Ever since women have been able to vote, there have been more rights for women everywhere in America. Somehow in construction working, women get lower paid than men. Should they be paid the same as men? The working area is the same, so why is it that women have lower payments because of their gender? This should be a new rule, for women have the same exact rights as men. Everyone is working the same, so why not? Finally, this can reduce women strikes. Working class women internalize their own oppression. These women learn the stereotypes that define their lives at an early age.
Working class women strive to maintain the traditional feminine ideal while simultaneously struggling with the limitations of class. To a significant extent, the problems of working class women persist because they have not participated in the financial gains of the women’s movement. Middle class women reaped the greatest benefits. They dramatically increased their presence in professional fields such as medicine, law, and banking: “in little more than a decade women increased their representation among the most prestigious and lucrative professions by 300 to 400 percent” (Ehrenreich, 1990, p. 17). Granted, middle class women still encounter the “glass ceiling” in their efforts to make it to the highest ranks of corporate life. Nevertheless, the women’s movement secured a definite change in fortune for women from backgrounds with high social status. These women can now afford to be independent of men. Their financial future is no longer based on marrying into wealth. If a professional woman marries, and later divorces, the specter of impoverished single motherhood is rarely a threat. In contrast, working class women are still largely dependent on the incomes of their husbands.
The occupational gains of the women’s movement have not been as evident in the blue-collar fields. Part of the reason is some blue collar occupations are in The construction industry, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, is the second-largest employer in America, with roughly 10 million employees (Hartman, 2004). However, women make up only 10 percent of this workforce. This is slowly changing as women are in increasingly high demand. According to Michael Barkett, state director of training for the Mississippi Construction Education Foundation, women in construction are now employed as job foremen, job superintendents nd architects” and the door to women’s involvement in construction is “wide open” for those women wishing to pursue this job market (Hartman, 2004, p. S25). A variety of “government, union and business entities” are endeavoring to inform both women and minority workers of the job opportunities available in the skilled trades (Smith, 2000, p. 3). Through their cooperation, it is the hope of these entities that the urgent need for worker will bring more women and minorities into these professions.
For example, the Great Lakes Construction Alliance is a non-profit organization whose goal is to improve practices within the construction industry and devise methods for attracting women and members of minorities to the industry through research with local unions, such as “bricklayers, carpenters, iron workers, plumbers and roofers” (Smith, 2000, p. 3). Donald O’Connell, managing director of the alliance, indicates that his organization is interested in bringing diversity to the skilled trades because the larger, more diverse pool of workers aids all stakeholders in the industry (Riegel, 2006).
In many areas, agency law dictates that women must be a part of the construction workforce. For example, in the city of Detroit, Executive Order 22 stipulates that all construction projects that receive public funding must have a workforce that consists of “50 percent Detroit residents, 25 percent minorities and 5 percent women based on total work hours” (Smith, 2000, p. “The construction of female sexuality and it is position in heterosexuality drawing upon recent feminist discussions” An area of great focus in contemporary feminist theory has been looking at the construction of female sexuality, particularly its position in heterosexuality.
Of the recent discussions, much of this has been influenced or at least based around Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis and the his account of sexual development that follows from it. In very simplistic terms his account places masculine Is the inequality between men and women a human universal In this essay I will look at whether the inequality between men and women is a human universal, or whether there are or have been societies in which women shared … sexuality at its centre, making the penis the only recognised and valued sexual organ (Smart).
Female sexuality is constructed as lack of or a void because her genitals offer us nothing to see (Irigaray), thereby her desire is framed as an urge to come to possess the valued organ, which is the penis. Freud’s account of sexuality was initially dismissed by Kate Millett in 1969 as she argued his ideas were self-interested and just plain silly, however in Human Sexuality Explain the components of Human Sexuality. In your explanation include the definition of Gender we constructed in class. The components of Human Sexuality … 1974, Juliet Mitchell brought Freud back into feminism (Smart).
She argued that his references to the penis shouldn’t be taken so literally, in attempt to split the symbolic phallus from the biological penis, the problem however remerged because men have both power and penises, so penis continued collapsing in the phallus (Smart). With Freud now subsumed into feminism, heterosexuality posed a real problem for women because it represented a submission to the phallic power of the penis. For Socialization Of Gender When speaking of social construction we refer to the way society defines and develops ideas and characteristics on issues that vary throughout certain time periods and certain cultures.
For … many women they felt this left them with only two choices: either renounce their heterosexual desire or remain oppressed by men’s phallic power (Jeffreys). Yet for those that renounced heterosexuality their actions did nothing to challenge man’s power within heterosexual relations, they only attempted to put themselves outside the oppressive force of the male sex drive. If anything by advocating only two courses of action they seemed to say woman’s position in heterosexuality was only escapable but not changeable, Sexual Harassment Sexual harassment is of the biggest problems facing businesses and workplaces today.
As individuals who will be looking for jobs in the near future, you must be aware of this … otherwise there would have been a third option to resolve the problems and reform heterosexuality. So despite feminism’s claim that change is always possibly as means to improve women’s position there has been a tendency to offer what seems a fixed and once and for all meaning of heterosexuality, for example Dworkin argued that penetration was the expression of men’s enduring hatred of women (Smart). Though this provides a very straight forward understanding of the oppression women do Xmen Essay
Discuss the construction and representation of gender in X-men As well as the films content, the films title can also be discussed, especially when discussing gender representation. X-Men implies … encounter in heterosexual relations, by offering a fixed meaning where men are actively sexual and women are passive by its definitions it also makes these acts against women natural and inevitable (Waldby). Sharon Marcus exemplifies this point when she writes “To take male violence or female vulnerability as the first and last instances of any explanation of rape is to make the identity of rapist and raped pre-exist rape itself” (Wadlby).
The point to consider is that Freud’s account incest Until very recently around early part of 1970’s, the sexual assault of children within their families was rarely openly discussed until the emergence of the second wave of feminism. Incest … of sexuality may have normalized heterosexuality and the positions it offers for its subjects but it did not necessarily make it natural or inevitable. If anything it can provide us with a framework for understanding how change can occur for men and women’s positions due to its polymorphic notions of sexuality, that is shaped by culture and psychological processes.
Having established that heterosexuality is capable of change we need to find the aspects that make it problematic and address ways Incest Until very recently around early part of 1970’s, the sexual assault of children within their families was rarely openly discussed until the emergence of the second wave of feminism. Incest … to solve them. The most problematic aspect of heterosexuality for women is the issue of penetration, for this is what established heterosexuality as problematic to begin with because it was seen as submission to man’s phallic power.
This is evident in early feminist work such as, Simone de Beavoir, who in The Second Sex documented several women’s first experiences of penetration which were described as painful, from which she argued that the first penetration is always a violation The role of self focus as a function of Siginficance In sexual dysfunction Introduction It is a popular belief that being physically attractive is of greater importance for women than for men in todaya€™s society, particularly in attracting the opposite sex.
Several … even when consented. Now her research was done quite a while ago, in a time when sexual education was limited, however does seem part of the problem with penetration is not so much the act itself but how we described it. If one looks up “penetrate” in the thesaurus it will list the following synonyms: – barge in, force, gore, impale, invade, puncture, trespass, infiltrate. None of these synonyms carry any notions of mutuality or positivity, so quite SEXUAL HARRASMENT
They may be neurosurgeons or typists, police officers or telephone operators, construction workers or even members of Congress – more than half of working women have faced the … clearly part the problem with penetration could be attributed to using that word to describe it. One alternative is referring to it as the “vagina’s embrace or grasp of the penis” (Waldby) this would shift penetration from the singularity of the man’s active penis and the women’s passive vagina to the idea of mutual activity. Though changing the word is not going to instigate any change on its own, it will change how we think about it.
Another problematic Hemingway By Bell Tony [1] Postmodernist discourses are often exclusionary even when, having been accused of lacking concrete relevance, they call attention to and appropriate the experience of “difference” and “otherness” … aspect of penetration is that it maintains itself as the only recognised sexual practice, at least within mainstream heterosexual culture. This has been demonstrated not so long ago when US President, Bill Clinton, argued that he did not have sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky because no penetrative sex was involved.
Clearly one can already see the problems that arise out of this in terms of cases of rape, for example it could be argued that if a woman was forced Female Dominance or Male Failure? Female Dominance or Male Failure? James Thurber illustrates the male species’ status with respect to, a€? Courtship Through The Agesa€? with a humorous and melancholic tone. He emphasizes … it perform oral sex then that is completely different from a women who was penetrated against her will.
However the notion of penetration as the only recognised form of sexual practice is also posses a problem to women in their negotiation of sex, particularly that of safe sex. By this I mean campaigns for safe sex have had a strong tendency to limit the safe sex options for women down to no sex at all or penetrative sex Feminism And Diversity “Feminism and the Standpoint of Lesbianism” In chapter ten of her text Whose Science Whose Knowledge, Sandra Harding introduces the standpoint of a distinct lesbian epistemology. Her objective is … with a condom.
Fiona Stewart is critical of this, arguing such campaigns as “If its not on, its not on”, continues to reduce women’s safe sex options by emphasing penetrative sex and thereby denying other forms of sexual practice. This common view of sexual practice as only being penetrative was shared by many of the women she interviewed who either felt that non-penetrative sexual activity wasn’t “real” or normal. On the other hand the homosexual community has a much Pornography It started by way of messengers and scribes, evolved through the presentation of newspapers and radio, brought us together with television and now servers us worldwide via the … reater view of what constitutes sex including such things as kissing, mutual, masturbation, oral sex which acts to de-emphasising penetration and has give much more room to navigate safe sex. A similar move would be equally as productive in heterosexuality for give women more room to navigate safe sex as well as disrupting naturalistic notions of heterosexuality as purely penetrative. Another issue of heterosexuality that has comes out of Freud’s account of sexuality is that woman doesn’t have sexual harrassment History & the Law Under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Sexual harassment is a form of sex discrimination.
Federal law as well as various state fair-employment … a sexuality of her own because her is seen as a lack of, because her genitals represent nothingness (Irigaray). This can be seen as a denying women sexual autonomy, Lucy Irigaray tries to resolve by proposing the notion of woman’s autoerotism, to be understood as the pleasure she gains from the constant contact of the two lips that constitute her genitals. While this was successful in giving women pleasure independent of the penis and giving value to her Sexual Harrassment
History & the Law Under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Sexual harassment is a form of sex discrimination. Federal law as well as various state fair-employment … sexual organs it also made the issue of penetration even more problematic than before. Now the act of penetration was seen as an interruption to woman’s autoeroticism by separating the two lips that give her pleasure through their contact. This meant that not only was penetration seen as a submission to phallic but also as forcing women to give their own desire, yet does this mean that woman’s sexual autonomy and heterosexuality are incompatible?
Maybe to think about sexual Gwen Harwood Gender Analysis Gwen Harwood: Gender Analysis The patriarchy of the society within the context of which poet Gwen Harwood constructed her poetry, is observed, sometimes criticized and often challenged in the collection … autonomy within heterosexual practice is to unnecessarily problematise the issue as it has been suggest that erotic pleasure arguably requires a kind of momentary annihilation or suspension of what normal counts as identity or the conscious (Waldby).
