Week 10: Violence & Harassment

            This week in class was heartbreaking.  It really makes you realize what could be going on behind closed doors, and how there are some people that don’t even feel safe in their own home.  This week’s topic of violence and harassment brought me back to approximately one year ago at one of our date parties at school.  When you are in a sorority or a fraternity, there are a couple of times a year when you have events at third-vendor places where you are able to bring a date and they are called date parties.  This one specific one went horribly wrong for one of my best friends Hanna.  She had brought her boyfriend to the party and he had a history of being short-tempered when he had been drinking alcohol, and in this night’s case, he had been drinking a lot.  Approximately half way through the party him and Hanna got into a fight and he slapped her across the face in front of everybody.  She was hysterical, which she definitely should have been, so my friends and I took her home.  When we got home, she told us that that was not the first time he had hit her, and that she wanted to be done with him for good.  We all agreed with this and tried to be there for her, but none of us really knew what to say because we had never been in a situation like that before. 

The next morning when we woke up, Hanna was gone.  We tried calling her a million times until finally she walked into our apartment and said she has been at her boyfriend’s house all morning and they had worked everything out and he promised he would never do anything like that to her again.  We could not believe what we were hearing and we did not agree with her decision, but we tried to talk to her and find out why she wanted to be in a relationship where she didn’t feel safe.  Was it because she was nervous what would happen if she broke up with him?  Was she blinded by love?  None of us really got the full story, and although we now really didn’t like him we tried to be as supportive as possible.  Luckily a couple months later they broke up for good, and we never had to worry about him laying a hand on our precious Hanna again.

Although Hanna was able to get out of the toxic relationship, not everyone is that lucky.  People should never not feel safe in their relationships and their own home, and it breaks my heart to know that there are many people that are.  I will never know what triggers someone to physically hurt someone they love, but I hope they eventually realize they are doing horrible things and pushing people who care about them away.

Week 9: Gendered Close Relationships

It’s safe to say that this week’s class really made me question all of the relationships that I have with my guy friends.  Do they actually like me?  Would they hook up with me if they were given a chance?  Do they know that we really are just friends?  I sure do hope so.  I was really intrigued by the video that was shown in class of the guy video taping the responses of people at his school when he was asking them if they believed they could simply be just friends with the opposite sex, so I went home and asked my roommates and this is what they said:

Me: Do you think boys and girls can just be friends?

Nicole: Yeah, I have plenty of guy friends!

Me: So you don’t think that if you gave them the chance that they would hook up with you?

Nicole: Oh yeah for sure they would but that would never happen.

Me: So you can’t just be friends with them?

Nicole: No I think some of them consider me as just a friend.

Me: So some of them wouldn’t hook up with you?

Nicole: No they wouldn’t.  Well I hope they wouldn’t.  I’m confused.

            And just like that, I turned Nicole’s whole day around too.  Now she was questioning all of the relationships she had with he guy friends.  Moral of the story is I think there is a strong miscommunication between men and women.  Women so quickly write men off into the friend zone, and don’t always realize that the boys might not feel the same way or want that to happen necessarily.  So how are you supposed to know if any of your guy friends are ACTUALLY you friend or if they are just waiting for you to finally let him get in your pants.

Week 8: Workplace

This week had me thinking a lot about discrimination in the workplace and how it happens all the time, but not only to women.  Yes, it is easy to point out all the times that women are not treated as fairly as men, but if you dig a little deeper you can also see some signs of men being treated unfairly in the workplace as well.  Immediately my brother came to mind.  TJ is two years older than me and is in college to get a degree in Elementary Physical Education.  In high school and in the summers during college, I have been a nanny for two little children.  I got the job through a website called care.com, where people post nannying and babysitting jobs.  I remember telling TJ that he should make an account on care.com, because he is great with kids and that would be a great job for him, it would even look good on his resume because of the career he wants to go into.  At that point, he laughed at me and said that families will not hire a boy nanny.  I was confused, because if anything he is the one who is better with kids than I am.  Also, his entire college education revolves around learning how to work with children, whereas my major doesn’t have much to do with children at all.  TJ then told me that it was because there is too many stereotypes around males being inappropriate with children.  I was shocked, so I decided to look into it a little more.  Right then I started noticing a couple of things in all of the advertisements.  What I noticed was in the descriptions on a lot of the advertisements it said looking for a female college aged student, not a male student.  That is just one of the many times in which males are discriminated in the workplace, it is not just females.  We often look past these little discriminations because we think that women’s being treated unfairly is the bigger issue, but that is not always the case.

Week 7: Politics

           Normally, I’m the first person to say that I really dislike politics.  Coming from parents in opposite political parties, it has always been one of those topics that my family is not allowed to discuss unless someone wants a large argument to occur.  However, I found myself smiling in lecture this week talking about politics, rather than sitting at the dinner table, cringing, wondering if someone will start a fight by bringing politics up.  To be perfectly honest though, the pizza might have contributed to my happiness a little bit.  But apart from my love for pizza showing through my large grin, I was really interested in our discussions that we were having in class.

            I think the most intriguing part about our conversation was when we were talking about one-night stands, and whether guys respect girls who participate in them.  The boys in our class made it clear that respect is lost as soon as a girl decides to have sex on the first date, which brought up an eye-opening discussion.  I get really confused about this topic, because how are girls not supposed to get mixed signals?  Boys want you to have sex on the first date and will give you shit if you don’t, but they won’t respect you if you do.  It is almost like you can’t win.  I suppose I would rather take the heat of not hooking up with someone on the first date than not be respected, though.  In my opinion, you can usually prove the boy who said bad things about you wrong, but once respect is lost it is really hard to get it back.  But when it comes down to it, I really think that it is important to make decisions for yourself, and not for other people.  If you want to go around having one night stands and it makes you happy, that is your prerogative, and if waiting to become sexually intimate with a person is more your cup of tea, then good for you.

Week 6: Media

           I really enjoyed listening to everything everyone had to say in class this week about media and gender.  I think this is a huge on-going problem that we have in this world, and it won’t get any better if we don’t do anything to change it.  Everyday I see advertisements in magazines and on the television of rail-thin models who are considered the epitome of beautiful.  I, myself, am aware that that is not the case, and how men biologically are attracted to a women with curves because it shows they are able to bare a child, but young girls might not understand these things.  Yes, there are times where I see an advertisement and think, “Wow she looked really good I wish my legs were that skinny,” but in the end, I am comfortable in my body and, unfortunately, that is not something that all women can say.  They see these models in the media and try to strive to be exactly like them, they aren’t comfortable in their body and that is a very sad thing.  It is the reason why so many girls today have terrible and detrimental eating disorders, and it is an epidemic that needs to be stopped.

            The problem of eating disorders hits very close to home because my best friend struggled with this issue in middle school and high school.  She was unfortunate enough to fall under the myth that you had to be skinny to be beautiful, like what was shown in the media, and it was painful to see her go through this and not be able to help her.  For years, our close friends and her parents tried to get her to see how beautiful she was in her natural body, and that she didn’t need to lose any weight.  That did not stop her though, because what she saw in the mirror was completely different than what we saw when we looked at her.  As humans in this big world, we need to realize that the media isn’t everything.  Just because the media says “skinny is beautiful” doesn’t mean that is how everyone feels.

Week 5: Culture

          There were many parts about the lecture and tutorial discussion this week that stood out to me.  First, it caught my attention when we were talking in lecture about arranged marriages and mail order brides.  I took a marriage class at my university back home last year, and I found this to be the most interesting and different topic that I learned about.  There is also a practice in Vietnam know as matchmaking, where someone from Vietnam has moved overseas, and finds someone else overseas that they set up with a family friend back home.  It is known as a social remittance, which means giving social aspects back to your homeland while you are abroad.  I was so intrigued by this topic because it is so unlike anything that I have ever heard.  This matchmaker has to work out all of the meet ups and visa problems that occur, and she almost never gets repaid.  It is a new form of arranged marriage that people are looking to in Vietnam.

            In the tutorial, there were also a lot of points in our discussion that stood out to me.  I truly believe that education and awareness is the key to shining a light on a lot of the problems that are happening in third world countries.  It is hard to judge people on what they do in their villages because of their cultural values, but it is equally as hard to not see that female mutilation is painful and wrong.  I was really taken back by all of the videos we watched in class, and I couldn’t help but think about how much I wanted these young girls to be educated and know that they have other options.  Being brutally mutilated is not the only way to be marriageable, but how do you tell that to a young girl when she doesn’t know any better?  It is a difficult and sensitive topic and I truly wish that they will find peace and education in their villages, because the complications with cultural acts, such as female mutilation, could really put many girls lives at risk. 

Week 4: Socialization and Gender

          Talking about gender and education this week really made me reflect on my job working at a day care in high school.  I usually worked with 3 and 4 year olds and their sense of gender at that age was incredible.  There was rarely a time when you saw the boys and girls playing together, because they were all interested in different things already.  There was too many times when I had to get in between an innocent fight between the boys before they got hurt.  After I would break up the fight they would get made at me because they were trying to see who was "stronger".  It is incredible that at that age they are already worried about being masculine and one-upping each other.  On the other hand, the girls were much more delicate and would always want to play house and read princess books.  At one point I did not even need to look at the words on the pages of Sleeping Beauty because I had had it memorized from reading it so many times.  Surprisingly, there were problems with reading books too, because they would fight over who go to sit on my lap or who got to lean on my shoulder.  Once again, I was so intrigued about how young their feminine sides showed and how they had to be near or touching each other all the time.

          I also saw examples of this when I was a nanny for two summers in a row.  The first summer it was just a one year old girl who I was watching, so the gender roles were a little less obvious.  She would play will all her toys, whether they were neutral or feminine, and not worry about a thing.  In the spring, she was blessed with a little brother and just like that her feminine side came shining through.  She no longer played with her neutral toys, saying they were for her little brother because they were "boy toys".  She would only dress up in Disney Princess outfits, and when I would try to get her brother involved and put one of her dresses on him she would start crying saying that he was a boy so he was not allowed to like princesses.  It is amazing that at such a young age she knew about gender roles and stuck by them like she was under oath.  I’m curious to see if this ever goes away, or if she will forever be connected with these roles.