http://www.homelesshub.ca/Library/View.aspx?id=49064&AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1
I see at least 3 topics right there.
L, I think you have a point (and although I have lived in the US, I don’t live in the US at present and it IS annoying much of the internet seems to assume that US = the developed world). However, there’s also the other end of the spectrum, where if a post or the ensuing comments do not line up 100% with someone’s individual life or dating experience then the conclusion is that “everyone is WRONG because this isn’t representative of ME!” so I’d say the site is fairly well positioned somewhere in between the the extremes…
The CDC study is here: http://www.cdc.gov/ViolencePrevention/pdf/NISVS_Report2010-a.pdf Penetration, for the purposes of the studies “rape” and “forced to penetrate” categories means forcible vaginal or anal penetration, or forcible oral penetration with a penis. Other acts would be “unwanted sexual contact”. For the purposes of “rape” and “forced to penetrate” categories, use of physical force or threats and sex while unable to consent because of intoxication are counted (and those two are tracked separately for rape). I don’t see a specific definition of “unwanted” for other categories. It includes, and tracks separate statistics for, assaults by strangers, acquaintances, authority figures, family members,… Read more »
@Lab Coats: That contains no message what so ever. Its basically a big fat “stop that, that is wrong-bad”, but it never says what “that” is. No saying its harassment doesn’t help; harassment just means wrong-bad. I suppose is does contain a bit of shaming people who have trouble getting a date by assuming that people who can’t get a date are the harassers and that anyone should be able to get a date on e-harmony. All in all, without giving a good description of what they mean by street harassment its just another one of those things that tells… Read more »
“For the most part, the rest of the content is really about middle-class, white, American men.”
Not true, L, there was that one post about attitudes to homosexuality in the UK that had a lot of stuff about how seeexxy English accents are…
…actually, never mind.
Sorry, zir*.
@Jared: Sorry, doesn’t fly. I know the blog is run by Americans, but every time they grab stats, it’s American stats, and they’re presenting them as universal. I highly doubt the male rape statistics in the Middle East or Asia are the same as here. I highly doubt their incarceration rates are the same. American problems and issues aren’t universal, and the ones presented as universal even for everyone in this country aren’t– different groups of people run into different issues. You can’t “just” talk about gender and sexuality without talking about race, class, and culture. I mean, Ozy even… Read more »
Jared, I was referring to comments, but regarding posts, aging is not the topic. Yes, the posts you reference can APPLY to older men, but I meant posts specifically ABOUT aging. The Tim Gunn post was about someone being older and not having sex for XX years (I forget how many) and that was aging-oriented (to me) since a time-span was part of the topic. (Yes, rather idiosyncratic in my definitions, sorry about that.) Would like to hear about older men, grandfathering, what men do in retirement, what they have learned in retirement, etc. What they would do differently regarding… Read more »
Collette: * Table 2.5 and 2.6 on page 22-23 lists the categories of the reported perpetrators. Both tables contains a Stranger category (13.8% of rapists of women are strangers – 15.1% of rapists (as defined by CDC) of men are strangers while 8.2% of rapists (in the being made to penetrate someone else category) of men are strangers). So, yes, it seems this survey includes stranger rapes. If you read the questions put to the respondents on page 106-108 one can see that the questions regarding forced or coerced sex is not constrained to intimate partners. * It’s a self-reporting… Read more »