Gender Myths in The Female Man - Literature Essay Samples

The Female Man begins with a direct challenge to the patriarchy in particular the patriarchal methodology used in silencing women. Before the narrative even begins, R.D. Laing is quoted from The Politics of Experience with a hypothetical situation in which â€Å"Jack† wants to forget something while â€Å"Jill† keeps bringing it up. â€Å"Jack may act upon Jill in many ways. He may make her feel guilty for keeping on bringing it up. He may invalidate her experience. This can be done more or less radically. He can indicate merely that it is unimportant or trivial, whereas it is important and significant to her. Going further, he can shift the modality of her experience from memory to imagination: Its all in your imagination. Further still, he can invalidate the content: It never happened that way. Finally, he can invalidate not only the significance, modality, and content, but her very capacity to remember at all, and make her feel guilty for doing so into the bargain.à ¢â‚¬  (31) One of the major tools of maintaining the social order is to write the histories in such a way that the reality of the past is altered in such a way as to ignore important historical influences and events. When the past is presented to people, often there can be a willful attempt to hide certain facts and exaggerate others. For example, rightwing historian Paul Johnson spends 2 pages in Modern Times talking about the civil rights legislation of the 1950s and 1960s without mentioning Martin Luther King or the NAACP and then concludes by stating that: â€Å"the turning point was the night of 10 May 1962, in Birmingham, Alabama. There was a black riot, with police forced onto the defensive and white shops demolished: ‘Let the whole fucking city burn,’ shouted a mob leader.† (645) Even though the civil rights movement saw many turning points throughout the 1960s including the March on Washington, Johnson purposefully depicts American blacks as people ungrateful for th e civil rights bestowed upon them by the Kennedy administration (Martin Luther King is not mentioned) to the point where they riot. By that same token, cultural myths about gender are purposefully created in order to maintain gender roles. In the first wave of feminism, essentialism was used as a reason for equality because women were â€Å"naturally† more caring, mothering, sensitive, etc. Women who stepped outside this role were not seen and ignored. Even though this served in helping women to secure the right to vote, the essentialism created a social setting in which women were discouraged from working save in times like World War II when most of the available male workers were in Europe. Women were mothers first and foremost. Women who went into the job field faced sexual harassment, the glass ceiling and limited roles. Even today, women are expected to choose between careers and families as if a career will ruin their families. Joanna Russ challenges traditional essentialist views of women and women’s â€Å"natural roles† by presenting four different female characters from vastly different worlds who are placed in sharp contrast to each other. When the women meet they must confront their previously unexplored biases. In the opening chapter, her utopian character, Janet, has a full resume that would normally be a masculine biography: â€Å"I was born on a farm on Whileaway. When I was five I was sent to a school on South Continent (like everybody else) and when I turned twelve I rejoined my family. My mothers name was Eva, my other mothers name Alicia; I am Janet Evason. When I was thirteen I stalked and killed a wolf, alone, on North Continent above the forty-eighth parallel, using only a rifle. I made a travois for the head and paws, then abandoned the head, and finally got home with one paw, proof enough (I thought). Ive worked in the mines, on the radio network, on a milk farm, a vegetable farm, and for six weeks as a librarian after I broke my leg. At thirty I bore Yuriko Janetson.† (2) The other characters of the book come from different worlds where their experiences have created their personalities. In the nature vs. nurture debate, Russ falls squarely on the side of nurture. In the plot of the book, Janet is a woman from a planet in which there are no men. They have all died 800 years in the past. She suddenly arrives in Jeannine’s world and then in Joanna’s world. In this world, Janet serves as a guide to what male-female relations could be (especially in her uncompromising dismissal of sexual harassment) while Joanna’s world is a prototypical 1970s America where women were expected to take harassment and Joanna is shocked by Janet’s behavior. Several other examples of gendered relations are explored as the four women change worlds and meet each other. Jeannine feels incomplete without a man and gets married for social stability. Joanna calls herself a female man in order to rid herself of gender expectations. In the future world where Jael reveals that she’s gathering the women to fight gender roles, there is a long war happening between men and women. Jael actually kills a man and tries to convince the other three women to go back to their worlds and fight gender roles. One of the most interesting things concerning Jael is that her name is that of a Biblical heroine who killed a man by driving a tent stake through his head in a reverse rape scene. That particular story ends with a song celebrating Jael and speaking about the man’s mother being worried and her handmaids comforting her by saying that he’s probably out raping Israelite women. Where Janet is a wish-fulfillment of what gender roles can be for women, Jael acts as a warning as to what could happen if the gender roles remain in place without the intellectual challenge represented by the book. In many ways, Janet is the hope to move beyond gender due to the fact that she comes from a place without men and therefore no gender. Jael is what happens when gender becomes so deterministic that people maintain their gender roles at the expense of sense, intelligence or life. Works Cited Laing, RD. The Politics of Experience. London: Penguin Books, Ltd, 1967. Russ, Joanna. The Female Man. New York: Bantam, 1973.

Career Advice Full Speed Ahead!

I'm going to tell you a story. From late 2013 through the early part of 2014, I faced a significant transition in my life, in both career and education. Not only was it time to make a choice for what I wanted as a first post-graduate school step, but it was also time to start learning how to live life. I don’t mean go forth and see the world and have adventures. I’m talking about doing routine things for myself (or having a routine at all!) and for my health: maintaining my car regularly, establishing the tone of the life I wanted, learning about personal finances and taxes, getting health insurance, making voluntary trips to the dentist...in other words, being an adult through and through! Job-wise, I was interested in a certain kind of consulting as well as smaller, more creative startups, but worried that they would be too focused on clients and specific products. It seemed that bigger companies that could afford riskier innovation groups (e.g. Google), would actually be decent places to work, as they could allow their employees to explore fresher, off-beat ideas. There was a catch though: I didn’t actually want the paying jobs that I thought I could get at that point, and I really liked the freedom in what I was currently doing. I was master of my own game, with the only unfortunate side effect being the lack of pay. I figured that I was investing my savings into my own success, though, by gaining precious skills and experience that I hadn’t had the opportunity to cultivate during school. My desire to do work with the people who could help me grow, whom I looked up to in skillsets and vision, was stronger than ever, and it was happening even in the non-traditional job that I held. I had excellent teammates to work with and the resources to refine and expand what we wanted to do. So that was why I threw my chips into that basket, and put my time into a risky, scary gambit of work – to grow myself towards a different arena! I hoped I would be there by late summer 2014. My plan was to get there from two ends - by just workin g hard and taking the opportunities that came along, and by looking at what was out there, thinking deeply about where I wanted to end up, and back calculating a good trajectory to take. I knew it would be helpful to acquire these skills and experience even if I never ended up applying for other jobs similar to the ones I was seeing, because they were all in line with what I felt passionate about while also increasing my employability. Entrepreneur Panda is in the fast lane As the year turned, I found myself becoming more and more committed to my venture, but one thing still often held me back. Persistent feelings of doubt about the value of what I was doing in the grander context of my career kept returning. Stick to this, stay with the initial plan, refine and debug, ride it out, see where it goes†¦I often thought to urge myself on. There were questions that kept coming back, though, which some of you may have thought yourself when you’ve set out on a difficult path: Is my value as a professional appreciating as I do this? Will the value of doing this be conditional on how successful it turns out,or will the experience be valuable in itself towards my next step? Does timing for when I'm done with this matter to my next position? Relative to when I finished my previous â€Å"legitimate step†? How do I position myself from this for the next step? What should I be doing in this to be maximally marketable for my next step? To put my fears to rest, I needed guidance from my mentors and peers, and from good connections, fast. Aside from personal connections, there were also groups I could bite the bullet and pay for membership for, or premium subscriptions to career services. It was all fairly hard to cultivate, but when the ball finally got rolling, what I heard back validated the gut feeling that I now tap into to get through those tough moments: theexperienceI gain will only bevaluableif two things are satisfied: 1) I need to work with my team well, and 2) I need to LEAD and INITIATE ideas and the building of this work. As in, rather than asking permission, just DO! I would then be able to speak of what I had envisioned and led the creation of, took initiative to do, in interviews down the line. This was how I would safely create value from my experience, however it turned out. In sum, I hope the story of my journey from professional student to working woman highlights the roller coaster ride of thrills, worries, and determination that it’s totally ok to feel all at the same time in the course of your career. Unfortunately, academic tutoring in Boston doesn’t usually entail this kind of experiential career coaching, which is beyond the scope of more traditional resume and application building. It may be better this way, as we tutors could inadvertently overstep our bounds in our enthusiasm for passionate and well-done personal achievements. Or, you may welcome the input, and welcome a deeper relationship in your 1 on 1 tutoring beyond the books. I encourage you to reach out to your academic support and see where it leads you! Looking forwards, I know I’m not going to be the same person after my venture experience. After all, I don’t even know what my priorities will be in the future! Life? Love? At that point in time, I'll re-evaluate what I want again. I’ve now seen so many companies with fantastic cultures out there that I might be happy and fully engaged in. Will I find a new work vision for my career path? I wonder sometimes. Worrisome questions occasionally abound again, and at those times I wish I could find a life tutor in Boston for all the answers, just as I had academic advisors in college and graduate school. Still, I wouldn’t trade the wonderful adventure of not knowing how things will end up 5 years from now for a life where every destination of mine was already certain. FULL SPEED AHEAD, I say! Reach for what you want to do, choose well, and then go! ;