Atlantic Sentinel

Tag: Gender

  • How to Lose Friends and Influence People

    de Young Museum San Francisco California
    Visitors of de Young museum in San Francisco, California, October 16, 2005 (Thomas Hawk)

    Social justice warriors can be their own worst enemies.

    For the first time, an openly gay man is running for president in America — but queer activists like Greta LaFleur and Dale Peck (whose article was pulled from The New Republic for its obscenity) are still unhappy. Pete Buttigieg is white, married and middle-class, and therefore somehow not gay enough.

    The current United States Congress is the most diverse ever, but for Massachusetts congresswoman Ayanna Pressley (one of the Democratic lawmakers President Donald Trump shamefully told to “go back” to their own countries, no matter that she was born in Ohio), this isn’t enough:

    We don’t need any more brown faces that don’t want to be a brown voice. We don’t need black faces that don’t want to be a black voice. We don’t need Muslims that don’t want to be a Muslim voice. We don’t need queers that don’t want to be a queer voice.

    If you thought the point of equality and liberation was that gender, sexual orientation and skin color would one day no longer matter, well, you’re just blind to your own oppression or an Uncle Tom for the patriarchy, heteronormativity, white supremacy — pick your poison. (more…)

  • EU Sets Red Lines for Brexit, Puigdemont to Lead Government-in-Waiting

    The European Commission has set out its red lines for Brexit in a draft agreement:

    • Northern Ireland: Would remain in the EU customs union, creating the need for an economic border in the Irish Sea.
    • Free movement: Continued free movement of EU nationals during the post-Brexit transition period.
    • Trade deals: Also during the transition, Britain would not be allowed to initiate or sign trade deals that are prejudicial to EU interests.

    None of these red lines are acceptable to hardline Brexiteers and the Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland, whose votes Theresa May needs for her majority in Westminster. (more…)

  • Government Should Stop Recording Gender Altogether

    de Young Museum San Francisco California
    Visitors of de Young museum in San Francisco, California, October 16, 2005 (Thomas Hawk)

    Robin Dembroff has an elegant solution to the “gender war”: stop government recording gender altogether.

    “Conservatives insist that the state should record what genitals I have,” Dembroff writes. “Liberals insist the state should instead record my self-identity.” Both assume that the state should be concerned with gender at all.

    In so doing, each side — whether tacitly or intentionally — endorses the use of legal gender to reinforce its own preferred gender ideology.

    (more…)

  • Two Violent Men, Two Symptoms of the Same Sickness

    America woke up this weekend to the news of the deadliest civilian mass shooting in the nation’s history. The senseless tragedy will undoubtedly evoke anger, sadness and helplessness.

    In the meantime, many will forget to think and talk about Stanford swimmer Brock Turner’s crime and his “summer vacation” jail sentence: three months for the vile sexual assault of an unconscious woman.

    As a sociologist, I was struck not by the abrupt shift to a new moral crisis, but by the continuity. Sociologists look for the bigger picture and in my mind, Mateen’s crime didn’t displace Turner’s. Yet the media simply replaced one outrage with another, moving our attention away from Stanford and toward Orlando, as if these two crimes were unrelated. They’re not. (more…)

  • The Geopolitics of Women

    Mired though she is in e-mail scandal and all the trouble that comes with her last name, Hillary Clinton stands a good shot at becoming the next president of the United States. The nuclear football representing the ultimate glass ceiling, America is nevertheless rather behind many other advanced countries when it comes to women rulers. Some of Europe’s most important rulers have been queens and empresses; think Elizabeth I, Catherine the Great, Isabella of Castile, among more modern examples.

    And yet the relationship between women and geopolitics is rarely delved into, despite women making up roughly half of humanity throughout recorded history. Here now is the tale of geopolitics, women and how both change the other. (more…)