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Experiences With Gender

I could talk for hours about my own experiences with gendered expectations or treatment from the men in my life, but I hesitate. I live in constant fear of the reactions of the men around me. Are they going to feel targeted and alienated? How is that supposed to help me in explaining to them an experience they can’t begin to understand, but must aid in remedying? But doesn’t silencing myself in fear of negative reaction further perpetuate gender norms? How is subjecting myself to gender norms productive in any way? I fear that we, as women, are not fighting an uphill battle, but an impossible one. But surely that doesn't mean we should just give up and accept the passive docility we’ve been conditioned to accept as our role in this world. I just don’t know how to answer these questions. How can we find an absolute solution for the repercussions of existing as a woman? 

The only answer I have to this question is that there’s not an obvious solution. Because like any issue dealing with people, there are complexities. I wish the issue of patriarchal violence could be reduced to the actions of far detached bad people who you hear about on the news and in true crime podcasts, but then I remember the people I’ve known more personally. Like the man who sat next to me on the airplane the first time I ever flew alone, (the man who told me he was visiting his grandkids), who is now the reason I'm afraid of flying at all. And how my freshman year boyfriend who never seemed to learn the word “no” also likes the color green, and has a dog named Marley. Or why I no longer see my old therapist. I remember the copies of children’s books in his office. I grew up believing in fairytales, and even if the world is less magical than it seems, Disney got one thing right: Princes can also be horrible beasts. 

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Me!

I'm Angie, I'm 17, and I'm a Junior in highschool. This project is for my AP Language class, where we've been asked to create an outreach project that reshapes our experience and research from a semester of inquiry about a topic of our choosing. My initial point of inquiry was in exploring women's anger and the ways it's weaponized against us. This led me to a rage room with 4 other girls in my class, where I discovered somewhat ironically, that a space designed to be destructive felt actually very safe to me, because we were given a space to exhibit our anger without judgment.  

This lead to further examination of the implications of this, and how gender expectations and roles influence the way anger is percieved in women. I found that as a woman, to be angry is to be perceived as ugly and to be ugly is to be worthless. This sparked my interest in Gender Theory as a whole and I conducted further research, like reading Judith Butler and other various essays. All of this has accumulated in this blog, which explores gender as a concept, along with my personal relationship with my gender.

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