When reading the comments on the Geek and Gamer girl video I noticed that there was quite some controversy, especially around the issue of geek women presenting themselves as sexy. Why is there criticism on sexy geeks?
I think it is clear to all kinds of groups that geek women do exist. In my opinion it is therefore obvious that they come in different identities, shapes, colours, sizes and sexual orientation. Of course they are not all as sexy as the girls in the geek and gamer video and this video is an aberration from the norm. But isn’t that the point of a parody?
I understand that female gamers take part in the geek culture because they enjoy it. I realize that they want to gain respect for their behaviour instead of being made into sexual objects. On the other hand, sexiness seems the way to get attention in this male dominated culture. Therefore, I think it is important to realise that this self-objectifying behaviour is performed for a reason. In my opinion this explains why the girls in the video are used as sexual objects.
Therefore, I don’t see this objectifying behaviour as anti-feminist, because it gets the conversation going. I think that team unicorn realizes that they have to work with the options that are available to them. I guess it might seem silly, but beauty and sexiness does provide females with power. This is shown in the male dominant culture like gaming, which females are able to enter based on this power.
Al in all, I think that feminist can use they sexuality as long as she strives towards a higher goal. She needs to keep in mind what it is meant for! And even though a lot of gamer girls disagree with the image team Unicorn is putting out there, I think it is very empowering for this group that this video let to a lot of controversy and started the discussion.

After looking at the wheel from Gayle Rubin’s “Thinking Sex” article for the just in time #1 assignment, I felt as though 200 words was not enough to really look into the wheel and how it shapes the way society and culture look at sexuality.

I think that culture and society influence each other when looking at sexuality and more specifically when looking at the wheel and how it pertains to views on sexuality. Our cultures shape how our society functions in many different ways. It shapes our societies views on religion, education, equality business, gender, sexuality, the internet and its usage. Sometimes different subcultures have a larger impact on us than our countries overall culture, but it does shape our societal beliefs and views.

In relation to the wheel that Gayle Rubin’s has created, I believe that this is slowly starting to change at least in the younger generations in western cultures. I am from the US, and I think that if someone did a survey of American bachelor’s students, average ages between 18-24, I think that they would find many people saying part of the inside wheel is more abstract and “not normal” than the views on the outside wheel. If you took a poll of American college professors, they may disagree with their students. I mentioned this would be specific to “western” cultures. Among personal finding, most “western” cultures do not have as high of an influence by religion in their everyday life. Not to say that the people aren’t religious or don’t practice religion or that it doesn’t have a strong influence in people’s lives, but that “western” cultures tend to preach that religion and faith does not have to shape every aspect of your life.

I think that age has a lot to do with the way that we view the wheel, this is a subculture that I don’t think is looked at very often. With each generation thoughts become more liberal and broad. For my grandparents the inner wheel was something that was followed and if you decided to do something in your sexual life that was with the outside wheel, you not only did not talk about it, but probably denied it. For my parent’s generation I think that some of the aspects of the outer wheel became more common place. For example, pornography is not really seen today as an “unnatural” thing. Not only do both sexes enjoy pornography, but many times couples will watch it together. I also think that for my parent’s generation it was not uncommon for aspects of the wheel such as “with manufactured objects” to be incorporated in their sex lives, however it was still something that you did not talk about openly. Maybe with your closest friends but it was not a common topic of conversation, and you certainly didn’t go around saying that you did these things. For our generation, at least in the American “western” culture, I think that most aspects of the outer wheel are very common place. I think that there are a few that you don’t talk about, or boys will to brag to their friends, as if they’re some sort of accomplishment to have done.

I think that this also plays into the fact that as a generation around the world, not just in “western” cultures or in the American culture, our ideas are more open and questioning as they will continue to be with each subsequent generation. There are aspects of our lives, sexual and nonsexual that we control, putting aside aspects of our religion or culture to discover who we are, what we want and what we think is normal or not normal because normal changes from not just culture to culture but person to person.

When I was looking for a subject for my fieldwork research, I noticed that a lot of people post very personal things on the internet. I was surprised how many people, mainly women, would poor their hearts out in a public forum or anything of that sort. For my research, I studied a forum where people dealing with binge eating would post their frustrations and disappointments and support each other. As much as I think it is helpful for these women that they have a place to share, I started wondering whether people might use forums like this instead of seeking professional help.

When scrolling through the forums, I came across a lot of websites that provide people with self-help posts. For example, I stumbles upon website launched by a man who is a happiness and health expert. He wrote a piece about recognizing and getting over emotional eating. Since this is mostly a female problem, I thought it was quite interesting to read how men would advise to deal with this. A lot of it made sense to me, but according to the comments, a lot of women experiencing emotional eating did not agree with some of his solutions. I think this might be a gender-related difference in dealing with emotions and problem solving.

I tried finding a forum that would mainly deal with emotional eating by men, as I thought it would be interesting to find some differences between male and female writing behaviour in this respect. The only thing I could really find in public forums is that men would in general consume different types of food than women. Furthermore, I found that men’s forums dedicated to this issue are usually private where women do not have a problem posting about this in public forums.

Fact is that much more women than men are dealing with serious eating disorders and it is wider recognised for women to go ask for help and support than for men. I think however, that the causes of having eating disorders, both being overweight and underweight, for men and women come from the same environmental influences. Where women get the idea that they have to be thin and beautiful in order to be socially accepted, men are given the image of a muscled and tanned man as the ideal. Having these images as an ideal may lead to both starving yourself in order to try to live up to these requirements or falling into emotional eating as a result of being depressed that you can never have that body.

I feel that nowadays, people start surfing the internet for self-help forums when they recognize that they might be dealing with a problem. However you can not solve every health problem by a 5-steps-to-get-over-something plan. For some problems you need professional help and a real person giving you support, when you are dealing with an eating disorder in particular.

The other day I remembered a little news piece about French feminists wanting to remove the word ‘mademoiselle’ from the French vocabulary. I looked it up again and translated, it basically says that they want to get rid of the word mademoiselle because the distinction between mademoiselle and madame would be sexist and discriminating.

Personally, I have always really liked the word mademoiselle. It might be because I am not a native French speaker and therefore not so used to the word, but it sounds so pretty to me. Besides the beautiful sound of the word, I like having a word in your language for an unmarried woman. Where English has the word miss and French the word mademoiselle, we used to have a word for an unmarried woman in the Dutch language too. However, this word is not as pretty as mademoiselle and hardly gets used anymore.

I know this topic does not specifically relate to internet, but if we talk about feminism and gender, I think this actually does relate to those topics and how women are looked upon and probably even more how they valuate themselves.

Coming to the point why this French feminist movement wants to scrap the word from the language, it being sexist and discriminating, I think it depends on how someone experiences being an unmarried woman. Some women might be devastated about the fact that they are not married and still single, and I guess that these women do not like to be reminded of that everyday. There are, however, also women who are proud to be unmarried and self sufficient. For these women, mademoiselle might be a title they take with pride. Moreover, I have been given to understand that the word mademoiselle in the French language is rather used for a young woman than specifically for an unmarried woman. The only time unmarried women actually are confronted with the fact that they are a ‘mademoiselle’ instead of a ‘madame’ is probably when they fill out official forms.

I honestly can not really see how using a different word for an unmarried woman is sexist and discriminating, especially when it is basically not used anymore to specifically make that distinction. The only thing I started wondering however is why there are not separate words or titles for married and unmarried men in any language I know of.

One of the topics often discussed in this course is the development of femininity and masculinity on the internet, specifically on social media typed websites, blogs and in chat room settings.  Many times on blogging sites such as Tumblr and Blogspot, bloggers are able to change the design of their background to suit their personal liking. Some will choose to design their own using a template and changing around the color scheme to meet their personal needs. My blog, which I like to keep private (I have disable searching for the blog on the internet via search engines. The only people that can read it are those whom I have given the link to.) is a travel themed blog, so I have tried to keep with that theme and use one of the templates that blogspot provides for me. Many times the usage of certain colors or images can give away a person’s gender, or can lead the reader to assume a certain gender. For example if a pink and purple background comes up with an image of a kitten or a puppy, most readers are going to assume the writer is a female. Also, lighter shades of blues and greens may lead the reader to believe that the writer is a female. Darker colors such as red, navy blues and deep greens may lead the reader to believe that they are reading a male’s blog. For example, here are links to two different blogs. Both of them are celebrity based blogs the first a male the second a female.

1.) http://mrtrohman.tumblr.com/

2.) http://hellogiggles.com

The second blog, hellogiggles.com, is a blog that Zooey Dechanel (an American actress, seen in the tv show New Girl on Fox as well as the movie 500 Days of Summer) is credited with helping to start. I stumbled upon this blog through reading an article about Zooey (http://omg.yahoo.com/blogs/aline/zooey-deschanel-bullied-being-chubby-kid-013328376.html ). Zooey is a great role model for girls: she’s strong, she’s smart and embraces who she is and she’s also very feminine. The main page of hellogiggles.com lead me to this article: http://hellogiggles.com/being-feminine-doesnt-make-me-weak.  The article brings up an excellent point about everyday life that I think can also relate to the world of the internet in regards to building gender in a profile, specifically in my personal reaction to the article we will have read for class “Oh No! I’m a Nerd.”

In the article for class, the author discusses how not many women were on the MUD site she studied and that the men tried to make themselves seem masculine amongst a group of men who were seen as not masculine by the society around them. In actuality there may have been women on that website that were using tactics to downplay their femininity so they would not seem weaker to the men on the site. Unfortunately, women have been viewed in societies as weaker than men. This is something that is changing around the world, however is historically built into the past of many cultures and is still at the forefront of others.

If we take a look at some of the more influential women in society today, many of them have tried to make themselves more like men in their field of work, which has helped gain them success in the work place. Hilary Clinton, former First Lady of the United States and current Secretary of State, is rarely seen in a skirt or dress. Same with Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany. Their outfits are not men’s suits however they are usually viewed in a woman’s PANT suit.

The hellogiggles article proves that dressing femininely and portraying a feminine appearance doesn’t make you weak. It does lead to a bigger surprise when you do something which has a more masculine association, such as lifting heavy boxes or talking politics, or even designing your blog’s background. So maybe add a touch of femininity to a professional blog about architecture or politics if you’re a girl. It may even make someone take you more seriously because after viewing a background they get one idea and then after reading your posts have another about you and what you have to offer.

When I got in touch with the wheel diagram of Gayle Rubin I was really surprised about the society conceptions and some questions came up. Is sexuality fixed? Is there a way to eliminate sex hierarchy? Based on what do we define sex as good or bad? The same questions arose to me after reading the article on ‘online pornography, normativity and the Nordic contexts.’

The Rubin’s diagram defines acceptable sex on the inside and unacceptable sex on the outside. A similar situation appears in the article on online pornography, they divide pornography into violent pornography versus regular pornography. However, where are the boundaries?

Rubin state that these constructs are connected to power and hierarchies. She states that sex is always political. But there are also historical periods in which sexuality is more sharply contested and more overtly politicized. In such periods, the domain of erotic life is, in effect, renegotiated.

As a society we judge about different kind of ideas and behaviour. Our judgements are influenced by social norms, culture and personal experience. I agree with Jacksons expression: ‘What is sexual is not fixed but depends on what is socially defined as such and these definitions are contextually and historically variable.’

Nowadays, sexuality is a big part of the personal identity and nonconformity to the norm can be threatening. In my opinion this is the reason why people judge and why sexual hierarchies exist. I think that this judgement happens unconsciously as we are used to our norms and values and don’t realize that these might differ among different groups. Therefore, as we all keep being influenced by our society and culture and might be difficult to eliminate these hierarchies.