Sexism and Heterosexism

Heterosexism: Lisa Diamond Lecture

Yesterday I went to a lecture by Lisa Diamond called Biobehavioral Dynamics in Same-Sex and Other-Sex Couples: Implications for Mental and Physical Health." Lisa Diamond is an associate professor of psychology and gender studies at the University of Utah.

I want to share what I learned at this lecture because our readings focus on heterosexism.

Diamond's research started with a sample of Female/Female couples, Male/Male couples, and Female/Male couples. At this point in her lecture, she stressed that she would be using "same sex" couples and "other sex" couples, because MEN AND WOMEN ARE NOT OPPOSITE, THEY ARE JUST DIFFERENT! And I personally think that shifts in accepted language are powerful tools against oppression. I was glad that she said that and put such an emphasis on it. 

The scale they used asked questions like, "do you feel oppressed by society," or, "do you feel oppressed at your job." At the last minute they added the question, "do you feel accepted by your family," and "do you feel accepted by your partners family." For the laboratory test, they brought the couples in to talk about conflicts they faced. One partner discussed a conflict they had with their partner, then they switched places to talk about another conflict, and then they had a cool down session where they discussed something good that has happened in their relationship recently as to not send them off angry with each other. They were testing a few different things that I don't quite remember, but one important hormone was cortisol, which I believe we are all familiar with.

The rest of the lecture focused on the oppression the individuals felt by their own family and by their partners family, because that was the only section they saw any real differences, which is interesting.

And as a disclaimer, some of this was over my head so I'm going to try to be vague as to not mess up the findings.

What they found is that gay and lesbian individuals face similar negative mental and physical health problems that we also find in other minority groups in America. But the interesting part was most of the individuals in all three groups didn't feel oppressed by society or by their place of employment. Because it has become socially unacceptable to discriminate against groups of people, now minority groups face oppression in subtle ways. An example the researcher gave was a lesbian couple going to a family event, but no one from the family talks to the lesbian partner. It's not that they were discriminated against per se, but that they were involved in a hostile environment.

So, what they found as a correlation of higher stress levels was a partner perceiving that their partner's family didn't like them, not that they felt oppression by society or by their place of employment. They found a correlation between partners feeling their partners family didn't accept them, and attachment anxiety. Her explanation was, maybe the family didn't like the partner because they were a jerk, or maybe the families didn't like the partners because of their orientation. Maybe the family would say, "we don't care that you're homosexual, we just don't like HER. She's not the right one for you." But she was very clear that further research needed to be done to conclude anything of that sort. She said she really wanted to continue the research by contacting the families to see if the families really didn't like the partner and if so, why.

Back to Sexism: Men Can Stop Rape Activity

As a few of you know, I'm a Healthy Sexuality Peer Educator at UT. The program is a three semester commitment. The first semester is really intense. There is a ton of reading, and you have to write a review on a research article every single week. But the next two semesters you get to teach, and you only have to attend a one hour seminar class.

Over the summer by professor went to DC to take a training on a program called "Men Can Stop Rape." She has partnered with a UT police officer named Kevin to do a trial run of the program to see if it makes sense to implement it to a larger degree on UT. My cohort participates in it every other class.

A lot of the activities so far have focused on how crazy victim blaming is. For example, one of the first classes we had we were asked what advice females are given to not get raped. "Don't dress like a slut, don't drink too much, don't walk alone, don't walk in a dark alley, etc." Things that may be harm reduction, but you certainly have no control over someone raping you. THE RAPIST HAS CONTROL OVER RAPING YOU. So this class is basically focused on how we can shift the message to men on how harmful these messages to women are.

But the activity we did yesterday was really powerful to me, so I want to share it.

We did an activity similar to what we did in Dr. Gerlach's class: we had to rate a few cards on if they were "not at all a harm to women," "least harmful to women," or "most harmful to women."

The first few were things like "blaming a victim for being raped because she drank too much." That was an obvious "most harmful to women." Then there were cards like "acquaintance rape," which we labeled the most harmful. I believe we placed "stranger rape" right before "acquaintance rape." (Just to be clear for those that are confused, my cohort believes that acquaintance rape is most harmful because you trusted that person to be in your life, and they are probably part of your group of friends. Victims may feel like they had some control over that, although we know that rapists have control, not you. Additionally, 9 out of 10 rapes occur between people that know each other. Because it is a more prevalent problem, it is the most harmful.)

But the ones that were hard for us that we really debated were things like, "honking or cat calling at someone." I immediately said most harmful. But one of my peers responded by saying something along the lines of, "some people would love to be objectified. Imagine how handicapped people feel to never be objectified." I feel that's a somewhat valid point, and so I wanted to share it here. But why I think it's terrible is the socialization that has to happen for men to think that is appropriate or makes a woman feel good. I am probably one of the most paranoid people ever (I realized this after one of these classes. Kevin told us we can always call UTPD to get an escort to our car, and I said, "Yeah, but then I think that they will probably send a guy and that scares me too." I heard a lot of my classmates say, "Wow," after I said that, and they're right. THAT'S RIDICULOUS of me. But I've been socialized to be terrified.) But why I bring that up is, when I get honked at our cat called at, I don't feel safe. And for another human being to have the social acceptance to make me not feel safe is WRONG. We settled on putting it between least and most harmful. 

The next one that was difficult was "calling a girl a slut." Some of the girls in my class said that they say "hey slut" to their friends or when they are talking about the guys they want to hook up with they call each other sluts. There was discussion of  taking back the word slut in events like Slutwalk, which I actually took part of last year. 

Marching from the capitol

Oops, pardon my grammatical error! (Isn't this lady FABULOUS?)

There was also discussion about how you may use this in a sexual situation, like calling yourself or your partner a dirty slut because you like it in that situation. We ended up putting it next to "least harmful for women."

The next one was a big one for me, and specifically relates to our readings. "Calling a guy a 'pussy' or a 'faggot.'" Again, I thought this should go under most harmful to women, but the rest of my class thought it should go next to "calling a girl a slut." My rationale is again socialization. Men are socialized to want to be manly, and that anything feminine is bad. And by calling a guy a pussy or a faggot, (without even thinking about how derogatory the word faggot is in general), a guy may feel like he has to actively pursue a woman to make sure the guys "knows" he's one of the guys. I also think this relates to a point I made in class, that men and women won't really know equality until men start moving towards predominately female jobs like teaching or hello, social work. But that might make a guy a pussy or a faggot, plus, why should people be paid fair wages for jobs that are predominately female? I just feel like those words are dangerous because they promote gender segregation. We put it next to calling a girl a slut.

And then the last card, the one that made me even think about putting this long ass story on my blog. "Reading Maxim or Tucker Max." Immediately you think, okay, definitely least harmful to women... that's just a magazine and a book. But my peer brought up an interesting point. She said something like, "don't these two things promote pursuing women? And doesn't that make them more harmful because they are part of the socialization of men?" I think that's interesting. And I think it's true.  

Kevin started this class by asking, "What would you do if you were at the lake and you saw a person drowning?" We responded with things like call 911, jump in, reach out to them with a stick, etc. Then he said, "What if there were two people? What if you looked back and there were ten people drowning?" We were baffled and said I don't know just call 911? Kevin and my professor had to say, "Wouldn't you want to go upstream and find the asshole that was pushing all of these people in the water?"

So, the point that my peer made about how Maxim and Tucker Max contribute to the socialization is really about the asshole pushing all of the folks into the water. 

Anyway, I thought these two experiences were really interesting and related directly to what we are talking about in Social Justice.

I look forward to reading your blogs!

Check out my personal blog. (I pretty much blog about women's rights. I posted by op-ed on this blog, and I would really love to see everyone's op-eds!)