Main Post: Feb/ 8th

The article in the Feminist Reader on “Challenging Men to Reject Gender Stereotypes” talks about how society normally thinks that the term “gender” or gender issues evolve around women. Despite this, Gokova argues that men have to participate since men need to change to realize overall change. In terms of sex, Gokova feels that it is important that men should begin to change their attitude towards sex. She suggests that they should start looking at sex as an opportunity to communicate mutually between women rather than to dominate them. She further argues that it is the role of the men to begin to recognize women as equal partners. The overall message in her piece was that men are understanding that the gender struggle is not about lifting women to the position of men because after all men have been put in a position of super-human, but that men need to cooperate with women to minimize gender issues.

In a lot of the readings the issue of oppression was raised. Johnson states in her article that the oppression of women happens because men want and like to dominate women and act hostility towards them. In Frye’s article she gives us a break down of the word oppression and explains how “press” is a element of the word which basically can referred to as something that is compressed, or some sort of mold, where restriction on the thing’s mobility occurs. We see that in Frye’s article it does not matter what your status or race is, oppression affects all women. I found Frye’s article really interesting especially when she harped on the fact that for teenage females, being sexually inactive or active is a lose lose situation. She made the point that heterosexually active women are often labelled as being “loose” or a “whore”. Frye states that the punishment comes from the criticism and embarrassing remarks. She further explains that the total opposite also happens. If females are unwilling to have sexual relations with males, they are referred as being “teases” or “prude”. What is also ironic about this example is how she used the idea of how girls who are active feel that they need to hide it from their parents. These same parents that would be disapproving of sexual activity are now criticizing or worried that because their daughters are not sexually active that maybe they are lesbians. Then she gets into nonsense examples where, if a woman has been sexually active and was raped then she is accused of liking it because she is sexually active. This is very true about reality where there are many instances where females are being downgraded and ultimately in lose lose situations.