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.