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!