The Venus flytrap is an innocent enough looking plant. It has a beautiful red, velvety cushion inside a green-fringed cap. It looks similar to an elegant clam, or a throne waiting for its rightful queen to take her place. Unluckily for the insect that alights on this red cushion, they are bound to be abruptly trapped and leisurely digested. Similarly to this are women in today’s society. Men and women commonly set up held ideologies and myths of how genders are supposed to act and behave. These delusions affect both men and women, but it seems that those surrounding women are more publicly open to examination and criticizing. They are unfortunately alive and well in society even now. These myths, like a Venus flytrap, look appealing, but destroy healthy society, relations, and reliance and are very much alive in today’s world.
One major opponent of these woman-based presuppositions and myths is the French intellectual Simone de Beauvoir. She wrote a book entitled The Second Sex in 1949. This book was discussed many topics, but one chapter “Woman: Myth and Reality” focused on the damaging role that preconceived notions, passed down in society, wrecked on society. She claimed that there were number of contradicting myths on why women act the way that they do, how women think, and how to treat women. It is no wonder that men are confused and call women a great mystery. When men have the excuse that women are impossible to understand, it readily leads to men assuming they are unable to help women. She claimed that no matter how much experience and reality contradict any myths, men continue to cling to them and pass them on to further generations. Amazingly, this issue came to public attention even before Beauvoir wrote in it, an...
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...ed. My confidence in the realm of men is broken, and I think all men are insensitive jerks. This hypothetical situation is just ONE myth. There are hundreds in America alone. Hundreds of thousands of relationships that could have worked were destroyed. Women hate men, and men are just confused and hurt. Society is damaged.
These illusions damage who we are and stunt who we could be, together and apart. Like a Venus flytrap infestation, they permeate every part of our culture, creating a path of destruction along the way. While Beauvoir gives little hope of it ever changing, I believe that with proper edification, we can train our children, the future men and women of society, to carefully criticize and dismiss these myths. We can teach our children to treat each person without these demeaning myths, but instead with a healthy dose of reality and individual value.
Throughout history, woman’s self has been Other in discourse, literature, and doctrine. She has been designated this position in the world by those who hold social power. This dichotomy is maintained under a hierarchy that serves to benefit men. I will be attempting to support Beauvoir’s idea of the self as Other under a patriarchal society by looking at statements from philosophers and myths, as well as identifying shortcomings she may have.
The world enjoys pigeonholing both men and women. It can be exhausting living in our judgmental society, where there is an expectation for each gender to fit into a rigid box of stereotypes. That is why, when Dave Barry is given the negative stereotypical question, “‘Why do men open a drawer and say, ‘Where is the spatula?’ Instead of, you know, looking for it?’” (1), he goes into a ranting frenzy. Barry responds and challenges this negative question in his column, on February 4, 1999, by writing the essay, “From here on, let women kill their own spiders”. Dave Barry utilizes the rhetorical devices of sarcasm, anaphora, and hyperbole to prove that is is pointless and ludicrous to create platitudes and stereotypes about each gender.
Margaret Wente’s Globe and Mail article on what women could learn from men presents itself as dogmatic and controversial. Wente’s intent is to persuade their readers into believing that men have become a scapegoat for society yet women could learn lessons from men. Although Wente does have a clear purpose in explaining what women could learn from men, her argument is weakened by her lack of substantial evidence and her appeal to emotions being manipulative.
“Women have been taught that, for us, the earth is flat, and that if we venture out, we will fall off the edge,” verbalizes Andrea Dworkin. Gender-roles have been ingrained in the every-day life of people all around the world since the beginnings of civilization. Both One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Hamlet portray typical female stereotypes in different time periods. Due to the representation of women in literature like Hamlet by William Shakespeare and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kessey, and pop-culture, evidence of classic gender-based stereotypes in a consistently patriarchal world are still blatantly obvious in today’s societies.
Prentice, D. A. and Carranza, E. (2002), What Women and Men Should Be, Shouldn’t Be, Are Allowed to Be, and Don’t Have to Be: The Contents of Prescriptive Gender Stereotypes. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 26: 269–281.
Women and men are not equal. Never have been, and it is hard to believe that they ever will be. Sexism permeates the lives of women from the day they are born. Women are either trying to fit into the “Act Like a Lady” box, they are actively resisting the same box, or sometimes both. The experience of fitting in the box and resisting the box can be observed in two plays: Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun” and Henrick Ibsen’s “A Doll House”. In Hansberry’s play, initially, Beneatha seems uncontrolled and independent, but by the end she is controlled and dependent; whereas, in Ibsen’s play Nora seems controlled and dependent at the beginning of the play, but by the end she is independent and free.
In the past there were many biases against women and their lack of abilities compared to men. Although the male perspective has changed over the past few centuries, there are many feminists who still fight for ...
As meaning making creatures, humans attempt to categorize and definitively understand anything they observe. Although this crusade for understanding is not inherently bad, it often produces unintended negative consequences. As humans sort, classify, and define everything, they simultaneously place everything into a box that constricts creativity and fluidity. Concerning gender, these boxes create harmful conceptions of each person on the planet. Although these conceptions of gender are constructed and not “real” by any means, they have real implications in the process of socialization that influence how each person lives his/her life. In the United States, the commonly socialized “boxes” of gender have done a great
...only accepted stereotypes are not based in reality at all, and that these stereotypes are harmful to everyone, not just the victims of being typecast. This conclusion is correct in all senses. Judy Mann’s book shows that the only real difference between men and women are their reproductive organs (24). Many professionals support this fact, but not society. Bernard Lefkowitz’s retelling of what happened to the young girl in Glen Ridge, New Jersey shows that believing that women are inferior can have terrifying repercussions. Society’s perception of people and the practice of labeling based on gender must be eliminated in order for women and men to live equally. These books simply help to make more people aware of the problem, which is only part of the solution.
Throughout history our understanding of the world has been manufactured through the judgment of human beings. The overall change and shift in paradigms can be explained by social construction theory. An article written by Carole S. Vance discusses the topic of social construction theory and illustrates how it impacts gender roles. Social construction can be defined as: a critical subject of reality that analyzes the ideas of a particular group or culture based on society and the aspects of society (education, religion, government etc.) Another article “Feminist Critiques of the Public/Private Dichotomy” written by Carole Pateman explains how men had placed women in a hypothetical bubble that is dominated by men. Men have always been looked
There has been a long and on going discourse on the battle of the sexes, and Simone De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex reconfigures the social relation that defines man and women, and how far women has evolved from the second position given to them. In order for us to define what a woman is, we first need to clarify what a man is, for this is said to be the point of derivation (De Beauvoir). And this notion presents to us the concept of duality, which states that women will always be treated as the second sex, the dominated and lacking one. Woman as the sexed being that differs from men, in which they are simply placed in the others category. As men treat their bodies as a concrete connection to the world that they inhabit; women are simply treated as bodies to be objectified and used for pleasure, pleasure that arise from the beauty that the bodies behold. This draws us to form the statement that beauty is a powerful means of objectification that every woman aims to attain in order to consequently attain acceptance and approval from the patriarchal society. The society that set up the vague standard of beauty based on satisfaction of sexual drives. Here, women constantly seek to be the center of attention and inevitably the medium of erection.
Simone de Beauvoir, in her 1949 text The Second Sex, examines the problems faced by women in Western society. She argues that women are subjugated, oppressed, and made to be inferior to males – simply by virtue of the fact that they are women. She notes that men define their own world, and women are merely meant to live in it. She sees women as unable to change the world like men can, unable to live their lives as freely as men can, and, tragically, mostly unaware of their own oppression.
Prior to the 1970s when the theme of gender issues was still quite foreign, the societal norm forced female conformity to male determined standards because “this is a man’s world” (Kerr 406). The patriarchal society painted the image of both men and women accordingly to man’s approach of societal standards that include the defining features of manhood that consist of “gentil...
Women – beautiful, strong matriarchal forces that drive and define a portion of the society in which we live – are poised and confident individuals who embody the essence of determination, ambition, beauty, and character. Incomprehensible and extraordinary, women are persons who possess an immense amount of depth, culture, and sophistication. Society’s incapability of understanding the frame of mind and diversity that exists within the female population has created a need to condemn the method in which women think and feel, therefore causing the rise of “male-over-female” domination – sexism. Sexism is society’s most common form of discrimination; the need to have gender based separation reveals our culture’s reluctance to embrace new ideas, people, and concepts. This is common in various aspects of human life – jobs, households, sports, and the most widespread – the media. In the media, sexism is revealed through the various submissive, sometimes foolish, and powerless roles played by female models; because of these roles women have become overlooked, ignored, disregarded – easy to look at, but so hard to see.
Society’s gender infrastructure has changed since the 1920’s and the nineteen amendment that allowed women the right to vote. Or so we thought, many of the gender expectations that were engraved into our early society still remain intact today. Women for many people still mean an immaterial, negligible, and frivolous part of our society. However, whatever the meaning of the word women one has, the same picture is always painted; that of a housewife, mother, and daughter. Women are expected to fallow the structural identity of living under her husband 's submissions. Threatening the social norm of what is accepted to be a woman in society can put in jeopardy the personal reputation of a woman, such treating her as a whore. But, what happens