My thoughts on the semester

            There was a lot I disagreed with in the curriculum, and that being said, I had my horizons broadened a great deal.  I have an enormous amount of respect and gratitude for our lady ancestors who suffered horrific conditions due to their sex, and never had the opportunities that I can afford to take for granted.  And the revolutionaries in the fight for equality made sacrifices and took risks that I don’t know if I would ever be brave enough to venture into, especially not if everything in my upbringing was telling me that defiance was wrong.  The course also forced me to take a hard look at my own life and my own behaviors, and examine the many easy ways out that I’ve taken over the course of my life.  There have been many times, as I’ve found, that I’ve benefited personally by reinforcing gender stereotypes and other sexist behavior that could only have been damaging to womanhood as a whole.  It was sort of like kissing up to the people in power in hopes that I could at least elevate my position a little as opposed to taking my own power.  These habits will change, for certain, and I do have this course to thank for it.  There were a lot of sides to the issues that had never occurred to me.

       As far as journals go, that’s a question you may have to ask yourself as much as you ask me.  I found the blogging aspect of the course helpful enough, but I thought about it sort of as an informal paper or essay, and I did try to formulate my own conclusions and theories about the material and my reactions to it.  If you saw progression and evidence that a bit of thought was being put into the work, then the blogging has been successful.  Nice course, I dug it.

Fundamentalist religion

           Fundamentalism has its appeals, and I’ve also found fundamentalist religion attractive, just like I, on some level, have found traditional femininity and domesticity attractive.  The authors are right on, the world has gotten enormous, and complicated, with advances in technology and communication it all seems overwhelming coupled with the age old mysteries of human nature and where we go when we die and what compels people to do the horrible/wonderful things that they do.  It’s complex, and I have been tempted to take the easy way out and look to old time religion to tell me where my place is and how to act.  If I devote all of my beliefs to religious teachings, I no longer have to fight for equality as a woman, I already know I’m not equal, and that’s the way it’s supposed to be.  I don’t have to wonder what my ultimate fate will be upon my death, I already have those answers spelled out for me.  I don’t have to wonder why people do the things they do, I can write it off as being compelled by God or Satan, and I don’t have to do anything strenuous or inconvenient to change the world around me, I can offer up a prayer and assure myself that whatever it is that’s going on in the world is the will of God, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.  It’s reassuring, and it’s cowardly, and it’s lazy.  Things would all be so much simpler for women if they didn’t bother trying to manifest their full potential and achieve their own self actualization, just as it would all be so much easier to deny evolution and insist that God created the world in seven days.  I’m not saying this is why all people have turned to fundamentalism in these precarious and changing times, but these were the things that I’ve found seductive about the religion, and the reports in ‘Fundamentalism and the Control of Women’ seem to back me up on that.  Religion is a beautiful thing, but all to often, people turn to it for the wrong reason.

           Amanda Wright

Flat broke with children

       One of the central issues around which Hays writes her essay is ‘Who has the right to fix whom, and just what, exactly, is in need of repair’.  I find it interesting, and I’m willing to run with it, but not in the exact direction Hays has chosen to.  Hays seems to take it for granted that the American poor and unemployed are entitled to a cut from the wages of the American rich and employed.  Not only are they entitled to a cut, but they are entitled to a larger cut than they are currently recieving, and the qualifications for said cut should be broadened.  Perhaps I’m making unfair assumptions, but she seems to believe that the fact that a woman is poor automatically makes her virtuous.  Hays did not seem to perform any broad spectrum interviews on the general populace of mothers on welfare, she chose a case study of a single woman on welfare who was holding a job and expressing a desire to remain a productive citizen.  Good for that woman.  On another note, any scientist who collected data from only one sample, never repeated the experiment, and tried to publish generalized theories on that one sample, would be laughed out of the lab and probably lose tenure.  The same holds for the social sciences I say.  And on the subject of this one welfare mother, this woman even said flat out that there were women who do abuse the system, who just have children to get on welfare.  The writer, rather than believe that Denise actually knows what she’s talking about and is giving an accurate report, deduces that the bad welfare mothers are elaborate hallucinations brought about by a self loathing imposed upon Denise by the mainstream prejudiced against welfare mothers.  Some welfare mothers are lazy.  Some welfare mothers work their asses off.  The same can be said of any social demographic in any population.

Hays reports that a number of welfare mothers went to the diversionary workshop, then went home without ever applying for wefare.  Good.  Hays believes this is a horrible thing, I think it’s excellent, and I won’t apologize for it.  Welfare should be a last resort, not something you kind of want to get into, maybe, but then you say ’screw it’ because it’s just such a bother.  I don’t want to punish the poor.  But making welfare too attractive, as in more attractive than working in the private sector attractive, is going to give us such an influx of people on welfare that our taxpayers simply will not be able to support the weight.  Somebody has to pay for all of this, and no, I don’t devalue the labor invested in raising children.  But I don’t believe any government bureaucracy has the right to devalue my labor in raising my own children, and allocating money that I want to put away for my own children to go to someone else’s children.  Unless the people recieving it are absolutely desperate.  Hence the reform in welfare qualifications, to which I say ‘huzzah’.

             In the 1990s, twenty percent of female welfare recipients stayed on welfare for six to nine years, and a quarter stayed on for ten years.  Single parent families are on the rise, the nation’s deficit is staggering, and I wonder if American workers can really support that many dependants for that long.  A common argument is that money that should be spent on welfare and social programs is being spent on the war.  That’s valid, sort of, but the ugly fact of the matter is that the United States has to keep its fingers firmly entrenched in the Middle East, because that’s where the oil comes from.  It sounds ugly and self serving, I know, but I also can’t name many people whose lives wouldn’t be utterly ruined if they had to go for one month without oil and gas.  No transportation, no electricity, no heating or cooling, essentially no America.  America would be closed.  We don’t like to acknowledge our need for presence in the Middle East, but there it is.  One thing I’m in favor of is nuclear energy.  Another possibility for raking up the money is to take it from the extremely wealthy in the nation, another unsavory idea, as these extremely wealthy people tend to be the ones who keep the economy up by investing in the stock market and spending exorbitantly.  The years when the government made the highest revenues were the years that they lowered income taxes and that’s a fact, because people are not angels and when we are allowed to keep what we kill, then that inspires us to do a great deal more hunting than the prospect of sharing our prey with the entire tribe and keeping only scraps for ourself.  Again, it’s ugly and self serving, and it’s also human nature.  Punishing the wealthy for being wealthy will inspire them to stop working so hard, because what’s the use anyways, and to stop spending so much.  I’m sure the economy will definitely not feel the effect of a class of rich people who no longer go out to eat, travel, stay at hotels, purchase cars and yachts and wide screen TV’s and all of the other useless frivolous crap that the rich people give money to the not-so-rich-people (ie: Me) to get.

              In short, I do feel bad for poor mothers trying to live the American dream.  But Hays’ agrument did not impress me.

Sexual freedom

           One of the key aspects of modern social change has been the ’sexual revolution’ that started in the 1960’s and has carried over and morphed into different forms since.  I bought into the messages about equality of sexual conduct and sex without shame or strings attatched, and I was very promiscuous.  Embarrasingly so, now that I look back, but it never satisfied me (on any level) and never made me happy, and it certainly didn’t make me feel free or equal.  I try to look at the issue from an evolutionary perspective, imagine a group of cave dwellers.  The first group engages in sexual conduct with emotions, strings, obligations and social expectations attatched.  The second engages in free love.  Among the first tribe, when a woman becomes pregnant, there is at least some idea of who the father is, and that father has to have had at least some sort of emotional attatchment to said woman, or he never would have had that intimacy in the first place.  THerefore, the father protects and provides for that woman while she’s vulnerable due to pregnancy, and does the same for the child, as that child is his own.  The tribe survives.  Take the second tribe, a woman becomes pregnant, any number of men could have been the father, none of these men might take any particular interest in the woman’s well being because they have no investment in her, if she doesn’t die during her pregnancy, it’s highly likely that the child will die.  Then men may have more fun, but the tribe ultimately dies out within a few generations.  Also, the transmission rates of venereal disease are much higher from man to woman than they are from woman to man, making women much more vulnerable in this respect too.  The writer is correct in pointing out that sexual freedom doesn’t really deserve the glorification it’s recieved.  The rules of engagement surrounding sex have been oppressive for women, but ultimately they developed to protect women.  We need to find a happy middle ground, not another radical extreme in the opposite direction.

         Amanda Wright

Questions about the course so far

Do you think affirmative action still has a place in today’s workforce/educational institutions?  How should it be handled and what should it entail?  How do you think the sexual revolution of the 1960’s changed the lives of women in the United States, either for the better or for the worse?

Pop goes the Arab world

       I honestly thought, before reading this article, that an essay on the social relevence of pop music was somewhat trite.  I guess I had taken freedom of speech in our media for granted, being that I’ve lived with it my entire life, it just seemed natural that people had a selction of what they could listen to and what music spoke to them.  I’m very pro-capitalism for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that anything sponsored by the government almost always seems to be horrifically substandard to those sponsored by a private enterprise, and the idea of any government bureaucracy being in charge of media and entertainment seems completely dismal.  To know that the people in the Middle East are now gaining access to the same blessings I’ve enjoyed all my life is a tremendous relief, because there are so many different possibilities and viewpoints that media entertainment presents to us.  I know there is a great deal of strife between the nations of the Middle East, and I like to think that citizens having access to the music of other countries, whether allies or enemies, might give them common ground, an appreciation or a better understanding of their neighbors.  Some may view the process of voting and free choice with regards to music a sort of distration from the things that really matter, and I believe that it would be detrimental to the people of the region if they simply let the process of free choice end and be confined to entertainment venues.  However, I strongly suspect that this is simply a beginning point for more democratic societies in the region, where power will be more equally balanced.  It will take time, and effort, and probably a loss of life, but I do believe it is within reach.

Maid To Order

         I found a few connections in Maid to Order, some from previous classroom observations, some from other materials.  I’ve found that all across the globe, when women want to have some of the power that men have traditionally had, they do so by taking on male attributes (Power recreates itself in its own image).  Part of the tradition of masculinity is domination over women.  Women who want power seem to find it much easier to dominate other women than to really challenge the status quo and dominate men.  That seems to be too radical to risk.  I think a lot of that ties into the phenomona of hiring ‘cleaning ladies’ to perform tasks that were traditionally assigned to women of the family.  First, a woman asking a man to perform housework is a radical reassignment of traditional gender roles and risks provoking feelings of resentment.  The much safer choice is to hire another woman to do the job.  Peace and calm is preserved, but no moves toward gender equality have been made.  Also, a working woman probably faces monumental discrimination and has to work twice as hard to advance to the level of her male coworkers can come home, observe the cleaning lady and remark to herself ‘At least that isn’t me’. Even hiring household help, which seems like a straightforward, utilitarian need, has taken on symbolic significance in that maids scrub ‘the old fashioned way’, taking a submissive, degrading position that really does nothing to make the task more efficient, but does reinforce feelings of superiority.
I don’t neccessarily think that hiring domestic help is in itself evil, we are a capitalist society and specialization of professions is part of what makes us prosper. But attitudes toward the hiring of maids have got to change, or every step forward that the feminist movement has made will be so saturated in classism and hypocrisy that it may cripple us.

Riverbedblog

The most dramatic difference I noticed between the Iraqi family and the American family was the solidarity.  Aside from my parents and my father’s mother, I had little to no contact with my family at all.  The tribe also seems to act as a sort of an enormous, extended family, which amazes me.  On one hand, the pressure to conform to the wishes of so many people must be a great deal heavier than the pressure to conform to the wishes of two parents,  but on the other hand I feel myself longing for that sense of being part of a greater whole that is willing to take action for you and takes an interest in you simply because you are a member.  There is great freedom in our culture, but great anonymity and isolation.  Any difficulties I may have faced in my life pale in compasion to hers, and I am in awe of her for coming through it all.

             I have to admit, I had had an optimistic outlook on the war, and thought that the United States was making significant contributions to the country and its welfare.  But after reading the accounts of a young woman actually living in Iraq, I feel shaken and somewhat ashamed of the actions of this country and its attitudes toward the Iraqis.  I have read many historical accounts of how war seems to justify acts of brutality, but I had hoped that humanity had advanced past that.  It seems not, and that infuriates me.

Women of Color and Their Struggle for Reproductive Rights.

      I’ve always thought that the oppression of women through reproductive rights manifested itself though denial of contraceptives and abortions, but never did it occur to me that the opposite would be true.  I know that eugenics was practiced in India and Nazi Germany, but the notion that it occurred in this country as recently as the seventies is nauseating.  It seems that in the early years of the United States black slaves were politically powerless and treated as commodities, so whites didn’t worry about their population, and in fact they encouraged/forced childbirth the way one would fertilize a crop.  In later years, non whites have won a great deal of social and political power, so much so that they have become a threat to the white majority, some of whom now seem to want to neutralize the threat they pose by diminishing their numbers.  I remember one account in the case of Brown vs. The Board of Education when black student were brought into a previously all white school for the first time, one white woman was reported to be screaming ‘Got your birth control pills?’ at the black students.  I think this all sheds light on what it truly means to be racist, or not to be a racist.  It is easy enough for a white person who lives in an all white community and never has to compete with black people to say they bear no animosity towards black people.  It is only when a person does come in contact with people of other races and does have to compete with them, and possibly lose a job or a promotion to a person of another race that their character is truly tested. 

              White women are pressured to bear children, non white children are pressured not to.  Both groups are subject to a template of an ideal America forced upon them by a small, but powerful sector of the population that seems to want white women forced back into a more traditional domestic role and seems to want the absence of black people as a whole, now that they no longer serve as commodities.  This conflict threatens to pit white women against black and Hispanic women in the fight for reproductive rights as both may resent the position the other holds in the struggle and may feel that the other group is taking their position for granted.  The goal of course is not unchecked childbirth or complete sterility, but for individual choice, something that men have far too long believed that women are incapable of making for themselves.  The whole situation is nauseating and enlightening, and gives me a great deal of sympathy and understanding for black women in America. 

         Amanda Wright

Designer vaginas

       This is an extremely shaming thing for me to admit, being a member of a Womens Study course, but a few years ago, I actually did have a labiaplasty.  I had existed most of my life without any feelings that there was something ‘wrong’ my body parts, and I had had fulfilling sexual relationships.  No partner of mine had ever made disparaging comments.  The insecurities came when I really started to encounter pornography.  The doctors in the essay claim that with a labiaplasy, the woman is the designer.  This is not so.  With a labiaplasty, Playboy is the designer.  Before I encountered pornography, the only vaginas I had ever seen had been my own and those displayed in medical textbooks.  This was my only basis of comparison, and so I felt just find with myself.  Pornography, however, gave me image after image of the idealized, perfect vagina, a clean slit, something I didn’t have.  This perfect, airbrushed being on the page was so different from me, and I began to feel insecure and ugly and ashamed of said body part.  When my boyfriend at the time broke up with me, I had, by then, managed to convince myself that he wasn’t satisfied with the relationship because I had weird labia.  I had a labiaplasty done, and it gave me a true, visceral appreciation for the life I lead in a country where female genital mutilation isn’t done.  When the anesthesia wore off for me, the pain was excruciating to the point it made me nauseous, and I blanch to think of what it must be like for a twelve year old gurl who undergoes such a thing with rusty tools and no painkillers at all.  Later on, when I had enough insight into the situation to wish I hadn’t had the surgery performed, I realized that plastic surgery, cosmetics, shoes, jewelry, yachts, nearly all of commercial America is built on the foundation of people being unhappy.  When people are happy, they want for nothing, therefore they purchase nothing, and the more frivolous industries suffer.  No wonder, I realized, we are all bombarded constantly with these images of mythical people in media and commercials who are so different from us and so impossible to attain.  As long as the industries can keep us hungry for their products, we will continue to feed them.  I look at advertisements (not pornography) with a different eye now, seeing it for what it is, a desperate corporations attampt to cash in on my insecurities.  I definitely agreed that attitudes by women about women are just as dangerous as attitudes by men about women, and I know that women can make far more cutting and hurtful remarks than men ever dare to in this society. 

          Amanda Wright