2015年4月7日星期二

Blog Post 17:Feminine Politics and Rape Prevention

On Tuesday, the class still talked about how to prevent rape by language, theory and feminist politics. Students suggest some aspects of language where rape is shown. For instance, people tend to convince themselves that rape is ok. The instructor suggests that in order to change the rape culture, people need to change their language. Students said human language is historical based because it exists in old religious texts like Bible. This sort of caught my interest because I know that bible depicts only one God and he is a man. All other female goddesses are less powerful than him. Yet this context didn’t say why God can’t be woman, or why female Goddesses are less powerful than male. To me, the Christian religion might enforce sexism, a concept that fundamentally relates our modern rape culture. People learned that man is the dominator throughout generations. If people want to change the way rape culture is designed, they should alter the context of how women are depicted in history. This part is extremely difficult because it may alter people’s tradition and a lot of people don’t like it. Like for instance, in Christian religion, they should be able to say that God is a woman because woman can be as powerful as man, but Christian religion is not just a doctrine but also a tradition, Christians worship their God and are used to the idea God is a guy. To change their religion would be to disrupt their lives and everything they believed in. Loyal Christians might treat change as an anti-religious movement.

Not just in religion, women are historically subordinate to men. Back to the history, women are treated as prostitutes and slaves. In 1970s, men hold the right to own properties but women don’t. Women also don’t have the right to vote. In post-modern eras, women don’t go to school or work; their traditional roles are housewives, wives, and mother. All they should think about is to find a husband and marry. Also, women are expected to stay home and be the caretaker. Women who play sports are considered non-traditional and manly. The reading suggests that maybe women should abandon feminine stereotypes and be more independent and strong. I think this idea is debatable. If women abandon their feminine traits like their traits of being a mom, they can choose work over children. This aspect actually is growing bigger in modern society. For instance, Many Japanese women today choose not to have children or even marry because they don’t want to be the caretaker. And the Japanese population is going down because women refused to have kids. If they become a mother, they have to play the role of caretaker, because there’s not way their husbands will be the caretaker. This can show that some feminine stereotypes still exists today and favored by society. Society doesn’t encourage men to be the caretaker so women have to take that role; this tradition empowers men while dissatisfies women, because women also wants to be ambitious and strong, but they can’t be when they have to take care of a child. Society still keeps teaching women to be feminine through commercialization. Media makes women think if they wear make ups and be sexually attractive, men will come and talk to them. American women started to learn how to dress up or how to do make-ups at an early age; this cultural aspect is very different from China. If you go to China, you will find that very few Chinese women do make-ups while in high school or even in college, because society doesn’t expect women to show their attractiveness in a sexy way. Instead of being overly feminine and sexy, Chinese society expects women to look natural. They don’t have to put on a party dress and heavy make-ups or go to a bar and get drunk; that’s not how Chinese people define “sexy.” If a Chinese girl get too drunk or wear a really short skirt and flirt with men all the time, her parents and friends will perceive it as unhealthy or unconstrained. So I guess, if American women want to abandon their feminine characters when diminishing rape culture, they should also change the way they look. But again American society doesn’t want women look natural; they expect women to look sexy and get a man and have babies in order to keep their civilization from extinction. 

没有评论:

发表评论