Soc Excerpt # 2: Gender

May 13th 3006

I don’t think that I will ever forget the first time that my gender worked against me. I was about thirteen, and had “fully developed” by that time. I wanted to hang out with my guy friends that I had had since elementary school, but suddenly I had breasts that they didn’t treat me like they used to. They were all going off to play football in the paddock (a pretty common pastime in the prairies), and I asked if I could join. I remember that Tom[1] looked at me, while the others looked uncomfortably at the ground, and shook his head “no”. “Why not?” I demanded indignantly, feeling that in my thirteen years I had never felt so slighted. “Well…cuz, you’re a girl”. With that, they all disbanded, though that had been enough of a reason for all of them. I reeled, feeling so hurt that my friends didn’t want to play with me because of something as stupid as gender. “So what?” I thought furiously. “It’s not like it makes any difference!” Eight years later, I have to laugh at myself for two reasons. First of all, because I now see the incredible inequality and difference that gender does indeed make. And secondly, because my personal view hasn’t changed that much.

Gender inequality has been an ongoing issue for decades. It has given birth to a sociological approach known, not surprisingly, as “The Feminist Approach”, and it centers on gendering and gender inequality. Basically, it outlines the differing “roles” and “functions” of women in a patriarchal society. Bottom line? Women are subservient to men. This seems to be a venomous cultural pattern of history that continuously repeats itself. For example, Ancient Greece, the birthplace of democracy, only allowed affluent men to vote, as women were aligned with slaves and subordinates. In medieval Europe, women were accused of witchcraft, and burned at the stake by the men who accused them. “From a feminist perspective, the crack-down on witches on Medieval Europe and colonial America was a gendered conflict.” (Tepperman 25)[2]

Even today, gender inequality continues to be a problem. This is my question: how can a society who prides themselves on being ‘advanced’, who takes deep pleasure in being ‘sophisticated’, and who had the arrogance to coin phrases such as ‘dark ages’ and ‘primitive times’ still align themselves with the prevalent gender inequality today that was apparent in the middle ages? How can a society that claims to be sophisticated still treat individuals differently based on their gender? Oh sure, it’s gotten better. Women now have the right to vote, to free speech, and to work shoulder to shoulder with men in the workplace. But one cannot ignore the fact that the shoulders that are bringing home the greater paycheque for the same job belong to men. This inequality is not a result of a ‘natural’ or ‘biological’ streak in our DNA mapping. It is a purely cultural construct.

"Nor are we born biologically predisposed towards gender inequality. Domination is not a trait carried on the Y chromosome; it is the outcome of the different cultural valuing of men’s and women’s experiences. Thus, the adoption of masculinity and femininity implies the adoption of “political” ideas that what women do is not as culturally important as what men do."
(Kimmel 3)[3]

This attitude aligns itself with the feminist perspective. A great deal of emphasis is put on the “gendering of experiences”. This involves the ‘splitting’ tendency (a belief that experiences are explicitly male or explicitly female).

How does this translate into deviance? It involves what is known as “the problem of victimization” and “the problem of truth-finding”. Because women are forced into a culturally subservient role by men, their rights and their ‘side of the story’ often becomes more fluid than justice would like to admit. Individual lives and case studies don’t hold as much weight in a courtroom as facts and traditional views of science. This combined with the fact that the courtroom is yet another arena that is dominated by a patriarchal mentality, does not leave a lot of room for truth or justice for victimized women, particularly when they have been victimized by men.

To this day, I maintain my original outrage and mentality regarding all gender inequality. Yes, I am a woman. Yes, I have a different gender then men do. SO WHAT?

-K

[1] Pseudonym
[2] Tepperman , Lorne. Deviance, Crime, and Control; Beyond the Straight and Narrow . Ontario : Oxford University Press , 2006.

[3] Kimmel, Michael. Human Beings: An Engendered Species. The Gendered Society. 2nd ed. New York And Oxford: Oxford University Press , 2004.