Life Changing Day

The impact that today’s class had on me was life changing; we went over so many important issue that I have never really put much thought into. The morning session of the class was going over the construction of gender in our society; this can play out into several categories. The first would be doing gender, classifying ourselves into a boy or a girl and acting like what we believe is a boy or a girl. Next would be gender then gets tied to power, it will be supported by religion, law, science and social values about how each should be placed in society. Lastly, essentialism when people are classified due to their essence.  Then we went over privilege and oppression and how it has shaped over time just due to the fact of society’s construction of who is in power.

Then in our afternoon we watched “Miss Representation” this was an amazing movie that movie that moved me. It went over how women are sexualized through the media and are not noticed for their intelligence but their looks instead. Young girls are taught to be thin, have perfect skin and behave a certain way for men to even consider them a potential anything. It was shocking to look at the statistics of how many girls are depressed, unhappy with their bodies, power that women have in the business industry.  The movie also focused how the media reacted to Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin during politics and the fact that we saw how male politicians reacted to this was disgusting. I saw male politicians talking about Hillary and Sarah as nothing but sexual objects and how they are just referred to as beautiful females, nothing else. No reflection on their policies or their intelligence. It really demonstrates to me that the fight for feminism is not over there is much more for women to fight for today, if not for ourselves then for our future generations, our children.  

Later we had a workshop that focused on diversity and how understanding diversity was important for a leader in general. The workshop focused on a lot of our personal backgrounds and how that has affected us over time, the ways we identify ourselves into today’s society. After that we met Jenny and we got to buy sweatshirts!! Courtesy of the wonderful ILC, I love my sweatshirt and I can’t wait to come home representing Brown University.  Tomorrow is our challenge course, wish me luck everybody!