Wednesday, January 5, 2011
Lecture by Michael Kimmel.
I do not find much worth in Gray's notion of gender differences. I agree more with Kimmel. I feel like Kimmel went straight to the point or the root cause of the issues we have with gender differences. To me he focused more on how men who are privlileged do not know what they have and therefore they misuse their privilege. It also relates to what Professor Harrison demonstrated about women being below the equality line and men being above, but the men won't come down. I find that to be true among a lot of my white male friends. With a couple of my friends I have tried to explain just what privilege is and as soon as they hear that they are on top they immediately disagree/ tune me out so maybe I will just refer them to this video. When Kimmel said that some of the students did not really respect his female colleague I was like, yes! I know what he means. Its as though women are not allowed to teach or even talk about gender differences without having an alterior motive. It relates to what we talked about with the F Word I like how he described the four values of manhood. For example, the mighty oak remark was pretty funny. I also like the way he demostrated inequality by showing with his hand that if the scale tips men freak out, which I also thought was funny.
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I agree with you, I think Kimmel really was able to express the inequality's between the genders in a straight forward way for both males and females. I think that this would be a good video for many people to watch because like you mentioned, men tend to tune out people who try to tell them how privileged they really are. I think that also presents a problem as in order for men to accept they are privileged they need to hear it from another male, or they think that the women saying that have other reasons for those ideas.
ReplyDeleteExcellent comments about privilege, Lynette. People are terrified to give up their advantages, it's like they feel they are going to lose out in some major way. But as Kimmel says, it is not a zero sum game. Everyone benefits from feminism, racial and economic justice, and LGBT civil rights. But, it is very hard to get people to see this and help them see how they too will benefit in the long term from a more egalitarian society.
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