We cant do it all

This blog is mainly a reaction to the reading about pop culture gone wild.  It brings up a point that I have thought about since the beginning of gender and conflict class. This point is the contradiction of what boys are looking for in the ideal woman. They want a girl who's available but unattainable, a lesbian who likes men. be a virgin but sexy. If a girl is both of these contradictions then she is obviously acting on one front. I was thinking about weather This made me ask myself if I though most girls are naturally party animal sex maniacs or conservative girls that like to read a book with some hot milk on Friday nights. I cant answer this question but it leads me back to the class discussion that we had two classes ago with Dr.Widman. In this class he was talking about the hook up culture. According to study's that he sighted woman do not actually like hookups and that this culture will eventually die. This means that either woman do not know what they want, or women know they don't like hooking up but do it anyway because of a sense of competition.   The article talks about how movies, porn and shows like Girls Gone Wild make it hard to "develop an authentic sexuality" but i can be done. The author suggest girls stop getting so drunk, ask themselves if they are having fun, if it feels goo and if they want it in every situation they are in.

Some things you would rather not know

The class that Dr.Widman was invited to was very informative, almost too much so. I do believe that our gender is at least somewhat defined by biology but the findings of studies that try to track biology's influence on our behavior is not what I wanted to hear. For example, Dr.Widman talked about how we are serial monogamists, men really only care that a woman has his child and then wants to find another woman. He told us about a study which was investigating how involved men were with their children finding that less good looking men were more involved. Dr.Widman said that basically men that could not attract other women were more involved in their family because they did not have the choice to find others. This made me think about social constructions such as marriage and their use. If we are meant to be with multiple people why do we get married? When did that start?

Gosh Darn Gender Roles

The readings this week talked a lot about the origins of gender roles.  In Chapter 5 of  Gender Stereotypes and Roles Susan A.Bosaw came to the conclusion that it was the difference in labor that created gender roles.  The fact that men were more suited for hunting and women gathering and working on horticulture started placing the importance of men above women.  I find it sad that even though in some cultures woman are equal than men, in no culture were woman dominant and men submissive. I don't believe that anyone should be submissive but the fact that woman are currently dominated makes me wish that at one point women had the power to be the "bigger man".  The shaping, sustaining, and changing of gender roles is all about power. In line with the postmodernist view I belive that gender is ever changing. The writers of the articles we read this week seem to have the same view. They believe that the way to change this power difference is through women having more economic power in the household, women no letting themselves buy into exploiting their bodies, and empowering themselves in times of war.  This idea as war as a catalyst for good is a hard one. War kills, it causes rifts through societies and is usually not carried out for the benifit of the collective. However, as Bridget Byrne says, war one of the opportune times for women to change their role in society.  I wish we, as collective women didn.t have to wait for times as catastrophic as war to change what is so obviously wrong. Being submissive and being the entertainment for men is so ingrained in us that we don't think to revlot.

Third or Fourth I forget

The readings for this week talked about violent abuse of women.  Rape, beatings by husbands, molestations, all of these things go on in the thousands every day but we do no seemed shocked at how sexist these crimes are. Crimes that target a certain race or ethnicity seem to be a bigger deal and less accepted (not that domestic violence is accepted everywhere) than crimes that are gender related. In the article about defining how feminists define peace by Brigit Brock-Utne she makes a point that while we usually look at a domestic violence case on its own as one event we need to look at the bigger picture. There are thousands of women who get raped, are the target of domestic violence or are in some other gender related crime that is not just a problem between individuals but a structural problem as well. Sexism is a way for men to keep power, crime and violence is about power and crime against women is no acceptation.  In the readings for this week I also found the way that women and men view conflict or violence to be particularly interesting. In the reading titled Bodily Harm by Suzanne E.Hatty she states that men view violence as a "means to assert or maintain control over others" while women view it as "a failure of self-control". In her article Brock-Utne also brings up the point that women more than men are against the idea of going to war.  I am not saying that if women had more say in government and war making decisions that this world would be 100% peaceful but I think we would be closer.

Gender and Identity

Going through these readings I am realizing that rather than accepting gender as a word that has no history I am being forced to look into what it means. Gender is another word we use to identify ourselves. Now we have the issue of coming up with a meaning for Identity. Is our identity our own individual foundation that we must find? Is our identity completely constructed by the social world? A mix of both? These questions also come up when looking at what gender is. Is our gender a product of biology, or completely formed by social practices? In the article by R.W Connell titled Making Gendered People he argues that it is a mix of both. In his words femininity and masculinity "constitute a world that has a bodily dimension, but is not biologically determined." In the other reading called Full Frontal Feminism by Jessica Valenti she discuses how feminism has been made into something unattractive. Its true, I think that it is more or an insult than a compliment to call someone a feminist but I don't think that it is as dramatic as Valenti portrayed.  I liked her point that all women who did not agree with the pay difference between men and women, childcare, women s health care...etc. then you are feminist. Then, in her eyes I am.  In my mind a feminist is an activist for feminist issues and at the moment I am not speaking out against anything feminists do.  This is mostly because I do not feel the inequity personally at the moment.

The very first one

The reading was confusing but out of all the new vocabulary and complicated sentence structure I pulled out a couple ideas that interested me.  The idea that identity is not something that you "find" but rather something that society constructs is one that I agree with. Because gender is a part of our identity it too is not something we have from the get go but rather something that has been constructed for us. Our gender and the gender roles we are supposed to fill are constructed through our history, culture, religion, language and many more factors. In class we looked at how media portrays the perfect man or woman and how we portray what we think is the perfect man or women.  These roles were not chosen by us but rather we were born into them.  I also found it interesting how in class the perfect man or woman as portrayed by the media was not always what we personally believed. Since the media reflects what we think is the perfect man or woman I wonder who's idea of a perfect man or woman influenced what was shown on t.v and how that may change with our changing views of perfection.