Post #7

Sugar and spice and everything nice...that's what little girls are made of.  Boys don't play with dolls.  A woman's place is in the home.  Nice guys finish last.  Boys don't like smart girls.  Boys will be boys.  All of phrases are ubiquitous in our society.  These are things that we have all heard, whether it be in the media, or from our peers, or even from our parents.  And other these phrases have stemmed from our societal ideals of gender, and act as a way to keep these traditional gender values present in modern society.  

As children, we are assigned our gender from even before birth.  When parents find out the sex of their baby, they begin to buy things that are exclusively blue or pink.  They buy either toy cars or dolls.  They paint the nursery blue or pink.  The idea of certain attributes, whether it be liking of a color or certain toy, belonging to a certain gender, is so engraved in our minds that I didn't even have to tell you which gender received which.  You already knew.  As I discussed in my last post, we are influenced from the second we are born by our families, and throughout the entirety of our lives by our peers and the media.  All of these groups are what are called agents of socialization, and they act as a tool to teach us how we are supposed to be to be socially acceptable.  

Our society teaches us that based on our sex, we must behave in a certain way, and keep ourselves within a certain box to be normal.  I'll start with the girls.  Agents of socialization teach girls that we have to have certain characteristics.  We need to be pretty, dependent, nurturing, kind, easily controlled, affectionate, simple-minded, and willing to succumb to a man's will.  Girls are taught that it is unattractive to be intelligent or strong-willed, and since our main goal in life should be to find a man that will take care of us, we cannot be this way.  Now, obviously this idea of total females being sub-ordinates to men has lessoned, but these traditional female values are still rooted in our society.  But, more importantly than anything else, girls are taught that we must be beautiful.  We must fit this certain cookie-cutter outline of beauty, we must be thin and tall, and have perfect hair without styling it, and a perfect face without makeup.  We must fit this outline of beauty to be considered attractive, and if we don't, we are less of a woman.  This effect of the media on the self-esteem of girls is discussed in the movie Killing Us Softly 4, where ads are examined to show how women are edited and objectified, which leads to a huge effect on girls, causing them to view themselves as less. So, girls begin to put in hours of effort in order to achieve this effortless beauty.  Girls grow up yearning to look like the models they see in ads, not knowing that those models don't even look like that.  In a Dove ad we watched in class, we saw the process that goes into taking a normal woman and making her billboard ready.  Being continuously exposed to these feelings of inadequacy cause girls to be exceptionally critical of themselves.  In another Dove ad, it said "Amy can find 12 things wrong with her appearance.  He can't find one."  Girls are taught to be incredibly critical of themselves and others, while boys are not.  This leads to the national epidemics of eating disorders and a influx in the number of cosmetic procedures done annually.  

The effect of society on boys is almost opposite of that on girls.  Boys are told that to be a real man, they need to be tough, smart, independent, strong, stoic, and dependable.  Boys aren't allowed to show emotion, unless of course, that emotion is anger.  Boys are raised watching movies and playing video games full of extreme violence and learn from it that in order to be a real man they need to be intimidating and controlling, and gain to ability to intimidate through violence, as was demonstrated in the movie Tough Guise.  But, if there are any boys who do show sensitivity or don't wish to be violent, they are made fun of.  They are called "gay" and a "fag."  This "gay-baitng" is what causes boys to try and demonstrate their masculinity through extreme displays of violence, like school shootings, as discussed in the reading by Kimmel and Maher.  Boys, specifically white, suburban boys, are the most likely to commit acts like school shooting because of history of "gay-baitng," and this constant blow to their masculinity causes them to eventually explode their feeling into this display of extreme masculinity through violence.  

Now, I have just described gender by splitting this idea into two distinct groups, as is the norm in our society.  In actuality, this is not how gender is at all, or sexuality.  Americans tend to try and have two distinct groups, one being masculinity and heterosexuality, and the other being femininity and homosexuality.  But in reality, these groups are just the two ends of a large spectrum of gender and sexuality.  There are people who are gender queer, and don't find themselves fitting into either the groups of boys or girls, but somewhere in between.  There are people who are bisexual or asexual, and people who are transgender or transsexual. There is a huge variety of gender and sexual identities in the world, even if society only wants to recognize two of them.  

Post #6

In class, we have been discussing the ideas of nature vs. nurture, and what agents of socialization affect the process of our nurture. Our nature includes traits we are born with.  We are born with our sex, our sexuality, our appearance, etc.  All of these traits are inherent in our genes; especially our aptitude to learn.  As children, we learn most everything we know.  As babies, we learn how to speak, how to walk, how to think and form ideas, even how to chew.  We are born unable to do most of these things that we now do subconsciously. We learn how to do these things from the people around us, or the agents of socialization in our lives.  Agents of socialization are things like our family, school, or the media, as described by James Henslin in the reading we read for class.  When we are born, the first and most influential agent of socialization in our lives is our family.  All the things I listed above are things we learn by being around our family.  Proof of the importance of nurture early in our lives can be seen in the examples of feral and isolated children.  In class, we discussed the example of Genie, who was found at the age of 13 locked in a room in her parents home, strapped to a potty-chair that she had never been able to leave since she was born.  Genie had never had any human interaction, had never had any nurture in her life, and as a result, couldn't speak, couldn't chew, wasn't able to stand up straight, could walk without shuffling her feet, couldn't straighten her hands or legs, couldn't feel temperature, the list goes on and on.  Without having any agents of socialization at any point in her life, Genie had remained in the primitive state in which she was born.  

Through the agents of socialization in our lives, we learn both manifest and latent lessons.  Manifest lessons are lessons that people like our parents have purposefully taught us.  For example, when our parents would discipline us as children, and tell us "Don't hit people" or "Don't talk back to me," they were teaching us manifest lessons to not be violent and to be obedient.  Our parents and others also teach us latent lessons, which are things they teach us unintentionally.  A prime example of a latent lesson is how our parents teach us our gender before we are even born.  While we are still in the womb, our parents will paint our room based on our sex, either blue or pink.  These gender norms are so engraved in all our minds, I don't even have to tell you which color is for which gender, you already know.  Once we are born, our genders are further imposed on us from the toys our parents give us to play with, be it Barbies or Matchbox cars.  We are dressed in certain colors and types of clothing that we carry with us our entire lives because from birth, we are shown that girls are supposed to like things that are frilly and pink, while boys like structured and blue.  

Thinking back on the idea of gender norms in my own life, I have realized that my parents actually did a pretty good job of not imposing certain roles on any of my siblings or myself.  Growing up, my favorite color was dark purple, and I was obsessed with the movie Toy Story as opposed to princesses.  I always carried my Woody the cowboy with me, and almost everyday wore my gray, fleece Toy Story hoodie, and never wore shoes, simply because I hated them. Similarly, my older sister was a fanatic about Thomas the Tank Engine, and my little brother would push a football around the neighborhood in a pink Barbie themed stroller.   I also aspired to be a football player throughout most of my childhood, until it was made clear later in life by the rest of society that girls can't be football players.  But, even though my parents never really pushed these gender specific roles on me, once I started school, I began to try and act more like a "girl," even if I didn't really realize it. My favorite color became a lighter shade of lavender, like the color  font I am using right now.  I began to wear more girly clothes, and play with dolls, and decided I wanted to be a chef instead of a football player.  I decided I wanted to be more like the girls I saw on TV and in the ads for Barbie dolls and fun hair accessories.  Even though I wasn't pressured to fill certain gender roles from my family, the agents of socialization of my peers and the media made me want to fill those roles, and be more of a "girl."