Five

The YouTube video "It's Not About the Nail" while cute and funny, promotes some stereotypes about women that concerns me. It was comical, because the woman and man featured in the video represent widely accepted norms about their sex in general; women always want to talk about their feelings and never want to fix the problem (just complain about it), while men are reasonable and practical problem solvers. This general theme of male-dominance and female subordination was present in all of the texts we read.

Trifles in particular seemed to me to be the ultimate representation of a male dominated society. The women in the play were characterized as lesser beings than their husbands, constantly being belittled in their conversational topics of choice, their chores, and their lives in general. This was exemplified in one of the concluding remarks from the sheriff when he chuckles to himself, "married to the law." The fact that he is "chuckling" insinuates that he fancies himself superior in this scene and one can almost envision him popping his coat collar or slicking his oily hair back as he basks in his own glory. While the sheriff is given a big title—the law—that brings his status up to not just law giver, but almost to a god like status, his wife is objectified to nothingness.

In the report of women and crime, I didn't find these results quite as compelling as I thought they were going to be. Yes, the 2% increase in women in prison compared to the 1% increase in men was interesting, but when I looked at the big picture, I wasn't convinced that women are going to be "equalized" with men in this particular area. The question is, does the comparatively low percentage of women in prison indicate that women are in fact less capable of heinous crimes than men? Based on the pure number, surely yes. Sociology would tell us to be skeptical of this information; assuming that men are probably more likely to be convicted of a crime, even if they aren't guilty because of the stereotypes society has about women being less violent. But maybe, women just are less violent? Not that I am determined to be skeptical of sociology itself, but even the summary that accompanied that statistics made me less convinced that this assumption of women isn't true because even those women who are increasingly being put in prison, are being put there for minor crimes like prostitution and drug abuse; I was expecting murder!

The article about the Princeton women wasn't a shock though, and only confirms what Trifles, the poem, the youtube clip and the outrageous dating profile said in their underlying messages: men want women to be what THEY want them to be. What the Princeton alumnae asserted was that men want women who are less smart than they are. This was exemplified in the online dating profile too because the men clearly were willing to sacrifice brains for beauty. This correlates well with the study they showed about BMI index and intellect in females. I see this all as directly related to warring forces of media constructed images of beauty, along with new waves of feminism and social justice education. I think that in years/decades past, men were less likely to give up beauty for brains than they are now, but that they still struggle to place beauty at the bottom of their requirements list. However, it should be noted that women are almost as bad as men in this area.  The poem too, seemed to imply that some kind of gender inequality was at work in the line "I should have been on Math Team/My marks were better than his".