Feministin: "Tötet alle männlichen Babys!" – Vermischtes vom 25. Januar 2017

1. Verschiedene internationale Medien, darunter Österreichs Plattform Oe24, berichten aktuell über die feministische Youtuberin Jenny McDermott und ihre Forderung, sämtliche männlichen Babys zu töten. (McDermott erklärte später, diese Forderung sei nur ein Jux gewesen.) Das umstrittene Video, das enorm hohe Zugriffszahlen erzielte, wurde mit dem zeitweise beliebten feministischen Twitter-Hashtag #killallmen versehen. (Genderama berichtete mehrfach.)



2. Der Medienkritiker Stefan Niggemeier beschäftigt sich mit Schwulenfeindlichkeit in der Geschichte des SPIEGEL. Ein Vergleich mit genereller Männerfeindlichkeit beim SPIEGEL und seinen Titelgeschichten wie Eine Krankheit namens Mann liegt nahe.



3. Der "Zeit"-Artikel Ralf Bönts über die Vernachlässigung von Männergesundheit, dessen Inhalt ich vor zwei Wochen zusammengefasst habe, steht inzwischen online.



4. Ich danke Genderama-Leser Christoph Kucklick für einen Hinweis auf einen etwas älteren Artikel des Harvard Business Review, verfasst von Rechtsprofessorin Joan C. Williams. Der Beitrag erklärt den Erfolg Donald Trumps anhand des zumeist ignorierten Weltbildes arbeitender Männer. Ein Auszug:

For months, the only thing that’s surprised me about Donald Trump is my friends’ astonishment at his success. What’s driving it is the class culture gap.

One little-known element of that gap is that the white working class (WWC) resents professionals but admires the rich. (...) Michèle Lamont, in The Dignity of Working Men, also found resentment of professionals — but not of the rich. "[I] can’t knock anyone for succeeding," a laborer told her. "There’s a lot of people out there who are wealthy and I’m sure they worked darned hard for every cent they have," chimed in a receiving clerk. Why the difference? For one thing, most blue-collar workers have little direct contact with the rich outside of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. But professionals order them around every day. The dream is not to become upper-middle-class, with its different food, family, and friendship patterns; the dream is to live in your own class milieu, where you feel comfortable — just with more money. "The main thing is to be independent and give your own orders and not have to take them from anybody else," a machine operator told Lamont. Owning one’s own business — that’s the goal. That’s another part of Trump’s appeal.

Hillary Clinton, by contrast, epitomizes the dorky arrogance and smugness of the professional elite. The dorkiness: the pantsuits. The arrogance: the email server. The smugness: the basket of deplorables. Worse, her mere presence rubs it in that even women from her class can treat working-class men with disrespect. Look at how she condescends to Trump as unfit to hold the office of the presidency and dismisses his supporters as racist, sexist, homophobic, or xenophobic.

Trump’s blunt talk taps into another blue-collar value: straight talk. "Directness is a working-class norm," notes Lubrano. As one blue-collar guy told him, "If you have a problem with me, come talk to me. If you have a way you want something done, come talk to me. I don’t like people who play these two-faced games." Straight talk is seen as requiring manly courage, not being "a total wuss and a wimp," an electronics technician told Lamont. Of course Trump appeals. Clinton’s clunky admission that she talks one way in public and another in private? Further proof she’s a two-faced phony.

Manly dignity is a big deal for working-class men, and they’re not feeling that they have it. Trump promises a world free of political correctness and a return to an earlier era, when men were men and women knew their place. It’s comfort food for high-school-educated guys who could have been my father-in-law if they’d been born 30 years earlier. Today they feel like losers — or did until they met Trump.

(...) The Democrats’ solution? Last week the New York Times published an article advising men with high-school educations to take pink-collar jobs. Talk about insensitivity. Elite men, you will notice, are not flooding into traditionally feminine work. To recommend that for WWC men just fuels class anger.

(...) National debates about policing are fueling class tensions today in precisely the same way they did in the 1970s, when college kids derided policemen as "pigs." This is a recipe for class conflict. Being in the police is one of the few good jobs open to Americans without a college education. Police get solid wages, great benefits, and a respected place in their communities. For elites to write them off as racists is a telling example of how, although race- and sex-based insults are no longer acceptable in polite society, class-based insults still are.

I do not defend police who kill citizens for selling cigarettes. But the current demonization of the police underestimates the difficulty of ending police violence against communities of color. Police need to make split-second decisions in life-threatening situations. I don’t. If I had to, I might make some poor decisions too.

Saying this is so unpopular that I risk making myself a pariah among my friends on the left coast. But the biggest risk today for me and other Americans is continued class cluelessness. If we don’t take steps to bridge the class culture gap, when Trump proves unable to bring steel back to Youngstown, Ohio, the consequences could turn dangerous.

Joan Williams irrt sich natürlich, wenn sie glaubt, in höflicher Gesellschaft seien geschlechtsbezogene Herabsetzungen inzwischen tabu. Sie erfolgen problemlos, wenn das herabgesetzte Geschlecht männlich ist. Aufgrund dieses doppelten Desinteresses weiß eine Genderstudentin heute mehr über die Befindlichkeit einer Frau in Turkmenistan als über die Befindlichkeit eines männlichen Arbeiters in den USA. Und als Donald Trump an die Macht kam, befand sich aufgrund dieses Unwissens eine ganze Generation von Student_*Innen im Schockzustand.



5. David Brooks erklärt in der New York Times, warum er sich vom "Frauenmarsch" keine bleibenden Erfolge gegen Trump verspricht. Ein Auszug:

The marches couldn’t escape the language and tropes of identity politics.

Soon after the Trump victory, Prof. Mark Lilla of Columbia wrote a piece on how identity politics was dooming progressive chances. Times readers loved that piece and it vaulted to the top of the most-read charts.

But now progressives seem intent on doubling down on exactly what has doomed them so often. Lilla pointed out that identity politics isolates progressives from the wider country: "The fixation on diversity in our schools and in the press has produced a generation of liberals and progressives narcissistically unaware of conditions outside their self-defined groups, and indifferent to the task of reaching out to Americans in every walk of life."

Sure enough, if you live in blue America, the marches carpeted your Facebook feed. But The Times’s Julie Bosman was in Niles, Michigan, where many women had never heard of the marches, and if they had, I suspect, they would not have felt at home at one.

Identity-based political movements always seem to descend into internal rivalries about who is most oppressed and who should get pride of place. Sure enough, the controversy before and after the march was over the various roles of white feminists, women of color, anti-abortion feminists and various other out-groups.

The biggest problem with identity politics is that its categories don’t explain what is going on now. Trump carried a majority of white women. He won the votes of a shocking number of Hispanics.

The central challenge today is not how to celebrate difference. The central threat is not the patriarchy. The central challenge is to rebind a functioning polity and to modernize a binding American idea.

6. Ebenfalls kritisch zum "Frauenmarsch" äußert sich das männerpolitische Blog Toy Soldiers. Der Artikel beginnt mit der von dem Popstar Madonna geäußerten Phantasie, das Weiße Haus in die Luft zu jagen. (Wie hätten die Medien auf einen weißen Mann reagiert, der dasselbe nach der Amtseinführung Obamas geäußert hätte?) Danach kommt er auf besonders bizarre Ereignisse bei den Protesten zu sprechen:

As for feminism going out of control, it has. One need only look at the ridiculousness that occurred at the women’s marches. You have supporters not being able to explain what issues they are protesting for or against. You have a feminist burning someone’s hair as none of the other feminists around her do anything to stop her. You have a male feminist punching a female reporter for filming him, only to have the female feminists protect him and ignore that he punched a woman in the face.

This is modern feminism whether you like it or not. This is the entitlement, the privilege, the misandry, and the double standard that makes up this movement. And this is just from the women’s marches. This is not including the number of insane policies being pushed by feminists on college campuses, in courts, or throughout society.

(...) There was no accountability. There is no self-reflection. There is no consideration that maybe behaving like a spoiled brat is not the way to conduct oneself in public.

No one challenged the women who did not bother to vote in November. No one sought to embrace the women who voted for Trump. No one asked themselves why the message "vote for Hillary because vagina" was not a winning election strategy.

The same lack of self-reflection happened on the right when Obama was elected. Twice. In 2012, it resulted in the Republicans conducting a post mortem on their party to see why they could not win over non-conservative voters. That the tone of their message came across as hateful, fearful, and dismissive to those voters never factored into their self-review. They never looked at their own actions with any sincerity and asked how they would feel if someone approached their group with that level of contempt.

The same thing happened on Saturday. Hundreds of thousands of progressive women grouped together in contempt of a man to complain about a myriad of unconnected issues with no foreseeable goal or intention to actual activism. They made no effort to convince their opponents that their message and concerns are valid. They made no attempt to extend a hand in civility and respect even as they demanded they receive the opposition’s civility and respect.

It was grade-A privilege and entitlement on display, all caused by a ten-year-old joke Donald Trump told while on a hot microphone.

7. Das liberale Magazin Quillette hat die Sexualforscherin und Neurowissenschaftlerin Debrah So zu ihrer Arbeit interviewt. Ein Auszug:

Quilette: You’ve stated before that talking about sex differences doesn’t make one sexist. I agree. Do you think that the fear of “neurosexism” is slowly going out of fashion, or is it still a prevalent concern within neuroscience?

Debrah So: It’s still a concern. And it’s a concern because this is a case of a political agenda attempting to silence legitimate science. I think it’s important that we speak up against it.

It’s become controversial to talk about biology. People think you’re sexist if you agree that there are biological sex differences. We should never be afraid to speak the truth about facts or science, but that’s the direction we’re heading in.

Sieht so aus, als ob der postfaktische und wissenschaftsfeindliche Trend nicht nur von Donald Trump ausgeht. Warum also ist er der einzige, der von Politik und Medien so scharf kritisiert wird? Wann kehren Feministinnen auch vor ihrer eigenen Tür? Solange sie das nicht tun, hat das Trump-Lager auf sämtliche Kritik eine naheliegende Antwort parat.



8. Zuletzt mal wieder ein Blick in aus unserer Perspektive exotische Länder: Indonesien greift endlich durch gegen die Versklavung von Männern.