Courtney Sprague

The Yamada reading was all about Asian and their stereotypes. Asian are typically classified by being very intelligent, small in stature, and not usually physical in activity. When people think of Asian women it is either tiger moms or hyper sexualized Asian women in little clothing. Asian women are typically not fantasied about they are the object of a fetish, since they are viewed as obedient and subservient to their men, so ultimately a mans brain envisions them to do unless possibilities. Unfortunately Asian women have both stereotypes to fight but also the fight to be feminists. They are fighting against being super smart, possibly tiger moms and also fetish obsessions. So they are fighting a large battle, although Asian skin tone is the closest to whiteness and whiteness is supposedly the one ethnicity that has it easier, Asian still have a long way to go to fight the stereotypes.  

This Butler reading was about how gay me disrupt the invisible boundaries in public bathrooms. Apparently men have unwritten rules when it comes to using public urinals,  such as don’t use the urinal next to someone who is already there, there has to be one separating the two men, and of course there is the no looking over and down rule for obvious reasons because that would make the man gay. All these unwritten rules for bathrooms are in Halbersam’s opinion are there because of the fear of homosexuality in a small public area, and by breaking the rules would make you gay. Upsetting this norm would provoke violence since that is how men deal with anything that threatens their manhood. 

It is funny to me that men can walk around holding themselves or flashing their genitals at parties but when it comes to the bathroom all rules are in place and if they are broken the situation turns uncomfortable and violence could ensue. On the other hand it is funny to think that women go to the bathroom together as a normal act and can even use the same stall without any kind of uncomfortably or homosexual context to it. Also there aren’t any unwritten rules for women when it comes to the public bathroom, just common decency.

In the May Douglas reading she touches on this idea that was a popular belief at one time which is that a women’s frailty is directly connected to women’s physical activity. This goes back to the story, “The Yellow Wallpaper” written by Charlotte Perkins, which is the story of a women who loses touch with reality because her husband locks her away in a room with yellow wallpaper. Ultimately she is locked away because it was believed that too much physical activity was too much for a women and her female insides were shifted. Although she loses touch with reality, from a diary she gains greater hold on the inner reality of her life. This is the idea that Mary Douglas is fighting, since it is absolutely ludacris that physical activity in a woman would do that to a females brain. I would absolutely agree with her on this topic, I don’t know what those doctors were on at this point in time but they were crazy, they were obviously oppressing women from having an imagination and thoughts. It reminds me of that saying, ” women should be seen and not heard” because if a women were to have an outburst she was doing too much physical activity and need to be locked away on bed rest. It is just absurd.

In the Denise Riley reading, she brings up an interesting point about how men think that women need rescuing, and also this idea of chivalry vs. kindness. She seems to believe that being a woman is an identity which involves compromising or scarifying your status as a women. Riley believes that ‘woman’ is a performance, something we act out at every moment. 

From these ideas I would have to disagree, I do not think that being a woman is a performance, I am not acting when I wake up in the morning until I go to sleep at night. I am simply me, I do not have to think about how a woman acts or thinks, I just do regardless if it is womanly or not. Secondly I do not have a problem with chivalry, I know I am more then capable of opening my own doors, but it is the thought behind the action. So if a man opens or holds a door for me I am extremely grateful that they thought of me enough in a split second. Thats just manners.

After watching “The Business of Being Born” I was extremely disturbed. It is not bad enough that a woman has to go thru nine months of pregnancy, which includes pain and nausea, but then when it comes to labor at the hospital it apparently turns into a circus act. Since the hospital is a business it is a time and money balance, the more people you can pack in throughout one day the more money. So the hospital rushes the labor process, I have also thought a 20 hour labor was a normal process for women, but from this movie it seems that a real labor should not be rushed and should be about a day to two day process. The hospital rushes this process since the more babies that come out means more money to those executive running it. So doctors and nurses are taught to give drugs to increase contractions to get the show on the road, causing the mother more intense pain, this process goes back and forth for houuuuurs, until the baby is effected because it is not getting enough blood and oxygen from all the drugs being pumped into the mother. Ultimately the doctors and nurses look like heroes when they get the baby out safe and sound, but it really is the doctors and nurses who cause the distress of the baby when in the womb. 

Before watching this movie I thought hospitals were the safest alternative when it comes to having a baby. But this scared me, I don’t think I would feel very comfortable having my life and my child’s life in the hands of a business that ultimately wants my money and not the safety of our lives. And truthfully taking any kind of drug scares me since I get a bad reaction to almost anything, so who knows what side effects I would get from these crazy drugs they are giving to pregnant women.

The point that Trigaray was trying to make in the reading was ultimately that you would not have women with out having men, the category would not even exist. Women are the source of life, they are nurturing and motherly and women create the population. However in order to make life you also need man, you need sperm and ovaries to connection in order to create new life. So yes, I see Trigaray’s point but I do not necessarily agree with her thinking.

Trigaray also suggests the point that men have a penis, because it is present, that they are  ’one,’ whereas women have a vagina, an absence of an organ, so we invisible, so we lack presents. Again I understand what her point is in this, but I do not feel less of a person since I do not have a penis hanging between my legs. Men are no better and no worse then women just because they have a physically present reproductive organ. I do not, nor have I ever had penis envy, simply because I am a woman.

Beauvoir’s philosophy was that women should overthrow men, women should become something else because the term “woman” was tainted or ruined and that we as women should fight the term. Beauvoir being an existentialist and a feminist, what she ultimately wanted was for women to no longer be the second sex and rise above that, because women are just a capable as men are so we are not second class citizens. She believed that in order for women to move forward, we have to break through the title of ‘woman’. 

I can both agree and disagree with her thoughts, yes I think ‘woman’ has some built in bias in the word, when we think woman, we think reproduction or wife, ideas which are directly related to men. Since you need a husband to be a wife, or you need sperm to make a child. In that respect yes ‘women’ has ties which are hard to break, however I am proud to be a women, I do not think my life is any harder being that I am female. In some ways it might even be more rewarding then being a man, for example, a man will never know the intense connection and rewarding feeling that it is to be a mother. They could never even understand the love and devotion that is formed caring and carrying a life for months at a time. So in that respect I would have to disagree with Beauvoir.

In the reading, Gilman believes that in a paired marriage, men are considered “the employer” and women are considered “the employee,” meaning that men are the bread winner and women are meant to be shown off like trophy wives, buying things to show off the wealth of their husband. The reading goes on to say that what Gilman would want is to free women from the institution of marriage from being dominated by economic need. 

I have to say I do not agree with Gilman, I think if Gilman saw the world today in which women are independent and make their own money and show off their own wealth, I hope that they would understand the world is hardily like that in today modern world. Yes there are show instances of that in which women are a reflection of mens wealth and how far they have come, but I believe those examples are few and far between from what we as women know today.

The Friedrich Engels reading argues what J.S. Mill says, which is that in the early human societies, women were not in fact enslaved by prostitution, rather they were very much in control of their body and what they decided to do with it. Sex was strictly for pleasure, for both women and men, it was not the way we think of it today as a dirty, disgusting job that women sell their body in order to make money to survive.

Engels suggests that threw time women were over thrown, and eventually their bodies were the only commodity available to them to make money, so women had something to supply and men demanded it, it was a business. Women will use their bodies to their advantage because it is something that is a resource to us, when you feel like you have nothing let you use what you physically have to make it work. 

After reading the Mary Wollstonecraft reading, knowing that the United States, French Revolutionary war was unfolding around her as she was writing I understand that point of view in which she is coming from. Wollstonecraft is a firm believe that women need to separate themselves from men in order to be successful, independent women. She claims women’s parasitic relationship on men make us ungrateful and this means that women do not appreciate men.

From these statements, I agree in the fact that women need to be separate from men, we need to be our own person and women do not need a men to make us complete or a better person. At the same time I do not agree that women have a parasitic relationship with men, it demeans women and makes us sound as if we can not eat, sleep or breathe without men existing. That is ridiculous.