In a New York Magazine article, 26 brave women share their stories of aborting their child.  The article shares some shocking statistics saying, “abortion is part of our everyday experience. Nearly half of all pregnancies are unintended; about half of those—1.2 million—will end in abortion each year.” If abortion is so relevant to our everyday lives, and apparently occurs so frequently, then why do we never hear stories concerning women’s abortions? This is because women are shamed if they admit to having one, or at least parts of society will shame them.  The article shares these stories in an attempt to normalize abortion and show that “normal” women can have unwanted pregnancies and that ultimately it is there right to do what they want with their bodies.  These stories reminded me of when we read “How It All Began: I Have Had an Abortion”.  This was written by a woman who chose to remain anonymous, which further proves how taboo of a topic it is.  In the piece she writes “The courage of these women was enormous. No one can imagine today what it meant to admit to an abortion at all, not to mention a public confession.”  Although it may be easier to admit to an abortion in contemporary times, I would still argue that it takes a significant amount of bravery.  This piece touched on how shameful women feel by society when they decide to actively take control of their own body.  I am not totally sure about where I stand on abortion, but I do respect these women’s stand for protecting their reproductive justice.

In a recent article written in ask.men, it discusses the Top 10 Reason’s for a man to get married.  Interestingly enough reason #5 was Financial Benefits.  The fact that financial benefits was prioritized as high as #5 on the list further proves how “marriage has become the central legitimating institution by which the state regulates and permeates people’s most intimate lives”, like Warner said in his writing of “Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life.”  Other scholars like Polikoff argue for marriage to only hold importance in a social, religious, or cultural settings rather than an economical state as well.  As Polikoff wrote, “It is possible to envision family law and policy without marriage being the rigid diving line between who is in and who is out.  Keeping the state out of marriage entirely making marriage only a relies, cultural, spiritual matter, would be one way to accomplish this.”  As they argue, if marriage did not come with health and financial benefits then it would discriminate less against those who do not wish to get married or those who believe in different types of relationships.  Even ask.men understands that marriage is not solely based on love or mutual romantic feelings, but that there is actually more at stake, like financial benefits.  This increase in other benefits causes those who do not believe in marriage to be at a significant disadvantage in life.  Although it would be difficult to allocate advantages in a manner that did not include marriage, I completely agree that it would lead to a less discriminatory society.

I found the Emily Martin reading of “The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles”, to be fascinating.  Martin’s work looked at analyzing how science has been a victim of using stereotypical feminine/masculine qualities to describe the process of reproduction. Martin believed that “One clear feminist challenge is to wake up sleeping metaphors in science,particularly those involved in descriptions of the egg and the sperm” and that once we wake up the sleeping metaphors we can finally neutralize our social conventions about gender.  Upon reading it I went to Google and started searching for more examples of how the egg is only described in stereotypical feminine terms, while the sperm portrays stereotypical masculine qualities. When doing this I of course came across several examples of what Martin was discussing in her writing, but I also came across an article written in Discover Magazine analyzing Martin’s work.  In the Discover Magazine article, “New Theory on How the Aggressive Egg Attracts the Sperm”, David Freedman examines the claims that Martin has made and how they are changing the way people view the process of reproduction.  In his opening paragraph he provides an example for how a textbook may describe reproduction through an Emily Martin lens saying, “First, a wastefully huge swarm of sperm weakly flops along, its members bumping into walls and flailing aimlessly through thick strands of mucus. Eventually, through sheer odds of pinball-like bouncing more than anything else, a few sperm end up close to an egg. As they mill around, the egg selects one and reels it in, pinning it down in spite of its efforts to escape. It’s no contest, really. The gigantic, hardy egg yanks this tiny sperm inside, distills out the chromosomes, and sets out to become an embryo.”  My first reaction to this was that he was grossly over-exaggerating the situation and going too an extreme.  But after looking at other examples in textbooks I realized that this was not that overly-exagerrated compared to some of the descriptions that I have read in favor of the active sperm and passive egg.  I find this all so fascinating because reproduction is such a big biological subject and the idea that it can be tainted so easily and so silently with stereotypes is crazy to me! Science should almost be the most unbiased subject, yet it has been polluted by social stereotypes that causes it to completely change the meaning/understanding of the process.

Reproductive justice is a battle women of color have been fighting for a significant amount of time.  In order to fight for these rights, women of color have created several different organizations and groups.  I recently came across one group in particular, Voice of Our Own, which is a Nationally recognized group whose agenda is fighting for and raising awareness for the reproductive justice for women of color.  This organization clearly reminded me of our reading of Jael Sillman’s “Women of Color and Their Struggle for Reproductive Justice”.  In this piece the struggle for women of color is summarized by saying, “the external challenges confronting communities of color and constraining their reproduction are — population control, sterilization abuse, unsafe contraceptive, welfare reform, the criminalization of women who use drugs and alcohol during pregnancy, and coercive and intrusive family planning programs and policies.”  The website for Voice of Our Own outlines their mission statement saying it is “to amplify and lift up the voices of Black women at the national and regional levels in our ongoing fight to secure Reproductive Justice for all women and girls.” They take pride in fighting for 4 rights in particular 1) Abortion Rights 2) Contraceptive Equity 3) Reproductive Justice 4) Comprehensive Sex Education.  I perused this website for awhile and loved the balance of fighting for equality, while also stressing education as another way to reach equality.  As a current student, I easily see the importance of education and the impact that it has on the way I think and the way I act.  I believe that this initiative to educate is not only unique, but incredibly important for the growth and success for reproductive justice for women of color.

I saw this video on buzzfeed and it reminded me of our discussion way back in the beginning of the year when we read Rich’s “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Experience.” The video highlights how underrepresented the LGBTQ+ community is in media and how rare it is to see and an LGBT character in a starring role. In the video one of the men talks about tokenism and how just having one minor LGBT character in a movie/tv show is not good enough representation. Actually seeing the these recreated movie posters transformed really makes me hope that in the future there will be more main LGBT characters with authentic story lines besides the “gay best friend” trope.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/mathewjedeikin/lgbt-people-recreate-iconic-movie-posters#.hfKVkDNoQ

Emily McGaughty describes in “Nothing Changed, Everything Changed: How Marriage Equality Strengthened my Marriage” how the recent Supreme Court ruling in many ways was unimpactful for her and her “partner” (the two considered themselves married after having had an unofficial wedding in 2013). Long before their 2013 ceremony, the two had felt all the gravity of a lifetime commitment, so the “heart and soul” of their relationship didn’t change with the ruling. But their decision to get legally married the day of the decision changed their lives in many legal ways, including tax and insurance benefits. Though it’s wonderful that they and all gay couples can now be legally married, it is problematic that the state must still put a stamp of approval on human relationships to determine which ones are suitable for exclusive benefits. Nancy Polikoff proposes rectifying this issue through “valuing all families,” a clever twist on the “family values” espoused by conservatives. Generally, gay marriage advocates “[did] not say that “special rights” should be reserved for those who marry” (p. 7). Although gay marriage has since been legalized, the problem still remains that not all family structures do or should include marriage, and it is exclusive and socially-unhealthy to discriminate against unmarried couples and families when providing certain benefits. Were marriage not the only path to certain important rights, its importance would diminish, and valuing all families would occur.

http://www.afterellen.com/people/477513-nothing-changed-everything-changed-marriage-equality-strengthened-marriage

http://www.businessinsider.com/womens-small-soccer-salaries-are-fair-2015-7

I posted on the fb group a few weeks ago about the US women’s national filing an official complaint about wage discrimination, which aligned with our topic of the workplace and the wage gap. A few days ago I saw one of my friends posted this article on his fb. The articles asks the question: What separates men’s and women’s sports? According to this article, the men’s team made more money in sponsor revenue during the 2014 World Cup than the women did during the 2015 World Cup. From this point the article moves to talk about the fact that more people care about men’s sports than women’s, saying we have been socialized to accept men’s sports as dominant. The article’s main argument is that in order for the women to be paid more, they need to make more revenue which means that the people who are upset by the wage disparity should by jerseys and tickets to matches. I fully agree that the women deserve to be paid the same as the men but when most of the money comes from sponsor revenues, the 25 million people who watched, cheered, and celebrated during the Women’s World Cup need to support the team outside the World Cup so that can happen. In order for women’s sports to be as prosperous as men’s, we need to start treating them like they are just as physically demanding, exciting, and intense because they are and anyone who watched the world cup last summer would agree.

In “Penguin Family Values” Noel Sturgeon makes a unique connection between the patriarchal and heteronormative normalized/popularized family form and today’s poor environmental health. He claims: “When such heteronormative family forms are bound up in environmentally dangerous social and economic practices, we have a situation in which we are promoting environmental damage by naturalizing heteronormative patriarchy” (107). This assertion reminded me of a scene in the television show Mad Men where the Draper family (a perfect model of the traditional and patriarchal family Sturgeon describes) goes on a picnic and, after they’ve finished, leave all their trash behind. Although it would be an unwarranted assumption to say that they do so only because they are the type of family Sturgeon describes, I think it’s interesting that the correlation he argues in his text is evident in a piece of prominent popular culture.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2016/03/14/obama_talks_positive_body_image_regarding_daughters_and_michelle.html

Christina Cauterucci comments on President Obama’s recent televised conversation with Misty Copeland, in which he says having daughters has increased his awareness of normative body-image pressures imposed by society onto young women. Copeland, a petite ballet dancer nevertheless deemed too large for the form, agreed that coded “appearance-based language” often excludes people of color from typically-white institutions. However, Obama slipped when, in the context of easing his daughters’ body image woes, he mentioned their “gorgeous mom who has some curves” which “their father appreciates.” His message about size is agreeable, but the implication that his appreciation of that beauty is necessary to validate it is quite problematic. If, instead, Obama (and anyone in similar positions) had left his thoughts out of it– thereby allowing individuals to make their own judgment calls on what health entails for them– those individuals would “deemphasize weight” in perceptions of worth and beauty, “eliminating a source of stigma and anxiety for people of any weight” (Burgard p. 51).

The other day when we were discussing Christine Henseler’s “Contemporary Spanish Women’s Narrative and the Publishing Industry” in class, Erin brought to the attention of the class something that I myself had noticed when reading and, that is, the phenomenon that with the women authors considered “successful” by Henseler, there was a very evident theme of separation from their partners. For example, in the text, Henseler describes Concha Espina’s “short and troubled marriage” (6) and Carmen de Burgos’s “abusive husband whom she left” (5). This seeming correlation between success and troubled romantic relationships for women was reminiscent, for me, of a mathematics project I did in high school where I mathematically (using Pearson’s correlation coefficient) evaluated the question: Is there any correlation between the increase in the number of women participating in the workforce and the increase in the divorce rate in the United States of America between 1890 and 1960? (Additionally, Did the number of women entering the workforce contribute to (or cause) the increase in the divorce rate between 1890 and 1960 in the United States of America?). I’ve attempted to attach my study if anyone is interested in the math but, essentially what I determined is that “There is a strong Positive Correlation between the increase of the number of women in the workforce and the increase in the number of divorces in the United States between 1890 and 1960 based on graphing and statistical analysis.” That being said, it is important to keep in mind that correlation is not causation but, I though this was a unique insight into Henseler’s article and more broadly the life of women in general.

Math Internal Assesment Final A.Corcoran

http://www.artslant.com/ew/articles/show/45471

Danna Lorch explores the intersection of art and gender in this article. Since 1989, when the Guerrilla Girls noted that under 5% of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s modern section comes from women, gender influence in art elitism has been acknowledged. But the patronizing assumption that often-veiled Middle Eastern women must be more censored and stifled in art than Western women are hasn’t been adequately challenged. This piece argues that gender equality in elite art will likely be realized in the Middle East sooner than in the West. Although there is considerable variation in gender participation rates across galleries, at the enormous Art Dubai fair, 45 percent of featured artists are women. This is “extraordinarily high compared to other major international fairs.” In “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?,” Lila Abu-Lughod criticizes the blind Western assumption that Muslim women are all oppressed and forced to wear veils. The reality is, many Muslim women see veils as innovative and liberating “portable seclusion” (p. 785). The veil is an especially recognizable symbol often seized as proof of oppression, and faulty assumptions about gender repression in art is no different than the ease with which most Western people accept veil oppressiveness as fact.

In Laura Freixas lecture tuesday she made note of the lack of female representation in novels. However, in my Reproduction and Childrearing Anthropology class the next day we made note of how almost all literature pertaining to childbirth and child rearing are female oriented, often times leaving the male out. Yes, I believe that female representation in high literature is a problem, but this could be seen as a double edged sword. Perhaps one way to fix this problem is to make the male more involved in feminine matters such as childbirth.