Lifestyle and the Depoliticisation of Agency: Sex as Power in Women's Magazines

Sex, due to its connotations of dangerousness and the non-traditional, has been used heavily in women's magazines and other mass media to signify core values of power and freedom as part of their brands. Through this process, other forms of agency for women have tended to be excluded. In these magazines women are shown to be assertive, powerful and independent, not through the political views that they hold, not through the way that they act upon society, but through the way that they seduce men and behave sexually. We show, using a number of examples, that for this to happen a fantasy space has to be created: a space where real-world obstacles and meanings are erased, allowing a repertoire of theatrical sexual play to operate. This is typical of the lifestyle society in which we now live. In this society, we define ourselves not on the basis of who we are, in an older sense of gender or social class, but in terms of what we do and the values we hold. The way we communicate these values is often through our use of consumer products, which allows us to align ourselves with the core values and meanings with which the products have been loaded. But while lifestyle itself may be a matter of choice, the choices available to us are often created to serve the interests and needs of large corporations, of consumerism. Sex is one such choice of which we must be very careful.     

哲学伦理学视野中的警察生活方式

追求幸福和快乐是人类最根本的生活目标,是人类社会发展的内在动力.警察生活方式,是指警察群体在一定的社会环境中如何生存和生活.警察生活的最高境界在于有效履行保障公众安居乐业职能的过程中,实现自身工作的快乐与生活的幸福.     

Risks of Criminal Victimization in Contemporary Urban China: An Application of Lifestyle/Routine Activities Theory

The philosophical underpinnings of youth courts rest on the notion that youths are less culpable and more reformable than adults. Some scholars argue that, ideally, when sentencing youth crime, judges should engage youthful offenders in moral communication to elicit change. But do they? What more generally do judges say to the youths? This paper analyzes the frequency and content of judicial censure and moral communication in the sentencing of youth sex offenders. Drawing on the sentencing remarks for 55 sexual violence cases, we examine the ways in which judges interact with youths and censure the offenses, and what, if any, normative guidance they give concerning gender, sexuality, and violence. We found that in most but not all cases, the judges censured the offending as both a moral and legal wrong. However, they spent more time discussing a youth’s future than past behavior, as they sought to elicit change. The judges did not degrade or exclude the offenders; rather, they addressed them in a spirit of reintegration, as worthy individuals with future potential. Although the judges set norms of appropriate sexual behavior to the youths when the offense victims were children, they did not always do so when victims were female peers. In this Youth Court, “real rape” was sexual offending by a youth against a child under 12 years of age. By contrast, in about one‐fifth of cases, all of which occurred against a female peer, the offending was censured only as a legal wrong (a “pseudo censure”) and less likely subject to judicial norm setting.     

Time and crime: The link between teenager lifestyle and delinquency

This paper—based on data from a national survey of 14 and 15 year olds and their parents in England and Wales—examines the relationship between teenager lifestyles and activity patterns and self-report offending. The legal ways in which teenagers spend their time show consistent relationships with involvement in crime. Offenders and nonofienders differ markedly on both general and specific measures where they go, whom they are with, and what they do. Consistent with models of criminal behavior based on group processes, these differences in activity patterns also extend to a number of the major correlates of delinquency whose effects on crime are typically conceived in lifestyle terms. These results further indicate that the link between activity patterns and delinquency is different between males and females in the age group surveyed.