Sunday, May 27, 2007

This entry is quite biased since I only got to interview one side since my dad was not available for me to interview since he was out of town. Interviewing my aunt for the first entry in our journal for our Genders class, it was quite a tough question to be just answered with a sentence or two, according to her.

Being a female doesn’t mean to be of a weaker sex. Essentially, being a woman requires much more than physical strength. Being a woman also requires strength emotionally and mentally. Strength to carry a child in her womb for nine months and have to risk her life to just give birth to a beautiful baby. Strength to go through monthly periods, PMS, and dysmenorrhea and actually cope up with the mood swings that comes with it; emotional strength to cope up with discrimination in the work area for just being a female. Being a woman requires strength to be a wife, a mother, a sister, and an employee all at the same time. As they say, a woman has multiple burdens.

After interviewing my aunt, I found out that we have basically the same thing in mind. For me, being a woman goes beyond being able to reproduce the next generation. Being a woman is harder as it may seem to the other sex. Being able to juggle work, family, and health all at the same time is quite amazing! Seeing my mother taking care of me and my dad; seeing her do most of the household chores like laundering, cooking meals, ironing clothes, and cleaning the house; seeing her do her job and being able to travel because of work amazes me. It makes me wonder if I could also do that when I get older and start having a family of my own.

Although we are living in a quite “free and liberal” society, females are actually discriminated when they don’t turn out to be what society expects them to be. If a woman turns out to be a member of the third sex, they look at her as if she is some kind of a criminal. We are dictated by society how to act, thus making our society not so free and liberal after all.

As what our professor in GENDERS said in our first meeting, everything is constructed. Our views on gender are quite constructed also. We judge them instantly and turn our heads away even before we truly see what they are. As a member of the female species, females should have as much choices males also have. We should also have a say on whether we like to carry a baby and risk our lives for them. I am not saying that we should legalize abortion or anything like that; I’m saying that we should have a choice on when we should have babies and whether we really like to risk our lives for them. Choices are limited for us females, especially here in the Philippines.

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After doing the activity last Friday, I could conclude that our views regarding different genders are quite constructed. We typically stereotype the straight women and men, the gays, the lesbians, and the trans-gendered. We judge them according to what they wear and project, and also how they speak.

I also realized that everyone could be a gay, a lesbian, or a bi-sexual. They could look like everyone else and would act like everyone else. Like in our society, many gays are still hiding in closets since they think society would put them down and might even discriminate them.

I think there are reasons why we stereotype other genders. We want to easily determine who is what. We want to be not guessing every time we meet a new person. We want to be easily informed of what they truly are.