Romance, Sweet Love

 In the first blog entry I ever made, I ripped into Bell Hooks pretty hard.  Her essay on the nature of love completely redeems her in my eyes, though.  It made me look back on my history of crushes and infatuations mixed in with sproadic handfuls of healthy, functioning relationships and feel like maybe I haven’t failed quite as hard as I thought I had.  My first impression of what love was supposed to be came from Disney movies, and those movies only ever told the story of the chase, the movie never went into anything that happened to the couple after the wedding.  A lot of what the essay contained hit me on a very personal level, and I realize many of my romantic pursuits were my attempt to fill gaps in my psyche that I needed to fill on my own, or to seek out personal qualities that I didn’t have or didn’t realize I had.  I had always felt that any man who told me he loved me either a) was lying, b) didn’t actually know the true Amanda Wright, and once he found out who I really was, wow would he be angry, or c) did truly know who I was, loved me anyways, and that had to mean he was an idiot and so I should drop him and run a mile.  Women are thought of as the more emotional sex, in most cultures, the personification of love is a woman, and for Hooks to take a phenomona (love) that’s been previously thought of as this untamed, uncontrollable external force and reveal it to be a conscious, rational decision that is utterly under the power of the person feeling it greatly elevates the percieved power of women, I believe.  We are free to be loving, free to feel a full emotional range, but it does not cripple our judgement.  I have always resisted emotions and been wary of love for this reason.  We do choose to love.  If our parents, for example, relied on wild bursts of emotion to dictate whether they loved us or not, most of us would have starved to death on the streets before our fifth birthday.  Hooks also mentioned that men often make the mistake of building a relationship around women they only feel sexually attracted to.  I believe this is because many men still percieve women to be this mysterious ‘other’ creature, instead of human being just like themselves.  They take it for granted that there is no way they could ever share common ground with a woman, and so they never even try to find a partner they can relate to.  All in all, a brilliant essay.  It made me feel like I’m really not alone.           Amanda Wright

Masculinities and globalization

    Though I realized that many professional institutions were made of mostly of men, I had never thought of them as gendered in the greater scheme of things until I read Connell’s essay.  Though the article suggests that interaction of gender concepts across countries has been detrimental to women in some areas, I believe the opposite for the most part is true.  Western influences have done a great deal to break up purdah systems (which the article does agree with), fight for civil rights and education for women, and gives some parts of the world a first hand example of what women are capable of in business matters.  The globalization of business may be detrimental to American women, however.  The USA is very fastidious about giving everyone equal opportunities and a fair chance (comparitively so) and so many businesses have childcare available, and have affirmative action policies.  American firms are now working with and competing against firms in other coutries, however, and the vast majority of these countries are only concerned with the botton line of what will glean the most profit for the least expense.  Such equal opportunity programs probably seem like a laughable, frivolous waste to them, and American firms will have to choose between either cutting these programs or losing profit to other companies.  I will definitely do my research now as to what companies I am buying my products from and what their employment policies are, because ultimately money determines the conduct of coporations.  I don’t neccessarily agree that Western influence is what led to global domestication of women.  In my anthropology course, we study societies from all around the globe and in all different time periods, and for the most part, the domestic sphere was allocated to women.  In only the most basic hunter gatherer groups, with a very small population, did true egalitarianism exist.  Connell, however, seems to acknowledge the fact that Western influence has either improved, worsened, complicated or simplified gender relations according to the country, and for that I respect her immensely.  I don’t believe that the dearth of women in multinational business dealings is neccessarily a sign of a poor job done by the West or by political movements, I believe it will take a few generations for attitudes to truly change.  I would never want her, or myself, or any other organization to stop fighting for equal representation in business though, though I know such a result is probably impossible in my lifetime.  The moment progressive voices fall quiet, the populace as a whole does get lazy and complacent, and it would be dangerously easy for things to stagnate or go back to the way they were.  So, I say, keep fighting the good fight!  Connell did make a comment that the weakening of welfare programs would hurt women more than it would hurt men though, and I did find that offensive, though I haven’t seen any hard statistics  to prove or disprove my indignation.

Amanda Wright

Homophilia: Week Two entry

     The article about the negative connotations of lesbianism struck me as extremely personally ironic.  I pity homosexuals, having a lot of gay friends, I understand that love for them is a far more brutal battle than love should ever be.  When I was a few years younger, however, I used the mystique of bisexuality and lesbianism to form a more equal relationship with male friends.  I have always enjoyed the company of men as much as I have the company of women, but it can be extremely difficult to relate to men on their level, as you are most often seen as a conquest.  The basic way that men define a man, it seemed, was that which had sex with a woman.  And so, gradually, I began to suggest that I was bisexual.  Many girls did this, usually because lesbianism is so highly eroticized among straight men in my generation, and suggestions of lesbianism was a sure fire way to get attention.  For me it had the added benefit of making me something of an equal in the eyes of my male friends.  I would always be something of a freak (what with my fallopian tubes and everything), but they could relate to me on equal terms.  While I was certainly a sexual being, I was not neccessarily theirs to obtain.  They respected me more than my female coworkers, they gave me greater inclusion in their intimate conversations, they answered my questions and talked openly about their love lives and families and fears.  In being one of them, (meaning ‘one who pursues women’) I was viewed almost as an honorary man, and they would talk shit to me in the same friendly way they did with each other, and I was never patronized.  More importantly, I was rarely pursued as I had been in the past, and when one would make advances on me, I had an excuse to fall back on.   This ‘honorary man’ status, also seemed to make me something feared and respected among my female friends. 

              As I have grown older, however, I have abandoned this.  I am wise enough now to understand that this is cheating, and directly relying on the fact that women are seen as something below men in our society, and that by lying about my identity to make myself more of a ‘man’, I am reinforcing that stereotype.  Plus it’s insulting to gay people.  I still hang out with men, and feel completely at ease with them, and much to my surprise, they do relate to me as an equal, they are open and honest with me, and I never get the sense that I don’t belong.  It seems I’ve underestimated them, sometimes I do love being wrong.

Week One blog entry, Bel Hooks

While all of the other essays in the
first chapter were very moving and invigorating to me,
Hook’s essay left an extremely negative impression.
It’s full of accusations against mainstream thinkers
and reformist feminists, but gives no evidence to
support its claims or examples of the malignant
behavior practiced by these people that Hooks claims
to be trying to abolish.  She accuses professionally
successful women of relying on a subordinated class of
female victims to boost their position (all females
apparently, no victimized men), but again, fails to
provide evidence of this or examples of what this
behavior even involves.  She claims that discussions
of race and class distracted the feminist movement
from their ultimate utopian goal, but she makes
complaints about the white middle class being the
group that enjoys most of society’s benefits while
trying to keep revolutionary feminism weak.  She says
she wants to transform the existing system, but
transform it into what?  Will she target corporations,
schools, churches, the media?  I have no idea what she
intends to accomplish or how she wants to accomplish
it.  She then claims that a person can not be pro-life
and also be a feminist.  I myself am certainly
pro-choice, but I know enough about pro-lifers to know
that their views are shaped by the belief that a human
becomes a human at the moment of conception, and while
feminism may be an important political agenda for a
pro-lifer, it would never be powerful enough to
justify what they would consider murder.  Besides,
half of all aborted fetuses are female (significantly
more than half are female in some other countries, sad
to say).  She ends the essay be saying that the
feminist movement has lost clear definitions, and
people must reclaim them.  Aside from ‘the end of
sexism, sexist exploitation and oppression’ however, I
could find no clear definitions whatsoever.  Hooks
has, in my opinion, turned feminism into this
exclusive club to which one can only belong by
following draconian orders passed down from the
enlightened.  The essay gave me the impression of a
protester with an incredibly loud voice, but lousy
articulation.  I promise I won’t be so negative in my
future entries, but this one really burned me bad.

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