#ph310

This video reminded me of one of our classes as we talked about rape culture. For instance, in one of the readings, the author points out that is “a culture in which sexual violence is considered the norm - in which people are not taught to not rape but to not be raped” (”What is Rape Culture”). According to the article, this term was coined by feminists in the 1970′s and nowadays is being used by survivors to tell their stories. At times, when discussing this issue in our society, people blame the victim. Depending on what the person was wearing, drinking, or doing before the incident, individuals say, “oh, well she was asking for it.” These types of remarks are disgusting as the victims not only face physical, emotional, and psychological trauma from the incident but they also face unnecessary judgement. Unfortunately, in our society, there isn’t much being done in order to protect individuals from predators, which reminded me of cat-calling. Cat-calling is essentially when an individual whistles or shouts something sexual to a woman passing by. At times, they even follow these woman asking for their number or continually talking about them in a sexual manner.  Most people do not do anything when they see this happening, which is shameful. It is acted as a norm in our society. Women cannot even go out for a walk without being harassed, which is why we need to end rape culture by addressing it and talking about it more often in our college campuses in order to create change for the future. Attached is a video of woman’s experience walking around New York City for 10 hours.

Today, we focused on motherhood and work life in class. One of the many things we talked about was the reason why mothers are more likely to stay home than the father or any other member of the family. After giving birth, the mother typically goes on maternal leave for approximately twelve weeks and spend time with their infant in order to create a bond and care for its needs. In contrast, fathers do not usually go on parental leave especially not at the same time as the mother. The reason behind this is due to the wage gap. The wage gap is essentially the difference in earnings between men and women for doing the same work. As this bias still exists families benefits more from the father going to work than the mother. Being on maternity leave, it is also difficult for women to return back to their job after being absent for a couple of years. Stay at home mothers face depression at times from this. Single mothers also face numerous problems returning to work as many have a difficult time finding an affordable nanny or daycare. This proves the United States needs to improve its maternity leave and how women are treated as a whole in the workforce as they are often unfairly discriminated because of their gender.  

While working on my feminist technology design project, I realized a number of things. As we focused on he to reinvent tampons from a feminist perspective, I realized how oppressive society can be with women on their periods. As a fifteen year old, I was taught to hide my tampons and whisper the word “period” as it could bother other people. Yet, as a student in college, I have now come to realization that disguising the fact that I am on my period is absolutely absurd. It is a normal bodily function that women must go through for a week every month for most of their lives. As I was researching this topic I also watched numerous tampon commercials to see how they would advertise their product to women. Many of them constantly promoted the idea of how well they could hide it. For instance, in one Tampax commercial they girl emphasized how the wrapper made no noise while “quiet=good” was underneath her. Here I found this video proving how ridiculous tampon/sanitary napkin commercials can be at times.