Kirsten and Allie's articles

Kirsten’s article:

It’s really interesting because this was one of the articles I found while researching my own topic on emotional literacy being taught more in younger children. And I really liked it a lot. The teacher didn’t really baby them, he asked them honest questions and acted as a sort of objective therapist for them to come and talk to, which I know that not a lot of people would like but I thought it was a refreshing difference. It’s very clear in this article that a social emotional education is crucial to learning connectedness with others as well (as shown with the awkward and disconnected principal) and it teaches them to be more in tune with their emotions. I think the overall argument was that an emotional education is as important – if not almost more – than an academic one.

Allie’s articles:

It’s crazy to see how much gender influences not just people, but media, research, and even life decisions. What a lot of people don’t realize is that gender is a social construct. It’s not the binary that many try to prettily paint it out to be. It’s a spectrum, with people falling on different parts of it. It’s also a performance. The gender we’re assigned at birth is sometimes the gender we perform to as we grow, and in other cases it’s not. But gender is also based on the sex we are born with at birth, which was one of the things I took away that I hadn’t fully grasped when reading this. The fact that sex is also a construct. We aren’t really taught about intersex individuals, people born with both male and female chromosomes and/or genitalia, we are taught that you’re either male or female in terms of sex, which is also a very constricting view if you do not fall clearly underneath that binary.

I also really liked the Buzzfeed article because I am appalled when I see advertisements or products labeled as “just for men” or “manly.” Hell, what is so different about it that I can’t use it? It’s too manly therefore females cannot and shouldn’t use it, preserving their own masculinity. What’s so horrible about having feminine attributes? It’s such a sexist, outdated view on femininity and females being inferior and weak. It made me think about how I use a Gilette’s “male” razor, because the ones targeted towards females suck! They are so terrible and don’t shave as well or smoothly as the ones for males.