Disney Gender Roles

I was unable to attend the class period when we watched Mickey Mouse Monopoly. However, I was required to watch it for a previous psychology class and recently have discussed the documentary in my sociology of gender class this semester. Looking back on Mickey Mouse Monopoly I can’t help but relate one of the main themes regarding gender roles to a movie I watched with my little sister over Thanksgiving break; it was the 2007 Disney film Enchanted. Mickey Mouse Monopoly researchers explain the problematic damsel in distress theme, “However strong and powerful a female character may be she still needs to be rescued by a male. In the world of Disney, females not only get into trouble easily they also lack the ability to save their own lives.” (Mickey Mouse Monopoly). Enchanted depicts today’s stress on equality by allowing Giselle (the lead female character) to save Robert (the lead male character) from the transformed dragon version of Queen Narissa (the villain). As the characters climb a skyscraper during the climax Giselle appears with a sword ready to fight the dragon.

Queen Narissa as the dragon: Oh my, this is a twist in our story! It's the brave little princess coming to the rescue. I guess that makes you [looking at Robert] the damsel in distress, huh, handsome? Keep up with me dear it’s time to take our tale to new heights.

Here, the film breaks the barriers held by every princess story in Disney’s past. Even the villain openly admits a change of gender roles. Realistically, males cannot always flock to the rescue. Personally, I enjoyed Enchanted because it enables young girls, such as my 14 year old sister, to see a confident, determined woman triumph adversity and save the day without the help of a male. With the personal beliefs and teachings my parents used to raise my sister throughout her young childhood I firmly believe that she enters her time as an adolescent understanding that women do not have to rely on the competence or even the checkbook of a man in order to succeed in our current patriarchic culture. Unfortunately, living on a college campus it is clear that some parents have failed to teach their daughters this mind-set. Just the other day I saw on a friend’s dresser a small coin bank which read on the front, “I'm savin' up for a rich husband!” She then openly admitted to me that she is only attending Mizzou to receive her “Mrs.” degree. Obviously her parents failed somewhere.

Perception and Smell

I enjoy the smell of my own farts. Don’t cringe at me. To whoever is reading this you know you enjoy yours as well. Don’t lie, just admit it.

In social psychology class we learned that there is a necessary social construction of the senses that occurs. Our teacher stated that “We do not react automatically to physical sensations but define and interpret them.” Awful, repulsive and nauseating smells are actually not bad smells but they are described as such because they are socially constructed as bad smells. Someone may enjoy the smell of horse manure while their best friend gags at even the thought of it. The most common example, which I love, is gasoline. Someone may truly appreciate the smell of gasoline while their roommate dreads the fact of pumping gas into his car once a week. One of these roommates will continue telling people how the smell of gasoline arouses the inside of his nostrils (you get the idea) therefore, causing those who listen to believe that the scent of gasoline actually is enjoyable. The same process occurs with the other roommate. He will continue informing people about his disgust for the smell of gasoline therefore, instigating a sense of animosity for the smell by anyone who chooses to believe him. Classifications of desirable and horrendous smells are products of our language while at the same time help organize our sense of reality and facilitate social interaction.

Other odd smells I enjoy: permanent marker, leather, new car, white out, raw dough, raw meat, skunks, melting rubber, dog biscuits, the doctor’s office, play-doh, a mechanic shop and ski equipment…just to name a few. 

The Reproduction of Race Privilege

From my sophomore year to the end of my senior year in high school I worked at two different country clubs. First, I worked at Old Hickory Golf Course as a server for banquets and weddings. After realizing how much I hated dealing with food and working till 1:30am I decided to quit and then began working in the bag room at Whitmoor Country Club. Here, I cleaned and parked all of the golf carts, picked the golf balls from the range at night and washed the members clubs before storing them in the bag room. I soon found out there were also long hour shifts as well as similar snobby club members. However, I enjoyed working outside and the fact that it was a seasonal job so I decided to stay until I left for college. Once I came to college and found myself attending classes with a diverse range of students. This new type of environment helped me realize the lack of racial diversity which existed at both of my previous country club jobs. Looking back, not once do I remember working with a black male or female nor do I remember seeing one working in a higher held job such as an office position. In fact the only people I remember seeing at the staff meetings were white men and women, not a single minority. The all-white environments I witnessed at the country clubs reminded me of the primarily white employee environment which existed at Diamond Toys from Inside Toyland. Just as Diamond Toys was located in a higher-end of town so were both of these country clubs. Their customers were also mainly middle and upper class and mostly white. As Williams observed at Diamond Toys, I too could easily notice the constant reproduction of race privileges. The HR representatives who conducted interviews and hired the employees at both country clubs were aware of the racial make-up therefore the reps saw whiteness as the norm; it was the same light the club members saw whiteness as. So who were the HR reps going to hire to help serve the needs of the white members? White employees. Once again white privilege is reproduced.  Unfortunately, I live nearby Whitmoor and occasionally play tennis on their courts. Even after four years, I still have yet to see a black employee working on the country club property. Some things will never change I guess. 

Ole Miss and Social Class

Aries and Seider conclude that lower income students who attend private elite colleges face more class related challenges than lower income students who attend state colleges. However, I have found through my own experiences that these difficulties still occur on a frequent level at specific state universities. There may not be as big of a gap in social and cultural capital between the classes at the state universities but the gap itself and powerlessness is still as noticeable, through my own eyes at least. Recently, some friends and I traveled down to Ole Miss University (Oxford, MS) to watch them play the number one ranked football team in the nation, LSU. We tailgated in The Grove which is known for having the best tailgating atmosphere in the country. Though the campus had signs hanging on their street lights emphasizing the teaching of cultural diversity in their classrooms it was clear that there was only one culture on that campus: Upper-Middle to Upper class white culture. This was evident not only by the fact that every male and female on the campus during game day dressed in “country club attire”  but I did not see a single minority in The Grove or on their campus for the entire 48 hour span which I stayed there. During my stay I did notice a group of Ole Miss students who were not dressed up in expensive brand clothing nor were they drinking the classier alcohol which most of the other students were consuming. Ironically, this group’s tailgate was located along the marginal outside boundary of the grove. The group consisted of all males dressed in t-shirts socializing by themselves. In Oxford, MS I also noticed during my stay that most working class job positions (in restaurants that is) were held by blacks. I am forced to wonder if these class-related challenges and difficulties discussed in the article are more dependent on the region of the country which the college is located in rather than the actual school. This would be an interesting fact to research throughout only colleges in the South where class is especially directly related to race and intersectionality as a whole.

Doing Gender

     As Tibbals discusses in her article, the act of “doing gender” occurs when “gender is undertaken by women and men whose competence as members of society is hostage to its preproduction.” As an athlete throughout my entire life I am forced to think about how the implications from being an athlete in a male dominant sport affect women. Are women that play basketball, hockey, tennis or any other sport which is known for predominantly being a male sport successfully resisting being a hostage to gender reproduction? I recently read sociology of sport article by Michael Messner and his feminist approach toward the subject of doing gender can help teach us how to forget about any sense  of “doing gender” regarding females involved in predominantly male occupied sports. Messner uses what he calls a social justice model to explain a trend in sports he hopes is soon to occur. This model calls for social activist organizations to stress the significance of an altered gender ideology to league officials and owners in order for change to occur. Only once a change has transpired within the center - high-status and in-group members - of the institution of sport will a cultural change in values, beliefs, and media imagery begin to arise. Like Messner, I believe through this model women will eventually receive sex equity in sports by fighting the oppression and ghettoization which female athletes encounter. Because I consider myself a feminist I see the restraints reproduced through doing gender. This social justice model has the ability to fully allow women of all ages to free themselves from the consequences of doing gender in an unconventional sense. Through the social justice model, women in sports will not have to worry about “doing the wrong gender.”

Urban Legend and Rumors

   




     As Best and Horiuchi examine the concept of urban legends and the effects they have on society, they state in their article, “Urban legends, like collective behavior and social problems construction, are responses to social strain, shaped by the perception of the threat and social organization.” This type of fear and the outcome it has on the surrounding public took place on a smaller scale in my neighborhood when I was a young child. When I was around the age of ten there was a belief spreading through our neighborhood that an older man had been sneaking into peoples’ homes late at night and stealing personal items while committing deviant acts of behavior with female undergarments. I never learned how this rumor initially started but I do know that my friends parents as well as mine took it very seriously. Not only did my parents check all doors and windows before they went to bed each night but they would walk outside around the house as well check the bushes and other random places. These acts were actually suggested in the monthly bulletin our neighborhood has so most parents were believed to do the same before they went to bed also. It turns out around a month later that a group of pre-pubescent teens were arrested in the middle of the night for trying to break into someone’s car. They ended up admitting to other crimes such as breaking into garages to steal beer and the occasional bicycle never admitted to actually breaking into peoples’ homes. After the young boys were arrested no household reported the breaking of an entry for quite some time. It was believed that the rumor of the old man was finally put to rest and that the truth finally surfaced that is was only the young teenagers in the first place. Why was the undergarments and personal items involved in the rumor then? Did those events actually happen or was it just neighborhood gossip that spread like wildfire causing the occasional house mom to exaggerate? I guess I’ll never know the truth about the rumor but since then I am never one to believe any type of urban legend unless I witness it firsthand.  For me, I have to see it to believe it.  

Impression Management throughout High School

Last post I discussed the idea of an individual’s personal and social identity and how that person has somewhat control over the self-censoring of the social identity others label them with. Though we will never full possess the capability of controlling which labels others assign to us we do have the  ability to control how others see us or to convince them that we are who we say we are. This type of control is called impression management and it is something we all do whether we notice it or not. Kenneth J, Gergen concludes that in the technologically advanced world we live in today an individual has the ability to “create and re-create” their personal identity more than ever before. This occurs because of how easy it is through facebook, twitter, email and texting (just to name a few) to quickly establish a new relationship or in some cases, end a relationship. I can remember back to my sophomore year in high school when I heard about a girl one year younger than me from my grade school. As most freshmen do, whether in high school or college, they try fit in with their new crowd by portraying themselves as part of the same institution with the clothes they wear, the way they talk, how they act around their fellow peers and teachers at school, and how they present themselves on facebook. This particular girl fell victim to this need to impress. Trying so hard to impress this new older boy she had romantic feeling for, she decided to send him nude pictures of herself. Unfortunately, the boy which was my age thought it would be an easy way to impress his friends with a laugh by mass emailing the photos of the girl out to three different area high schools. Soon most high school students in the St. Louis area had either heard of or seen the pictures and knew the name of the girl in them. For her remaining years in high school the girl was forced to learn a convincing from of impression management. However she acted in public, what she wore out at night, who she hung out with, however she designed her facebook profile and whatever she said on the internet for her remaining three years in high school was all one entire effort to convince others that she was not a “slut.” Personally , I believe she successfully practiced her own type of impression management. After attending Mizzou, which is known for being a college many St. Louis kids attend, she is no longer associated with these photos. In fact she is one of the classier girls I know and is well respected by both her male and female peers.