BBC News – Indian girl ‘humiliated’ by village elders found dead
One quiet, largely unasked, question about the persistence of misogyny across cultures and generations involves cultural mechanisms achieving this persistence. This is where a certain paradox seems to arise. Women are the principal victims of misogyny, if only by definition. Women are also the principal means whereby mores, folk-ways and cultural values are transmitted from one generation to another. Why, then, have women and mothers not been better at raising male children to become more wholesome, inclusive adults?
I think this question does not come up for two related reasons. The first is that men are identified as misogynistic in normative, moralizing ways - i.e., that they choose to behave abominably and that this choice is consciously made. This means that men originate misogyny and that it does not flow from proximate cultural sources.
So understanding the problem, the victims of misogyny are encouraged to overlook their own complicity - even if this complicity amounts to nothing more than being an unwitting conduit of culturally-embedded mischief.
BBC News - Indian girl 'humiliated' by village elders found dead.
Ready, Aim, Fire. Not Fire, Ready, Aim. – NYTimes.com
Friedman's analysis overlooks an important reality. Mainstream religious populations on every side of every sectarian conflict regularly deplore the excesses of their fundamentalist brothers and sisters. They emphasize that they themselves abhor violence and recommend peace, love and inclusion. The problem is, their mainstream religious lives establish the legitimacy of Holy Writ (The Bible, The Koran, The Whatever... ). They are the conduit transmitting faiths from one generation to the next, and even from one population to the next. So instructed with authentic, legitimated religious notions, new generations are positioned to take these faithful tenets to new heights and proper spiritual conclusions. Thus they often identify their own nation's cultural and spiritual softness and often turn upon their own moderate families and communities. Their faithful postures are not aggressive or rigorous enough to shield them from charges of apostasy.
None of this is surprising. The young are always on the lookout for ways to distinguish themselves from their parents. In secular nations these inclinations are usually merely annoying. In religious nations that easily become toxic.
The problem therefore is not the predictable existence of religious extremism - it is the global reach of faith-based religious populations. Moderate or not, they make bigotry and radicalism possible and perhaps inevitable.
Goodbye & Good Luck!
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via Goodbye & Good Luck!.
Bad tenant, bad boyfriend reveals his methods, says ‘I should have a big red flag’ | Toronto Star
Bad tenant, bad boyfriend reveals his methods, says ‘I should have a big red flag’ | Toronto Star.
Tiny, Vast Windows Into Human DNA – NYTimes.com
Any day now an idea will become commonplace. The sorting out we have been doing, yielding notions of objects, creatures, species and other realizations, will be seen as imaginary constructions, reifications, gestalts... . We will revisit discoveries such as the one following and wonder why we were so childish.
BBC News – Ukraine crisis: ‘Russia has launched a great war’
BBC News - Ukraine crisis: 'Russia has launched a great war'.