Emily Hunter: Final Response

Emily Hunter-Response to Paper Topics and Class Experience

                After hearing the paper topics explored by everyone in the class, I noticed that a large number of students, including myself, analyzed media representation of gender, either through film, reality television shows, magazines, or commercials.  Through these unique forms of media, in addition to children’s media that we explored earlier in the semester, we see the same gender representations forming.  Men are almost always represented as being strong, active, athletic, and emotionless, while women are most commonly represented as weak, dependent, tiny, and beautiful.  With such a lack of alternative forms of gender representations in media, how do we expect people to learn to step out of the stereotypical gender norms?  Media have the power to advance the exploration of gender fluidity by representing alternative forms of gender, but I am unsure if media will ever fully engage in blurring gender boundaries.

                Previous to last class, I had never given grinding much thought or analysis, but after doing so, I cannot help but think of all the gender norms that are represented in the form of dancing done on Saturday nights.  Grinding essentially leads to the overall objectification of women for when a man is looking to dance, he picks his partner based on the thinness of her legs, the shortness of her skirt, and (as it appears to me anyways) , the drunkenness of the women.  As I mentioned in class, there is no desire to take interest in the women outside the realm of sexual experience.  Thus, the girl could have a 4.0 GPA, could be an excellent singer, or could have an amazing sense of humor, but none of these factors matter.  In the world of grinding and hooking up, girls are a commodity that if obtained may raise the man’s social status in relation to other men within his homosocial environment while also allowing the man to display his heterosexuality.  What is more frustrating to me in regard to grinding/hooking up is that we have created an environment in which so much social enjoyment and social success is focused around “hooking up”.  The problem is if, as a girl, you choose to excuse yourself from grinding, or from the random hook up scene, you have essentially isolated yourself for the remainder of your college career.  Even worse than this is the fact that while girls may consciously remove themselves from this objectifying culture, they still find themselves questioning their performance of femininity.  For example, I have heard (and been a part of) numerous conversations in which girls attempt to determine why they were not “picked” by a boy at the dance.  The questioning results in the girl analyzing her weight, her appearance, and why she isn’t consider beautiful to the men on campus.  Not only does this foster an environment in which women will obsess over body image and beauty, but the culture also prevents girls from feeling fully successful as women.  As we have learned throughout the semester, women are taught that their primary goal in life is to earn male attention, and therefore, regardless of how successful the girls are in the classroom, on the sports field, or in the workplace, they will never feel successful without the attention of a man.  I have always wondered whether there is a male equivalent to this feeling of worthlessness many women feel at the end of a Saturday night when they return home alone.  Maybe, if men understood the feelings of objectification and victimization that women experience on Saturday nights, the too would restrain from the hook up culture.  I do not think that desiring sexual pleasure is wrong in any way.  Instead my problem with the hookup/grinding culture lies in the fact that this conquest for sexual pleasure ultimately results in the loss of women’s self-worth and objectifies women at this, and many other, colleges.

                Overall, this class has provided me with the opportunity to look at the world through a gendered lens.  Now that I have examined an array of gendered issues, I can no longer view my life without analyzing the gendering factors that influence every aspect of what I do and who I have become.  I must say that coming into this class I was not sure whether I fully classified myself as a feminist, but now I can proudly say that I do.