October Blog Post

Kevin Kelley

Christina Ivey

Comm 160

10/28/2016

Recently we read the poems of Amy Arellano and and she had quite a few powerful poems in our most recent reading. Of these poems one of the lines from Word Wielding Womb stood out to me. "That women are to be seen and not heard." This line seems even more impactful in the midst of everything that is happening currently especially in America. There was a movement recently that took place on Twitter with people posting with the hashtag to #repealthe19th. This movement is just one example of many related to the Trump campaign currently. However, there has been quite a bit of sexism floating about recently regardless. Despite women being able to vote since 1920 and women being involved in traditionally male jobs and college major, women are also still facing many challenges in today's society. In class we were able to talk about privilege and being able to use privilege to help others overcome the hardships facing them. For me, this has meant trying to be able to use my voice with those being oppressed to help them land on an even playing field and hopefully become fully equal. I personally define myself as a feminist and hope that I am able to help with what little I can do. But beyond that, this quote also shows the massive view, that is women are an object to solely be the sexual desires of a man. This can be seen in everything from video games, like in League of Legends where almost every female champion has big boobs and a perfect body (by American standards), to TV shows, where a superhero like the Black Canary in Arrow is in a skin tight leather suit for fighting, and her sister always has her boobs on display. This is a problem in that it can make young girls who see this think they have to be sexy to be seen or have to use sex to get their way. This make traits like strength, intelligence, etc. worth a lot less in the scheme of things for most women. This is a hard problem to be solved, but could be solved mainly through time dedicated to the issue, but hopefully will be solved in my lifetime, as it's already been almost a hundred years since women gained the right to vote, but women are still far from equal.