Beyond Tolerance

The beyond tolerance speaker this past thursday was Loretta Ross, her talk was on women's human rights and politics. During her talk she came to the topic of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and how he was not trying to lead a civil rights movement but a human rights movement. She then described what the Human rights, that are divided into eight categories, were that we are legally required to have by international law. This is where the talk got really interesting because no one knew that this was international law and no one knew what the human rights categories were. In my opinion we need to do a better job in teaching young people about what rights they are supposed to have not just from the constitution but also by international law.

Female Physical Recreation

In class today Celia asked me to say what the argument that I read was about, I want to expand on what I said in class. The article was about the overall health effects that physical recreation can have for a person. It mainly deals with the difference in what men and women are permitted to do for physical activity. The women cannot go outside of social norms and play sports because they are associated with masculinity. This hinders what women can do for physical recreation and this generally hurts the females because they are not given the release that sport gives. It also talks about how females are other-centered and always think of what they could be doing for other people instead of themselves. This also keeps most women from being able to enjoy physical recreation in their leisure time because they are always doing things for other people instead. 

Equality of Sexes

Today in class there was a point made about how we always think about how women can do whatever men can do but we do not think the other way around. I thought it was interesting that women are always looked at as being the care givers and that men cannot be. So the men cannot do something that the women can do. This is very interesting to me because the argument from feminist groups is that the sexes are equal, but there are very few discussions about how men can do the things that women do. To me if there was discussion on both topics a lot more would get done because the feminist groups would be able to show that the sexes are equal.