I chose to discuss The F-Word, Feminism is for Everybody, Opt Out, The Eternal Feminine, and He’s a Stud, She’s a Slut. These pieces of literature were chosen primarily because they affected my views in some way. They actually affected my views in the order presented: The F-Word eradicated the notion in my head that women have won their battle so that I was read to listen to more that feminism had to offer. Feminism is for Everybody gave me my favorite definition of feminism to go off of. Opt Out made feminism more personal. The Eternal Feminine made me realize the need to be active and educate individuals who do not know about the forces that work against them. All of the previous pieces of literature made the classic double standards in He’s a Stud, She’s a Slut seem far more real and personal. The feminist agenda will be effective for different people in different ways, which is why taking care in the delivery of its message is so important. People need a chance to understand that there are problems, that the problems affect them, and that the problems will not go away unless they become active.
The F-Word
I chose to write about the F-Word for a number of reasons, the first being that it is my favorite reading from the semester. The F-Word has the single most important argument I have heard all semester. This argument is wrapped in part of the thesis as a group of questions: The F-Word asks three questions in its thesis. How is feminism changing? Is the new generation on young women taking their rights won by previous generations for granted? And by focusing on cultural politics, instead of electoral politics are young women giving their power away? These are the questions that helped me dramatically understand what much of the feminist movement is all about. These are questions that I hadn’t been able to articulate until I read the arguments that support the thesis. And most importantly to me, evidence in my experiences show that these are valid questions to ask.
The F-Word discussed countless issues to support its thesis, so I will highlight only some. The first part of the book is devoted to defining what the third wave of feminism is. It turns out that most of the women she interviewed had very unique ideas, which is the key point. There is one attitude, however, that is largely portrayed in the third wave discussions. Much of it is comprised of apathy towards certain subjects and a want to define feminism on a more individual basis. The F-Word directly addresses these attitudes by arguing that there is a danger of segmenting the political strength of women –especially on issues which most agree on like poverty, the wage gap, etc.
The F-Word also examines the current state of motherhood. There are two basic parts to the motherhood discussions. The first is that women want to have the choice to be stay at home mothers and the second is that statistics don’t really show that most women have a real choice. The author argues that young women seem to be turned off of the idea of motherhood because of how difficult the balancing act can be.
One of the most important parts of the book discusses women in the political realm. People interviewed in this section express the lack of representation in the political realm for women which is why women need to get to the polls. The chapter titled “Democracy is Not a Spectator Sport” clearly expresses what the author is trying to get at. If the evidence shows that women really have been more apathetic towards government and that they have also reaped many negative side effects from that, then they need to vote!
I talked about The F-Word a considerable amount because it has a considerable overlap with other readings. I also think that this book demonstrated the origins that the other readings expand on.
Feminism is for Everybody
Feminism is for Everybody is basically a hand guide to what Hooks believes is Feminism. This book motivates feminism with the statement: “Imagine living in a world where there is no dominion, where females and males are not alike or even always equal, but where a vision of mutuality is the ethos shaping our interaction.” This idea is the cornerstone for the author’s thesis: that is the goal of feminism. I chose to discuss this book because it gave the first simple definition of the feminist movement that I liked. I always disagreed with a movement that blamed an entire sex instead of historical mistakes. Mutuality between males and females will never be achieved unless women stop “hating” and “blaming” men so that men can understand women as being intrinsically equal.
Much like The F-Word, Feminism is for Everybody covers several topics. Within the web of airy sounding idealistic statements, the author does make her point, which is that feminism really is for everybody. She argues that feminism bleeds into the interests of so many groups, for instance minorities and individuals below the poverty line. The author also spends most of her time explaining what feminism has done for society, which is why feminism is so noteworthy. Achievements discussed include civil rights, a voice for sexual abuse, a network of women for a cause, the institutionalization of women’s studies, reproductive rights, challenging sexist thinking, fighting the “beauty myth”, raising awareness for feminism in social classes, raising awareness in the workplace, and the list goes on.
The important point to take home from this book is that feminism can be used to fight on all fronts. Feminism effects everyone in a society and it takes many people to make it work. Feminism is for Everybody was able to contrast the F-Word by giving an almost exact description of what feminism is. The important link between the two lies in the fact that The F-Word is trying to motivate this generation to choose an activist view of what feminism is, which is what Hooks does in her book. I think the author of The F-Word has her own very specific definition and views of feminism, despite the fact that you only read a motivation for people to at least care and be active. I think that The F-Word provides much more sound arguments than Feminism is for Everybody, but Feminism is for Everybody serves its own important role. That is, the book simply states what feminism is in the author’s view. This is important since most people don’t know what feminism is.
Opt Out.
Opt Out was one of the more controversial articles that we read this semester. The thesis of opt out is that women are now choosing to be stay to home mothers instead of being forced to. The article considers the testimonies of several graduates from Princeton, which the author recognizes is hardly a representative snap shot of women in
I think that this article if taken at face-value is entirely a contradiction to what The F-Word argues for. When people react to the stay at home mom argument, the article becomes another piece of clear evidence that feminism has not finished its fight. In the same light, Feminism is for Everybody discounts the discussion of privileged women and their choices, because feminism is for everybody.
The Eternal Feminine
The Eternal Feminine is a much different piece of literature than most read in class, mostly because it is a stage play. And it is not a stage play about feminism. Reading this play, however, does give the opportunity to analyze gender in Mexican literature. For my “reading gender” assignment I focused on one section of the play, which I wish to talk about now: the scene in her dream when she talks with her mother.
Castellanos places us in the perfect situation to learn the true context up Lupita’s fears. Lupita is dreaming of “what the future holds”. Instead of dreaming in fairytales, Lupita dreams in terms of what she doesn’t know, and how she has always learned what she now knows; Lupita doesn’t know how to be a good wife, what her husband will expect of her, what to think of sex in her mariage, how quickly she may get pregnant, and how she should take care of an unborn child... she answers these questions in her dream with the imagined angry reactions from her husband and the scorning reason of her mother. The way that Lupita resorts to answering the questions in her dream shows how innocent she really is. Her innocence is juxtaposed with what she figures real motherhood is at the send of this section: darkness. It isn’t very often that we see women seeking out what other possibilities there are, more correctly, it isn’t very often we encourage women to do so.
Lupita’s lack of control over her own pregnancy parallels the lack of control many women have over their pregnancies today. One parrallel is in education. As discused in the F-Word, sex education in the US is not properly provided everywhere. When Lupita’s mom tells her that she must wear loose clothes, and feed her cravings, it becomes apparent that neither of them know what really contributes to the health of a baby, so the one with more experience is the only one who should be bossing. Lupita is also completely bossed around by her husband and her mother. This may have represented her lack of understanding since she eventually listened to everything that she was told to do. There was also no talk of Lupita wanting to have a child, it just happened. The issue of a contraceptive didn’t enter the picture at all. It seems that the lack of knowledge about being a good wife was the very thing that was making her a good wife; she just had to listen to two people and she was fulfulling her duties. Many times in our society people are considered good when they don’t ask questions about a taboo subject like sex and pregnancy.
He’s a Stud, She’s a Slut
This book is a black and white motivation for feminism in that there really are obvious inequalities that place females at a disadvantage in our society. The book it written in a way that everyone can understand since it directly references the culture that we all live in. There are at least 49 double standards that every woman in the
Many of the double standards discussed in He’s a Stud, She’s a Slut are also discussed in The F-Word. This makes sense since double standards are a good motivation for women to stop being apathetic. The double standard that mixes the most with the F-Word is “He’s a politician, she’s a fashion plate”. This overlaps so well because the F-Word argues that women need to become more involved in politics. The “fashion plate” is a direct reference to women being useless in political matters, which wouldn’t be the case if women become more politically charged and motivated. “He’s gonna be a success, she’s gonna be a stay-at-home mom” is the double standard that meshes with the Belkin article over stay at home mothers. Regardless of the evidence that Belkin was showing, the actual majority of out culture believes this. All people have to do is consider maternity leave, paternity leave, tenure-tack jobs, and statistics that show there are less professional women working in the US than men. In the same fashion, this double standard is depicted in The Eternal Feminine.
The F-Word, Feminism is for Everybody, Opt Out, The Eternal Feminine, and He’s a Stud, She’s a Slut really did build on each other and motivate each other. The F-Word was able to explain to me that there are political issues that have to do with women’s issues that affect me and the
The F-Word has motivated more than anything else read in this class because I have always wanted to become a leader, specifically a leader in the science community. While there really are countless forces that keep women out of this field of study and keep women suppressed in the field, I find comfort in understanding these forces to fight them with a greater fire. The F-Word taught me to stop being pig headed. It taught me that there is opposition to my success in the sciences and that I need to get in there are fight. I now have two specific goals for my future career. The first is to establish a women’s physics group for undergraduates and graduates and be the head coordinator. Every physics department needs this in place for properly encouraging women in their major (the OU physics department only has a group for the PhD women students). The second goal is to be active in changing the way tenure is given so that it is not discriminating towards women.
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