Think like a woman!

This weekend I saw the movie Think Like a Man.  It was a movie about how men and women date and the tricks they use in order to get with the opposite sex.  The movie surrounds four women and five men and the different methods they practice to get what they want.  It was a funny movie and great for entertainment.  However, I really hope no one (women or men) sitting in the audience was taking notes and thinking any of these tricks would work.  All the men and women in this movie did was play games with one another, which ended up back firing on all of them.   It wasn’t until the end, once everyone was honest and forth coming about what they really wanted, did anyone end up happy and get what they desired.  Playing games, when it deals with matters of the heart, will never end the way most people want it to.  Also, the title of this movie really annoyed me.  The title, Think like a man insinuates the way women think is either inferior or wrong in comparison to the way men think.  I get that the idea is to tell women not to be as emotional and to play the game more but it should be phrased a different way.  To me thinking like a man, in most circumstances, especially dealing with relationships, is thinking stupidly.  Men think without consequences or how things may play out.  A better thing to tell women might be think with your head and not always with your heart and to trust your instincts.  Many men wouldn’t admit it but they are just as sensitive and some are more sensitive than women, they’re just better at hiding that side.  They love and they hard and just try to be more careful about being open with their feelings.  Women could learn some things from men about how to be more careful with their hearts.  Nevertheless, telling women to think like men is not the right answer, to think like a man is to think ridiculously.

It's More Common Than You Think

 Gendered power and violence are things I think may never go away.  As long as society and the media continue to portray women and violence the way they do, I only see things getting worse.  When we are constantly fed images of men in power and women in subordinate roles and as sex objects we can’t really be surprised when certain things happen.  Society tells us these things are ok.  The media reinforces and glamorizes demeaning and violent acts against women.  Since these messages are always coming at us through, tv shows, commercials, etc we take them to be right or acceptable.  Sexual harassment and assault is not as rare as some would think it is.  I know for a long time I thought sexual harassment and assault was something that you only saw on tv or in the movies because that wasn’t my reality or that of anyone I associated with (I was sheltered lol). It wasn’t something that was discussed. Guys hitting me or invading my space in certain way wasn’t sexual harassment to me it was life, and guys being guys, which looking back I realize was harassment because there were many times it made me uncomfortable.  However, it wasn’t until college when I realized sexual assault was common and nowhere near as rare as I thought.  I was taking public speaking and a girl gave an informative speech on sexual assault and how she’d been molested and raped.  The professor then opened the floor for discussion and five more girls stood up and shared stories similar in nature, people were crying and everything, I was shocked.  After class I was hanging out with some of my friends and shared what happened in class then they started revealing things that had happened to them as well.  In a group of 7 of us 4 had been either raped, molested, or both.  Our text tells us majority of the time the victim knows the aggressor and with my friends it was an uncle, family friend, love interest, and a member of a fraternity. Three of them said nothing, one tried to tell but the few she did tell didn’t believe her because they knew him and said he wasn’t that type of guy so she just left it alone. My eyes are now so open to what’s really going on. 

Society Makes the Decision for Us

One of the questions raised during our class discussion on Thursday was, why is there a double standard between girls and boys with pimp/slut? When dealing with terms like pimp and slut, the underlying message of the words is sexuality.  When it comes to men, women, and sexuality there has always been a double standard and I assume there will always be.  As we’ve discussed in class on numerous occasions, society or the big D discourse shows us men are expected to go out and “plant seeds” and “conquer” as many woman as they can.  One can even look in other cultures like countries within Africa where men have and/or are encouraged to have multiple wives or like on TLC’s show Sister Wives where it documents a man and his 4 wives.  With these and acts and others like it society tells us behavior like this is ok for men or what they should be doing, where in contrast women are told to “close their legs” or to “save themselves”.  So when terms like pimp and slut come up it would only make sense that if both words mean multiple sex partners the one in relation to a man would be good and the one for a woman bad.  Some of my classmates said it’s because of what we expect from each other man to man and woman to woman, but is it was really expect from each or what society has told us to expect from each other???? Personally what someone has going on in their bedroom is their business and I could care less, as long as if what you’re doing has no direct effect on me.  Both men and women who sleep around should be viewed the same way, although they never will be, and that’s because society has predetermined that for us.  In popular music we see this all the time, case in point 50 cent’s 2003 song, P.I.M.P.  he raps “ Man this hoe you can have her, when I'm done I ain't gon keep her Man, b_tches come and go, every n_gga pimpin know You saying it's secret, but you ain't gotta keep it on the low.”  As he raps he’s well aware that pimping for men is just something that’s done and it’s not a secret. 

Who's my baby daddy?

This week in class the subject of reproduction was brought up and there was a lot of back and forth on the idea.  People should be able to sleep with and marry who they want.  However, like Alexis said life can only be produced through a biological man and a biological woman.  It is impossible for two men or two women to bring forth life, it’s not talking down about or disagreeing about homosexuality or transgendered people, it’s just the reality of the situation.  Also, I do not remember all the questions Dr.  Abbey put forward to make it more complicated, but one I do recall was, can people who are transgendered have children?  To me the answer is no and possibly yes.  No, because if you have a trans couple who are the same gender it’s not happening just like with other homosexual couples or if there is trans heterosexual  couples who’ve had both top and bottom surgery each, technology is still not to the point where that would even be possible.   Perhaps yes, because if trans man and a trans woman get together technically you still have a biological man and biological woman it’s only that they switched roles.   If neither has had bottom surgery and they have sexual intercourse the traditional way or if a trans man identifies as gay and has sex with a biological man, then it might just be possible for them to have a child.  For example, the “man” who had a baby.   A man did not have a baby; a female to male transgender did with the help of artificial insemination.  (link to article http://abcnews.go.com/Health/story?id=5302756&page=1).  At the end of the day it boils back down to the same argument, that it takes a man and woman by birth to make another life.  Taking hormones of the opposite sex doesn’t change one’s sex it just makes the person more comfortable with their gender identity.  They can take all the hormones they want but at the end of the day even though the public doesn’t see what’s in their pants they’re still what they were born as.  Yes, their organs might shrink or enlarge but they still have them.  I have a testosterone imbalance where I produce too much of the hormone but that doesn’t make me a man. 

I don't know how I feel about men's movements

There is a part of me that doesn’t really feel the need for men movements.  I like a few ideas some of the groups have.  For example, with the peace keepers I admire their love for god, the emphasis they place on family, and the way they want to bond with other men.  Also, I like aspects of the million man because I appreciate the fact that they want to change how the black man is perceived and not the stereotypes that are constantly thrown around.  However, with men having the privilege in this country and pretty much every other one in the world, I see most of these movements as something to oppose women, (except pro feminists, even though I feel like these men could just be feminist and support the women’s movements) and they felt excluded so they just let’s make a men’s movement too.  Sometimes people are just left out.  In addition, I thought it was interesting that the way our guest speaker’s father was absent from his life in certain ways, due to work, and it made him ultimately made him become a pro feminist.  I’ve grown up with a dad who is traditional in pretty much every sense of the word, growing up on numerous occasions my father would tell me I couldn’t go certain places or do certain things because I was a girl, when my family would sit down for dinner, I couldn’t sit at the head of the table because it was a “man’s place”, or when my brother –in- law would get up to wash dishes, he would say things like “why would you wash dishes with all these women in the house” and he would always say things like my favorite (sarcasm) “a woman can’t do the same things as a man and still be a lady”.  All those things really used to piss me off but after a while I would laugh at him as I got older and told him he was crazy, but I never felt strongly enough about it to make me want to become a  feminists, honestly it kind of shaped some of the opinions I have today.  Many of my classmates said they preferred our male feminist speaker over our female, I wasn’t too fond of either, but I appreciated what they had to say, but I felt like many preferred the male because he was more PC and he didn’t stir people’s feelings and make them upset or feel some type of way whereas the female did.  It’s easier to like someone when they’re not controversial.

Just my take on things

I found this week's materials quite interesting.  There were a number of thngs that stuck out to me,
 however the one that stuck out to me the most was the reading about abortion.  I was apaalled at the
notion that the most dangerous place for an African American is in the womb.  I'm personally insulted
by that statement because that means my womb is being considered a death chamber.  Yes African American
are more likely to get an abortion but only but a small percentage.  It says black women have 37% of
abirtions and that white women have 34%, with a small difference like one could consider a white woman's
womb pretty dangerous too.  It's easy to configure percetages in different ways to make the numbers
work to one's advantage in order to present their arguement.  I don't think it's right to label on race
with an issue that transcends all races.  Also, another thing that stuck out to me was our guest speaker.
I respect her views and her right to express them but I didn't particularly appreciate how she presnted
them.  She expressed that she never got her race card, but I didn't really believe her. especially with how
much she did focus on race.  I understand that her view can only come from the perspective of being a black
woman, but I felt like the way she convyed her points seemed more like a black panther member or civil
 rights leader than that of a feminist, even though the definition is so broad.  I understand oppression
but I don't wake up feeling oppressed and like the world is against me even though I know a lot of odds are
against me by being an African American woamn.