Seven

For this post, we have explored how something like gender can be so taken-for-granted.  In our culture there is a polarization of what it means to be female and male and heterosexual and lesbian or gay.  Our culture pushes individuals to opposite ends of a spectrum.  For this post, use examples from your own experience to show how our society socializes men and women into narrow boxes.  How do the agents of socialization play a role in your experiences?  To demonstrate literacy, feel free to comment on the movies Killing Us Softly4, Tough Guise2, the reading from Kimmel and Mahler about masculinity or the myriad other sources on my blog posts over the last 2 weeks.

Post Seven concerns gender as a key issue in the United States. As we observed in the documentary we watched in Sociology, gender equality is NOT a settled issue. In fact, as the woman proclaims in Killing Us Softly 4, if anything, it has gotten worse in the last 30 years or so. In this documentary, the woman presents the audience with dozens of advertisements that range from the subliminal submission of women to the downright objectification into objects, like beer. "Sex sells" is something that marketers will bank on until the day they die, especially since the government is no longer regulating the ethicality of these advertisements.

In Tough Guise 2 (which has now become my favorite documentary of all time), the man (blanking out on names right now, my apologies) makes the argument that violence in the world is considered a universal issue that applies to all, even though that women are responsible for a mere 14% of all violence in the United States. It's a men's issue. The sensation and obsession with being a man and toughening up can only result in either intimidation or fights breaking out. Many school shootings occur because boys feel that they were picked on or weren't manly enough. One boy even declared that he wasn't insane, just mad, and that he was explicitly taking out his frustration on the years of dominance-driven bullying. Men cause pride, pride causes anger, and anger causes fistfights.

Why is this an issue? Why can't we all wake up tomorrow and officially declare equality? I believe the problem is slightly similar to race in a sense that our zeitgeist preaches equality, yet so many violations of this thesis are apparent that it's hard to convince even ourselves that the country we live in is equal. If we can convince ourselves that we don't need to "be a man" to be a good man or a "be a woman" in order to be a good woman, we could level the playing field in gender. This is almost impossible though, because there are so many men in this country who are outright convinced that men are dominant. In my AWOD classroom, all but two freshmen stated that they think men have opportunities in our society that women do not. The two boys, of course, were the toughest two boys in our class.