Thursday, September 20, 2012

Gender and Sport

For the literature research paper my group is doing gender and sports. I have always wondered why there are female only leagues. I have always wondered this because any woman from those leagues that you talk to says that women can compete with men, but men are not allowed to enter their league. In golf the men are not allowed to compete in the LPGA but the women are allowed to compete in the PGA. If women can compete with men why are there two separate leagues then. Also why are men not allowed to compete in the LPGA, if women were not allowed to participate in the PGA their would be an uproar about how that is sexism.

Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Basow Historical Perspectives

It was interesting to look at Basow's paper and what she had to say about the historical theory of gender relations. It was interesting to see that when people were in hunter- gatherer societies that both genders were relatively equal. However, as society moved into an agricultural society gender relations started to turn into a male dominant power dynamic. In this society most women were viewed as property and as a commodity. This was the most interesting part because this thinking is the backbone for most gender relations now. It would be very interesting to see how different the world would have been if the power dynamic between the two genders would have stayed equal.

Thursday, September 13, 2012

The article that I am analyzing for our argument analysis paper deals with the topic of girls not having as many opportunities for athletics as boys. It shows that it is not socially acceptable for girls to participate in masculine sports even if they are very good at them. To me this seems very wrong and needs to be changed. I know that when I was playing tee ball half of the team was made up of girls and most of them were better than the boys, but after tee ball the girls were not allowed to play baseball any more they had to go play softball a more feminine sport. Looking back on it now I don't know why that was done I mean if the girls can play baseball and are good at it they should be allowed to play as long as they like. Coaches need to stop worrying about what gender their players are and start worrying about how well they can play the game.

Tuesday, September 11, 2012

I really understood the way Goldstein defined the differences in relationships for men and women. Being a guy I do constantly compare myself to all the other guys in the room to see where I stand. I often use violence and aggression to try an assert dominance. I definitely look at this as being a hierarchal system where the most dominant man is at the top and all the others want to try and take him out. It was interesting to me though how she defined how women want to build relationships in webs. I have never really thought about it like this before. I thought that women would build their relationships the same way that men did. I did not think that it would be this different of a structure. I was really able to understand this when I thought about the difference between my mom and dad. My dad has a few close friends but my mom has a lot of friends, so i would consider her to be apart of the web and I would consider my dad to be closer to the hierarchical system.

Tuesday, September 4, 2012

Women's Rights

While I was reading Women's Rights are Human Rights it occurred to me that the paper was written in 2000. Now that is not that long ago and I was blown away that this was not accepted before this point. I mean to me that statement seems like a no brainer, yeah women are humans so they would have human rights. It was hard for me to understand how it took ten years for the people fighting for this to have someone listen to them on a national and international level. To me this should have happened a lot sooner and it really shows how far we still have to go for gender equality.