Women and Peace Brocke-Utne

I read this article last night, and I found it to be pretty helpful because it refreshed a lot of terms/ideas that we went over in intro to PACS. I found other parts of the article to be confusing.

The helpful parts were redefining positive and negative peace. Positive peace is when there is absence of direct violence/structural violence and there are desirable conditions. Negative peace is merely the absence of direct violence. An example of structural violence would be the distribution of resources; if you are at the bottom of the 'food chain' so to speak, you have less access to food and health care and thus a higher mortality rate. As I understand, direct violence is violence with intention, like murder/war, but indirect violence is something like a car accident where you don't mean to hurt anybody. Intention matters in labeling violence, but in some cases, I would imagine that it is hard to tell somebody's intention.

I was really confused when reading about the microlevels and macrolevels of peace/violence. The authors discussed where the 'war against women' or women repression would fit in, and I'm not quite sure where it does after reading the article. Is the fact that a large number of men beat their wives an instance of collective violence and societal influences and thus a macrolevel of violence? Or is the fact that there is no open war against women make in a microlevel of violence?

"Bodily Harm" Hatty

I found this article to be pretty interesting. Here are some highlights of it:

-aggression involved behavioral terms/assualt/emotional outbursts
-conflict- incompatibility of interests/goals/etc
-violence- infliction of emotional/physical/sexual/psychological damage
-Killing with a knife is different than killing with a gun
-the meaning behind it varies...

Ways to study violence
-genetically-hard to do, but was found that violence is more prevalent in people who had head injuries
-evolutionary- men were hunters/women were gatherers; competition among men in sexual selection
-personality trait approach--good but not enough results yet.


Men and Women define violence (for themselves) differently. For men violence is a way to assert control, but for women violence is a failure of self-control.

The article discusses some pretty horrific personal stories of violence. The public reaction is important in creating the general attitude towards violence. If somebody was raped and killed by several people, the investigation into that should be thourough and intense. Insead the police met resistance from the community. This leaves the impression that you can get away with rape and murder, and may lead to further problems.

Hardcore Feminist?

Hardcore Feminist would never be a way I would describe myself. Then I read the first chapter of Valenti. I have always agreed with the equality of the sexes idea, but I shyed away from the f-word because I had a lot of negative associations with it. I was/am one of those people who said, "I'm not a feminist but...." I guess that I did not realize that you had to be extreme to be a feminist. I guess being a feminist is something that I will have to reconsider...

I really liked how she pointed out that if everything was okay, why was Harvard's president allowed to say that women are naturally worse at math?? As a math major/physics minor, I took offense to that, but I can also say that unfortunately the idea is not just one man's opinion. Being the only girl in a class can be really intimidating, and on occasion, due to past encounters, I have hesitated to ask a question in class. It is also really annoying when I tell strangers/people who are only an acquaintance that my major is math, the automatically ask me if I am going to go into teaching. Why would that be the questions and not, are you looking into grad school/etc.?

One last thought: If I end up unmarried, I can guarantee that I will not have to resort to selling crack.