Boys Beware!

Some of you have asked me about where I found the “Boys Beware” video, the 1960s instructional movie warning boys about the supposed dangers of predatory homosexuals. Boys Beware is archived at the Internet Archive in the Prelinger Collection. It’s available in multiple downloading formats, or you can watch on the website. Also look for “Girls Beware!” and “What About School Spirit?” (filmed at Lawrence High in the 1950s). I posted a version of the Monday’s video material on youtube:

Here’s the description: This video offers snapshots of three sexual regimes in US history pertaining to male-male intimacy and gay identity. The first two clips show a stereotype of men who have sex with other men as "pansies" and "fairies," but it's not necessarily a demeaning one. The crowd is laughing with them as much as they're laughing at them. The fairies' performance receives giant applause from the hip Greenwich Village crowd. Jay (Tony Jowitt) and Nasa (the irrepressible Clara Bow) enter the night club because they're fascinated by the edgy scene, not because they hate gays (in fact, "gay" is not a commonly used term to describe men who have sex with other men at this point in history). As George Chauncey explains in Gay New York (1994), the public fascination with "gay" men (the so-called "pansy craze") turned to hostility during the 1930s. The second clip represents the solidification of anti-gay hostility after World War II, including the medicalization of same-sex desire, the conflation of pederasty and homosexuality, and other closet-constructing public opinions. The final clip represents the post-Stonewall celebration of gay pride. Chauncey's research suggests that the first and last clips have more in common despite their historical distance. The history of gay liberation in the US is not a linear one, and this history shows that fascination and public acceptance can turn to intolerance and hostility if we're not careful.
-- Brian

Brian’s Reflections on Exam #1

In a giant class like ours, it’s difficult for me to give personalized feedback on your exam. I don’t want to spend too much of tomorrow’s session talking about the last exam, so I thought that I’d talk about a few of the questions that gave people problems. In this discussion, please recognize that I’m sharing some of the blame. I’m not going to change the grading scale or give credit for incorrect answers to the difficult questions, but if a large percentage of the class misses a question I’m more than willing to admit that the question should have been clearer and/or my instruction should match the exam question more closely. With that said, let’s look at a few of the questions:

Question 43: In the lecture on Structure and Agency, I described the relationship between these two forces as “dialectic.” You know it’s not “doxic” or “paradoxic.” If you got this wrong, odds are you answered “oppositional.” I can see why there’s confusion. A dialectic relationship is oppositional to a point (in its original Hegelian formulation: thesis + antithesis = synthesis). The reason why it’s better to think of structure/agency as dialectical rather than oppositional is because the capacity for agency depends on social structural arrangements. Likewise, through the exercise of human agency, we can alter social structures. There’s a back and forth quality to this (admittedly abstract) relationship. The quotes from William Sewell Jr. suggest how an agent’s “schema” (or worldview) depends on resources (a specific social structural relationship in the economy, law, etc.). I’ll admit that the question was a bit unfair given the close semantic relationship between “dialectic” and “oppositional,” but good job to those who answered “dialectic.”

Question 33: “A convenience store clerk who suddenly wins $23 million dollars in the lottery. Where would Bourdieu place this person on the following map of social space?” I thought this would be an easy one. Upon reflection, I think students over-thought it, or it relied on (unshared) assumptions about occupations. Convenience store clerks (like Apu from The Simpsons) start with low cultural and economic capital, but the lottery winning will increase the individual’s economic capital (but not necessarily their cultural capital). The correct answer was B – low cultural capital / high economic capital.

Question 48: “All of following emerged as opponents of the People Temple EXCEPT” This question was definitely detail-oriented and (arguably) nit-picky. The correct answer is Annie Moore, the nurse who stayed with Jones until the very end. Phil Tracy and Lester Kinsolving were journalists trying to expose Jim Jones. Grace Stoen was a high-level defector who helped start “the Concerned Relatives,” and whose child was at the center of the Jonestown custody battle.

-- Brian

The Washington Post Printed It So It Must Be True...Women Are Biologically Inferior

Charlotte Allen, from The Washington Post, should start looking for another job. Or maybe she should start writing her own obituary. On March 2, Allen catalyzes a blogosphere backlash to her infamous article “We Scream, We Swoon, How Dumb Can We Get?” In it, she argues that women are the weaker sex, the stupid sex, the dim half of our population, citing such “convincing” evidence as Obama rallying, Hillary’s presidential campaign, recent bestselling chick lit, Grey’s Anatomy, bad driving, oh…and the female ability to score lower on standardized visuospatial tests (i.e., the ground for math, science, and philosophy). So I guess that proves it—The Washington Post printed it, so it must be true!

Too bad Allen didn’t do any research or even utilize the internet to find at least one study to disprove her outlandish observations. But I guess we shouldn’t really criticize Allen anyway, since she is one of the many dim-witted women out there (strange, seeing that she graduated from both Stanford and Harvard). She herself admits to being a “classic case of female mental deficiencies,” claiming, “I can’t add two and two (well, I can, but then what?). I don’t even know how many pairs of shoes I own. I have coasted through life and academia on the basis of an excellent memory and superior verbal skills, two areas where researchers agree, women consistently outpace men.” What’s more, all of the brilliant women throughout history, according to Allen, must be outliers. Sure, they can do their jobs well, but they’re just the exception, not the norm. And the rest of us…well, Allen lays it out plainly. We should just “relax, enjoy the innate abilities most of us possess (as well as the ones fewer of us possess) and revel in the things most important to life at which nearly all of us excel: tenderness toward children and men and the weak and the ability to make a house a home…Then we could shriek and swoon and gossip and read chick lit to our hearts’ content and not mind the fact that way deep down, we are…kind of dim.”

It’s no surprise that the backlash happened (and is still going strong). Apparently women (and men) took offense to females being portrayed as vaginas that were really just brain cell black holes (The Washington Post: Bitches Ain’t Shit). Bloggers were quick to note that Allen supports the right-wing anti-feminist Independent Women’s Forum (who, according to Sara Gwin on Silence is Betrayal: A Feminist Blog, want women to be more like the virginal, less intelligent 1950s housewife). That earlier in her career she claimed that to solve women’s financial problems, women just need to get some husbands and all will be fine. So, knowing some of her biases, why did Allen write this? Was it a joke? An attempt to be loud and proud about the innate inferiority of being a woman? No. Allen claims it was to give an accurate picture of how stupid females really can be.

Let’s imagine for a minute that everything Allen says about women is true—that actual research has confirmed it. Now, imagine if instead of writing about women, we wrote about another group like blacks, gays, or Jews. Maybe we could write an article about how Africa is doomed because it’s full of black people trying to rule themselves, how the Jews deserved a genocide, or how gay people really don’t merit rights because such and such study proves that they are psychologically deranged beyond the help of medication and intervention. These would be too offensive to print, too costly to imagine the lawsuit or drop in credibility and readership. But write an offensive article about women and it’s okay. Why? Katha Pollitt, whose response to Allen was published in the Washington Post March 7, claims that “misogyny is the last acceptable prejudice.” And worse, The Washington Post—overwhelmingly dominated by white males—allowed it to be published. The editorial board probably didn’t even think twice about how it feeds into the sexism of our culture, how it unfairly condemns women to nothing more than the sex destined to relegate themselves to childcare, assisting men, and home decorating. Or maybe they did think twice about it and still said, “Okay, we’ll publish this article because we really need women to give in to the virginal mothering image, patriarchal authority, and accept that this is the greatest aspiration women will ever have.”

Makes you kind of sick, doesn't it.

Ada Van Roekel-Hughes