Joe Rogan’s comments reveal a values disconnect
Joe Rogan asserted,
“You can never be woke enough. That’s the problem. It keeps going. It keeps going further and further and further down the line and if you get to the point where you capitulate, where you agree to all these demands, it’ll eventually get to ‘straight white men are not allowed to talk’…because it’s your privilege to express yourself when other people of color have been silenced throughout history. It’ll be, you’re not allowed to go outside because so many people were imprisoned for so many years…. I’m not joking. It really will get there, it’s that crazy.”
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Pushing past our privilege
I once was a deeply religious person. I was a devout member of the Mormon (or Latter-day Saint) faith tradition, and I spent a lot of time reading the Bible and other books of scripture unique to Mormonism. I developed a deep love for the Jesus Christ of the gospels and the Book of Mormon. One story that is a favorite of mine is found in Mark:25–34 in which a woman who had a disease that no one could cure, reaches out in faith to touch Jesus’ clothes as he is hurrying by in a large crowd, and she is…
Experiencing all there is to offer
Growing up in conservative Utah, I didn’t have to be explicitly taught what was and wasn’t inside of the male range of acceptable behaviors. It was clear to me that I was to shun anything that felt soft and feminine in favor of what was hard and masculine. I ran from activities that women seemed to enjoy, and I avoided items that could be labeled as womanly. When I eventually did find feminism and began to branch out again and become more in touch with what I like and want for myself, I realized that I had been missing out…
Sexual Predators?
Given that I have a blog and podcast titled Feminist Masculinity, you might guess that I watch a fair number of videos regarding feminism, masculinity, and adjacent topics. That is why the YouTube algorithm, through its wise and not at all destructive recommendations, showed me a number of videos making fun of the idea of male feminists. From Bill Burr’s thoughts of a male feminist while on a date, “If I just agree with her, maybe she’ll touch it!” …
I was told, recently,
Humans evolved as storytellers.
From the mythical to the mundane,
The full span of any life is bound
In the act of transmitting meaning.
Meaning that must be first found
In an indifferent universe.
Humans search, eyes peeled,
For even the slightest shade of purpose.
All is entropy, solution and dissolution,
Change and decay and growth,
Directionless yet uncompromisingly driven,
And we monkeys seek for truth in it.
For beauty and goodness and hope
And right and wrong, opposites
And attractions and distillations
Of order to scrape into some rock
Press into vinyl, encode into a…
Dehumanization just ain’t it.
My partner and I were traveling up I-15 toward Salt Lake City Utah the weekend before the election. It was 3pm on a Sunday in Mormon country, which should usually mean light traffic even in this section of I-15 known best for its constant state of construction work. (A friend of mine once quipped that construction cones should be Utah’s state tree). That’s why my partner and I were perplexed when the traffic ahead was suddenly all brake lights. Then we saw them.
In the right-most lane, in perfect color contrast to the bright orange cones…
A reflection on merciful accountability.
John Green, author of The Fault in Our Stars, is a creep and belongs in prison according to a tweet a saw recently. The evidence presented being the way that he, a grown man, described and wrote about teenage girls in his books. I have read, and enjoyed, several of John Green’s books, so I paused to reflect on his depictions of teenage girls, and, in a way, I can see where the author of the tweet is coming from on this one. Many of his books could be classified as coming of age novels, and they do tend to…
A look at erotic content through a critical lens
Porn.
What a word, right? There is intense stigma and debate around it at the moment, with some anti-porn proponents calling it “the new drug” and saying that it is as addictive as cocaine or heroin and will destroy the life of anyone who watches it, while others see it as a harmless pastime and use the age-old “everyone’s doing it *insert shrug emoji*” argument.
My goal in this article is not to weigh-in on the meta argument of whether porn is good or bad but instead to talk openly about the actual content of mainstream pornography with a critical lens…
How policing masculinity helps no one.
Feeling Superior
Picture, if you will, an encounter with the resident coffee snob in your life as you are coming out of your local coffee shop, brew in hand.
They, the snob, an eyebrow quizzically raised, ask the dreaded question,
“What did you get?”
You, with an inward sigh of dismay, tell the snob what you have, which you know is never going to be pure, dark, or earthy enough for them.
They respond with, “Ugh. When are you going to try ‘real coffee’?”
While it is not a new phenomenon for human beings to find some justification for making themselves feel…
In my first social work practice class at Utah State University, a professor taught us an important lesson. He asked the class how we might respond if a client told us that they had just broken up with their significant other the previous night. One of the students in the class responded that they would say something like, “That must be really hard.” My professor’s response to this was, “What if they say, ‘No way! I’m thrilled it was such a terrible relationship!’?”
He was conveying to us the danger of assuming another person’s emotional state by projecting our own…
Alan Parley Buys
Intersectional feminist social worker. Creator of feministmasculinity.com. Advocate for survivors of intimate partner violence.
