#because these cultural norms are formed by placing increased importance on white ways of doing things

[hashtag-anthems]

Maybe I'll go into more detail on this later but I was in class last week and we were talking about how to incorporate social justice into our pedagogy and curriculum as math teachers (because there's a lot of people who think social justice doesn't belong in the math classroom and should be left to the social studies teachers and those people would be wrong)

So we were looking at the development of racial identity and how it's impacted by education because education is currently built on a lot of structures that stem from white supremacy and we were looking at a framework that lays out a lot of the cultural features of white supremacy and uh...

Let me just say that a lot of "cancel culture" and the anti mentality is really, disturbingly aligned with the cultural facets of white supremacy, and I don't think it's coincidental.

This is the pdf that our field instructor gave us to give us a foundation to build our discussion on: link to pdf.

This isn't to say that everyone who ascribes to these ideologies of cancel culture or antis is a white supremacist. I'm not making any statements on anyone's motivations or intentions here.

I just want to say that it's important to educate yourself on these things, because it's very easy to go into something with good intentions and find those who want to take advantage of that.

#hashtag rambles #do not let tumblr be your education on social justice #i say as i try to educate people on social justice using tumblr #basically i mean you need to go to sources outside of tumblr #reputable sources #and you know examine multiple sources and make informed decisions that way #and yes sometimes that means looking at sources you disagree with #so like this document isn't about any kind of hate groups or blatant hate actions #it's about cultural norms that stem from white supremacy #because these cultural norms are formed by placing increased importance on white ways of doing things #and enforcing these norms is a way of upholding white supremacy #just want to clarify that because my class was a little confused as well

[amxwolf]

Here is why conventional healthful-thinking is not working on Millennials.

Have you ever had that terrifying dream where you are stuck in a dark forest or sketchy alley, frantically running for your life from some kind of feral monster or mad man? Most of us can personally recall at least once being roused from sleep in a cold sweat because their brain had spent the last few hours perfecting the latent image of a made-to-order nightmare. While that experience is certainly not exclusive to Millennials (rather quite the opposite), the waking reaction or at least how it is processed later by this roughly categorized group of mislabeled people is unique to say the least.

For years now, people in marketing have been fervently dissecting and attempting to recreate what has been loosely categorized as "Millennial Humor". And in all of their efforts to connect with this flock of black sheep, the grand majority of them seem to be missing a key factor in the psychology at work here. For all the unwarrantable bilge that modern advertising haphazardly cobbles together, only a small percentage of the nonsense is seasoned perfectly with the secret ingredient. What is this singular spice? Well, while indulgent to profess and speculative, from someone "sitting in millennial class”, it's obvious: A touch of salt.

Never will I sit here and cry to the general public about how unhappy I am that the modern advertising industry is just not scratching my itch for the wares it’s peddling, but I think it's important for us now to look at how this systemic lack of understanding is reaching beyond the world of subliminal profiteering. Society has other significant quality-of-life effecting systems that are also missing the mark when trying to aim and reach out to help this specific group of people. Puns aside, "a touch of salt" as I quipped, is flavoring the lives of a lot of people in their mid to late 20's and early 40's. And the most frustrating and difficult to reconcile attempts that I personally have made to better myself, have been those that were guided by people who just cannot seem to put their brain into that salty head space.

For example, trying to focus on and internalize a well-organized medical presentation about the encompassing negative effects of stress or insomnia and its seemly simple solution of just "changing your thinking", is about as easily digestible as a two-decade-year-old fruitcake for someone who is imprisoned daily by the symptoms of chronic stress. While I may sit there and give listening (ironically) "the old college try", the sound quickly turns to fuzzy white noise the deeper the lecture dives into positive thinking.

You see, Millennials are not generally fluent in positive thinking. More and more of them seem to be speaking a very distinctive dialect of realism, which incorporates a robustly cultivated sense of sarcasm and a somewhat grim shade of hopelessness. A lot of millennials grew up with a laughably poetic twist on "Growing Up" and "Being Successful", which in turn has colored their day-to-day interactions and created this defeatism-culture. Millennials will openly joke about their death as a needed release, their eulogy as a retirement card, or emotionally decompile themselves over something simple like saying "you too" in a situation that doesn't warrant it.

A good percentage of Millennials were old enough to understand the destructive consequences of the most recent housing market disaster on a very personal level; At an impressionable age, watching their own parents, who may have worked excruciatingly hard at the expense of any number of personal or family goals, lose just about everything resonated in a way that cannot be unheard. Then add the borderline criminal and unscrupulous "sheep-shearing" that became common place when the generation was herded off to college, trade school, or other form of career-building education. Not to mention the fact that upon completing said programs, a proverbial "step-in-the-right direction", a substantial number of these "hopeless wanderers" were faced with yet another barbed-wire hurdle when the job market in countless fields were oversaturated with potential employees. Many positions had not been vacated as they normally would have been with the age of retirement being stretched further and further down the road due to increased cost of living and financial demands; the finish line or lap marker was just not getting any closer. To add insult to injury, Millennials, sometimes unbelievably hardworking, are frequently being listed as perpetuators of the clashing reality we have today. This being what the modern media is calling "The Great Resignation"; a dubious combination of a labor shortage amidst an unemployment spike fueled by uncompetitive wages left unchecked, the government's inability to reel in the situation, and a general devaluing of laborers overall.

Oh. And also, we were killing the diamond industry at the same time. Or was it simultaneously the marriage and divorce industry? Wait! I think it was cinema? Or no....maybe it was fabric softener. For a complete dissertation of all the things Millennials brutally murdered over the last two decades, perhaps I'll include a link below if for no other reason to drive my point home.

You have this group of people who are conditioned to endlessly swimming upstream, against the current, with nothing but chastising and bitterness to listen to. So, when it comes to something universal like learning to "sleep better" or "problem solving", the indifferent but somehow time-honored approach of saying "it's as easy as just taking control" is over time if not immediately rejected as dissonant information.

These people don't feel like they have control; some of them feel like they never had any to begin with.

Why is this a problem?

Our society is not developing a taste for "salt" at a pace in which it can prepare social-sustenance for its population. We're not getting any younger, and neither are the generations in front of us.

Millennials are already, by some definitions the mass-population of workers, voters, and other titles that we've yet to embrace. And our lack of interest is not because we do not have a passion for positive change (even on a global scale). Millennials have voiced over time that they feel they are the silent majority amidst a group of people who will not give them breathing room and don't respect the validity of their opinions and ambitions. And it is by no means restricted to one region or country on this planet. This is a global phenomenon.

I could spin a vast yarn about the political ramifications of continuing to exclude the Millennials from the metaphoric Counsel of Elders, but I'm more concerned about the neglect that is spreading elsewhere. We need our leaders in the medical and social fields to really respect and dig deep into how to incorporate "Millennial Thinking" into their treatment and development plans. A large amount of the global population is going to need carefully tailored treatment for things as old as depression, bi-polar tendencies, or schizophrenia as well as newly discovered mental encumbrances like imposter-syndrome.

While “positive-thinking” may have been easily cultivated in the past, we may need to start from a more negative approach and build from there to educate and treat a group of down-on-their-luck millions. Pumping drugs into a populace is not going to permanently patch the leak either, so there truly is precedence for a rehashing of how we should prioritize mental health in modern society.

Stop spending so much time and energy assigning blame to modern technologies and social norms. Are these going away? No? In that case, those things are much like our other daily stresses that are unavoidable. Yes, you can change your nightly routine to de-stress the same way that you can change a job or a daily commute, but there needs to be a fundamental shift in accountability divvied to circumstances out of a person's control rather than scolding them for not being able to manage it.

Do I have all the answers? No.

But this was less about offering a solid a solution and more about opening a dialogue. A starting point.

So yeah. I've had that dream of being chased through the woods by a life-leeching alien. It felt very similar to being sucked dry of my pitiful wages for an education that was at the time, barely panning out. Even now, as a 32-year-old, slightly more successful version of the starving student I've become, I still feel as though my rat race will end when my heart gives out; and all I can hope for is enough money when I drop to cover the ambulance ride to the over-crowded emergency room and a large pit to rot in. But I just hope that the generation behind me has the benefit of a system that understands how to create and sustain “Millennial Inspired” social structures that will allow them to flourish in what little we can leave behind for them.

Also, could you pass the salt?

#rant #millenials #heavy thoughts #random thoughts #seriously though modern mental medicine is a joke

[chsamuseum]

CHSA Interns Respond: What does AAPI Heritage mean to us?

This month, we asked our interns to share their reflections on AAPI Heritage, answering the question, “What does AAPI Heritage mean to you?” Here’s what they wrote: 

AAPI Heritage Is…

...a living history 

Shou Zhang, Research Intern (We Are Bruce Lee) 

I am a 1.5 generation Han Chinese American.

I believe our communities' diverse and beautiful history lives through us like water flowing from the past into the present and onwards to the future. Our very existence in this country is a testament to the resilience of those who came before us. When I can go to a Chinese grocery store and buy goods that satisfy my taste for the Chinese Lu culinary cooking style, that experience is the legacy of our lived history. When I cook the dishes that my family taught me, the very act of it is a celebration of my Han Chinese culture. 

Examples of China’s Lu cuisine, originating in Shandong. (PC: China & Asia Cultural Travel).

To me, the AAPI history of my community is a lived experience. I recognize that the Han Chinese and Han Chinese American community in America are members of a wider community whose struggles and experiences intersect with our own. So for me, AAPI History Month means going beyond protecting, sustaining, and sharing the history of the culture of my community – it means finding the emotional space to listen to the stories of other AAPI communities.

In my journey as someone who grew up and emigrated from the People's Republic of China, I have been particularly invested this month in learning more about the lived experiences of other ethnic and indigenous communities who emigrated from mainland China, who have had a drastically different experience than my own.

...a way to understand my identity

Samantha Vasquez, Research Intern (Chinese in the Richmond) 

Being Asian American is integral to my identity, as I have spent almost twenty-one years attempting to understand what it meant to be Asian and American. I am a Chinese adoptee with a third-generation Chinese American mom and a first-generation Mexican American dad. I learned about the term "third-culture kid" in a Multiracial Americans course in college, and I found it to describe my experiences almost perfectly. This experience is defined as the phenomenon in which a child grows up with their parents' culture and the culture of the place they grew up.  Both of my parents grew up in the U.S. and have navigated what it means to be American. For me, I have my Chinese heritage, through which I participate in traditions and cuisine, and I also have my Mexican culture, through which I understand Spanish phrases and attend religious ceremonies.

There are so many nuances with my identity that I had trouble understanding when I was younger, but I embrace being Asian American because it can encompass these nuances. I want to give my children the tools to begin to understand their identities, no matter what their culture is. I want them to know my parents and their cultures' influence on my upbringing. I want them to embrace all cultures and realize how interconnected we all are.

...a source of political strength

Katherine Xiong, Community Programs Intern 

I have to admit that I struggle a lot with the term “AAPI.” Doubtless, the lived experience of individuals grouped together under the AAPI umbrella are extremely disparate -- even within ethnicities, there’s so much diversity that it’s hard to say that people belong ‘together.’ Take the term “Chinese” for example: It’s fuzzily defined. It can (or can not) include diaspora from the mainland, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, etc., many of whom chafe under the label “Chinese American” because of political connotations in their countries of origin. It can include descendants of the first railroad workers, migrant workers, and communities facing gentrification, but can also include some of the richest people in America, many of whom have become the gentrifiers. We don’t all have the same history, or the same political issues, either. Questions of affirmative action that my conservative parents are thinking about and questions of media representation my friends are thinking about are not the same problems that massage workers or Chinese American elders in large cities are facing. Zoom out to all of the ‘AAPI’ umbrella, and the differences grow still vaster. Yet outsiders often read us as “all the same.” 

A protestor displays her support for solidarity between the Black and AAPI communities. (PC: NBC News). 

As I interpret it, the power of the term “AAPI” has less to do with identity and more to do with politics. And it’s not about having the same political ‘issues’ or racial/ethnic stereotypes. It’s about coalition-building and solidarity in spite of difference -- building from communities up, across ethnic and class lines. It’s about recognizing the ways in which we all get ‘read’ as one people from the outside and leveraging those misconceptions to say, ‘If you treat us all as one people, fine. Then we’ll face our problems together, and support each other in each other’s problems, no matter how different we are. We are not the same, but our communities do not have to form around divisions and differences. We can borrow each other’s strength. We can -- and will -- make change.” 

...the past (and the people) who shaped our present 

Samantha Lam, Development Intern 

As Asian Americans, we have been taught to believe that we are the model minority, and thus a greater ‘proximity to whiteness.’ AAPI history tells us the exact opposite. For example, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was the first immigration ban towards a specific ethnic group, and was only fully repealed with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which abolished the National Origins Formula. Discrimination towards Asian Americans is not as much a “thing of the past,” as some people like to think. 

I cannot stress how important it is to know about how we as Asian Americans have reached our current status, thanks to the sacrifices of people like early Chinese laborers, who came to the U.S. hoping to find work, and Asian American activists who fought for our civil rights. I know more about this thanks to heritage museums and cultural institutions like CHSA. I am so grateful to CHSA for filling in the blanks for me and many other young Asian Americans who may not have been taught Asian American history in school. 

High school students in Oakland at Black Panther Party funeral rally for Bobby Hutton. (PC: Asian American Movement 1968). 

AAPI Month this year has been far sadder than I think anyone anticipated with increasing reports of hate crimes towards Asians. However, I can see a silver lining in the uptick in Asian American activism and with more resources being made available online discussing topics like intersectionality and the history behind the model minority myth. I believe learning and connecting with Asian American history has allowed me to better understand the struggles other minority groups have faced here in the U.S., and I know I need to do more with the privileges I have.

…a diverse community with many voices

Kimberly Szeto, Education & Research Intern 

Real talk: I am not the biggest fan of umbrella labels like AAPI, API, etc. There is so much to being Asian American or being Pacific Islander that just gets bunched up into one monolithic category. As people, we are more than what labels and stereotypes define us to be. 

But what the labels such as “AAPI” and “API” do instead is bring together a community of people with similar but different backgrounds and give a space to embrace and celebrate who we are, as well as giving us a voice. Yes, May is the month to celebrate AAPI, but why don’t we celebrate all year round? As Asian Americans, we should not have to conform to what “societal norms” in the U.S. constrain us to be, for us to stay quiet and not rock the boat in fear of backlash. Furthermore, we must debunk the model minority myth stereotype, where Asians are seen as uniformly more prosperous, well-educated, and successful than other groups of people. This is a dangerous generalization of vastly different groups of people, one that allows the white majority of America to avoid responsibility for racist policies and beliefs. We need to embrace who we are and educate those who may not know or are less aware.

I started hearing the term AAPI more prominently when I got to college and found a place in the AAPI community at UC Santa Cruz. I think this is where I started to feel more comfortable and began to champion my Asian American identity because I felt like my community was a safe space. I was no longer embarrassed by my family out in public and the customs of our culture that others may have found foreign. 

As an Asian American, I think it is very important to keep history and customs alive. That includes our lives here in America as well as the history of those who came before us, and all the triumphs, struggles, and little things in between. These are the experiences that should form the narratives of any human being, no matter where you are from and who you are. 

I invite you to celebrate AAPI Month with me, and to encourage you to embrace your own heritage and to educate and support yourselves and others. 

#chsa #chsamuseum #chsacomcon #community connections #aapiheritagemonth #AAPIHM #reflections #heritage #asian america #pacific islander

[arcticdementor]

My article “Why is Everything Liberal?” has gotten a great deal of attention. See in particular thoughtful commentary from Bryan Caplan and Robby Soave at Reason.

This post is a followup, with two main goals. First, I’ve discovered additional evidence that liberals care more about politics, which I will just add on to what already was an extremely strong case.

Second, some people criticized the piece for not addressing what has changed recently. I think I’ve found the answer to that too, which is that the mobilization gap increased precipitously in 2016. It is at that time that we see Democrats overtake Republicans in fundraising, liberals overtake conservatives in signing petitions, and the left’s already sizable lead in protesting become much larger. While it seems that liberals have always cared more about politics if we are looking at the tail end of the distribution–i.e., those who become activists, journalists, or academics–it is only in 2016 that we see more noticeable and significant gaps open up in the next level down in the pyramid.

Since 2016, liberals have achieved true mass mobilization in a way conservatives never have in the modern era.

…

In 2016, fewer than 1% of conservatives had been to a protest in the last year, compared to 15% of extreme liberals, 10% of regular liberals, and 5% of the slightly liberal. Even moderates, at 2.4%, protested more than conservatives. Remember, this was before the Women’s March and the peak of BLM! The estimates for protest size used in the original post were pretty crude, but it’s nice to see self-reported data match what we see in the real world. Petitions tell the same story, but the differences are not as extreme: 61% of very liberal individuals had signed one in the last year, compared to just 26% of the very conservative.

…

Liberals already tended to protest more in the years leading up to 2012. But conservatives used to at least hold their own. This matches what we know from the real world, as this was the height of the Tea Party. Glenn Beck’s largely forgotten “Restoring Honor Rally” in summer 2010, for example, drew a lot of people, though nobody really knows how many. Wikipedia says “a scientific estimate placed the crowd size around 87,000, while media reports varied wildly from tens of thousands to 500,000.” This was also the time of Occupy Wall Street, so liberals weren’t exactly sitting on their hands, but conservatives at least made a showing. By 2016, conservative protesting had collapsed to practically nothing, while liberal protesting stayed at similar levels or, more likely, increased (hard to know for sure because of the time frame of the 2012 question being different).

…

In 2012, liberals were more likely to sign petitions than conservatives, but the gap was pretty small and there were many more conservatives in the country, which meant the right actually had more total people signing petitions. By 2016, more Americans than before were calling themselves liberals, and liberals were more mobilized, giving the left a substantial advantage.

Another thing we can do to see how relative mobilization has changed over time is to look at campaign donations. In the previous essay, I went all the way back to 2012, and showed that for every recent presidential election cycle Democrats brought in more money. I didn’t go back to 2008, as I was sure Obama outraised McCain, and I was of course right.

However, if you expand the analysis to midterm elections and all federal candidates, we see the Democrat advantage does not open up until 2016. Here are numbers I’ve gathered from Open Secrets for every election from 1990, as far back as data go.

…

In response to my piece, Ezra Klein argued that liberal domination of institutions was better explained by age and education polarization than liberals caring more. This is an argument I’ve seen him make elsewhere before (see also this and this from Josh Barro on Woke Capital).

…

Romney won college educated whites by somewhere between around 5% and 15%, while according to CNN’s 2020 exit polls, Biden won the same demographic by 12%. CNN actually has Trump barely winning college educated whites in 2016 (48%-45%). Education polarization is real, and the fact that college educated whites vote something like 15-30% more Democrat than they did in 2012 should be having some effects on board rooms and the larger mobilization gap. Yet educational differences do not seem nearly massive enough to explain the total liberal domination of institutions, as Republicans hold their own well enough with degree holders.

As far as the age gap, it can cut both ways. When I was growing up in the 1990s, the stereotype was that retirees had a lot of time on their hands and were therefore politically powerful, while young people were largely indifferent. Old people certainly have more money, and so you’d expect age polarization to actually give Republicans an advantage in donations. Yet since 2016 the trend has been the opposite. As parties have polarized more by age, Democrats have started winning the competition over fundraising. Maybe young people are inherently more likely to protest, but wouldn’t you expect old people to be just as capable of signing petitions? Thus, I’m pretty confident that age and education gaps are less important than the simple fact that liberals care more about politics.

…

The left has always had an advantage in committed activists. Yet, no matter whether you look at donations, protests, or signing petitions, the mobilization gap increased in 2016. Liberals had always protested more, but in 2016 the ratio was absolutely massive, being around 3.7x larger than it was around the time of the invasion of Iraq. This was before an upsurge of liberal protest activity that has included BLM, March for Our Lives, and most importantly, the Women’s March. Finally, the parties raised about an equal amount of money from 1990 until 2016, when Democrats took a lead that has now lasted three straight election cycles (2008 was an exception to the rule of parity in the pre-2016 era, when Democrats ran a fresh faced Barack Obama against John McCain, who seemed good at exciting Republican elites and MSNBC pro-war centrist types but not actual voters).

So what about “Woke Capital”? In many ways, business was the last domino to fall. Yes, liberals have always had more noisy activists, and corporations tended to bow to them on some issues when they got really agitated, like MLK day. But big business is more directly answerable to a wider swath of the population than are schools or non-profits, and so held out the longest. Coca-Cola and Walmart care more about what the median citizen thinks than does Harvard, The New York Times, or the ACLU. Yet after 2016, when the mobilization gap exploded, almost nothing in society could remain neutral, and pressure has come from both within and outside corporations for them to take a stand on almost all hot button issues.

Why was 2016 the year everything changed? Take a wild guess.

…

Just as the previous post raised further questions, this one does too. The most interesting thing to me is not simply protests and donations, but why one side has for over half a century now drawn more idealistic people who want to dedicate their lives to changing the world. The journalist-academic-activist complex is ultimately where power lies, and it has grown much stronger in the last 5 years because it has started to engage many more people at the intermediate level in the mobilization pyramid, among those who give money, sign petitions, and go to protests, and who find themselves between true elites on top and the mass of the largely indifferent voting public at the bottom.

If the rise of Trumpism explains the last five years, why did the left begin with such a strong built-in advantage? I hope to explore this question soon.

…

Moreover, right-wing protest culture has collapsed since the time of the Tea Party. It’s hard to know for sure, but other forms of conservative activism may have fallen off too. So even the degree to which Trump has actually mobilized the right must come with a caveat: he has turned out more Republican voters and gotten more people to donate small amounts of money, but few seem to want to make more substantial sacrifices, even compared to 2012.

Overall, the Trump era has provided mixed electoral results for Republicans. They won unified control of government in 2016, lost the House but kept the Senate in 2018, and came extremely close to winning again in 2020. Yet it has been an awful 4 years for conservatives who care about controlling institutions, or at least keeping them neutral, although even here it hasn’t been a complete loss. After all, the Trump era has given conservatives a comfortable majority on the Supreme Court, probably the most important single institution of all.

Federal court appointments last until death, while the widening of the mobilization gap is relatively new. Best case scenario for Republicans is that Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh live for a very long time, while the Trump era ends up being an anomaly in mobilizing the left to an unusual degree, with things going back to something resembling the pre-2016 historical norm. Worst case scenario is that things continue as they have for the last 4 years, with anti-Trump hysteria combining with the Great Awokening having created a class permanently mobilized for confronting racism and other evils, plus Republicans not even getting the mobilization on their own side that Trump gave them. A generation shaped by the experience of Trump and a party currently led by such uninspiring figures as Kevin McCarthy and Liz Cheney may end up giving conservatives the worst of all worlds.

#richard hanania #substack #data

[riparian-philosophy]

A Growing Number of People Are Identifying or Presenting Outside of the Gender Binary – Why?

In the Western world, the gender binary has played a huge role in society. Gender roles have determined how people act, what they wear, what jobs they can get, and even what place they hold in society. Even in modern societies people are punished for going against the gender norms; men are attacked for wearing ‘feminine’ clothing and are often called gay for feeling comfortable in themselves and in expressing how they feel. However, despite this, in recent years the number of people expressing themselves in ways that do not fit the status quo, and doing so openly, have been increasing, and with this increase the number of people who are supportive of this are doing the same. Here, I will be discussing why I think that this is becoming the case.

It is important to note that this is in no way a new phenomenon. Some people have been going against the grain throughout recorded history, although for this topic more modern examples are more easily applicable. In the twentieth century, many ‘celebrity icons’ were seen to be breaking the stereotypes, and in some genres of music men dressing in ‘feminine’ clothing was part of the genre or band’s image. One of the most notable people to have been challenging these norms at this time was music legend David Bowie, who was recognized for incorporating aspects of both masculinity and femininity into his androgynous look, and who also wore a dress on the cover of his album ‘The Man Who Sold the World’. Even then, as aforementioned he is certainly not the earliest example of this idea of ‘breaking the norm’ when it comes to gender, and this outlook of what is expected of people in terms of gender roles is a very Western one.

Many non-Western cultures often have gender systems that work differently to how gender is seen elsewhere, most notably different from mainstream Western culture. Generally, in the Western world, gender is traditionally seen as the same as biological sex of a person at birth (usually characterized by sex characteristics and chromosomes, although this can differ for intersex people), however in recent years the existence of binary transgender (trans men and trans women) people has become more accepted. One of the most well-known examples of cultures where the gender system is different to what we are used to is among Indigenous and Native American communities. The term Two-Spirit is one that is reserved for people within native cultures, who are both masculine and feminine. These people can also have very specific spiritual or societal roles [Gender Identity, University of South Dakota website]. This identity, and many others across other cultures, is rooted in not only their culture but their traditions also. Despite this, they are almost unheard of due to the forced teaching of Western ideals that occurred predominantly due to colonization.

I present this example to prove that Western examples of gender are not inherently ‘correct’. If, for example, these differences were not seen anywhere in the world, and all cultures’ ideas of gender were the exact same, one could make the argument that gender identities, and therefore gender roles, are entirely based on biological sex, however, as there are clear differences seen between cultures, I would instead argue that this link is, at least partially, social. In cultures where it is more accepted to identify and present in ways that go against the idea of a binary gender system, people feel comfortable in openly doing so. This explains why, in today’s society, where it is slowly becoming more acceptable to do such things, more and more people are beginning to comfortably present and identify how they wish.

Another point I will make, before moving on to why it is that I think this change in what is acceptable is occurring, is that this is not the only time such a change in traditional ideas of what is associated with a certain gender has occurred. When thinking about the most stereotypical ideas of what differences there are between the two sexes by societal standards, some of the most obvious I can think of are the following. Blue is for boys; pink is for girls. Boys wear trousers, girls wear dresses. Women should shave and wear makeup to be presentable, but men are not required to shave and are often discouraged to wear makeup. However, these have all been very different at various points in time. The colours blue and pink were first used as gender signifiers at around the 1940s, however prior to this the colours were often not gendered, and in many cases when they were associated with a gender, pink was associated with boys and blue with girls. Skirts were not gendered until reasonably recently also, with men across history wearing skirt-like cloth wraps or forms of kilts. In fact, it is argued that the only reason men stopped wearing skirts is because they were the ones who rode horses most often, and skirts were simply impractical for this purpose. Makeup has been worn by all throughout history, most notably being given to the male workers in ancient Egypt along with ancient skin care products as a form of payments, and also being worn by the nobility for centuries, particularly in eighteenth century France. Women were not required to shave until after the Victorian era of long dressed that would cover all skin, and even then, the only reason that they did was because shaving companies made the realization that they could make more money by targeting razors at the young women who were now wearing clothing that was more revealing.

If these ideas of what is normal are constantly shifting, then why do they play such a large role in societies today? And why are other cultures’ ideas of gender systems being stifled by predominantly white Western cultures? I believe that these realizations are one of the reasons that an increasing number of people are beginning to openly present or identify outside of the norms of the gender binary. As more people become aware that the norms that they are confined to have little to no genuine reasoning behind them, they are beginning to feel less pressured to conform to these roles. The growing number of people at the forefront of popular culture who are also making this realization and are challenging these norms are simply providing a way for people to see that there is nothing wrong with presenting or identifying in a way that is not seen as ‘normal’, and so I believe that this is at least partially responsible for the increasing number of people choosing to break these norms. I also believe that the national lockdowns due to the coronavirus pandemic have played at least some role in this change, particularly in those identifying outside of the gender binary. Nonbinary individuals are in no way new, however the amount of people who have come out as nonbinary in recent times is increasing. I believe that this is because, while stuck inside away from other people, these people have not been subjected to the pressures and judgements of society. They have not had to conform to how they ‘should’ be, and I believe that this time has given many people, particularly young people, a way to reflect on their identity and whether or not they truly fit into what is expected of them. This, along with the more frequent use of the internet due to not being allowed to do ‘normal’ activities in the lockdowns have, in my opinion, hugely impacted young people’s sense of identity in an almost entirely positive way.

In conclusion, I believe that a growing number of people are identifying or presenting in ways that are outside of the gender binary because of a lack of pressures and expectations from the rest of society, and because of a growing understanding that many of these expectations are not formed on any logical or reasonable basis and are instead simply kept up due to outdated traditions which, in this instance, are causing more harm than good. As this is entirely my own opinion, it is important to note that this is not applicable to everyone that identifies or presents in this way and is instead built upon my own beliefs and interpretations of what I have seen around me.

https://www.usd.edu/diversity-and-inclusiveness/office-for-diversity/safe-zone-training/gender-identity

#politics #gender #nonbinary

[skincarebeautymakeuptips]

How Indie Beauty Brands Practice Inclusivity

In this edition of Beauty Independent’s ongoing series posing questions to beauty entrepreneurs, we ask 17 brand founders and executives: What is your brand’s approach to inclusivity?

KETHLYN WHITE | COO, Coil Beauty

Our brand was created to give a face to beauty that has not always been considered beautiful. When we create graphics for our marketing, we strive to look for the nontraditional beauties because we know how important representation is to everyone, even on a subconscious level.  

One of my favorite things as an adult is to be able to watch a show like "Insecure" or "Black-ish," and say, “Oh, there’s my hairstyle for next week.” As a kid, I was trying to use the Topsy Tail and, if you remember what that is, then you, my friend, are aging gracefully. So, for me, my brand aims to be inclusive of the people who weren’t always included, and I think our website and social media pages do a good job of that. Of course, we are always trying to do more. For us, this is a marathon not a sprint.

ADA JURISTOVSKI | Co-Founder, Nala

We strive to be inclusive of forms of sexual identification, body types, cultures and race. To us, it means being mindful of representation in our brand, but also being open-minded to continually learning about how we can widen that representation. It can be something as detail-oriented as updating our copy from “women” to “womxn,” or deliberate decisions we make such as intentionally having our packaging represent body forms that are fluid, androgynous and ambiguous with the hope that anyone can identify with it and see a part of themselves within the art.

KAILEY BRADT | Founder and CEO, OWA Haircare

Inclusivity has to mean something personally to a founder and, therefore, a brand. I've always been mindful of inclusivity because I've always felt a bit on the outside. It's important to think of inclusivity with a holistic perspective. It's not just about appearance. Inclusivity goes beyond age, gender, ethnicity. I always felt judged without saying a word. As I got older, especially when I first got to college, I felt even more out of place because I was studying engineering and my appearance didn't say "engineer."

My approach to inclusivity is to look beyond the physical attributes of a person and take into consideration their experience, education, career, etc. My approach with our brand is to give real people a genuine voice. I really enjoy working with up-and-coming professionals and giving people opportunities they might not have been given otherwise. I know others who have done this for me in my career, and I wouldn't be where I am today if people didn't believe in me and present me those opportunities that challenged the norm.

RANAY ORTON | Owner, Glow by Daye

My approach of being mindful of inclusivity in my brand is to try and create multiple physical avatars of my customers. Many books and experts say to have one exact avatar, an icon or figure that represents your key demographic. Well, the reality is that, yes, you can have a go-to person in mind for key decision-making on your brand and it's positioning, but all your customers do not look alike.

People want to see some physical resemblance of themselves when they see your website, marketing and social media. As a company, we have to be conscious of that as we serve many different people with different ethnicities, hair types/textures and/or complexions, but all have the same goal of achieving healthy, thriving hair.

PAAYAL MAHAJAN | Founder, Essential Body

Inclusivity is not just a term for me. I am a brown woman who has faced a lot of discrimination while living and working in the U.S. I have faced assumptions around my background with no thought or interest in where I come from or what my heritage is. I have dealt with the blows of white privilege in the workplace and personally. I was also judged for my size for a majority of my life. I am someone who has fought and continues to fight for the rights of the marginalized and oppressed.

I am not interested in tokenism. I smell it from a mile away. You can’t fake your way into being inclusive. My authenticity and my voice are the most powerful ways for me to communicate that my brand is me, and it espouses my values and my perspective on the world. It never was, and is certainly not enough now, to do a rainbow of ethnicities in your imagery. I see brands appropriating cultures, not giving thought to messaging and imagery. None of that is for me. You can’t be mindful of inclusivity unless you fundamentally shift your mindset. This is not something businesses can phone in.

ADA POLLACEO, Alchimie Forever

We strive to be inclusive in everything we do. From the people we use in our marketing materials (fun fact: They’re all family members, team members or friends.) to the way we train our brand ambassadors, we focus on skincare concerns rather than gender, skin color or other identifiers. We don’t say, “Hey, we’re inclusive." Rather, we strive to behave in a way that makes everyone feel welcome and comfortable, and that our products were made for them.

KATONYA BREAUX | Founder, Unsun Cosmetics

As a black founder and consumer, I have firsthand knowledge of what it feels like to not be considered by companies providing skincare and makeup products. I wanted to make sure that not only women that looked like me, but women in general had the benefit and knowledge that there is a product that is made with them in mind, and not only as an afterthought. In this very inclusive environment, the companies that aren't getting on the bandwagon are the ones that are standing out.

NISHA DEARBORN | Founder and CEO, Fresh Chemistry

I teach my kids that the only difference between skin of different colors is the amount of melanin in it. As a daughter of a dermatologist, I can attest to this very simple, yet still profound truth. So, when it comes to my brand, I choose models or repost user-generated content that represents who the freshly activated serums are best suited for: all skin types and colors.

JULIE PEFFERMAN | Founder, The Lab and Co.

We have always thought about inclusivity from the customers perspective and our employee perspective. In the near future, inclusivity won't be a buzzword. Instead, it will be something every brand must do. It will be the authenticity that inclusivity is delivered that will distinguish us from the rest.  

On the employee internal side, since we are a lab, it makes sense that our one-word company philosophy is "mix," which guides us as we grow. Mix in kindness in everything you do. Mix with other kinds of people/thinkers to expand your mind and life. When something isn't working, mix it up with a new approach. There is always a way. Work hard, take pride in what you bring to the mix. Take the risk, failure is valued, speak up and mix in your ideas, and see what bubbles to the top.

On the customer side, we try to rethink target customers and find meaningful ways to include others. Our brand, Cleantan, was the first self-tanning brand to showcase full-figured models of various skin colors. We encourage people to be as tan as they want to be with our color controlling concentrate. Our brand Equal By Nature was birthed out of inclusivity, encouraging everyone to celebrate their differences. We aim to create luxurious hero products that fit into anyone's routine at a reasonable price. We call it inclusive luxury.

AMBER FAWSON | Co-Founder, Saalt

Inclusivity is a central and all-important topic in the world of period care. It is actually one of the reasons we love period care. There is something about period talk that brings people together regardless of background or belief. We all share struggles with period management. We all agree that no one should feel confused and alone about their period and their body. We all agree that we want students around the world to have period care that allows them to attend school when they are on their period.

At Saalt, we believe in being period positive and, by focusing on period positive topics, we can do some incredible things with the help of our audience. Our audience helps us break stigmas and also connects us with impact organizations who are doing incredible work around the world. Every part of our brand is about being welcoming and adding people to our tribe regardless of any variety of personal backgrounds or beliefs.

MELISSA REINKING | Chief Marketing Officer, BioClarity

We always try to stay grounded in knowing that the consumers who discover us all have different starting points and skin goals in mind. Step one to being inclusive is being individualized. If we can help people get to where they want to be by understanding their individual needs, desires and starting points, and if we can customize their experience around these attributes, not some idealized version of what we think a consumer might need, this helps us remain not only inclusive, but also very mindful of the evolving needs of those who become part of our brand.

BRANDON GARCIA | Co-Founder, Mira

My co-founder Jay Hack and I wanted to ensure that anyone, no matter who they are, what they look like or what their interests are is able to find what works best for them. The incredible diversity of beauty consumers has driven not only the increased fragmentation of beauty products and trends in the industry, but also the heightened demands for personalization.

Diversity and inclusivity are not only baked into our very core, but they are also the primary factors driving the need for a platform like this. We've worked hard to build an expansive data catalog of over 60,000 products and millions of reviews and videos that can be leveraged to help consumers from all walks of life find what works for them.

In the long term, we hope that it becomes a platform for beauty brands, content creators, and consumers to engage in authentic, meaningful conversation. By doing so, we seek to help advance the industry in co-developing products that best speak to the amazingly diverse individuals that comprise the beauty community.

RENAE MOOMJIAN | Founder and CEO, NipLips

We are vocal in all touch points with our community that everyone is welcome. Whether it is a photoshoot, new brand ambassador or activity, we are continually looking for ways to bring diversity in race, ethnic background, religion, sexual preference, sexual indentification, age, size (large to small and everything in between) into our brand.

Our company tag line is “Beautiful, Authentic You!” and our goal is to help people look within to define not only their unique beauty, but who they really are at their core. So, for example, by using our app, doing a color scan of your nipples, and matching to one of our vegan, organic, lip colors, you are using your body to define what looks good on you rather than social media or celebrities. True beauty and inclusivity starts with embracing your uniqueness and, then, sharing it with the world. We work very hard to promote that message.

FEISAL QURESHI | Founder, Raincry

My personal view is that beauty is not real, it doesn't exist. It's all perspective. That perspective evolves, changes and means different things to different people at different times in our lives. Just look at the 80s. We looked ridiculous, but were full of confidence.

So, beauty is not about the things we buy or how we look, but rather how that thing makes us feel when we wear it, use it or experience it. Therefore, beauty is about emotions and, as a beauty brand, you become a custodian of those emotions to help better people's lives.

KRISTEN BOWEN | Founder & CEO, Living The Good Life Naturally

My entire life I have been on a diet or searching for the perfect diet. I just wanted to be skinny and equated that with being healthy. I will never forget the day that I was sitting in my wheelchair feeling pretty sorry for myself and wondering if I would ever feel good again. A friend walked up and asked me how I was doing. Instead of the usual, “Oh, I am fine,” I answered her honestly. “I am so tired of being sick and having seizures and stressing my family out.”

She looked at me and said something that would shatter and change the course of what I was searching for when it came to my health. She patted my leg after I told her how tired I was and replied, “But Kristen, at least you are skinny.” I had achieved my lifelong dream of being skinny, but it was not what I wanted. I wanted vibrant energy.

Now, when clients start to work with me, I ask them to write out what healthy looks like to them. That way they have a specific goal in mind of what they are wanting to create. Because of that one exchange, we make sure to include all body types in our marketing. Being healthy is so much more than being skinny.

JEAN BAIK | Founder and Creative Chief Officer, Miss A

One of our biggest missions as a business is to #justhavefun with makeup and beauty. So, we always offer as many shades as possible and offer products that would work for a young teen all the way into late adulthood.

JASMIN EL KORDI | CEO, Bluelene

Cellular health is gender, age and ethnicity neutral, and our brand reflects that philosophy. We ensure that our packaging and messaging appeal to a wide human audience, and that we incorporate that variety into the imagery we use.

Source: Beauty Independent  

#beauty #cosmetics #makeup #beauty industry #beauty brands #skincare #inclusivity #makeup lovers #beauty lovers #entrepreneur

[nationaldvam]

Intersex people are born with chromosomal, hormonal, gonadal, or genital variations that differ from social expectations of what male and female bodies should be like. Even as we begin or continue to challenge binary understandings of gender and sexuality in the anti-violence movements, many of us have not stopped to question the assumption that there are only two biological sexes – and anything else is not “normal” or acceptable. Social discomfort with this aspect of human diversity has resulted in discrimination and marginalization of intersex people, including medically unnecessary surgeries that they have not consented to.

While there has been a shift away from seeing intersex conditions as a problem to be dealt with medically (a practice that became popular in the medical community in the 1960s), these types of unwanted “corrective” surgeries do continue today. Adults who have experienced these medically unnecessary surgeries, also known as Intersex Genital Mutilation (IGM), experience trauma common to many adult survivors of child sexual abuse. The impact of such surgery includes shame, stigmatization, physical harm, and emotional distress. Anti-violence advocates should be prepared to provide trauma-informed care to those who have experienced trauma surrounding IGM.

As you reflect during Pride Month on your efforts to reach out to LGBTQ+ communities, consider ways you can increase your capacity to meet the needs of intersex individuals who may be dealing with trauma related to IGM.

Intersex Community & Inclusion

https://youtu.be/cAUDKEI4QKI

There is great diversity of experience in the intersex community, and diverse ways intersex individuals think about community, activism, needs, and goals. There is also a wide-ranging response to whether or not intersex people should inherently be considered part of the LGBTQ+ communities. One reason that someone might take the position that intersex identity is not part of LGBTQ+ communities may be the opinion that LGBTQ+ movements have, at least in recent history, been primarily concerned with relationship recognition and concerns around identity, and not as much with bodily autonomy.

On the other hand, including intersex as part of LGBTQ+ communities can lead to more visibility of intersex experiences, and can address a common root cause of discrimination: harmful adherence to the gender binary and related gender norms. Writer and intersex advocate Hida Viloria makes this case in the article The Forgotten Vowel: How Intersex Liberation Benefits the Entire LGBTQIA Community:

“When we recognize the rights of intersex people to have their identities recognized, we dismantle the very foundation of the binary sex and gender system which has harmed LGBTQIA people for centuries.”

For more reading on this topic, check out this blog post by Viloria and another intersex activist, Dana Zzyym, which explores many of the diverse ways intersex individuals approach issues of identity.

Note the distinction between being transgender and being intersex. Being transgender has to do with having an internal understanding of one’s gender that is different than what was assigned at birth. This assignment typically has to do with the external anatomy – babies with a vagina are assigned female at birth and babies with a penis are assigned male. A transgender person has a gender identity that is different from that assignment, whether female, male, non-binary, or other genders.

People who have intersex conditions, though, have anatomy that has not been historically considered by societies to be typically male or female. An intersex individual may be transgender, but the majority of intersex individuals do not identify as transgender, and the majority of transgender individuals do not identify as intersex.

Living at the Intersections

Intersex people of color are disproportionately impacted by physical, psychological, and medical violence. Historically, people of color have faced unspeakable atrocities including exploitation at the hands of the medical industrial complex. Activist Sean Saifa Wall reflected on these intersecting identities in a recent interview with NBC:

"I draw a very distinct parallel between how the medical community has inflicted violence on intersex people by violating their bodily integrity, and how state violence violates the bodily integrity of Black people… My desire for intersex liberation is totally [entwined] with Black liberation. They cannot be teased apart.” (2016)

Additionally, intersex activists and survivors of color are marginalized within the intersex movement itself – facing underrepresentation in leadership roles, lack of visibility and voice in public spaces, and limited opportunity to engage with other intersex people of color.

By honoring and lifting up the unique experiences of intersex people of color, by asking them what they need to feel heard and to feel safer in our collective spaces, we can build a more intersectional, anti-racist, trauma-informed movement. For more information, read the Statement from Intersex People of Color on the 20th Anniversary of Intersex Awareness Day and the Intersex People of Color for Justice Statement for Intersex Awareness Day (IAD) 2017, which emphasizes, "We are a just movement that has our vision set on attaining bodily autonomy for all."

The Experiences of IGM Survivors

To explore what intersex advocates are saying about intersex genital mutilation, check out this video from Teen Vogue in which three intersex advocates address what some forms of IGM specifically entail, and how they’re unnecessary and nonconsensual.

One of the advocates in the video, Pigeon Pagonis, discloses the experience of having the clitoris removed, and later having a vaginoplasty at age 11. Pagonis makes the connection that one of the underlying reasons for these operations was to make the vagina “more accommodating to my future husband’s penis” – underscoring one example of how harmful societal assumptions about what male and female bodies should look like (and how sex should happen between men and women) forms justification for these invasive medical surgeries. One of the other advocates in this video, Hanne Gaby Odiele, helps make the connection to trauma, by claiming, “Those surgeries need to stop because they bring so much more complications and traumas.”

A 2017 report from Human Rights Watch called “I Want to Be Like Nature Made Me”: Medically Unnecessary Surgeries on Intersex Children in the US contains information on the history and impact of IGM, including insight into the trauma mentioned by Odiele in the video. In one testimonial from an adult survivor of intersex genital mutilation, Ruth, age 60, shares: “I developed PTSD and dissociative states to protect myself while they treated me like a lab rat, semi-annually putting me in a room full of white-coated male doctors, some of whom took photos of me when I was naked.” The report goes on to illustrate forms of psychological harm and emotional distress that adult survivors of intersex genital mutilation may experience.

When working with a survivor of intersex genital mutilation, consider that control was taken away from the survivor in the nonconsensual, medically unnecessary surgery. These surgeries may receive legitimacy simply because they take place in a medical context, which we tend to view as being associated with consent and authority. But the root of the perceived “need” for this surgery is embedded in social standards about what male and female bodies should look like, not medical need. We need to move away from the notion that there might be an underlying medical justification for this abusive touching (Tosh, 2013).

Shifting Our Culture

Working to end false binaries of sex, gender, and sexuality can be an important first step in preventing IGM and many forms of violence. Developing  an understanding of intersex peoples’ experiences by reading intersex history and listening to intersex people share their stories when offered can deepen your understanding of who is part of our communities and how we can provide trauma-informed care to everyone who needs our services. A first step can be to become familiar with intersex organizations like Intersex Society of North America, interACT, and Intersex Campaign for Equality. Another can be to educate colleagues on trauma related to IGM, and to make efforts to directly engage the community in which your agency wants to provide welcoming and relevant services to intersex people. Shifting our culture to end the shame, secrecy, exploitation, and abuse of intersex people will require broad level systemic change driven by all of us.

What can you do to positively impact the lives of intersex survivors in your community?

References:

Human Rights Watch, interACT. (2017, July). “I Want to Be Like Nature Made Me”: Medically Unnecessary Surgeries on Intersex Children in the US. Retrieved from https://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/report_pdf/lgbtintersex0717_web_0.pdf

Tosh, J. (2013). The (In)visibility of Childhood Sexual Abuse: Psychiatric Theorizing of Transgenderism and Intersexuality.   Intersectionalities: A Global Journal of Social Work Analysis, Research, Polity, and Practice. Retrieved from http://journals.library.mun.ca/ojs/index.php/IJ/article/view/739/743

Image from InterACT Advocates for Intersex Youth.

#VAWnet #News

[billclinton42]

An analysis of Bill Clinton and the Cultural Wars that shaped him and influenced the 1992 election.

*this is a topic I find really interesting and it is a quick informative amateur post which is just my interpretation. Of course, I am condensing it and not putting everything in here* 

Bill Clinton was born in 1946, after the Second World War and during the time in which the Second Red Scare had begun in the United States. Given that during the Red Scare, tensions with the Soviet Union were at large and the United States Government tried to seek out Soviet spies, there became a definition of what it meant to be “a true American.” This can be seen in that this was also the age of McCarthyism, where Senator Joe McCarthy tried and accused many American citizens without regard to evidence. Senator McCarthy spent almost five years trying in vain to expose communists and other left-wing “loyalty risks” in the U.S. government.  Many thousands of Americans faced congressional committee hearings, FBI investigations, loyalty tests, and sedition laws; negative judgements in those arenas brought consequences ranging from imprisonment to deportation, loss of passport, or, most commonly, long-term unemployment. It is no secret that immigrants were targeted, civil rights activists, and people of color in general (as well as the LGBTQ community) This is due to the fact that they were an easily defined “other” and previous paranoia of the Japanese Empire and the attack on Pearl Harbor had already stigmatized anyone who didn’t appear to be a White American. 

This was the root of the Culture War that would define Bill Clinton and come to full form in the 60s because though McCarthyism died out around 1957, it contributed to the uniformity of the 50s and the culture. This is due to the fact that many people tried to prove themselves American enough and they did this by conforming in a way in which they deemed standard for all Americans to behave. During the 1950s, a sense of uniformity pervaded American society. Conformity was common, as young and old alike followed group norms rather than striking out on their own. Though men and women had been forced into new employment patterns during World War II, once the war was over, traditional roles were reaffirmed. Men expected to be the breadwinners; women, even when they worked, assumed their proper place was at home. Sociologist David Riesman observed the importance of peer-group expectations in his influential book, The Lonely Crowd. He called this new society "other-directed," and maintained that such societies lead to stability as well as conformity. Television contributed to the homogenizing trend by providing young and old with a shared experience reflecting accepted social patterns.

What McCarthyism and the 1950s deemed as a “true American” consisted of these traits:

Being White

Following traditional gender roles

A pride in the military and serving in war (this is due to the pride and support of WWII).

This became the common theme of the 1950s and became known as the “conservative culture”. Though rebellion against these norms came into play in many ways, music is one example: ll. Tennessee singer Elvis Presley (it should be noted that Bill identified with Elvis and enjoyed his music). popularized black music in the form of rock and roll, and shocked more staid Americans with his ducktail haircut and undulating hips. In addition, Elvis and other rock and roll singers demonstrated that there was a white audience for black music, thus testifying to the increasing integration of American culture, this served as a foreshadowing to the culture wars that would come to light in the 60s. 

The Baby Boomer Generation became the “counterculture” in many ways going against the norms set by the “conservative culture.” This can be seen that in the 60s movements by marginalized groups suppressed during the McCarthy and 50s era, gained more support amongst young people. 

How Bill Clinton was shaped by The CounterCulture: Like many, Bill Clinton was influenced by the Counter Culture and became a part of it. This can be seen in his admiration of Martin Luther King support for Civil Rights, and his opposition to the Vietnam War. 

How this influenced the 1992 election: 

George H.W. Bush belonged to the generation that lived through WWII and supported the conservative culture that was the norm in the 1950s.

Bill Clinton belonged to the baby boomer generation and the Counterculture that took place in the 1960s that rebelled against the culture of the 1950s. 

The 1992 election was very much representative of the “conservative culture” vs. the “counterculture” war that had happened between the two cultures in the 60s. 

This can be seen in how the candidates spoke of one another and the issues that were brought up in the election.

The main issues that were discussed were character, moral values, and service in the military. 

1. The issue of character shows how the 1992 election was representative of a cultural war. George H.W. Bush’s strategy was to portray Bill Clinton as a promiscuous, pot-inhaling, stereotypical hippie. Though Bill Clinton was rather promiscuous in his youth, the fact that Bush chose to highlight on it was evident of a cultural war being present in the election because it fed into the 1950s norm that sex should be reserved only for marriage, in contrast to the counterculture 60s trait of sexual liberation. The issue of pot was also evident of a culture war in the election because again this fed into the 1950s conservative culture norm that recreational drug use was bad under any circumstance, vs the 1960s counter culture trait of experimentation with drug use. Remember Bill Clinton’s iconic quote: “When I was in England, I experimented with Marijuana a time or two and I didn’t like it, and I didn’t inhale and never tried it again.” This fed into the hippie stereotype and though while it is hard for some to imagine now, many of those who belonged to the older generation “looked at Bill Clinton and saw every hippie they ever wanted to sock in the jaw.” In the same way, Bill Clinton portrayed Bush as stagnant and unchanging, a product of the 1960s counter culture where the youth felt that the government didn’t do enough or progress enough change. 

2. The issue of moral values also demonstrates how the 1992 election was influenced by the conservative culture vs. counter culture war. This can be seen in the attacks on Hillary Clinton and family values. The Bush campaign often attacked Hillary’s previous work as a lawyer. This demonstrates how the election was influenced by the culture wars because the Bush campaign was sticking to the traditional gender roles of the 1950s society where “women, even when they worked, assumed their proper place was at home.” Hillary being very independent and outside of the home represented the 1960s counter culture trait in which women began to liberate themselves more and were free to both work and be involved in domestic life and not have to choose between one or the other. The Bush campaign also criticized Hillary’s active role Bill’s campaigning. 

3. Service in the military. Perhaps the most distinct and demonstrative issue on how the conservative and counter culture came into play in the 1992 election, this was significant because Bill was the first president in several years who had not been alive to witness WWII. So naturally when it came to light that Bill had been opposed to the Vietnam War, the Bush campaign jumped on this. This is due to the fact that Bush, having served in WWII, could not understand Bill’s opposition to the Vietnam war. Bush himself even said in the 2nd debate “I don’t know if that’s a generational thing or what,” when describing anti-war protests American students would go to abroad. This demonstrates the cultural wars influence because it was very WWII generation vs. the counter culture generation of baby boomers because they were seeing the wars from a different perspective. The WWII conservative culture saw military service as something to take pride in and that all wars were just. While the 1960s counter culture questioned the government’s involvement in Vietnam. 

In conclusion, despite this cultural war Americans aged 60 and over showed a clear bias in favor of Bill Clinton, according to the polls. He also ran well among other demographic groups, including half of the military veterans, (despite the furor over his draft status during the Vietnam War), half of the first-time voters, and more than half of union members.

Of course there were other influences in the 1992 election and other factors that influenced Bill Clinton but the culture wars of the 50s-60s really did shape his political beliefs and eventually his run for the presidency. 

Bonus: This is my favorite magazine cover of Bill because it makes reference to the 1968 Beatles song ‘Revolution’ which came out while Bill was in college and the Beatles were a very counter culture band: 

#i checked for typos but the semester is over and my brain is fried so sorry if there is #this is like my favorite thing ever to talk about though so I made a post on it #bill clinton #1992 election #wjc #William Jefferson Clinton #president of the united states #president clinton #60s #50s #the clintons #billclinton #history #american history #american presidents

[howwelldoyouknowyourmoon]

Gods

Religious Worlds (1994)

“This book is a good introduction to the phenomenology of religion. Stressing that religions are not just systems of belief, but forms of behavior…William E. Paden focuses on four key complementary categories: myth, ritual, gods and systems of purity.”

This book is something of a landmark work within its field. "From gods to ritual observance to the language of myth and the distinction between the sacred and the profane, Religious Worlds explores the structures common to the most diverse spiritual traditions.” In other words, Paden is studying the concept of religion itself and how it manifests across the spectrum of available world religions. He is not surveying what individual religions have to say and then comparing his findings to find a right one. Paden asks questions like: What function do rituals serve across all religions? And, what about sacred writings and histories (properly called "myth" within comparative religion); how do these shape and fashion religion?

From his perspective, Paden is attempting to let each religion speak on its own terms and simply listen to what each is saying. Paden seeks to classify these facts, or "phenomena," in the search for religious structures, or "forms of expression," from any emerging patterns. Throughout the process, respect must be given to each religion's complexity of contexts (geographic, historical, sociological, etc.); each one sees the world in its way because of these dynamics, what Paden calls a "religious world," and engages the world accordingly. Only when we shed our "religious world" and enter into those of others can we truly understand them. Finally, Paden also stresses sensitivity for the sacred while surveying religions to help discern what is religious by nature. His goal is to understand and survey each world's respective landscape in a spirit of tolerance and diversity, and let the reader evaluate from there as necessary.

William E. Paden University of Vermont, Professor Emeritus

Area of expertise: Cross-cultural patterns of religious behavior.

Professor Paden had been a member of the Department from 1965 until his retirement in the spring of 2009. He served as Chair from 1972-78 and 1990-2005. His M.A. and Ph.D. (1963, 1967) in comparative religion are from Claremont Graduate University, and his B.A. (1961) from Occidental College (philosophy). He has been a visiting scholar at Wolfson College, Oxford (1999, 1992), and spent time as a research fellow and lecturer in Japan (1999, 1992).

Contents

Preface to the 1994 Edition    vii

Preface to the 1988 Edition    xiii

Introduction     1

One: Religion and Comparative Perspective

1 Some Traditional Strategies of Comparison   15

2 Religion as a Subject Matter    35

3 Worlds    51

Two: Structures and Variations in Religious Worlds

4 Myth    69

5 Ritual and Time    93

6 Gods    121

7 Systems of Purity    141

8 Comparative Perspective: Some Concluding Points    161

Notes       171

Index       187

Preface to the 1994 Edition

In the five years since Religious Worlds was published, the need to understand the plurality of culture and religion has become even more apparent. Issues of pluralism indeed seem to have become part of the tasks and riddles of civilization itself. The profound differences between human worldviews have not been erased by information technology or international business networks, with their appearance of having so easily unified the surface of the globe. Beneath the surface, the earth is still a patchwork of bounded loyalties and hallowed mythologies, a checkerboard of collective, sacred identities. The theater of ethnic and religious diversity has not gone away. The variety of human worlds, with all their conflicts, is still there despite the facade of unity.

Pluralism refers not only to cultural diversity but also to the many kinds of “knowledges” or lenses humans use to perceive and construe their universe. With increasing clarity we see how inevitably the world forms itself according to our different frames of reference. A chemical lens will only register a chemical world; a poetic lens uncovers a poetic world; a religious lens yields a religious world. These multiple frames whereby telescopes picture the universe one way and religious symbols picture it another simply coexist. Alter the lens and you alter the data; change the receiving channel and you change the program; switch groups and you exchange one world for another.

Models of knowledge based on an exclusive, privileged, single lens—whether that of the sciences or the religions or white middle-class Americans—have come under challenge. In a new, pluralistic setting, in this new openness to the many architectural possibilities of what we take to be the world, the study of religious diversity has a definite role to play.

When in 1963 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the practice of prayer in public schools, it advocated at the same time that the comparative study of religions should be an indispensable part of education. Yet the study of religion has long been controlled by what might be called the interests of private ownership, that is, the religious groups themselves, so that the subject matter of “the gods” has until recent times lacked an appropriately unbiased vocabulary parallel to those in the study of the physical and social worlds. There cannot be a study of religion that is not at the same time the study of all religion, just as one cannot have a “geology” based only on impressions of the rocks in one’s backyard. Religious Worlds, which works at broadening, purging, and reshaping our otherwise provincial language about religious life, is a small contribution to this new globally oriented era of religious studies and I am gratified that it has found a wide readership in college classes and in Japanese and German translations.

I continue to be impressed by how useful, synthesizing, and far-reaching the concept of “world” is as an organizing category for the study of religion. “World” is not just a philosophical abstraction nor a word for the endless galactic stardust. In more human, experiential terms, it is an actual habitat, a lived environment, a place. It is what we need to understand about others in order to understand their life and behavior.

A “world” is the operating environment of language and behavioral options that persons presuppose and inhabit at any given point in time and from which they choose their course of action. The term has enough flexibility to refer to the scripts and horizons of an entire culture, a subculture, or an individual. Within a single tradition like Christianity, there are thousands of religious worlds, because of the many ways they are packaged by cultures and history. “World,” then, becomes a tool for getting at the shaping power of context in the fullest sense of the word, and the idea of multiple worlds helps us to recognize and take seriously the distinctive life-categories of the insider, however different they may be from our own.

Here variety and paradox abound. Some religious worlds are tightly bounded by rigid laws, others rely on individual conscience and no boundaries. Some are hierarchical, with stratified ecclesiastical functions, others dispense with all social roles and distinctions. Some worlds are fixed on tradition and the past, others on awareness of the moment. Some focus on everyday duties, others on states of ecstasy and escaping the mundane. Some revolve around worship, others around self-reflection and meditation. And everywhere cultures configure religious life with their unique styles and language.

Comparative method in the study of religion is still in its formative stages, still seeking self-definition as a tool in research, education, and interpretation, and Religious Worlds attempts to contribute to certain aspects of this process. While we have always made comparisons, the important issue now is the purpose for doing so. In the West, comparison has been used to attack Christian claims to uniqueness, to establish those claims, or to prove that all religions are really one. I do not take any of these traditional, political approaches here. Nothing is compared to show that one religion is better than another, or that some are exactly the same, or that none of them is true. Instead, what I submit is a framework for dealing evenhandedly and integrally with both difference and commonality.

Religious Worlds advocates the approach of a balanced comparative sense which neither ignores resemblances nor simplistically collapses them into superficial sameness; which neither ignores differences nor magnifies them out of proportion to the human, cross-cultural commonalities of structure and function that run through them. Every religious expression is different from others but also has something in common with them. My hope is that this book, while not pretending to represent any final, normative model for comparative work, will at least help stimulate further thinking along these lines. Clearly more historians of religion are now realizing that cross-cultural analysis is a tool not for dissolving variety, but for discerning and appreciating it; and this is a promising development. But you cannot analyze diversity without understanding commonality, too. The two go together.

A religious world is one that structures existence around sacred things. An important point of the book is that “the sacred” can be described without taking a position on whether it is something that exists or does not exist outside the participant’s own world. It exists to the insiders, to the believers. That is enough; that is the fact. Sacred objects play a powerful role in organizing human behavior. To the insider, the holiness of Christ, or Amida Buddha, or the Qur’an is absolute; to the outsider, in contrast, these symbols have no special value at all and may even be considered illusory. Holy objects, in this sense, are world specific. The most sacred and inviolable sacraments, traditions, gods, authorities, places, and times of one world are irrelevant or do not exist in another. One person’s “holiest day of the year” is just another working day for someone else. In a Buddhist world, the Muslim “center of the world,” the Kaaba in Mecca, is not on the map. Who among the Irish think that the Ganges River is holy? Taoists do not face Jerusalem for their meditations, and Protestants give no special role to the Roman Catholic pope.

Comparative religion makes this diversity intelligible. It shows that the very nature of a religious world is to experience the universe through its own focal symbols, to see the whole of time in terms of its own history, to find the absolute in its own churches and temples, and to equate its particular moral order with the ultimate order of the entire world.

Does the book itself have a point of view? General readers may find its approach peculiarly nonjudgmental. I do give priority to describing the insiders’ religious worlds before interpreting them by outsiders’ evaluations. And there is certainly something quite open-ended, enigmatically so, in the image that the world—whether that of the religious insider or that of the nonreligious outsider—exists in accordance with the lenses, contexts, and locations of its inhabitants. Religion scholars will recognize that Religious Worlds reforms and applies some aspects of phenomenological methodology, which attempted to delineate the structures of religious life (or the “phenomenon” of religion) without imposing metaphysical judgments. But more particularly, they may also notice that it presents a direction for comparative religion that invites convergence with socio-historical and anthropological levels of description and that, through the centralizing concept of world construction, brings to bear the contributions of scholars as otherwise different as Emile Durkheim and Mircea Eliade. Since Religious Worlds first appeared I have published a sequel, Interpreting the Sacred: Ways of Viewing Religion (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), which does deal directly with the radically different ways of explaining religion and in that sense takes up where Religious Worlds leaves off.

Changes to the actual text of this edition of Religious Worlds are strictly minimal, comprising only a few minor word substitutions where specific clarification or correction seemed necessary. Bibliographic references have been updated where relevant. Readers will understand that most references to socialist rituals in Eastern Europe should now be read in the past tense—indeed, the change of staging that hauled down socialist icons, removed the honor guard at the tomb of Lenin, and piped in Christmas carols to Red Square gives dramatic, contemporary illustration to the historically changing nature of world creation and definition.

When first-year college students come to orientation, I sometimes give a talk about liberal arts education. In a word, it is this. Welcome to the artes liberales, the arts of free persons (liberi). You are not here just to train for a job, in order to take a niche in someone else’s notion of reality, but you are free to study the nature of the world itself and come to your own views about it. Each department here offers a different set of glasses for seeing the world, so you will find that the universe in fact consists of a dazzling array of worlds and that each world has even more within it. Science guides you to some, history and sociology to others, art and music to still others. Now the world will appear one way, now quite another. Whose world will we choose to engage? Which world will we choose to live in?

Religious worlds should be studied, too, alongside all the others. Can anyone be truly educated about the complexity or scope of human existence and values who has never engaged the question of religious lenses, and who has never asked what can be learned from their global and inexhaustible variety?

Burlington, Vermont November 1993

page 121

Gods

Gods are a central, unavoidable subject matter for the study of religious life and require phenomenological analysis that is not governed by Western, theistic premises. Although gods are in some ways aspects of myth, they are also important enough structures in their own right to deserve special focus.

Gods as Religious Structures

We shall use the expression gods to represent a general type of religious experience. We will examine gods not for their intrinsic qualities as distinct, supernatural beings but as instances of a form of religious language and behavior. Gods are not just names and representations, not just literary, artistic or philosophic images, but the points at which humans relate to “the other.” We adopt here not a traditional theological approach that assumes one god, “God”—with a capital G— to be the reality behind all worlds and religions, but rather a descriptive approach that examines how any god represents a way of structuring existence and hence amplifies our thematic understanding of religious beings and objects. We set aside unresolvable evaluative questions about whether gods exist outside of human lives, and directly address how gods do in fact function in religious worlds.

The word god is used generically here to mean any superior being that humans religiously engage. Any being, visible or invisible, inhabiting past, present, or future, can function as a god. There are all kinds of such entities. For our thematic purposes, the category comprises a whole spectrum of mythic beings—more than what Westerners habitually associate with the term. Buddhas and bodhisattvas function as gods in many ways, even though they are a very different genre of being than the gods of theism. In traditional China the difference between ancestors and deities is sometimes hard to make. Kings, gurus, and other holy persons may be approached with the same behavior as that directed to divinity. The Greeks offered sacrifices to “heroes” and other demigods. Spirits and gods overlap in their functions and characteristics, and in Shintoist Japan everything has a kami—a term that, depending on the context, is translatable as soul, spirit, or deity. But there are kami of different powers and levels of importance.

Like myth and ritual, a god is a form of religion that can have any content. The content can be demonic or benign, male or female, limited or unlimited in power. It can represent the power of vengeance, kingship, love, ancestry, luck, territory, wisdom, fertility, consciousness, or being itself. A god can be endowed with specific character or personality—and given biographies—or simply representative of a force or function such as good fortune or cattle protection. Even within a tradition that has only one god, the images of that mythic being can be quite diverse. Phenomenologically, there have been many radically different experiences of the god of the biblical traditions, even though these are theologically understood as referring to one and the same god—namely, God.

Once again, in pursuing a comparative approach we must acknowledge the nets of semantic ambiguity. The term god means many things in modern Western culture, and understanding gods is easily impeded by any one of four thickly sedimented cultural predispositions.

First, it is not easy for a monotheistic culture to take an even-handed attitude toward gods when the very word God serves as the proper name of the Supreme Being of the universe, the one “before Whom there are no others.” We have seen above how “gods” in the plural conjures up idols of tin and wood, the hapless competitors, so railed against in the Bible, of “the one true Lord.” By definition, monotheism scorns polytheism and animism except occasionally to show that they are stages on the way to “pure” theism. In contrast to the observation of the Greek philosopher Thales that “the world is full of gods,” the central creed of Islam begins, “There is no God but Allah,” and the warning “You shall have no other gods before me” heads the list of the Ten Commandments.

A second bias comes from the side of rationalism, which typically takes all gods, including the biblical God, as fictions. Scientific explanation has done away with gods. Demystification of the universe is the goal of rationalism. Gods are merely projections of natural realities.

The third approach is the deistic, conceptualist one that accepts the general idea of a supreme being but takes it as an abstract, philosophical concept rather than as a religious presence. For many, the god of the West has been relegated to a principle—designating the ultimate force of order in the universe. God here is like a metaphysical hypothesis, to be either accepted as semantic currency or proved by argumentation. In this semantic context the word God often summons up a series of arguments for or against the existence of a supreme being. God is something to be argued about, not something to be sacrificed to.

The fourth bias is the universalist one that the main gods of the world religions are all versions of the same ineffable divine reality. Here Allah, God, Brahman, Buddha, and even Tao are but the various names for this transcendent mystery.

These approaches have their function within the world of their adherents, but tend to close off the process of observing and comparing what gods mean in people’s lives. Rationalist and conceptualist frameworks see god language as on the same level with rational language, yet we have seen that religion does not share the same territory as science but is a different sort of language altogether. The discourse of science is disengaged, objective, and neutral to issues of the significance of human life or how one should behave. The language of gods—as part of mythic expression—has to do with what acts one must take to lead a meaningful life. A world inhabited by gods is therefore not just a prescientific world but a completely different genre of worldview and world behavior. The two realms can certainly exist side by side, as they often do in modern culture, where the sheer differentness of their semantic form and context can provide for a degree of mutual autonomy.

As for the universalist view, there has been a definite value and truth to some of the parallels to which it has called attention. But insofar as it reduces gods to the same reality, it is engaging in metaphysical affirmations and transcends any real interest in comparative differences and hence specific worldviews.

The most important word in Western languages is the word God. Yet it is a term about which we have little reflexive or comparative awareness. It is typically insulated from inclusion in the cross-cultural subject matter of religious studies by its privileged place in living biblical language. In this chapter the god of monotheism is respectfully incorporated into a wider generic framework.

With these clarifications in mind we may proceed to examine further the idea of gods as experiential structures.

A god is not just a bare object—like a statue in a museum—but part of a bilateral relationship. A god is a god of someone or to someone. Only in the eyes of a religious person can a god be a god as such. A god is a category of social, interactive behavior, experienced in a way that is analogous to the experience of other selves. With gods one receives, gives, follows, loves, imitates, communes, negotiates, contests, entrusts. A god is a subject to us as objects and an object to us as subjects. We address it, or it can address us. Part of this relational quality is even evident in the etymology of the English term god, which traces back to a root that means either “to invoke” or “sacrificed to.”1

The religious meaning of a god lies in what one does in the presence of the god. If gods are not just objects but constituted by forms of behavior between subjects, this relational universe sharply contrasts with the antiseptic, demystified world of scientific language where the earth is not a place of any exchange or engagement—where nothing is addressable. In this absence of dialogue, scientific language flattens everything it sees into data, but in the language of gods, the world is experienced through categories of invocation, listening, and respect.

This dialogical factor may be understood better if we see how virtually any object can function as a “being.” Anything can be spoken to. Poetry has always known this. And any form can confront us with its own power and message. An “it” can become “you” or “thou.” It can be apprehended as “the one” that brings to us this or that effect. The evening news reported a falsely imprisoned man who found a turning point in his life when he met an object “he could talk to”: a button. With the button he became friends and found solace. Religiously endowed objects easily become personified: the sabbath has been addressed as God’s “bride”; Tibetan Buddhist shrines (stupas) are sometimes called “precious one” (rimpoche); the Sikh scripture is “the ultimate guru”; and the sacred fires of Zoroastrianism are addressed as though they were special beings. Any object, any “other” thing, can assume a temporary absoluteness in the way it faces and dominates us, in the way it forms a conduit between us and the infinite “wholly other,” the “thou” that is the self’s perpetual, complementary counterpart. Again, we both address and are addressed.

In the following sections we will examine two sets of variations related to the theme of gods. There are many others, but these are especially germane to our examination of the religious structuring of worlds. We will first see how kinds of gods correlate with kinds of worlds, and then look at the typical patterns that channel the interaction of gods and humans.

Gods and Worlds

Gods go with their worlds. It would be worth investigating the extent to which a god—in traditional geographies—could not really be worshipped outside its own land. In ancient Semitic religion the term baal—“master” of a house, “owner” of a field, “husband”—meant the god who possessed some place or district. In the ancient world, priests were customarily not priests of gods in general, and not even of one god or goddess in general, but of a particular god at a particular site. The Bible tells of Syrian armies that, after being defeated in the hill country of Samaria, held nevertheless that the gods of the hills would have no power in the plains.2 The god has its polis, its relative totality of influence. My great ancestors and heroes may not be yours. The territory of Ares is not the territory of Aphrodite. Nor does gentle Jesus the bambino rule over the same world as Christ the apocalyptic world judge. Protestants know nothing of the domain of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Gods are not just fantasy symbols but beings whose realms cannot be violated with impunity. Where sacrilege does take place with no consequence, the gods have fled. We see this in the historical transition between religious worlds: when missionaries hewed down pagan oaks with no divine punishment, and when Polynesian taboos were neglected without repercussion, the pagan world orders with their ruling gods had already been abandoned. In a similar way, secular cultures have replaced impotent historical sacralities. Behavior that under the sanctions and surveillance of the gods would have been unthinkable in one generation is routine in the next.

Gods correlate with the critical points of a world where humans are most open to the power of “the other.” If a world is crucially subject to what comes from the sky, from animal or plant life, from clan or political order, or from ritual purity, we may expect to find gods located in these junctures and conceived in these categories. In societies based firmly on family relationships and social hierarchy, such as traditional China, we are not surprised to find ancestors, elders, and emperors receiving the same reverence as gods. If a community or individual is weary of a despotic, alien world, we are not surprised to find gods appearing as messiahs, redeemers, and inner guides, delivering us to another, better place altogether.

Because the location of gods follows the location of the sacred, we get used to gods of mountains, rivers, vegetation, and fire; gods of the hearth, village, tribe, nation, and humanity; gods of thieves, merchants, smiths, hermits, priests, and mystics. There are gods such as the “One Great Source of the Date Clusters” (Amaushumagalanna of Uruk), and also the “one great source of yogic power” (Shiva). There are gods of the whole complexity of time (e.g., the ancient Iranian cosmic god Zurvan), but also gods for collecting wood, gods for cutting wood, and gods for burning wood. There are gods of longevity, child protection, health, and success; there are gods of death, misfortune, and every disease; and there are gods who are called “The True Parent.” There are gods who are the sun itself and gods of the inner light. Gods are the looming masks of the ultimate confrontational points of success and disaster, life and death. The history of gods is linked with the history of those points, with the succession of zones of sacredness.

…

This extraordinary specificity of gods extended even to powers of the moment. The Greeks “saw a special divine being, a daimon, in each piece of fortune or misfortune. The tragedians speak repeatedly of ton paronta daimona, the god who dominates someone at a particular moment, for instance during mourning over a dead person or on being shamed. ”6 Lightning and sheaves of grain were other instances of “momentary deities.”

In traditional Roman Catholicism the polytheistic outlook was carried on to some degree in the veneration of a multitude of saints. Forty different saints were invoked in the French Vosges, as “guardians of livestock and protectors from all kinds of sickness, such as gout, toothache, and burns (St. Augustine, for instance, protected one from warts), as protectors in storms and against fleas.”7 In Asia we find a similar assimilation of native spirits to Buddhist saints. The name of invocation could change, but the domain (childbirth, smallpox) of the god or saint remained the same.

One class of supernatural beings is that of the negative gods: demons. Every world has its negating forces. The Satan figure in the West became elaborated as a diabolical antagonist to the biblical God. Minor demons, though, may be limited to specific functions, like drought, leprosy, or the weakness of hunters. The Ifugao of the Philippines count thirty-one gods who send dysentery and twenty-one who produce boils and abscesses.8

Some gods are patrons of specific communities of people. In traditional cultures every significant collectivity would have a sacred group spirit of some kind. Each of more than 400 Australian aboriginal tribes had its own, different totemic being—usually a certain species of animal or plant. Each village in Bali had its own barong, a patron protector in the form of a supernatural dragon mask. Latin American villages each have their special saint. In many societies domestic spirits or ancestors rule the household circle. The Japanese sun goddess, Amaterasu, is the ancestress of all the gods, the imperial family, and ultimately the Japanese people. Traditional Near Eastern city states each had their divinity: Melkarth was the god of Tyre, Moloch of Carthage, Astarte of Byblus, Marduk of Babylon, Jupiter of Rome, Yahweh of Jerusalem. Moreover, within a society certain classes of people were accountable to certain gods—such as warriors to Mars, seamen to Neptune, merchants to Mercury, and farmers to Ceres. Juno presided at marriages. In Greece youths identified with Apollo, maidens with Artemis, married women with Hera.

These examples should help us to see how complex are the domains and nature of the so-called supreme beings of the world religions. The supreme being is that god that grounds the entire world, not just some part of it. There are several versions of such unity—different families, as it were, of supreme gods. Many tribal systems refer to a creator god who is ultimately responsible for the world but has withdrawn from activity in it. In biblical traditions, theocratic images of power over the world—such as God as creator, king, and lord—are central. In Hindu tradition, ontological metaphors dominate; a common name for Brahman is “being, consciousness, joy” (satchitananda), and Shiva and Shakti are the “perpetual union of consciousness and energy”—that is, existence itself. Buddhas are defined in terms of primal, archetypal virtues such as wisdom and compassion. Chinese religion pictures the cosmos as the harmonious “Way” (Tao) of “heaven and earth.”

For illustrative purposes consider the difference between Hindu and biblical images a little further. In the former, the supreme being is the indwelling reality of the world. In the latter, the world is under the monarchical power of the god, and there is an unbridgeable distance between the holiness of the Creator and the finitude of the creation. In the Hindu conception, all the countless gods are only the million faces of the one god. Krishna, as the supreme god in the Bhagavad Gita can say,

I [am] the oblation and I the flame into which it is offered.

I am the sire of the world, and this world’s mother and grandsire: ... I am the end of the path, the witness, the Lord, the sustainer: I am... the beginning, the friend and the refuge: I am the breaking-apart, and the storehouse of life’s dissolution: I lie under the seen, of all creatures the seed that is changeless. I am the heat of the sun; and the heat of the fire am I also: Life eternal and death. I let loose the rain, or withhold it. ... I am the cosmos revealed, and its germ that lies hidden.9

The biblical god Yahweh is more intrinsically connected with the symbolism of power, reflecting the kingship imagery so characteristic of the great gods of the ancient Near East. The Lord’s “answer” to the suffering Job makes quite a different point than Krishna’s:

Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?

Tell me, if you have understanding. … Have the gates of death been revealed to you, or have you seen the gates of deep darkness? … Do you know when the mountain goats bring forth? ... Who has let the wild ass go free? ... Do you give the horse his might? … Can you draw out Leviathan with a fishhook? ... Will you play with him as with a bird? … Whatever is under the whole heaven is mine.10

Here the god is not establishing his identity with creation, but his rule and mastery over it—the Hebrew word for God, Elohim, has an etymological connotation of “power” or “strong. ” There is nothing He cannot do: He made the world, parted the Red Sea, and called forth his Son from the realm of the dead.

Understanding the nature of the supreme being has been the endeavor of philosophers and theologians East and West. How are the many things of the world, including negativity and opposition, related to this one principle? Why is there evil if God is good?

But religion is not philosophy. Religiousness means engaging the sacred. It means having a focus, a point of engagement. These points are the earthly embodiments of the gods: incarnations, authorities, priests, and a multitude of symbolic objects.

The institution of the guru-disciple relationship illustrates this idea of focus.11 In Asian traditions the guru has some of the functions of a god. The guru is a living embodiment of the divine, a “realized being,” a “living master.” True progress is possible only with the guidance of such a person, who initiates and prescribes one’s spiritual path. To be in the presence of the guru is to be in the presence of a god. The entire focus of Christianity is on one great manifestation of the supreme god—Jesus Christ, the Christian guru, so to speak. “I am the way, and the truth, and the life,” he enjoins, and “no one comes to the Father, but by me.”12

A god’s presence can be experienced in virtually anything, in shrines, words, and sacraments, in stones, and in people. Hindu scriptures teach that the supreme being is to be seen in all life. Sacramental religion finds the god in the rites of church and shrine. Some ethically oriented Christian worldviews are guided by the words of Jesus: “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.”13 The religious person always knows where to find and honor the god, and with what actions.

Gods also appear within the self, as spirit allies or as indwelling elements of the supreme god. We have seen that shamanic cultures give importance to the individual’s knowledge of personal supernatural entities. Many Christians testify to the presence of Christ within: “I have Jesus in my heart and I am no longer alone.” Mahayana Buddhist traditions speak of everyone being “the Buddha.” Islamic mysticism takes its cue from the Qur’anic phrase that Allah is closer to us than our very jugular vein.

Not all religious systems limit themselves to the idea that the supreme reality of the world is a being per se. Most noticeably in Asia, but also in some Western theologies and mysticisms, we find the notion of ultimate, divine reality as something utterly and intrinsically beyond any naming or representation. Hindu and Buddhist systems often point to an inexpressible unity of things that lies behind all human, subject-object distinctions. Said one Zen abbot, “There is Buddha for those who do not know who he is really, but there is no Buddha for those who know who he is really.” The image of the empty circle in Zen symbolizes this state of having gone beyond the process of mental objectivizing. Buddhism is perhaps the religion that offers the most illustrations of the attempt to transcend gods and other objectifications in the pursuit of enlightenment.

Often we find two or more religious systems interwoven or side by side in one culture, such as an ethical tradition like Islam, Buddhism, or Christianity coexisting with an indigenous system of spirit observance. The realms of the nats in Burma, the yang in Indonesia, and the jinn in Arabia are examples of the latter. In Japan the buddhas cohabit the land with thousands of Shinto kami, the latter governing the forces of everyday life. Residents do not find these systems contradictory. In India by traditional count there are 330 million gods—and yet ultimately there is only one.

The religious significance of gods is not fathomed by just showing and comparing their respective realms. The spatial metaphor has its limits. We understand the life of a god even more fully when we examine the actual ways humans interact with it. The most intimately local ancestral spirit profoundly approached may reflect a richer religious phenomenology than a sublimely conceived being that has only a philosophical or literary existence. So we must now turn to the question of how gods are approached. If a god is a god only in relationship to a human, then how is this relationship enacted? How is a god’s existence or presence acknowledged? Once again, we enter a world of variations.

Patterns in the Experience of the “Other”

Recall the principal: Gods appear to us reciprocally according to our attitudes toward them, and our attitudes toward them are reciprocal with the way gods appear to us. As the fourteenth-century mystic Meister Eckhart put it, the eye by which we see God is the same eye by which He sees us.

These patterns of interaction can be understood in terms of two main types. The first comprises those ways humans experience themselves on the receiving end of the relation; the second includes those ways humans are the active agent in the relation.

Receiving the Gods

Preeminently, a god is something received. This is connected with the sense of the numinous. Rudolf Otto’s term is useful here for naming the feeling of being encountered by a powerful “other”—of being faced by a reality or being that is astonishingly greater than one’s self. The contrast between this greater presence and one’s ordinary reality is dramatic and produces awe, amazement, ecstasy. Otto and many historians of religion have taken this sense of the holy to be the source of religion, suggesting that doctrines and rites are but elaborations of numinous experience.

While the numinous is something that comes to us, it does come channeled through given cultural forms. Religious systems, by definition, anticipate the points at which interaction with things supernatural might or will occur. For some these points are visions and dreams, for others ritually induced states of possession, conversion experiences, church services, sacraments, faith healing, illnesses, contact with a holy person, divination, contact with nature, meditation, or private prayer. Many religions have begun with visions or voices. Moses is reported to have seen the majesty of Yahweh on Mt. Sinai, and the Hebrew prophets felt “the Word of the Lord” come upon them. The Christian apostles ecstatically experienced the appearance of the resurrected Christ. Islam is the direct result of the words of Allah that came to the nonliterate Muhammad via the Archangel Gabriel, words that were thereafter enshrined as the holy Qur’an. None of these experiences were solicited.

The experience of possession is common in many traditional cultures. Here a spirit, which may be either negative, positive, or something in between, takes over a body or personality. There are many societies for whom states of possession or trance are the regular religious avenues for contacting the supernatural.14 The assumption is that humans cannot communicate with the gods in a merely ordinary mode of consciousness. But even in the modern West, faith-healing rallies continue to fill stages with the entranced, prostrate bodies of those who have been touched by the “spirit of God.” Pentecostal and other charismatic groups make the direct experience of the Holy Spirit central to their faith. The power of their god is demonstrated to them regularly in such phenomena as “speaking in tongues” and spiritual healing. Worldwide we find practices aimed to demonstrate the direct power of spirit over matter—such as fire-walking or the handling of poisonous serpents.

Mystical experience, in contrast, is not a semiconscious or trance state but an intensely conscious state of union with or apprehension of the numinous. The experience itself is often felt as involuntary or spontaneous, as the grace of the god. Precisely because it is conscious, the effect of mystical experience is great on one’s life and dramatically transforms, through its searing impress, one’s normal system of priorities and attitudes. Many are the reports like those described extensively in William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience, which speak of “that one great moment in my life spent in the presence of God.”

For some the presence of the supernatural is received intensely in holy objects such as relics or icons. “Seeing” the divine image, or darshan, is central to Hindu worship. A Hindu goes to a temple, pilgrimage site, or holy person not for “worship” but “for darshan.” The deity or holy person “gives darshan” and the people “take darshan.”15 Catholic and Orthodox Christianity focus on the presence of God in the rites of the Eucharist, in which the consecrated bread and wine are transformed into the body and blood of Christ. The bread and wine are not just symbols but divine presences. Moreover, any object associated with the divine can have the same effect as the presence of the god itself, and it is not surprising that “miraculous” cures are regularly claimed as issuing from contact with the humblest of these vehicles. Recently a thirteen-year-old boy was reported as having recovered from leukemia after the skullcap of the late Cardinal Cooke was placed on his stomach.

A broad, universally found form in which divinity is manifest is that of dispenser of fate. Humans find themselves on the receiving end of life. Gods allot destinies. They are often synonyms for fate itself. Relating to this “givenness” of the will of the god can even constitute a large part of daily religious life—as in the Dantean phrase, “In His will is our peace.” Some terms for god actually mean “dispenser.”16 A true devotee is apt to “read” all events, negative or positive, as lessons in divine edification. The puritan Thomas Shepard thus wrote in his autobiography,

He is the God who took me up when my own mother died, who loved me, and when my stepmother cared not for me, and when lastly my father also died and forsook me, when I was young and little and could take no care for myself ... He is the God that brought me out of Egypt, that profane and wicked town where I was born and bred, ... He is the God that brought me, the least and most despised of my father’s house, to the University of Cambridge and strangely made way for me there. ... He is the God that carried me into Essex from Cambridge and gave me the most sweet society of so many godly ministers, ... 17

Many will dedicate themselves to a religious life as a result of feeling specially touched by some extraordinary event. In return for having his life spared during a terrible lightning storm, the young Martin Luther vowed to pursue a monastic vocation.

As Job found, the Lord gives and the Lord takes away. Gods dispense affliction, humiliation, chastisement, and destruction as well as blessing and mercy. The same puritan quoted above lost his wife and son through a tempestuous sea passage to America. His reading: divine instruction in humility. Certainly gods are not just expressions of solace for the ego, and any theory of religion based on such a concept is just neglecting the contrary evidence. Gods punish offenses, any violation of their order. They bring down pride. Hinduism has innumerable and terrifying representations of “the Destroyer,” such as the devouring goddess Kali, pictured with necklaces of skulls and bones. As a refrain, biblical monotheism speaks of the judging, punishing, wrathful side of God.

Gods dispense, but also empower. They give power to help against otherwise insuperable odds. Gods offer adherents part of their own “life.” Thus the great Buddha Amitabha (Amida in Japan) aeons ago made a vow that he would not enter nirvana himself until he had achieved such magnitude of virtue and enlightenment that ordinary beings could share in his liberation through sincerely calling on his name. This invocation, the nembutsu, is the primary religious affirmation of Japanese Pure Land Buddhist adherents, and consists precisely in the act of accepting a salvation that has already been given or made accessible. This religious mode of acceptance is an important strand of Christian tradition, too, as interpreted in the phrasing of a revivalist who preached, “In giving you Christ, it is like God is giving you a one hundred dollar bill: all you have to do is just accept it!” The affirmation that salvation is not man’s accomplishment but rather God’s grace is central to all major forms of Christianity. Hindu devotees receive a new life when a guru bestows shaktipad—a touch on the forehead.

Responses to Gods

Human responses to gods follow certain patterns. There are identifiable, thematic ways that people relate to numinous objects, and these actions form the stuff of much daily religious life. Two kinds of relationships are discernable here: the longterm relation to the god, and the set of short-term occasions where the superior being is enjoined in particular ways.

The long-term relationship is characterized by the theme of service and attitudes such as faith and trust. This is the realm of loyalty, steadfastness, and commitment.

One aspect of service is obedience or allegiance. Gods, after all, are “lords” of the world they embody. They have authority and in turn require fealty or loyalty. They are guarantors and maintainers of world and moral order. Authority is expressed positively in terms of obligations, and negatively in terms of interdictions and sanctions. Yet in the subject matter of religious allegiance we once again acknowledge cultural variations. There are different social forms of loyalty, and onto the idea of deity are projected the modes of allegiance familiar to the group’s tradition. Traditional monotheism, reflecting the imagery of the king-subject relationship, made homage and obedience the primary themes of scriptures and worship, and made disloyalty to the god the greatest sin. An apostate was a traitor. There was a joint obligation here, as in feudalism: if the people serve obediently, the lord protects; if people uphold their world, their world will uphold them.

But serving a god is certainly not limited to simple obedience. The variations on service to gods are revealing and instructive. Gods are served in conformity with their nature, and followers seek to imitate or participate in the nature of their gods. One serves the god of wisdom through wisdom, the god of love through love, the god of compassion through compassion. The divinity who challenges false rulers, who liberates slaves, who cares for “the orphan, the widow, the poor, the outcaste,” is a god served through social caring. At one point in the Bible, the Lord is satisfied by detailed kinds of animal sacrifices at the Jerusalem temple, but at another, when the religious world reflects the values of the prophets, we hear, “What doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?”18

Thus there is some correlation between the nature of a god and the act of serving it. Demons have their followers. Where fanatic devotees of Kali the Devourer took it as their divine responsibility to murder on her behalf, adherents of the peaceful Tao aspire to be like the Tao. Where gods are departmental bureaucrats, the employees behave accordingly. What the gods are determines what it is that belongs to them, and what it is that humans have received and hence should give back.

There are also more specific, patterned ways that the behavioral relationship between humans and gods is acted out. By distinguishing and comparing these ways we get a sense of the spectrum of responses to deity that are religiously possible as well as a sense of the cross-cultural nature of the patterns. We identify here the following: (1) petition, (2) atonement or confession, (3) offering, (4) celebration, and (5) divination. These indicate that in relation to gods humans ask, purify, give, honor, and inquire.

The first type of behavior, petitionary, is that connected with prayer and propitiation. Humans need and desire things, and what they cannot obtain on their own they need to seek and receive from a higher, other power. In religious terms, success in life lies outside the control of the human ego and reason. People perceive themselves as dependent on higher powers, and acknowledge that their well-being is in the hands of those powers. Humans approach gods in order to receive critical guidance and support and to avoid negative or disastrous outcomes. To many an adherent, prayer is not an episodic formality but a sustaining way of life, and existence would be unlivable without it.

Asking things of gods does not necessarily take the form of simple petition. There are all kinds of ways to ask for something, and each religious system has its own protocol for what it takes to be effective propitiation, such as self-accusation, flattery, vows, conciliation, and meditation. Some words for prayer mean ask; others mean seek, long for, speak in a formal manner, or soften. Proper propitiation may take the aspect of formal rites, spontaneous personal prayer, or acts of asceticism. Different gods will have different expectations and standards for determining the adherent’s sincerity.

Consider one example of propitiation from the realm of shamanism. Specialists in communicating with spirits while in trance, shamans are particularly adept in methods of direct negotiation. This usually involves a “journey.” The shaman knows spirit geographies and languages intimately and is a master intermediary between his or her audiences and the spirits who control the affairs of the local universe. Our illustration concerns the descent of an Eskimo shaman to the abode of Takanakapsaluk, the mother of the sea beasts. This is done in time of illness or famine and is conducted in the format of a seance. In trance the shaman successfully overcomes a series of obstacles (such as crushing rocks and vicious beasts) believed to be preventing access to the goddess. Finally reaching her marine domain, the shaman finds a pool of sea animals. The report of this seance continues as follows:

The goddess’s hair hangs down over her face and she is dirty and slovenly; this is the effect of men’s sins, which have almost made her ill. The shaman must approach her, take her by the shoulder, and comb her hair (for the goddess has no fingers with which to comb herself). ... As he combs Takanakapsaluk’s hair, the shaman tells her that men have no more seal. And the goddess answers in the spirit language: “The secret miscarriages of the women and breaches of taboo in eating boiled meat bar the way for the animals.” The shaman now has to summon all his powers to appease her anger; finally she opens the pool and sets the animals free.19

The shaman “returns” to the seance, gasping for breath, and asks the audience for confession of their sins.

This points to a second pattern; atonement and purification. One must actively remove offense to the gods in order to avoid their judgment and be a recipient of their benefits. Petition is often accompanied by acts of purification. One needs to make up for something done wrong, make oneself worthy of that which is desired, rid oneself of any impurity that may be obstructing one’s goals. Confession of sins is one format. Another is that of Chief Sitting Bull, who before an important battle would face the sun and make a hundred cuts in his arm. Prayer itself is often not just a form of communication but an act of humility, involving the chastening of self (or community) in order to be worthy of the god’s gifts.

The third pattern is giving. One gives—just as one serves, asks, and atones—according to the nature of the god. Some offerings to gods are like tributes or even taxes, but while a material offering may be appropriate for continuing land rights, in return for salvation one offers one’s entire allegiance and moral life.

There is reciprocity to giving, and Gerardus van der Leeuw saw perceptively that “the gift allows a stream to flow, which from the moment of the giving runs uninterruptedly from donor to recipient and from receiver to giver: ‘the recipient is in the power of the giver.’ ”20 The gift or offering sets in motion a cycle of giving. Giver and receiver are united in this binding quality of the offering. The more we give, the more the god gives; the more we have received, the more we must give back.

Sacrifices and offerings are the common external forms of giving. But to be effective they must always involve giving something that is one’s own possession or part of one’s own self. When an animal is sacrificed, it is not a wild animal but a domesticated one. In the bear sacrifice of the Ainu of Japan, the animal is reared among the villagers and treated as a member of the family before it is ultimately sent back to the gods. It is only a natural step in the logic of religious giving to shift from the sacrifice of foods and animals to the sacrifice of one’s own self-possession, one’s own ego. “My self belongs to God,” say the mystics. The dynamics of sacrifice and its endless contexts and variations form an enormous part of the subject matter of religious life.

A fourth pattern of action is celebration, the human response to blessings received. This is the behavior of thanksgiving, worship, and praise, again as expressed in countless cultural styles. We have already seen in the analysis of festival times how celebration follows the nature of its objects and goals. The gods may be honored by formal composure but also by exuberant singing and dancing.

The fifth pattern of relating to the gods is through divination. The Latin term divinatio (from divus, “divine” or “of the gods”) means the act of “reading” objects in the physical world to see how they express the activity or inclination of the gods. The premise of divination is that there is a synchronistic sympathy between the wholeness of life and each fragment of it, and, therefore, the action of gods can be deciphered by scrutinizing certain patterns in nature and interpreting them as signs or adumbrations of the future. Augurs look to the sky for such premonitory signs. Others scan the livers of animals, consult the “fall” of objects such as sticks, dice, or coins, or analyze dreams. Divining is often connected with the need for auspicious timing. A leader might consult a diviner to determine the right day for a certain military venture; or a wedding day may be selected astrologically. The act of opening a scripture at random in order to find the divine “will” is a spontaneous application of the divinatory principle, as is, in a purely secular sense, the act of deciding what action to take by tossing a coin.

Gods are religious forms that have had every conceivable content and scope, and endless local inflections. This experiential richness and diversity is often obscured by theological, con-ceptualist approaches that look at a god in terms of what it is ideally believed to be rather than in the phenomenological terms of how it is actually experienced. In seeing gods and their followers in experiential perspective, we emerge with another component of our framework for understanding and interpreting religious history.

Comparative perspective is not just a matter of judging the worth of gods, as in a beauty contest. It creates a broad cumulative outlook for appreciating any particular god or act connected with a god. It brings out both unity and difference in human experience.

There is no disparaging insinuation here that gods are mere inventions. In describing worlds, not only is the line between invention and discovery impossible to draw, but gods, whatever they may or may not be ultimately, present themselves to human experience as “other” and as primordially given. Even from the point of view of invention, gods and their worlds would surely be among the astonishing creations and creative acts of our human species, and unavoidable subject matter for any student of how humans choose to live.

The Unification Church and shamanism. At its heart the UC is not Christian; but it presents a Christian facade.

How “God’s Day” was established

The FFWPU is unequivocally not Christian

The Moons’ God is not the God of Judeo-Christianity

Hananim and other Spirits in Korean Shamanism

#William E. Paden #Gods #Theology

[luketesta]

Conclusions

Friends and family,

I am writing, what I expect to be, my final blog of the semester. I returned home to the states four days ago, a return that was in no way easy, physically or mentally. My time in Nepal was an enlightening adventure and filled with more meaning than I could have hoped. Although I did miss many people back home, it was very difficult to leave the people whom I had become so close to, the busy streets of Boudha that I weaved through each day, the valley of Dho Tarap where I completed my independent research, and the country that taught me so much. I feel very grateful for the time that I was able to spend abroad, the lessons I was able to learn, the hospitality and acceptance that countless people showed me, and for the relationships that I was able to build, specifically those at the Snow Leopard Residence. I already miss Nepal but feel very appreciative for the time I was able to spend there and the positive memories I formed.

I now find myself continuously drifting into reflection and experiencing feelings of gratitude and nostalgia. In conversations with others, I find myself struggling to accurately and fully communicate that which I experienced over the past three and a half months. As I have mentioned in past posts, this blog is nothing more than a mere brush stroke in the full picture of my trip. I do not see it as possible or even necessary to try to offer a complete illustration of my time in Nepal, for any attempt would be futile and a dishonor to the complexity that characterizes any experience in life. Instead, below, I offer a small glimpse into the last month and a half so that I may share a bit of this trip with all of you.

The last time I posted, I was in the midst of my travels to Dho Tarap, where I was to complete the research that I began in Kathmandu. My research related to gender roles, women’s issues, and social change. I had begun my research in Kathmandu (interviewing older students who are from Dho Tarap but attend school in Kathmandu) and had a great baseline of data and understanding for entering the valley. When I typed my last blog post, I was waiting in Nepalgunj for a plane that was supposed to take my group (me, three of my classmates, and seven students from Dho Tarap who were on vacation) to Dunai. However, little did I know, my journey was about to become much more difficult and adventurous.

Our travels were extended by 3 days after our flight got cancelled. With no more flights scheduled for the next couple of days that could accommodate our group, we decided to traverse the distance by bus, jeep, and foot. After taking a 16-hour bus ride the day before, we strapped in for another 15 hours with a bus that drove us through the night until a point in the road (now in the “hilly” region of the Himalayas) where the bus could go no further. From there, we squished into a jeep and continued further into the mountains towards the villages of Lower Dolpo. Eventually, the road ended altogether, and the jeep could take us no further. After resting for the night, we woke early to walk about 7 hours to Dunai. Finally, it was from Dunai, that we then began the 3-day walk to Dho Tarap.

We had left on a Thursday morning and didn’t arrive in Dho Tarap until the following Thursday evening. It took 7 days to travel the distance of Boston to New York City, not counting the increase in altitude (Dho Tarap lies at about 13,000 feet) nor the indirect route that one must take to arrive there. The 3-day walk from Dunai was beautiful as we slipped between valleys and over mountain passes, every step bringing us closer towards our final destination. For the students from Dho Tarap, it was their first time returning home in three years and it was clear just how excited they were to see their families and friends. I will not forget the final day of walking (Day 7). We were all tired and worn out, but the energy was high and our pace swift, as excitement and anticipation fueled our legs and our spirits. Just beyond our gaze, laid, for some, the end of a long, exciting journey. For others, home.

After walking for most of the final day and as a light snow began to dust the path, we finally arrived at the village of Dho. Upon arrival, parents and children engaged in long overdue embraces, and I entered for the first time into a place that would, in two weeks’ time, become so hard to leave. During my time in the valley, I lived with the family of one of the tenth-grade students, a family whom I have come to greatly miss. Together, many laughs were shared and much understanding gained, as we all shared about our lives and homes, two places literally on opposite sides of the globe. My ama (mother) treated me as one of her own and did not hesitate to unfailingly provide me with a place to sleep, a full cup of per cha (Tibetan butter tea), a heavy plate of food, or (comically) an earful of Tibetan that we both knew my minimal studies had not equipped me to fully understand. I often responded with the typical answers of lhaso lhaso (yes yes), hako song min duke (I don’t understand), pay yapo duke (very good), or with an English phrase (which I knew she similarly would not understand)—a type of banter that transcended language and helped to foster a close bond between us.

Our family spent most of our nights brought together by delicious meals and energized by the entertainment of each other’s company as we all sat cross-legged around the stove late into the evening. During the mornings and afternoons, I would spend most of my time either working in the fields (carrying fertilizer, ploughing with yaks, or delivering fertilizer via yak caravans), performing interviews, visiting the school at the center of the valley, or conversing with locals. In such a communal environment, it was not long before I was familiar with most people within the village and felt at home amongst the close-knit community.

My research was, in many ways, difficult. To begin, I was an outsider and a white man performing research on a taboo topic. My positionality not only created challenges, but it raised my potential for inflicting unintended harm on the community. However, the research ended up being very successful and positive. I found that women were more than willing to have conversations with me and were eager to share their thoughts on the difficulties that women face. It was a humbling position that I found myself in, both as an outsider within a community so far from my own and as a researcher having conversations on such a sensitive topic. My goal was to simply listen, record, and learn (with consent of course). To not press for information, but instead, to create space where people could share their opinions and/or criticisms if they felt inclined to do so.

Throughout my time in the valley and still now, I have tried my best to keep all information private and confidential and to prevent unintended harms. It was challenging but necessary to consistently and unfailingly be mindful of my positionality, aware of unintended consequences, and to not overstep boundaries with interviewees or in the community. My hope was that, at best, the research would be a positive (or at the very least neutral) experience for those I encountered. Through conversations with interviewees after concluding the research, it appears that these hopes for reciprocity have manifested. 

When I returned to Boudha, I produced a 49-page report. The paper goes through the many challenges that women report facing in their lifetime, offers a conceptual framework for understanding the role of gender in Dho Tarap (which was reviewed and edited by eight individuals from Dho Tarap before publishing the report), highlights women’s thoughts on change and empowerment, and finally contains anonymous statements from women who wished to include their own voice in the report. I have tried my best to exclude my own voice from this paper, for it is not my own convictions that matter, but instead, the voices of those I interviewed. I do not offer solutions or make suggestions for what should change or even if change should occur, because I, as an outsider who knows so little about life in Dho Tarap after only one month of research, should not pretend to have answers to the issues that women talk about in my report. Instead, it is the women of Dho Tarap and others who call it home who know best and who should decide what is best for their society. Thus, my report is simply my best attempt to accurately illustrate the stories and criticisms shared with me during interviews, highlight connections or areas of disagreement between interviewees accounts, and offer a conceptual framework for understanding the bigger picture of gender. For anyone interested in reading my report, please reach out and I will send along a copy.

The most important thing that I can say related to my research is thank you to the many women who were willing to speak with me and that may be reading this post. I thank you all for your willingness to voice your opinions on the challenges that women face and for teaching me about your lives, treating me with dignity and respect, and for allowing me to see your desire for change. You all have taught me so much, and without you, my report would not have been possible and my experience would have been far less meaningful.

Being back in the states is strange in so many ways. Everything seems essentially the same yet a little bit different. It is as if everything has another layer to it that I am now just realizing exists. Although I am in many ways the same person, these past four months have taught me more than I could have hoped. I have learned to empathize with people in a new way, experienced the fluidity of social norms and rules, been in awe by the beauty of nature, learned about the experiences of refugees in an intimate setting, felt just how easy it is to connect with people beyond language and culture, been reminded of the importance of human relation, gained a new understanding of my own privileges, been shown the necessity of navigating life quietly and with an open mind, seen just how similar humans are all over the globe, and have been reminded of how very little I know about this world, amongst other lessons.

I really miss Nepal and hope that one day I will have the opportunity to return to Kathmandu and Dho Tarap. Although I am no longer there, the lessons that I have learned through observation, conversation, and relationships will not leave me and have undoubtedly broadened how I understand this world and my place within it. For this, I am incredibly grateful. I feel that it is only right to conclude with a thank you, to those who helped prepare me for this trip, supported me back home, and to those who made my time in Nepal enlightening, purposeful, and unforgettable. Tuke Chey Nung and Namaste.

Gratefully,

Luke

[marjorieevans92]

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Bacterial Vaginosis No Discharge But Smell

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#Bacterial Vaginosis Leaflet For Patient Astonishing Cool Tips #Bacterial Vaginosis Treatment Meds

[tlatollotl]

From 400-Rabbits

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A female conquistador would be an anachronism, as the role was very much bound up in ideas of Medieval European knighthood and specifically the role of the hidalgo. More on that in a bit, but let's start by asking a very real and important demographic question.

Where the White Women At?

In order for there to be be female conquistadors, there first have to be women. The gendered reality of immigration to what would become the Spanish territories of the Americas, however, is that is was overwhelmingly made up of men. Women were particularly in what we might consider a sort of "Conquistador Era" of the conquest and settlement of the Caribbean and Mexico. Boyd-Bowman (1976) finds that, between the years 1493-1519, only 308 Spanish women were documented as immigrating to the Americas, or 5.6% of the total documented migrants. Between the years 1520-1539, that number increases to 845, but the greater overall influx of Spanish colonists means these women still made up only 6.3% of the overall migrants. Most of these women came not independently, but as the pre-existing wives of Spanish men moving to the Americas.

Beyond these years, female immigration increases (in part due to laws that banned married men from immigrating without their wives), but by that point the era of heroic deeds and battles were over in the Caribbean and New Spain, leaving South America as the destination for those seeking to recreate the deeds (and riches) of Columbus and Cortes. Cañizares-Esguerra (2006), commenting the distinction made between the crusading Spanish conquests and the more economic aims of the English in 1609 pamphlet endorsing emigration to Virginia notes:

The rather medieval knightly, chivalric view of colonization that privileged service to God and honor over profits and mercantile pursuits had already gone out of fashion in Iberian American, where merchants, miners, and planters were firmly in control and the Creole heirs of the conquistadors nostalgically wrote epics to recall the forgotten deeds of their ancestors.

Simply put, by the time women -- particularly independent women -- were present in New Spain, the age of the conquistador was over. But what were women doing at this time, if not going out conquering?

Non-Overlapping Gendered Magisteria

As noted before, the role of a the conquistador was one that was very much bound up into the Medieval chivalric tradition, and in particular the Spanish notion of the hidalgo. Growing out of the Reconquista, which saw the opening of new lands for Christian dominion through expulsion of Muslim rulers, the hidalgo was a fiercely romanticized figure in Spanish culture. As a member of a sort of petty nobility, the hidalgo (particulary in later times) might not be landed, but he was legally independent and entitled to bear arms.

Such men were too far outside the main wealth of the landed upper nobility in Iberia to live comfortably off hereditary incomes, but well off enough financially to make their way the Americas to join, or even outfit, expeditions for trade and conquest. As such they formed the a significant contingent of the early migrants to Spanish America. Cortes was a hidalgo, as was Bernal Diaz del Castillo. Indeed, Hassig (1994) notes that of those early Spaniards, even those who could not claim the background "pretended to hidalgo status."

William H. Prescott, whose History of the Conquest of Mexico was perhaps the first major and enduring English-language account of the Spanish actions in New Spain, writes of a Spain drenched in the chivalric traditions of Medieval Europe and outright ascribes the call to the Americas a stemming from these ideals. Writing of how word of the Americas was received back in Spain he says:

These reports added fresh fuel to imaginations already warmed by the study of those tales of chivalry which formed the favorite reading of the Spaniards at that period. Thus romance and reality acted on each other, and the soul of the Spaniard was exalted to that pitch of enthusiasm which enabled him to encounter the terrible trials that lay in the path of the discoverer. Indeed, the life of the cavalier of that day was romance put into action.

The role of the hidalgo, however, was ultimately a gendered one. A woman could not be a hidalgo because a hidalgo was a man. Period. Full stop. The role was inextricably bound up with the performative role of masculinity in Spanish society, which excluded women from the combat at the core of the knightly identity of the hidalgo. Women, particularly in New Spain, often found themselves managing the household or even vast estates, but they themselves could not legally hold title to such material wealth, given their status as legal minors in the Spanish judicial system. In this system, a woman, outside of extraordinary circumstances, would always be the dependent of a man.

We can compare and contrast this with the indigenous system of gender roles, particularly since the much more numerous indigenous women are far more visible in historical record. Just as the Spanish hidalgo was synonymous with maleness, so to was Aztec military life the province of men. If anything, the separate spheres of men and women were more explicit, with Nahua sources making a clear analogy between men dying in battle or sacrifice, with the stuggle and sometimes death of women in childbirth, with both the men and women giving their blood and lives to bring forth new life, and both being honored greatly in the afterlife.

The connection between maleness and warrior status is so ingrained that "acting womanly" was seen as a grave insult to the martial male. Even the most famous example of female combatants in the Aztec era, during the civil war between the sister cities of of Tenochtitlan and Tlatelolco, has their role less as warriors and more as shaming and alarming the men by interceding with their naked bodies and (in the account of Duran) spraying breast milk at the attacking Tenochca. Yet, in the Siege of Tenochtitlan, we find the women up on the rooftops, raining stones down upon the invading Spanish and their native allies.

So while women fighting in defense of their homes was not unknown in the Americas, both the Spanish and the Mesoamericans firmly saw them as alien to the warrior role. Native women, particularly in the early colonial period, enjoyed the much less deprecated roles of the indigenous culture, where they could be landholders, own significant property, and generally operate as legal equals to indigenous men. Kellogg (1995) notes, however, that as Spanish norms of women as "legal minors" took hold in the 16th and 17th centuries:

indigenous women, especially nonelite women, found themselves increasingly circumscribed in a more rigid and narrowly defined "woman's" domain, which was rooted symbolically in the family and household but which extended outside the home into forms of labor that usually took place under male supervision and control.

Women, in other words, were necessarily excluded from the combat roles which were at the base of the conquistador identity because they were women. To have a female conquistador was to have a transgression of gender roles overturning centuries of chivalric tradition, and though we see similar ideals about separate spheres for men and women in indigenous cultures, we also have accounts of women rising up to defend their homes with force when needed. The very limited number of Spanish women in the Americas, however, were not placed in such dire circumstances, and were often already a part of a male-dominated household. In addition, the Spanish legal mores of the time meant that even if a Spanish woman were to go out conquistadoring, she would need to overcome judicial norms which saw her as the dependent of her male relatives, if she hoped to hold on to her spoils.

American and African men, however, were not excluded from this military tradition.

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A Rainbow Coalition of Conquest

English language accounts of the Conquest of Mexico, following the tradition of Prescott, tend to begin with the arrival of Cortes on the Gulf Coast, and either end or quickly trail off following the surrender of Cuauhtemoc bringing an end to the Siege of Tenochtitlan and the Aztecs as an independent political entity. The problem with this narrative is that it tends to either ignore or give short shrift to the Aztecs as agile and evolving power in Mesoamerica with their own military history and tradition, the momentum of which was hardly slowed by now having transferred ultimate authority to a Spanish emperor an ocean away. Lockhart (1992) notes a basic pattern to how indigenous life adapted to the realities of Spanish rule, with the first generation basically existing in "stasis" with little to no changes to everyday life.

The continuation of business as usual extended to Nahua conquests of their neighbors. The Aztec TlatoaniMotecuhzoma Xocoyotl had been busy running annual campaigns down into Oaxaca and Guerrero to subjugate the Mixtec and Zapotec polities of the region. Chance (1991) makes it clear that these campaigns basically continued with a little more than hiccup as a result of the Spanish establishing dominion over the Nahuas of central Mexico. Only now the armies of Nahuas were ostensibly led by small numbers of Spaniards.

Likewise, the authors of Indian Conquistadors: Indigenous Allies in the Conquest of MesoAmerica (1997) show the innumerable ways in which the martial traditions of Mesoamerica were expressed through conquest of Guatemala, Honduras, Oaxaca, Gran Chichimeca, and elsewhere, with native allies not simply serving as subsidiaries and support, but as active participants in colonial ventures, which also helped to establish a Nahua presence in outside the core areas of Central Mexico. We see Tlaxcalans settling the northern parts of Mexico and being integral to the burgeoning silver industry, and we see indigenous nobility accepted into the role of hidalgos, being granted titles, coats of arms, and the characteristic privileges of being able to ride horses and carry swords. It is only due to the strong association of "Spanish-ness" with the notion of conquistadors that these native participants are excluded from the title.

Matthew Restall, whose work features in Indian Conquistadors, has also written on the role of Africans in the Conquest of the Americas, both in his Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest and in his (2000) article, "Black Conquistadors: Armed Africans in Early Spanish America," noting that in the latter work that “African were a ubiquitous and pivotal part of Spanish conquest campaigns in the Americas” and that “from the very onset, Africans were present both as voluntary expeditionaries and involuntary colonists.”

Probably the most well-known African conquistador is Juan Garrido, born in Africa and brought to the Americas enslaved, was part of the Cortes expedition and eventually became a free man who participated in numerous campaigns throughout the early stages of extending colonial Spanish Mexico. Similarly, Juan Valiente, who was similarly born in Africa and brought to the Americas as a slave, would earn his freedom through his martial efforts in Peru and go on to be a named a captain and encomendero.

Restall notes, however, that:

Just as Juan Garrido has been called Mexico’s only black conquistador, so has Juan Valiente been called “the lone Negro conqueror of Chile.” Yet the evidence for Mexico, Chile, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, and elsewhere shows these men were by no means alone.

Just as the native contributions to Spanish conquests often go unmentioned, with the thousands and sometimes tens of thousands of Mesoamerica soldiers who dwarfed the dozens to a few hundreds of Spanish among them rendered to little more than “invisible Indian,” so to does the retelling of the Spanish colonial effort suffer from a case of “anonymous Africans.” In some cases the numbers of African troops outnumbered the Europeans on expeditions. While these black conquistadors were often acting as auxiliaries, and many of them were slaves or servants, we also see men like Garrido, Valiente, and others who either took up arms as free men or else earned their freedom through their actions and continued to expanding their own fortunes. Again, as with the role of indigenous men, the only reason to exclude these black men from the ranks of the conquistadors comes down to a narrow, ethnocentric view of that title being reserved for Europeans from Iberia wearing neck ruffles and morions.

Among and betwixt the defined roles of European, American, and Africa, we also find the growing populations of mulatto and, especially, mestizo individuals who sought their fortunes with expeditions pushing the boundaries of colonial Spain, whether it be to Northern Mexico and beyond, or Peru and Colombia. While the Spanish would eventually become known for the fairly rigid casta system of racial hierarchy, this was much more a development of later centuries and the earlier period was much more, to mix my Romance languages, laissez faire in their approach to racial boundaries.

While women may not have been commonly present on the frontlines of the various colonial entradas and expeditions (though they certainly were present on many campaigns in the form of cooks, weavers, etcs.), and their inclusion as such can be seen as an anarchronism, the inclusion of American, African, and mixed-race men should not be surprising.

Actually, it’s about historical accuracy in video games

All that being said, I have no problem with the inclusion of fictional female conquistadors in a video game. I know it is fashionable to vociferously critique and fisk to death the minutiae of particularly video games, and wholeheartedly support the role of historical criticism of all sorts of popular media. I worry more about overly exclusive errors of fact than overly inclusive ones though, as such omissions tend to elide over all of the wonderful details of history in favor of a severely (and literally) white-washed Western canon which perpetuates noxious notions of history that serve to ill-inform the casual consumer of such media. A player of Expeditions: Conquistador being disappointed to learn there are not actually any historical accounts of women conquistadors is far less harmful, on a societal level, than a game that perpetuates the notion that the Conquest of the Americas was exclusively carried out by a small handful of white men.

This is not to give any game a pass. Just a brief glance at the description for Expeditions: Conquistador makes it clear I and many others knowledgeable in the history of Americas could probably spend hours happily grousing and perhaps even angrily railing about its inconsistencies, errors, and perpetuation of harmful tropes. Game designers, however, necessarily make choices and sometimes those choices are in favor of gameplay over historical accuracy. Prior to taking a break from Reddit, I had some wonderful correspondence with /u/downvotingcorvo and /u/Jonah_Marriner as they put a tremendous amount of effort into building a historically accurate mod for EUIV. Not every developer wants to delve into centuries old, non-English, primary sources however, but instead want to simply use the basic tropes of an ear to build gameplay around.

So I’m not bothered by the choice to give a nod to modern day ideals of inclusion and have female conquistadors; it’s a harmless anachronism. If we were to seriously critique the game on historical grounds we’d probably have to start with asking why the devs chose to make the player act as the Spanish, since invading armies of alien peoples bent of pillage, forced conversion, rape, and conquest seems to be an odd choice for a protagonist. More importantly, if we were to hold the devs to the fire for historical accuracy, we would need to have an actual role for women in the game. We would need to see a chance to play as someone like Malinche, the Nahua companion to Cortes who played an absolutely pivotal role in the conquest. Or we would have to see a chance to play as someone like Isabel Moctezuma, the daughter of the Aztec ruler who was given to Cortes as a wife and went on to be a wealthy matriarch of a prominent line of mestizos.

The sad reality is that such playable roles would probably be massive unpopular, or at least off-puttingly strange, to the intended audience for such a game centered on conquesting about as a Spaniard. Pulling a gender swap on said Spaniard may be an innocuous anachronism, but basically comes down to what the much maligned Anita Sarkeesian has termed the trope of the “Ms. Male Character.” Truly building a nuanced world allowing for roles which reflect the actual lived experiences, struggles, and achievements of women at time would, from the position of historical accuracy and artistic complexity, be the preferred route, but game devs must make choices, and the ruffle and morion clad trope of the heroic conquistador is a simple enough framework to hang a game on, I guess

#history #historia #conquistador #mesoamerica #mexico #askhistorians #reddit

[moniqat]

The Influence of gender roles in Disney

Gender roles are huge part of how we define ourselves and each other. It affects our everyday actions, more than we think. But where does it start? Are we born with the definition of male and female, or is it created as we grow up?Media influences greatly how gender is presented to us, not only through advertising, but through tv shows and films. Studies show that tweens and teenagers spend around 6-9 hours on screens each day. As a teen myself I know that a lot of this time is is spend watching tv shows and films. Children, of all ages, are very impressionable because we are figuring out how the world works, and our own relation to it. Watching films, helps create a subconscious understanding of the roles we are expected to play.

Have you ever discussed gender roles and the impact it has on us? Few people have, which makes it really interesting. Are they good? Are they bad? Or are they neither of the two?

Disney is a big part of the entertainment industry and is a good place to look for gender stereotypes. Disney shows us how gender roles are portrayed through history and in our society today. When Disney released their first film Snow White (1937), most women in Europe and America were able to vote and a lot happened with the women's rights. The view on women was changing, as the amount of women joining the workfield was increasing. But women were still mainly homemakers and caregivers, as Disney mirrors it in Snow White. 

This is one of the reasons why Disney has been highly discussed. It is not mirroring the hole truth, because female characters only are portrayed as passive homemakers, whose whole world revolve around the prince.

In 1998 “The Little Mermaid” was realised. The little mermaid was very different from the previous princesses because she was showing personal interest and seeked her own love, despite what her father wanted her to do. But her whole story is still about getting the prince. She sacrifices her fish tail, making her value depend on her looks. Even when her life is in danger, she like the other princesses, waits for the prince to fall in love with her.

Disney females characters are portrayed as passive, pretty and perfect. Disney males characters are portrayed as dominant, durable and drastic. But neither women nor men can be put within one label.

Wait men? Who was talking about the male characters?  Well why should it be less important to discuss the role models Disney target for boys?

When Prince Phillip from “Sleeping Beauty” rescues Aurora, he does not show any weakness or signs that he does not know exactly what to do, which is creating a perfect stereotype that men do not think twice about fighting and being dominant, and they are good at it.

When Walt Disney was alive he said that his films were only made to entertain, that this entertainment did not include norms or values of any kind. Fortunately, Disney has come far since then, by gaining awareness of the norms and values they convey, trying to use them conscious within the films. We see a development in the way they portray genders, as they created roles models that embody the 21st century young people, not only by creating more positive and achievable body images for both genders, but by beginning to show female characters fighting and male characters showing emotion. 

Today Disney’s influence reaches far beyond just films. They have clothes, games and toys, that reinforces the messages from the films that children incorporate into their play. These messages exist in all of their films, packed with glitter and glamour or an exciting journey. But they are still there, constantly teaching and reinforcing us how to look, and act around each other.

The book “Disney in Denmark” is an investigation and analysis of children's reactions towards disney. Professor Coyne, a researcher in gender and child development, agrees with the book, that Disney is a part of children developing and exploring their identities. Professor Coyne explains further, that the princess culture has a long term impact on women. We know that girls who strongly adhere to female stereotypes, feel like they can not do some things and do not like to get dirty or experiment with things, like we expect boys to do.

We need to become aware of the gender role messages we consciously and subconsciously learn and incorporate from all around us. The behavior norms begin when we are infants, and increases when we start watching tv shows and films like Disney. But as we get older, we can think about why we act and think the way we do. We can learn how to avoid gender stereotyping, to become more open to diversity instead of accepting the gender stereotypes of women being passive and men being dominant. Professor Coin (2016) states that this is what we tend to become, when gender roles are reinforced in their purest form. I think reinforcing gender in their purest form; as men being dominant and women being passive, is shaping gender inequality.

[queerasart-blog]

LGBT RIGHTS IN THE 60/70s (Part 1/3) | Issue 2

LGBT RIGHTS  by Émilie Parent and L.D

The common expression of “the Sixties” and “the Seventies” is widely used to refer to the times succeeding the reconstruction of Europe after the Second world war. They do not refer to a specific cultural or intellectual movement, but rather merely to chronological points, from 1960 to 1979. Nevertheless, the context of this time offers room for the apparition of a specific culture and counterculture, based on social changes and liberation of the voice of minorities, that have retrospectively been raised as emblematic of the period.

In 1960, the reconstruction of the damages of the war has ended and the economy has gone back from the predominance of war industries to more regular activities. The arms race and the huge increase in transports and technologies, however, has left the world with an important amount of infrastructures that can now be used for other purposes. This allows for a general increasing of living standards for the population and a renewal of cultural and social norms.

But this is not the only consequence of the war. In the United States, during the years following the Nuremberg trials, emphasis is put on upholding traditional values against the forces of change, as a reaction against the idea of civil disobedience, which has come out stronger of the revelations brought by the trials. The national paranoia raises after the second world war against communists, anarchists and soon extended to any community seen as “subversive”, such as LGBT people. This movement is known as the Lavender Scare, in reference to the Second Red Scare targeting communists. Police and FBI keep lists of known homosexuals and their relatives, friends, as well as the places they meet up. This leads to the closing of a large number of gay bars, arrestations, and public exposure of people in newspapers, further leading to employment and housing discrimination. Meanwhile, in Europe, fascist governments had heavily repressed homosexuality, and the laws they put in place were not always repealed after 1945 - the french law against homosexuality, written in 1942, stayed in place, and homosexuals were often kept in concentration camps even after the liberation of Jews. In the 50s and the 60s, the opposition between the East and the West blocks creates a climate of unnatural tensions between opposed political stances, and social questions often become symbolic banners to raise whenever one wants to make a point.

AMERICA

The position in the Sixties slowly changes compared to the previous decade. The Vietnam war, started in 1954, comes with a rise of protesting movements. In the United States, the Beat Generation is the first cultural movement showing of the emergence of a counter culture rooted in anti capitalism, rejecting materialism in favour of spiritual quest (through the use of psychedelic drugs), personal exploration and sexual liberation. The “Beatniks” are poets and some of them write about homosexual experiences. Although this movement is very male-centered, because girl rebellion is faced with violent backlash, it brings homosexuality to the table for the first time in a positive light.

A few gay activist groups have started to appear in the 1950s. The Mattachine Society is one of them, heavily linked to the Communist Party and often focusing on the actions of police against gay people, which shows again how anticapitalist politics and lgbt activism go hand in hand. Five years later, in 1955, the group of the Daughters of Bilitis is formed, as an alternative to lesbian bars who were harassed more and more often by the police. This social group is asking for a better education about LGBT issues, as well as civil and political rights for LGBT people.

These are the two axes that start developing in the 60s. More and more groups appear, such as the East Coast Homophile Organization (ECHO) in 1963, and the National Transsexual’s Counseling Unit in 1965, the world’s first transgender organization; and these organizations reclaim and obtain civil rights, such as the decriminalization of homosexual acts between consenting adults (1962 in Illinois, 1969 in Canada). The same year, Franck Kameny, teacher in the Astronomy Department of Georgetown University, is fired because of his perceived sexual orientation and enters a judicial procedure against the US government. He creates the Washington, D.C. branch of the Mattachine Society and sides with the Daughters of Bilitis in a number of protests and picket lines in front of the White House, the Pentagon, the United Nations, and the United States Civil Service Commission. In 1966, endocrinologist and sexologist Harry Benjamin publishes The Transsexual Phenomenon; a Scientific Report on Transsexualism and Sex Conversion in the Human Male and Female, opening the door to the idea of sexual transition and advocating for a humane treatment of transsexual people. This is also the year of the founding of the National Transsexual Counseling Unit in San Francisco, which is the world’s first transgender organization.

picket lines in front of the White House, 1965. Kay Tobin Lahusen - New York Public Library Manuscripts and Archives Division

Meanwhile, the cultural background evolves too. In 1961, the Motion Picture Code allows movies to talk about homosexuality and the same year, the first documentary on homosexuality, The Rejected, airs on TV. In 1962, James Baldwin writes Another Country, a novel set in Greenwich Village and deals with bisexuality of both men and women, interracial couples, extramarital affairs, and it becomes a best-seller.

But these attempts stay mild, essentially coming from people of higher social background, and focus mostly on appeasing the tensions by painting the lgbt community as respectable and acceptable for the rest of the population. They tend to ignore gender nonconforming people and transsexual people, who risk appearing too threatening for the status-quo. Vanguard, an organization founded in 1965, insisted on “peaceful co-existence”.

This changes when the decade culminates in the events of Stonewall, on June 29th, 1969. What was a police raid into a gay bar turns into a rebellion from the clients, led by trans women of colour, and leads the way towards a more inclusive and more radical activism. Directly resulting from the riots, the Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Activists Alliance are formed, the first being more radical and the second more reformist. These two groups help spreading LGBT activism and serve as an anchor for the whole LGBT community. Newspapers become a new way to share ideas, events and LGBT culture - Gay, Come Out!, and Gay Power, gathered between 20,000 and 25,000 readers. People are then encouraged to come out en masse, by the revolutionary article of reporter Leo Laurence, “HOMO REVOLT: DON’T HIDE IT” published in the leftist magazine Berkeley Barb. The Red Butterfly published Carl Wittman’s Gay Manifesto in 1970, where the LGBT activist encourages all gay people to find refuge in San Francisco. Also In 1970, the commemoration of the Stonewall riots, organized by bisexual activist Brenda Howard, becomes the first Gay Pride, with marches happening in New-York, Los Angeles and Chicago. Brenda Howard is then called the “Mother of Pride”. Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson, who were both leaders to the riots, found the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries. 

Berkeley Barb,1969, Volume 8, Issue 13(189)

And things change slowly from there. In 1972 the movie That Certain Summer is the first gay-themed movie to win an Emmy and in 1973, The Rocky Horror Picture Show meets a huge success, becoming a pop-culture phenomenon for decades to come. 1972 is also the year of the first gay synagogue and of the first gay person to be ordained by a major Christian denomination. Politics also move, even more than culture. Canada is faster at decriminalizing homosexual acts between consenting adults - in 1969. In the United States, it’s in 1973 that homosexuality is removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders by the American Psychiatric Association, under the combined pressure of activism, social changes and empirical evidence. 

One year prior to that was founded the Lesbian Feminist Liberation, by Jean O’Leary, as the first lesbian activist group to counterbalance the domination of gay men in the activist movements and the exclusion of lesbians from most feminist groups, and this group is the first one to organize a meeting of gay activists in the White House, in 1977. The same year, Harvey Milk becomes the first openly gay person to be elected in public office, in San Francisco. In 1978, he encourages the activist Gilbert Baker to create a symbol for the LGBT Community. Since the US flag has become a symbol for people to gather around during hard times, Baker creates the rainbow flag, made of eight lines stacked together representing people stitched together as one community. The colours also have each a meaning: pink for sexuality, red for life, orange for healing, yellow for sunlight, green for nature, turquoise for magic, indigo for serenity, violet for spirit - pink and turquoise have later been removed for technical reasons (pink couldn’t be properly rendered) and balance reasons (a pair numer seemed better). The flag becomes extremely popular after the murder of Harvey Milk in November 1978. As the decade closes, the first case of AIDS appears in the US, yet not registered as such. 

(Part 1/3)

#lgbt history #american gay rights #america #gay rights #history #lgbt art #lgbt zine #past articles #queer as art #part 1 of 3