Heart of Maleness: An Exploration - Softcover

Liogier, Raphaël

 
9781635429930: Heart of Maleness: An Exploration
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1635429935 ISBN 13: 9781635429930
Verlag: Other Press, 2020

Inhaltsangabe

In this timely, self-reflective essay, a groundbreaking sociologist and philosopher examines the underlying causes of gender inequality and how we can fight against it.

Following the shocking, infuriating accounts shared as part of the #MeToo movement, Raphaël Liogier felt compelled to apply his academic expertise to shed light on the roots of gender inequality and its many manifestations, including catcalling, workplace harassment, and rape, as well as the glass ceiling and the gender pay gap. In the brazenness of Donald Trump, who brags about groping women, in the hypocrisy of outspoken progressives whose private behavior belies their so-called feminist ideals, and even occasionally in the good intentions of men such as Liogier who strive to be allies, we can see the influence of a deep-seated fantasy of male dominance.

With candor and clarity, Liogier demonstrates that the archetypal Prince Charming and a monstrous predator such as Harvey Weinstein are two sides of the same coin—products of a worldview that not only places a man's desires above a woman's, but also doubts whether women are fundamentally capable of knowing what they want. Recent years have witnessed significant progress toward gender equality, from the ousting of prominent men accused of sexual misconduct to the unprecedented popularity of the 2019 Women's World Cup. Heart of Maleness maps out the crucial work still to be done, first and foremost addressing the core male fantasy about women's bodies and minds.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Raphaël Liogier is a philosopher and sociologist. He is a professor at Sciences Po Aix-en-Provence and teaches at the Collège international de philosophie in Paris. He currently lives in New York and is a visiting scholar at Columbia University’s Council for European Studies. His major works include Le Mythe de l’islamisation, La guerre des civilisations n’aura pas lieu, and Sans emploi.

Antony Shugaar is a writer and translator. His recent translations include Kill the Father and Kill the Angel by Sandrone Dazieri, The Catholic School by Edoardo Albinati, Everything Is Broken Up and Dances by Edoardo Nesi and Guido Maria Brera, and Notes on a Shipwreck by Davide Enia.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

When I sat down to write this book, aghast at the stories countless women were posting with the hashtag #MeToo, I had a moment of doubt. Because I am a heterosexual, white, affluent, Western man, a citizen of the European Union, in short, supposedly immune to discrimination, I was afraid that anything I might say would lack legitimacy. At least, that is, if I was trying to produce anything more than distant musings, arm’s-length observations; at least, if I hoped to achieve any sort of full personal engagement with this issue. In time, though, my doubts subsided: there was no need for me to talk about women at all—their singular nature, their essence. In any case, I wouldn’t have known how. What I needed to conjure up, instead, was the world that we all share, a world in which a stunning inequality stubbornly persists, even now, an imbalance subtly fed by our common perceptions and our everyday behavior. In that case, it was enough to be human, really, to be able to claim legitimacy. To think otherwise, to believe that some dark veil could forever divide feminine from masculine—to believe in a mysterious and unbridgeable difference—would have betrayed the very meaning of what I was sitting down to write.
As I ventured deeper into the accounts of sexual harassment and even rape that women had been providing since October 2017, I felt a surge of disgust. The disgust gradually turned into dismay. These men are revolting, no doubt about it. Often, pathetic. Many are shameless pigs. Above all, though, they’re men just like me. And it is the very fact that they are men that makes them pigs. Even if I was unwilling to accept it then and there, a part of my identity as a man had just been thrown into my face. It would be pure hypocrisy to deny it. Even if I had no distinct acts of harassment on my conscience, I could see, emerging vaguely in the background of these stark depictions of grim tableaux, the ways in which I myself had long been conditioned to view and desire women. I make no claim to any new gender theory, much less do I intend to lecture about feminism. But really, if I stop to think about it, I’m speaking mainly to men. For that matter, I’m basically writing about them, too. I’m addressing them as a man, and I’m writing about my own problem. Because I’m convinced that, above and beyond all the media hype, women today have clearer ideas about themselves than “we” do. At least when it comes to what they do want and what they don’t. In contrast, behind an increasingly fragile façade, my fellow men are having a hard time accepting the collapse of their empire of virility, a decline and fall that is unmistakably heralded by the worldwide impetus and power of #MeToo. They are struggling, I am struggling, we are struggling to redefine our ambitions as men, our fantasies as men, our behavior as men, our desires as men. In short, our place in the world. Our relations with women. Our identity. Even if most of us know perfectly well that we have no choice but to change. The stunning arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn at New York’s JFK airport on May 14, 2011, as he was about to board a flight to Europe, did not bring with it any larger debate about the Situation of Women. And yet the whole business resulted in a worldwide media storm. The case involved a powerful man accused of sexual assault on a woman who was dependent on him—much like what happened in the Weinstein case, six years later. He, the accused man, was the managing director of the International Monetary Fund at the time and a sure bet for future president of the French Republic. She, the alleged victim, was a young Guinean maid working at the Manhattan hotel where he was staying. It emerged in the aftermath of his arrest that the man was a perpetually randy sexual predator. He was forced out of his executive perch at the IMF and was effectively ruled out as a potential presidential candidate back in France. But he dragged down no other men in his calamitous fall. There was no domino effect. There were certainly other women, their claims suddenly cast in a far more credible light, who brought their own descriptions of the appalling behavior to which he’d subjected them. Our eyes were suddenly opened to DSK as a sexual glutton, a libertine pig, a diseased lothario. He was depicted as unhinged. In a word, an abnormal individual.
The  producer and movie tycoon Harvey Weinstein was also spectacularly toppled from his pedestal—reviled by Hollywood en masse—in the wake of a strongly accusatory article in the October 5, 2017, issue of the New York Times. His fall, however, resulted in an explosive chain reaction. Because here, with repercussions that went well beyond the individual actions of an isolated predator—however monstrous—we were suddenly presented with the larger system we live in, revealed in the harsh light of day. The fundamentally unfair rules of our modern civilization were now illuminated by the pitiless light cast by the personal accounts offered by millions of women. Why this sudden tsunami? Why this surge of scandals in every walk of life, with resignations of cabinet ministers and members of parliament, expulsions of college professors, and firings of business executives across the face of the globe? Unquestionably kairos played its part—sheer chance, contingent circumstance, simple opportunity. The election to the White House of an aging playboy oozing virility to a degree that verged on the burlesque, an impulsive and proven harasser, also surely played a part. We should remember that, in the fall of 2016, in the thick of the American presidential campaign, it was hard to give serious credence to this buffoonish uber-male parading through the mass media like the circus come to town. He appeared to the eyes of the world a little bit like one of the last living exemplars of a species on the verge of extinction. And yet: Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. There was no denying it: in brutal defiance of the belief system of the progressive elites, the archaic world of the alpha male—dominant to the point   of caricature—with his meek and picture-perfect “trophy wife” at his side (these are Trump’s own words), still existed and was, in fact, in a state of rude good health.
The seismic fault, at the very heart of society, between the old world of glorious virility, on the one hand, and—on the other—the ideological maturity reinforced by the economic autonomy women had attained was becoming increasingly and unmistakably hard to ignore. And therefore, all the more intolerable.
Beginning in the middle of the twentieth century, in fact, a growing number of women had challenged the limitations intrinsic to their status as second-class citizens, managing to climb to positions that made them equal to men, if not actually to supplant them. First in the realms of school and higher education, and then, in the course of time and in the face of resistance that endures to the present day, in the professional and political worlds. These women did nothing more than take modernity at face value. Still, there has been a growing gap between women’s aspirations to acquire the means of earning a living in accordance with the modern principles of equality, on the one hand, and the persistent, die-hard resistance, and even resurgence of male behaviors which deny them that equality in everyday life. The culture of patriarchy in its most abject manifestations, radiating an aura of bad faith, has become all the more intolerable as an ever deeper moat has been dug to thwart women’s real-world ambitions. Lest we forget, the French Revolution did one big thing: it enshrined in concrete terms the...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Other Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2020
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1635429935
ISBN 13 
9781635429930
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
112
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar