STEREOTYPING

                                                            

This is actually true !  :)

How do I need to function so that society perceives me as belonging or not belonging to a specific gender?

Gender constantly surrounds us, whether it be in the clothes we wear, the actions we make, or even in the things we see. There are different ways gender is viewed in society. Men must act a certain way and females must too. That is called a gender assignment. The feeling of not being socially accepted when a man or woman does not follow its gender roles, will decrease their confidence and can lead to problems such as eating disorders, depression, or  maybe suicide. In order to fulfill the gender role for women they must be feminine. Men will witness this media and begin to feel that women need to be this way in order to be liked. So actually everything is related with each other.

Gender roles

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWc1e3Nbc2g&feature=related

A very interesting video of gender roles perceived by children at 'very' young age.
It's very impressing that each child gives the same response to all of the questions. The way they have classified and portaited gender at that age shows how society indirectly imposes certain ideas to people. 

Advertising Gender!

Advertisement can really affect a culture's perspective towards gender discrimination. Some details that we don't consider important, are actually affecting our thoughts deeply. For example, using women as pure, naive and weak charactered, men dependent  'creatures', gives generally the scene of men controlling women. Men are also shown as emotionless human beings in the ads. So men get affected from these advertisements. Their actions are being influenced so they behave dominantly against women.  On the other side women is shown as a beauty idol: Sexy, attractive, a charming barbie doll. These images that we see on TV, involuntarily change the way we act, the way we show our feelings, the way we interact with the opposite gender, so therefore our cultural perspective of looking to the case of gender discrimination.

Last week, we watched a video that really touched me and  it made me think even after class. It was about the photographer who was trying to take photos of the war, while people were shooting each other wildly. She was there for her job and aiming to be the photographer of the year by taking courageous snapshots. She was there, as she was looking to the war materialistically just thinking of what she was doing at that moment, with pure isolation from the scene and the situation. The main event that occured in the video was, when she was hiding behind a car and was trying to photograph a child who was trying to escape and who was standing close to her with a big gun pointed at her head by a soldier. She waited for a second and looked at the girl. The girl stared at her too. For an instant, she questioned herself: Was this right? What was she doing there in place of trying to rescue her? Where was all the humanitarian feelings she had once? A photo that will perhaps bring her some prestige and a small bronze statue that will stand in her living room, or saving a child's life, giving her a chance to see the sky once again, making her feel the sun with its warmth under her skin and making her taste love... Then we see that the lady wins the award of the best photographer of the year with that photo of the little girl, shot just in the middle from his head. The photographer was unable to defeat her feelings and felt such a regret that she couldn't even present herself on the stage to get the award. Has humanity become so senseless and unemotional that can no longer understand the value of  the heartbeat of  a creature that is miracleously come to life?    

Hi,
I would like to write a brief comment about the text we read in class : The Enormous Radio by John Cheever.
I think it was a pretty symbolic text that made the reader not just stay with the plane meanings of the words but also look deeper with their senses. I would like to state two things that I really liked and that attracted my attention.
The first one is the fact that the writer makes a resemblance between the weather conditions, the outside temperature and the cases that Irene, the main female caracter of the text, passes through. He cites " From where Irene sat, she could see the open sky above the East River. There were hundreds of clouds in the sky, as though the south wind had broken the winter into pieces and were blowing it north,.." This passage is a basic demonstration of Irene's previous life and how her life has changed with the arrival of the radio to the house. "The open sky" symbolises the clear, monotonous, problem-free life that Irene has. By saying that the clouds are coming to North by the south wind, the writer shows that Irene's life will be changing fundamentally and she will have a new life which she had  never had before.
The second point is that the transition from the old radio to the new one is the exact same situation with the changeover of the old, calm, quiet life and the new life full of excitement and emotion. It also gives point to the fact that they have a primitive relationship, and that they cannot repair it, like the old radio. They have a problem with communication. But at the end, we understand that their real feelings were supressed, and that they weren't really communicating with their real feelings.