Wednesday was a difficult day for The American Independent News Network, which is the larger entity that operates The Iowa Independent. Our chief executive and founder announced two of our sister sites would close and their content would be moved to The American Independent.
A recently introduced bill could have far-reaching impact on the U.S. sugar industry, including American Crystal Sugar, a farmer-owned cooperative that locked out 1,300 Midwest workers on Aug. 1.
The chairman for Herman Cain’s Iowa effort says the campaign “relied more on the word of farmers than Washington regulators” in deciding to run an ad containing claims the Environmental Protection Agency says are false.
The Iowa Senate will remain under the control of a slim 26-25 Democratic majority when it reconvenes in January 2012.
Jackson Katz, an internationally recognized educator on gender violence prevention among men and boys, argues society must first transform how it thinks about violence against women if it wants to prevent these acts from reoccurring. “As a culture, Americans first must take the step in acknowledging that violence against women is not a women’s issue, but a men’s issue,” Katz said.“This is the foundation strategy for engaging young men and boys in gender violence prevention,” Katz told an audience of school counselors, social workers, teachers, UI psychology students, social workers, and community members April 17 at West High School in Iowa City. “The first problem I have with labeling gender issu
es as women’s issues is that it gives men an excuse to not pay attention. This is also the problem with calling them gender issues, because the majority of the people in the status quo see gender issues as women’s issues.”
Katz is an educator, author and filmmaker and has been long recognized as one of America’s leading anti-sexist male activists, in particular in the sports and military cultures. In 1993 he conceived and co-founded the Mentors in Violence Prevention (MVP) Program at Northeastern University’s Center for the Study of Sport in Society. The multiracial, mixed-gender MVP program was the first large-scale attempt to enlist high school, collegiate and professional athletes in the fight against all forms of men’s violence against women. Today MVP is the most widely utilized gender violence prevention program in college and professional athletics.
Drawing upon his most recent book, “The Macho Paradox: Why Some Men Hurt Women and How All Can Help,” Katz shared some strategies with the audience, providing them with what he hoped was a foundation they could build upon in their professional and private lives. “My goal here today is to give you some concrete strategies on how to approach issues regarding violence against women and prevent gender-violence issues among men and young boys.”
Katz spent a significant portion of the session driving home his first strategy and why a paradigm shift in thinking is imperative to the prevention of gender violence. At the root of the problem is language and how, historically, language has helped cement and legitimize how people view gender violence.
Katz used race and gender to illustrate how, over time, language has helped perpetuate and maintain the dominant culture’s dominance. “In the United States, when we hear the word `race,’ people generally think of African Americans,” Katz said. “When people hear `sexual orientation,’ they tend to think that means homosexual, gay, or lesbian. When people hear `gender,’ they think of women.”
“In each, the dominate culture is left out of the equation. This is one way that dominant systems maintain themselves in that they are rarely challenged to think about their own dominance,” Katz said. “This is one of the key characteristics of power and privilege and why the dominant culture has ability to go unexamined and remain invisible.”
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