http://pandagon.net/index.php/site/comments/gender_power_and_the_giffords_shooting/
With regard to the question, "how do you know what you know?", it does seem as if males tend to have a harder time figuring out the difference between ideology and reality than females of the same level of intelligence do.
Perhaps the shooter Loughner was engaged in this kind of search for meaning. As this post above suggests, he wanted to be able to differentiate between socially constructed meaning and meaning that has enduring value. (This is to lend some intelligibility to an otherwise unintelligible project. It is the kindest light I could put this in.) He also wanted a way out of a situation where social control and ideological spinning coupled with a reality that seemed too systematized.
I think the inability to distinguish between ideology and a deeper level of reality is part of the nature of the patriarchal construction of reality, which was, from its inception, religious. Males were told that they were better than women for transcendental reasons -- because "God" had ordained it this way. Consequently, males believed it, but this was a form of psychological flattery that, whilst consolidating a male supremacist position in many ways, also robbed males of their ability to pay attention to their own experiences and to learn from them. When ideology had so much to offer and when the pull of ideology was in the opposite direction to personal experience (which surely does not suggest that males are uniformly superior to women in all ways), one succumbed to ideological flattery.
This situation of not knowing how to pay attention to the meanings entailed in one's personal experiences is a debilitating one. Many women "know what they know" because they've often developed a strong capacity to observe their own experiences and learn from them. On the other hand, males very often have shied away from doing this. Furthermore, the patriarchal game of bluff -- achieved by feigning intellectual and knowing superiority in the face of not knowing anything at all -- seems to be failing more and more these days.
I think a lot of males feel that they have been cheated, but they can't quite work out why. They are not prepared to analyse how it is that the ideological system that was designed to give them systematic advantages seems now to be setting them up to fail.
Many males are quite angry because their transcendental "truths" are not accepted by others as truths anymore.
This seems to be related to a desire to return to reductionistic "facts", or failing this, to the ostensible objectivity of mathematics. I noted similarities in Assange's diary and Loughner's YouTube writings. Both express this drive to prove male superiority through posing as being objective in life, using numbers.
With regard to the question, "how do you know what you know?", it does seem as if males tend to have a harder time figuring out the difference between ideology and reality than females of the same level of intelligence do.
Perhaps the shooter Loughner was engaged in this kind of search for meaning. As this post above suggests, he wanted to be able to differentiate between socially constructed meaning and meaning that has enduring value. (This is to lend some intelligibility to an otherwise unintelligible project. It is the kindest light I could put this in.) He also wanted a way out of a situation where social control and ideological spinning coupled with a reality that seemed too systematized.
I think the inability to distinguish between ideology and a deeper level of reality is part of the nature of the patriarchal construction of reality, which was, from its inception, religious. Males were told that they were better than women for transcendental reasons -- because "God" had ordained it this way. Consequently, males believed it, but this was a form of psychological flattery that, whilst consolidating a male supremacist position in many ways, also robbed males of their ability to pay attention to their own experiences and to learn from them. When ideology had so much to offer and when the pull of ideology was in the opposite direction to personal experience (which surely does not suggest that males are uniformly superior to women in all ways), one succumbed to ideological flattery.
This situation of not knowing how to pay attention to the meanings entailed in one's personal experiences is a debilitating one. Many women "know what they know" because they've often developed a strong capacity to observe their own experiences and learn from them. On the other hand, males very often have shied away from doing this. Furthermore, the patriarchal game of bluff -- achieved by feigning intellectual and knowing superiority in the face of not knowing anything at all -- seems to be failing more and more these days.
I think a lot of males feel that they have been cheated, but they can't quite work out why. They are not prepared to analyse how it is that the ideological system that was designed to give them systematic advantages seems now to be setting them up to fail.
Many males are quite angry because their transcendental "truths" are not accepted by others as truths anymore.
This seems to be related to a desire to return to reductionistic "facts", or failing this, to the ostensible objectivity of mathematics. I noted similarities in Assange's diary and Loughner's YouTube writings. Both express this drive to prove male superiority through posing as being objective in life, using numbers.
No comments:
Post a Comment