"Oppression by Choice" by Anne E. Cudd

I tried to apply the first tier analysis of Cudd's oppression test to the husband's situation described in "Coming Apart." My first impression was that the husband character did not meet the first tier prong of the oppression test.  According to Cudd's  "... one of the criteria of oppression ... is that one suffer harm as a result of coercion." Cudd. "Oppression by Choice." I cannot see how the husband's character is coerced to buy pornographic materials. Quoting for Cudd's article, which cites Michael Levin " ... a person is not oppressed by  feature of society if it is unintended result of "her" choices." "Oppression by Choice."  Every time the husband decides to buy pornographic material he is exercising his free will in a consumer society where we are all free to buy whatever we want so long as we have the means to pay for it. He has not been oppressed because of any coercion to buy pornography. He feels oppressed because his wife has started to question their relationship in light of her new understandings of the relationships of power that have shaped her and her African sisters' lives through history. " A necessary condition of coercion is that one lacks a choice,..." "Oppression by Choice." He lacks a choice because under his wife's new perspective of their relationship he cannot control her views or her understanding of their relationship with the American society anymore. He has no choice but to let her be her new being. She is walking away from oppression, finding choices for herself, while he has lost control over her and this leaves him without a choice over who is this person he is in a relationship with.

"White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences Through Work in Women's Studies" by Peggy McIntosh

I really enjoyed reading "White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences Through Work in Women's Studies" by Peggy McIntosh. It was written in a straightforward manner, easy to follow, full of everyday examples of privileges that I guess people do not notice because such privileges are so common and people are so used to them that they do not consider them privilege, and finally because this reading selection helped me understand better the other two poems I read: "And When You Leave, Take Your Pictures With You" by Jo Carillo and " The Bridge Poem" by Donna Kate Rushin.

An issue I think McIntosh does not discuss in any detail in the selection, and that I believe is of some importance, is that once people recognize that they do enjoy a particular  privilege, they have to decide how to go about solving the privilege problem. I can see two ways in which this can be done, either by providing the privilege to the other group that did not enjoy it, in which case the privilege ceases being a privilege because everyone will enjoy it,  or by the people who are enjoying presently relinquishing the fruits of that privilege so that no one will enjoy that privilege. Because race and gender issues depend a lot on personal attitudes and beliefs I do not think that it will be feasible to end privilege by granting everyone the living conditions of the white male in the United States. It would require a major change in personal attitudes. I think that though affirmative action this country tried to effectuate the second alternative to ending privilege, relinquishing privileges, that white males have enjoyed and give it to those who do not enjoy the privilege, for example seats in colleges and universities.  The problem with this system is that the group "white male" selected to relinquish a privilege is also defined by class, and poor white males do not understand that they have enjoyed the privilege that they are being asked to relinquish. I am coming to the belief that to really understand social issues you cannot artificially divide and focus groups into isolated variables  such as : gender, race, etc. This is really complicated.

"The Bridge Poem" by Donna Kate Rushin

I like the " The Bridge Poem". When I first read the poem, the title of it made me think that it was going to say something positive about being a bridge, because from my personal perspective a bridge is something I relate with unity and service, something useful. I was surprised when I read the poem and realized that the author did not want to be a bridge anymore. But after thinking about it, and reading the poem once again, I can understand the reason why the author does not want to continue being a bridge. If she continues being the bridge between her friends they are not going to make an effort to reach out to each other. Her friends, the groups she mentions in the poem, are groups that are supposed to have common ideals, nonetheless they do not seem to understand each other. There is something that separates them that is stronger than the ideology that is supposed to unite them. The author seems to say, and I agree, that people need to understand, without a "translator/bridge", why they seem to feel like they are all like separate islands instead of like one group of people sharing a common history, common goals and probably a future together, and then resolve those issues so that they can move on together. But this process of understanding oneself is a personal individual experience,  if you do not do it by yourself you do not learn. The author also admits that she needs to go through that introspection process herself before she can be a real bridge. Perhaps she has to continually be a bridge because she really has not been an effective bridge so far because she is still learning about herself,

" I must be the bridge to nowhere

But my true self

And then

I will be useful" By Donna  Kate Rushin.

Time, March 31, 2008 "A Village Women's Legacy" p.62

I really liked this article. After doing a presentation on women's activism, where I spoke about some famous women who either used their notoriety to be politically active, like the Dixie Chicks, or who became famous in certain circles because their causes succeded in part due to their activism, this article presents the example of a quiet personal approach to activism that saved a whole village in Ghana. President Jimmy Carter and former First Lady, Rosalyn Carter decided to take the cause of eradicating the guinea worm disease in the village of Denchira in Ghana after they met a young women who greeted them while in great pain, and that during their meeting, they had the opportunity to observe how a worm of the kind that causes the guinea worm disease came out of the woman's nipple. This was so shocking to the President and Mrs. Carter decided to use their power and influence of the Carter Center to work to stop this disease from decimating villages in Africa. This disease would make villagers so weak that they could not work the land to make a living. "Sometimes it's the quietest voice that speaks the loudest"... " I never did see the young women again or find out what happened to her. But the following year when we returned to her village, guinea worm had been nearly eliminated there, .... Having seen her the day in 1988, I came to see life differently- in a micro way. I now believe that the vitality of one person's life has an impact on the health and harmony of the surrounding world."

Time, March 31, 2008 "Why Women Need Better Sleep" p.64

As soon as I saw this article another article came into my mind- "Biology Does Not Determine Gender Roles" by Ruth Hubbard. Hubbard's article made the statement "Women's biology is a social construct and a political concept, not a scientific one,..." The Time article seems to say that women's biology is a scientific concept and that based on biological differences women develop more adverse effects because of lack of sleep than men. The reason why women develop more negative effects for lack of sleep than men is that men produce more testosterone than women. Dr. Suarez, from Duke University, did the study that reflects the finding. " I kept trying to disprove the findings, Suarez says. I put in age, but age did not do anything to destroy the results. I put in race because blacks often report worse sleep than whites, but nothing happened. Smoking and, for women, menstrual statues did not eliminate the gender gap either." According to the study women do not get enough sleep are more likely to develop risk factors for diabetes and heart disease than men under the same circumstances. If we accept this findings as correct, is it not true that in our society well-paying and prestige require long hours of work and attending social events at night which means these positions may mean that women will have to trade their future health for their dream job ? If these biological results are true, then society has gendered these high-powered-well-paying jobs by the way society has defined and crafted them or else women's physical health will pay the cost.

FEMINITY by Sigmund Freud

I agree with Freud's premise that we cannoassume that "masculine" means active and "feminine" means passive. He points out tht in the animal kingdom many females have very active and aggressive behavior while males are passive and sometimes are solely devoted to caring for offsping. Freud indicates that the passivity associated with women's feminity comes from social impositions on women's behavior. He explains that in general terms the behavior of young girls and boys are basically the same, "Analysis of children's play has shown our women that the aggressive impulses of little girls leave nothing to be desired in the way of abundance and violence." Freud, "FEMINITY", p.4. Freud labels this early stage of girls' development, in which there are not marked differences in girls' behavior when compared with boys' behavior, the "masculine phase" of the girls' development. So although Freud disagrees with the inference that "masculine" means active and "feminine" means passive he validates this inference by his choice of language in his study.

I strongly disagree with Freud's statement that the development of "femininity" may have its psychological roots in the girls' envy for the boy's penis. He does not present any examples or arguments supporting this statement with regards to studies with children in environments where they carry on their regular daily living experiences. Freud knows the weakness of his report when he declares, "Accordingly we are on within our rights if we study the residues and consequences of this emotional world in retrospect, in people in whom these processes of development had attained a specially clear and even excessive degree of expansion." "FEMINITY", p.6. The subjects of his studies are people undergoing psychoanalysis and this population is obviously going to give skewed results since they are a special population limited by their own traits and circumstances. Based on the "penis envy" theory Freud goes on to make insulting inferences about women such as; "The wish to get the longed-for penis ... may contribute to the motives that drive a mature woman to analysis, and what she may reasonably expect from analysis-a capacity to carry on an intellectual profession- may often be recognized as a sublimated modification of this repressed wish." "FEMINITY", p.9; and "The effect of penis-envy has a share, further, in the physical vanity of women, since they are bound to value their charms more highly as a late compensation for their original sexual inferiority." "FEMINITY", p.13.

I cannot imagine the terrible impact that some of these assumptions may have had on women in need of treatment because of mental health problems at that time, since this may have been a good example of the theories used as the basis to provide such women with diagnosis and medical treatment.

Much of Freud's analysis and inferences come from the framework of the typical nuclear family at the time, mother, father and child. I wonder if he would have been able to develop this theory of femininity with the same conclusions he reached at that time in today's society where the nuclear family and the roles of mother and father are definitely different from those at the time he conducted his analysis.

Gender Treachery: Homophobia, Masculinity, and Threatened Identities, Patrick D. Hopkins.

I do not think that this essay gives enough of an explanation of the connection between masculinity and homophobia to persuasive as to its thesis that homophobia comes about as a result of the masculine identity feeling threatened at the individual level. The essay states that much of our identity, our "personhood" as Mr. Hopkins puts it, is based on gender notions, and I agree with this point. But then Hopkins goes on to say that anything that does not clearly fit within the "binary" categories created by the two gender classification system is viewed as a threat to a man's developed identity. However he does not explain why a behavior that does not fit into the binary categories becomes a threat, why and how having a third category threatens the concept of masculinity. Hopkins does explain that the binary gender classification has an effect on many other categories in society, "They affect-if not determine-labor, reproduction-associated responsibilities, childrearing roles, distribution of political power,....", but he fails to make a convincing argument as to why having only two categories is the magical solution for having this societal order, as opposed to a society that may have three or more categories with respect to gender, or no categories at all.

Hopkins touches a little bit on the definition of masculinity, as mostly a definition as to what a male person is not, a negative definition. " For a man to qualify as a man, he must possess a certain (or worse, uncertain) number of demonstrable characteristics that make it clear that he is not a women, ... ". Hopkins does not clearly state how the definition of what a homosexual is- which he does not define in this essay-infringes on the definition of masculinity in such a way that it becomes a threat to it. It seems to me that the threat to masculinity comes from being an alternative, a third category, to the established categories, and not because the definition of masculinity as such. I found the essay kind of confusing because, as I understand it, Hopkins' arguments support the argument that homophobia is the result of a binary system, and not the result of preconceived definitions or roles. That seems to suggest that homophobia is a structural problem in society which may be more difficult to deal with rather than merely dealing with it at an individual personality level. Yet the title of the essay suggests the author's theory is that homophobia is the result of the definition of masculinity and potential personal identity crises, as opposed to society's reaction to a threat to its stable classification system based on only two genders.