Growing up with a mother who came from an abusive upbringing, and has centered her career on helping battered women, it has been hard to escape from the realities of domestic violence. Gender-based violence and the effects of “doing masculinity” can be detrimental—physically, psychologically and emotionally. There are many factors that lead to physical, verbal and sexual abuse, such as our cultural environment and the way hegemonic masculinity is reinforced in the media. The impact of abuse is cyclical and has been shown bleed over from one generation to the next. According to the National Violence Against Women survey (NVAW), 78% of rape victims are women and 80% of the time, those who were sexually violated knew their perpetrator. Out of those who reported being physically assaulted, stalked or raped, 64% of women (and 16% of men) reported that the perpetrator was an intimate partner, someone they probably trusted. Beyond the bruises, fear and anxiety, abuse is also linked to several other harmful effects. Reporting on findings from the NVAW, the American Bar Association notes (here) that girls who have experienced physical or sexual abuse are more than twice as likely to smoke, drink or use illegal drugs when compared to those who have not had such experiences, 32% of girls who had been abused reported having eating disorders, while only 12% of girls who had not been abused reported such disorders. The fact is that there are enough women who have suffered abuse at the hands of men that most of us know a victim of abuse and can put a face to these statistics. Is it any wonder why there is so much masculine violence aimed toward women when misogyny virtually floods the airwaves and can be so easily downloaded? As demonstrated in the documentary Beyond Beats and Rhymes, today’s hip hop often depicts violence perpetrated against women and seems to depend on exploiting and objectifying female bodies. This music may be catchy, but having it all over the radio is sending the wrong message to our youth. . . The extent to which masculine abuse against women is ultimately the result of hip hop may be debatable, but it is less debatable that abuse is cyclical. Those who abuse are often themselves victims of abuse. This was the case with my mother’s stepfather, who was her abuser. Not surprisingly, he was also abused as a child. The only way my mother knew how to break out of her abusive world was to reach out for help and spend decades in therapy. We have been raised in a society where masculinity is defined by muscles, strength, power and control. Just as the young men stated in “Tough Guise,” masculinity defines who men are and when men are not masculine enough, they are too often taunted as pussies, faggots, babies or bitches. If a man cries or appears emotional, he is stamped with any or all of these dreaded names. Jackson Katz’s film reminds us that true men are to be tough and emotionless, and there is evidence to suggest that the imperatives of masculinity are only becoming more severe. As Katz brought to our attention, G.I. Joe’s biceps have doubled in size over the past 20 years, and the musculature sculpted onto the Superman action figures has steadily increased. Young boys in our society are under the impression they will only be men if they are huge, muscular and powerful. They see men in the movies, television, music videos, and in the intimacy of their own homes demonstrating their masculinity in part by degrading women. These televised role models physically and verbally abuse women in order to gain respect, power and control. . .
Even though my mother got the help she needed, I still see how it affects her and her sisters. I have watched how they struggle to create healthy relationships with non-abusive men and how they find it difficult to become attached to people who truly care about them. They have battled with addictions and depression and are paralyzed when somebody close to them slips away. As I have observed with my mother and her sisters, it is incredibly hard putting a stop to abuse because those who are abused are often too scared to seek help. The men who are doing the abusing often do not feel the need or desire to change because they have been so thoroughly immersed in a culture which ties violence and aggression to their masculinity. As I have mentioned above, many of these men grew up with their fathers abusing them, watching their own mother’s get beaten up and raped, or even witnessing gender-based violence on television and in their communities. It is often the case that even when abusive men realize they are doing something wrong, they make excuses for their actions. Anderson and Umberson point this out in their article, “Gendering Violence: Masculinity and Power in Men’s Accounts of Domestic Violence.” They write that men often “excuse, rationalize, justify, and minimize their violence against female partners,” and moreover, “batterers deny responsibility for their violence” (p. 488). They typically blame women for “extreme provocation, a loss of control, or a minor incident that was blown out of proportion. The abusive men participate in the violence because they are ‘doing gender’ ” (p. 488). Violence, therefore, is a means of achieving masculinity, and men likely use violence to achieve their masculinity because it has been modeled for them time and again as an effective means for doing so. Abusive men, then, are following in the footsteps of the men in their lives. In order to end this destructive, devastating pattern, young men need to be taught how to interact with women without the possibility of violence. I believe violent speech acts and images, especially in music and video should be made illegal. I understand that depictions of violence toward women are only a fraction of the problem, but making such depictions illegal would be start. This would end to flippant justifications that society somehow approves of abuse from men, that “all men are doing it” anyway, or even that truly manly, men beat and rape women. Additionally, women need to understand that help is easily accessible. My mother is a supervisor for the Center for Abused Persons and there is a 24 hour hotline that anyone can call if they need immediate assistance or if they simply need to talk to someone. If you are being abused please seek help, and if you know someone who is being abused, please encourage them to seek help. There may not be a second opportunity. ~ Terrapin Love
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In the post, “Dirty Sluts in America,” Chellebell writes that while boys are allowed to sleep around, girls are supposed to be innocent and pure. Once a girl is found to be sleeping around she is labeled a “slut” or “whore,” which can be very harmful to her self-esteem. I agree with Chellebell 100% that this double standard is neither fair nor right. However, I think Chellebell fails to acknowledge that it is not only men who judge women. Women also engage in slut-shaming against other women in order to move ahead or secure their social status. As a woman, I have witnessed women being very caddy with each other on occasion. If Sue does something to upset Mary by going out on a date with a boy that Mary likes, or if Sue embarrasses Mary in front of her friends, the invective Mary typically chooses to call Sue is “whore” or “slut, and she will likely use one of these terms, perhaps because she intuitively knows how easy and damaging it is to affix such a label to a woman. In “Slut! Growing Up Female with a Bad Reputation,” Leora Tanenbaum proposes that since men devalue women and their bodies, women in consequence also devalue their own bodies, leading them to hate themselves. Tanenbaum states that the only way some women can feel empowered is by having the power to make or break someone else’s reputation. Popular movies such as “Cruel Intentions” or “Mean Girls” depict women being ruthless to other women and getting pleasure out of it. . .
In a post, “Sluts!” on the blog Rage Against the Man-chine, Nine-Deuce argues that “Slut-shaming is one of the chief ways women attempt to compete with each other for male approval in a patriarchy that defines women’s worth by their physical attractiveness and limits their ability to distinguish themselves by other means.” At least among heterosexual couples, a lot of men love women who are innocent and pure, and saying that a woman is easy implies that she is dirty and not someone you bring home to meet the parents. An easy girl is not someone a boy wants to take out on a date, but someone who he sleeps with on a whim and later laughs about amongst friends. Therefore, no one wants to be called a slut. Women know the damage these words cause, perhaps even better than men, and some are willing to use it against other women, as a means snagging Mr. Right. I do think that men are often directly responsible for degrading women and that misogyny is a serious problem that America must address; however, I think we as women need to realize that it is not only men who degrade us. Slut-shaming is a strategy of power, which is also deployed by women within a hegemonic system in order to attain and secure a position at the top of a social hierarchy. Women—not just men—threaten to characterize other women’s behaviors as slutty, some women are able to gain favor for themselves, thereby giving strength to the degrading ideas widely propagated about women’s sexual lives. If we really want to stop slut-shaming, then, as women we need to look at ourselves first and truly understand why we are so hateful toward one another. Once women can do this, we will be freed to act in concert to stop the slut-shaming from men as well. It makes sense that women should be able to treat each other with love and respect before we can expect the same from men. ~ Freedom Fighter Today in my sociology of gender lecture my Professor asked us the question “if you were to see a man walk down the street with a black eye what would be the first thing that comes to mind?” The class responded, “Oh, he got in a fight!” My professor then proceeded to ask “Ok….now if you saw a woman walking down the street with a black eye, what would you think?” The class responded “She was beat up!” People in the class assumed the woman was a victim in a domestic dispute, but the man was assumed to be an agent that could and would transform his environment. The example illustrates that we interact with men and women on different terms, but also that we often fail to notice how we are doing it. This tendency to have common sense ideas about how men and women operate in the world, and the different expectations we develop from that common sense is the double standard. Now, with regards to sex before marriage or having multiple sexual partners, one can easily see this double standard. I would like to begin this post by echoing the rhetorical question posed by Wenty in the last post: If we all agree men and women ought to be treated equally, then why are women shamed for being sexually active when men are congratulated? As has been pointed out on this blog (here), there is a hegemonic, gender ideology at work, which leads us to regard sexually active women as sluts, while sexually active men a rarely referred to as anything. A survey conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation, and reported in Contemporary Sexualities (2003), revealed that out of 500 boys and girls between the ages of 15 and 17, 92% reported that girls get bad reputations for having sex. Associate director and senior research scientist at the Center for Research at Wellesley College, Deborah Tolman, notes that as a result of this double standard “many girls find ways of transferring blame to escape responsibility for their sexual encounters.” The article goes on to explore the way “parents, not just peers, are also guilty of applying the sexual double standard to their children. 85 percent of teens said parents have different expectations of girls and boys. Even today, sexually active boys are ’ladykillers’ while girls are ’sluts.’” Sex has become something of a spectacle and can be found anywhere in present day America, so it is odd that we seem intent on sending the message that sex is shameful for women, Just watch any number of music videos or find the nearest commercial billboard. Sex clearly sells! American society is obsessed with sex, but we don’t demonstrate this obsession in a uniform way. More often than not, we passionately decry it as shameful when it involves women, but when a man like Lil Wayne demonstrates some provocative moves in his latest video, he is in no danger of being told he should feel ashamed. Similarly, the bawdy lyrics of Trey Songz’s latest hit are not perceived to be daring, but they would be if sung by a woman artist: “You gunna think I invented sex.” .
It is not just that there are double standards, but that the standards placed on women are themselves inconsistent and therefore impossible to satisfy. On the one hand, men frown on women who flaunt their sexuality, but at the same time, they seem to insist that half-naked women parade around in the background of music videos. Does anyone sense a trap? In their posts, ChelleBell and Wenty wrote about the practice of slut-shaming and noted that women are objectified, and their bodies are sought by men hoping to become manly. Masculinity theorists like Jackson Katz might point out that men, in fact, depend on sex with women in order to “do” masculinity well. A society characterized by hegemonic masculinity strongly encourages men to develop characteristics such as aggressiveness and a will to dominate, but it also encourages men to participate in the subordination of women, all in to the name of obtaining a true masculinity. ~ Country Girl citation: Teen Gender Double-Standard Persists. Contemporary Sexuality [serial online]. April 2003;37(4):7. Available from: Academic Search Premier, Ipswich, MA. Accessed May 4, 2010. In a recent post on this blog, titled “Dirty Sluts in America,” Chellebell argues that women are pressured to “engage in sex to fit in, but once they have sex, their peers bash them.” After reading the article, the question that bogs my mind is why sex is generally acceptable for men and not for women. Why in particular are women so often shamed for engaging in premarital sex? I mean, why aren’t women just as entitled as men to make decisions for themselves when it comes to their own sex lives. . .
Not only does slut shaming occur in the United States, but a recent article explores this phenomena in Turkey (here). In the prosaically titled “Ambivalent Sexism and Attitudes toward Women who Engage in Premarital Sex in Turkey,” Nuray Sakali-Ugurlu and Peter Glick observe the sexual double standard that women are pressured and ridiculed when they engage in premarital sex while men are not. They argue that “women who are known to have engaged in premarital sex are not only disrespected but may face myriad forms of discrimination, including serious social and family problems” and such women undergo “involuntary virginity examinations, surgical reconstruction of the hymen, and physical abuse for failing to ‘protect’ their virginity.” Whether in Turkey or the United States, it is my view that women are independent individuals whose sexual ideas and desires should be respected. The disrespect directed toward women who have premarital sex not only demonstrates a double standard, but shows a broader pattern of discrimination against women. Attacks on the rights of women to make choices for themselves about their bodies reveal how vulnerable women are, and the fact that this standard is applied unequally for men and women demonstrates that we are still living in a patriarchal society. To take the analysis a bit further, I think it is important to understand that the double standard applied to women is bound up with hegemonic masculinity. In other words, men ridicule women for having premarital sex, but at the same time, they often depend on having premarital sex with women in order to achieve their masculinity. In this light, a woman’s choice about who she wants to have sex with and when she wants to do it is scrutinized and ridiculed because men depend on it for their own masculinity. It is important to highlight that even though masculinity is hegemonic, women retain a measure of control. Ironically, women are centrally involved in the production of hegemonic masculinity, which in turn, subjects women to a sexual double standard. By this logic, women are co-creators of the system that imprisons them, and if this is true, then it stands to reason that women have a direct way to intervene on the production of hegemonic masculinity. Women have agency, and they aren’t just the victims Chellebell seems to take them for. Unfortunately, exercising this agency is not without its consequences. Women are raped every day for daring to decide for themselves the terms of their sex with men. It is often stated that rape is more about power and control than sex. I think women fall victim to rape because they are attempting to exercise their agency in denying sex with men who seek to realize their masculinity. They are, in effect, attempting to wrestle power away from men. ~ Wenty In order to explore the ways in which the concept “gender” structures contemporary society, I will first discuss how gender is constructed. I will also address how a binary system of gender is maintained in society and the problems that consequently arise from this organization. To do so, I will use an intersectional lens to illustrate how gender interacts with other socially constructed categories. In her essay, “The Social Construction of Gender”, Judith Lorber opens up with a metaphor about gender, stating that “talking about gender for most people is the equivalent of fish talking about water” (13). The main point she is trying to make by using such a metaphor is that gender is everywhere. It is so pervasive in our society it seems natural and most individuals make the assumption “it is bred into our genes” (13). Lorber does not accept this idea of naturalness, but instead posits that gender is a socially constructed category. The construction of gender starts as early as the womb. Once parents are informed of a child’s sex, they buy gender-typed toys and paint their child’s bedroom in a gender appropriate color. Gender is not natural or inherent and thus should not be thought of in terms of biology. Instead, gender can be regarded as a historical and ideological process. Ideas about gender change over time and what may be considered masculine or feminine in this century will likely be different in the next. Baby Franklin D. Roosevelt The image of Franklin D. Roosevelt as a child on the cover of Life Magazine can be used as a prime example of how the definition of masculinity has changed over time. When the image was shown to our class, most people assumed that it was of a girl because the child was wearing a lacy dress and mary janes. By today’s standards, this type of dress would be considered feminine, but during the time in which the photograph was taken, this was normal apparel for little boys. In the chapter, “Learning Gender in a Diverse Society”, Susan Shaw and Janet Lee discuss how making gender seem natural is key to upholding a stratification system within our society which gives men higher status in relation to women. Shaw and Lee state that “the differences between femininity (passive, dependent, intuitive, emotional) and masculinity (strong, independent, in control, out of touch emotionally) are made to seem natural” (126). In society, masculine traits are given greater value and since masculinity is often equated with maleness, males are given higher status than women. Shaw and Lee define gender as a “process by which certain behaviors and performances are ascribed to women and men” or in other words, gender “can be understood as the social organization of sexual difference” (124). This idea that gender has been socially constructed has been a pervasive argument within feminist discourse because if gender is not intrinsic or biological, then gender as a social institution can be restructured. With this said, an important question to consider is, if we have constructed gender then why does it look the way it does? The answer to this question is power. The idea of power addresses both how gender is maintained in contemporary society and also why this structure is problematic. The way that gender is constructed in contemporary society highlights hegemonic masculinity and emphasized femininity. In her article “Hegemonic Masculinity and Emphasized Femininity”, R.W. Connell states that “hegemonic masculinity is always constructed in relation to subordinated masculinities and femininities” (183). Women as a whole are subordinate to men, but within the male population, there is a division or hierarchy of masculinities. The basis for division is based on various categories including sexuality, sexual orientation, race etc. The main problem with this system of categorization is that every individual assumes the role of both victim and oppressor. As Patricia Hill Collins states in her essay “Toward a New Vision”, “each one of us derives varying amounts of penalty and privilege from the multiple systems of oppression that frame our lives” (69). Caster Semenya Another major problem lies in the way that society assigns gender. Males are taught that they should prescribe to masculine traits while females are taught to act in a feminine manner. In a society that gives higher value to masculine traits, males are given higher status than women. Also, when individuals transgress gender boundaries, there can be severe consequences for their behavior. Take for example the case of South African runner Caster Semenya. Caster outran her competition in the 800 meter world championships by more than two seconds. This coupled with her masculine physique caused people to call Caster’s sex into question. Caster was subjected to several “gender tests”, media scrutiny, and ridicule. This really took a toll on Caster’s psychological health and at one point she was even on suicide watch. As we can see, our society's binary categorization system of gender is problematic for several reasons. By structuring gender the way we do, individuals are forced to abide by prescribed sets of behaviors or face consequences if they transgress these boundaries. Gender also creates a stratification system within our society which gives men a higher status than women. In order to eradicate these issues, we need to rethink our rigid ideas about gender and recognize that more than two types of gender are possible. ~ Lady Lazarus |
AuthorsThe Class Blog Project, or CBP, is a blog featuring undergraduate students forming a critical dialogue with each other around ideas related to the sociology of gender. Archives
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