Hombres, mujeres y trabajo

Men, women and work

Vanilla is not the only flavour
Apr 17th 2008

The Sexual Paradox: Men, Women, and the Real Gender Gap.
By Susan Pinker.
Scribner; 352 pages; $26. Atlantic Books; £12.99

WHY can’t a woman be more like a man, wondered Henry Higgins of his protégée Eliza Doolittle? Susan Pinker, a psychologist-turned-journalist, thinks the question is still being asked, sotto voce, by those who fret about the absence of women in boardrooms and laboratories.

Male, she says, is the “vanilla gender”; the norm from which female deviates. Now that women are free to work in any field, their choices are expected to mirror those of the men around them. So discrimination, albeit covert, is often held to be the cause when more women study biology and education than computing and physics, or take part-time and public-sector jobs rather than work the 80-hour weeks needed to get a seat on the board or a partnership in a law firm.

Ms Pinker sets out a different hypothesis: that the Western women who on average do different work from their brothers do so freely and with reason. The theory is attractive, given that the common alternative view is that women are all too often “either patsies or victims”. It is also controversial. Larry Summers resigned as president of Harvard University in 2006 because of the fuss caused by his suggestion that discrimination might not be the only reason so few women make it in science. But Ms Pinker marshals much evidence to back up her contention (some of it more contested than she acknowledges) of differing brain structures, hormones, motivation, empathy and risk-aversion.

Problemas para conseguir la viagra femenina

A Dose of Desire
The Race Is On to Create ‘Pink Viagra,’ But Some Women Aren’t in the Mood for It

By David Segal
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 12, 2008; C01

Viagra turns 10 this month, and didn’t time just fly? It seems like only yesterday we started guffawing at the Symbolism for Dummies ads on TV for the little blue pill and its “erectile dysfunction” rivals — footballs tossed through tires, faucets erupting. The spots ended with a list of potential side effects that sounded like a satire of potential side effects. “More than four hours ?” we winced. “Ouch.”

However discomfiting the commercials, the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of Viagra — on March 27, 1998 — is a landmark day in the history of sex. It seemed at the time like a biomedical revolution was upon us all, and about five minutes after word of the magical med went global, the question first was asked: Where is the women’s version of Viagra?

The short answer: They’re still working on it. A bunch of companies have tried and failed to create “pink Viagra,” as it’s often called. Other companies have drugs in late stages of clinical testing, including a gel that recently began a make-or-break nationwide study with several thousand women. Give us five years, maybe less, say the most optimistic researchers and doctors. Though it’s unclear exactly how many women would ask for a prescription, no one doubts that the first company that gets to market a remedy for female sexual dysfunction, as it’s formally known, will earn a fortune.

But as this race reaches what could be its final lap, not all of the spectators are cheering. Some, in fact, are booing as loudly as they can.

Pechos en el arte

I’m a huge fan of breasts. Always have been
Germaine Greer

March 10, 2008 9:30 AM

Ever since I can remember I have been a fan of breasts, or, as I called them when I was little, bosoms. I longed for the arrival of my own, and put socks down the front of my vest so that I could see how they might look.

When I drew female figures I used to pencil in a “u” on each side of the chest and put a dot in the middle of the u. I told people they were pockets, but no one was fooled. I may have been so interested because I was breast-fed, but I don’t think so. Feeding didn’t figure in my fantasies at all.

In those days you didn’t often get to see breasts, or even cleavage. The fashion was whirlpool-stitching and “lift-and-separate”. The name of one bra was Maidenform; another boasted “cross-your-heart” styling, which turned each breast into a horn set at right angles to the other. There was nothing about a properly controlled bosom to suggest that it might be nice to touch. Even after the sweater girl arrived from Hollywood, the bosom remained a rebarbative domain. Boys put a good deal of effort into learning how to take a bra off single-handed. There was little fun to be had in the days of necking and petting if it stayed on.

Like all the other young owners of chests without breasts, I looked long and hard at the bare-breasted women in the National Geographic, wondering if I was destined to have the long pointy kind or the round kind, hoping I wouldn’t end up with the kind that had huge nipples and not much else. The photographs of the real thing were far more satisfactory than breasts in art, which were usually small, pale, understated lumps, whether the owners were painted standing up by Cranach or lying down by Titian. The lactating Madonna sometimes flashed a breast, usually set far too high on her narrow chest. You know from the way that Goya painted the breasts on his naked Maja that he had never seen any.

Control de la natalidad en Gran Bretaña

 

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-Albion@h-net.msu.edu (February 200

Kate Fisher. _Birth Control, Sex, and Marriage in Britain, 1918-1960_.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. 294 pp. Figures, bibliography,
index..
$125.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-19-926736-1.

Reviewed for H-Albion by H. G. Cocks, Department of History, University of
Nottingham

Getting Off at Mill Hill

Historians have long been puzzled by the decline in fertility which took
place in Britain between about 1870 and 1939.  Specifically, they have
wondered how exactly it happened, and have tended to assume that it was
the consequence of three interlocking factors: the spread of contraceptive
education by pioneers like Marie Stopes, leading to a wider awareness of
mechanical birth control methods; the gradual emergence of less
patriarchal, more “companionate” marriages in which women’s interests were more
readily voiced and discussed; and the consequent ability of wives to take control
of decisions about birth control and family size.  All of these, it is often
suggested, were a constituent part of modern attitudes to sex, fertility,
subjectivity, and society itself.  In particular, the increasing use of
birth control has been seen as a rejection of the “traditional” and
fatalistic belief that conception, and hence the future, could not be
controlled.  In contrast, small families and fertility control appear to
represent a revolutionary moment in the making of modernity, one in which
people began to develop a “modern” mentality of trying to control
uncertainty through careful planning.

A number of related assumptions accompany this narrative: first, that
women were empowered by taking control of contraceptive decisions–what was in
effect their natural province; second, that new methods of birth control
required more marital communication and hence were the key cause of the
decline in patriarchal marriages;  and finally, that the adoption of
increasingly reliable appliance methods occasioned the demise of birth
control techniques which historians have seen as unreliable, unsatisfying,
and harmful to the sex lives and psyches of those practicing them.  In
this account, the vagaries and frustrations of coitus interruptus are replaced
by more predictable condoms, caps, and pessaries.  This story is also central
to the rise of women’s sexual, moral, and political autonomy, a
narrative in which key obstacles to female sexual enjoyment–ignorance, insensitive
masculinity, unreliable contraceptive methods, and the possibility of
conception itself were gradually removed.

Apología de la diversidad corporal

All colors, shapes, sizes
An ex-beauty queen wrote ‘Body Drama’ to help liberate young women from society’s obsession with perfection

By CECELIA GOODNOW
P-I REPORTER

Here’s how the struggle over girls’ self image is shaping up.

On one side: ubiquitous media images of pouty supermodels whose digitally enhanced perfection promotes shame, longing and cosmetic surgery among everyday girls battling zits and thunder thighs.

On the other side: the Dove “campaign for real beauty,” the first bans against ultrathin catwalk models and our mothers’ assurance that we’re beautiful just the way we are.

Guess which side is winning.

The scales may tip a bit closer toward sanity with Thursday’s release of “Body Drama” (Penguin, $20), a sassy, photographic body manual being hailed as “a book of liberation” and “the modern girl’s ‘Our Bodies, Ourselves.’ “

Filled with practical, big-sisterly advice pitched to the adolescent ear, it celebrates the lumps, bumps, sags and smells that make us human while also sharing tips on fake tanning, hair removal, PMS and other health and beauty issues.

It doesn’t just tell, it shows — through frank, unretouched photos of exuberant young women of all sizes, shapes and colors. Women who flaunt stretch marks, dimpled behinds, keloid scars from piercings, uneven breasts and rough elbows as if to say, “Yeah, this is how I am — so what?”

Its most radical feature is the “vulva spread,” a photographic array of two dozen vulvas of diverse colors and grooming persuasions — a display meant to counteract the trend toward “designer vaginas” by showing the range of normal.

Violación: Historia de 1860 a la actualidad

Rape: A History from 1860 to the Present
By Joanna Bourke: an examination of the many preposterous ways that rape has been explained over time by all manner of experts

Reviewed by Isabella Thomas

Rape, says Joanna Bourke, used to be understood as the act of sex with a woman who does not “belong” to the perpetrator. In the 19th century it was widely thought that an unwilling woman could not be raped because “merely by vibrating”, a vagina “could ward off attack”. A victim of rape was, therefore, a contradiction in terms. Some thought that if the woman had experienced orgasm in the act, or had finally succumbed, then she could not claim to have been raped. The belief that women were prone to lie about rape to gain attention was, of course, widespread, and rape trials were notorious for their prurient investigations into a woman’s past. In the past 50 years or so, western feminists have argued – with some success – that rape is more about power than sex. In British courts these days, rape does not have to involve violence to justify the name. Lack of consent (which is itself potentially ambiguous) suffices.

As Bourke shows in her scholarly historical survey of rape and rapists, part of the problem with this subject is that “imprecision permeates much of the clinical and psychiatric literature”. Her examination of the many preposterous ways that rape has been explained over time by all manner of experts – doctors, academics, lawyers, psychologists et al – is an attempt to lift the obfuscation.

Sexo, mentiras y revistas de mujeres

Sex, Lies, and Women’s Magazines
BY LIZA FEATHERSTONE

Standing on line at the grocery store almost anywhere in America, the hapless shopper is bombarded with insistent exhortatory headlines: blow his mind; sexual bliss secrets!; get his sexual attention instantly; what he’s thinking about you . . . naked. Perhaps she stands in front of them to prevent her mother or her kid from reading them aloud. Or she skims the copy to see if it might deliver the promised ecstasy. Whether or not she actually buys women’s magazines, she can’t escape their sexual anxieties, enthusiasms, and obsessions.
Our shopper might have been all ears at a fall cocktail-hour panel of women’s magazine editors, hosted by Mediabistro.com, a media networking organization, and held at Obeca Li, a trendy nouvelle Asian restaurant in lower Manhattan. Audience members, mostly senior-level editors and writers for women’s magazines, joined the panelists in voicing many familiar complaints about the industry: too many skinny models, even more emaciated feature stories, and too much advertiser influence on editorial content. Laurie Abraham, executive editor of Elle magazine, however, had something else on her mind. The worst thing about women’s magazines, she asserted during the panel discussion, is how much “we lie about sex.”

Under normal circumstances, a roomful of experienced journalists might rise up in outrage at being called liars. But Abraham’s statement was met with nods of guilty agreement and mildly embarrassed “tell me something I don’t know” shrugs. No one denied the charge.

This is not Watergate, of course, or even Monica-gate. Yet these ubiquitous stories about sex are presented as journalism, chock full of analysis and quotes, and they are surely believed by many of their readers. They are a formidable cultural force, shaping and reinforcing our attitudes about men and women, orgasms and relationships. Women’s magazines run scrupulously reported and fact-checked articles on such subjects as breast cancer and women under the Taliban. Do they have a problem with sex?

Placer, procreación y selección natural

Journal of Homosexuality, Vol. 51(2) 2006

Sexual Pleasure, Procreation
and Natural Selection
WITH PLEASURE: THOUGHTS ON THE NATURE OF HUMAN
SEXUALITY. Paul Abramson and Steven Pinkerton. New York:
Oxford University Press, 2002.
The pulses of vigorous theorizing about sexuality that started up about
thirty-five years ago show no signs of abating. The first pulse came from
feminist writers, who insisted that sex be satisfying to women as well as
to men. Anne Koedt’s (1973) widely discussed essay, “The Myth of the
Vaginal Orgasm,” noted that penile-vaginal intercourse often failed to
give women orgasms. The essay valorized clitoral stimulation by a male
or female partner for this purpose, even when it takes forms that cannot
lead to conception. Soon after, gay liberation gave birth to “social
constructionism,” a perspective that theorized sexual orientation to be a
socio-cultural creation. More recently, evolutionary psychology has
sought to explain sexual behavior and interests as the product of natural
selection and sexual selection.
With Pleasure, by Paul Abramson and Steven Pinkerton (2002),
builds on the foundations laid by feminism, gay liberation and evolutionary
psychology, and thus gives us the opportunity of seeing the uses
to which these developments are being put in current theorizing about
sexuality.1 The volume is a chimera, partly an exposition of scientific
ideas, and partly an effort to persuade readers of the desirability of certain
social and cultural changes. Readers will find an abundance of material
on various aspects of human (and sometimes non-human) sexuality. The
authors not only summarize and sometimes criticize research and ideas of
others, but also develop provocative ideas of their own.
Central to the authors’ project is the goal of reconstituting theorizing
about sex so that its central organizing principle is not procreation, but
pleasure. This is a direction for theorizing that would have been unimaginable
fifty years ago. Social change of the last half-century, including
the widespread use and cultural acceptance of contraception, the more
controversial decriminalization of abortion, the large-scale entry of
women into the paid labor force and their consequent need to control
their fertility, and the flourishing of feminist and gay social movements
enabled this theoretical enterprise.

La mujer en la Iglesia primitiva

La mujer en la Iglesia primitiva
Varios autores
Sígueme. Salamanca, 2007. 400 páginas, 25 euros

Éste es un libro bello, muy interesante, audaz y riguroso. Como indica su título, trata de explicar cuál era el papel que correspondía a las mujeres en las comunidades cristianas de los primeros siglos. Para explicarlo, los autores han manejado un número notable de fuentes y no se limitan a las cristianas o las que hablan de los cristianos. Parten del supuesto de que, en el Imperio romano (que es donde nació la Iglesia), las mujeres cristianas se formaron en las mismas costumbres que las demás mujeres y, por ello, se refieren a los modos femeninos de afrontar la vida, sea cual fuere la religión que se profesara. Esta amplitud de visión es sumamente rica y permite ver dónde tropezó el credo cristiano con las costumbres y qué se hizo cuando ocurrió (lo que sucedió no pocas veces).

El libro no repite lo sabido, ya que los autores han reconsiderado las fuentes a partir de unos criterios metodológicos fundamentales que explican al comienzo. El primero consiste en partir de la posibilidad de que los textos que se refieren a los cristianos y que emplean, con ese fin, el plural masculino, no tienen por qué referirse sólo a varones, sino a varones y mujeres. El criterio es válido, por más que requiera una justificación lingüística más detallada. En algunos casos, en griego, se resolvía el problema de hablar de hombres y mujeres simultáneamente por la vía de emplear el plural neutro, en vez del plural masculino, y es una posibilidad que habría que calibrar. De todas formas, las conclusiones de los autores son más que verosímiles. Rehacen toda la vida social del Imperio, sólo que en clave cristiana femenina. Tiene mucho este libro de historia global en perspectiva femenina. Los temas que se tocan son, por lo tanto, múltiples; es imposible enumerarlos; nadie suponga una visión restrictiva.

Crítica feminista del deseo sexual femenino

 Journal of Sex Research, Volume 43, Number 3, August 2006

 Women’s sexual desire: a feminist critique

By Jill M. Wood, Patricia Barthalow Koch, and Phyllis Kernoff Mansfield

Sexual desire is a key component of the current popular conceptualizations of sexual identity, sexual orientation, and sexual functioning and dysfunctioning. Some sexologists contend that no scholarly or scientific discussion of sexuality can occur without reference to it (Leiblum & Rosen, 2000; Levine, 2002). Even though sexual desire has been the topic of much recent research, there is a great deal of ambiguity and variation regarding the conceptualization, definition, operationalization, and application (in research and practice) of the term “sexual desire” as it relates to women (e.g. Basson, 2002b; Kaschak & Tiefer, 2002; Tiefer, 1995). This variation is profoundly related to the theoretical framework from which sexual desire is viewed. Most often sexual desire has been studied from a biomedical paradigm, as noted by Basson (2002a; 2002b), Rosen and Lieblum (1995), and Winton (2001). This paradigm posits sexuality as intrinsic, natural, and universal (Tiefer, 1988).

In contrast, feminist scholars and researchers have called for a critical analysis of the biomedical paradigm in favor of more woman-centered models of sexuality (e.g., Daniluk, 1998; McCormick, 1994; Tiefer, 1991, 1995, 2000). Feminism is not a monolithic ideology, but instead is defined and practiced in various ways by different people and groups (e.g., radical and liberal; McCormick). In its broadest interpretation, feminism represents advocacy for women’s interests. In a stricter definition, it is the “theory of the political, social, and economic equality of the sexes” (LeGates legate (lĕg`ət) [Lat. legare=to send], one sent as a representative of a state or of some high authority. In Roman history a legate was sent by the senate to the provinces as an envoy of the emperor. Sometime during the 12th cent. the word came into use to designate a papal ambassador., 1995, p. 494). Feminist sexology sexology /sex·ol·o·gy/ (sek-sol´ah-je) the scientific study of sex and sexual relations.
sex·ol·o·gy (sk-sl is the scholarly study of sexuality that is of, by, and for women’s interests (Koch, 2004). Using diverse epistemologies, methods, and sources of data, feminist scholars examine women’s sexual experiences and the cultural frame that constructs sexuality (Vance & Pollis, 1990). To this end, Pollis (198 has proposed the following principles to overcome the deficits in understanding women’s experiences, gender and gender asymmetry, and sexuality:

Sexo y placer en la cultura occidental

Archives of Sexual Behavior Volume 36, Number 3, June 2007 , pp. 471-472(2)

Book Review
Sex and Pleasure in Western Culture
By Gail Hawkes, Polity Press, Cambridge, England, 2004, 207 pp., £50.00 (hardback); £15.99 (paperback).

Dustin M. Wax1 Contact Information
Department of Human Behavior, Community College of Southern Nevada, Las Vegas, NV 89146, USA

Published online: 18 May 2007

The regulation and management of sexual desire is one of only a few well-documented cultural universals. In every society that has been studied, there exists some form of restriction as to whom one can or cannot view as potential sexual partners, whether this takes the form of incest taboos that forbid sexual relationships with family members, marriage rules that prevent access to other people’s partners, legal frameworks that restrict one to one’s own racial, class, or other grouping, or informal aesthetic restrictions that do the same. These restrictions are often thought of in terms of minimizing conflict between individuals, controlling reproduction, and promoting the formation of alliances between groups or group segments, but Hawkes’ volume suggests that these restrictions also need to be understood in the wider context of control over the social order. In this perspective, discourses on the sexual body express anxieties over the control—and potential loss of control—of the body politic, and suggest as well the channels through which social control will be asserted.

This volume explores the ramifications of this thesis in the development of Western society, beginning with the Greece of Plato and Socrates and moving through early Christianity and the establishment of the Church, through the rise of modernity in the Renaissance and Enlightenment, through the Victorian era, and up to the present. Along the way, Hawkes tracks concerns over sex and sexuality as embedded in philosophical, religious, medical, legal, and, finally, popular discourses, revealing both the mutability of attitudes towards desire and pleasure and the endurance of the underlying need to establish social order through the instrument of the sexual body. Although her argument rests on discourse analysis and thus is subject to some of the shortcomings of that mode of analysis, the depth of Hawkes’ timeline makes this book an important resource for situating attitudes towards sex in their proper historical and political perspective.

Doris Lessing

Premio Nobel de Literatura
El zumbido de su cerebro trabajando

ROSA MONTERO
EL PAÍS  -  Cultura - 12-10-2007

Es difícil describir el impacto que produjo El cuaderno dorado de Doris Lessing en las escritoras o aspirantes a escritoras de la época. La obra salió en 1962, pero en España la leímos en la transición y cayó en nuestras mentes como una bomba, rompiendo paredes, haciéndonos más libres y, como suele suceder con los materiales altamente explosivos, causando también considerables estragos. Era una novela que hablaba de problemas reales de mujeres reales; de Anna Wulf, escritora y madre en solitario de una niña, y de su lucha para salir adelante, para trabajar, para encontrar su lugar en un mundo que acababa de dinamitar (de nuevo un símil pirotécnico: eran tiempos fulminantes) los roles sexuales tradicionales. Y trataba de estos temas, por entonces novedosos, con vigor intelectual y con una gran complejidad formal. Fue un libro rompedor, y de ahí los estragos, porque una legión de escritoras se dedicó a imitar su estilo cacofónico, híbrido y fragmentario, tan original como brillante. Incluso se estereotipó, durante cierto tiempo, una supuesta voz literaria de mujer que pasaba obligatoriamente por escribir así, con esa técnica como de retales. Ni qué decir tiene que los resultados fueron por lo general calamitosos.
Ésta es la parte negativa de su influencia. Pero la positiva fue enorme, y consistió precisamente en lo contrario. Doris Lessing demostró que se podía escribir sobre temas que antes habían sido considerados como de mujeres con altura intelectual y con calidad literaria. Y que a través de esos temas se podía retratar el mundo con tanta hondura y amplitud como a través de cualquier otro.

Sacerdotisas en la antigua Grecia

October 3, 2007
How to be a modern goddess
Did sex and the sacred mix in Ancient Greece?

Joan Breton Connelly
PORTRAIT OF A PRIESTESS
Women and ritual in ancient Greece
456pp. Princeton University Press. £26.95.
9780691127460
Ancient Greek women lived lives that would be far more recognizable to the women of Iran or Saudi Arabia today than to the women of the modern West. Their skin was pale from a life in the shadows. When they were not indoors they covered up with a veil. Hence part of the preparations of the cross-dressing, coup-plotting women of Aristophanes’ Ecclesiazusae consists of letting their skin get tanned by secret exposure to the unaccustomed rays of the sun. Men kept well away from women they were not related to, and even husbands and wives often slept in different, sex-separated, parts of the house. Decent women were not supposed even to be spoken of in the public world of men, according to the funeral speech penned for Pericles by Thucydides. For a woman even to allow herself to be seen at a window or leaning over the sill of a Dutch door was dangerous for her reputation, and eulogists at weddings were advised to preface their praise of the beauty of the bride with an “I have heard”. In Crete the fine an adulterer had to pay was halved if the woman was seduced in a house that was not her home, and in Athens no charges at all could be laid against a man who seduced a woman who went to and fro “showingly”; as if by the very fact of appearing in public she was announcing that she was anybody’s.

Given this background, it is perhaps not surprising that funerals were viewed as dangerous opportunities for men with adulterous intent. They provided rare occasions for a man actually to get a look at another man’s women, and for a woman to see what might be on offer instead of her old man (who was often a cousin or an uncle and usually twenty years older than her – a man her father had arranged for her to marry when she was a little girl and without, of course, asking her opinion). At least, when the go-between arrived with a secret proposition, she might remember a handsome young face in the mournful crowd that smiled at her when nobody was looking, and might not be disappointed when on a subsequent night, her husband away, she held a lamp up to the face of the intruder the slave-girl had been asked to let in, hoping to see same face again.

Mujeres rebeldes

September 30, 2007
We’re No Angels

By KATHRYN HARRISON

WELL-BEHAVED WOMEN SELDOM MAKE HISTORY

By Laurel Thatcher Ulrich.

Illustrated. 284 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $24.

“The pervasive theme is rebellion.” Laurel Thatcher Ulrich begins her new book, “Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History,” struggling to explain — understand — the appeal of an aside she made in the spring 1976 issue of an academic journal, a comment that has become a popular slogan printed on T-shirts and coffee mugs and bumper stickers, usually without her permission and often without attribution.

It was in an article for “American Quarterly,” about the pious and extremely well-behaved colonial women described by Cotton Mather as “the hidden ones,” that Ulrich made her now familiar observation . Her study of wives and mothers and daughters as they were remembered in funeral eulogies, the sole record of women who lived and labored in silent obscurity, illustrates a critical point. Much of what is characterized as female “misbehavior” is a matter of voice — of a woman insisting she be heard, paid not only attention, but also the respect due a being as fully human and necessary as a man.

Given millenniums of patriarchy, the issue of women speaking out is necessarily that of their speaking out of turn. The mostly male forums of public life may patronize women with token attention and even, sometimes, take their words seriously, but they rarely if ever pay attention to a woman as they would to a man, without consciously taking her sex into account. Is it an accident of fate that “Well- Behaved Women Seldom Make History” is published as we look ahead to what may become the historic first of a major political party nominating a female candidate for president? Has Hillary Clinton arrived at the forefront by misbehaving?

Ulrich, a Harvard historian whose “Midwife’s Tale” won the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for history, uses “three classic works in Western feminism” as a springboard for examining the theme of “bad” behavior. Could the popularity of her slogan, she wondered, be explained by “feminism, postfeminism or something much older?” The answer emerges in Ulrich’s choice of texts: Christine de Pizan’s “Book of the City of Ladies,” written in 1405; Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s “Eighty Years and More,” published in 1898; and “A Room of One’s Own,” based on two lectures Virginia Woolf gave in 1928 — all works by women who “turned to history as a way of making sense of their own lives.” History, Ulrich reminds us, “isn’t just what happens in the past,” but what we choose to remember. As much invention as discovery, history attempts to make the chaotic present into a coherent picture by comparing it to images, equally artificial, fashioned from events long past.

Hombres inmaduros

The Entertainment Industry’s Love Affair With Immature Men
By Alicia Rebensdorf, AlterNet
September 13, 2007

You know the guy. He has a monosyllabic retro name like Hal or Earl or Chuck, mildly wacky hair and a death grip on his adolescence. He’s got frat house furniture and dependency issues with his friends, and is hapless or commitment-phobic with women. The Act One diagnosis is usually that he just “needs to grow up.”

No, not Michael Vick. Though the Falcon quarterback’s explanation for dog fighting — “I need to grow up” — does show just how ubiquitous the Peter Pan excuse has become. Male leads in recent popular TV shows and movies are increasingly portrayed as victims of their own immaturity. If only instead of claiming he had found Jesus, Vick had said he’d found some fantastically attractive and accomplished woman, perhaps the viewing audience would’ve gone along. In today’s romantic comedy scripts, the man-child always meets his Wendy. Only through the innate, successful, high-achieving grace of a female may our hero be saved.

Taken one at a time, it’s easy to pass off this trend as a simple, comedic trope. But considering the storyline’s popularity and how it is affecting gender relations at large, this narrative is worthy of closer attention.

Construcción acartonada de la sexualidad masculina

Rigid Scholarship on Male Sexuality

By CAMILLE PAGLIA

BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ESSAY

Images of Bliss: Ejaculation, Masculinity, Meaning, by Murat Aydemir (University of Minnesota Press, 2007)

 

Impotence: A Cultural History, by Angus McLaren (University of Chicago Press, 2007)

 

Sperm Counts: Overcome by Man’s Most Precious Fluid, by Lisa Jean Moore (New York University Press, 2007)

Three provocative books on male sexuality recently published by university presses provide a good barometer of the current state of campus gender studies. A welcome development of the past decade has been the expansion of the gender lens to include men, who were routinely stereotyped by women’s-studies curricula as they took shape from the 1970s on. These books reflect that broader perspective and also display a more liberal attitude toward pornography, which was assailed in the 1980s by religious and cultural conservatives oddly allied with crusading feminists. By the 90s, pornography was legitimized as a field of study by gay male academics as well as an insurgent wing of sex-positive feminism. However, despite their greater sexual sophistication, the three books under review still retain traces of the old archfeminist censoriousness toward men — or, more exactly, toward the majority of men in the world who do not happen to conform to the tidy bourgeois values of political correctness.