Summary and Response to: Chapter 13; Militarism and Violence: Who Benefits – By Barbara Chasin
Many institutions today portray the military as defenders of freedom and brings of democracy. Although what would the average person say if you asked them to define such words. I have a feeling that definitions would not match up, for the most part, with the actions our military undertakes on it’s home territory and else where. The military is only talked about as a conquering force but never is actual militarism talked about. The ‘justified’ military actions that take place everyday outside of the war zone consist of three types of violence; organizational, structural, and interpersonal.
Organizational violence consists of plans and production of systems, such as weapons manufacturing, under military action. A large part of this system is the cost benefit to America through business interests. With such a violent and capitalist based operation it is hard to create a egalitarian society where everyone can fit. In the name of these business dealings the United States government has done some horrific things. We preach democracy and yet do not allow it to occur.
For these takeover to occur and the military to continue militarism as a system there has to be monetary substance to the act and before the act. In 1980 the United States which held about 5% of the worlds population spend 24% of the total military spending in the world. Since then the number has only risen. In 2001 the military received 396.6 billion dollars to spend not including the more secretive funding from the CIA’s budget of 28 billion dollars a year. “In one year the United States spends on the military more than 17,000 dollars per hour, for every hour, since Jesus Christ was born.”
Once a war is over the defense of the area is needed, or at least stated as needed. This is done by strong ‘protections’ for the benefits of the people including random searches of private property without warrants, building up of military equipment, and testing human subjects with radiation and chemicals to ensure readiness of available treatments and resources. In these cases you have to ask who benefits and where the lines are drawn. When are my civil liberties more important then the fact that now that you’ve exposed a population to high levels of radiation you know what kinds of cancers are most likely? And who are these people being tested on? Not the rich or the affluent but the poor and the least likely to complain or be heard in a crowd. Security is important but the security of a few should not be burdened on the backs of the many.
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Summary and Response to: What is Masculinity? Chapter 1 of Masculinities and Culture – by John Beynon
This chapter by itself could have been an entire book. The question of what masculinity is starts with the realization that there is no one definition but rather a set of rules and guidelines. Masculinity is in fact the way males interact with each other and the environment. Mr. Beynon tried to make it so everyone could understand this complicated social construction but in doing so he almost trivialized the first chapter of his book. There was a very black and white understanding of some topics leaving out proportions of the community such as Transexual/Transgendered individuals and the influence of race, ethnicity and sexual expression in the masculine world. He does do a very good job explain the lack of biological proof that masculinity is inherent and gives many authors/scientists opinions on the matter but it is all in a every ethnocentric backlighting.
I was very interested in the idea of the nostalgic loss of the ‘young manhood’. I’ve never considered young manhood to be any different in orientation, even though the expectations have change, then male masculinity. The ever-changing ideology and glorification of the true man was, I assume, been spread across the globe ever since the invention of the patriarchal ladder and the ‘breadwinner’ strategy to living and supporting the local economic structures. But young manhood’s history could very possibly be even more confusing and chimerical. As one grows up there are more susceptible to social changes and influences in my mind. So with each new generation of ‘males’ a new definition of manhood and masculinity would have been evolved tangential but not separate from the definitions of their fathers; a form of hybridized masculinity. An ever changing straitjacket keeping the populous from feeling they have no control by allowing slight altercations but in the end it still tries to keep everyone strait.
Now as masculinity changes so does what it means to be feminine for our social structure has set them as dichotomies. When women step more and more into what has been known as the traditional masculine light men have had to adjust as well. Some adjustments have been towards a nullification of gendered stereotypes and others have been towards super-masculinity. These changes are effecting the ever changing straitjacket of youth today for the messages of appropriate behavior are slowly getting altered in two very different directions.
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