Why I started this blog

I haven't been an avid reader of blogs for very long, and judging by the amount of blogs on other people's blogrolls, maybe I'm still not. I only read a few of them right now, partially because I don't have enough time to keep up on scores of them. But I was drawn to the medium because of the unique opportunity you can get in addressing the very serious things happening in the world in a very personal way. I'm a college student right now, and in my day-to-day academic work, there certainly isn't much of a space for that.

In the social sciences (I'm a sociology student), we are supposed to remain value-neutral as we go through our work. Of course, this is impossible, but we're all supposed to do the best we can with it. I can do work like that, that pretends like I don't have a position on what I'm talking about, and I think I'm good at it, but what really got me turned on to sociology in the first place was works by authors who tackled these issues in very personal ways. I first became interested in race after reading two books in particular: The Heart of Whiteness by Robert Jensen
and White Like Me by Tim Wise. Both are books written by white men that are honest, personal, and self-critical that made me interrogate and question my own life in ways that "value-free" works have never made me do. Around the same time, I read bell hooks' Killing Rage, which introduced me to the idea of race, gender, and class being inextricably linked. Killing Rage was the first of many bell hooks books I would read, and hooks was an invaluable starting point for me coming to terms with oppression.

What really made me decide to start this blog, though, was reading Robert Jensen’s latest book, Getting Off. The book’s subtitle is “Pornography and the End of Masculinity,” and in his discussion and analysis of porn and masculinity, he includes his own life experiences, both with porn and coming to terms with what it means to be a man and what it means to be a man who is conditioned by porn. I was really moved through reading it, and wanted to try to make some kind of contribution of my own to the discussion of intersecting oppressions—both how I as a white middle class heterosexual male contribute to it, and how I try to struggle against it.

So maybe none of y’all have any interest in reading what I’m writing. Overall, I guess I don’t really have any reason you should. I’m not a particularly witty writer, and that seems to be a prereq for blogs these days. And I’m not audacious enough to think that what I have to say is new or particularly insightful. So, if nothing else, even if nobody else ever reads a word of these posts, I hope that my efforts to make things personal furthers me on the road to coming to terms with my role in oppression. Maybe some day I’ll have the gall to hope that it can help others, as well.

Interview with Robert Jensen on his book, from my good friends at Media Mouse:


NPR discussion of his book The Heart of Whiteness