Since this is the first one of these posts, these won't actually be things I specifically read this week. In the future, I'll try to keep it to recent stuff, or at least pieces that I've personally read recently.
First up is actually a group of articles about masculinity:
The Lack of Gentle Platonic Touch in Men's Lives is a Killer by Mark Greene
Bosom Buddies: A Photo History of Male Affection by Brett and Kate McKay
Escape the "Act Like a Man" Box by Charlie Glickman
The first two are about how homophobia has made men afraid to touch each other casually and gently. Greene argues that because of this fear, young boys get much less physical attention from their parents and peers than girls do. They then enter adulthood understanding touch as either sexual or aggressive - sometimes, disastrously, both. The pictures in the McKay article do a really good job of showcasing how men used to be much more willing to hold hands, sit on each other's laps and hug. While I think Greene may be overselling the psychological value of touch, I think there's a lot to the argument. I'm lucky that my dad was never afraid to show affection with me or my brother - he hugged us and told us how much he loved us every day. I went to summer camp as a kid, where hugging is the default form of greeting. So I've always been pretty comfortable with physical contact with other men. Even so, those photographs are striking in how different the interaction is to what I would consider normal or comfortable.
The third article of the group is a pretty straightforward take on how corrosive the norms of masculinity are. Hopefully this isn't news to anybody, but it's worth emphasizing often. Even as a pretty gender-norm conforming type of dude, I bristle when some marketer tries to remind me that liking musicals or cooking or bracelets means I'm not a "man."
Next up, The Drone Papers by The Intercept.
This is a chilling set of articles detailing secret information about the United States' drone strike program, as revealed by a whistleblower. There's a lot of information in there - acronyms, statistics, diagrams, dates. But it's worth reading. The upshot is this: the US has become increasingly willing and able to initiate drone strikes against possible threats by order of the President. The strikes are often against targets within the borders of countries not at war with the US; they can target citizens of the US or allied countries, killing them without recourse to due process; they are imprecise, killing hundreds of non-combatants who are by default labelled as "Enemies Killed in Action" when their identities are unknown; and these strikes are an inefficient form of intelligence gathering, as they kill people who might otherwise have divulged valuable information. It's all horrifying. The knowledge that nobody cares enough to stop it horrifies all the more.
Let's keep it dreary:
The Case for Reparations by Ta-Nehisi Coates
The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Coates is the best non-fiction writer I've read in ages and these two cover stories for The Atlantic (from last summer and this summer respectively) illustrate why. With beautiful writing, he brings mounds of evidence to show that the crime of subjugating African Americans was historically and is presently fundamental, not incidental, to the wealth of the United States. I've actually just finished Coates' recently published book, Between the World and Me, and plan on writing a longer post about it, so I won't go into more detail here. Rest assured, you should know who Ta-Nehisi Coates is, what he writes about and why it's important.
On a somewhat lighter note, Canada recently had an election and after nine long years, we've had a change of government. I'm more thankful that Stephen Harper's gone than pie-eye-excited about Justin Trudeau, but he's at least saying most of the things I want to hear. The CBC has a rundown of the new Liberal government's top early priorities and The Trudeau Metre is a good resource to make sure that the new Prime Minister fulfills his promises. Something to keep an eye on.
No comments:
Post a Comment