Doing Gender 1 /Class Activity

  I want to start out commenting on the class activity about the ideal man and the ideal woman.

  I thought the overall dynamic between the one male poster and the several female posters was pretty interesting.  It almost seemed as though the guys wanted to be the ideal type they drew out and the females wanted nothing to do with the image of the female that is portrayed by the media.  Many of the female groups had their own versions of the ideal woman as opposed to the media's view.  I also found that many of the things written in the "our" sides of the female posters were more inner qualities (i.e. compassion, loving, honest) and didn't have anything to do with physicality.  If we're supposed to be striving to be these compassionate, loving individuals then why are we still buying make-up and subscribing to weight loss programs that would in turn lead us towards the media's ideal woman type?

   I would have liked to see this experiment in reverse as well.  Where the men wrote what they thought the ideal woman would be and the women wrote what they thought the ideal man was.  I would like to know if we have higher standards for others as opposed to what we think we should be and vice-versa.

  I also enjoyed the reading on the self and how it described one's self identity as an on-going project.  I had never thought of it this way but it makes a lot of sense and makes the concepts much easier to grasp.  One's self is constantly changing through different experiences and I think the reading really conveyed that message in a way that was easy to understand.

  Until next time.