This blog is starting to gather cobwebs from lack of use and, given my devotion to men's emotional wellness, that is beginning to bother me. With the Dog Days of July upon us, I decided it was high time I wrote down a number of thoughts that have been running through my brain about events in the media during the last several months. Hence, while I haven't enough for one 'single issue' article, I did want to write down my thoughts about several disparate issues of interest to me -- and hopefully of interest to my readers.
Global Warming and Blistering Heat
St. Louis, where I live, and most of the rest of the nation, have been experiencing triple digit temperatures since late June and they are continuing into late July (who knows when they will subside). It's surprising how few 'brown outs' there have been in the country, given how many air conditioners have been running full-blast trying to cope with this excessive heat. Personally, I have kept my thermostat at 77°F for most of the blast furnace heat wave, both to keep my cooling costs down and to be a conscious protector of the environment. Amazingly, by keeping my house at that temperature, the local electric utility has informed me that my budget billing plan will drop by $10 a month starting the next billing cycle.
The paradox of extreme heat is that when we run our air conditioners to overcome the heat, those units and the coal-fired power plants that provide the electricity add further carbon emissions to the environment, which produces more greenhouse gases that further fuel problems with global warming, which in turn produce hotter temperatures -- sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy. As a colleague of mine noted last winter, when we were having major snow storms in the Northeastern U.S., anyone who thinks that weather behavior displayed that global warming is not real confuses 'weather' with 'climate'. With the average temperature of the planet rising precipitously over the past decade, increased melting of glaciers and the polar ice caps and the consequent rising of sea levels, widespread extinction of species, profound droughts across our nation and the spreading of desertification in Africa and Asia, plus the destruction of coral reefs worldwide, if anyone still doubts that global warming is occurring, they have to be either living in a box or have their head in the sand. Clearly, 'climate change' is occurring and is doing so on a vast and disturbing scale.
Coming as I do originally from New Mexico, I've joked for years that when there's 25% humidity in New Mexico, people there think they're having a monsoon, whereas when there's less than 40% humidity in Missouri, people here think they're experiencing a drought. Every time it rains here, I let out a cheer, which makes people around me laugh in surprise, but they understand when I explain that I spent 30 years of my adult life in the desert where rain was a rare event. But, of late, there truly is a drought, both in New Mexico and Missouri, and in much of the rest of the nation as well. I've had few reasons to let out any shouts of joy for rain recently, because it has rained so rarely.
Hence, no matter how much we complain about the blast furnace heat this summer, we might be experiencing the metaphoric [and paradoxical] 'tip of the iceberg', with these extreme temperatures becoming chronic and worse in coming years. As much as I melt from the often extreme humidity here in St. Louis (and have taken to wearing a color-coordinated towel over my shoulder all summer), I have come to expect it in the 14 years I've lived in this part of the country. But that humidity hasn't occurred much this summer and the extreme dryness of New Mexico -- which is my 'benchmark' -- may become the norm here as well.
Tragedy in Aurora
The horrific slaughter in Aurora, Colorado this past weekend dominates the media at present. As with so many such events, there are a multiplicity of issues involved, not just the insanity of the shooter.
The news reports are rife with comments about how, during this presidential election season, while it is obvious that there are problems with our gun laws, very few candidates or members of Congress will be making many comments about that, because the National Rifle Association controls so many of the purse-strings of the various political campaigns. That civilians can legally go into a gun shop and purchase an assault weapon for personal use is, frankly, absurd. Except for killing large numbers of people (or animals), what purpose would anyone have for such a weapon? We have -- unfortunately -- successfully militarized our society to such an extent that there is little wonderment when we allow individuals to amass an arsenal of weapons in their homes. That the shooter in Aurora was able to purchase multiple high-powered weapons and copious rounds of ammunition online "because he had no criminal record" betrays the larger issue of why we allow anyone to purchase such weapons.
I read somewhere that there are something like 2 or 3 guns for every citizen in the country in the hands of private citizens. Given that I and most of the people I know personally don't have any guns, and many people in the society are in that category as well, that would mean that a small percentage of the population must have massive arsenals of weapons in their homes. This whole "right to bear arms" argument of the NRA is ridiculous in the extreme. I'm not so worried about people breaking into my house and harming me or stealing my possessions as I am about rogue citizens pulling out concealed weapons during traffic altercations or having 'legal' access to multiple weapons and engaging in the kind of behavior that occurred this weekend in Colorado.
As one headline I read noted the primary issue is not why it occurred, but why it doesn't occur more often. Given the easy and loose 'legal' access to weapons that is allowed in the United States, it's actually quite amazing that more such incidents don't occur.
Many years ago, when I lived in Albuquerque, I was dating a woman who was an anthropologist at the University of New Mexico. She told me about a paper she was presenting at a conference on urban violence. In her study, she noted that as horrible as the current statistics are concerning gun violence in inner cities in the U.S., around 1900 the statistics on weapons usage in the New York City tenements was even worse, and make our current statistics seem almost prosaic in comparison (though hardly minor for the people who have to experience them). Her paper stressed that the major difference was one of technology. In 1900, people had single-firing pistols, so when they were trying to murder a rival or mug someone, they largely killed only the person they were focused upon. Nowadays, though, with weapons that fire multiple rounds in seconds, when gangs are out to murder a rival they end up spraying the person and everyone around them with bullets, simply because the technology allows them to not be as accurate shots. The result is that while the level of urban violence may be less overall, the number of people killed in any one incident is greater.
There are two other elements about the massacre this last Friday that are equally disturbing. The first is why our citizens take such an avid interest in attending movies that portray the kind of extreme violence in "Dark Knight Rises". Our television screens are nightly filled with violent images, both of extreme brutality and gratuitous sexuality. While I am no conservative 'moralist' who believes that I have the right to pontificate about what kind of moral code our society must adhere to, I do believe it of value to 'sit back' and think about that. What kind of society have we created that allows us to view such imagery with dispassionate interest?
Personally, I rarely watch 'serials', for just such a reason. Such imagery is extremely disturbing to me and I have no desire to be 'triggered' by images which remind me so much about the violence I experienced as a child in my family-of-origin (which I've written about in previous articles). PBS is my cup-of-tea; I'd rather learn something of value, than be dulled into mindlessness by violent 'entertainment'.
The other element that made my skin crawl when hearing reports about the survivors of the assault was why were so many very young children in the audience? That they were in attendance with their parents was important, but why would parents take their impressionable children to such a movie in the first place? That in our society we believe it appropriate to expose young children to such violent images, portrayed in brilliant color and with the use of special effects (making them seem all too real) can't help but traumatize the children at some deep psychological level however much the kids may superficially delight in such images. In this case, of course, the 'reality' of the violence became, horrifically, all too real, and many people, including children, we injured or killed in the process. As a society, I believe that we should honestly question whether exposing children to such violent imagery is appropriate. I feel that exposing adults to such nihilistic villains has it's own psychological problems, but at least most adults can distinguish between fiction and reality; children have not developed such discernment.
The Sandusky Child Rape Trail
Given the emphasis of the Mariposa Men's Wellness Institute on the issues of adult male sexual abuse survivors, the child rape trial in Pennsylvania has been on my mind since it began last spring. That the convicted perpetrator, Jerry Sandusky, could engage in multiple rapes of young boys over a decade or more, with the complicity or at least willful ignorance of the Penn State athletic program, is disturbing in the extreme. It's one thing to hear about child rape within families, when it occurs behind 'closed doors', wherein others, outside the home, have no idea it is occurring (until it is discovered by alert social workers, having family members break the familial silence or denial, or the survivor has the courage to step forward and expose the perpetrator). But when a 'system', which is supposed to protect their students and/or any other person from abuse, willfully suppresses the information to protect it's 'image', one's stomach can only turn in revulsion.
Clearly, the athletic program was far more concerned about the image it projected to the public as a powerhouse team than they were about the rights and moral concern for the young boys from poor families. It was as though, since they were economically deprived and, as a disempowered population, unable to protect themselves, the authorities willfully 'looked the other way' and covered-up the rape of the children. Their concern was for their short-term corporate image, rather than longer-term social protection of children.
This, of course, only continues the society's allowance of institutional coverup of male child rape so thoroughly exposed in recent years in the Catholic Church. Clearly, we as a nation have learned little or nothing about this widespread crime. That girls are not the only population that are subject to sexual child abuse should already have been obvious, yet the society continues to be shocked by such cases -- not shocked into doing much about it, but rather shocked that it occurs at all. Yet, given the statistics that 1 out of 4 girls and 1 out of 7 boys is being or has been sexually molested as a child, the phenomenon is far more common than the public perception of its occurrence allows.
The Miss Universe Canada Pageant
When, last spring, "The Donald" Trump, funder of the Miss Universe Canada Pageant, under intense public pressure, reversed himself and allowed Jeanna Talackova, a 23-year-old transsexual woman, to compete in the event, that was reason for me to both leap in joy and feel slightly queasy.
I felt joy because gender, which has been allowed (after many painful years of battling) to be seen as more 'fluid' than the strict cultural categories of male and female, has now allowed transsexual females to be viewed as 'culturally attractive', even 'sexy', at least in that contest's perspective. But also queasy: genetic females have, quite reasonably, attacked beauty contests as personifications of the kind of 'femininity' that demands that women fulfill a male-view-demand for a certain specific variety of attractiveness. Transsexual women, in their struggle to be allowed to express their inner sense of gender identity, are often denied 'validity' because they don't 'appear', after transition, to be the kind of attractive women that our culture demand that all women look like. That in my view is profoundly oppressive and unacceptable. I have written about this on the Mariposa Men's Wellness Institute website, under the section "Gender Socialization".
One of the books that has strongly influenced my views on feminism over the last 20 years is Femininity by Susan Brownmiller. She wrote about the ways in which culturally-defined femininity is often incredibly oppressive to women. It's not that 'being or delighting in being feminine' is so negative; clearly, it can be very enjoyable for many females and very attractive to a number of men. But the demand that women fulfill a specific variety of femininity that constrains their ability to exercise their human completeness is the issue that is so troubling. And beauty contest-defined femininity is, hence, very oppressive to many females.
Further, I remember Helen Boyd's comment in She's Not the Man I Married, when she observed that her husband, in the process of acting out 'his sense of femininity', started behaving in what she termed "an über feminine" manner, where he was delighting in women's fashions (specifically shoes). As she noted, his delight failed to factor in that women's lives weren't simply about 'feminine fun', but involved childcare, cleaning homes, working, and taking care of boyfriends and husbands. While it's a reasonable and quite understandable 'phase' that many transsexual women go through, in trying to gain a clear sense of 'what it's like to be female', getting stuck in that phase is something that many feminists have, with equal reason, been fighting for the last 30 years.
Hence, while I honor the struggle that Ms. Talackova has gone through, and the mountain she has successfully scaled in her legal battle with the Miss Universe Canada Pageant, I am also bothered that females, genetic or transsexual, continue to be 'rated' on their attractiveness as human beings, their very value as participants in the culture, by a Playboy-style beauty contest-defined vision of womanly acceptability. Females, both genetic and trans, are more than their bodies, and we should be careful in making sure we honor their humanity with equal energy.
