This article focuses on how men and women see themselves, what roles they are taught to fulfill, and the cultural "normalities" that define these roles. As a guy reading this piece, it makes me wonder what misconceptions I myself have regarding masculinity and femininity. As much as I consider myself to be an average nice guy, do I still carry around as much contempt for woman as men are described in this piece? The part of this Cixous essay that caught me off guard was the suggestion of being homosexual as anti-woman. I had never really thought about homosexuality in that context. I do believe that guys grow up surrounded by affirmations of heterosexuality. Even as a child, I remember watching Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, and if you look at the cast, you'll see masculinity over femininity. 3 Male Rangers to 2 Female Rangers. Scooby Doo has 3 Male characters and 2 female characters. Even this simple sighting of higher ratio of men to women has to affect the mind in some way, shape or form. When you combine these little hints here and there all throughout someone's lifetime and especially during the years when they are growing exceedingly fast mentally, they start to add up. I truly believe that these little anti-woman suggestions build up to men unconsciously hating women.
With all of the discussion regarding the Other from tuesday's class, I started to see a connection with The Other and hate. If we take the male perspective regarding The Other and the male perspective regarding woman, we can start to see how men view females as the other. We do not understand the other, and we rely on sex to defeat this misunderstanding. In order to eat the other, to become a part of the other and understand it, we have to literally and figuratively insert ourselves into The Other.
I enjoyed Cixous because her writing style is very unique. While I still find words that I don't understand here and there, I think that throughout the blog posts and readings in class I've gotten better at reading texts. Not necessarily in the word for word sense, but it's gotten easier to see what the author is trying to convey, what change they are trying to make by sharing the information they've discovered.
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It's great to see you, as a guy, quesiton your role in soceity towards inequalities between men and women. Critical thinking is all about looking at the way you see the world, not just the way that society does. And your childhood memories enhance how culture has shaped the way that children have grown up with these ideologies. Frightening, huh?! :)
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