Unit 2 Blog Post

After spending many classes discussing how gender is socialized and what it's effects are I have come to this conclusion.
Gender as defined in the Doing Gender article is, "An achieved status: that which is constructed through psychological, cultural and social means."  In constructing the social aspect there are 4 main Agents of Socialization that help determine gender. They are; your family, your peers, your school, and mass media. Your family helps construct your gender by teaching you social roles of a man and a woman. The average American child has a father that is the main breadwinner for the family and a mother that stays at home and takes care of you and does house work. Mr. Vinluan even told us that he was taught gender roles by his mother in a book that she read to him. This book called "I'm glad I'm a boy, I'm glad I"m a girl" gives various comparisons between what man should do and what a woman should do, one of the comparisons states that boys can eat and girls can cook. Which leads kids to believe that girls should cook for their families. In school kids are taught many gender roles, for example in class when Ethan was asked to describe what manly was, he said strong, not emotional and makes money for his family. This also leads to the belief that men should make money and work not women. Your peers have the largest impact on how your gender is constructed. Society/your peers have a large set of expectations that one must follow if they want to be a true man or a woman. Men must play sports, get a bunch of women, fight other people to prove themselves and not show emotion. In Freaks and Geeks when Sam and his friends are not good at dodge ball or rat the bully out to a teacher they are told to man up and not act like women. Or when they are bullied they challenge the bully to a fight to prove themselves. In the Gender Socialization and Stratification activity the idea that men are supposed to conquer other women by having sex with them and then claiming them as trophies is brought up. One father says that even though his son is said to have raped multiple women, he believes that his son was being manly and proving his sexual prowess. This leads to another point having to do with gender, in multiple sources in the Gender Socialization and Stratification activity it is said that women are there only to satisfy mens sexual needs and that sexual harassment is seen by some to have blurred lines. In the song Blurred Lines, it is stated that "I know you want it" and that she needs to "be a good girl" or that "the way you grabbed me you must want to get nasty". All of these quotes seem to say that women are always asking for it and that it is not rape because women are just supposed to please men. Which is wrong. This leads to the mass media aspect of gender construction. Gender changes quite dramatically depending upon where you are in the world. In America women believe that you must be thin, have big breast and always dress to impress to look like a real woman. This is because all of the women on tv are so dramatically sexualized. I found that through my Un-TV Assignment that all of the women on tv hardly wear any clothes and always have on a ton of make up. While in Fiji women are thought of as beautiful when they are chunky and it is thought of as a insult when some one says you have lost weight. But, when TV was introduced to Fiji this all changed. Girls started to have eating disorders to lose weight because the women they saw on American TV were skinny and this taught them that in order to be beautiful you had to be skinny.
So all of this gender construction has a very negative effect on people in society because if you are gay you are seen as not a real man (homophobia reading). Also it teaches girls at a very young age that they are sex objects, which causes them to start trying to be "sexy" while they are still little. Which can lead to bullying girls if they are not "pretty". So mainly it causes many people to become insecure with themselves.
2. Learning all of this has affected my sociological imagination because now I know there is a difference between sex and gender. Sex being purely biological and gender being socially defined. Also now I realize that if I jokingly call some one "gay" or "un-manly" that this can be taken as very offensive so I don't say it any more. But mainly I have realized that as a white man I need to help minorities and women break the glass ceiling that is in place in their lives so they are just as able to get a high paying job as I am. I realize that as a white male I have according to the per talk we watched a lot of power in today's society, so if i can get my friends and those around me to help those that are affected by this glass ceiling, then I would have made a difference. I realize that I am constantly constructing others genders because I am their peers (agent of socialization), so I try to not make any judgements on others and try to encourage others to break free from social restraints and be who they are.
3. I feel that there definitely can be a solution to gender stratification and discrimination, but i think that this solution would take a long time to fully solve this problem, for example Target tried to go gender neutral in their stores by not labeling toys as either boy toys or girl toys. but sadly this change was reverted. I think we definitely need to get rid of the glass ceiling that prohibits women and minorities from getting high paying jobs. We can do this by teaching our children that women are just as capable as men so when they grow up and are the adults of society they can make sure that women and minorities have as much of a chance as men do to get these jobs. Also we can teach young boys and men that sexual harassment no matter how you look at it is unacceptable and that there are no blurred lines in consent, there is only a yes or a no. This will help make kids aware that rape is wrong and that women are not trophies that you earn. Also we can change mass media, and make it that every woman on tv isn't a sexual object serving to please men. This helps aid in the belief that women are not on this planet to please men, but instead here to be people just like every one else. Maybe if we had a woman president then people would start to accept women's ideas more so and hopefully the views in Miss Representative would be changed.