Tag Archives: gender

what the heck is a pronoun?

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Today I had my training for volunteer work with sexual minority youth. It’s the second such training I’ve had – the first being in 2009. No matter how basic the information we learn is, I feel like there is always some new information to take in, or some new perspective to look at something from. I was glad to be there and to have the opportunity to learn more or to refresh information that I’d already known.

The age ranges that I’ll be interacting with are around the ages of 12-24ish and often times are youth at risk. The training lasted for four hours and was, for the most part, gut-wrenching. We first learned what at-risk youth were. Examples could be at risk for: poverty, isolation, stds, self-harm, pregnancy, and homelessness. For all of the categories we listed, GLBTQ youth were more likely to be at risk. The woman leading the training noted that we don’t know a single area in which GLBTQ aren’t more at risk.

There was so much to take in, but one really special thing about GSA (gay straight alliance) or QRC (queer resource centers) is being able to be in a space where you can begin to feel comfortable expressing your identity safely. For some people they may not be able to come out, express their gender, or be open and honest about their fears or sense-of-self anywhere else. Places like this haven’t always existed. Kids are coming out and talking about these things much younger now than they used to.

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At the beginning of this (and my last) training session we talked about gender specific pronouns. In my college courses we’ve started introducing ourselves with our pronoun preferences. For instance, during roll, I would say “My name is Lorelei and I go by female pronouns” or “My name is Lorelei and I go by she and her.”

Pronouns are something really important to know because you can really alienate someone if you call them “he” when they identify as “she.” It’s also hard because we do have those snap judgements and want to quickly categorize someone in our minds. We may be curious to ask how someone identifies if we can’t quickly snap judge them into a category. Someone who is trans* or gender queer or androgynous, for instance, may not be as easy to “read” in a traditional sense. We talked about what that means and how people may use gender to identify themselves. We talked about how you can ask someone how they identify, if you are unsure of how to refer to them in conversation.

Preference varies – so we were told that generally it’s safe to call people by their name or go the gender neutral route by using “they.” This is an intentional act of being respectful of someone. Of course you don’t know what someone has gone through or how sensitive they are going to be. We came to the conclusion that it is okay to ask someone what gender pronoun they prefer, if it’s appropriate for the conversation. Instead of saying “are you a guy or a girl?” you could introduce yourself first “My name is Lorelei and I go by female pronouns, what’s your name?” This allows you to say “This is who I am so you don’t misread me, who are you so I don’t misread you?” Some people may prefer to be pulled aside. You also have to keep in mind that not everyone is “out” and so a gender pronoun that they prefer in a safe space might not be what they use at home or around family. There is a lot of variance and everyone is different.

Being respectful and listening to people talk and trying not to make too many assumptions is a great way to go.

If anyone has anything to add – please do.

Starbucks

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Have you ever walked into a Starbucks and questioned the interactions you have? That was the purpose of my latest assignment. I went to two Starbucks locations and one alternative café of my choosing, with the intent of primarily observing whether or not drink orders are gendered. The idea came from (earlier posts included) thoughts about how what we order is gendered. You could look at a menu and pick out what items women or men might be more likely to order even if you’re not sure why.

The interesting part about Starbucks is that much of their advertising is gender neutral or doesn’t have people in it at all. Many of their advertisements focus on images of the coffee itself, with messages about the best part of your day or better/best for you. Despite this, we jotted down drink orders and found that women did order more specialized drinks and men ordered more basic drinks.

We later expanded on this with the concept of space. Where do you go to order specific drinks? I would be more likely to order a cup of black coffee at a smaller local cafe where I know the roaster than I would at a Starbucks. I would be more likely to order a mocha at a Dutch Bros (known for their sweet, sugary drinks) than a cafe known for their local roasts.

There was also some interviewing done where some people noted that they felt uncomfortable ordering, either because they felt their drink “said something about who they were as a person” or “they didn’t know the proper technique for ordering.”

It was by no means a “research paper” but just sitting their and observing how people interacted with the baristas we noticed a lot of interesting things, and left me with the unanswered question: if we’re not told what to order, why do women order more of those specialized drinks than men do? 

leaving relationships, ethical non-monog, and gender

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“Whenever I hear a headline like, ‘Marriage Ruined by Cheating,’ or ‘An Open Marriage Fails—It Just Never Works,’ I’m tempted to point to a divorce somewhere else and declare, ‘Marriage Ruined by Monogamy.’” – Pamela Haag

ten reasons to leave a relationship

I was actually pleasantly surprised by this list. Sometimes they can reflect a more flippant attitude towards relationships. There wasn’t a single point here that I disagreed with.

you may call it cheating, but we don’t

An awesome article published on the NYT website. I feel like I must have shared this a million times over again, but it’s probably just because I keep seeing it everywhere.

The main thing that helped me get over the affair was realizing that attraction to other people isn’t necessarily a sign your marriage is bankrupt. In the course of being together forever, especially if you’re out in the world meeting new people, it happens. One of the challenges in a marriage, in addition to deciding whose job it is to do the dishes and how to balance the budget, is to figure out how to deal with lust or love for other people.

masculine/feminine and why it matters

An interesting excerpt:

Across the board, object gender influenced the participants’ judgments. For example, the word “key” is masculine in German and feminine in Spanish. German speakers in the study tended to describe keys as hard, heavy, jagged, metal, and useful. Spanish speakers, on the other hand, used words such as golden, intricate, little, lovely, and tiny when describing keys. The word “bridge” is feminine in German and masculine in Spanish. Sure enough, German speakers described bridges as beautiful, elegant, fragile, pretty, and slender, while Spanish speakers said they were big, dangerous, strong, sturdy, and towering.

Stupid Girls are hot

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The one irritating thing about college is that it challenges everything you know to be true and makes you think about things in at least a hundred different ways, none of which might be right or wrong. Man, learning is hard. The cognitive psychologists will tell you one thing and then the behaviorists will tell you something else and you go over to the humanists and then throw in some philosophy in there with a little bit of woman’s studies and by the time you finally get your degree you can’t give a straight answer to anything.

Today we watched the Stupid Girls music video, by Pink. If you haven’t watched it yet, catch up and regain your sense of social significance.

When I first watched this video in 2006 I was still in High School (sorry to pull the age card on you) but it didn’t mean that much to me at the time outside of face value messages. Yeah, don’t be stupid, stupid girls are stupid, etcetera. One issue that comes up a lot in class is “Why dig deeper than that? What if nothing else was intended?” And that’s often a message that gets reflected in comments. The point isn’t necessarily to pull things out of a video that aren’t there, but to think critically about other messages the video might send, intentional or not, whether it has personal meaning to you or not.

So, like I said, I didn’t think much of it at first. I think it was cool that Pink was being Pink. Today in class though I saw the video again and perceived it entirely differently. It relates back to the BOTH/AND message I was sharing in an earlier post. Pink is mocking women like Paris Hilton or Jessica Simpson for being dumb or being portrayed as dumb in the media, and is asking where all of the strong women went, why there isn’t a female president? For the first time I questioned why can’t you both really like fake tanning and small irritating dogs and be a strong empowered women? (Or, in this video, why can’t you like football and dolls?) First off, it’s never portrayed in the media. You’re either pretty and dumb or you’re smart and plain. The only instance I can think of where a film attempts to break those stereotypes is Legally Blonde, where Elle portrays a woman who is not only beautiful and traditionally “femme” but is also intelligent and a bit of a klutz.

The video also seems to target the “stupid girls” as being at fault for being stupid and not having dreams or going after their dreams. But is it really the fault of women who are told you can either be beautiful and well-liked or smart and un-liked? Is it their fault that the messages they’re pelted with growing up actually worked?

I suppose the two things that I pulled from the video this time around were that you don’t have to look a certain way or behave a certain way to be a certain way. (Which strictly goes against what I am learning in non-verbal communication about physical appearance and what not, but default back to the first paragraph of this post and sigh along.) And, of course, that it’s not necessarily any given woman’s fault if she gets trapped within the dichotomy of having to be either this or that. Not everyone gets told that they can be BOTH/AND - and even if they do, and they try, the system may set them up to fail.