Gender/Sexuality Differences

This idea that the femininity or masculinity of a person is learned behavior instead of inherent in your natural being as a boy or girl in sex has bothered me from the moment we discussed it. After reading the article I am convinced that the idea of women having femininity only as learned behavior is actually just women still trying to fight society's view of women. They are trying to say that women can be whatever they want to be, that we can compete with males, we can be just as masculine and men can be just as feminine...and while this may be true in the learned behavior discussed in the article, we are essentially by sex, naturally more feminine or masculine by hormone secretions in our bodies. We are feminine because we are by sex girl, whether these feminists featured in the article like it or not. We have created this media rendered image of the perfect woman (like below)
to sell things to people because sex sells, especially if you are using a female to attract a male, because men are visually stimulated. Once this media image was born, it was too late to try to change society's view of women. No longer are women respected in society, and always will we be seen as an object. Always will we fall short as real women when compared to the images rendered in magazines, and as such we will always be trying to compensate and trying to bring back respect for ourselves. This quote by Martha Wilson supports this argument: "art-making is an identity-making process...I could generate a new self out of the absence that was left when my boyfriends' ideas, my teachers' and my parents' ideas were subtracted." Wilson is only just now discovering that she is not the object of others' ideals; she is just herself. What she calls her "new self" is actually the true self she is under the culturally painted surface. She and all these other mentioned feminist artists are trying to say that women deserve to be free of culture's views of them, but their comments through art are only serving to make women more the enemy of men instead of earning their respect. They are trying to be as powerful as men, and they aren't and never will be. Men are supposed to be the leaders, and women are supposed to respect the man. This is how a man feels love, and he returns that love to the woman, who needs the comfort and safety of that love. As more feminists create art like this, less respect for men is shown and fewer men love women because of it. In this pattern, women feel lost and unloved and try to compensate even more. In the end they are causing more problems than they think they are solving.

ADRIAN PIPER

I found this article interesting because I also keep a journal of my life throughout the years. I like to occasionally go back and read what happened during my life, read what lessons I learned, how my character grew, and how my experiences have ended up shaping who I am now. It always strikes me that the experiences that happen to me although technically unique, end up being the same story that everyone else also deals with. Everyone has the occasional fight with their parents, every person deals with the stress of friendships and romances going sour, and everyone has to learn how to balance their time among all the things they want or need to do. When I write this stuff in my journal, it feels like it is happening only to myself, but when I look back later, I compare my writings to the stories I've heard from friends, and suddenly the story isn't so unique any longer. We are all part of the same puzzle. Adrian Piper took this a step further of course, and rereads her experiences until they are so commonplace that she starts to wonder if they are from her life or someone else's. As she does this, she creates an alter ego that is so far from herself that she fears this alter ego will start having experiences of its own...it will become its own person. This is where I differ in opinion from the artist. While I think it is a good thing to look at yourself objectively as just another human and see that we are all similar in the end, there is no excuse for making yourself into a completely different person. This to me is the extreme, and can cause problems just like Roberta Breitmore did for Sherman. Sherman was so obsessed with Breitmore that some people thought she was schizophrenic. And who is to say she isn't? Artists often take things too far to the extreme and I think this is yet another instance of this. Is Piper an artist creating art or is Piper using art to find in herself that she is actually a cross dresser? That she actually wants or perhaps is deep down emotionally, a male? Is art helping her find that she is gay? Or did art make her gay?