On Becoming Female: Lessons Learned in School

Preoccupation (with appearance) among American women prevents them from focusing on more constructive aspects of themselves. At Woodview (middle school), concerns about attractiveness were promoted primarily through the high status activity of cheerleading. The tea her who organizes the tryouts told the judges to keep appearance in mind as they selected the candidates. Also, to pay attention to the person's weight. To be the best representatives they should be highly attractive as wek as being capable of promoting school spirit. Appearance was included in the judging of cheerleaders under the category of "sparkle." Iy was important to have the skills to do these gymnastic routines, but it was equally important to find was to maintain a neat, feminine appearance throughout the performance. This conveys the message to girls that how they look is as important as what they do. Although weight was taken into account, one year some girls who were considered overweight were selected. The judges suggested that they be put on diets, preserving the idea that thinness is an important aspect of cheerleaders' appearance.

Boys' Focus on Girls' Appearance in Peer Interaction

Male interest in girls' bodies as being sexual and appealing could arouse the deepest level of appearance anxiety in girls. Infromal rankings such as this remind girls that they are being evaluated on a daily basis.

The Role of Girls' Gossip

It was evident from the girls' comments at Woodview that the continual focus on other girls' looks further added to their anxieties about their own appearance. Many girls are likely to stay self-conscious and insecure about their body type and weight. Besides being appraised on the basis of their attire, girls were also evaluated for their body weight and type. Girls who were particularly overweight were frequent targets of gossip. Girls who were too skinny were alzo criticized, as were girla who had large hips and large breasts. Girls often try to increase their control over their weight by dieting, which leads, in more severe cases, to eating disorders. A group of sixth graders spent much of their lunch period making fun of a popular girl for wearing a particularly unusual outfit to school.
In another case, a group of eighth grade girls was critical of a local beauty pageant contestant of high school age who visited the school to collect money for her campaign. They claimed that she used makeup to give a false image of beauty, and that underneath she was really ugly. This girl was ctiticized for her attempts to be "too attractive" and "too sexy."
If girls do succeed in looking, acting, or dressing like the models they see in the media, however, they are likely to be accused of portraying false images or wanton sexuality. Thus, girls blame each other for drawing sexual attention to themselves rather than criticizing the social practices that promote a view of girls and women as sexual objects.

Attractiveness as an Increasing Concern for Girls

Appearance is alrady a salient concern among students, and it is likely to increase in importance for many as they get older. A more powerful form of school-sponsored competition is the selection of prom queens, homecoming queens, and attendants in which girls are annually evaluated on their attractiveness, often without ever volunteering to enter such competitions.

These experiences send girls a strong message that what they do and who they are is less important then how they look. Girls and women continued to be viewed as sexual objects within the media as well as other arenas from cheerleading and pompon teams to swimsuit competitions. Women must struggle to overcome a perception of self as object rather than subject  before they can begin the process of self-definiton as total and compleate human beings.

Relation to Myself:

I can absolutely say that this article was so true because it's there, at school, in the hallways. I hear girls talking about how other girls look all the time. One incident I overheard a girl saying "I kept looking at her hair wondering how she got so many bobbypins to stay there, and her hair was down. I just kept laughing at her." If girls would stop criticing eachother and start worring more about the important things in life we wouldn't have as many problems as we do. I remember being in elementary school and girls use to torment others for being ugly or having ugly clothes. They use to talk about girls who had big legs and weren't skinny. This is a horrible horrible state of mind. Judging others isn't right. Just like people say, "don't judge a book by its cover." In the end you might have missed out on a great friendship.

Sexuality and Gender in Children's Daily Worlds

This article written by Barrie Thorne and Zella Luria is about children and how they interact with the opposite gender. It focuses on the domains of gender and sexuality as they are organized and experienced among elementary school children, especially nine to eleven year olds. People use gender to refer to cultural and social phenomena. When children are between the ages of nine to tenthey're beginning the transformation from the gender system of childhood to that of adolescence. They are also on the verge of sexual maturity, cultural adolescence,

The Daily Separation of Girls and Boys

Gender segregation-the separation of girls and boys in friendships and casual encounters.
When children choose seats, select companions for work or play, or arrange themselves in line, elementary school children frequently cluster into same-sex groups. Gender segregation in elementary and middle schools has been found to acount for more segregation than race. There is more gender segregation when children are freer to construct their own activities. Boys tend to interact in larger and more publicly visible groups. Boys engage in more physical aggressive play and fighting. Their socail relations tend to be overtly hierarchical and competitive. Organized sports are both a central activity and a major metaphor among boys. Girls more often interact in smaller groups. They more often engage in turn-taking activites like jump-rope and doing tricks on the bars. Girls do engage in conflict, although it tends to take more indirect forms than the direct insults and challenges more often found in interactions among boys, and between girls and boys.

Interactions Among Boys

Boys in all-male groups often build towards heightened and intense moments. Dirty words are a focus of rules. Both girls and boys know dirty words, but flaunting of the words and risking punishment for their use was more frequent in boys' than in girls' groups. dirty talk is a staple part of the repertore of the boys' groups. Sports, dirty words, and testing the limits are a part of what boys teach boys how to do.

Rule Transgression: Comparing Girls' and Boys' Groups

Rule breaking by girl groups is smaller scale than rule breaking by boy groups.Teachers avoid disciplining whole groups of boys, partly for fear of seeming unfair.Girls' groups may engage in rule breaking, but the gender gourp's support for repeated public transgression is far less certain.

The Tie To Sexuality in Males

Gender arrangements and subcultures of middle childhood prepare the way for the secual scripts of adolescenced. Fifth and sixth grade boys share pornography7, in the form of soft-core magazines like Playboy and Penthouse, with grteat care to avoid confiscation. Since pornography is typically forbidden for children in boht school and families, this secret sharing occurs in a context of rule-breaking.

Interaction Among Girls

Forth and fifth grade girls more often organize themselves in pairs of best friends linked in shifting coalitions. The pattern is more one of dyads moving into triads, since girls often participate in two or more pairs at one time. Girls often talk about who is friends with or likes whom, they continually negotiate the parameters of friendships. On school playgrounds girls are less likely than boys to organize themselves into team sports. Sometimes girls work out group choreographies, counting and jumping rope in unison, or swinging aroud the bars.

Compared to my life:

I can compare this to how it is in high school, even though this is elementary children being talked about. When we are gie\ven the choise to pick our own groups in class most the time girls go with girls and boys go with boys. Even when we're able to pick seats at the beginnging of the year. The guys sit together and girls sit together. When I'm in gym class and we have a free day were we can play basketball or walk. Most the time the girls walk and the boys play the games. The only thing I can say is that there is a couple of guys that do interact with girls and be apart of girl groups and there is girls that interact more with guy groups in high school. Even though we're not given recess anymore we do still have free periods, and the girls do sit all together same with guys. Girl lunch tables tend to have guys and the main subject. But all in all things never really change from elementary to high school. It's all pretty similar.

Extreme Isolation

This article talks about kids who have been isolated from society for long periods of time, with no human interaction and socialization. In the 1940s a girl named Anna had been deprived of normal contact and had been given little human care for most of her first six years. Her death caused by hemorrhagic jaundice (bacterial disease caused by being exposed to water, food, or soil with the urine of infected animals. If left untreated it can turn into meningitis and cause death) occured on August 6, 1942. She was about ten and a half at death.

Two weeks after being born in a nurse's private home, Anna was taken to teh family farm. The grandfather's antagonism caused her to be moved to the house of her mother's friend shortly after. The local minister became interested and took her to his house thinking of adoption. Decided against it when he found that she had vaginitis. Anna was then taken to a child's home in the nearest large city. She spent eight weeks there until the agency told her mother to come get her. Her mom wanted to give her to a couple who got denied by the agency so she came and got Anna herself and gave her to the couple anyway. Social worker went to the mother's home and pleaded with Anna's grandfather to allow the mother to bring the child home. He refused.  More than four months old, she was taken to another children's home in a near-by town. A medical exam revealed that she had impetigo, vaginitis, umbilical hernia, and a skin rash.

She stayed in the second child home for 3 weeks. Later she was transferred to a private foster-home. Since the grandfather would not, and the mother could not, pay for the child's care, she was finally taken back as a  last resort to the grandfathers' house at the age of five and a half months. Anna was kept on the second floor in an attic like room. She received only enough care to keep her barely alive. She rarely moved from one place to another. At the age of six she could not talk, walk, or do anything that showed intelligence.

In 1936, two years after being discovered, Anna had progressed but still did not speak. On August 30, 1939 she was taken to a private home for retarded children. She eventually attained an adult mental level of six or seven years. A final and last report made from the school on June 22, 1942 stated that Anna could follow directions, string beads, identify a few colors, build with blocks, and differentiate between attractive and unattractive pictures. She talked mainly in phrases but would repeat words and try to carry on a conversation. At her death her capacities did not amount to much more than a two and a half year old. Her isolation prevented a considerable amount of mental development.
"It is almost impossible for any child to learn to speak, think, act like a normal person after a long period of early isolation."
Anna represented a marginal case, because she was discovered before she had reached age six.

Another case similar to Anna's is one of a young girl who was given the name Isabelle. She was born one month later than Anna, and discovered November, 1938, nine months after Anna was discovered. At the time she was found she was about six and a half years of age. She was an illegitimate child and had been kept in seclusion for that reason. Mother was a deat mute, and it appears they had spent most of their time together in a dark room shut off from the rest of the mother's family. Isabelle had no chance to develope speech; when she communicated with her mother. Lack of sunshine and inadequacy of diet had caused Isabelle to become rachitic.

Her behavior towards strangers was almost like a wild animal, showing much fear and hostility. In lieu to speech she made only a strong croaking sound. Isabelle acted like an infant. Many of her actions resembled deaf children. The individuals incharged of Isabelle launched a systematic and skillful program of training. One week of intensive effort before she even made her first  attempt at vocalization. In a little over two months after her first vocalization she was putting sentences together. Nine months after that she could identify words and sentences on the printed pages, could write well, could add to ten, and could retell a story after hearing it. Seven months beyond that point she had a vocabulary of 1,500 - 2,000 words and was asking complicated questions. She reached a normal level by eight and a half years of age. Isabelle covered in two years the stages of learning that oridinarily require six.

Today she is over 14 years old and has passed teh sixth grade in a public school.

In both cases of Anna and Isabelle  there was exceedingly low, or rather blank, intellectual level to begin with. In both a considerably higher level was reached later on. But the Ohio girl (Isabelle) achieved a normal mentality within two years whereas Anna was still markedly inadequate at teh end of four and half years.

How Sociologists Do Research

This article starts out with an example of a rape crime. A girl named Renee, age 19, was very scared because she had never went anywhere with a stranger let alone be in the car with one. The man's name was George and she had met him at her friend Patricia's party. They had danced and he asked if she would like if he took her home. She accepted the offer of him taking her home. While he was driving he passed her turn to her dorm and mumbled that he had to get something. He turned off onto a country road and that’s when she became scared. He looked at her and told her, "It’s time to pay babe," and started clawing at her shirt. Renee won't talk about that night.

Now the question is:

How can we gather reliable information on rape?

Sociologist and Common Sense:

            Common sense- A kind of knowledge not based on formal investigation, but on ideas that we pick up from our groups, mixed with abstractions from our own experiences.

o   From common sense we know that rape has ongoing effects, that it can trigger fears and anxieties, and that it can make women distrust me.

o   Also, some common sense ideas are not right.

Research Model:

            A research model has eight basic steps some have less, some are in different order, and some could have more.

1)     SELECTING A TOPIC

What you want to know about. It’s a sociologist own interest that helps them pick a topic or just because the funds are available.

2)     DEFINING THE PROBLEM

This is the second step to determine what you want to learn about the topic.

       Ex: You may want to determine the education and work experience of a rapist, or the average age of their victims.

3)     REVIEWING THE LITERATURE

Third step to reviewing the literature to see what has been published on the topic. If a question has already been answered, you want to know that. It can help you accomplish more.

4)     FORMULATING A HYPOTHESIS

A statement of what you expect to find based on a theory. A hypothesis predicts a relationship between or among variables.

5)     CHOOSING A RESEARCH METHOD

Ways by which sociologist collect data.

6)     COLLECTING THE DATA

Now you gather your data and make sure that it is accurate and reliable.

a.     SURVEYS

Let’s say you want to know how many women are raped each year then you will want to take a survey. Then you have to decide who you’re going to survey. What is the target group that you want to learn about? It’s best to do a random sample to generalize the whole population. Let’s say you’re at a college … you will need a list of all the women on campus. Then assign a number to each name on the list. You then will use random numbers to determine which particular women will become part of the sample. There is always some variation.

In some surveys, questionnaires, a list of questions are mailed to people. Other surveys use interviews: Respondents are asked questions directly. Usually surveys are done face-to-face, although they could be done over the phone. An advantage is that the researchers bring control to the situation. A disadvantage is the effects that interviewers can have on respondents that lead to biased answers. Some respondents try to make their answers match what they think the interviewer wants to hear.

b.     SECONDARY ANALYSIS

This is when researchers analyze data already collected by others. Ordinarily, researchers prefer to gather their own data, but lack of resources, especially money, may make this impossible. This approach can solve problems of access, but it also poses its own problems.

c.      DOCUMENTS

This is a written source of data. They are not commonly called documents, also included in this are movies, television programs, videotapes, computer disks, CD-ROMs, and other digitized records.

To apply this method to the study of rape, you might examine police reports.

a.     EXPERIMENTS

Sociologists seldom use this method. However, because they are more likely to be interested in broad features of society and social behavior, or in studying a social group in a natural setting, neither of which lends itself to an experiment.

The basic purpose of an experiment is to identify cause-and-effect relationships-to find out what causes what.

b.     UNOBTRUSIVE MEASURES

       Observing people’s behavior when they do not know they are being studied.

c.      PARTICIPANT OBSERVATION (FIELD WORK)

                                  The researcher participates in a research setting while observing what is

                                  happening in that setting.

7)     ANALYZING THE RESULTS

a.     Now it’s time to analyze your results. Sociologist use specific techniques for doing this, each of which requires special training. Ranging from statistical tests to content analysis.

8)     SHARING THE RESULTS

a.     Write a report to share your findings with the scientific community. Relate your finding to the literature. Explain your research procedures so others can replicate them.

In class we were given an assignment to go out and have 4 different people do the same surveys that were just worded differently. The results of the survey were that many people had the same thoughts and ideas, and understood the different wording. One thing I learned about doing this is that you need to make sure that people can understand what the question is asking them. Also, we watched a video about two men doing a survey asking people if they would like to end women’s suffrage. Many people didn’t understand the true meaning of what they were being asked and ended up signing the petition and only a couple people understood and became infuriated. I actually thought this was a really good lesson so that if I were to ever have to do a survey on my own I will know what I’m doing.

The Way People Speak

Are Dialects Fading?
The answer to that is no, different dialects will never go away. Carmen Fought address language diversity in the 21st century. She states that some of her students don't like when applications ask them what ethnicity they are. They respond by checking other and writing "human being." She also says that we tend to be very attached to the distinctions among

Ex 1). Teenagers would die of embarrassment if somebody were to think that they dressed, acted or talked like their parents. We try to avoid this as much as possible like inventing new slang terms.
Ex 2). Men don't like to be mistaken as women and vice versa.

Will we all end up talking alike?

"Now that we have so much television in America, will dialects die out?

Will we all end up talking alike?"

Carmen Fought thinks not. People who oringinally settled here were seperated by geographic features or great distances, which helped to maintain the distinictions between dialects. Now, that we have airplanes to get from place to place, and t.v. to bring people who speak other dialects into our lives it is easy to think that all the different accents could eventually evaporate. Also, another important fact to think about is all the large cities that have people of very different dialects, but they still maintain to speak different from eachother.



Our language expresses who we are

Carmen says in the article that we want to sound like the people we want to be like, not like other people from other groups. Basically, people want to sound like other people who are exactly like themselves. For example: cheerleaders at Barrington want to sound like other cheerleaders at Barrington. This is the reason dialect will stay around because people want to sound like the people around them.

Chicano English is Still English

Many Chicano English speakers dont speach any spanish. Chicano English is a contact dialect. It developed were two languages were in contact. Many people who speak Chicano English today are monolinugal in English.

Carmen's co-worker:

'Why do so many Mexican-American students seem to have

such a hard time learning English, even if they were born in the U.S.?'

The student that her co-worker was talking about was a native speaker of English. Her co-worker's confusion illustrated a common myth about Chicano English:

that it is a broken version of English

spoken by people whose first language was spanish

Kids of all ethnic backgrounds learn English perfectly, but its not standard English. Mexican-American students who speak spanish at home tend to have low test scores. Carmen said that someone looking at these scores would conclude taht bilingual Mexican-American children are likely to be hindered in learning English properly because of their spanish.

My Opinion:

I agree with what Carmen was saying throughout the article about dialect never fading. Reason being, because theres still a lot of people in America who you speak to personally and you can hear their accent clearly. Also, the people who are on television still seem to have their tone of dialect when they speak. I have personally witnessed this when I went down south to Texas and visited my family. When I spoke to people there they had a really slow relaxed southern accent. Also, they had the different slang words that southeners use. They tend to mix their words together and if you're not a decendant from Texas or the southern part of the states is more difficult to understand what they are saying. When I moved to Illinois from Texas I even had a real legit southern accent, but being that I was still at a young age when I moved here I have lost that accent. That does not mean that other people who mover here from other countries will though. This article was very interesting to read on someone else's oppinion of people's dialect. Especially the Chicano English speaker's part. To see that many of them don't even speak Spanish is astonishing because I would think that would be the first and formost language they spoke.

The Sounds of Silence

Language and Culture

"The Sounds of Silence," article is about nonverbal communication. While reading this article I actually learned that many cultures use different body language for different things/meanings. An interesting quote that my teacher Mrs. Castelli mentioned caught my attention. "There is no such thing as culture without language," she said. Which if you think about it that is really true.
Nonverbal language includes posture, gestures, facial expressions, costume, the way you walk, even the treatment of time and space and material things.
In different cultures or societies people use different ways of communicating that means different things. For instance, in white middle-class American culture they show they are listening to other people by looking right into their eyes. Also, alot of people nod their heads to show their paying attention or make slight noises. But when someone is ready to end a conversation they do alot of body shifting. As in stretching of the legs, crossing and uncrossing them, bobbing the feet, or looking away from the person talking. Then to really give a sign they look at their watches to end the conversation.
Most people will quickly glance at others then look away, but people from other cultures might think that staring at one another for a length of time is ok. To Americans this is unfamiliar and disturbing and they tend to look away.Men in different countries look at women differently. They really look at them: their eyes, hair, nose, lips, breast, hips, legs, thighs ... ect. Then when your in America no men every take more than a second to look at you unless their interested.
The most obvious use of nonverbal communication is eye contact. Some people can actually tell what your thinking by looking at your eyes. One example in the article is when people were looking a jewelry. The merchant kept telling the purchaser to buy a certain bracelet, but this bracelet was not the one they had chosen. By the merchant watching the pupil of the eye he really knew which one the purchaser wanted.
Also, study shows that when someone is really interested into something their pupils tend to dilate. Psychologist also say that the dilated a woman's eyes are the more attractive they are to men.
When someone gives you direct eye contact they want something specific such as a pickup or handout or information of some kind. But in the West alot of people look and greet on another even as strangers.
Another thing is people like their space, more known as a bubble. When others get too close we tend to tense up or back away. Sometimes we put things between us and the person who is invading their space. Also, your attitude affects the size of your bubble. If your angry your bubble expands. There are four main distances: intimate, personal, social, and public.
Then touch comes into communicating. Touching others on their shoulders breaks a sort of barrier between two people. Strangers have a lot of different ways of communicating.

Personally, I know I use alot of eye/hand communication to express how I feel. Especially when I'm explaining something to someone. Also, when I'm talking I feel more comfortable when the the person in which I'm speaking to is looking at me. It makes me feel that their really engaged in what I'm saying, and I find it rude for someone to look away or gaze at someone else when I'm expressing my thoughts. Another thing, in the article it mentions the sparkle in people's eyes. Most everyone had seen it happen with experience to someone else. When I say a nice thing to someone as in, "you look nice today," their eyes light up and they have a sparkle to show you have made their day.
The "bubble" situation can really relate to me, because I despise someone being to close to me. It's upsetting and gets me a little moody. I don't like to be crude but it's how I feel. Especially when I'm in a elevator and it gets overcrowded with people, and your shoulder to shouler with everyone. I'm a very closterfobic person, and feel I can't breathe when in small places with a lot of people.
Futhermore, I tend to glance at people for a second and look away just like most do. Like while walking the halls of the school I will look then look forward, or on a crowded bus many people look then have a tendency to look down at their feet.
Also, I have met many people from different countries. One in particular from Italy. After I got to know her everytime we seen eachother she did the two sided face "kiss/peck." At first it was very ackward for me, but I love how they are very loving to people.
I really enjoyed this article, it made me really look at the difference of the way people act simply by body language.

My Opinion:

Doing Field Work Among the Yanomamo (cont.)

                                  Yanomamo Chief Selling Baskets / Yanomamo female loin cloth

In my last blog I talked about this article, "Doing Fieldwork Among the Yanomamo." I talked about how the Yano would beg Chagnon for food when he was eating, and if he wouldn't give them none they would start to tell him disturbing things and harrassing him basically. The reason I feel they did this was because in their tribe they share with eachother. When someone is eating they are expected to give to everyone, and if they don't it's disrespectful in their culture. Also, when he wouldn't give them what they wanted they would steal from him. Eventually, Chagnon became interested in the Yano's genealogies. When he started asking about people's ancestors it took the Yanos by surprise, and they found it rude for him to ask about the dead. So, they would trick him and tell him fake names, and then laugh because he would believe them. The thing about the Yanos is that they never give one name to mutiple people. Everyone has their own name and nobody else can have it. After so long some began giving him a couple names, but not too many were he could figure out the rest on his own. One day there was a club fight over possession of a woman who was suppose to be getting married to a man named Rerebawa. He had been married into the Yano's and was now engaged with the younger sister of his wife. So, this says that this tribe can have many wifes and it's normal to them. When Chagnon heard Rerebawa call the man he was in a fight with by his dead father's name he took action. Since Rerebawa was angry with the whole group he began giving Chagnon names, and even looked over the names he was given in the past and told him they were fake and that the people in the village laughed at Chagnon about the fake names. When he started saying the names to other people they would get mad and he knew then that they were real names. Some people even started giving real names in exchange for goods or products such as a man named Kaobawa. Kaobawa had 5 to 6 wifes and was having affairs with many other women. His eldest wife, Bahimi, was pregnant when Chagnon started is fieldwork, but she killed the child because she didn't want her nursing son to have to compete against the new baby. Also, Kaobawa would beat his wife once in awhile, and nevery hard but to the Yanos this was typical standards. People from other villages and tribes would raid one another and kill women.

My Opinion:

After reading this article I see now that the Yanomamos have a very different way of living than Americans, but there is also similiarties between us. The Yano people value sharing and exchanging. Also, I feel that the Yanos would get upset when Chagnon would ask about ancestors, because they wouldn't want to remember. One thing in particular I found interesting about the Yanos was that they wouldn't give anybody the same name, that part is very different from Americans. People in our society give their children names from the decieced people in their families or they give them part of their own names. We find this being a good thing because it shows that we're not forgetting our dead, and also we value certain names and pass them down from generation to generation. I was giving the middle name Maxine, and that comes from my grandmother. So, it's very special to me. The Yanos most likely find it disrespectful to name someone after someone else. Also, the Yanos are allowed more than one wife and it's ok to them to do that. For me and in our culture that is wrong and illegal to have multiple wifes. It's even wrong to have affairs with other women/men. Another thing is that it was ok for the Yano to beat their women, and here people would go to jail. When other people would enter their village and do bad things they call it raids, but in our society thats basically like gangs. Furthermore, the Yanos have certain values that they have and follow that are very different from ours, but at the end of the day we have two different cultures and if they were to observe us they would find us weird as we see them.

Using Hallucinogenic Yopo