Tag Archives: chapter 7

Single Dads Are Not Extinct

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This evening I was watching television while eating dinner with my single mother, (a regular occurrence), when a Whirlpool commercial came on, here it is:

Although this commercial did not yell “single dad alert”, it brought to my attention how maybe there is an equality issue for the single fathers in the World who are raising children alone. Single fathers are unlikely to be recognized and also believed in that they too can raise a child single handedly. This week, we have discussed the different personality traits and communication styles of males and females. This topic, brought to my attention that maybe it is more difficult for a male to be naturally inclined to be a mother figure and a father figure. In this commercial it shows the struggles of not being a perfect dad, burning food,  neglecting to show up to sports games to support the child, and other struggles. Being a single mom is a regularaly praised topic, praising mothers all over the nation for doing the best they can. However, single dads is something that is increasingly becoming more common and may deserve an equal amount of praise. According to the The Atlantic- The Rise of the Single Dad there are more than 2.6 million single father households in the United States.  This article also discusses the unfairness of child custody cases always going to the mother because it is “best for the child”, never considering the father just because they may lack maternal instincts.

I found this commercial interesting to be brave enough to praise dads in general and also single dads; a rare sight. This is a gender difference in equality with men and women. What are your thoughts?

Diapers & Daddies

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According to an article from Buzzfeed from April, a senator is trying to pass a bill that requires changing tables in men’s bathrooms. Before stumbling upon this article, I had heard about new father Ashton Kutcher bringing up the same topic and issue, but other than that it was actually something that I never really crossed my mind. When I was younger, my dad would take my sister or I into the men’s bathroom without hesitation when it was just him, because what else was he going to do? Send a four-year-old into a bathroom alone, no thank you. 

It never really occurred to me that without those changing tables, men would have to resort to holding their children while changing them? My biggest question is why does there even need to be a bill for something like this? Shouldn’t it just be a requirement for all bathrooms, whether it is men’s or women’s?

Mean Moms

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I seriously love the movie Mean Girls.  It’s hilarious, campy, and has the perfect dash of realness to spice it up.  So when I heard that a Mean Girls spin off was going to begin shooting, I was over the moon excited.   The spin off is titled Mean Moms, and is going to star Jennifer Aniston as a house wife whose family moves to a competitive neighborhood.  Mean Girls featured a bunch of clique obsessed teenagers, and I have a feeling that Mean Moms is going to explore negative female relationships of middle aged women.

The premise of this movie reminded me of the common experience list for women that was discussed in the Chapter 7 online lecture.  I’m going to go ahead and make a guess that the movie will touch on appearance of women (especially moms), how women take care of others, how women treat each other negatively, and how all moms are expected to be superwoman.  I’m not exactly sure  how the movie would address a fluid meaning of femininity, but if Mean Moms is anything like Mean Girls, I’m sure it will exceed my expectations!

 

Defying Gender Stereotypes with Cosmo

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I am not an avid reader of Cosmopolitan Magazine, I barely have time to read anything these days because I’m so busy. However when I am bored I do like to hop on social media. Snapchat is my personal favorite because I like to see what everyone is up to and recently they added a great new feature where they have partnered with different companies, publications and online news outlets to bring news and entertainment to snapchat in the form of daily snapchat stories. One of those publications is Cosmo. About a month ago I clicked on their story and was scrolling through it and got extremely excited because the article was titled “18 Badass Portraits of Female Rugby Players Defying Gender Stereotypes”. I even screens shotted it so I could write about it for my next post on this blog.

It wasn’t really an article but more of blurb about who the photos were of and why the photographer took them but I thought it was great that they put these photos out there knowing they have such a large audience and doing their part to combat our societies gender stereotypes.

Take a look at the rest of the photos here!

 

 

“I’m not your mom”

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Being in this Gender Communications class has really opened up my eyes to how often we use gender roles in communication. For instance, just the other day one of my friends was telling us a story about how he had to clean up after some guys in his lab and said “I’m not your mom, why can’t you clean up after yourselves?” And my other friend stated “why does it have to be a mom, why can’t it be a dad?” This then turned into an almost screaming argument of  of gender roles. The argument really mirrored what we talked about in class and in the online lectures. Not the screaming of course, but the discussion that was going on between my two friends. Why are certain people classified in these certain roles? Not every mom cleans, so why did my friend say “I’m not your mom”? Has society taught him to think that way? Why does society think that way?

“The Chance That We’ll Regret It Doesn’t Seem Like A Compelling Enough Reason To Do It”

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I recently saw this article that was composed of twelve actresses/icons that were talking about why they do not have kids and why they aren’t in any rush to do so. I found this very interesting because throughout my life I have always been told that women need to get married and start having kids right away and now that I think about it, having kids is something that is so far from my mind and when thought about, its usually something that terrifies me. I guess in a way I go against gender norms because although I am open to the idea of marriage, I’m not sure if I ever want to have kids. Honestly, there are a lot of other things I would rather do than have kids. I also go against the norms when I say that I know for a fact that I am a workaholic and I most likely always will be. I will see my career as one of the most important things to me and although I may be looked down upon because of that, I now know I am not the only one that feels this way. The things these women said in this article really struck home with me.

“I want to have kids when there’s nothing else I want more, and I can make them my world.”

Being sensitive and caring is something that comes with growing up feminine. This means that most women feel like they HAVE to be nice, helpful, nurturing and the mothering type. Also, girls learn that being outspoken about the fact that they are not nurturing and they do not want to have kids is looked down upon.

So why is? Why are women scrutinized for not having kids when able to? Is it something that we HAVE to do or we are shamed?

 

http://mic.com/articles/112910/12-women-who-had-the-best-response-to-society-s-biggest-expectation

 

From Bob to Zoey and Back in the Helicopter

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Helicopter reporter pilot, Bob Tur, had been a news journalist for 27 years. He covered the O.J. Simpson car chase in 1994 and the LA Riots in 1992.  Bob Tur has recently come out as transgender and has completed the reassignment surgery. He now goes by the name “Zoey Tur” and is the first openly transgender reporter in the United States. As seen in the video, most people are rather supportive of Zoey, however there still are some that are not, like her daughter Katy.

Upon first seeing this segment by Inside Edition, I was amazed by how well Zoey was handling herself. I applaud Zoey for being willing to make her transition public. As she stated in a Los Angeles Magazine article, she “wanted to help others struggling with gender dysphoria, make them feel less marginalized, and show them what transitioning looked like.” While the life of a transgender is rarely without its obstacles, it is amazing that Zoey Tur has chosen to handle herself so gracefully and become a role model to others in the world.

#Gogurt

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When asked to stop and look around you for an example of gender, it actually had me thinking for awhile what a great example was.  There is so much around us that could show a great example of gender.  The one example that I came up with is something that I am actually using for another class as well in a presentation about gender and I know we all have seen it!  When you ask anyone around you, “Who is the parent that stays home to take care of the house?” Most people would answer that with stating that the mother is the one that stays home.  With the mother staying home she is the one that has to get the lunches together for the kids to take to school.  Within the Gogurt commercial, you can see that the dad is the one that prepares the lunches in the family.  The boy though communicates with the father using Post-It notes to remind him to put the gogurt in the lunch box.  It is possible too that this family could be a single parent family but we are not 100% sure because we do not see the mother at all.  Even if it is a single parent family it is something that shows the men are starting to step up in our society and taking the roles of the women too.  [youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KyHo63_IyY[/youtube]

Gender and Environmentalism

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This Psychology Today blog talks about gendered attitudes about the environment. According to polls, women care more about protecting the environment than men, who are “more likely to support increased use of nuclear power and offshore oil and gas drilling (Burn, 2013).” The author says that this has to do with gender socialization, where females are “more likely to be socialized to be communal and other-centered (Burn, 2013)”. This is not saying that men don’t care about the environment, but that women are more likely to care because of the way they are socialized.

This blog is an example of gender socialization of the ego boundary. An ego boundary is how much a person separates their self and their identity from others and the rest of the world (Wood, 2013, p. 167). Females are socialized to have a more “permeable,” “thin,” or “open” identity, where their needs and interests are “interrelated” to others’ needs and interests. (Johnson, 2014; Wood, 2013, p. 167). Wood notes that this causes “women to feel responsible for others and for situations that are not of their own doing.”

In this case, Wood was talking about relationships, but ego boundaries affect a person’s worldview, too. Even though people with feminine socialization are not “responsible for” or “cause” environmental destruction or animal harm, they still feel like they need to do something. Their ego boundaries are “thin” so there is no “clear distinction” between their health and nature’s health (Wood, 2013, p. 167). Feminine people feel that all humans “are a part of nature (Burns, 2013).”

 

Be Pretty, But Don’t Wear those Slutty Heels to Work

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Recently, the prestigious Loyola Law School issued a memo to students including a statement about how female students should dress when clerking.

As is often the case with professional dress codes, women’s clothing choices were addressed, with no suggestions about what is appropriate for men.

This gets at the double bind faced by women in something as simple as choosing what to wear to work.  On the one hand, women are encouraged to look beautiful in their work appearance, as traditionally defined in our culture.  On the other hand, often women are judged for looking too “sexy.”

Ultimately women’s job performance should not be evaluated on their appearance.  It is an example of how “appearance counts” as a theme of femininity affects women in their professional lives in a significant way.

As Drexler argues here in a CNN editorial about the memo what should matter most is, “how women perform their jobs, and not which shoes they happened to choose that morning.”