SHOW AND TELL #3

Look at this link guys! -- http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2012/04/18/black-face-racial-caricature-and-cake-raising-awareness-about-female-genital-mutilation/


My show and tell post is about an artist in Stockholm who raises awareness about female circumcision in a very unique way.  In this post, he uses a cake.  This cake looks like a naked African Amerian woman.  He uses brownish-black icing on the outside for her skin.  When people start gethering around, he decides to cut the cake.  He gets a woman to do it, and she starts cutting exactly where the clitoris would be.  And as soon as she cuts, he starts screaming like he's in agonizing pain.  The inside of the cake is bright red.  With every cut, the artist gets louder and louder with his cries of agony.  More and more people, alarmed by artist's screams, pay attention to the exhibit.

This article addresses many different issues we covered in this class. 

We didn't talk about this too much, but we did mention female circumcision in class.  Female circumcision is way different than male circumcision.  After males get circumcized, they can still have sex without pain and get pleasure from it.  However, when females get circumcized, their genital area gets completely mutilated.  It honestly probably looks like the cake from this article. They can have sex after, but not comfortably.  Sex is painful and contains no pleasure for them because their clitoris has been cut out.

Another topic this addresses is race.  Kitimbwa Sabuni, a spokesperson for the National Afro-Swedish Association and a critic of this presentation, called the cake a “racist caricature of a black woman.”  But is this cake racist? Or is it just helping raise awareness by showing that this happens a lot in African American communities?

I personally really like what this artist did.  The thought of female circumcision sickens me, and I feel like not enough people are aware that it happens.  Although what he did was radical, it was effective.  Whether they liked it or not, people at the exhibit paid attention to his presentation and probably learned something.  People need to do more things like this around the world to raise awareness about cruel things like female circumcision.

I think there are a lot of things that we learned this year that more people need to know.  From the things we learned this week, I think more people need to know how rape happens most of the time.  Before this classk, I considered rape to be when creepy guys drag you into alleys or break into your home and rape you, but I now know that that is not the case.  Although this does happen, people are raped more often by people they already know.  A lot of people don't know this, but if a guy has sex with a girl at a party who is too drunk to say yes or no or even know what is going on, it's rape.  It doesn't matter if she was kicking and screaming or not, if she didn't say yes, it's rape.  This happens way more often than the "rape script" we are so familiar with.  I think one way to spread awareness about this to girls AND guys is through television.  I don't know about everyone else, but I watch a lot of Law and Order.  And that show is why I had this scripted idea of rape in my head.  Maybe if they put more crime show episodes on tv where girls are getting raped at parties by guys they know, people would be more aware of it.  It also needs to be taught in school.  Guys also need to know that it's rape with they sleep with a girl that's too drunk to function, and girls need to know to be cautious at parties, too, not just when they're walking alone in the dark.  All in all, I think this is a very important piece of information that needs to be taught in our society.

I don't think that I can pick just one specific topic to take from this class because I feel like I've learned so much!  A combination of everything we have learned has lead me to think of the world in a completely different way.  I look at the signs in Walmart differently ever since we talked about the "Shampoo" and "Women's Shampoo" thing.  I look at commercials and magazine ads differently ever since we talked about photo editing and eating disorders.  I feel like I am more aware of major issues in our society like racism, sexism, and homophobia.  I also feel like I'm more open-minded and am able to listen to other people's opinions better.  I can even listen to other views on abortion without immediately tuning them out and forcing my own opinion.  I love all the different sites we were exposed to.  I go on Sociological Images and just scroll through the stuff on there on my own time now because I think it is so interesting.  Overall, this was my favorite class, and it really altered my way of thinking for the better and made me much more open-mined.  I wish I could take this class again and learn more!

I'll start off by saying that I've always been 100% against abortion.  I don't push my beliefs in other people's faces, but I have always been very pro-life no matter what the circumstance is.  This blog prompt actually comes at a really good time because something I saw recently made me question my beliefs.  As dumb as it sounds, it was actually a Grey's Anatomy episode.  A patient on there was pregnant and the baby had complications so she had to give birth really early.  They kept doing procedures on the baby to keep it alive, but it was still struggling.  It came down to a very difficult decision.  The doctors said they could do a certain surgery on the baby, but then the baby would have physical and mental defects for the rest of his life.  If they didn't do the surgery, the baby would die peacefully in a few days.  This made the mother really think about what kind of life she wanted for her baby.  Is a life where you can't move or think normally or even really function a real life?  I know this isn't abortion because the baby had been born, but it made me think of mothers who are pregnant and they find out that if they go through with the pregnancy, the baby would have physical or mental defects.  I still think that killing the baby is wrong, but now I can see why some women make the decision that they do. I can see why they think killing the baby is actually the best thing for it. I'm still going to be pro-life, but I now feel like I can understand some women's decision to have an abortion.

I think one of the most annoying types of objectifying is when a random guy grabs a girl’s butt in a bar or anywhere in public.  It’s humiliating and degrading, and I hate it so much.  One time my friend Maria and I were at a bar.  She is a very nice, sometimes quiet girl who isn’t confrontational at all.  We were walking when all the sudden she stopped, whirled around, and shoved some guy against the wall next to us.  She then proceeded to yell profane things at him that I wish I could tell you.  After she was done, I asked her why she did that.  She just said, “Oh, that? He grabbed my ass. I hate that.”  Then she shrugged like her behavior was no big deal and kept walking.  I will always admire her for that.  That’s how I should act when that happens to me, but I don’t.  I usually don’t even acknowledge it.  I’ll just ignore it and pretend like I didn’t feel it.  I think we all need to be more like my friend.  We don’t have to be as extreme as her, but we need to acknowledge it when it happens and let that guy know it’s not okay.

SHOW AND TELL POST #2

For my show and tell post, I went to sociological images and found a lot of things I wanted to use.  I saw a lot of shocking things on there that I didn't really know about society.  And some things on there I knew about but never really thought about.  The url for the topic I decided to do this post on is http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2011/05/14/skechers-shape-ups-for-tween-girls/.  This is about a commercial I've never seen before.  You guys know what the Sketchers Shape Ups are, right?  Made for women so you can get a better butt and thighs by just walking?  Yeah, they make those for 11 year old girls now.  Which I think is disgusting.  Why on earth would an 11 year old need a better butt? Why on earth would a parent tell her daughter that her butt is too big by buying these for her?  They took the video of the commercial off the site, but they talk about a few key points in the commercial.  In one part, they show a girl wearing shape ups, walking confidently down the street while boys dressed as food walk behind her, looking exhausted.  So, do these shoes make you avoid fatty food, too? It obviously does not make sense to put that in the commercial.  What's even worse is that research has proven that these shoes don't really make anyone more fit.  They don't really help burn very many calories or improve muscle tone. So you're putting your child in these ugly shoes, indirectly telling her she has a bad body, and they don't even work??  All that humiliation and lowering of self esteem for nothing.  I just think that it is really sad that we are now trying to make pre-teens have firmer butts.  What's next? Making babies crawl on treadmills because their thighs aren't skinny enough?  I just think the whole thing is absolutely ridiculous, so I wanted to share it with everyone.

One thing that really surprised me from Monday's class was how many people have mental health disorders.  We think of mental disorders as rare things.  We think there are only a few "crazy" people in the world, but mental disease exists everywhere.  In another one of my posts, I talk about how I participated in an activist movement called Spread the Word to End the Word, which tried to stop people from using "retarded" in such a casual way.  And what we learned in Liz's class showed that we really do need to be careful about these things.  I do it, too.  When I go back to my apartment to make sure my door is locked, I always joke about how I'm "so OCD," and I really do need to stop saying that because a lot of people suffer from the actual disease in today's society.  Overall, I really liked everything in the lecture on Monday, but the statistics on the amount of mental disease in the population surprised me the most.