bestiality, gender profiling, and American "beauty" oh my!

The article Growing Up Hidden by Linnea Due had some really great points about how she felt growing up in a prejudiced society.  She talked all about how she had to live in “hiding” because she was not allowed to be who she really was, which was a woman in love with women.  In order to find out what she was, she ventured into her father’s medical journals and found a book by the infamous Freud, which posed some, well, interesting theories of homosexuality.  Anyway, she felt somewhat relieved that here were people out there just like her.  However, Freud grouped these people with those who “fucked chickens or corpses.”

Why is homosexuality often considered bestiality in the eyes of those opposed to it?  Even recently Mike Huckabee, yes the one in the presidential race, equated homosexuality with bestiality in a recent interview with Beliefnet.com, a religious website.  His exact response to a question about whether or not he would preach the Bible’s ways in his reign as president, he said:

“Well I don’t think it is a radical view to say we are going to affirm marriage.  I think the radical view is to say that we’re going to change the definition of marriage so that it can mean two men, two women, a man and three women, a man and a child, and a man an animal…”

Not only does he talk about a man and an animal, but he ALSO brings up pedophilia, which is also something often slung at gay men even though there are just as many straight male pedophiles as there are gay ones.  Not to say that pedophilia is an okay practice, which of course it is not, but to point towards the gay community for such a practice that involves men, women, gay and straight, is completely unjust and ignorant.

Also, notice how Huckabee doesn’t mention female pedophiles, or women and animals.  He directly associates both of these practices with men, and specifically homosexual men at that. 

I don’t know about any of you, but I would rather vote for Bush again than place my hands in such a bigot as Huckabee.  Actually, I take that back.  I’d move to Canada instead.

In Judith Lorber’s Social Construction of Gender, she talks all about how socially profiling people.  She gives the example of babies and their respective colors.  She sees a baby wearing pink and automatically she thinks, “girl!”  People do this without even noticing.  Every person you see as you pass through your daily lives you want/need to gender profile.  Each person that walks by is classified simultaneously as a boy or girl, and if you can’t tell, that if when the staring begins.  People study each other, especially in these cases of gender ambiguousness.   For some weird reason, gender specificity is just one of those things that people need closure on.  What do you all think?

(Gender as a Process, Stratification, and Structure)

I just wanted to write down Lorber’s literal definition of each:

-Gender is a process of creating, distinguishable, social statuses for the assignment of rights and responsibilities.

-As a part of a stratification system, gender ranks men above women of the same race and class.

-As a structure gender divides work in the home and in economic production, legitimates those in authority, and organizes sexuality and emotional life.

Well I could write an entire book on those three categories, but no worries, I’m lazy.  I think the process is pretty much straight forward.  We all know about social statuses between men and women and the division of social rights accordingly.  I would say that his process is what is used to inevitably create the stratification system on which the society is built.  Indeed then the structure can be created, which decides what is expected from each contributing person in a society.  This structure deems what is to be expected from a man and a woman, and therefore how these parties should act accordingly.  In essence, the process creates the level playing field where the stratification can then rank authority.  Then once this authority is established, the structure segregates responsibilities due to gender.

Wow, that confused me when I re-read it…but it totally made sense in my head while I was writing it.  Any thoughts?

Lastly, here are some other quotes from this week that I found particularly interesting:

-“Simply put, a woman endured, but a man fought back.” And “But it was the need to prove myself an American man – tough, resilient, independent, able to take it – that pulled me through the war with the virus.” These are from Taking It  by Leonard Kriegel

-“…[Black women] will never possess the fundamental ingredient for female beauty in America, and it is whiteness.” From Who’s the Fairest of Them All? By Jill Nelson.

I suppose what I enjoyed most about the Leonard Kriegal essay is how he has used gender almost as a guiding light.  I think that this is the first example expressed in our readings that uses gender as a good thing, rather than a negative.  Not that our readings say that gender itself is a negative.  They really just pinpoint the stereotypes that are paired with gender and how that negatively affects certain people who wish to obtain a lifestyle that strays from this norm.  Anyway, what I am trying to say is that Kriegal used the social expectations of him to be tough, and triumphed over his disease because of it.

Jill Neslon’s essay comments on how there is never a truly black woman on television.  How even in modern day American, the black women on the tube are a hybrid between black and white, and they all posses white attributes such as small noses and feathered hair.  If a traditional black woman is portrayed on television, she is shown in a situation such as being a mother with a son who is in trouble with the law.  In fact, it was mentioned in class that there were more black people on television in decades past than there are now (considering such television shows as the Jefferson’s etc). Look at the most successful black female actors such as Halley Berry and even Tyra Banks.  They both could practically be white with their tan complexions and constantly “relaxed” hair.  I put relaxed in quotations because Nelson talks about how the this term makes it seem like the problem is their hair, and that it is “uptight and all we need to do is to get it to cool out.”  Haha.

I don’t know.  What do you think? Has television become more racist, or at least more segregated, over the years?