Unemployment Numbers

I just wanted to take a few seconds to share some unemployment numbers I saw in my Economics class. The unemployment rate is determined by figuring the number of people actively, but unsuccessfully, looking for a job and dividing it by the total labor force. Through these statistics, it is shown that, by comparing black and white males, blacks have an 8.1% higher unemployment rate. When comparing black and white females, blacks have a 6.4% higher rate of unemployment. When comparing numbers between males and females, females actually have lower unemployment rates. Just thought I take some time to share that with you all.

boys vs. girls

I thought some of the pictures that we looked at last on Thursday were really interesting. I was especially taken back by the "diamond ring" rattle. To groom girls at such a young age to only aspire to marriage and jewelry seems pretty terrible. Everything that young children are taught and given has a huge impact on the rest of their life. Young boys are given toys that resemble tools and cars. Basically, they are taught that they are EXPECTED to do other things besides getting married. Why should young girls be taught any less? Obviously, this got me thinking about other gender constructions like this. Although there are definitely some limiting male gender constructions, the female gender expectations really seem to be inferior. A lot of them seem to make a woman frivelous with life centered around a man. Women have a come a long way as far as becoming independent, but I wonder if these limiting gender constructions will ever really diminish.

Kilbourne Reading

The “Two Ways a Woman Can Get Hurt” reading caused me to have a strong response. I think something to keep in mind, before getting all emotional over some of the provocative ads, is that it is JUST ADVERTISEMENTS. When trying to sell their product, a company will objectify anything if it means getting their product noticed and making it look good in the process. As we’ve all seen by now, most advertisements involve a sex related idea, and lack of emotion for the woman in the ad. On a lot of accounts, I think Kilbourne over exaggerates. I’ve heard she is sometimes considered somewhat of a feminist. She will explain an advertisement, like the one on the bottom of 239 about the perfume and shaking your head no – and then goes on to say “In other words” and explain her interpretation of that. I understand that some advertisements put ideas into peoples’ minds, but it still is just advertising. We all need to understand that companies will make advertisements to get their product noticed, even if it is unethical. I don’t think this issue is something to be too concerned over, because this type of advertising will probably never go away. But, I do think girls from a young age and all youth for that matter should be educated on the meaning of having a strong sense of self and confidence. That way when they do see ads, they don’t need to think, “Oh I need to look like her or act like her in order to be considered pretty or sexy.” On page 245 though it does talk about what we saw in class the other day- using little girls, all made up and seductively posed, in advertisements. As we talked about in class, this seems a bit de-humanizing, creepy, and disgusting. I do believe it should be illegal for companies to advertise in this way. Also just wanted to add- the part on 244 about the Canadian judge accusing a 3-year-old girl of being sexually aggressive… what the heck. How could that have even happened? That is completely ridiculous and I am completely shocked.

One step forward...

I would like to begin by saying I think there is a long way to go when it comes to gender equality for men and women. Women seem to get the short end of the stick most of the time. However, I think that society is showing some promise. Maybe, by the time the next generation is here, the inequality will be completely gone and men and women, male or female, will be treated equally. I just read an article today in The Buffalo News about young girls who were practicing with an all boys football team, thinking they could play in games together, but later finding out that there were rules against girls playing. However, once this was brought to the attention of the league that was in charge of the football team, they could not find good enough reason to not let the girls play. This is just a small example of how things really are changing for the better. I think that this will be happening more and more and eventually there won't be discrimination in some cases.
This is the link to the article in The Buffalo News.
http://www.buffalonews.com/city/columns/denise-jewell-gee/article588371.ece

kitchen set!

ok so im sooo excited about this topic because i have taken a lot of gender classes and my knowledge has grown so much about this issue since i have been in college. i have two nephews (who i love more than anything) and its so interesting to see how they grow up. in the olden days, and even now days, it is said that the women are the ones who belong in the kitchen. the men are supposed to be the ones who can put food on the table however the women have to cook it. i dont know if any of you guys ahve heard of buy buy baby. its a kids store, like toys r us, and they are now selling kitchen sets that are blue! so its showing that guys can be in the kitchen too which i think is great. my sister actually purchased on of these recently for a christmas gift for my youngest nephew and i think it is a great way to show respect for women. because a lot of times i feel like its disrespectful to say that the women belong in the kitch and should be doing all the laundry as well as cleaning. i hope that soon it will be socially constructed for men to "belong in the kitchen" WITH their wives :) if you go to toys r us website you can find pictures of boys kitchen sets!

Princess Boy

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DnbjtXDlv0

I saw this a little while ago while watching tv.In the video, the mother talks about how her little boy wanted to be a princess for Halloween and she at first said no. After her oldest son said "Mom, why can't you just let him be happy?" she then said yes.

This really got to me. So many people are afraid of boys not being boys or girls not being girls. Just let people be happy! Her son is happy and healthy and thats all that should matter. This mother is amazing!

PINK!

In class on Thursday we saw pictures of the same exact baby face, just one was all with blue and looked like a boy and the other was all with pink and looked like a girl. It was very interesting to me that the same face could look so much like different genders just because of the color it is associated with. This shows that if a baby boy was wearing pink on a normal day out in public, most people would most likely think it was a baby girl. However, it is more socially acceptable for older men to wear pink and not even be questioned about their gender or sexuality. If a baby boy wears pink he will be mistaken for a girl, but an older male is perfectly fine wearing pink.

Learning Gender

Parents obviously play a big role in teaching gender roles to their kids. This was became evident one time in my life when I was younger. I was to little to remember this story, but it has been told to me several times. I grew up with four sisters and no brothers and was surrounded by a lot of girls toys. My three older sisters thought it would be funny to dress me up in the fake plastic jewelry from their pretty pretty princess game. I was only about two years old and too young to protest. My mom and my sisters thought it was the funniest thing ever, and snapped a bunch photos of me in my princess garb. My dad was a different story. He came home from work and was furious to see his son dressed up like a Cinderella. He tore the jewelry off me and began worrying that I was scarred and my manhood was doomed being surrounded by all these women. I'd like to think that my manhood turned out alright, but I learned society doesn't like when we stray from our gender roles.

Articles/Discussions on Sex(ism)

As we talked about in class, read about, and have seen pictures of as well, we have touched on the topic of sex and sexism. It is quite ironic to see that as far as this country, and this world have come with making advances in equal rights that there are still so many things that seem to take us back to a time they did not exist. Toys, cereals, care packages...are all geared differently to boys than they are to girls. It is also funny to see how things are made in pink and flowers for girls and everything for boys is blue or has some sort of tool. Even nowadays from the time we are babies we are sent a certain message on how we should be and what we should like. It is definitely time that we start to become conscious of things like this so our children are not forced into a certain way that some members of society say they should be and let them never feel bad for not conforming to other peoples standards.

The Rise (and Fall) of the woman image.

Reading this article on how women are portrayed in advertising has really gotten me to thinking about how much women have gained in modern society and at the same time how much they've lost and their relationship.

In our modern society women have gained many things. No longer are women subjected to being housewives, no longer are they forced to be a primary caregiver in a family, and no longer are they discriminated (legally) in the workforce. Women are in politics, are heads of companies and are doing jobs someone 50 years ago would have never thought appropriate for a woman to do.

Along with this, though, is the destruction of their image. In our modern society, women have been increasingly sexified and demeaned. More than ever are advertisements and shows featuring and pushing the image of woman overtly sexually glorified. Victoria's Secret is a prime example. So do movies like American Pie (damn, do I love that movie though). Porn as well. The porn industry is now HUGE and it almost exclusively has women as the ones being dominated, demeaned. It even goes as far as to glorify pseudo-rape.

Is this increase in publicly demeaning actions a male response to the increase in power and equality women have received in recent years? Just throwing that out there.

Crazy Eddie

This past week, learning about the difference between gender and sex, and the acknowledgement that when we tend to categorize people into a group of either male or female, got me thinking of a local example I'd like to discuss - Crazy Eddie. You know how when you see someone you can't necessarily distinguish as a man or woman, and you can't help but think about it until you eventually come to a guess of which category to stick them in? This is what anyone who has ever seen "Crazy Eddie" has thought. Crazy Eddie is a City of Tonawanda local, who appears to be a man, with a male shaped body, facial hair, male facial structures, etc, yet he has what appears to be breasts, dresses like a female wearing skirts, and even has long hair (minus the balding spot on top). I guess at first this sounds a little ridiculous, even funny, but it eventually led to the entire City of Tonawanda and now people of surrounding cities talking about how weird this person is who rides his bike around the city all day long, appearing as both somewhat a man and woman. It's even led to a facebook page which publicly humiliates Crazy Eddie. I'm not sure where he got his name, but I can take a guess he didn't dub himself. Maybe Crazy Eddie's sex is male and his gender is female, I'm not really sure what his deal is. But through the discussions in class, and the articles we've read, I have a new outlook on Crazy Eddie, and I see the cruelty it has led to.

stereotypes and understanding each other

Not until after class last week did I realize how ingrained society has the idea that boys will like certain things and girls will like other things. Everything we do in life is based off of the choice of the individual what it is that they like more. I know lots of girls that like to work on cars, drive jet skis and all other types of vehicles as much as I do which is not typical. Then I also have friends that like to cut and style hair for a living which is something that girls usually are seen doing as well. We put things into categories based on a stereotype that has been in place for millennium that women do only certain jobs and men do other things. What we can take from this is that the key to understanding each other is to first accept how other people are different and what makes us similar and then we can remove stereotypes and not judge each other.

popculure and stereotypes

I saw a blog post about people feeding into stereotypes and I completely agree. I think a lot of people really are their own stereotypes. There is nothing I can do about a stereotype when I see so many rappers acting the way we "stereotype" them. It's true with any stereotype, white people down south feed into their stereotypes as well, maybe it is just the way the media presents them. It is really hard to say whether popculture is entertainment because we are laughing at stereotypes or the way people really are. If you go down south it's not like the media lies about the way hicks live their lives. Popculture is so important because it is a direct reflection of the way we see the world. Music, tv, and movies only have to do with things we are familiar with. Like the way minstrelsy used to be popular because of jim crow and the way you see racism against arabs because of political and social problems. Even though popculture might just be a diversion or entertainment it is still very important because it is where we learn stereotypes and where we learn about our society today and in the past. It is so much easier to really understand all the racism that used to be so much more accepted by the media when we watch clips of tv shows killing Indians or the horrible racism in Disney movies.
So basically I'm saying that I think popculture emphasizes the stereotypes we know and is a representation of the world today.

If gender is constructed...

As we discussed in class, gender, like race is a very socially constructed phenomenon. Society creates a perception of what a girl should be, and what a boy should be. If these social constructs were not so embedded into our brain, would that mean that transsexuals would not exist? Transsexuals usually change sex because they do not feel as they belong into the gender they were born and raised. However, if we did not have this strict belief of what a male and female should act and look like, then there would never be anybody feeling as if they do not belong as the sex they were born. A man could be born a male and still like things that women usually are associated with,and vice versa for a female. If we had no gender, then this would not be so abnormal. Our society tries to be so open, yet there are only two genders they deem as "normal", despite the fact that there are other cultures that recognize another gender. And, then to make matters worse for people like transsexuals, who already feel like they do not fit in, they are discriminated against and hate crimes and performed upon them. It's just sad, really. It would be very interesting to see how a child would grow up if they were raised gender-less, because then we could see how one exists without the social norms of gender controlling their life.

Disney fans beware - Mickey Mouse Monopoly

Attached is the film Mickey Mouse Monopoly. This documentary looks at the pervasive power of Disney and the gendered and racialized images within their films.

The film is broken up into five segments on Youtube. While the whole film is definitely worth watching, the second and third segments apply directly to this week’s classes. The first video is the film from its very beginning, the second video is the film's second section, which is specifically about gender.

Like Kilbourne argues of advertising, the film depicts how Disney films often portray women as a monolithic stereotype: the helpless seductress. This character, seen both time and time again in both Disney films and advertising, is highly sexualized, slim, frail, and passive. Often, the only time these characters are seen asserting their own power over a man is when the women character uses seduction to manipulate the masculine characters. The body becomes the only way that the women Disney characters can achieve their goals (goals which are always simply to please and “obtain” the man). Otherwise, the women characters in Disney films constantly find themselves in precarious situations where they require the men to rescue them.
Conversely men are often depicted as burly, strong and powerful. They are also often seen as sexual aggressors, however this aggression is justified because the women always allow it and eventually surrender to the sexual dominance of the masculine characters.

The film The Beauty and the Beast is a prime example of this gendered stereotype playing out. The Beast is an aggressive and violent character that abuses Belle for the vast majority of the film. Once Belle allows, passively tolerates and excuses his violence, she falls in love with him. This is essentially telling a young audience to excuse violence against women, but also presents a cultural climate where that violence is justified and normalized.

What are these images teaching us gender norms? How are they teaching us about the ways that men and women should act, and interact with each other? What are they teaching us about intimate relationships between men are women? Disney films are shown to children at such a young age (as are countless ads)? What are these images teaching our youth?