The American Psychological Association Goes Full Gender Studies Re: Masculinity
link
Of course "toxic" or "problematic" or some other stupid-ass PC mantra is probably the preferred term...
I expect to see this show up in the next DSM. And it's really no surprise. Progressivism tells psychology what it wants to see in the DSM, and gender studies is just a wing of progressivism.
I actually do think--and thought so before it was cool--that there are interesting questions about gender. It's all been radically blown out of proportion by activist academia...it's about 1/100th as interesting and important as they think it is, and should, therefore, occupy about 1/100th as much air time as it actually gets in the academic world...but that still makes it somewhat interesting.
At any rate: masculinity is something worth thinking about, and it's not beyond criticism. But the gender-industrial complex is about as far to the left as it's possible to get. It blows its own obsessions out of proportion, and its dedicated to "valorizing" (as the paleo-PCs used to say) women and shitting all over men. Women: inherently good, held back only by "toxic" masculinity and "toxic" femininity and probably other "toxic" shit as well. Men, however...: f*ck 'em. Inherently bad.
The PC/SJ left has gone completely insane about "whiteness," declaring it to have nothing whatsoever to do with, y'know, having white skin... Instead, to be white, they proclaim, is to be an oppressor. That's not just a correlation: "whiteness" is constituted by oppressiveness. Of course that's idiotic, and won't get off the runway before crashing...but that's what they think. And they accept similar absurdities about 'man' and 'woman'--to be a woman, we're now told, has nothing to do with being female! Rather, it is to be oppressed! And to be a man is to be an oppressor! Again: those are constitutive claims. They can't get up off the runway either, but that's a different matter. (I mean...even if these claims weren't insane...not just any old kind of oppression could make you a woman, yes? Their answer: it's oppression based on your sex...er...no, wait....on other people's perception of your sex! Because biology don't real...or something....)
Masculinity (like femininity) can go too far, and it can go wrong. Seems to me that pop ideals of masculinity went kinda overboard in new and weird ways in the '90s, when being super-duper over-built became the ideal. That shit was a parody, and should have gotten a lot more ridicule than it did. Assertiveness can turn into aggressiveness, bravery can become foolhardiness...absolutely none of this is news. It wasn't even news to the ancient Greeks.
So, as with just about everything else, there's room for improvement.
But that's not what we're going to get with this new instance of the left saying Jump! and psychology asking How high? This is politics by other means--one of progressivism's favorite tactics: using its control of academia--and even the softer parts of science--to advance its social, political and cultural assault.
Or that's what it seems to be, anyway. Maybe it's not as bad as it looks. I mean...it almost couldn't be...
The document starts off with a bunch of bullshit PC definitions, incidentally--including a definition of 'gender' that's pretty much completely wrong. Then we also get definitions of 'cisgender' (lol), 'privilege'...the whole trainwreck of contemporary leftist sex/gender BS. (Don't miss the section on "masculinity ideology"!) It's hard to even get past the first two pages. It's a political document, not a scientific one. I don't see how any reasonable person could read that and not get freaked out by the degree of control that the extremist left appears to enjoy over psychology.
Maybe the substance of the thing isn't that bad--some of the section headings seem ok. But I haven't been able to make it that far yet. If I can get past the laughable first couple of pages, I'll let you know what I think, FWIW.
more
Of course "toxic" or "problematic" or some other stupid-ass PC mantra is probably the preferred term...
I expect to see this show up in the next DSM. And it's really no surprise. Progressivism tells psychology what it wants to see in the DSM, and gender studies is just a wing of progressivism.
I actually do think--and thought so before it was cool--that there are interesting questions about gender. It's all been radically blown out of proportion by activist academia...it's about 1/100th as interesting and important as they think it is, and should, therefore, occupy about 1/100th as much air time as it actually gets in the academic world...but that still makes it somewhat interesting.
At any rate: masculinity is something worth thinking about, and it's not beyond criticism. But the gender-industrial complex is about as far to the left as it's possible to get. It blows its own obsessions out of proportion, and its dedicated to "valorizing" (as the paleo-PCs used to say) women and shitting all over men. Women: inherently good, held back only by "toxic" masculinity and "toxic" femininity and probably other "toxic" shit as well. Men, however...: f*ck 'em. Inherently bad.
The PC/SJ left has gone completely insane about "whiteness," declaring it to have nothing whatsoever to do with, y'know, having white skin... Instead, to be white, they proclaim, is to be an oppressor. That's not just a correlation: "whiteness" is constituted by oppressiveness. Of course that's idiotic, and won't get off the runway before crashing...but that's what they think. And they accept similar absurdities about 'man' and 'woman'--to be a woman, we're now told, has nothing to do with being female! Rather, it is to be oppressed! And to be a man is to be an oppressor! Again: those are constitutive claims. They can't get up off the runway either, but that's a different matter. (I mean...even if these claims weren't insane...not just any old kind of oppression could make you a woman, yes? Their answer: it's oppression based on your sex...er...no, wait....on other people's perception of your sex! Because biology don't real...or something....)
Masculinity (like femininity) can go too far, and it can go wrong. Seems to me that pop ideals of masculinity went kinda overboard in new and weird ways in the '90s, when being super-duper over-built became the ideal. That shit was a parody, and should have gotten a lot more ridicule than it did. Assertiveness can turn into aggressiveness, bravery can become foolhardiness...absolutely none of this is news. It wasn't even news to the ancient Greeks.
So, as with just about everything else, there's room for improvement.
But that's not what we're going to get with this new instance of the left saying Jump! and psychology asking How high? This is politics by other means--one of progressivism's favorite tactics: using its control of academia--and even the softer parts of science--to advance its social, political and cultural assault.
Or that's what it seems to be, anyway. Maybe it's not as bad as it looks. I mean...it almost couldn't be...
The document starts off with a bunch of bullshit PC definitions, incidentally--including a definition of 'gender' that's pretty much completely wrong. Then we also get definitions of 'cisgender' (lol), 'privilege'...the whole trainwreck of contemporary leftist sex/gender BS. (Don't miss the section on "masculinity ideology"!) It's hard to even get past the first two pages. It's a political document, not a scientific one. I don't see how any reasonable person could read that and not get freaked out by the degree of control that the extremist left appears to enjoy over psychology.
Maybe the substance of the thing isn't that bad--some of the section headings seem ok. But I haven't been able to make it that far yet. If I can get past the laughable first couple of pages, I'll let you know what I think, FWIW.
more
posted by Winston Smith at
8:47 AM
1 Comments:
Still, it is wonderful to get some definitions! I've been wanting a pro-level definition of this one forever:
"Privilege refers to unearned sources of social status, power, and institutionalized advantage experienced by individuals by virtue of their culturally valued and dominant social identities (e.g., White, Christian, male, and middle/upper class; McIntosh, 2008)."
The definition is clearly written by professional academic and formally quite good, with a classification, "unearned sources of social status, power, and institutionalized advantage", and then a qualification, "experienced by individuals by virtue of their culturally valued and dominant social identities."
The qualification exists to restrict privilege to to only the usual suspects, handily added to the parenthetical examples, while still being vague enough to be usable elsewhere, should the rhetorical need arise. That part is not especially interesting.
(But, it is amazing how quickly "heterosexual" has vanished from privilege lists, since Obergefell, isn't it? The reaction by the radical left to the recent, swift, and near total victory of gay rights and social integration is simply to never, ever talk about it.)
The first part of the definition is what really points to the scary heart of this view of the world. "Unearned sources of institutionalized advantage" might, were it was on its own, get close to a real useful idea of what a privilege is. But instead, unearned sources of social status and power are included in there too, and many of the most critical elements of persons' social status and power are not in any way earned. The whole set of human rights, and most of the civil ones, fall under this definition. This definition is an attack on non-contingent rights generally. For now, that attack on rights is confined to their enjoyment by the current, "culturally valued" suspects. But how long will that last? In the case of white, gay men, it changed overnight.
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home