Gender is what?

    Gender is the characteristics of a male and a female.

Most people see it as sex, biologically speaking. Males, have a Penis and Testicles. Females have a Vagina, Menstruation, breast and longer hair than males.

COME ON GROW UP….

The women of today have it hard, because we have been rising out of the unemployment since the fall of the stock market during the days of the great depression. We have not been doing this bad in many, many years. That is why it seems to be so horrible. It Is not as good as it could be, but it could be a lot better.

The problem we have come to discuss is sexism. Although the class has turned it into Misogyny. We also should discuss Male gender bias’, also called Misandry.

“Males are taught to suck it up, as to where girls are able to cry when they stub their toe.”

- Josetta Buendia, Assistant Principle at Priest Elementary School

Males are hated upon in the world and sometimes although their struggle is the same, their growth and traditions make them worse in ways then female cases.  In her example to me she used the following example.

When a female is raped it is most often by a man, a person of the opposite sex. Alternatively when a male is raped or molested it is also by a male,  a person of the same sex. Although it may sound biased, it isn’t, so hear me out.  A women’s rape is normal sex, with an unwantd partner by force or immoral direction.  It is horrific in the sense that she was violated, her personal space and privacy was voided, and she was attacked.

When a male is raped, it is mostly never normal sex. It is homosexual. Nothing against homosexuality, but you should have the right to choose. In the case of a male rape they are too vilated and their personal space, and privacy. There is one added source of pain, they are mentally debating their masculinity and heterosexuality. Some pretend it never happened and do not report them as do most women. They are tought to not be homosexual, and not to say anything about it because of fear of chastisment and harrasment. Most feamle rape cases are treated with compassion, but males are treated as outcasting.

Which do you really feel is worse?

your honest opinion.

What if a bisexual rapist raped and attacked a woman on monday morning, and struck again on monday afternoon attacking a male . What are the options for male rape victims, who can they tell without fear of chastisment? How come there is so much help available for female rape victims and males have to guess.

I wonder why the HIV, AID’s  and STD’s are spreading so rapidly…

Donnie McClurkin overcame and here is a link to his story.

<a href=”http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1077/is_10_56/ai_76770627″>LookSmart’s FindArticles – How Donnie McClurkin Overcame Rape, Sexual Abuse And Leukemia Scare To Become A Gospel Music Star</a><br>
Ebony, August, 2001, by Glenn Jeffers

p.s. i had this darn thing in opn time, but somehow it’s still in the draft section. Any Questions, ask.

I don’t want to argue, debate maybe. I came to even the board for gender.
Males and female.

Gender issues surround our environment in many different ways.  Females seem to be portrayed as the weaker link. As a woman I think that males tend to be shown as the stronger one where as gays, lesbians, and bisexuals are shown as nothing. For instance, in basketball men are shown to be the ones who can play the sports. They think that they are the only ones that can play and that the WNBA can’t accomplish as much. When it comes to stations like the sports center and fox sports or any other sports channels its all about the men, female sports are not broadcasted as much because apparently men can do more than women. Of course not all people believe but, the majority of them do. No woman thinks that they are better than all men, but they do know that they are very much capable of doing anything a man can do. Gender also ties in with family issues. When we see a father being the house dad, and the mother working we think that there is something wrong with their household. This is the same problem when men see woman bringing all the money into the household. I feel that women are stereotyped as the ones who have to stay at home, cook, clean, and take care of the families. I don’t think that is true. Women can do as they please and some of them are much more successful than men are with their careers and in their lives in general. Men feel inferior to women who are more successful but women never feel inferior to men who are more successful than them. I don’t see how this works. I don’t think that men should be able to feel this way. Because of things like this gender is an issue. When women go to apply for a job, there is countless amounts of times where they don’t receive the job because they think that men are better fit for the job when in fact the women has better credentials. I feel like things like this will always surround us even though they shouldn’t, but there is nothing we can do about it. Things now and days are much better than 50 years ago but it is always going to remain an issue.

N. Patel

Gender issues, seemingly the Pandora’s box of writing topics, eh? Well, let’s just get down to brass tacks.

Our peers, ’society’ as it were, dictates a lot of what we deem ‘normal’ and ’status quo’, right? Well, over the course of the past hundred thousand years or however long we’ve been around on this planet, there have been a burned-in set of ideas and guidelines that we’ll say the majority of people follow. Depending on where ever you want to look at it in history, men and women have never been equal on all fronts. Both having ups and downs, pros and cons, the responsibilities given to men and those given to women are clearly different. Everyone always has that stereotype that like, women need to stay in the kitchen and cook and clean, and men have to go out and get the job and make the money, when in fact, especially recent years, that just isn’t the case 100% of the time. I’d be willing to bet it’s not even the case 75% of the time. However, where ever you decide to look in history it’s going to be a little bit different. Even today, cultures differ their views towards men and women.

We all go to Wayne State, a college with an extremely expansive cultural diversity, and for the matter, a high concentration of Muslims and people of middle-eastern descent. In the middle east, they still have women totally covered in shrouds, and they’re not allowed to speak unless spoken to. What’s the deal with that, you say? Well, it’s obvious, you have a different outlook and ideas surrounding the issues of gender than they do.

Now, it’d just be rude and wrong for you to try and justify your stance on the issue as any better or worse than anyone else’s. Let’s look at Halloween (she didn’t show it to us for the hell of it, might as well at least call upon its vast reaching gender-subjectivity and cues on how we apparently thought of women in the 70s ) Let’s face it, when you think about horror movies, it’s always the virgin white girl that dies first, am I right? It’s been a stereotype since the 70s, and Scary Movie 1 thru whatever they’re up to now makes a point of calling it out. They all say that women are just not as coherent or as ‘in the zone’ as men when it comes to basic survival instincts. Is it true? Ponder that for a minute or two.

Now look, I’m a guy, I guess you could sit here and come up with a million reasons why I’m biased or something, but I’m not. I’m the one always cleaning my apartment and cooking, and frankly I think a girl who goes out and does something productive in society, is assertive, confident and smart is like crazy attractive. The fact is, it’s just now starting to happen (women getting their voice out, I mean). I think over the years women just got fed up with it, and after the bra-burning years of the 70s and 80s, the girls brought up in the late stages of the 20th century are really starting to turn those stereotypes around, and good for them, but I also think that by we all in society as recognizing this, I don’t think we should be just leaving boys out to hang. It’s a fact, now boys are doing significantly “less good” in high school that girls. Is that to say in a household either of the contributing members has to be less smart or less qualified in life? No, but again, ponder where this tract is going.

Men and women are geared physically and psychologically for different things, don’t ever forget that. Whether you believe in a supreme creator or not, something put us here the way you are, and when you look at things on a deeper level, you’ll see why there isn’t a predominant representation of female football teams and why most of the time it’s guys going out on opening day of hunting season. It’s what we’re born with. Changing that may lead to consequences no one will see coming.

N M Buccinno

I was reading the posts that are already up on our Blog and a lot of them have to do with the movie. I think that some scientific evidence can settle the fight between genders. I was on psychologymatters.org and I came across this article about gender differences. I think gender goes beyond the clichés of the movies and social norms.  I think psychology can explain gender from a different perspective as far as thinking, communication, aggression; leadership, self-esteem, moral reasoning and motor behaviors differ in the two genders.

Men and Women: No Big Difference

Studies show that one’s sex has little or no bearing on personality, cognition and leadership.

Psychologist Janet Shibley Hyde, PhD, of the University of Wisconsin in Madison, discovered that males and females from childhood to adulthood are more alike than different on most psychological variables, resulting in what she calls a gender similarities hypothesis. Using meta-analytical techniques that revolutionized the study of gender differences starting in the 1980s, she analyzed how prior research assessed the impact of gender on many psychological traits and abilities, including cognitive abilities, verbal and nonverbal communication, aggression, leadership, self-esteem, moral reasoning and motor behaviors.

Hyde found that gender differences seem to depend on the context in which they were measured. In studies designed to eliminate gender norms, researchers demonstrated that gender roles and social context strongly determined a person’s actions. For example, after participants in one experiment were told that they would not be identified as male or female, nor did they wear any identification, none conformed to stereotypes about their sex when given the chance to be aggressive. In fact, they did the opposite of what would be expected – women were more aggressive and men were more passive.

Media depictions of men and women as fundamentally “different” appear to perpetuate misconceptions – despite the lack of evidence. The resulting “urban legends” of gender difference can affect men and women at work and at home, as parents and as partners. As an example, workplace studies show that women who go against the caring, nurturing feminine stereotype may pay dearly for it when being hired or evaluated. And when it comes to personal relationships, best-selling books and popular magazines often claim that women and men don’t get along because they communicate too differently. Hyde suggests instead that men and women stop talking prematurely because they have been led to believe that they can’t change supposedly “innate” sex-based traits.

Hyde has observed that children also suffer the consequences of exaggerated claims of gender difference — for example, the widespread belief that boys are better than girls in math. However, according to her meta-analysis, boys and girls perform equally well in math until high school, at which point boys do gain a small advantage. That may not reflect biology as much as social expectations, many psychologists believe. For example, the original Teen Talk Barbie ™, before she was pulled from the market after consumer protest, said, “Math class is tough.”

As a result of stereotyped thinking, mathematically talented elementary-school girls may be overlooked by parents who have lower expectations for a daughter’s success in math. Hyde cites prior research showing that parents’ expectations of their children’s success in math relate strongly to the children’s self-confidence and performance.

I think that alot of factors determine how each gender acts and thinks but the norms of society skew everyones perceptions of gender and how each one should communicate, associate with one another, what roles should be played out and not to mention competative and aggressive traits- found in both genders but more likely to show in males.

http://www.psychologymatters.org/nodifference.html 

Marsha K.

After watching Halloween I began to think about how in most films or TV shows women are always shown as the weaker power compared to men. In the movie we saw the main targets are women especially naked women for some reason or another but we never see a man be killed but once. Halloween was a very stereotypical kind of movie in regards to the content of all the scenes. The girls are young and” attractive” (of that time). The only parental role models you see of the girls are there fathers but never there mothers. The killer Mike Myers is a male which shows in a weird way a strong power. You rarely see a movie that portrays women as killers unless she is messed up in the head but not as a killer because the killer roles in most cases are males not females.

In other movies especially Disney movies you always have stereotypical women as princesses, queens, or homemakers. Think about Beauty in the Beast, Aladdin, The little Mermaid, and so on. All those movies had young women characters that never had a mother role model. They also portray a male character that is forceful and strong in each one. They are all given away for marriage by the permission of their fathers. A majority of Disney animated movies are shown with a male whom is powerful, strong, or attractive.  

In both cases of Halloween and Disney think of the way that the women are dressed in regards to whether or not they show a lot of skin or dress conservative. When you think about certain roles in television shows and movies you may find yourself thinking of them being masculine or feminine. I am not saying that males are horrible people or that women need to rule the world. I am simple saying to take a look around and think about how so many gender roles have big parts in the production of a movies and television that you would have never noticed before.  I can promise you will find these gender roles if you pay close attention. I never realized it in the movie Halloween until Jena pointed out why we were watching the film. So take a minute and think about it.

N. Corker   

I decided to write about something that no one else has yet: gender roles in Disney films, mainly of the animated variety as can be seen in classics, such as Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty. This brings us back to one of the readings in our text book. Women didn’t start becoming more assertive and aggressive until the ’80s and ’90s, as far as Disney films go. In movies, such as Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty that were made near the start of Disney’s career, the plot revolved around the female being rescued by her “Prince Charming.”

For example, in Cinderella, Cinderella didn’t stand up to her evil stepmother at all. She simply did what she was ordered to all the time and never really let her voice be heard. The animals with whom she lived, such as the mice and the birds, stood up to Cinderella’s evil stepmother more than Cinderella herself did. It took her dancing with the prince at the ball and the duke’s finding her to have her try on the glass slipper to get her out of the hellhole that she called her home. The same for Sleeping Beauty. The only thing that saved her from her deep sleep was being kissed by her “Prince Charming.” In Disney movies, the running theme has always been that women literally can’t live without men, who are, in most cases, their love interests.

Thankfully though, with the Disney movies that were produced in the late ’80s and early ’90s, such as The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin, women became more assertive and aggressive and were able to stand on their own 2 feet.

In The Little Mermaid, Ariel defied her father’s will by exploring the human world even though he told her not to. Of course, near the end of the movie, Eric’s actions do decide Ariel’s future, but throughout the bulk of the movie, Ariel really is a very strong-willed girl compared to the earlier animated Disney films. In Beauty and the Beast,the female (Belle) is actually the one who ends up saving the male (the prince turned beast turned prince again). In order for the beast to be turned back into the prince again, he has to love and be loved in return. Belle makes him realize that there is good in this world, and teaches him to love. Therefore, he turns back into the prince. Belle also defied gender stereotypes, by not falling head over heels for the “village hunk”, Gaston and actually reading a book, which wasn’t thought of in those days, because women weren’t supposed to be so educated that they could outsmart a man. In Aladdin, Jasmine really put Aladdin in his place several times. She also stood up for herself against Jafar and her father.

Therefore, I believe society really has progressed, as far as gender stereotyping goes, but there is still a long ways to go.

-Ashley Tune

Yesterday we all watched the movie Halloween, the story of a crazed man who likes to kill people.  Fun.  We were then given the assignment to discuss the characters in relation to their genders.  Well what I’m going to do is give a short rendition of the movie in maybe three hundred words or more.

Haddonfield 1963 Halloween night

Mike Meyers: I’m a deranged six year old who wants to kill his sister

Mike’s Sister: Golly Gee, I am dead *tee hee* (falls down dead)

Several years to the future!  Zoom!

Loomis: I am a doctor who knows all about the problems of this man but wont be of any help until the end of the movie so until then I’m going to talk about some smart stuff and make every one feel like an idiot…

Mike steals his car

Loomis: Damn

Haddonfield, again

Laurie: I’m the main character in the movie because I’m more mature than everyone and I’m not paranoid and… did you hear that?

Annie: I’m, like, Laurie’s friend and, like, smoke pot and, like, care about my boyfriend who treats me like shit and all but I ,like, like him and all, so its cool.

Yes, she is stoned

Lynda: I’mlikeatotallycoolcheerleaderandlikeIlikeboysandsexandboysandbeerandsexandsexandthisisoneofthetwoscenesthatyouseemeinandtheonlytimeonscreenthatIhavemylikeclothesonsoyaysex

Tommy: I’m the kid that no one takes seriously.

Bully 1: I say old Victor, isn’t that Tommy over yonder?

Bully 2: Why I do believe it is, Charles.  What do you say Thadeus?

Bully 3: Oh my, I do believe a good teasing is what old Tommy boy needs right now.  Right lads?

Bully 1 and 2: Righto!

Loomis:  My intellectual talk has made me arrive in Haddonfield.  Excuse me sir, but are you the sheriff here?

Sheriff: Yes I am.  I am also, in case you didn’t know, Annie’s dad, who didn’t know that she was smoking pot with her friend, even though you think I would have smelled it while talking to them.

Loomis: Sir there is an evil afoot here. A terrible evil that could kill us all.

Sheriff: I am obliged to believe you.  Where do we start.

Loomis: Where it all began.  The Meyers House.

Sheriff: I’ll meet you there.

Sheriff drives away.

And Meyers drives right behind Loomis.

Loomis: I sense something, a presence I haven’t felt since….

Meanwhile…

Laurie: Ok Tommy, I’m babysitting you.  What do you want to do?

Tommy: Talk about the relationship between time and space?

Laurie: Listen I have my own problems with a guy who stalks me and friends who are too stupid or are going to die to care. Lets make a jack-o-latern

And they did.

Annie: I’m, like, making some food for, like, a kid I’m also babysitting who’s too brain dead to move away from the T.V.

We see a little girl who watches the T.V., quite brain dead.

Annie: I, like, spill butter all over my clothes and, like, I’m undressing in the kitchen and putting on a clean shirt and, like, I’m not going to put on pants, ’cause its obvious that I die so, y’know, why not?

We’ll skip the part where she takes the girl to the other kid’s house and go straight to the dying part.

Annie: I’m, like, dying because I was, like, stupid to notice that the car was, like, unlocked and all fogged up and stuff.

Mike: *Darth Vader breathing noise

Lynda: Letslikehavesexatsomeone’shousebecauseitsliketheadolescentthingtodoandallanddoitinsomeoneelsesbedandstuffcausethatslikefunandcoolandyaysex.

Bob: Sexsexsexsexsexsexsexsexsexsexsexsex!

Lynda: Yaysex!

They take their clothes off, and Mike kills them.

Laurie: Its down to me now, hes going to kill me.  Thank god I have an armory of every type of weapon to ever exist in the  history of war.

And yet despite all the bullet, grenade, bomb, dagger, sword, arrow, chainsaw, axe, swear word wounds and the third degree burns from the spare flamethrower, he keeps on coming.

Laurie: This guys like a thing that could be used for a movie called Timinator or something.

Loomis: I’ll save you, I’m a doctor after all.

Six shots later, Mike falls out of a window.

And lives.

So from that shortened version of the film, the main heroine is not interested in sex, beer, or doing stupid stuff, even though she did smoke some pot.  The girls are stereotypical and are interested in sex, boys, and beer.  The guys are the same, only their interested in girls, not boys.  In regards to gender issues, the girls die with nothing or little on them in the way of clothing.  The guys are all macho men who know whats going on, try to know whats going on, or, in regards to Bob, are in it for the sex.  In short, with the exception of the main character, the genders of the characters are exaggerated because they are going to die, or are minor characters.

William Turbett

In the movie Halloween the crazy killer is always a man who can’t be killed and is after young women who are dinky and can’t defend themselves. Some how their always have to be a sex scenes and that’s when you know someone is going to be killed. The men are in control of the women and tells them what to do and they do it. The movie makes it seem like women are worthless without a man. Men are usually saving the women from the bad guy in the movie. The movie portrayed that women make dumb decisions when facing life or death situations. The Halloween movie made Mike Myers just go after the women even though he killed a couple of guys but that’s because they was in his way to get to the girls. Why in a horror movie the women have to be the prey all the time. Are they saying that women can’t be equal to men when it comes to being physical? I think movies like Halloween favorite guys more than females because they think society will agree that’s how a movie should be made. Masculinity is dominate through out the United States is really what they are saying and if they switch the roles of the men and women in the movie it can’t be right. That would make females look more dominate than the males and I guess no one could believe women can do that. Myers is going after a specific crowd which is high school girls. Why not an older crowd of females? I assume that the movies exposes that young females are easy targets and can’t handle themselves in a dangerous situations. Then at the end of the movie when the girl is fighting Myers why did she stop stabbing him with the knife or defending herself, when she know he keeps getting back up why not run out the house once she gets him down. That’s what type of foolish things they had females doing in the movie. The movie didn’t have any guys doing dumb things like that. I conclude that horror movies are aimed at females’ weakness and males’ strength to save them. James Morrow

In this particular society that we live in, women are thought out to play specific roles no matter what the situation may be.  In the movie, Halloween, the women were portrayed out the way society sees them.  They stay home, they take care of children, they cook, they clean, they adhere to what “the man says,” and according to the movie, they are always the ones getting hurt or in trouble.  And in the same right, men are portrayed the same way.  They go out and protect, they leave the children up to the women and in this movie and they seem to be the only ones who have a mission.  But why is it that way?  In the movie, all of the babysitters were females.  Why weren’t any of the babysitter males?  Is it because in order to take care of a child and babysit, you need to be able to cook and clean? Is society saying that they don’t think that men know how to cook and clean?  Also, one of the babysitters suggested that her boyfriend come over to the house where she was babysitting.  Instead, the boyfriend “told” her to come over to his house.  Why is it that whatever the boyfriend said was the final say in everything?  See the consequences of doing what someone else tells you to do all the time? Michael Myers killed her.  Her life ended.  Another thing:  why couldn’t Michael Myers be Michelle Myers?  She could’ve done the same things as Michael only; she would’ve been in a women form.  Do women not get angry and want to go on a killing spree as well?  I believe they do. Another thing in the movie was that the police officer and the social worker, who went out looking for Myers, were both men.  Are we saying that women can’t go out looking for a serial killer?  Are we saying that women can’t get in harm’s way to serve and protect like men do?  The only part in the movie seemed to fit into this stereotypical synopsis was when the little boy was scared and the little girl was the one saying that there was nothing to be scared of.  This showed that guys can cry and break down a little bit more than girls can.  I guess….Brandon Richardson

Most of the posts I’ve read have to do with how the movie Halloween, and society in general, treat men and women differently, but not much regarding women’s relationships with each other. Halloween is a valuable window into the twisted psyche of our social mores and how they effect the ways in which generations of girls and women interact with (or ignore) one another.

Firstly, because this point seems to be missing in the blogs of my peers, it is interesting to note that in the murder that opens the film, the camera is in first-person perspective with the killer. This trains us early to identify and sympathize with the murderer, and indeed to show us what it feels like to abuse and violate a nude woman. Also, since all of the female victims are nearly nude with sexual connotations at the time of their murders, we the audience are taught to sexualize violence and brutality against women. One could argue that this particular film is sure to be no ones sole source for socialization, but similar images, if taken daily since birth, of the forceful male and the glamorized, beautiful victim, begin to effect the way we view ourselves and each other.

The film paints for the viewer a clear picture of two groups of women, commonly referred to as the Madonna-Whore Dichotomy. First, let’s explore the “bad girls” : Judith, Annie, and Lynda. Judith has little personality to speak of, being the first victim, but what we do glean from our limited interaction with her is that she is sexually promiscuous, and that seems to be enough to justify ending her life. Next we come to the assertive Annie, who picks herself out as a target when she shouts at Michael as he drives by, “Hey, jerk! Speed kills!” only to be warned by the pristine and innocent Laurie that, “Someday, you’ll get us into deep trouble.” This seems to suggest that Annie’s behavior precipitated her own murder and the murder of her friends and was, in other words, “asking for it.” Lynda too is portrayed as a morally bankrupt, one-dimensional party-girl who dies as a result of her own actions. Indeed, had she never met up with her boyfriend, she might have lived.

The “good girls” are predictably less interesting.  The nurse who’s car is stolen by Michael is submissive and bossed by the doctor and almost immediately relinquishes control of the vehicle when threatened. She lives by giving the aggressor what he wants. Secondly there is the virginal Laurie, who we learn is so chaste because, “guys think I’m too smart.” Laurie runs, impotent and squealing, to the neighbors house begging for help, but won’t go so far as to enter uninvited, via the large picture window to call the police. We later see Laurie cowering, whimpering in the closet and only fighting back, rather pathetically, at the last possible opportunity. Laurie is ultimately saved by a man who looked like he had just crawled out of his own grave. The message of this is clear: Women cannot be relied on to overcome male forces, only other men can save them. A dried-up carcass of a man is still more powerful and valuable than a young, healthy female, and women’s only avenue to power is by their proximity to male power.

The horror film Halloween, when viewed from this perspective comes off as a clumsily didactic morality play that is ruthless in it’s judgment of women. By suggesting that “good girls” are boring sticks-in-the-mud, and “bad girls” will, by association, “get you into trouble,” it expresses much not only about double-standards for men and women, but social conventions that divide (and conquer) women as well. Because women’s choices are limited by this mindset, they see each other as enemies and can be dismissed, by men, women, and society at large, as “too good” or “too bad” they are deprived of the unique perspective provided by intra-gender dialogue with women from other walks of life.

-Mae Wood