How SWMS influenced my values

Before I never thought how this class could influence me, and I thought the "change my life" review on Rate My Professor must be exaggerating...But now I sit here and agree to the idea that this gender issue class is really life changing. I don't know how much I can still remember about the books, since I haven't  started to prepare for the exam; but there are definitely some ideas rooted in my head and affecting my daily life.

 For an example, I was unaware that gender is actually socially constructed, and what I learned from this is that never categorizing individuals into  class, sexual orientation, or even gender. Categorizing or stereotyping might be helpful when you want to study a group of people with some similarities, but when it comes to an individual, you have to look at the differences in order to really understand this person. We all fit in a different spot in a spectrum of life, and only when you try to understand a person at his/her unique and specific standing, can you get a more objective point of view without bias and discrimination.

Raise your hand Campaign

National Domestic Workers Movement(NDWM) started the raise your hand campaign in Jan 2011in India to urge the citizens for the rights of domestic workers especially children.
It is true, until citizens take an initiative to stand up for their rights nothing can really be achieved. Many children at a very young age waste their childhood by working in homes, for a meagre amount of money, instead of going to school.

National Domestic Workers Movement has been active since the past 25 years yet it has been unable to save young kids from ruining their childhood because of working in houses. Raise your hand campaign seems to be a very innovative and challenging concept in terms of the involvement of the employers who recruit these young kids to work in their houses.

Success of this campaign cannot be predicted because of the low laying aspect of the movement but if this campaign gains momentum, it will be a change for many young kids who waste their childhood working when they should really be playing or going to school.

Can Porn Be Feminist?

I read an interesting article this week that initially opened with praising the Toronto Feminist Porn Awards and quickly changed its tone to a more critical one, asking the question: "Can porn ever truly be feminist?"There are some interesting criteria for how some classify feminist porn such as, a woman must have played s significant role in either acting, directing, writing, or production, and the film must challenge stereotypes that exist in mainstream porn. In addition to this, feminist porn usually depicts a variety of women, not simply thin, white, large-breasted women but women who look more like the average woman walking down the street.

While seemingly well intentioned, feminist porn is still critiqued for having things such as BDSM films that portray a submissive woman dominated by men. Critics may see these types of films as confirmation that women continue to be sexually objectified even within "feminist porn" so can this truly be considered feminist at all? Feminist porn proponents say allowing actors in their film to do what they want, even if that includes women who like to be dominated, is to be feminist and open to a diversity of sexual acts. Mainstream porn does not care about the actor/actresses' likes and dislikes, they are essentially paid to perform acts that they might not personally like or agree with.

Yet critics still don't buy into feminist porn, after all how can people who use bodies, especially women's bodies as raw material for profit, really have the right to call themselves feminist? At least that is what the critics believe. Its a tricky topic overall and I'm not sure if there's a right or wrong answer. I personally think that society should not shame people for watching any type of porn, (in fact it reminds me of Gayle Rubin's ideological formations about sex, especially benign sexual variation) but I will admit to personally being somewhat disturbed by some of the genres of porn, especially those that have racist undertones and extremely explicit scenes of sadomasochism where women are in a submissive position. However, I don't think I am in any position to judge people who consume or engage in that type of porn/sex.

link: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/04/21/can-porn-be-feminist.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+thedailybeast%2Farticles+%28The+Daily+Beast+-+Latest+Articles%29

masculinism

Have you heard of masculinism ?  According to Fox news the men’s rights movement or simply the men’s movement goal is to have “a gender-neutral approach to social problems such as broken families, domestic violence and reproduction. For example, in approaching domestic violence it demands that the police, court system and social networks cease to pre-define victims as female and to recognize that men are often victims of domestic violence as well.” I would have to agree with that last point about domestic violence. In the rare occasion that a man is being abused by a women he should be able to seek refuge within the court system and it should be taken seriously but that’s about all I agree with. After reading this article this movement really just seemed like they could care less about women, it was strictly from the point of view of men. Many supporters talked about how much they despised the feminist movement because those feminist are the ones that have been keeping the man down. The creation of this movement just seems odd to me seeing as so many things are already tilted in men’s favor. Below is a link to the article if you want to take a look.

 http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,88400,00.html#ixzz1tT5DDStX

Men's Definition of Masculinity in the Context of the Second Shift

Arlie Russell Hochschild, the author of The Second Shift, saids that men and women come into marriage with implicit “gender ideologies”, which are formed from expectations about traditionally appropriate marital roles for themselves and their mates. During her research on family relations, Hochschild conducted a case study on a family – consists of Evan, the husband and a furniture salesman, Nancy, the wife and a social worker, and their son, Joey. After multiple bargains on equal sharing of domestic life, the couple agrees that Nancy is responsible for “upstairs” and Evan for “downstairs”. The deal sounds fair until one discovers that “upstairs” includes shopping, cooking, cleaning, paying the bills, doing the laundry, and caring for the children, while “downstairs” only consists of dealing with the car, the garage, Evan’s hobby workshop, and the family dog. Yet, as Hochschild notes, “the two have convinced themselves that this arrangement is fair.” In another research that uses data from 18 countries called Understanding Men’s Housework in the Cultural Context of Paid Work, men who earn approximately the same income as their spouses have been found to perform more housework than men who are primary breadwinners; however, when men are dependent on their wives, they do not perform proportionately more housework than men who are not. Surprisingly, in some cases, men who are especially dependent on their wives do even less housework than when they are the primary breadwinners. Although men who are dual-earners do more housework than they would if they were sole breadwinners, they do not raise it enough to engender parity or to undo the traditional gender division of labor. Thus, although men have increasing agreed to division of domestic work, they still perceive it as a role of a woman, not a man.
              
The role of a man as a breadwinner in the family has traditionally been the central aspect of hegemonic masculinity in diverse cultural contexts. This link between masculinity and gender role is especially emphasized in capitalist societies despite the rise in women’s paid employment and flexible labor markets. Men’s identity in terms of masculinity continues to be the underlying reason for men with employed wives to feel an obligation to become the main providers. In cases where women’s income is about the same as her husband’s, the wife, as well as her husband, tends to interpret his employment as the main source of supply for essential family needs, while hers is, no more or less, a “supplement”. Likewise, when the wife provides the main source of income, her spouse makes up for his shortcoming by considering his work as more important than hers. Despite the variation in circumstance, women typically do the majority of the housework due to the sturdy link between gender roles and masculinity; because housework is symbolically “women’s work” and masculinity is defined in opposition to masculinity, men in counter-normative situations reinforce their masculinity by not engaging in feminine activities, i.e. house chores and childcare.

Video Clip in Discussion Session

The video clip, shown in the last discussion for the Tuesday 5:00pm session, was quite interesting and I thought that the sexualization of kids and the objectification of women have a lot to do with the sexualization of sex itself. What I mean by the sexualization of sex is that we constrain ourselves of sex in general in spite of the fact that sex is an intrinsic desire for us. A guy in the clip said, "sex sells." But, it is not the actual sex, of course, that we are buying. It's like a fractured form of supply to our demand. Yeah, sex sells because the situation is like this: a real meat-eater eating veggie patties for meal knowing that s/he really wants to eat a 2lb medium rare Kobe beef steak for dinner.

Moral Dilemma in Bread and Roses

In Bread and Roses, I saw a few interesting moral dilemma that are actually existent in our society. First is the issue of immigration. While, as for the rule of law, it would seem to undermine the law itself if the government did not to do anything about illegal immigration But, we also need to think about well-being of illegal immigrants at the same time as well because they are already here; they moved here because the needed to; and, perhaps more importantly, they are human beings as well.

Second is whether or not to be vocal and fight for one's own labor rights. If you were an illegal immigrant, you would be easily taken advantage of by your employer due to your legal status. Simply put, if you were hired by an employer who knows your status, you would basically be "indebted." Now, if you became vocal and criticized the employer because of exploitation the employer put you through, you could be fired automatically and you would not be able to support yourself or family anymore. It's definitely tough situation and the movie, I think, depicted it pretty well.

Third is the conflict of interests between an individual and an organization. An activist may want to go further and deeper to fight for labor rights, but if you were running a labor rights organization, you would also have to think about the well being of the organization itself to provide, systematize, and sustain your service, and secure the well being of your employees as well.

I thought these dilemmas were quite interesting so just wanted to bring them up!