The purpose of this discussion post is to apply what you’ve learned about how power is distributed through socially constructed identities. The hope is that in completing this discussion you will be able to identify examples of socially constructed ideas that are related to privilege and power. In reading and re-imagining Gloria Steinem’s If Men Could Menstruate you will demonstrate critical thinking skills, imagination and creativity and practice writing skills.
SKILLS: This assignment allows you to practice critical thinking and analysis skills, which are essential for your success in this course, as a college student, and engaged citizen beyond the classroom. The following skills will be needed to successfully complete this assignment
· Identify, summarize, and understand the concepts and arguments presented in the Steinem reading, If Men Could Menstruate
· Identify a different situation, concept, or identity that is associated with socially constructed ideas of power and privilege
· Develop your own “political fantasy” to share with classmates
· Read and comment on each others’ political fantasies.
KNOWLEDGE: This assignment will help you to become familiar with the concept of social construction and how power is distributed among privileged identities. Students will gain an understanding of the diverse range of people’s experiences, including the specific ways that factors such as gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, nationality and class background intersect with one another to shape these experiences.
TASK: For this assignment, you will do the following:
· At the heart of the Steinem piece is the following quote, “In short, the characteristics of the powerful, whatever they may be, are thought to be better than the characteristics of the powerless—and logic has nothing to do with it.” Use this quote as the guide for how to write your own political fantasy.
· Write a brief (500 – 750 words) discussion post that is inspired by the reading If Men Could Menstruate. For this Discussion you will identify a concept, practice, or policy this is built around the social construction of one group’s identity. Similar to the Steinem piece, you will have to identify what the assumptions are of the group who holds less power and imagine what would happen if that characteristic was a part of the group who holds more power. An example could be to imagine if men could give birth, or if heterosexual people were asked how they knew they were heterosexual. You will then describe how that concept would become appropriated or understood as source of pride, strength, or justification of their social position.
If Men Could Menstruate
By Gloria Steinem, Ms. Magazine, October 1978
A white minority of the world has spent centuries conning us into thinking that a white skin makes
people superior—even though the only thing it really does is make them more subject to ultraviolet rays
and to wrinkles. Male human beings have built whole cultures around the idea that penis-envy is
“natural” to women—though having such an unprotected organ might be said to make men vulnerable,
and the power to give birth makes womb-envy at least as logical.
In short, the characteristics of the powerful, whatever they may be, are thought to be better than the
characteristics of the powerless—and logic has nothing to do with it.
What would happen, for instance, if suddenly, magically, men could menstruate and women could not?
The answer is clear—menstruation would become an enviable, boast-worthy, masculine event:
Men would brag about how long and how much.
Boys would mark the onset of menses, that longed-for proof of manhood, with religious ritual and stag
parties.
Congress would fund a National Institute of Dysmenorrhea to help stamp out monthly discomforts.
Sanitary supplies would be federally funded and free. (Of course, some men would still pay for the
prestige of commercial brands such as John Wayne Tampons, Muhammad Ali’s Rope-a-dope Pads,
Joe Namath Jock Shields—“For Those Light Bachelor Days,” and Robert “Baretta” Blake Maxi-Pads.)
Military men, right-wing politicians, and religious fundamentalists would cite menstruation (“men-
struation”) as proof that only men could serve in the Army (“you have to give blood to take blood”),
occupy political office (“can women be aggressive without that steadfast cycle governed by the planet
Mars?”), be priest and ministers (“how could a woman give her blood for our sins?”) or rabbis (“without
the monthly loss of impurities, women remain unclean”).
Male radicals, left-wing politicians, mystics, however, would insist that women are equal, just different,
and that any woman could enter their ranks if she were willing to self-inflict a major wound every month
(“you MUST give blood for the revolution”), recognize the preeminence of menstrual issues, or
subordinate her selfness to all men in their Cycle of Enlightenment. Street guys would brag (“I’m a three
pad man”) or answer praise from a buddy (“Man, you lookin‘ good!”) by giving fives and saying, “Yeah,
man, I’m on the rag!” TV shows would treat the subject at length. (“Happy Days”: Richie and Potsie try
to convince Fonzie that he is still “The Fonz,” though he has missed two periods in a row.) So would
newspapers. (SHARK SCARE THREATENS MENSTRUATING MEN. JUDGE CITES MONTHLY
STRESS IN PARDONING RAPIST.) And movies. (Newman and Redford in “Blood Brothers”!)
Men would convince women that intercourse was more pleasurable at “that time of the month.”
Lesbians would be said to fear blood and therefore life itself—though probably only because they
needed a good menstruating man.
Of course, male intellectuals would offer the most moral and logical arguments. How could a woman
master any discipline that demanded a sense of time, space, mathematics, or measurement, for
instance, without that in-built gift for measuring the cycles of the moon and planets—and thus for
measuring anything at all? In the rarefied fields of philosophy and religion, could women compensate
for missing the rhythm of the universe? Or for their lack of symbolic death-and-resurrection every
month?
Liberal males in every field would try to be kind: the fact that “these people” have no gift for measuring
life or connecting to the universe, the liberals would explain, should be punishment enough.
And how would women be trained to react? One can imagine traditional women agreeing to all
arguments with a staunch and smiling masochism. (“The ERA would force housewives to wound
themselves every month”: Phyllis Schlafly. “Your husband’s blood is as sacred as that of Jesus – and so
sexy, too!” Marabel Morgan.) Reformers and Queen Bees would try to imitate men, and pretend to have
a monthly cycle. All feminists would explain endlessly that men, too, needed to be liberated from the
false idea of Martian aggressiveness, just as women needed to escape the bonds of menses envy.
Radical feminists would add that the oppression of the nonmenstrual was the pattern for all other
oppressions (“Vampires were our first freedom fighters!”) Cultural feminists would develop a bloodless
imagery in art and literature. Socialist feminists would insist that only under capitalism would men be
able to monopolize menstrual blood . . . .
In fact, if men could menstruate, the power justifications could probably go on forever.
If we let them.
7/23/2018 What High School Dress Codes Teach Our Daughters
5 Things I Wish You Knew
About Intersex People
In her University Forum lecture, sociology professor
Georgiann Davis discusses how intersex people navigate
their lives.
RESEARCH | OCT 7, 2015 | BY UNLV NEWS CENTER
he University Forum Lecture Series presents Contesting
Intersex: The Dubious Diagnosis, a talk by sociology
professor Georgiann Davis, at 7:30 p.m., Oct. 13, 2015, in the Barrick
Museum Auditorium. The event is part of Research Week activities
on campus. Here she offers a preview of one topic to be discussed:
how to be an ally to intersex people.
If you’ve never heard of intersex, you aren’t alone.
A few weeks ago a colleague and I were at a popular Las Vegas bar
attending a drag show fundraiser for a local nonpro�t gender and
sexual rights organization. In between drag show performances, the
host, who introduced herself as a “drag queen,” kept encouraging the
35 or so people in attendance to purchase more ra�e tickets to
raise money for Nevada’s gender variant community.
My colleague asked the host, “What about intersex people?” The
host quickly responded in the microphone she was holding,
“Intersex? What’s that? International sex?” The audience erupted in
laughter.
The irony was not lost on me. Of all places, you would think there’d
be greater awareness about intersex in that particular crowd.
I have complete androgen insensitive syndrome, meaning I was
born with an outward female appearance, but I have XY
chromosomes. I had internal testes before doctors removed them,
without telling me, when I was a teenager. My research is centered
on how intersex is experienced in contemporary U.S. society,
including when dealing with the medical community.
As I discuss in my new book Contesting
Intersex: The Dubious Diagnosis (NYU
Press, 2015), doctors routinely subject
intersex people to physically and
emotionally harmful genital surgeries.
http://aisdsd.org/dsd/
http://nyupress.org/books/9781479887040/
7/23/2018 5 Things I Wish You Knew About Intersex People | News Center | University of Nevada, Las Vegas
These surgeries are almost always
cosmetic and rarely medically necessary.
Perhaps even worse, many intersex people
aren’t told the truth about their diagnosis,
or if they are, they are told they are rare and
would likely never meet another intersex
person.
As both an intersex scholar and person,
here are �ve things I wish everyone knew:
5. We do exist.
Although there are no reliable estimates of the presence of intersex
in the population, a widely cited statistic suggests about 1 in 2,000
people are intersex — or about 1,000 people in a city our size. Many
doctors use their scalpels to surgically force us into invisibility, often
making us feel ashamed about being different. However, when we
�nd out the truth about our bodies and what we endured, we don’t
hide. We search the internet for information and usually end up
connecting with one another through support groups such as the
AIS-DSD Support Group (a nonpro�t for people with differences of
sex development whose mission is to make sure no one is forced to
face their diagnosis alone), or any other number of intersex
organizations that exist around the world, including Organisation
Intersex International.
4. We are normal.
Regardless of intersex status, all male bodies and all female bodies
do not look the same. Penises aren’t carbon copies of one another,
nor are vaginas. It turns out there is a whole lot of variation in what
makes up your reproductive system. Instead of shaming bodily
differences, whatever those may be, my hope is that we embrace
The Interface Project’s slogan that “No Body is Shameful.”
3. We are �ghters.
For over 20 years intersex people from around the world have been
organizing to end the medical treatment of intersex. Intersex people
speak at medical education events and public protests, regularly
appear in the media, address the United Nations, and even work
with the World Health Organization. We are also looking to the law
to, for once and for all, put an end to the medically unnecessary
surgeries intersex babies and children are forced to endure in the
United States. You can read more about an ongoing historic lawsuit,
�led in 2013 and known on twitter as #Justice4MC, at Advocates
for Informed Choice.
2. Our youth inspire.
Intersex people have many accomplishments to be proud of — just
look back at how much more connected intersex people are today
than we were in the early 1990s, when the intersex rights movement
was formed — but our intersex youth and youth leaders are
arguably the most inspiring. They speak up in their classrooms, they
march in parades, and they even made a BuzzFeed video that was
watched more that 1.7 million times. Our youth are honorable and
determined activists.
1. These issues affect you.
Doctors continue to perform surgery on intersex bodies to squeeze
us into an arbitrary male or female box — one that is narrowly and
problematically correlated with gender and sexual stereotypes.
These stereotypes force everyone into rigid categories, regardless
of the shape or features of their genitalia. If you have a penis, you
are expected to use it to penetrate a vagina if you want to be a “real”
man. If you have a vagina, you are expected to desire and enjoy
vaginal penetration if you want to be a “real” woman. However, it
would behoove all of us to escape these constraints of binary
thinking that underline sex, gender, and sexuality. Genitalia are
naturally variable and are not predictive of our gender or sexual
identities, which are complex and �uid parts of who we are. There
are many ways to accomplish your gender and sexual identities
both with and without your genitals.
Intersex people are here to stay and will always be around �ghting
for intersex rights. But we could use your help in raising awareness
and debunking myths about our lives. My hope is that I can count on
you to stand by our sides.
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