adonism

News from Adonis Mirror

Wed, 07 Sep 2005 15:51:30 GMT

Three new articles from Adonis Mirror:

*The Changing of the Guard: Men Flock to the Frivolous in Academia

When there is a crisis in masculinity, men look back towards the old days—more imagined than real—for inspiration: Latin sounding words are one way to pad legitimacy and authority into any endeavor, so the number of “-ologies” in academia is rapidly increasing, covering any area of male-interest. Women, however, have to hit the books the old fashioned way.

http://adonismirror.com/08182005_leader_changingguard.htm

*I Made Some Science: Massaging the Medium

Gender and blogs, the subject might be old hat but men are still able to take advantage of the genre, even when it comes to completing their Ph. D. projects: as is the case for the MIT Weblog Survey that was able to draw upon women’s exclusion from the “blogosphere” and other patriarchal legacies to maximize it’s own importance by garnering female participation… even though the data it is collecting isn’t necessarily the answers for which it is even searching.

http://adonismirror.com/08252005_leader_imadesomescience.htm

*Wrath of God, Wrath of Men

In the wake of hurricane Katrina, liberal men acted as if they’d never take advantage of a natural disaster for their own political goals, or puerile amusement for that matter: having short memories, many forgot that they did exactly that a year ago when three storms struck Florida.

http://adonismirror.com/09052005_leader_wrathofgod.htm

News from Adonis Mirror:

Thu, 28 Jul 2005 19:01:38 GMT

We have a variety of new articles posted:

*Roger Ebert and the Terrifying Girl Next Door:

While his partner, Richard Roeper, has been in hot water among feminists in recent weeks for making comments about the models Dove has employed in its latest advertising campaign, Ebert has certainly had the more interesting career: indeed, his personal responses to feminism are well worth examining given his current fame as a Liberal celebrity.

http://adonismirror.com/06292005_leader_rogerebert.htm

*Vanilla on Top

Sexism exists not just in the minds of sedate conservatives, but also among the urbane and trendy; being coolly hip is often the perfect defense for the most outrageous of acts, where every transgression can be defended under the aegis of irony. “Vanilla on Top” is about how this process unfolds, where white people “other” themselves for fun and profit, declaring their peers to be more “normative” than themselves, and thus their oppressors. The dynamic itself is very high school and yet this time it is the privileged and popular crowds who are insisting they’re drawing the short end of the stick, arguing that Vanilla is— well— on top.

http://adonismirror.com/07182005_leader_vanilla.htm

*God’s Gift
“One day our Youth Pastor, Rick, was delivering a lecture on the topic of love. Or more truthfully, about marital rape, although none of us were sophisticated enough—nor allowed to be sophisticated enough—to understand it precisely in those terms. Instead, this was a message on love and what to expect from it, a point clearly directed towards us boys even though we were a minority in the classroom. Married couples exist as one flesh and all the other standard topics were addressed, but the primary argument was that of submission: marital rape cannot happen because if one partner fails to consent, an ethical breach in the relationship has already occurred: and that a marital breakdown more worrisome had already occurred, with one partner putting the other into the position of being a rapist.”
http://adonismirror.com/07192005_leader_godsgift.htm

*Rusty White Knights

Fun fact: the only Dateline NBC episode to ever be video-capped and uploaded to the infamous and now defunct Suprnova.org (where files of all sorts were traded before it was shut down) was the one featuring Perverted Justice.com. And yet the supposedly anti-pedophile website continues to claim that they are about protecting children and not entertainment. “Rusty White Knights” covers many of the problematic issues of men’s response to their own violence against those with less power than themselves.

http://adonismirror.com/07192005_leader_rustywhiteknights.htm

I would also like to thank our readers and leave a reminder that we are always looking for new submissions.

—Adonis Mirror

News from Adonis Mirror

Tue, 14 Jun 2005 06:07:48 GMT

Today we’ve published a new article, “The Mythology of Capitalism in Criticism,” that explores how criticism as a genre is used to sneak antifeminist polemics past editors—and lawyers—that would otherwise meet criticism of their own.

After all, how many book reviews themselves get publicly reviewed?

The article tracks numerous examples of this phenomenon—reviews that are not about the subject matter ostensibly being criticized but just an excuse for writers to wax on at length about their own pet issues with impunity—such as the treatment of the rap group Northern State and their “Dying in Stereo” album, JK Rowling, and even feminist powerhouses such as Gloria Steinem and Catharine MacKinnon.

Please check it out at

http://adonismirror.com/06132005_leader_mythofcapitalism.htm

And this is a bit backdated, but in May we published an article about the worship of masculinity in organizations that are presumably anti-violence, the article “Our Humanity is not in our Strength” can be found at

http://adonismirror.com/05162005_leader_strength.htm

In retrospect, I believe the article to be a bit light in its criticism of the White Ribbon Campaign (especially compared to how Men Can Stop Rape was not afforded the same amount of charity), and have edited it to include a link to feminist concerns about the group:

Roberta Spark’s “Gift Wrapping The Men’s Movement: Canada’s White Ribbon Foundation Campaign”

http://www.members.shaw.ca/sparkspeaks/wribbon2.html

For further reading, please consider “Uneasy Questions about the White Ribbon Campaign” by Martin Dufresne:

http://www.rapereliefshelter.bc.ca/dec6/whiteribbon.html

—Adonis Mirror

Even When You Lose, You Win

Sat, 07 May 2005 19:15:22 GMT

We have a new article posted at Adonis Mirror:

http://adonismirror.com/05062005_leader_winning.htm

While superficially about the videogame industry, a certain advertisement for a game called Rumble Roses has wide ranging significance.

"The videogame industry is sexist—a hardly contested fact—but no more or less so than other industries. What it is, however, is far more honest: its ostensibly trivial status (even if fans of the medium like to cook numbers and brag that it is larger than the film industry) affords it a certain amount of rogue agency, permitting it to not have to put on that same false veneer of adult professionalism that bankers, stock brokers, and other industrialists (all equally sexist and racist institutions) are often forced to don in today’s political climate. The fact that videogame developers and publishers are allowed so much freedom makes it easier for those in more stodgy industries to bear the tightness of their own collars, as they are allowed to both vicariously enjoy the fruits of the sexism endemic to the games that are produced, but also the benefits to their own businesses which are seen as increasingly respectable when there are more obvious targets in place for critics of sexism to discuss. This is similar to how all men are rewarded by a culture in which women live in fear of rape, whether or not those individual men themselves choose to perpetrate that rape."

Kill Your Blogs

Mon, 02 May 2005 12:17:55 GMT

We have a new article up on the blog phenomenon, entitled “Kill Your Blogs.”

Excerpts:

“While self-publishing has never been easier, instead of simply contending with editors, writers are now awash in a digital world where no man will budge from the stage and be demoted, if only for a moment, to a mere member of an audience. This development has been widely taken as a good thing, a universal theater for mankind to hurl his defiance at the stars: through a patriarchal lens, dueling tyrants are often confused with democracy.”

“...the explosive popularity of blogs is in no small part due to the fact that men can actively express themselves not just in their own blogs, but in those of others, reading only so much as they need to in order to form their own rebuttal—which one can imagine to be quite a meager amount of reading indeed. Writing has become the new reading, subject to the “if a tree falls in the forest” effect: reading as an activity only possesses efficacy when it can be proven, empirically, by immediate material benefit. This is something that renders blogs exceedingly valuable to the masculine mind beset by doubt. Despite our gender’s happy illiteracy, we have always managed the lion’s share of letters to the editor in other venues as well; here, the rewards for being a ‘reader’ have never been so enticing.”

Check out the full text at:

http://adonismirror.com/05022005_leader_killyourblogs.htm

We also have a new collection of illustrations drawn by Timo Honkasalo.

Richard Leader

First Blood: So-Called Battered Men on the Offensive

Tue, 26 Apr 2005 20:32:59 GMT

Today is the second anniversary of when David Brame, Tacoma’s chief of police, shot and killed his wife, Crystal Judson, before committing suicide.

http://adonismirror.com/04262005_leader_firstblood.htm

First Blood: So-Called Battered Men on the Offensive

“In all likelihood, David Brame felt cornered, terrified, and battered the day that he turned his gun on his wife: he had decided that his own life was ruined, over, never mind that it was his own actions that had led him down that road. And like Rambo—hiding in that cave with bulging muscles and veins, crouched low with a long knife and a submachine gun, the brutal light of his torch flickering against their cold metal—there was a profound disconnect between his conception of a tortured inner identity as a victim and the external reality he presented the world. With men in our society becoming increasingly reliant on fiction to serve as a buffer for such disconnects, the gulf between what men feel and what they are is ever widening, increasingly losing touch with reality.”

For a more traditional write up on the story, check out the somewhat dated

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/09/25/48hours/main575070.shtml

Or today’s

http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/local/story/4808651p-4422625c.html

Venturing into journaland

Tue, 26 Apr 2005 06:26:33 GMT

Hi, I'm the editor of a new pro-feminist website called Adonis Mirror. Things are just getting started but there's a lot of content posted already.

http://adonismirror.com/index.htm