The Reading Corner.

[Dio]

I spent some time over the holidays reading more technical works on the issues in adult men's friendships. Four core issues of fear of vulnerability, fear of homosexuality, aggressiveness/competition, and poor communication skills from ingrained gender roles appeared in the literature around men’s friendships.

1. Many men fear vulnerability with other adult male friends because other men might employ information of a personal nature against the other man. This fear of vulnerability ties into the issues around aggressiveness and competition because men's internally perceived social status revolves around the acquisition of achievements and higher socioeconomic positions.
2. Fears of homosexuality derives from the perception of masculinity as the opposite of femininity. Homosexuals often receive the stereotypes of feminine traits, so many heterosexual men avoid any activity with the potential ridicule of homosexuality in our culture. While these issues have diminished to an extent from the late 1980s and early 1990s, the core issue of men receiving negative feedback for perceived "homosexuality" of expressing emotions to other men from men and women continues through the present day.
3. Aggressiveness and competition dominate men's lives and demonstrate the importance of social status in many men's lives. Men perceive masculinity with the attainment of social status and delegation of emotional issues to women. This trend continues today with the domination of women in occupations with high rates of emotional labor including teachers, social workers, psychotherapists, occupational counselors, and so on. Men's competition for women, jobs, and other status symbols makes emotional intimacy with other men a difficult challenge.
4. Poor communication skills derive from the gender socialization of men and delegation of emotional labor to women in many families. While modern progressive circles have begun working on this issue, the majority of men suffer from these effects to some degree. Men who  express emotions to other men confront gender stigma and issues around poorly developed communication skills.

For more information on this topic, you can consult the following sources from your local library or university.

Nardi, Peter M. Men′s Friendships. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, 1992.
Towery, Twyman L. Male Code: Rules Men Live and Love by. Lakewood, Colorado: Glenbridge Publication, 1992.

[Dio]

I have been busy with life again. I have, however, been enlightened on the presence of free book resources through Library Genesis. This library provides access to free textbooks, fiction, and non-fiction books, so students around me have been accessing textbooks through the website.  https://libgen.li/

[Dio]

One of the books on recreational reading list is Michel Dorais's Rent Boys: The World of Male Sex Trade Workers. This phenomenon interests me on a profound level as a heterosexual man because an upper division History course on the Qing Dynasty introduced me to the topic of the male and female child sexual worker trade supplying the Chinese Imperial Court during the late 1500s through the mid 1700s.
The fact some of the sexual workers in the book identify as heterosexual men also interests me. How does a heterosexual man engage in various acts with another man?

The book cover appears in the spoiler.

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[Dio]

Many of the topics discussed in books on my future recreational reading list for Summer 2022 cover topics of a sensitive nature, so viewers of these books should proceed with necessary caution.

The second book related to male sexual workers on my list includes Victor Minichiello's and John Scott's Male Sex Work and Society.

Citation:
Minichiello, Victor, and John Scott. Male Sex Work and Society. New York, New York: Harrington Park Press, 2014.

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The authors discuss the often rigid modern notions of sexuality compared to earlier notions of sexuality based on the gendered position and age of a person involved in a sexual act. These earlier forms of sexuality disregarded the permanent nature of sexuality and only judged sexual actions and the person's position in those sexual actions.
Modern sexuality labels only developed in the mid to late 1800s, so history contains a long period of sexual activity outside these modern ideas of sexuality.
'

[Dio]

Topic Warning: Mental abuse, psychological manipulation, and social engineering.

Another book on my "return to periodically list" consists of Dr. Joost Meerloo's The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing.

Citation
Meerloo, Joost. The Rape of the Mind; the Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing. [1st ed.]. Cleveland: World Pub. Co., 1956.

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Book Cover

This book discusses in detail various methods for the psychological control and manipulation of people around a person with methods established in the 1950s for the control of prisoners of war under the People's Liberation Army and the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the United States of America. These methods include sleep deprivation, starvation, milieu control, and several controls over a person's environment. Many elements of brainwashing interfere with normal psychological attachments in people and create features of an abusive relationship between people in a group psychological setting.

[Dio]

I have recently been involved with a unit on gender roles within the United Kingdom, a.k.a. Great Britain, between the 1830s into the late nineteenth century. I have been very busy recently, but this information from my course might provide some insight into alternative modes of masculinity compared to the predominant modern masculinity within our culture.

The Culture of True Womanhood

Gendered segregation in the 1830s to the early twentieth century limited British women's interactions within the public sphere and promoted the Culture of True Womanhood among the middle and upper classes. Alleged true women adhered to the four social expectations of domesticity, piety, purity, and submissiveness. Working class women naturally appeared outside these tenets because most working class women worked outside the home or in the residences of middle and upper class people. Rejection of these tenets from a woman risked the woman's reputation and created the potential labeling of said woman as a fallen woman. Women's adherence to these principles garnered positive public praise because women allegedly represented a superior vehicle for the transmission of alleged proper moral values from the current generation of citizens to the next generation of citizens. John Stuart Mill and other British men in the period perceived women as underdeveloped men and a natural subject for the submission to men's alleged superiority.

Men's Roles in the Middle Class Victorian Home and Public Sphere

Men's gender roles in the same period restricted their interactions with women until courting for marriage and stressed the regular interactions with other men over women. These restrictions on men's interactions with women until marriage stressed the importance of men's expected fulfillment of predominant economic provider for the household and primary actor in the public sphere of business and politics. Men's restricted interactions with other women prompted marriages where the socioeconomic considerations superseded romantic love in many cases. Around forty-five percent of marriages in this period contained one or more disgruntled occupants and few divorces occurred except in extreme cases of abuse, financial abandonment, or infidelity. Men in this period often acquired non-sexual and non-romantic support from other men through fraternities and other exclusively male institutions because interactions with women outside a marriage created negative stigma. Henry David Thoreau, other married men, and single men criticized some married men's alleged excessive interactions with women for the perceived domestication of those married men in this time period.
Similar processes involving married men in the present day on this forum appear with the reduction of some married men's assertiveness and independence compared to single men. Reductions in men’s assertiveness probably arise from a greater belief in equity and equality within marriage and gender roles. These expectations for equality reduce the institution of marriage from an economic institution into a romantic institution.

One of the Sources for This Information
Tosh, John. A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999.
Cover of the Book:

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[Dio]

Modern research on the range of human sexual expression originated with Dr. Alfred Kinsey's publication of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male in 1948. Dr. Kinsey's research posited the spectrum theory of human sexuality and rejected the binary expressions of sexuality labels from previous generations of sexuality researchers in the late nineteenth century. While numerous issues existed in Dr. Kinsey's samples of male prison inmates and other male dominated sites, more recent reliable surveys in the Hite Report and the Janus Report indicated approximately twenty percent of American men possessed some sexual experience with other men. Dr. Kinsey's research sparked later measures of human sexual expression in sexuality research and ushered modern notions of sexuality into public consciousness under the Lavender Scare and other backlashes against the organizations of sexual minorities.

Citation:
Kinsey, Alfred C. (Alfred Charles), Wardell B. Pomeroy, Clyde E. Martin, Wardell B. (Wardell Baxter) Pomeroy, and Clyde E. (Clyde Eugene) Martin. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. Philadelphia ;: W.B. Saunders Company, 1948.

[Dio]

Wendy Kline in Building a Better Race: Gender, Race, and Eugenics from the Early Twentieth Century to the Baby Boom explored the eugenics movements from the early to mid twentieth century, and the eugenic movement's alleged assistance in the elevation of people, especially women, with mental illnesses from the alleged moral depravity of sexual sin, wanton copulation, and rebellion against perceived proper gender roles. Women in these periods experienced the increased development of contraceptives and increased knowledge on the nature of sexuality among the general population. White upper class men and women in the United States of America exerted continued control over women's and men's sexuality through the forcible sterilization of various people. Doctors and progressive scientists mobilized forcible sterilization for the people with alleged mental illnesses, "sexual inverts," and "sexual perverts." The movement also targeted people with perceived improper gender socialization from feminine fathers and overbearing mothers. Medical scientists also struggled against the increasing sexual freedom of people outside marriage in the 1920s through the invention of social intelligence for the institutionalization of alleged "feeble minded" women, institutionalization of alleged unemployed moronic men, and people with perceived emotional issues.

Citation:
Kline, Wendy. Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.

[Dio]

Forcible institutionalization of political dissenters also appeared in the former USSR during the 1960s and 1970s. Former Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev replaced the overt political violence of Joseph Stalin for a more refined political violence through the medical system. Theresa Smith noted the prevalence of forcible imposition of fabricated psychiatric labels of "sluggishly progressive schizophrenia" and other false diagnoses on political dissenters in the Former USSR. These labels enabled the Soviet government
s avoidance of overt condemnations from other nations until the late 1970s for political human rights abuses. Current psychiatric care in the Russian Federation probably adopted some methodologies from the USSR and created a mixture of palliative western medicine with political oppression through false diagnoses.

Citation:
Smith, Theresa C., and Thomas A. Oleszczuk. No Asylum: State Psychiatric Repression in the Former USSR. New York: New York University Press, 1996.

[Dio]

One of my favorite early modern European author and book appeared in Niccolo Machiavelli's The Prince.

Niccolo Machiavelli's The Prince described the improper and best methods for a prince's acquisition and maintenance of power. Machiavelli believed "it is not necessary for a prince to have all the above mentioned qualities in fact, but it is indeed necessary to appear to have them" (70). Good rulers should choose fear over love because people love on their own whim and fear on the ruler's demands. Rulers must "hold [Lady Fortune] down” because a modern prince courted Lady Fortune like a woman and needed “to beat [Lady Fortune] and strike [Lady Fortune] down” with impetuous behavior. (101) Machiavelli explained with the previous rape metaphors on the disappearance of ancient Greek and medieval belief in an uncontrollable fortune under human planning and control. Modern business and political movements often applied Machiavelli's tactics in planning, discussions, and activities.

The edition of the book for my course appeared in the Mansfield translation from 1998 under the Chicago University Press, but the edition below provided a more general translation in the library.

Citation
Machiavelli, Niccolò. The Prince. New York: Open Road Integrated Media, 2014.

[Dio]

Industrialization and the profound transformation of people's lives from industrialization in the nineteenth century through the present appeared repeatedly in the last two semesters of my degree program. Industrialization and the resultant changes in lifestyle affects everyone on this forum and Earth.

Industrialization fundamentally transformed people's perception of time. Artificial time replaced natural time for the dominant control of people's lives in corporations and employment. Artificial time arose from the needs of trains for synchronous movement while employers adopted clock time for the mechanization, centralization, and corporatization of capitalism and workers throughout the first and second industrial revolutions. These influences of corporatization of time alienated workers from the natural ebbs and flows of nature and sparked romantic "return to nature" movements from the early nineteenth century through the present day. These romantic movements illustrated one of the struggles within the emerging global labor relationships between managers and unskilled workers. People struggled for authentic expression within the mechanical and artificial worlds of the new corporate models of Taylorism and Fordism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century American corporate environments.

Citation:

Porter, Glenn. The Rise of Big Business, 1860-1920. Wiley-Blackwell, 2014.

[Dio]

Buster’s Uncle might find Christopher Capozzola's Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen of some interest because he adapted a famous phrase from World War I's martial propaganda into the forum’s registration system.

Christopher Joseph Nicodemus Capozzola’s Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen discussed the beginning of a transition in World War I between political rights conceived as political freedom with connected obligations in voluntary political communities and nations towards a more modern individualist conception of freedom regardless of a person’s connection to the nation. Capozzola discussed connections between Americans’ conceptions of political duty, obligation, and civic organizations with various Americans’ reactions to the enactment of the Selective Service Act in 1917, effects of violence and spying from the American Protective League and other non-governmental civic organizations on Americans, and the Espionage and Sedition Acts' forcible imposition of civic patriotism onto recalcitrant Americans in World War I.

My penultimate general conclusion from the book remained, Did the American government's stoking of hatred and xenophobia for Germans and other foreigners during a political crisis remain an essential component in the protection of the United States of America against foreign spies and saboteurs in World War I? What do you think of the American government stoking political patriotism for the alleged protection of national security interests in political crisises?

Capozzola, Christopher Joseph Nicodemus. Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen. Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2008.

[Buster's Uncle]

I've been remiss by a couple months in sharing that SF author Greg Bear died in November...

[Geo]

I've been remiss by a couple months in sharing that SF author Greg Bear died in November...

I noticed. Suddenly his work was more widely available at this website.

[Buster's Uncle]

His work, never magnificent, was also never terrible and often quite good.  He is missed.