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By Anna
We’re nearing the end of March and you know what that means: the women stop celebrating and the men take the year back over. With that said here are my final thoughts about our patriarchal society:
Commercials-
- Verizon Wireless: The muscular jock needs an English tutor, and although they’re playing into stereotypes for the whole commercial, why is it that the tutor is a guy? Aren’t the majority of English majors at colleges girls? Although I expect nothing but sexism and stereotypes from commercials, they missed the boat on this one.
- Rose Petal Cottage: Yes it’s from our youth, but no wonder so many girls of my generation are now “playing house” with real cupcakes and children, fulfilling their “big dreams.”
“You guys”-Although this is something I find myself saying (mostly because I don’t possess enough drawl to say “You all”). It’s a good example of the institutionalization of sexism. We can’t help but say “You guys.” Everyone imagine if you will, what it would be like if it was institutionalized to say “You gals.” Right! It sounds ridiculously weird and offensive to guys, so now you know how we gals feel.
“Mankind”-I had a roommate who lost ten points in a paper because she kept using gender exclusive grammar. She ranted and ranted about how ridiculous losing those points was, but she was wrong. Try using the word “whitekind” in replace of humankind sometime and see how your professor reacts.
The Prince Charming notion-Nearly every mainstream television show and movie applies the ideal man. Granted I don’t condone going to films where the girl pines for the guy in the end (even though he was the one not giving her enough space to be an individual), plenty of American movie lovers are going to these shows and promoting the self-deprecation that apparently comes with being a female.
By Anna
Certain “women” in Samoa are not honored as a part of Women’s History Month, but are shunned every month of the year and have been traditionally segregated into their own communities because of their unfamiliar sexual orientation.
Hazy Pau Talauati holds her dog in her village in Samoa. Talauati is a fa'afafine, a man who was raised by her parents as a woman.
The fa’afafine are Samoan boys raised as girls because their parents already had too many boys in the family and need girls to do the “woman’s” chores. While families are aborting girls in China, Samoans are deciding the gender of their boys because they recognize women are vital to their culture. On the other hand, if Samoans would not segregate work as female and male they would not need to raise their male children as females.
Traditionally fa’afafine are the caretakers of their parents after their other siblings have started their own families, but, if they do marry, they often marry women because they are not necessarily gay. Today, however, many fa’afafine have chosen to become so later in life and are homosexual. They also have become more accepted in modern culture and can have ordinary jobs and careers, but still face much discrimination.
Because of organizations like GLBT, fa’afafine are integrated and appreciated in culture today, but how would the culture function if it hadn’t accepted institutionalized sexism hundreds of years ago? Discrimination would have decreased and boys could go about doing “women’s work” without actually becoming women just because the work needed to be done.
A fa'afafine man poses before a luau in Samoa.
What has fa’afafine culture done to the girls of Samoa? Though women are highly respected in Samoan culture, they still have few options when it comes to jobs because there are certain village chores not for men. Yet now the fa’afafine often have more options than naturally born women because they can work in men or women’s roles.
God forbid women use their month to actually make change for women instead of playing into the institutions’ hands. Maybe then men and women throughout the world would stop denying people the opportunity to be nurses or secretaries or hairdressers because that’s “women’s work.”
All facts from http://www.abc.net.au
By Anna
It started out with one day, March 8, and blossomed into a month of feminist misery. 
Segregating a month out of the year as an excuse for public (and private) schools to talk specifically about what women have done in the world’s history is objectifying. The pontification of Walt Whitman in “Song of Myself” is feministic. He is “maternal as well as paternal” because he understands the equality due to all.
Though I respect the goal (and agree that women’s roles should not be ignored) of minister and teacher of women’s history, Jone Johnson Lewis, in the “hope that the day will soon come when it’s impossible to teach or learn history without remembering these [women's] contributions,” it won’t be possible if the majority of U.S. history teachers are white men.
Throw us a bone so that we will sit in silence like we did when the drafters of the constitution left us out, or when we patiently waited to vote or when we opened our vaginas to life and disease (infections, monthly shedding of our vaginal walls, etc…) and yet we are given one month. As if the white male majority in Congress needed merely to shut up the bitching wife, who demanded she be heard.
In the words of matriarch Margaret Fuller, “inward and outward freedom for woman as much as for man shall be acknowledged as a right, not yielded as a concession.”
When one month gives me equal pay, gives me respect in coed sports, gives my husband paternity leave (which some jobs allow, though it is not law like in Spain), gives me equal opportunity to education (only 23 percent of women complete a bachelor’s, whereas 27 percent of men do), keeps me above the poverty line, gives me equality in the church and gives me the White House, I will stop this rant. One month isn’t justifiable; it’s offensive and pejorative.
