Clothes Defining Gender

During class the other day, we had a discussion about a book that we are currently reading, Dude You’re A Fag. We mostly talked about masculinity and femininity in high schools, but I want to discuss one of the questions from our discussion that we did not cover in class which was can we envision a future in which men are “allowed” to be feminine in ways women are allowed to be masculine today?  
Personally I feel that it would be great if guys were more accepted by society if they decided that they wanted to dress more feminine. Today, women who dress masculine by wearing baggy clothes or clothes that are made for men are acceptable in society. However, for men today to who dress feminine by wearing clinging clothes with colors such as pink or purple is not as readily accepted in society.
I think that people feel that if girls wear the baggy clothes then they assume that girls wear it just because it is comfortable. Also, I think that people feel that if guys wear clothes that make them look feminine then that must mean that they are gay. I’m sure that most people associate men who are gay to wear those types of clothes.
I once knew a guy in high school and he wore a purple shirt in school one day. Many of the other guys were teasing him because he was wearing “a girly colored shirt.” After that I never saw him wear that shirt to school ever again.
It would be great if we lived in a world where people are not judged by the clothes that they wear. I just can’t see it happening any time soon though. With the way society defines everything, it’s just hard to even think that we will get past even something as simple as what people should or should not wear.

Math skills

When we had our discussion on Thursday one of the topics that we did not get to discuss in class was that females are less likely to be good in math and science. I do not believe that this is true. Women are just as smart in math and science. My last years of high school my math and science teachers were women and they knew the subjects well and they were very good at teaching it. Also, I know that many girls did very well in math and science.

Personally I did very well in science, but I was never any good with math. I do not get math at all, it’s complicated and I just don’t want to mess with it because I am not interested in it. It could be biological because my parents and my grandparents are not that great with their math skills either.

 However, my brother is very good with math and he even thinks that algebra is fun. My parents have no idea where he got such knowledge for math because like I said nobody in our family is good at math. A few years ago my mom and I were watching something on the news and they were giving information about a study that women who eat a lot of fish while they are pregnant their babies will be more intelligent in school work.  When my mom heard this she said that it made sense because she ate a lot of herring while she was pregnant with my brother. I told her, “Well, I guess you didn’t eat any fish while you were pregnant with me.”

I sure that if I would try to commit myself to keep at math then I would probably be able to do better in it, but I know that math is not for me and since I am done with it I am concentrating on other things.

    

Idealistic Body Form

During our discussion in class we started off talking in groups about our readings. The group that I was in we talked about all of the summary discussions as one whole thing. We mainly focused on how people are so obsessed with their bodies. As a group we tried to figure out why being skinny is the idealistic body form in society and why women would put themselves in harm’s way in order to look skinny.

In our group I made a point that I had learned from my Art History class a year ago. One of the first images that we were shown was a Paleolithic miniature statue called the Woman of Willendorf or Venus of Willendorf as you can see on the image below provided by Wikipedia. That statue of a heavy set woman was the idealistic body form for women around that time because having that body type was a sign of longer life span and fertility and women were seen as beautiful. Women who were skin and bones around that time would not have lasted long.

Eventually, somewhere along the line people started to see thin women as having the beautiful idealistic body form. In our group someone wondered how we have become so obsessed with being thin. I found an article online written by Kate Fox called Mirror, mirror; she provides three reasons why our society is obsessed with the way we look. “Thanks to the media, we have become accustomed to extremely rigid and uniform standards of beauty.TV, billboards, magazines etc mean that we see 'beautiful people' all the time, more often than members of our own family, making exceptional good looks seem real, normal and attainable. Standards of beauty have in fact become harder and harder to attain, particularly for women. The current media ideal of thinness for women is achievable by less than 5% of the female population.”

It really is hard to go against all the pressures of how the media portrays women and how they should look. I hope that people will look past all of those lies and realize who they are and that they are special in their own way no matter what they look like.

Fox, Kate. Mirror, mirror. http://www.sirc.org/publik/mirror.html

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_of_Willendorf

Etiquette

In class we learned about gender nonverbal communication and the topic that interested me was kinesics which is facial and body movements. The typical kinesics behavior in women is to smile and use their facial and body gestures that are seen to others as gentle and approachable. The typical kinesics behavior in a man is to use their facial and body gestures more aggressively to others; like getting up in their faces and invading others personal spaces. Also, how a person sits and how their posture is like is considered body movement and how men and women are seen and approached.

Between the lecture, the teacher wanted us to do what I call an etiquette test. The teacher told us how to sit straight, to bend down, and to sit on the floor. I noticed that our teacher had told us to do all those things just as a lady would do them.  That means that all the guys had to do this as well. Since I had taken Charm class when I was in 9^th grade I knew all of the proper etiquette response that the teacher had instructed us to do so I mostly watched how everyone else, especially the guys, did their responses. I could not prevent myself from laughing when one of the guy’s was in pain from sitting straight while keeping his knees together and his feet crossed. It was nice to see the guys doing what most women have to do when it comes to posture and body gestures.

I found this video on youtube called Young Ladies Etiquette Classes; this is an advertisement that shows the teachings and the positive outlooks on how etiquette classes have impacted on young ladies. If you want to see the video just click on the link that is provided at the bottom or you can copy and paste it. This video shows how the young ladies learn proper etiquette so that they can become well behaved and mature ladies who people will come to respect. The ladies taking these etiquette classes are using them to learn how to be polite and respectful whereas I had to learn proper etiquette because I was told that it is what ladies have to do.  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-Qr8lzkIPE

Wood, J.T. (2011). Gendered Lives: Communication, Gender, and Culture. Boston: Wadsworth.