Gender

These past two weeks in class, we have talked about gender and how media portrays each gender. Gender is defined as how you define yourself between your ears. To help us understand this, we watched a video called Killing Us Softly. It is about a lady named Jean who talks about how the media (advertisements) mainly portrays woman as sex objects and not as people where as men are always portrayed as these big, strong, tough men.
In my opinion, i believe Jean is wrong and that she takes things out of line. First off, people need to understand that advertisements main objective is to sell their product and that basically everything in them is digitally enhanced or unattainable. Jean says that ads that contain stick thin women are forcing girls to try and look like the ones they see in the ads. I believe it s the girls responsibility to know that the girls they see in the ads are not really that thin in real life and it really to just get peoples attention. Another thing that i disagree with that Jean said was that the government needs to start enforcing rules and regulations against what can be put in ads. If the government were to enforce certain laws, that would cause in my opinion serious controversy. First off, it violates the companies freedom of speech and expression. Also by regulating ads, it will cause a huge problem because then companies will not be able to sell their products efficently and therefore ruin our economy.

The past week, we took a "field trip" in school to listen to a few panelist who were either gay, lesbian, or tans gender. We listened to each one as they each shared their stories about growing up and realizing their sexuality. While listening, it was very sad to hear about all of the panelists stories and how some of their parents weren't accepting. It also really hit when i found out that 3/5 of the panelists had tried to commit suicide.
I think it it really hard for somebody who is not gay or lesbian to really understand what people who are gay or lesbian go through. I know in my life, i use derogatory terms like gay and fag when talking to friends, but when i say it, i'm using it in a kidding way. After listening to the panelist stories and hearing how much it hurts them when they hear the words, i am going to make a effort to not use the terms at all because they are really hurtful to some people.