Tag: amanda marcotte

Keeping the Patriarchy: Sex as Dominance in the Catholic Church

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by Amanda Marcotte

To quickly summarize a recently- released,  five-year study funded by the Catholic Church on the priest sex abuse scandals: “We’ve investigated ourselves and concluded that it was the hippies that did it.”  It may be easy to be hoodwinked into believing the report isn’t as dodgy as it is, as the researchers did offer some concessions to the critics, both in denying that homosexuality is the root of the sex abuse scandals and suggesting that the church failed to deal with the problem effectively, but it’s important to look beyond these concessions and at the larger conclusions reached.  Doing so demonstrates that the Catholic Church has no interest in addressing the toxic, patriarchal culture that breeds sexual abuse and the subsequent cover-ups.  Instead, the researchers have gone out of their way to suggest that the sex abuse was a historical anomaly caused by a lascivious 1960’s culture, and that no real changes need to be made in order to prevent future incidents of abuse of children and teenagers by priests. Continue Reading →

Gender Caricatures

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How are ideas of masculinity created and enforced?  Are the political and Christian right less tolerant of a spectrum of male behavior than those on the left?  What about Boehner’s crying and Obama’s killing?  From Amanda Marcotte’s article at The Guardian, “The soft underbelly of the right’s hard abs”:

Unfortunately, the right’s obsession with masculinity, and the fear that if they aren’t constantly shoring it up and attacking the feminine, they might grow soft, has very real effects. Many, maybe most of America’s problems go back to this manlier-than-thou attitude on the right. Wars are started. Women’s basic human rights are denied. Gays are bashed. The main slurs against Democrats are about how they’re feminine, childish or weak for doing things like thinking through important decisions before making them or caring about the environment. Even fights over the budget become masculinity displays, with Paul Ryan casting people who use the social safety net living “lives of complacency and dependency” – all the while, portraying himself as a tough guy with his own hefty workout routine.

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