Class Discussion 09/23/10

Class discussion today was a bit interesting. I really liked hearing about the physiological and biological side of gender and conflict. I was really into the conversation until some arguing went on and the lecture died on me. I would have really liked to hear more and get the full lecture. Dr. Whidman discussed things such as species and their testicle size has a relation with how "promiscuous" the female of that species is. He talked about the brain and how it works different with males and females. It was all very interesting.

By the way, I found a great website to pull some gender related advertisements off of: genderads.com. Enjoy.

Class Discussion 09/21/10

Today we broke up into groups to discuss a couple of questions based on our reading and on our experience. Our question was based on power distribution in a conflict and how we are impacted as men and women because of our identifications. At first all discussion in our group came down to an answer: "it just depends." We felt that our identities would be affected only by things like who we were around, their personalities, how this other person would react, etc. We were looking too much into the question at that point. We needed to look into the question in a general manner. How would society see it, not just people we knew, or hardly knew. The answers changed completely. How we react in a conflict could cause someone else with a societies point of view to question our gender. Such examples may include a woman punching a man in the face during a conflict, or a man crying. This may cause someone to question the persons gender.

Class Discussion 09/14/10

Conflict is a tough term to define. There are many aspects to conflict, and many ways it can be defined. At first conflict to me is an argument, and fighting, both realized by two or more people. Talking about one person being in a conflict without the other knowing redefined the term for me. Also splitting it into aggression and violence helped me understand what conflict is. I am interested to see how we will throw gender into the mix. How the situations are started, how they are solved, and what other factors may contribute to conflict. Between man and man, woman and woman, and man and woman will all be different situations.

09/07/10 Class discussion

Today's class was really interesting. I feel that activities in the class really bring out the discussion leading to main points in our class. The activity today was three separate skits, one in which two females were to act like guys watching football, one in which two males were to act like girls shopping, and the last which a female(acting like a male) was trying to "pick up" a male(acting like a female). It was really interesting to see how difficult it was for these people to play the part of the other gender, some started off great, but slowly faded back to their actual gender(personalities). It was even more interesting to discuss what they were doing wrong and why, generally men pointed out what the women were doing wrong, and vise versa.
The chapstick example was also very interesting, it is amazing how companies have really separated such a small product for both genders, and how we could point out what is man chapstick and woman chapstick.

Initial reaction to gender and conflict

I found that after the discussion this past Thursday that there are a lot of opinions and views that will feed this class. The poster activity was a great way to break the class in and start a discussion. I thought the female posters were very interestingly arranged, as well as similar. Since the males are outnumbered, we only had one poster. I think it would have been a lot more interesting to have two separate groups to bring our ideas together such as the females did. I found it interesting that our ideas of the perfect man suited, but did not match up with the females' ideas of a perfect man.
I look forward to talking about many things in this class, such as stereotypes, gender roles, as well as get into some heated arguments along the way. It will be interesting to see others perspectives on the same issues from a gender perspective rather than a general perspective.