Weakness: Is it Physical or Mental

Okay, here’s something I have a little theory on. Let me know what you think, I may be way out there on this one or dead on, I’m not sure.

So last week I went to the Staples store by my house to get some ink and paper. I decided to get one of those boxes of paper instead of just one packet. I hadn’t planned on getting the box when I went into the store, but they were having a sale. Anyway, I decided to get the box of paper, I’d say it weighted all of thirty pounds or so. When I walked up to the checkout line the cashier was very surprised that I carried the box by myself. He said usual a sales associate has to pick up the boxes, put them into the carts, and load them into vehicles for women.

At first I thought to myself, “what a sexist.” However, while driving home I realized that as far as I knew the cashier was not a sexist, he was merely stating a fact. The fact was that women who shopped at his store often demanded assistants in carrying a thirty pound box.

Now here’s my theory: Thirty pound is not that much. I wasn’t too much for me to carry through the store, and I certainly doubt it’s to much for the majority of able bodied women to lift into a shopping cart, and then into the trunk of their cars. Perhaps our society’s infantilizing views of women contributes to some women’s own views of themselves as weak.

Transsexuals and Provocative Manikins

Last night my mom and I were watching a documentary on the Discovery Health channel called Sex Change. Though we have watched documentaries and read about transsexuals on several different occasions throughout the semester, it is still a subject that fascinates me and crushes me at the same time. Over the course of the show, we were able to meet five different people (4 females and 1 male) who went through with the surgery and the hormone treatments. While I was hearing each of the individuals’ stories, I kept thinking about how I never would have known that they were born as something different. I think it is so amazing that we have the capability to improve peoples’ lives like this so that they are able to live feeling “normal” and happy about themselves. The show ended with the camera focusing in on a bustling city street with the time sped up, and the narrator explained that at any moment in our day-to-day lives we might come in contact with a transsexual and not even know it. We then zoomed in on a man leaning against a building who we found out was the producer of the show and who is also a successful writer. The narrator then informed us that this man was born as a female. I loved the way that the show was filmed and produced. It showed that people who do get sex changes are able to live more normal lives without the daily stigma of feeling different or abnormal.

Something else I have been thinking about has to do with the manikin displays in store windows. When I went to the mall with Brittany and Kayse about a week ago, I felt like I was paying more attention to the ways that males and females are represented because of what I have learned in this class. Every female manikin had her legs showing (except for maybe one in the ENTIRE mall, which is strange—shouldn’t the stores be marketing winter clothes?) and she was placed in a pose that was both unnatural and unrealistic. Victoria’s Secret, for example, featured women in the front window in very provocative and sexual poses that were incredibly unnatural. Victoria’s Secret ads get to me anyway because I have trouble believing that they are geared towards their female customers…

Transgender Dilemma

After watching that film about the Vagina Monologues in class last week that’s all I seem to think about. These perpetuating thought were also encouraged by a Grey’s Anatomy episode which dealt with a man who was planning to have the surgery which would change his penis into a vagina, the sex change operation. However, this character had been taking hormones previous to the surgery which allowed her to grow breast. During a pre-surgery check-up it was discovered that she had developed breast cancer which in essence was being fed by the hormones. She was told by the doctors that if she continued with the hormones the cancer would spread and chemotherapy may not work, this left her with the likely possibility of death. But, if she stopped taking the hormones her masculine feature would come back and she would become a man again.

This character was left with a horrible decision. To live as an unhappy woman trapped in a man’s body but “normal,” or to live for what may be only a while as a happy woman body and soul, meanwhile being “strange” and prone to hatred or violence. She chose to go ahead with the surgery and continue to take hormones despite the risks. Now this particular case I know doesn’t apply to all transgender people, but her story really made me think about how important changing really is to them. Honestly I never truly thought about it before as life and death, but theoretically (at least for the Grey’s character) it was be a man and kill your soul, or be a woman and celebrate life.

This is an interesting article about how New York City is going to make it easier for transgendered people to change the sex on their birth certificates--even before they have surgery...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/07/AR2006110701262.html


Maybe they'll lead the way with this.

What is Feminism?

I just came from my sociology class, where we had a somewhat disturbing conversation about feminism. Our professor asked us to get out a sheet of paper and write "What is feminism?" at the top. Then underneath the question, he asked us to write whatever came to mind about feminism and to indicate on the back of the sheet whether we were male or female. He collected these papers and showed them to us on the overhead projector so that we could see our peers’ comments/opinions about the meaning of feminism.

Out of 120 students in the class, there were only about 15 of us who would even dare to raise our hands and identify ourselves as feminists or who, on our comment sheets, even knew what feminism was. One male student wrote on his sheet that feminism is "petty," and when his comment was shown to the rest of the class, quite a few people were upset. He attempted to explain himself by saying that he thought women who want to change the language are just being petty and that they should focus on larger problems. The example he used was the word "mankind." He could not begin to understand why a feminist would be upset by a word that describes the species (his exact words) and he thinks it is dumb that women focus their attention on such "stupid" things.

When he said this, it even got my professor (who is a male) riled. The student obviously has not been paying attention in class this semester if he couldn’t understand why words and the structure of our language could cause such a problem. One of the first things we learned about in the class was the Sapir-Whorf principle, which explains that language shapes how we think about and perceive everything in society. He couldn’t grasp that words like "mankind" or the pronoun "he" are the basis of male superiority and gender inequality in our society. These generalizations fail to recognize that something else exists and it creates a sense of otherness to those it excludes (like we talked about yesterday in class).

A female in the class suggested to this confused student that we use "womankind" to describe the species. I’m sure you can only guess what his reaction to that was…

Halloween Madness

Yesterday morning I caught the beginning of a story on the Today Show before I had to run out the door for school. The report focused on the change that has taken place in women’s Halloween costumes, and how the vast majority of the costumes out there are basically another contributing factor to the objectification of women.

There were two costumes that struck me the most. One was supposed to look like a correctional officer’s uniform, but really did not look like one at all. It consisted of a pair of disgustingly short booty shorts and a short sleeve button-up shirt that would accentuate a woman’s chest. Another costume was supposed to make a woman look like Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz. Honestly, if I had seen someone wearing this costume--Dorothy is probably the last thing I would have thought of if a person asked me to guess what they were trying to be. In the movie, Dorothy is a very conservatively dressed person, and there is nothing revealing about her. The costume was a completely different story. Besides being blue and white with ruffled sleeves, it was nothing like what was worn in The Wizard of Oz.

These costumes were terrible. I think that if I hadn’t been running out the door for class, I probably would have shut off the TV anyway. This class has really made me start to see the consequences of almost everything around me, and sometimes it can be too overwhelming and frustrating to take in—but I love it at the same time.

While I was out trick-or-treating with my 8-year-old sister last night, we passed a woman who was basically naked. She was standing with a large group of kids—I think some might have been her own children and the others were the kids’ friends, which makes what I am about to say even worse. Her husband/partner was dressed as Superman and I believe she was supposed to be Wonder Woman. Her costume consisted of a red, white, and blue skin-tight leotard that didn’t really have any chest coverage and then it also had a cape (thank God!). I was offended by this costume for several reasons. The first is because there were so many young kids around and I think it is completely inappropriate for them to be exposed to things like that—I don’t even think I should have to be exposed to that. Second, I don’t think she was wearing the costume for her own comfort. Its aim was obviously to appeal to men. And by wearing this costume, especially in the presence of so many impressionable children, she was demonstrating that women are supposed to dress in a revealing way in order to be seen as attractive in the eyes of men. I think it is another factor that will perpetuate the objectification of women and make the terrible cycle continue for years to come.

Halloween Costumes

I was shopping at the mall this weekend when I observed some interesting behavior. So interesting in fact, I sat on a bench while waiting for my sister and further observed this behavior. The behavior I’m referring to is the gender typing of children.

Halloween is tomorrow. This weekend at the mall children and their parents (usually their mothers) where shopping for costumes. Of course we all know that the best part of Halloween besides the candy is dressing up like someone of something we aren’t. Halloween is a holiday (today in America) built upon children’s imagination. Almost anything a child wants do be they can. What is of interest is why they want to be these characters.

At the mall what caught my attention were the pleas of children. Girls begged their mothers for princess, fairy, and butterfly costumes. Boys begged for anything with swords, blood, goo, or fangs. The correlation seems quite simple. The girls generally gravitated toward soft, gentle, and “pretty” costumes. The boys generally gravitated towards strong, harsh, violent, and “ugly” costumes. The mothers’ reaction to their children’s choices was also very interesting. I found that often mothers would encourage their daughters’ choice of more feminine costumes by saying things like “oh how beautiful and cute.” They would also encourage their sons’ choice of more masculine costumes by saying things like, “oh how scary, strong, yucky.” For the older children this clearly had an influence on their decisions, they would smile at their mothers’ reactions.

While watching these families shop for their costumes I was reminded of my own costumes. I surprised myself by remembering everyone. I was equally surprised by how varying they were in terms of stereotypical gender from a dinosaur, vampire, and witch to a princess, space girl, fifties girl, and gypsy.

I was a:

Dinosaur
Princess
Witch
Vampire
Space Girl (like from the Jetsons...)
Fifties Girl
Gypsy/Fortune Teller

Can you remember your costumes? What do you think they say about you?

What needs to change...

I was reading an article this morning for my sociology class from the American Sociological Review. The article is called "Antiblack Discrimination in Public Places," and it gives personal accounts of situations and experiences that African Americans have had that showcase the oppression they face in their everyday lives and how they deal with this discrimination. One section really caught my attention because it reminded me of something that we have talked about before in class (and in the blog!), relating to the oppression of women. The section in the article that I am referring to focused on the personal account of a middle-class African American woman who happens to be a professor at a major all-white university. Here is a chunk of what she said:

"…Because I’m a large black woman, and I don’t wear whatever class status I have, or whatever professional status [I have] in my appearance when I’m in the grocery store, I’m part of the mass of large black women shopping. For most whites, and even for some blacks, that translates into negative status. That means that they are free to treat me the way they treat most poor black people, because they can’t tell by looking at me that I differ from that."

The last sentence is what really caught my attention because, as writer Joe Feagin explains later in the article, when she says "they can’t tell by looking at me that I differ from that," she is talking about her status as a professor. I felt that her statement was strange because she is almost trying to separate herself from her race and from her fellow African Americans by saying that she is different from them and that she basically doesn’t deserve to be lumped into that category.

This reminded me of an earlier discussion we had about the oppression of women and how there is no way that we are ever going to be able to overcome oppression if we keep picking on each other and pointing out our differences. This woman is an African American, whether she realizes it or not. I know that being a professor gives her more status than the "poor black people" that she refers to, but I think she needs to join forces with the poor, rather than try to separate herself from them, in order to combat the oppression that they are all facing because of the color of their skin.