Concerns about the Media

I am deeply concerned about the current generation of children and adolescents. This is mostly due to the fact that my eight-year-old sister is a member of this generation, but also because they are a unit of our society. I feel like the current generation knows more about life at a younger age than any of those that came before it, and this is mostly because of the media. It doesn’t seem like there is a childhood anymore. After watching documentaries like Killing Us Softly 3 and The Merchants of Cool, I have realized that television producers and advertisers are basically able to get away with anything if it means that they will have more viewers of a specific program or consumers of a given product. Both of these documentaries showed how sex and sexuality are portrayed everywhere, because that is what sells.

I have watched many “family” movies and television shows with my sister, and it is disturbing to see how much sexual innuendo is present in programs that are supposed to be suitable for a younger audience. I’m not sure if producers do this to entertain parents, but I think it is terrible. The media is sending children mixed messages that sexual activity is normal for teens, while school systems are trying to promote abstinence. If a child sees a character that he or she idolizes on a television show acting in a suggestive manner, it’s hard to know whether they are going to follow what their favorite actor is doing or what the school says to do.

Because the media can be so unpredictable, I think that a lot of this problem is left in the hands of parents or anyone who may have a young child or adolescent in their household. It is up to them to filter and monitor what their children are watching on TV, and to never leave them alone with it.

Do you think that the media is more inappropriate and suggestive than it was when we were younger? Or is it simply that we are old enough to notice it now?

Gender in Media and Language

In class this week the one think that really caught my attention was in the clip from Scrubs when the nurse is in a bikini all oiled up. Then someone commented that you rarely see men in Speedos all oiled up. It's true, rarely is a man objectified in popular media. Granted it is present in some newer films and shows, but not nearly as much as women's objectification. In addition to visually representations of women there are also the verbal descriptions of women that in general are more objectifying and sexual. Like in the 40 Year Old Virgin, almost every monologue between the men is about women and sex. In comparison there aren't many monologues between women talking about men as conquest and so forth. The one exception I can think of is Sex in the City. Of course that is the whole basis of the show "having sex like men."

The more I think about it the more I notice that the things we consider normal can be sexually bias and/or often objectifying women. Take the Declaration of Independence for example, "All men are created equal" (but not women). There are also countless other examples of sexual bias that we use in our everyday language such as; businessman, mankind, human, fireman, policeman. Not only does this trend exist in English, but it can be much more pronounced in other languages such as German. For example a male teacher is Lehrer a female is Lehrerin, and a male professor is Professor a female in Professorin. In the German language every title has two gendered words. This to me suggests a difference or inequality between the people in those positions and there abilities.

It’s the simple emphasis that we place on titles which suggests inequality. Why can’t all food servers be called waiter or host? Why must we say “female doctor” instead of just doctor, is the fact that a doctor is female change her medical expertise? I highly doubt it! All of this seems so simple and stupid, and yet it frustrates me.

Gendered Communication

Okay, my thoughts are still dwelling on the rather “intense” conversation my group engaged in during class. This conversation was sparked by statement two on the Beliefs About Sex and Gender Issues worksheet. Now I just want to make it clear that truly I’m not personally bother by what was said of anything like that (just wanted to reassure you Prof. Scott). I'm writing about this because after a few days of thinking about I realized that the “intensity” of our conversation itself was a part of gender representations.

So, statement two said “Young children need an at-home mother at least for the first year of life.” The group was comprised of three other women, Shannon, and me. Shannon and I said it was generally false, the other three said it was generally true. Then one of the other group members began to tell us why children should stay at home with a parent until they’re one year old. A little calm conversation began with each person explaining their reasoning. Then me, being the psychologically inquisitive person I am, asked everyone whether they had stayed at home with a parent or not. When it was discovered the three members who said the statement was true had indeed stayed at home I suggested to the group that our upbringings influenced our beliefs. That’s when I’d say a distinctly female way of speaking defensively and offensively began. A very mild “cat fight” if you will. Shannon and I were told how babies need to be at home with someone, and that you can’t always trust daycares. Well, I wasn’t going to just sit there and listen to what I personally knew to be false so I rebutted by using Shannon and I as an example, explaining we were both in daycare as infants and weren’t scarred by the experience, Shannon agreed with me. Then one of the other group members responded by making a personal attack that she tried to fix or brush off afterwards. She asked us how old we were, when we said nineteen and twenty she responded in a manner similar to, “Oh, well that explains it, you’re too young to understand what it’s like to be a mother.” Then she said, “Just kidding.”

The point I’m trying to make by recalling this whole narrative is that classically women are too hard on each other. We judge each other’s decisions too much and try to put others down. This has always bothered me for one important reason, (I heard this on TV at one point) if we make it okay to put down each other then we give men the green light to do it as well. Sometimes I wish we could all just stop and see this, and live in the unrealistic blissful harmony like at the end of “Mean Girls.” Knowing that in the near future that would be almost impossible is what keeps me indecisive about having children. I want to raise children and have a family, but I also don’t want to have to give up a career and part of my identity like in the one episode of “Sex in the City” when they go to the baby shower in Connecticut and see all of the former lawyers and brokers unemployed, worrying about diapers, and also judging the single women who hadn’t conformed to their societies expectation of women yet.

Cultural Differences and the Socialization of Gender

One of the topics that really stood out to me while reading the assignment that was due yesterday, was how different cultures view gender and sex. I found some of these differences to be very troubling and strange, but I know that that is only because they are not “normal” practices in our society. One of the practices that I am referring to is on page 50, and it deals with children in the Dominican Republic. It says that “it is common for males to be born with undescended testes and an underdeveloped penis” (Wood 50). The boys are then treated like girls and wear dresses until their bodies are fully developed, when they are then treated like males. My group had an interesting discussion about this yesterday, dealing with the potential psychological damage that could be done to the child. Adolescence is confusing enough as it is, and this cultural practice seems like it would just add to the confusion of figuring out who you are and where your place is in society.

My next thought came to me after watching a video on Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment in sociology today. If you are not familiar with this experiment, Zimbardo conducted a simulation of how prisoners and their guards interact by placing about 20 volunteer male college students (with perfect mental health and perfect mental health history) in the basement of a psychology building and turning it into a mock prison. The students were randomly assigned either the roles of guards or the roles of prisoners, and the experiment was set to run in two weeks duration. By the second day of the simulation, all of the students began to assume their new roles and identities. Some of the guards became sadistic, placing their prisoners in an isolation cell (which was actually a dark storage closet) for hours at a time, and several of the prisoners became rebellious and resisted the guards’ control. The experiment ended up being cut short after 6 days because Zimbardo realized that what he had done was completely unethical and that the prisoners were enduring extreme psychological and emotional abuse from the guards.

While I was watching this video, I kept thinking about gender differences and whether the experiment would have had a different outcome, had Zimbardo conducted it with women rather than men. Wood argues that the genders are socialized differently and that women have a maternal and protective instinct (Wood 54). If this experiment had been conducted with women, do you think that women would have used their maternal instinct to protect their fellow prisoners from the emotional abuse? Or, would they have taken on the roles that they were assigned, like the men in the actual simulation did?

Welcome - Our first entry!

For me the most interesting topic in Gendered Lives so far has been, well obviously gender. More specifically, the difference between sex and gender is what caught my attention. Even though this difference was covered in both my PSYC 100 and PSYC 211 classes I guess I didn’t quite fully grasp the concept. I did cognitively understand the difference, but it wasn’t until reading about femininity and masculinity and how in some cultures there are more than two genders that I feel I developed a more complete and open understanding or gender.

Perhaps the most important new understanding I feel I have developed about the topic of gender is that it doesn’t have to be simply male or female with a distinct line drawn in between the two. Rather, gender seems to be best explained as being on a continuum of sorts in which the most masculine or traits is at one end and the most feminine at the other with all sorts of unique combinations and identities throughout the middle.

Of course characterizing traits as either masculine or feminine also brings about another topic, and that is how each gender is expected to be represented according to our society, our patriarchic society. What I find most unsettling and still unanswered at this point in time is, how our society and basically the majority of societies today became patriarchic. What originally happened that allowed men to claim superiority over women? Logic would suggest physical strength, accounting for strength being a masculine trait, weakness a feminine trait, and I can only guess that gender/sex specific roles followed. Perhaps, I will soon find my lingering questions answered in the days and reading to come.