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.