It is hard not to hear about the laws being introduced at the state level and their biggest target being trans youth. One of the biggest resources for trans youth being targeted is gender affirming care such as hormone replacement therapy. As a trans young adult who in the past year has gained access to hormone replacement therapy, it is so hard to put into words the impact that it has on one’s mental health. Living with a heavy level of depression for 3.5-4 years before having access to this resource I tried counseling, therapy, and medication, with varying levels of minor success, receiving HRT was when I finally felt like I had gotten my life back. These impacts are often talked about but there isn’t a lot of longitudinal data to back our statements due to the lack of research revolving trans individuals.

This does not stop research from developing in the meantime and recently there was a study comparing individuals who did receive HRT and those who did not and the data has suggested that trans teens who receive HRT have a positive correlation with mental health. The only issue with the sample is that teens who are able to receive HRT must receive parental consent meaning that the participants who were receiving HRT were already living in an affirming and support family environment which could have an impact on positive mental health reporting rates.

In order to get around this a research team analyzed data from the 2015 U.S. transgender survey that had 27,000 respondents. They found that over 40% of trans youth who live in an unsupportive family environment have attempted suicide by the time they turn 18. They also found that HRT significantly improved mental health and that suicide rates for trans youth drop after having access to this resource with a 14.4% decrease.

Even with research coming out in support of trans resources the community is still facing a huge attack towards their rights. Back in June the Human Rights Campaign declared a national state of emergency for LGBTQ+ Americans due , more than 560 anti-LGBTQ+ bills that have been introduced and 80 of which have passed.

The article ends with a statement that “If you are struggling or having suicidal thoughts, help is available. Call or text the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline or chat at 988lifeline.org. The Trans Lifeline (1-877-565-8860) and The Trevor Project (phone 1-866-488-7386, text 678-678, or chat thetrevorproject.org) also offer crisis support.”

These are resources many trans and other LGBTQ+ individuals know about due to the widespread understanding of the climate around us. Even though the climate is gloomy the LGBTQ+ movement has always been resilient and continues pass down resources of how to survive. Trans youth exist and have always existed; support trans youth.

Trans Artist and small business owner: https://www.etsy.com/shop/MegEmikoArt

Article: Trans youth are significantly more likely to attempt suicide when gender dysphoria is met with conversation therapy than with hormone treatment.

During the COVID pandemic there were numerous prisons and jails releasing people from incarceration and one of the biggest states to do so was California. Releasing thousands of people there was instant lash back towards the actions of the state with worry that crime rates would rise. Before the COVID pandemic started California had lowered their rate of incarceration from 329 per 100,000 residents to 290 from 2009 to 2019 without any impact on crime rates. However, in 2020 there was an increase in homicide rates with a total of 500 victims.

There is discourse on if this was due to incarceration or due to the pandemic as there was a lot going on in this year and correlation does not equal causation. So in order to tackle this question Charis Kubrin and Bradley Bartos took a quasi-experimental approach to better understand jail decarceration in California during COVID. In order to do this they gathered information on the 58 counties in california and identified 6 counties that had the highest amount of decarceration in reference to their jail populations the year before. They compared these groups to groups that had the least decarceration rate in order to look for any gaps in crime that would show if there was an increase in crime for the states with higher rates of decarceration.

Looking at rates of violent and property crimes there was not a set pattern of crime and the patterns ranged from increased crime in counties with higher decarceration to a null impact to even a decrease in crime in counties that had higher decarceration. Even though the study had a few limitation that the researchers go over, they still showcased that there is not a relationship between decarceration and crime rate.

The researchers left their article with a quote stating “In the words of one research team: “The pandemic created rare natural experiment research conditions that enable unique and potentially valuable insights … that may indicate future justice practices and policies.” The valuable insight from our study is knowing that we can downsize our prisons and jails without seeing crime rates skyrocket.”

Decarceration and Crime Do Not Go Hand in Hand

BY CHARIS E. KUBRIN & BRADLEY J. BARTOS

In the past few years there has been an increase of transgender violence as well as an increase in anti-LGBTQ+ bills being introduced and enacted in state and national legislature. Since this has been a recent increase research takes time to provide there is a lack of data to discuss how these issues might be connected. It takes time to be able to collect and analyze data but there also inst a lot of discussion about trans violence in reference to gender violence. There has been a call for including trans individuals in reference to gender violence by the scholar Daniela Jauk who points out the exclusion of trans individuals by the United Nations in intergovernmental negotiations based on gender (2013). Without this discussion it has erased and silenced trans experiences creating an unbalanced power dynamic pertaining to what might be considered gender violence.

The matrix of domination is a concept that was built by Patricia Hill Collin and analyses how political domination occurs at a macro level. This concept was adapted by Laurel Westbrook and is called the matrix of violence, an analysis that aims to explain how structures such as institutions and social systems shape patterns of violence (2023). The data that Westbrook uses is an accumulation of trans murders from 1990 up until 2019; gathered from sources such as activists, mainstream news, and government sources to collect information about the victims. Even though this is a very thorough collection of documentation there are also still trans victims that have fallen through the cracks due to trans invisibility or mislabeling of trans individuals unless the trans individual was out before the murder there is no way of knowing if someone is trans. Even with trans some victims unaccounted for, this is still one of the biggest datasets on trans homicide and allows for a better understanding of how trans people are affected and are at risk of violence compared to their cisgender peers.

Scholars have discussed how inequalities between cisgender and transgender people have called for transgender violence but this does not identify why or why certain trans victims are targeted more than other trans individuals. Trans women are significantly more likely to be killed than Trans men but Trans women of color are killed more often than white trans women. The author points out that this race gap between trans homicides is significantly bigger than the race gap seen in homicides toward cisgender women. Trans women of color are also killed in different scenarios white trans women as trans women of color are killed more often in exchanges of sex for money while white trans women are killed more in nonmonetary sexual relationships.

Sex, gender, race, sexuality, class, age, and ability all shape how institutional systems work at an interpersonal level such as social, legal, educational, political, economic, media, family, religious, and healthcare institutions (Westbrook 2023). These social ideas can create a space for racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, ageism, and ableism which in turn enables violence. Trans Homicide shows us how intersectionality plays a role in violence in a way that cis – gender violence does not.

Westbrook, Laurel. 2023. The Matrix of Violence: Intersectionality and Necropolitics in the Murder of Transgender People in the United States, 1990-2019. GENDER & SOCIETY. 37(3), 413-446.

Jauk, Daniela. 2013. Invisible Lives, Silenced Violence: Transphobic Gender Violence in Global Perspective. Advances in Gender Research. 18, 111-136.

Branching off of my last created post, I will be talking about the last selection framework that aims to navigate societal evolution.

The third and final selection framework defined by Turner and Abrutyn is Marxian Selection and is used as a way to support their theory of Spencerian Selection. Marxian selection identifies the opposition to production and is identified as the marginalized groups that face resource deprivation and therefore lead to negative emotions and possible ideology of revolution. This is the conflict process to the ever-growing organism of society and creates counter ideology from the status quo. Conflict can lead to violence and in the past has led to the downfall of governments and other governing groups in power. Conflict arises from resource deprivation by institutional systems and is recognized as needs being unmet, issues being unaddressed, and an overall sense of subordination or marginalization. Turner and Abrutyn argue that these institutional systems have been able to become more flexible than Marx had originally believed and have created change to their systems in reference to these systems.

Marx projected that institutional systems would not be able to change and that these systems would be too rigid and would not be able to resolve inequality. Considerable efforts have been made to address the systematic oppression that underpins our institutional systems. However, as we develop new theories of evolution, particularly those emphasizing social contexts, it becomes crucial to underscore the power structures that perpetuate the dominance of these institutional systems. The second criticism of the selection is the amount of biological theory to back up evolution. Overall, this is a very useful theory to understand how societies interact with each other but it refrains from getting at the relationship between society and the environment. Our society influences the environment, and one example is the waste generated by capitalistic production. This environmental impact disproportionately affects lower-income neighborhoods and this issue exists at the intersection of Sociology, Ecology, and Biology. The environmental injustice that is created reinforces existing social disparities as lower-income communities bear a higher risk of exposure to harmful wastewater, amplifying the likelihood of health issues. Resulting in healthcare costs that can further deepen the cycle of poverty, perpetuating systemic economic disadvantages, especially among marginalized groups.

The reason I choose to emphasize the biology in my second criticism was to highlight the how in removing biology from the evolutionary discussion we are ignoring a part of something we need to identify. The biology field has been called out on their flaw of having androcentric tendencies—a predominant focus on males and the neglect of understanding females. Other biologists that have criticized biology, assert that this bias relegates women to an afterthought, hindering comprehensive analysis and limiting the scope of scientific research (Gowaty 1992 and Hoquet 2010). In response, a researcher, Zuk, proposes the transformative role feminism could have on biology (2002). They advocate for an objective and unbiased approach that addresses inherent biases within the field. By encouraging researchers to look at and address inherent biases within the field, feminism pushes for a broader and more inclusive understanding of biological phenomena. The acknowledgment and correction of biases can lead to more comprehensive and accurate scientific knowledge.

True crossovers between the disciplines might be hard to navigate due to the number of scholarly arguments discussing evolutionary theory and feminism. Some argue for evolutionary psychology and feminist theory to merge while some argue that feminist theory altogether has already influenced biology enough and there is no need for further assimilation (Ah-King 2007). Despite the roughed-up conversations on how to move forward, there might be room for more advanced research in the future once researchers have learned how to bounce off of each other and pull in different perspectives for different projects that calls for them. Personally I hope to work on various projects and work with other scholars outside of my discipline to call upon new perspectives as we face new issues.

This project allows for the possibility of analyzing evolution in different stages which can possible help identify how to better account for issues such as global warming and other environmental justice issues as it exists at the cross section of society and environment.

This paper post will continue the conversation in my last paper post and will be continued in the next post as well. In this post I will discuss Spencerian selection and the next post will cover Marxian selection. Once defined and discussed I will then lay out the wholes that I have identified and where I will add a separate analysis, adding onto the discussion that the authors have discussed in their paper. 

Spencerian Selection:

Spencerian selection coined by Turner and Abrutyn is defined as two different types of selection. The first type is based on Spencer’s argument that when societies evolve they become more complex in their variances of social structures. These complexities are labeled on axes defined as production, reproduction, regulation, and distribution. The scholars define these as:

1. Production of resources needed for humans to survive and build social structures
2. Reproduction of individuals and the sociocultural formations organizing their activities; 
3. Regulation through the (a) consolidation of power, (b) codification of belief systems, and (c) formation of structural interdependencies through markets.
4. Distribution through the expansion of (a) infrastructures of moving resources, information, and people across territories, and (b) markets facilitating exchanges of resources, information, and even people.

When there are needs not being met there is pushback from “actors”  (which can be from the individual or corporate level) to create new ways to handle identified problems revolving around these four fundamental axes. This makes type one Spencerian selection be driven by needs, motives, interests, and power which can change the “sociocultural phenotype”. 

The second type of Spencerian selection is based on societal interaction in warfare. It is a brutal version of “survival of the fittest” and showcases how societies can change based on war outcomes. The author points out that it is typically countries with higher levels of economic and military resources, such as technology, economic surpluses, and other warfare advantages that might aid in war tactics that typically have the upper hand. This can have varying outcomes for local cultures, creating “subordinate societies” and sometimes even redefining geographical information. The authors do discuss how conquest increases inequality and these inequalities then coincide and relate back to type one Spencerian selection. Which then puts pressure on new forms of regulation in institutional systems such as polity, law, economy, and religion. 

I do think that this explanation accounts for some aspects of societal interactions on the basis of societal evolution but I believe it places too much trust in the true adaptability of structural institutions. While it does explain some social inequalities in some settings it does not showcase how institutions adapt in ways that still keep the status quo in power and does not emphasize power relationship dynamics to “change” for the needs of others but rather reinvent inequalities. Tactics such as these have been used across countries and cross-culturally to keep the powerful in power while “catering” to what the “actors” identify without giving too much resources.

Returning the “Social” to Evolutionary Sociology; Reconsidering Spencer, Durkheim, and Marx’s Models of “Natural” Selection by Johnathan Turner and Seth Arutyn

Many of the connections between the book UnFree by Rhacel Parrenas and the book “feminist Theory Reader” by Carole McCann, Seung-Kyung Kin, and Emek Ergun are connected to Orientalism. A framework that shows us how we perceive, connect with, and treat countries outside of our own that we may deem as “exotic” or even just “different”. There are a lot of things even within our own culture that vary and leave us to fill in the blanks with our own explanations; however, explaining things without context can diminish the problem at hand. This gap in understanding and knowledge grows even more when we do not have a cultural understanding of the group one is discussing. 

The book UnFree not only discusses Filipino workers who find work in the United Arab Emirates and how the kafala system used to find work is one that creates a vulnerable work environment but it also discusses how many of the scholarly conversations around this system involve a orientalist perspective. A perspective that does not account for all the cultural context needed to truly give an analysis without placing judgment or colonialistic ideals on the individuals of another country. Many Western scholars placed the kafala system in the same category as contract slavery which is defined as “the contractual binding of workers so as to subject them to slave-like conditions in which they are denied freedom of movement and not adequately compensated for their labor”. However, this definition does not fit a wide portion of Filipino workers’ experiences; the workers who did experience extreme and unsafe workplace environments were not the majority. This system however does aid a lot of Filipino citizens and the Philippines as a country because this is a big portion of how they provide for themselves, and their families, and helps aid their economy. 

Scholars focus a lot of their dialog on the negative experiences of Filipino workers and these conversations can be framed too easily as a foreign issue rather than a domestic one. This issue is one that we see all too often in the United States but is never really discussed. Recently in the United States, we have seen violations against child labor laws on the rise with the Labor Department announcing that it has concluded 955 investigations in 2023 with 800 investigations underway. That is just one example of how this is a domestic problem and how framing conversations in a Eurocentric light can be damaging to citizens who are undermined by the shadow of how we want the United States to look. Our labor standards in America are heavily built off of our idea of heteronormative Capitalism that contributes directly to the patriarchy which is the ideal “free market”. Our market and economy are seen as pure and other countries need our help but this market at best equates our productivity to profit and at worst equates us to property or even erases us. 

Our system is somehow “better” in the eyes of some, and we are more forward than other countries because we are “modern”. Picking apart which systems are better than others and which ones need to be completely eroded and rebuilt is one that is easily subjected to what the majority sees as correct rather than understanding the little intricacies that work for a country and what does not work for a country. Parrenas does a great job at discussing a pressing topic but also being careful to make sure the viewpoint of her study is not to diminish the kafala system but to understand the experiences of the workers and frame the conversation to be about labor standards. As we work to learn how to have conversations about other countries whether it be in a scholarly article, news article, or a random class paper, we should always put an effort forward to write and understand from a culturally educated perspective.

Child labor violations soared in fiscal 2023

UnFree by Rhacel Parrenas

Feminist Theory Reader by Carole McCann, Seung-Kyung Kim, and Emek Ergun

This past spring, I decided to do a project on anti-LGBTQ+ bills that were popping up at a hefty and alarming rate. In 2022, we had a record-breaking year, and same as the year before, but nothing like we saw this year. I wanted to revisit this topic to get an overview of where we are at this far into the year as we have two months left in the year. Where I last left off we were roughly 467 bills introduced with 45 bills enacted into law four months into the year. According to the Human Rights Campaign and the American Civil Liberties Union, we are now sitting at around 501-525 bills total being introduced and about 77-84 bills passed into law meaning that about 40-60 bills have been introduced in the last 6 months and about 40 more bills have been enacted. Now let’s reference past years and the amount of bills they enacted:

• 2015: fifteen enacted bills
• 2018: two enacted bills
• 2019: seven enacted bills
• 2020: four enacted bills
• 2021: seventeen enacted bills
• 2022: twenty-nine enacted bills

The topics of these bills have also increased over the years and of the bills that have been enacted there are fifteen that target gender-affirming care for trans youth, seven bills that require or allow misgendering of trans students, two bills targeting drag performances, three bills that created a license to discriminate, and four bills that censor school curriculum just to name a few. The Human Rights Campaign has identified over 220 bills that specifically target transgender and non-binary individuals which is just under about half of the bills that were introduced. 

In reference to the beginning of the year to now, we have seen a slower rate of introduction but the rate of enactment is still scarily high. In four months there were 45 enacted bills and in the six months since then, there have been about 40 more bills added. With the year coming to a close, this has been one of the worst years in recent history for LGBTQ+ rights. This came after some of the worst years in reference to trans losing trans lives from transgender violence as last year (2022) we lost at least 40 individuals and the year before that (2021) we lost at least 46 individuals. I hate to bring up such a grim topic but these are issues that trans individuals and other LGBTQ+ individuals are facing and it is not a topic that I can ignore. This post does not discuss the impact these bills have had on LGBTQ+ youth and adults but the rates for depression, anxiety, and suicidality within this population are already high enough. The impact this is having on the community is ongoing and it is hard to watch but I have hope as this is not an unfamiliar battle within the community. The resources that were built by the people who came before us still are with us today and we are not at square one, as we have always been here and we will continue to fight against queer erasure.

2021 Becomes Deadliest Year on Record for Transgender and Non-Binary People by the Human Rights Campaign

Fatal Violence Against the Transgender and Gender Non-Conforming Community in 2022 by the Human Rights Campaign

Roundup of Anti-LGBTQ+ Legislation Advancing In States Across the Country by the Human Rights Campaign

Mapping Attacks on LGBTQ+ Rights in the U.S. State Legislatures by the American Civil Liberties Union

Piecing together a new discussion that I have never indulged in has proven to be a little complicated and the topic of the discussion is a little daunting as I have stated in the last post that I made. This is because the topic is something that professional researchers in the field are arguing about and don’t necessarily have a huge grip on just yet however so far in my reading, focusing on ecology has been the way to go and I believe feminist ecology theories can provide me with the context that I need to bring more to this discussion.

The first scholarly article I am reading is a discussion on sociobiology and the issue of exclusively using Darwianian ideas to discuss evolution. Darwin’s ideas are specifically relating to one’s phenotypes and genetic make up, this is a problem for sociology as you cannot base social contexts and ideas in the sense of biology. Social Darwinism does not work because one’s status and social settings are not based on their genetics, lower class society does not equal inferior genes. As sociologists, we have a baseline understanding of how complex society is and how intricate the intersectionality of one’s social status can be (whether it be class, race, gender, etc.). Turner and Abrutyn both acknowledge that fields outside of sociology tend to ignore sociology (2017). 

Many biological approaches do not take into consideration sociological theories and focus on a biological base but human behavior has become too complex for these ideas as culture has a huge impact on group and individual behavior and the dynamics that come from it. While Darwin’s ideas work for certain aspects of nature and they do explain a good portion as to how humans have adapted the way they have , it is also important to factor in that humans have used their capabilities to purposely create social structures due to goal making and the ability to act with agency. These goals are not biologically written into humans and collective action of groups, organizations, communities, institutional domains, societies, and intersectional systems all interact with their environment and are capable of changing it as it changes them. 

The researchers also point out that these organizational systems in communities interact similarly to Darwin’s idea of natural selection in the sense that they seek resources, change due to their competitive environment, compete with other organizational systems which then produces the “sociocultural phenotype” of what works best in that social environment. These organizations are made up of individuals that have the capacity for change and will change their environment to see success which means they can remake themselves and create variations. This is in line with Durkheim and Durkheimian ideas as he recognized that competition does not always equal death and that specialization, diversification, and the construction of a new resource expands the capacity of environments. In summary, organizational/corporate units can create both new resources and new environments to which the whole population of organization/corporate units have to adapt to in return creating a capitalistic selection which produces new ideas. What these researchers characterized Durkheimian selection as:

• “The units on which selection works are organizations or, more generically, corporate unites revealing internal divisions of labor”
• “Emphasis on the evolution of the population resources niche.”
• “The dynamics driving selection are much more like those specified by Darwin: population growth, increased density, escalating competition, selection, and death to less fit organizations” even though they can avoid this by creating new resources to survive.
• “Competition and Durkheimian selection always occurs within the boundaries of an institutional framework, to some degree, shapes and limits how competition manifests itself”.

This is just one idea of how selection plays a role in social settings as this is not the only way societies interact within each other and Turner and Albrutyn argue that it is actually multi-leveled and calls for more theoretical analysis which they do with their ideas of Spencerian selection and Marxian selection which I will have to discuss later on. However, this is a snippet of what is being discussed and how sociology needs to be added to other conversations as society plays a huge role in how we interact and grow.

The second article I have been reading is about eco-feminism and how some fields are coming to conclusions that eco-feminists had discussed decades ago such as interspecies theory and standpoint theory. Gaard points out a scholar named Griffin that discusses how a feminized status can and has created a space of inferiority in a male-dominate society (2011). And how another scholar named Merchant identifies that roots of subordination of woman and nature lies in the logic of science and capitalism. Looking deeper into what these scholars are pointing out, I want to compare them to the conversations that Turner and Abrutyn are having as they discuss competition and how their ideas might refer to the hegemonic ideas of society while possibly leaving out important populations’ dialogue regarding gender, class, and capitalism. With that possible analysis, does selection operate on social hegemony and how will it affect the discussion? Is the analysis viable? I still have a lot of information to process but I am closer to where I need to be for my project and to where the conversations will navigate me.

Articles Cited:

Returning the “Social” to Evolutionary Sociology: Reconsidering Spencer, Durkheim, and Marx’s Models of “Natural” Selection by Johnathan Turner and Seth Abrutyn

Ecofeminism Revisited: Rejecting Essentialism and Re-Placing Species in a Material Feminist Environmentalism (PDF) by Greta Gaard

Starting a new research project means the ever so dreaded literature review and depending on how much you already know about your topic depends on how much information you start out with as you continue on your search for sources. The amount of information you know can make your reading of articles simplier or harder. In my case, since I do not know a good deal of the scholarly conversation on the topic I choose to pick, it will not particularly aid me so to start off I need to start familiarizing myself with the conversation they are having in this sub field. 

In reviewing biological models and what the crossover of sociology and biology means for this subfield I have uncovered a dark past that I have heard about in various classes but never really knew the origins of. Sociobiology formed as a field within evolutionary biology where darwianian ideas had crossed over into a sociology context and created a space for scholarly justification of racism, sexism, classism, and ableism (Wilson 2019). The National Human Genome Research Institute talks more in detail about the impacts on the Eugenics movement, the history and how it’s existence in today’s society (2023).  This provided spaces and had direct correlations for the eugenics movement, legalized segregation and possibly other historical events that we now know are unethical. Many of these ideas used in the eugenics movement came from Darwin’s theory of natural selection and that applied to social behaviors such as crime, intelligence, etc. which particularly impacted people of color, LGBTQ+ individuals and people with disabilities which created discourse on who should or should not be able to reproduce. 

As sociology moves forward, scholars are starting to try to fit how sociology fits in with the other fields but are understandably hesitant in bringing up this conversation. Hearing about this past, I too am put off by this conversation as I was simply interested in both biology and sociology separately and decided to dive into what topics the subfield was having, never knowing the weight of its historic past until now. Two scholars, Jonathan Turner and Seth Abrutyn, point out that the past darwinian ideas that led to these scientific inaccuracies are too simple for the intricacies of society and are inadequate in it’s analysis of how biology and sociology intertwine and rather favor an analysis that would take the theories of Spencer, Durkheim and Mark into consideration (2017). 

Ecology, however, is leading in conversations regarding gender and environment as there is a lot of literature pertaining to feminism or what they call ecofeminism as well as conversations that include women of color, people with disabilities, and queer people as well. I hope to continue to learn from the discourse of the ecology field as I piece together the literature in front of me.

Returning the “social” to evolutionary sociology: Reconsidering Spencer, Durkheim, and Mark’s models of Natural Selection by Turner and Abrutyn

Sociobiology by Robert Wilson 2019

Eugenics and Scientific Racism by The National Human Genome Research Institute 2023

As we discuss feminist theories in class, the theories and playwrights of how femininity and masculinity interact with each other never fails to intrigue me. One researcher decided to see if the game, Grand Theft Auto, could tell us something about ‘Crisis in Masculinity’ and what breaking down ‘toxic masculinity’ looks like in real time. Scholar Steven Dashell took the opportunity to code the twitter responses to a leaked rumor about the new Grand Theft Auto game that the main playable character was going to be a female rather than the historical male main character role. 

In looking at these responses he found the obvious sexist comments that did not come to a shock to him as “given the subject matter of Grand Theft Auto, which often has the player taking the role of a criminal who must do antisocial acts—stealing cars, for starters—to advance in the game, a dose of misogyny was not unforeseeable.” (2023). The other responses were typically supportive of this new leak but were not ecstatic in their support. What did catch Dashell’s eye was the way women were countering the negative misogynistic comments and in his words “weaponizing masculinity”. These comments ranged from stating that anyone who had a problem with playing as a female character is not a man to calling them an incel which plays on the ideals of the binary male role but in a way that emphasizes less toxic stereotypes. 

Dashell comments on the need for masculinity to shape into the ideals that the 21st century has brought on but without falling into misandry? He also comments on the fact that masculinity studies has historically left out other masculities such as African American masculinities, Latino masculinities, poor masculinities or rural masculinities. What do you think about the current gendered interactions in the United States? How have they been changing and what do you think the pros and cons of the changes are? There have been a lot of conversations about gendered online conversations in the United States but not a lot of scholarly conversations. 

“What Grand Theft Auto Tells Us about the ‘Crisis in Masculinity'” by Steven Dashiell on August 3, 2023.