Getting off the hook; Denial and Resistance

1. The thesis of Getting off the hook; Denial and Resistance is about people who are on the hook and they are always trying to get off the hook. There are a lot of ways to getting yourself off the hook and this article shows you a number of ways to get off the hook.

2. There are eight different ways of getting of the hook that this article talks about but I chose to summarize five of them.
Deny and minimize: This is when people deny that the problem exists in the first place or they make it sound like it could be worse. For example the article tells about a parent who tells their child who is in pain, that it does one hurt that bad, so they should stop crying. The parent does not know what the pain feels like to the child so they should not tell them that it does not hurt that bad.
Blame the victim is the next way of getting off the hook. In this approach we can see that bad things happen to people and they still get off the hook by blaming the victim. The example used most is when men and sometimes other women blame the women that were sexually assaulted. They do this by saying that the women was too sensitive or sent mixed signals or my favorite she asked for it because she was too nice or friendly to men. In this case oppression is blamed on people who suffer more and privilege is placed on the ones who remain invisible and untouched.
Call it something else is a subtle way of denying oppression and privilege, such as gender inequalities is called battle of the sexes.
Its better this way is a combination of denial and calling privilege and oppression something else to say people prefer things to be the way they are. They give the example of blacks wanting to live next to one another and not having a problem with it. Which is a lie, the article says that the people who like to live among themselves are white people.
The last way that I talked about was it doesn’t count if you don’t mean it. In this section people think they will get off the hook if they did not mean to have what they said come out in a negative way.

3. Do these really work to get people off the hook? Yes, think of the case of calling it something else. People get away with being dominated over another group of people because they call it battle of the sexes and they think of it as a game that people like to play, instead of saying it is a way to show men have power over women in one way or another.

4. I thought this was an interesting article because it showed me that my brother has a bit of male dominance. This is because ever since we were kids, I would be telling my dad a story about something that happened earlier that week and right in the middle of my story, my brother would start telling my dad something completely off topic. I later on after putting up with this for so many years called my brother out on this and would tell him to shut up and I would go on with my story.