Dance

I took dance lessons for thirteen years of my life, as well as play all types of very physical and non-physical contact sports. However because i was a dancer people viewed me as a sissy girl, a little fragile ballerina that would break in half if shook to hard. It really took a toll on me when i was going through my adolescents because i have always been very much a tom boy and i was always being told that i wasn't doing the proper ballerina things. SO i would just like to ask why do we have to be in pink and tutu's everyday of our lives if we are ballerinas why can't i love football and dance? Why did i have to be a perfect little girl when i wanted to be out rolling around in the mud?

I LOVE SPORTS

Since i was about five years old i have been on sports teams. Throughout my school career i had played baseball, softball, volleyball, track, and basketball. However the one team experience i wanted to share with you is my earliest. When i was little i played baseball and in my town there is only a boys league, that girls can play in. Well me and my best friend and i Amanda decided to join the team because we loved the sport and we were pretty good.

well when we got to the age that we were old enough to transition to girls softball, the softball league wouldn't let us. They said that the experience we had on the guys baseball team made us to aggressive for the women's league and that we were to "good" and must play in the upper level boys league. This meant that boys from the fifth to the 8th grade would be our team mates and competitors.

Instead of fighting the town Amanda and i decided to play with the boys, two years in a row we both made the allstar team and we had the most amazing time playing. We were so cool with all the guys because we were just as good as them and better than some. We had more respect than the other girls our age and we were perceived as better athletes because we were two girls keeping up with and beating the boys. However after two years we were tired for only being recognized as the girls that were playing with the boys we wanted to prove that we were rounded athletes and that we had real skill on all levels. So we petitioned the softball league and Amanda's dad and my mom started a new team and we decided to play softball. We were so much happier on the girls team because we were leaders rather than followers, and we were the girls that had set and example for others. It was a big deal in my town that two girls played on the boys team and were good and because i was a part of that i felt as though i help no matter how small to put an end to the ridiculous stereotypes that society has.

how much affect does society have???

When you look at a person the very first thing you notice it their gender. This is an obvious observation one that the mind rarely thinks about, you see a nicely dressed women walking down the street and you assume she is going shopping or on her way to lunch with her friends. If you saw a women wearing baggy clothes you would judge her because of what she was wearing. What defines a persons gender society or biology?

People say that men are just naturally tougher than women, and women way more emotional than men. However multiple studies show this is not biologically true it is more society creating these perceptions. Society tells us that you have to be a strong tough man and you can't cry when something goes wrong. How could anyone every develop their true gender role and own sexuality if society has already put in place pre determined cookie cutter molds of what we should be as men and women?

Although society places these restrictions on us i feel that it is important to determine who you are in your gender role, and not let society do it.

David Widman

In one of our classes Professor David Widman came in to guest lecture us on how gender effects the thinking process because he is a psychology professor. He used the lab rats that he works with and how the reacted differently to certain situations the help us understand the mind of men and women. He talk about how the reacted to different stimulus and how much it took to push male and female rats to kill their babies. He said that if you put babies in a cage with a male rat he would almost always kill them, however just kill them and not eat them. The mother had to really be pushed to kill her children, she would have to be put under extreme stress and starved. The difference however between the male and the female rats when they killed the babies was everytime a female killed a baby it would eat them to conserve the energy to produce more young at a better time that there was no danger and she thought it would be a safe enviroment to have her young, the males would just kill them! this was a nice way to examine the difference in the thought process regaurding the young with difference to gender

In class we broke off into groups and had to write down what we thought was the perfect women, and the guys had to do the opposite. Of course our group went with a lot of superficial aspects, because that in my mind and the minds of my group members is what a lot of guys look for like, blond hair big boobs tan skin and the perfect sized waist. However as much as those stereotypes are prevalent in today's society the opinion of our class was a little different, which i think is due to the fact that they are at the school they are. I think going to a liberal arts college and being in a class like Gender and Conflict really opens your eyes to how people really are as opposed to just how the look. Now although most of the guys I know don't think this way the guys in our class told us that our superficial perception was wrong. It was refreshing to say the least.

Gender & Conflict-First Class

Last Thursday was our first real class, we started off by discussing what gender means, and what it means to us as individuals. Gender is a tricky word that can be a sensitive subject, that's why I felt opening up as a class like that was just one more step towards everyone feeling comofrtable around each other. Then six memebers of the class preformed skits portraying the opposite sex. A lot of stereotypes were brought up, like women only being concerned about looks, and about beer being more important to men than just about anything else. It also was a nice ice breaker, so make everyone laugh get to know each other a little more, and it cut the tension amoungst the class.
After that we moved on to a very intersiting task. We were split into groups by sex, and told to describe the perfect woman or man. Being women we as a group had to lay down what we thought men were looking for in a woman. We of course went with a few shallow atributes like, physical features such as large breasts and a tiny waste. However as we progressed through the excersize we found ourselves writing down more and more cliche's as well and the word "but." It seemed as though everytime we wrote something done there was a disclaimer following it, for example, smart but doesn't think she knows more than him. The excersize was fun and a breath of fresh air form the routine of my other classes, I can't wait to see what happens when we present our ideas to the class!