Wednesday, July 31, 2013

Who are the Pimps?

This week, the FBI rescued 105 young people and arrested 150 alleged pimps in a three-day sweep in 76 cities.

Articles reporting the roundup, as that referenced below, point out that the young people in the roundup were almost all girls, ranging in age from 13 to 17. However, no article we could find referenced the gender of the pimps.

We know from studying hierarchies that we are programmed not to hold the top accountable. Is that the reason that we aren't informed of the gender, assuming men are the pimps? Is it because in hierarchies we assume that what the top does is a reflection of, and problem of, all of society, and not isolated problem of the top group? Are we assuming "boys will be boys" and there is nothing we can do to change the detrimental attitudes of how men view and treat themselves and women sexually?

Like a city who continuously cleans up the river from a company that continues to pollute, we are not dealing with why male culture in our society finds child prostitution enticing. Stating that further, we are not talking about why male culture produces pornography and stands by while men to commit so many rapes and sexual assaults. Almost every week we see another news story of a girl or woman being sexually assaulted and/or murdered by men, and we hardly ever see women doing the opposite.

Let's start insisting that if a lower group of the hierarchy is going to be identified as such, as in the case of girls with the roundup of pimps, that the upper group be identified also. We would undercover gems of wisdom about our hierarchies.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/fbi-raids-in-76-cities-save-105-kids-forced-into-prostitution-150-others-arrested/2013/07/29/03ee9496-f865-11e2-a954-358d90d5d72d_story.html

Friday, July 26, 2013

Limited View Brings Limited Life

In a great video, Dustin Hoffman describes how men will only consider talking to women who have a certain look, and he has realized how much men miss. Men do limit their lives when they insist on staying at the top of a sexist hierarchy. Women have known this for years, as so many women will go to great lengths – surgery, eating disorders, uncomfortable shoes and clothes, changing their natural selves –  just to "make the cut" so men will pay attention to them.

http://www.upworthy.com/dustin-hoffman-breaks-down-crying-explaining-something-that-every-woman-sadly-already-experienced-3?c=ufb1

Wednesday, July 17, 2013

No Problem with No African Americans on the Jury?

It appears to us that it was Travon Martin who was on trial, not George Zimmerman, as so much talk was about Martin's actions. Typical of our racial hierarchy, anyone in the bottom group is scrutinized, while the top is not held accountable for their actions, even when they fully initiate the problem.

The jury did not include any African-Americans, as we would expect in our race hierarchy. The top group is assumed to represent everybody, so it wasn't questioned when most of the jurors were white.

Each of us is programmed from childhood to believe that the top group in a hierarchy represents everyone. 

For example, our schools teach American history as the history of everyone in this nation. But the stories we learn are predominantly about white men. To study the history of other groups, people have to take separate classes, such as African American history, women’s history or Native American history. And if we take “Hispanic American History,” we don’t expect to learn “Asian American History,” because a class about anyone but white men is assumed not to be inclusive of anyone else.

Tuesday, July 9, 2013

Leveling the Religion Playing Field


The group American Atheists is planning to erect 50 monuments on public sites around the country where the Ten Commandments stand alone. A quote from a member of the organization puts their perspective into hierarchical terms:

“True equality means all or none,” said Ken Loukinen, a retired firefighter in Florida who volunteers as director of state and regional operations for American Atheists. “Christianity has had an unfair privilege for at least the last 150 years. We want to level the playing field by stripping them of privilege, and bringing them to equality with all other ideologies.”

Christianity does not have to put itself on top of a hierarchy claiming to be "the only" religion. But unfortunately in our country, many people also use the "superiority" of Christianity as an excuse to build hierarchies based on additional factors besides religion.