Unit Seven Ethnographic Notes

Ethnographic Notes A 

Introduction

Gender and sex are different but interrelated. Basically, sex is human’s biological orientation that defines people as male and female. Gender often refers to gender roles that are originally nurtured and influenced by society and culture. Importantly, it’s based on individual’s biological sex. Actually, human beings are born female and male but they are imposed by society to be men and women. In reality, male and female play different determined roles in society and family. Under society’s perspectives, these roles are seemingly suitable for their gender. For instance, female is supposed to be a woman who takes care of her family and child rearing. Meanwhile, male as a man is expected to become a breadwinner or at least keep an important position at work. According to that idea, it becomes responsibilities of women to stay home, do household chores and raise their children because it is totally suited for them. Meanwhile, men have to be the one who work and earn money to put food on the table. As a result, that leads to the world in which men rule everything, and women do nothing but staying at home and waiting for their husbands to come home.

Performing Gender on the Campus

Males commute to campus on a tough-looking car with a masculine color tone.

Meanwhile, females drive small and gentle figure cars.

Males play baseball or football to make use of their strength.

Females are attracted to flexible and feminine sport like cheer-leading. 

Girls wear slip-on and fitted shoes.

Boys wear big and athletic shoes.

Girls are skinny.

Guys are muscular.

Girls hugging each other to greet.

Guys making a high-five or shaking hands to greet.

Ethnographic Notes B

In today’s life, through the high-speed spreading and the influential power of mass media, people in modern society are getting familiar with the image of women are shown in advertisement as a sexual object while men are depicted as a representation for domination. The overuse of women bodies, the violence and the inconsiderately extravagant power of men in commercial advertisements are literally a reason for the normal feeling of society towards sexual violence and brutality in that a woman is plainly a victim. In fact, the target of making advertisements is simply to connect a commercial product to customers’ needs and make it appealing to them but actually when sex and violence are exploited in the advertisements, it comes to a disconnection and distance. Indeed, in advertisements, men are seen as a dominant class and it becomes the ordinary when they use violence and abuse with women, as it is indispensable that creates an outrageous distance between the two sexes. It becomes a danger when women are depicted as sex objects because the dehumanization and value deprivation could make women become easier to be victimized, at least under men’s view. That is when the violence, brutality, and aggression towards women are extremely skyrocketing when women are not seen as equal. People would be unlikely to hurt someone that they have respect for or see as equal as them. Dangerously, the advertisements tend to convince men that dominance is a key to score with a woman and that means they have to treat woman badly. In that case, men are likely victims as well when they are imbued with a wrong masculinity ideal. In general, the advertisements obviously use sex to attract the viewers and sex-related factors are something that makes a product more appealing to buy. It also portrays women as something that can be gained and easy to have a sexually exchanged just by using company’s products. Obviously, women’s sexualities are often over-exploited in advertisements in order to sell a product. From that, the messages with sexual appeal in the ads are completely out of control and spreading harmfully to many generations. Advertising do have enough influence to create a trend or popular culture as well as mentally develop an ideal in consumers’ minds that could become a drastically serious problem when it is misused.