misandry/misogyny

Ever since I learned the word for hatred of men (misandry), I've wanted to know when it was entered into the English lexicon, and how it compared, historically, to misogyny. Today, thanks to dictionary.com, I found the answer:

Misogyny, the word for hatred of women, was entered into the lexicon sometime around 1650-1660.

Misandry, the word for hatred of men, was entered into the lexicon ~1945-1950. 300 years later, and (I think significantly) the same time the Rosies of WWII were displaced by men returning from the war.

What does this mean? Does it mean, as Carl Sagan and Ann Druyun suggest in Contact that the "male lexographers" couldn't imagine a use for the word, or does it mean that hatred of men is historically more likely to be ignored? There are at least a dozen other explanations I can think of off the top of my head, but first I'd like to know what you think. What accounts for the 300 year gap?

What Kids Can Teach Us

Yesterday, I came across this article via metafilter, and it is easily one of the most interesting pieces I've read in a very long time. In it, two teachers describe how their elementary school-aged after school kids went from playing with legos to deconstructing capitalism over the course of a school year.

Certainly, the ethics of teaching social justice in an elementary school classroom are up for debate, but I'd rather not focus on that here. Instead, what I found striking was the amount that these 8-year-olds were already a product of their environment. I think elementary school interactions socialize kids in broader ways than merely helping them form interpersonal relationships. These kids were clearly savvy to their societal environment. By the age of 8, many were already products of capitalism, completely accultured to the socioeconomic system in which they were growing up. Moreover, as I read further into the article, I realized that they were speaking in terms that were already defined by that system. For American schoolchildren, inequality is a natural way of life.

Back to the ethics of teaching social justice. In college I took a class on the Cold War in which we read a number of texts relating to propaganda. One of the texts discussed how social values are promulgated in small children. One of the most striking examples was how math texts are used to surreptitiously convey values to children. Look at an American high school or grade school math textbook. Look at the word problems. They almost always talk about buying things. Even when people buy them together, they rarely split the cost evenly. This isn't the case everywhere, and it certainly wasn't the case in Soviet Russia, where most math texts involved sharing or producing. So regardless of what teachers do in the classroom, children are constantly being instilled with social values in the classroom.

The "din" of destruction

I just finished reading this article from the NY Times about an AP report (and the clamor that followed it) claiming that six Sunni worshipers were doused in kerosene and lit on fire by a group of Shiite attackers in Iraq.

I have to admit that for all my zealous pacifism, I've had trouble following many of the news details coming out of Iraq in the past few months. This quote from the article might explain why:

“And finally, as horrible as the alleged events in Hurriyah were, caches of dumped dead bodies are turning up in neighborhoods almost weekly, car bombs rip through markets and waiting lines and the death toll for American soldiers is approaching 3,000. No one is disputing those accounts.

But then, that may be partly the point. It is important to find out if this really happened in order to separate the hyperbole from the merely horrible in Iraq, so that the horrible will still have meaning. Otherwise it will all become din.

Part of the general political apathy in our generation stems, I think, from over-saturation. I used to think that referred only to the availability (or inevitability) of news information and sources, but I think that even within single publications the amount of coverage a single issue gets is enormous, and from day-to-day, very little changes.

I think this is why I've taken to long-form news magazines like New Yorker. They save the intermediary steps by collecting and analyzing the "facts" over an extended period of time (at least a week, often more), and as a result the articles identify problems, potential solutions, themes, debates, and "sides" of the issue or events at hand accordingly. But are they better?

One of the problems with long-form journalism, or any reporting that emphasizes the analytical over the immediate "factual" is that important elements that deserve attention are often dropped if they don't support the article's overall point. About two months ago, the New Yorker printed an article on the debate over string theory in contemporary physics. For weeks to follow, letters were printed in defense of string theory and its proponents, and identifying related-but-overlooked forms of physics sectarianism.

Another potential problem is, of course, bias. All journalism has bias, but in long-form journalism it's basically a necessity. Generally, I find long-form bias less disconcerting than short-form because it's marketed as "news analysis" and not just plain "news," so readers are at least informed that there's more to a New Yorker article than "the facts." There's no disguise. It becomes a problem for me, however, when I realize that I get all of some types of my news from left-wing long-form publications. The New Yorker has a "financial page" in most issues, and it's the only place I get any kind of financial news that isn't directly related to media/culture. But sometimes, as a leftist reading a notably leftist long-form publication, I start to wonder if I'm doing myself a disservice. It's not that I don't want to hear other views, it's just that I happened to read the financial page of the New Yorker once (with no prior interest in real-world economics) and I got hooked on its bite-sized-yet-long-form style.

To return to the issue of Iraq: the war itself is in a dangerous and precarious position, politically. At this point, the Iraq more seems more a symbol than a real-life event and it's used that way by all sides. John Kerry's idiotic joke seems an example of this--Kerry seemed to forget long enough to open his mouth that soldiers are people. The political right can be equally blind, by (among other things) insisting that it is the only reason many republican congressmen and women were voted out of office in the midterms.

The plethora of angry attacks and defenses of the AP report tells me the din is already there. It's not an issue of separating truth from fiction so much as separating ideology from reality. Will any more evidence to support or to refute the kerosene incident really affect how people think about it? One side will win. My guess is the other side will just ignore the after-effects.