More on Gender

So previously, I've written posts on my thought about gender. Just to reiterate, what I've said in those posts is basically that gender is really just a social construct, something created by the society in which we live to make distinctions between people that often don't really exist. In present day, this is a pretty radical view, but I'm not the only person who feels this way. I thought that today I'd highlight some artists and authors who express this same view.

First I'd like to talk about the song, "When I was a Boy", by Dar Williams.

Dar Williams is a folk singer. She writes songs about a variety of social issues, as well as her own experiences. I had the privilege to see her in concert at my sleep-away camp this summer. She explained that this song was about her experience as a "tomboy" when she was little. This song really captures the way in which gender is something forced on people by the society around them. The speaker in the song talks about having many traits, as a child, which are stereotypical assigned to a boy. As she grows up, she finds herself conforming to the societal expectations of a girl, yet she feels like she has lost something. She also feels like she can't share the way she was as a child with anyone. The same goes for the man who she speaks to at the end of the song.

I think that this song reflects the experiences of a lot of people. No one perfectly fits into the societal ideals for gender; however, our society places such a big emphasis on fitting into a gender (specifically, your biological sex) that people give up pieces of themselves to do so.

Next I'd like to talk about Andrea Gibson. Andrea Gibson is an amazing slam poet. Her poetry deals with gender, sexuality, class, bullying, and war, among other things. I'd like to specifically highlight her poem "Swing Set". The poem can be found on YouTube under the search "Andrea Gibson swing set"; however, the link isn't posted here due to language. Before you continue reading though, please watch the poem. 

This poem touches me in a way that I'm not sure that I can describe. I've definitely experienced some of that childhood curiosity myself, working at summer camps, and just being around kids. Last summer, I worked at a camp for a three week session. During the last week, one of the second graders who I had been working with every morning and afternoon for the full session came up to me and asked, "Are you a boy or a girl". A conversation very similar to the one described in Andrea's poem ensued. I got the same question from other campers, one of whom wouldn't talk to me or sit near me because she thought I looked like a boy. In various places, I'll catch a little kid, generally about three or four years old, looking at me and I'll smile at them or say hi. Sometimes, as they walk away, I'll hear, "Daddy, that boy was my friend" or "Daddy, that boy was nice, I like him." Their parents will glance back over their shoulder to look at me again, before giving their child an indulgent smile.

As she points out, it's the adults and older kids who care. In that moment when the parents glance back to look again at the teen who they didn't bother to really notice, there is a look of judgment on their faces that doesn't exist for their kid, as the parent wonders, "is that a boy or a girl". The bathroom incident that she describes has happened to me more than once. And the thing is I live in an extremely tolerant area. It's not like I'm bullied for looking the way that I do. A lot of people don't care at all. So if I still have to deal with some of what she describes in this poem in an area as liberal as the one in which I live, I can only imagine what it must be like for people who aren't as fortunate.

While I agree that (for the most part), young children don't care that much about whether you (as an older person or figure of authority) fit gender norms, at the same time children are extremely aware of gender. Although there is no judgment in the question or assumption that I am a boy, there still is an understanding of what girls and boys are supposed to be like and look like. This understanding, instilled in people at such an early age, has the potential to provide the basis for judgment and intolerance later in life. It also has an enormous effect on the way in which they live their own lives and change themselves to fit into this understanding.

Finally, there is Kate Bornstein, an author, playwright, and performance artist. Bornstein is best known for the books she's written on gender theory. Her books talk about gender as a social construct, moving beyond gender, and her personal experiences as first, a transsexual woman, and then as someone who does not identify with any gender. Bornstein's books discuss gender in a way that is frank, educational, and engaging.  I agree with a lot of what Bornstein says. She basically says what I'd like to say but in a better and more coherent way.  Bornstein has a gender workbook titled My Gender Workbook: How to Become a Real Man, a Real Woman, the Real You, or Something Else Entirely (which you can find if you search it on Google books). There isn't that much of it on Google books, but there is a gender aptitude quiz that I really suggest that you take. The quiz really gets you thinking about your own gender and how you relate to the concept of gender.

Charter Schools and Saving the World

I watched the documentary The Lottery, a film about the lottery to get into the Harlem Success Academy, a high performing charter school in New York City. A charter school is a school that receives federal funding but is not subjected to some regulations of other public schools.

This lottery is, for some of the children, their one shot at a good education. These students generally come from lower income families, whose parents can’t afford to move to an area with better schools, or take their children out of the children’s zoned schools and place them in a private school. The film portrayed both this charter school, as well as charter schools in general, in a very positive light.

This film was an hour and a half long, but took me close to two and a half hours to watch, because I kept pausing the film to take notes and to talk with my mom.


My mom's job has to do with civil rights in education, and she is generally against charter schools because she has seen them used in the context of parents in the south who put their kids in charter schools because their children's zoned school (also known as home school) is too "integrated". She also says that many charter schools seem to think that they are above the law and don't have to follow various federal 
nondiscrimination laws.


She takes the position that instead of making charter schools, the money that would go to charter schools should be used to improve already existing schools.
What really struck me about the schools in the movie is the enormous difference between the performance of the students in the Harlem Success Academy and the students at the zoned schools.

I don't think that giving money to the already existing zoned schools would be able to save them in this situation. It would take a full overhaul of the education system in New York and maybe in America to do that. 

It seemed that the difference between the charter schools and zoned schools in the movie was that zoned schools expected the students to fail. No one at the zoned schools expected the students to succeed in life, and consequently, most of them didn't. In the Harlem Success Academy, the teachers hadn't given up on the kids. They were still pushing their students to succeed, regardless of what the world thinks of their chances at success.


And that's not something that can change with more money. That's something that will take school systems reassessing the way that they approach education as a whole.


From there, my mom and I started talking about how unions played into education. In the movie, the teachers union was presented as harmful to schools because union contracts make it difficult to get rid of incompetent teachers and make any change to the schools efficiently. This is something that charter schools don't have to deal with because they can hire teachers who are not members of the teachers union.


This was something that I was very conflicted about because I think that unions are important, but at the same time, I recognize that the currently, the way that the unions function may not be the most efficient or effective.


So my conclusion on that was that the unions also need to be reformed. Not gotten rid of, which how the charter schools dealt with them. That is not a real solution. But improved so that teachers and students and parents all get their needs met.


At this point, I came to the conclusion (and shared with my mom) that the world needs to be reformed. Just in general. The schools, the unions, the economy, gender, the government, the entire structure of our society.


And I know that that's ridiculous. It’s unrealistic and overly idealistic. I realized it as I said it. And my mom also pointed it out to me. She said that she fundamentally agrees with me, that this type of thing takes time, that change is a long and continuous process. She also pointed out that change takes all types of people. The idealists and the realists.
 
I think that she makes a good point. I think that people often forget that it takes both sides of the spectrum to make a difference. The idealistic extremists and their strong beliefs are needed to make change. But the more logical, realistic people also need to be there. These people create a balance, giving reality checks, helping things stay structured and not get lost in the craze of ideology.
 
I often tend to be an idealist. Some people think that that’s pointless, that  idealists are stupid because they ignore the realities of life for the world that they think should exist. I think that being an idealist is also valuable. Without idealists, the ideas for a lot of the progress in the world wouldn't exist. At the same time, realists are also needed to keep any movement grounded in reality.
 
So I don't think that I can fix the world. I don't even think that I really know what needs to be fixed. But I hope that I can make some kind of difference. I think that as crazy as it can sometimes be, my way of looking at life is valid too.

A bit about PFOX

This week I'm going to talk about my documentary topic, PFOX. I'd like to open with the clarification that this is going to be an impartial post. I am writing this to post some information about this organization  not to share with you my personal beliefs.

I'm writing a blog post on this because it seems that many of my peers know of PFOX, but don't really know anything much about them, which I think is never a good thing, especially when it comes to a topic that is this controversial. When the PFOX flier was sent out last year at Blair, some of the people I talked to didn't really understand what the flier was saying. Now when I say that my partners'and my documentary topic is PFOX, some people vaguely remember that they were"the flier people", but not much else.

PFOX, or Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays and Gays, is a national nonprofit organization. It was founded in 1998 and is headquartered in Virginia. It state that it id an organization that works to educate the public on sexual orientation and the ex-gay community. It also says that "PFOX supports an inclusive environment for the ex-gay community, and works to eliminate negative perceptions and discrimination against former homosexuals."

To give this some context, PFOX describes ex-gays as people with unwanted same-sex attractions who, "Make the personal decision to leave homosexuality via secular therapy, Homosexuals Anonymous support groups, faith based ministries, and other non-judgmental environments."

PFOX supports the idea that people should have the option of "self-determination", or that people should be told that with the proper guidance, they can leave homosexuality.

According to PFOX, "PFOX families love their homosexual child unconditionally. Unlike other organizations which insist that parental love is conditional on affirming homosexual behavior, there are no conditions on our love for our children. We do not have to approve of everything our children do." 

The website links to PFOX's statement of principles (if you click this link, please don't skip the intro), a site that opens with the statement that ""Path [the site] is a non-profit coalition of organizations that helps people with unwanted same-sex attractions (SSA) realize their personal goals for change -- whether by developing their innate heterosexual potential or by embracing a lifestyle as a single, non-sexually active man or woman." In other words, PFOX's principles are that people should have access to organizations that help them leave "unwanted same-sex attractions".

PFOX feels that "former homosexuals" are the least visible minority group in America. PFOX works to gain recognition and acceptance for "ex-gays" and the organization itself, which is often met with a negative reaction from the liberal community

PFOX, an organization who's main target audience is children and teens, sends fliers explaining itself and its goals to school around the country. As I'm sure that some of you remember, Blair was a recipient of those fliers last year. Some of you may not have received the fliers, as some teachers made the decision to not had them out to students. I can't find the specific flier that our school received but this flier is similar and has pretty much the same information.

PFOX also supports students in starting an Ex-gay and Straight Friends club at school. The website explains that this club would be a safe environment for students to discuss "alternatives to homosexuality". It states that "gay student clubs encourage questioning youth to immediately self-identify as 'gay and proud.' With an Ex-Gay Alternatives club at their school, students who struggle with same sex attractions have the option of receiving all the facts on sexual orientation in a fair and balanced manner instead of being pressured to adopt a gay identity."

Honestly, I'm going to stop short of drawing any real conclusion here because I don't know how to do that in an unbiased manner. I feel like this post isn't all that substantive because I couldn't put any of myself into it. This was very difficult for me. Maybe it was a good exercise though. I think that it is a valuable skill to be be able to explain one side of a very charged topic while removing your personal opinions from your explanation.

  I plan to return to this subject when I'm done with the documentary. In the meantime, please, please, please, comment with your own opinions. Do you agree with PFOX? Disagree? Interested in starting an Ex-gay and Straight Friends club at Blair? Think that would be a bad idea? Really, I would appreciate all reaction in the form of comments.

I'll leave you with this video posted on the PFOX YouTube channel:

There's a Girl in the Girls' Bathroom

For this post, I'd like to share an experience that I had recently.

So all of you who know me know that the way that I dress is generally pretty androgynous. It's not super masculine  but it's not particularly feminine either. My hair is pretty short, not a crew cut, but shorter than a bob. The day that this happened, I was wearing a loose grey fleece sweatshirt, loose jeans, and tennis shoes. I'm used to having people mix up my gender every once in a while, and refer to me as a boy, or use male pronouns, but on this occasion  something that goes beyond that happened.

After school, I stopped at the Community Center to use the bathroom. When I entered the bathroom, there was a gaggle of middle school girls standing there gossiping. When they saw me, they got quiet. Then they started giggling nervously. One of them muttered, "what the h**l." I ignored them. As I went into a stall, one of them said to me, "Wait, this is the girls room." I replied with, "yes indeed." Normally, that's enough to clear up any confusion. Not for them. They continued to giggle nervously, whispering to each other, "What's he doing?" They then left but continued to discuss me loudly, right outside of the bathroom door.

"What is wrong with him?" "I think that's a girl?" "Why is he still in there?" "Should we tell someone?"

They decided that they should take action on their own. They opened the door to the bathroom and switched the lights off, then hastily retreated. As there were no windows in the bathroom, it was pitch black. I could barely see my hand right in front of my face.

As I groped to unlock the door of the stall and find the light switch, I felt like crying. I don't think that anyone deserves to be treated like that.

First of all, leaving then returning to turn off the lights on me was not the correct way to handle the situation at all. If they were that confused, they could have specifically asked if I was a girl. If they truly thought that I was a guy, they should have gotten security. Not that I would have appreciated that either, but turning out the lights was just stupid and immature. If I was a guy and I had gone into the girls bathroom on purpose, I don't see how turning out the lights would really make a difference. If anything, it would have just made me angry.

I recognize that these were middle schoolers and middle schoolers are, by  nature, not always the best at handling this type of situation. At that age tweens, egged on by their friends, are infamous for doing stupid things without thinking about how their actions might affect anyone else involved. I understood that fully, even as it was happening. But that really doesn't make their actions any less hurtful.

I don't mind that they initially confused my gender, that's just one of the things that happens. I do mind the way that they continued to treat me after my gender should have been clear to them. Just because I didn't say, "I am a girl," does not mean that I'm not one. That is not something that I should have to proclaim whenever I go into a bathroom.

This all fits into my first blog post rather nicely. Gender is ridiculous. It's just a series of stereotypes put in place that tell us that our genitalia should dictate how we look and act. And that if we don't fit in with those stereotypes there's something wrong with you.

But really, there isn't. As cliched as this sounds. Everyone is exactly who they are supposed to be. I am just as much of a real girl as the middle schoolers in the bathroom were.

So please, don't make assumptions on gender based on appearance. It is absolutely unnecessary. Please don't assume that you know everything about a person because they fit your image of a girl or a boy. If you don't know and you're worried about offending someone, ask as politely as you can, and if they seem offended, explain that you didn't want to hurt them by drawing the wrong conclusion. And just be nice. Please.

This link is targeted towards parents raising gender nonconforming children, but I think that really, it's something that anyone can benefit from.


Also, Stephanie commented on my first blog post with this link, but I think that it's a great video and really fits here as well so I figured I'd share it here as well.

Israel Discussion in a Kosher Restaurant

Those of you who follow what's going on in the middle east know that things between Israel and Gaza are not looking pretty right now. There's a conflict going on that involves rockets, the death of innocent civilians, and the possibility of a ground war. All in all, not so much fun. Also, not all that new. This type of thing has been happening on and off, pretty much since Israel first became a state. But that's not the point. The News isn't telling you that. The News is telling you about the escalating conflict and stuff. Because it doesn't make a good story to say, "Israel and Gaza are going at it. Again." This is not meant to undermine the violence going on there. This is terrible stuff, and the fact that it isn't new doesn't make it any less terrible.

Anyway. My uncle and his family live in Israel on the kibbutz Ma'agan Michael, a small socialist community based on the idea of farming the land (they also have a plastic factory that makes toilets). The kibbutz is to the north of Israel, near Haifa for those of you who know where that is. To give some perspective, Gaza is much further south. But with close family living in Israel, this type of conflict makes my family worry.

The issue is, my mom is extremely liberal and seriously faults Israel for its occupation of Gaza. My Zaydie (her father), is an Orthodox Jew, who is liberal in most social and economic things, but orthodox in those things Jewish. He doesn't think Israel is completely perfect, but if you criticize Israel too much around him, he'll snap. As you can see, in a family with a large stake in what happens in Israel and largely conflicting view points, there might be a bit of conflict. Just a bit.

This came to fruition today after lunch, while sitting in a kosher restaurant (where my Zaydie's views are generally more popular). My mom was talking with her parents about my uncle and Israel and what was going on there. It somehow came up that my uncle had been kind of pushing my grandparents to move to Israel. As you might expect, considering that most people who's parents live nearby don't want their parents to move out of the state, much less to a war ridden country across the globe, my mom was vehemently opposed to the idea of them moving.

At one point, she mentioned that she would never want to live in a country in which the government actively oppress their population. My Zaydie clearly took a bit of offence, but at that point, things were still relatively civil. From there, they got to how the Jews who moved to Israel originally got their land, whether they had bought it from the Palestinian's or stole it from them (sounds a bit like conflict surrounding the US and the Native American's, huh). My mom talked about how the government forced Palestinians off their land to give the land to people who immigrated to Israel. My Zaydie compared it to how the US, "stole one-third of our land from Mexico, but we're friends with Mexico now and the US isn't a bad place." And things kind of spiraled downhill from there. Very quickly.      

Personally, I'm not sure what to think about all this. I've grown up listening to both my mother's perspective and my Grandfather's. At my parent taught, cooperative Hebrew school, I've had classes that do their very best to give both sides of the conflict. I go to a Jewish sleep-away camp that stresses labor Zionism  the idea that there should be a Jewish state and that Jews should move to Israel and farm the land. But even at this camp, the counselors do their best to teach us that Israel isn't perfect.

Honestly, I don't think that this is an issue with one right answer, if any right answer. At this point, both the Israelis and the Palestinians are at fault. Neither side is even close to perfect. You can't really play one side as the victim and one side as the persecutor. It doesn't work that way.

Unfortunately, that is what people have the tendency to do. Many people see this as either the Israelis oppressing the Palestinians or the Palestinians are bombing the Israelis, unprovoked. People tend to pick the extremes in a conflict that is no where close to black and white. Both my mom and my Zaydie understand that actually. But a lot of people don't

The thing about my mom and Zaydie's argument is that it isn't all that rare. This is the type of things that really has the potential to divide families. And in arguments about this, no one will win. No one will persuade the others that they're right and the others are wrong.

 
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mrdevlar/4921828661/

Leftover Soup

I spent the weekend in New York city with my family, going to see the Broadway show Newsies. We had a great time at the show, but I also had an experience this weekend that really moved me.

We rode the bus in to New York and walked to our hotel, stopping at a restaurant for dinner. My brother ordered soup that he decided he didn't like and didn't eat. Although nobody wanted the leftover soup, my dad took it to go. As we walked from the restaurant to the hotel, we passed a young woman, sitting under a store awning with a sign saying something along the lines of "Hungry and Broke, Please Help". She was sitting hunched against the wall in a pair of jeans and a flannel shirt, her blond hair whipping around her thin face in the wind. My dad offered her the leftover soup. Often in these situations, the homeless person will respond with thank you, god bless you, god bless your family, have a nice evening, and on, but she simply said, "yes, thank you."

First of all, she must have been freezing. It was dark, cold, and windy, and I was shivering in my winter coat, so I can barely imagine how cold she must have been in just a flannel shirt. But what really struck me in the encounter was a tone in her voice. As she accepted the soup, there was a something that crossed from thankfulness into desperation. The "yes" was an exclamation, the "thank you", tagged on to the end in an attempt to save face, to cut that desperation a bit.

My mom was also moved by the encounter. To her, it was less about the woman's tone of voice and more about her age. Often, the people you see on the streets at night are middle aged men, but this girl looked like she was only a few years older than me. After we walked another block, my mom decided to go back and give her twenty dollars.

Interactions like the one described above always leave me feeling guilty. As a privileged teen, I never have to worry about where my next meal is coming from. At the same time, in these situations, I think that people have the propensity to look down on the homeless people they meet. They feel bad for them, but they also feel better than them. At my summer camp, we have spent days discussing this; whether it is better to give money to a person on the street, or to donate money to an organization that helps homeless people. The subject also came up of how it's difficult, but important to remember that you aren't any better than the people to whom you're giving your money, just in a different situation.

I don't know what this woman's story was, why she was on the street, or even how she felt about being there. That's something that I'll never know. But as we walked around New York city for the next two days, I saw an amazing amount of homeless people on the streets, many more than you see walking around DC.

According to the Coalition for the Homeless, an advocacy and service group, homelessness in in New York City is currently at its highest level since the Great Depression. In June 2012, there were 46,600 homeless people sleeping in municipal shelters each night, including 11,200 homeless families with 19,200 homeless children. This is not including the number of unsheltered homeless people, as there is no accurate count of unsheltered homeless people in New York City. Studies show that the primary cause of homelessness, especially among families is a lack of affordable housing in New York City. In addition according to a report published by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 92.9% of chronically homeless people in New York City are African American and 82.3% are male. They found that people experiencing transitional homelessness (one short term stay at a homeless shelter) are also predominately African American and Male.

I don't think that my experience that night has really changed how I'm going to behave in the future. It hasn't left me any more inclined to run out and volunteer at a homeless shelter or to hold a canned food drive. I think that really this experience has simply helped me relate more to the situation of homeless people. We all tend to relate the most with people with whom we feel we have something in common. I think that I saw something of myself in that cold, desperate young woman. I have no idea what it was, but it was there. And that something made her, and through her, the issue of homelessness, seem more real to me.




Homeless Girl

Don't Burst my Bubble

I live in a bubble. I think that it's safe to say that most of us do in CAP. This bubble includes all aspects of my life--my school community, my family, the neighborhood in which I live, my friends, my religious community, even my socialist summer camp. In this bubble, everyone believes pretty much the same thing.

That is not to say that people aren't opinionated, in fact, in bubble land, most people have extremely strong opinions, they're just all the same.

This weekend, I went on a trip with my Jewish community, a cooperative, parent run group, to a lodge on the Appalachian Trail. The professions of the adults present ranged from union organizers to a civil rights lawyer to a NASA scientist, to a professor of Astronomy at Johns Hopkins University, to an education policy consultant, to an urban planner. These were adults from a huge variety of professional fields. On this trip, I attempted to work on my crystal ball assignment, researching the demographics of Pennsylvania and using the information to predict the result of the upcoming election in Pennsylvania. Upon my explanation of the assignment, the adults present launched into a long conversation about the Pennsylvania elections, from the talking points of the U.S. Senatorial election, to the union's position about president Obama, to their own experiences canvasing there.

After the conversation, which covered a lot of issues but was really a bunch of adults agreeing with each other about things, the adults turned back to me. One of them jokingly presented me with their predictions for Pennsylvania's elections. "Our conclusion is that the Cheder adults want Obama to win Pennsylvania." Accept for really, it wasn't  joke, it was a pretty good summary of both their conversation and the political views of almost everyone around me. I know only three republicans. Literally, three. Besides those three, anyone I know would tell me that they planned to vote for Obama in the upcoming election and that they hope that he wins.

Hey, I'm fine with that. I hope Obama wins just as much as any of them. But at the same time, it's important for me, even more than it would be otherwise, to educate myself about issues, try to find both sides of each story, and figure out what I believe personally.

On my Hebrew school trip that night, we were all sitting around the campfire, the adults singing songs from a Tom Lehrer album, including Pollution , National Brotherhood Week, and The MLF Lullaby . Not your traditional campfire songs, but hey, why not. You sing songs about fires burning bright, we sing political satire.

After somewhere around the fifth song, I commented on how strange we must seem, sitting around a campfire singing about politics. They responded with a comment about my bubble. Someone pointed out how strange the real world would seem after being raised constantly surrounded by people like them. I responded by saying that I wouldn't ever have to leave my bubble. And it's true. I could theoretically go from bubble to bubble, from liberal land to liberal land, for the rest of my life. The helpful people of Cheder even suggested colleges I could go to if that was my goal, Oberlin College, University of California, Berkeley and University of Texas at Austin.

But honestly, I don't really want to live in my bubble for the rest of my life. I appreciate the beliefs that surround me and largely agree with them, but at the same time, I feel like I can't possibly know what I believe until I've really been exposed to people who don't fit into my bubble, who disagree with everything that I'm used to hearing, and who can intelligently explain their position. Part of me wants to go to a conservative college, just to get the other side of the story. Odds are very low that I'm going to do that. I'd probably be miserable. After your childhood is spent in an all enveloping bubble, you can't break out of it all at once, even if your sure that you want to (and I'm not sure at all).

I have one last point. Almost everyone lives in some kind of bubble. Whether you live in political bubble, a religious bubble, a racial bubble, or another type of bubble, odds are good that you live in some kind of bubble. When people go out of one bubble, they don't generally spend the rest of their lives bubble free, they just move to a different bubble. Bubbles are often just another way that people separate themselves from others and build barriers between themselves and people with whom they disagree or don't understand.      

Bubble Picture

I hate shoes

I was going to talk about gender again, but I've had a hard week, and at this point, my brain is pretty dead, so I've decided to talk about shoe shopping instead.

I need new shoes. This happens about twice a year, once in fall near the beginning of school when my mom realizes that I have no shoes appropriate for cold weather except for tennis shoes, and once in spring, somewhere around spring break, when my mom realizes that I have no shoes appropriate for warm weather except for flip-flops or Crocs. My mom, as well as many other people are of the opinion that two pairs or extremely casual shoes are not enough to get a person through the year. I, respectfully disagree

Full disclosure here. I hate shoes. If I got my way, I would go barefoot or in just socks all year. Shoes hurt my feet and they're uncomfortable. Yes, all of them. This is why I loved Crocs so much, regardless of how ugly they might be. Really, Crocs aren't shoes they're light pieces of plastic which loosely encase your foot. For a while, I would wear Crocs all year round. But, eventually, Crocs became too hated by society, even for me, someone who's known to completely disregard styles and trends (and not necessarily in a good way).

Power struggles over shoe shopping have been part of my relationship with my mom for as long as I can remember. Since I decided that my then trademark patent leather shoes hurt my feet when I was five, there has been a perpetual struggle to find shoes that she deemed acceptable and I deemed comfortable. The Crocs were just a more recent part of the battle (my mom did not approve of my wearing Crocs everyday). Before that, we had reached a truce over Merrell Moccasins, a clog-esque shoe which was impossible to find in stores.

Really, what it comes down to is that there don't seem to be any shoes that fit my feet well. They make shoes that are wide, shoes that are narrow, shoes that have high heels, shoes without heels, shoes that are completely flat, shoes for flat feet, shoes for high arches, but they don't seem to make shoes for people with tall feet, as in from top to bottom of the foot, and although they do make shoes for people with ankles that collapse in on themselves, these shoes are expensive, clunky, and look like they should belong to an old, retired jogger. As you can see, my choices are rather limited.

So, this weekend, my mom decided that it was time for our biannual shoe shopping trip. Every year, twice a year, these trips happen, and every year twice a year, I buy a new pair of shoes and then refuse to wear them. This year was worse than usual. Not only was there nothing comfortable, but there wasn't even anything that I wanted to try on.

Because most of my clothing consists of loose jeans and loose t-shirts, nicer women's shoes and clogs would look weird, at least in my head. My mom clearly disagreed because most if the shoes that she suggested were block heeled clogs. After the third pair, one would think that she'd get the idea that those weren't what I was looking for. But she kept asking what type of shoe I did want to try on, and the truth was, I didn't want to be trying on any shoes, so I just kept trying her suggestions.

This time, I went home without any new shoes. My mom and I returned form the shopping trip exhausted, disgruntled, and seriously annoyed with each other. I'm betting that after that experience, fun though it was, I'll be off the hook for shoe shopping for another six months. It looks like I'm going back to the Merrell Moccasins. Maybe they'll work again. Who knows?

I'm going to close this post using the same format as my last one--my ideal world. In my ideal world, people would go barefoot. Either that, or there would be different types of socks which had the texture of socks but were thick enough to keep out worms, water and cold. That way, there wouldn't have to be shoes. It would save people a great deal of money on shoes and it would be much more comfortable. I mean, really, some scientists are finding that shoes aren't all that great for your feet anyway. Obviously, based on the amount of garbage on the ground today, what with broken glass and all sorts of other sharp objects, some forms of shoes are necessary to protect feet. Also, there is the issue of worms which enter the body through bare feet, but there are ways to prevent that, either through the aforementioned sock idea or by using a worm repellent medicines (if they have them for dogs, I have the utmost faith that something like that could be created for humans).

I'll just leave you with one final thought. Consider this: What if shoes are created in a way such that once you begin to wear them, your feet come to need them? What if the constricting shapes of shoes makes it increasingly harder for our feet to function without them? What if shoes are really just a mass commercial scheme to get us to all spend money on increasingly decadent coverings for our feet? What if the shoes are really controlling us?
 

Got Gender?

So, we're supposed to be writing about anything that interests us for these blog posts. Whenever I'm asked what interests me, I promptly forget all of my interests, so for this post, I figured that I would start with something very broad -- gender. I then realized that gender was in fact one of my interests and managed to narrow the topic down into something a bit less gigantic.

So, like I said, I'll start with the broad by defining gender. According to the American Psychological Association, gender is defined as, "the attitudes, feelings, and behaviors that a given culture associates with a
person’s biological sex. Behavior that is compatible with cultural expectations is referred to as gender normative; behaviors that are viewed as incompatible with these expectations constitute gender non-conformity. " In case you still don't get it, gender is not defined based on your genitalia-- that's sex. Gender is what attributes are ascribed to a sex, traditionally male and female.

Next, I'd like to introduce the idea of the gender spectrum. The gender spectrum is the concept that instead of being binary, male and female, "gender occurs across a continuum of possibilities," (according to Gender Spectrum, an organization about gender). So based on the gender spectrum, not everyone fits into the traditional genders of male and female.

I also found a test online called the S.A.G.E or Sex and Gender Explorer test. This test is offered as a way to help people figure out where they fit on the gender spectrum, whether they are male, female or somewhere in between. This test is amazing, in that it professes to be able to tell you your gender (something extremely complicated and hard to understand by its very nature) in only 160 multiple choice questions. As I went through the test though, I noticed that there was a very, very obvious trend in the questions. For each question, there were two answers that were in fitting with female stereotypes about thought processing, physical attributes, or hobbies among other things, and two that were in fitting with male stereotypes. If you didn't fit in either of these two groups of stereotypes, you had one more option, one that according to this test implied that you were androgynous.

I guess that now would be a good time to explain what androgynous is. Androgynous is defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary as "neither specifically feminine or masculine".

Personally, I feel that it's a bit presumptuous to assume that someone is neither specifically feminine or masculine just because they don't fit into limited stereotypes of the two genders. You can't tell all that much from a multiple choice test about gender because even within the most binary gender expectations, people are individuals who may not fit under one of four or even five statements. It is unhelpful to sort people into genders, even if they are not the traditional genders, as this only perpetrates stereotypes.

And that brings me to the main point of my post. It has recently dawned on me that gender is really nothing more than stereotypes put out by society about what a specific sex is expected to be like. Using male and female as a way to put people in gender boxes is really invalid because realistically, no one will ever be 100% "female" or 100% "male". At the same time, the gender spectrum, although enormous progress from the original binary way of thinking about gender, can be just as constricting. The gender spectrum, in saying that some people don't fit the societal ideal of male and female, is again perpetuating the idea that some people do fit the ideal of male and female and that gender ideals are an attainable thing to fit under.

To me, in an ideal world, there would not be labels to describe gender. Instead, each person could express themselves in whatever way felt comfortable to them, regardless of their genitalia. Now, would this be lovely? Yes. Is this going to happen anytime in the near future, based on where society is today? Very Probably not. Are we even going to get rid of the titles of male and female anytime in the near future? Doubtful. The world as we know it is too grounded on gender and even language would have to be redesigned if that were to happen. But hey, it's a nice idea.    

Archival Footage

So, this is a short film about the telephone system, from the early 1950's. This is for a dystopia trailer about a world based around standardized testing, so most of the film doesn't apply at all; however there are some short clips that might work. Anything from 7:51 to 8:12 without the audio could be used when talking about how people's lives are controlled by test scores. Although the dotted roll of paper are actually phone data, we could use it as people's test scores or the answer key for the test, or something. This would be put at the beginning of the trailer during the voice-over describing the society.

I don't think that we're really going to use that much archival footage for our trailer. What we really need is footage of a large room with people all quietly hunched over desks, preferably in black and white; however, I haven't managed to find that anywhere. Also we might use numbers flashing across the screen, either to show that the people are just numbers in a testing system, or to show how test scores control the citizen's lives.   

In the article, "World Without Walls: Learning Well With Others," Will Richardson writes about the access that teens and kids have to information, and their ability to share it, using technology. Richardson describes how in the "collaborative age", an amazing amount of information is available on the web. He talks about how people are able to learn with others who have similar interests. The article discusses the importance of teachers and adults guiding kids and helping them to navigate the amazing network of online connections because on the Internet, there is so much information that it is often hard to tell what information is reputable or applicable. It also points out that even without adult guidance, kids use online networking, so it behooves everyone if they are helped by adults to learn online constructively.

In the article Richardson writes, "we need to rely on trusted members of our personal networks to help sift through the sea of stuff, locating and sharing with us the most relevant, interesting, useful bits." To me, this quote is really interesting because it recognizes that at times, the information and spider-web of communication online is overwhelming. I think that its important that people aren't alone in trying to make their way through all this. It is helpful for anyone to have people upon whom they know that they can rely for accurate information and sources. You always need to have a starting point.

In this article I was surprised by the actions of Laura Stockman, an eleven-year old who uses her blog to come up with community service projects. I was surprised that she was able to so effectively communicate with people around the world, but I was even more surprised that she was able to take the information that she learned from blogging and turn it into something real and productive.

I think that in out media class, connected learning has the potential to be very successful. I really like the idea of being given free reign to learn about something that I am genuinely interested in. At the same time, I am a bit daunted by how many sources there are out there with which to interface.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I'm interested in the directing aspect of film. I think that it would be cool to use this to learn more about directing techniques and directors.

Here's a link to an annotated copy of the article.

Review of Movie Review

The movie review "Freedom Fighter in Life Becomes Potent Symbol in Death", written by A.O.Scott is a review of the 2008 film, "Milk". This review had a bit of an odd structure, giving historical context for the film and the authors critique of the directing and overall film, interwoven with pieces of a summary. The summary was not at all linear, so unless you had already see the movie, you would have to read through the entire review to get a good idea of the plot.

This review focuses mainly on the literary aspects of the film. The majority of it is either a summary or the parts of history that the summary fits with. The historical context allows the reader to further appreciate the summary and to understand the context in which the story takes place. The film has also has a paragraph about the dramatic aspects of the film, but only talks about Shaw Penn, the lead actor.  There is really only a sentence in which the cinematic aspects of the film.

Scott seemed to love the film and have a lot of respect both for the film and its namesake. He writes that in his opinion, "Milk" is the best live-action mainstream American movie of 2008. He praises the director, script, actors, cinematography, and musical score.

For our quarterly movie reviews, I think that we should have to touch on certain key points and meet certain criteria, such as setting a clear tone, and writing about all three aspects of film. That said, I think that the general structure of the review should be left up to us. For me, what makes movie reviews interesting is that often, they're unique, written in their own style with their own structure. Basically, there should be certain points that we have to cover, but we should be allowed freedom in the way in which we cover these points.

The links to may annotation wound up on two separate pages because the review was two pages long:
Page one
The second page link is currently not working. It will be put up shortly.