Thought I would write a blog post on what I am studying in my class, Women, Men, and Society. I have a test coming up soon and thought I would share some links, take some notes, and drink some tea! Hope you find this as resourceful as I do!
OMG! Wait sex, gender, and sexual orientation are not the same thing? But everything must line up. Sex determines gender determines proper orientation. Sounds like the heterosexual warphole of doom if you ask me! Judith Butler's heterosexual matrix comes to mind. Sex is the physical sex. Man, woman, and anything inbetween. We'll get there shortly. Gender is like the social ties we associate with sexes. It is more to do with our internal sense of self. For example, one can be physically male, but be internally female. Gender deals with what we have constructed. Blue boys, pink girls. (Please tell if I have this all wrong! I am studying here. I can get things wrong.) Orientation, deals with what we are attracted to. And that can deal with a whole lot more than sex. For example, sometimes I find myself attracted to masculine lesbian women. It is the sense of male that I am attracted to as oppose to simply one's sexual parts. (It makes me want to dress more effeminate so I can fool straight guys into checking me out. Then I can be like, HA sexuality isn't as black as white as you thought it was now was it! Fooled you!)
This is all tied into the following terms on my list of things to study such as Gender Stereotypes, Gender Roles, and Gender Identity. I won't go into depth here.
Stratification, patriarchy, sexism, paradigm, and social movement are all terms and ideas I am comfortable with, so I won't spend much time there. But, I am very curious to learn more about structual functionalism. It's interesting because the New Wave Feminists have come to reject this philosophy for explaining gender differences and stratification. What they really don't like about it, is the biological overtones structual functionalism has. Women have boobs, men have penises. They serve a function in society. Any deviation from that norm has a direct social sanction! (This is the point when the nazi-feminists rage my blog comments.) But that's ok. Here's a wiki diving board on the subject of structual functionalism. I think the paradigm still has some merit. Monkeys communicate! Not everything is simply socially constructed. And I am more of an interactionist any how. Nature VS Nurture is bullshit.
Structual Functionalism
Hrmm, will have to go to my book to read about the first, second, and third waves of feminism. That's a lot of feminism! Essentially, from what I understand, each wave just became broader and broader. (Broad is a terrible term!) First starting out with women's suffrage then progressing to family, sexuality, to orientation and overall equality for all groups of people. It is arguable that feminism is the most comprehensive of all the movements where other movements were more segmented into compartments. Feminism, in the new wave form, is all inclusive. Though, separate paradigms exist within todays movement as well.
5 Primary Social Institutions
Religion
Education
Economy
Goverment
Family - Yay, I got it right! -
Answers here! Not that I always trust the internet for answers.
Masculine Hegemony - Male Domination! - I find it fascinating that in apes and even in other mammals there is a tendency for the male to be more dominant. In
Female Choices, which leans a little to the biological deterministic perspective, it discusses the way monkeys mate. Does this mean that males dominate because of evolutionary instinct? Maybe. Does it mean it should stay that way? No. I think it is through the process of understanding our biological nature through our more sophisticated understanding and meticulous use of language that we can overcome our "innate instincts" that often cause inequality in regards to sexism. And if I could critique the sociological perspective, stop thinking that people are so much better than monkeys!!! We're not! Yah, we have language. Hooray. Primates communicate too, and they remember and keep track of social karma. So yah!
Haha! Well, last year, there was a male student who sat inside our human growth and development, which was made up of mostly women, and he argued that PMS was just a result of confirmation bias and that in many other developed countries, it didn't exist. Hence why I wrote the blog post,
PMS Doesn't Exist. Well, it turns out that some sociological perspectives suggest that it is also socially constructed. I think this is what my classmate last year was getting at. Who knows though, there were a lot of psychology majors. And if PMS and some of the mental disorders psych individuals make up from no where didn't exist, there would be no psychologists, and there would be no DSM! Ahhhhh! (I'm not always crazy enought to believe myself. But, I am saying that there are some sketchy disorders out there. Plus, the diagnosis criteria are often times arbitrary!) _Where's your proof Jacob? Hugh, Where's is it? I dropped an abnormal psych class because I didn't like the criteria for diagnosis, does that count? No! Use sources. Blarg.
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I feel like my whole life was dependent on the acceptance into the undergraduate research program offered here. This isn’t good because it is due very soon! Friday! And I am in the process of frantically editing, procrastinating, and wondering why I don’t move to Norway and learn how to play the Kalimba. It’d be a magical life! 
