So what now

So what do I do now. Now that I've learned all about women repression, now that I have learned that the small gestures, the worlds we use, the work place, our media, my day to day interaction are all chock full of gender. In an article by Frye she writes that even a man opening a door for a woman is a symbol of oppression. She really gets at the heart of it when she writes that elderly or weak men will open a door for a perfectly able bodied woman. This is not chivalry or courtesy it is the show that women are so weak that men have to do this small task for them. But in the end when it comes to helping women in the laundry, the dishes, or more important things such as rights to equal pay they will not. I feel for the boys in our class because we always genderalize. Yes that was on purpose. Genderalize. Men are......Women are......  I feel like this class is about realizing that we cant say that. Well, we can say that but it is not correct to. We are people, even if we are male or if we are female we should not have such specific niches that we fit into. This takes me back to the discussion on transgender. In the perfect world we would not about people as male or female, we would use their names. Characteristics other than gender would identify a person. But the truth is, is that gender is an easy to way to identify someone. A clean fifty-fifty swipe of people to choose from. We know that this fifty-fifty is not clear cut because it includes transgender people as well. Just from writing this last blog I can see that gender and conflict class has got me to think about what I have assumed to be "just how things are". thank goodness.

We have choices to make

After doing the readings on oppression the biggest factor that I am seeing is institutions. Insitutions that we have already set up is probably the biggest reasons for oppression. In her articl Oppression by Choice Anne E. Cudd makes the claim that oppression is the porduct of individual choices. She focuses on women, saying that because women make choices to stay and home and be house wives rather than challenging their husbands and going out to work their choices are oppresing themselves. In her artle Cudd also eximens what cooersion means. She states that most examples should be looked at from the viewpoint of moral coersion which means that there is more to the picture than A is pushed to P  because the other options that A has arnt acceptable. It means that we cannot look at if A is coeerced by P unless we look at the background factors. The main idea of morally coercion  is if "whether the agent is denied some choice that she ought to morally have." In another article by Lorde, Teish and Gardner there is a story about a black couple that are going through married issues. The black wife is realizing that her husband has let go of his identity to become what he sees as better, which is the white man. He has left his oppressive state to go be someone better. I like the story because the wife realizes what is going on and starts to analyze their situation and in a way embrace it. It shows that the only way for them to accept themselves was to realize the truth about their situations which was that they are still oppressed. One of the hardest things for oppressed groups to do is to realize what is going on to them, for example woman that stay home rather than go out and work.

Women in Religion

Women aren't equal. When did this start? When did religion incorporate the idea that women are not equal to men? Was it culture that effected religion or the actual religious happenings? Islam was the religion that was most extreme in its control of women. Many women in Islamic countries are beaten legally because the law is so in line with the religion. In a clip that was shown in class one of the clerics states that beating women actually gives them respect. The burkah was also another way that people said that women in Islam are oppressed. The discussion in class moved to discussing weather wearing a burkah is actually oppressive. In my opinion anything that you must do that is not a choice is oppression. If Islamic woman are given a true choice and choose the burkah that would not be oppression but it is not by their own choice that they wear it. I think that this is the case with other religions as well. If orthodox women could go past the alter but chose not to that would be different than being banned from going past the alter. Women are accepted as oppressed in their own religion because they are not used to having it be any other way. However some women are exposed to life outside the confines their religion puts on them yet they decide to stay with their religion because of the history. Because the rules of the religion are what they are used to.

Boxes are a comfortable shape.

Who are we kidding? We want to be in a box. We dont want to be floating around without a name, we want to be categorized. Even the kids that walk around bare foot, ripped and dirty t-shirt want to be boxed. The kids that walk around in the plainest clothes, head down want to be boxed. Weather we are categorized as "out there" or "part of the norm" is not up to us thought, it is up to the people that view us. When it comes to gender we have two boxes in our minds, male and female. One girl in class stated that even when we do not say that person is a "boy" or that person is a "girl" we still say that a person is a girly-girl or just a girl and we say that a boy is a manly-man. The place that I am trying to go with this is discussing one of the very interesting points that Andy brought up in his part of the presentation. During his presentation Andie said something that made me think about what it meant to be trans gender differently. We were talking about acceptance when Andie stated that he did not want to come out of the closet when he came out as a girl, his end goal as with other trans gender people is not be put into the correct box. This statement made me realize that trans gender people want to be seen as "normally" the other gender. They are not really fighting against boxes but rather they are fighting to be accepted in a a box.

Rainbows

Rainbows, marshmallows, fairies and buttercups. The idea of love being free and easy is like a fairy tale. Gays and Lesbians still have difficulty in the U.S, the land of the free, being accepted for their sexual orientation. We always think of Gays and Lesbians when we see the rainbow sign on the bumper stick of a car or on the window of a house, but the truth is that the rainbow represents more than just the Gay and Lesbians it also represents the inclusion of trans gender people as well. This is what I found in researching for the presentation on transgenders people. There is little information on them. There has been such a little amount of research, there isnt very much literature on the topic of transgenders as a whole. The information that I found was very specific to certain arenas such as male to female transgender people or a specific sect of trans people in a culture. This lack of "broadness" may be because of the vast array of different kinds of transgendered people. There can be male to female, female to male, lesbian trans women, straight trans women, gay trans men and straight trans men. There can be people who feel asexual and are not attracted to either men or women or feel like they do not fit into either male or female gender boxes. Because of this spectrum it is difficult to talk about a group of people that we already dismiss.

Man of the house

Who is the Man of the house? Yes, traditionally men bring home the bacon. But who decides where the bacon goes? Traditionally women to the dishes, they take care of the kids and the house but they are not as powerless as we say. In one of my favorite quotes from "My big fat Greek Wedding"..."The man is the head of the family but the women are the neck and they can turn the head any way they want". After the presentation in class today we discussed our fathers and mothers roles in our own households quite extensively. It seemed, looking back on the discussions that every house is different in terms of who is allotted the work. In some it is more the mother than the father, in some the children do it, and in some households that isnt an issue because of maids. I did not hear anyone say that their mother or their father did all the work, 100 percent of it. Like the presentation stated, attitudes towards women working is becoming more accepting. In one of the videos we were shown in class the man and woman were sharing responsibilities of taking care of their children. The woman even stated that working gave her a fulfillment that contributed to her happiness. Unlike in the past when it was assumed that the only way to make a woman happy was for her to be working as a full time mother we are seeing woman expressing the need to fulfill themselves in other ways as well.  Another part of the discussion that I found very interesting was when we talked about what happens to relationships when a person supports their spouse while their spouse gets an education and then they split up. We also discussed how men who have girlfriends or wives that earn more them justify themselves by stating that they supported their wives while they were going to school in order to get this high paying job.

So children...Sex.

How do we teach a topic that we hardly talk about in our daily conversations. We already feel like it is a taboo topic. Sex means different things to different people, different religions, family cultures, regions, everything. This is one issue that the article entitled "Sex Ed in Washington" was talking about. It argued that the argument between whether we should teach sex education in terms of abstinence or contraception should not be brought to Washington because it needs to be fought over locally rather than nationally.  If sex education is going to be effective decisions about how to allocated money need to be made. A program that focuses on abstinence will work in some places and not in others. It cannot be said that teaching sex education in terms of abstinence hasn't worked because the amount of teenage pregnancy has improved during the implementation and use of this sex education however change is needed in locations in which it is known that simply saying that one should wait till marriage is not enough because most students will have sex before they are married.  A good point was brought up in the article entitled "How to End The War Over Sex Ed." In this article it is said that no matter what kind of education system is implemented social and cultural pressures outside of the classroom are what is going to be the deciding factor in if teenagers have sex or not, the show "teen mom" may dissuade kids from abstaining from sex or using a condom as well as sex education in school.