Flashback: Summer of 86, metal moment

Summer 1986: Screaming in Digital

Butterflies

The whole album is great, but here's the song of the day.

Nerd yoga

You might be a nerd if your Exalted Warrior pose reminds you og the 80s He-Man cartoon and you have the urge to shout "I have the POWER!"

Nostalgia for the 80s

One of the things that tickles me and confuses me in equal measure is the current fascination with, and romanticizing of, the 1980s. From Stretch Armstrong to the Thunder Cats, I can understand the strange relationship that 1980s popular culture might engender. But to take it as far as to bearing actual nostalgia for the time of double-digit interest rates, state-sponsored racism and egregious sexism, the hegemonic sway of the religious right (who were neither) and conspicuous consumption seems delusional. This was the height of the arms race, and, until recently, the closest we had gotten to the destruction of the planet by nuclear war, according to the Minutes Til Midnight clock by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.

Perhaps I 'm just very GenX here, but I share with my age group a bit of PTSD for being old enough to have to live by the rules and policies enacted by rulers I was too young to vote against. Please remember that Reagan was the head of the Hollywood House of Un-American Activities and delivered names gleefully to Congress during the Red Scare, laying waste to his professional competition in the process. And let's not gloss over the fact that George Bush, his running mate and later 41st president of the united states, was the head of the CIA.

1984 indeed.

What do the 1980s mean to you? What informs and shapes these impressions you have of the era?

Calling Kevin Bacon

A small town in Oklahoma made the news when a Valentine's Day dance had to be cancelled because it was too close to a church. An old ordnance prohibits dancing within 500 feet of a church, though no one really took it seriously as the planning went on.

And there was a time for this law, but not anymore. See, this is our time to dance. It is our way of celebrating life.

This is clearly a case for Kevin Bacon, who, after teaching a town to dance, went on to serve in the Marines' Legal corps. He's super talented like that.

Green Monkeys, All

“Men’s acceptance of the cultural association of manhood with control makes them complicit in its consequences, including the use of violence. Acceptance need not be conscious or intentional. Individual men need not be violent themselves. Mere silence -- the voice of complicity -- is enough to accomplish the effect and to connect them to the violence that other men do.”

This needs to be said over and over and over again. Rephrase it, repeat it, reprint it, restate it until we all know it in our cells. Because the patriarchy has only one tool, only one punishment for failure: Men won’t like you if you don’t conform. Yep, that’s it. People won’t like you, specifically middle class white men, the standard to whom all beings are held, the measure by which we are all found to fall short. We are willing to beat each other into submission, to kill each other, to cage each other, to hurt each other, to use tools ranging from violence to shame, to avoid being ostracized.

The code begins in the school yard if we didn’t get the message at home: point and laugh at anything different; set the new kid apart and be actively cruel; define your inclusion to the group by standing together against the outsider; show your position of strength by how forcefully you can act in to perpetuate the idea of the norm.

Back in the Seventies, before there were rules governing such experimentation, a bunch of social scientists studying group inclusion and identity behavior had a collective of monkeys in an observation area. One day they decided to take a middling member of the community and dye his fur green, reintroduce him to the collective, and see what sorts of behavior was used to assimilate or address this surface change. The researchers expected actual behaviors by the collective, elements that they could study and from which they could draw conclusions and possibly write papers for the coming decades about skin color and its effect on the collective subconscious.

They certainly were not expecting what they got: The whole group came together as one body to shred the green monkey. Nothing was left of it other than small bits of fur. It was not merely killed; it was annihilated, evaporated, removed, violently and with one explosive, collective act.

In their confusion, these researchers concluded that there was nothing of value to be learned from the experiment.

Instead of dismissing the unexpected results, we should see what is really before us, presented in undeniable context and and written in blood: xenophobia is a survival issue. Love and belonging are the real currency of the group, and no health and wellness program, from gym memberships to soup kitchens, can hope to be effective if these elements are met as well.

---

Allan Johnson, “Fatal Distraction: Manhood, Guns, and Violence,” in Okun, Rob, ed. Voice Male, (Northampton: Interlink Books), 2014, p.377, emphasis added.

Get Real

Links on Real Man:

http://www.askmen.com/top_10/dating/traits-of-a-real-man.html

8 items listing the desirable traits of of what makes a man real, a “man’s man.”

There have been many changes in the roles of the sexes over the past 60 years. As a result, the expectation of men and the standard we are held to has morphed a little. But one thing is for sure: There are certain traits that define masculinity that most men and women would still agree upon.
This isn't a question of backwards thinking or outdated sensibilities. This is the type of stuff that points to the fundamental characteristics that most men still hold dear. Strength, reliability and action are all still core parts of what makes a man's man. This doesn't mean that you're failing if you aren't achieving some of these aspects, but rather, they're goals to keep in mind as you forge through your quest to become better.
Any way you slice it, men are still going to compete in all aspects of life -- and you need to be ready for what gets thrown your way.  [introduction page, emphasis added.]

I find it interesting that this list is in the dating section (see the directory in the link address). The whole site kind of blew me away, and I am pretty certain it will end up generating a lot of conversation in the class and at home.

I really like that the traits and explanations seem to highlight being a responsible adult. There has been a lot of talk in my personal world about how so many quasi-adults seem to be extending adolescence into their thirties, and mourning the pressures of real life, real family issues or career politics to grow up.

When it comes to women, the message is to be real as opposed to an imposter -- when I was younger this was part and parcel of the women’s movement, tied up with no-fault divorce and another run at the Equal Rights Amendment. Anyone remember that Enjoli perfume ad from the 80s? The lyrics went “I can bring home the bacon/ Fry it up in a pan / and never let you forget you’re a man/” This was an impossible image and standard, but one many of us internalized at the time as what it meant to be “real.” Lots of Hollywood stuff intervened in the 80s, a tragic time in the US culture IMHO, and women’s roles experienced a backlash from the sexual revolution of the late 60s and 70s. 

Latch key kids and juvenile delinquency were buzz words of the day, their existence blamed on broken homes (never on the failure of a post war economy), and the mother was more often than not seen as the one who was supposed to repair all wrongs, to set her children on the path to healing, without being That Bitch Who Wants Child Support.

So when I found this poem on what makes a woman a real woman, I really loved it. But then, I would. Finding meaning for ourselves is harder than ever. I am grateful that the hippies tore down so many of the structures of society, but I also swim in unchartered waters as a result. Woman have had a particularly rough time of it, breaking free of the ties that bind and define us as members of society while also trying to help glue our homes together under a cripplingly broken financial system that no longer provides for even the basics. Our sense of self, of family, of community have all suffered blows. So when Eastman writes that real women get to decide what makes them real, not anyone else, I cheered a bit inside. This is hard, because it requires unflinching introspection and self-knowledge, something that many of us simply don’t have the capacity for, even if we are so inclined. It can lead to more self-doubt and self-loathing than should seem possible, and once completed, it can leave us feeling deeply alone in the world, for all that we embrace our unique definition of ourselves and take pride in the work we did to get there. Radical honesty, with ourselves and others, only works in a relationship (friends, family, community -- it doesn’t have to be huge, but it does have to be present) of radical acceptance (not the same as permission or blessing, but stone cold acceptance). To have acceptance without honesty is to sport delusion; to have honesty without acceptance is just mean.

This speaks to the critical climate women are creating for other women, and I applaud Eastman and others who are debunking this method of relating to ourselves and to each other. Huzzah.