Blog #6: Socialization

"The images in our lives affect the reality of our lives" - Jean Kilbourne
 
One of the 'news' making headlines on Fox News Channel this week was an advertisement on a rival broadcasting channel that talked about kids belonging not only to the parents but also to the community, and the importance of investing in social institutions which children interact with. I took that as an interesting backdrop for my blogpost about socialization. I will summarize the two videos that are part of this assignment and the two articles and how they all relate to the chapter.

Tony Porter presents his  Call to Men TED about the socialization of the male child by using examples from his childhood and how he treats his own children (a boy 12 years old and a girl 11 years old). He starts off by talking about what he has been taught about being a man. This collective socialization is also referred to as the man box. He further talks about how he has acted in the past as a result of his socialization for example in the way he has treated his kids on one occasion; he comforts his young girl when she comes crying to him, and his son does the same, he scolds him and tells him to stop crying and act like a man. He explains where this particular mentality about the way we should treat the two sexes comes from: Socialization.

 

I found it interesting his comparison of what boys are taught about manhood, or manly traits, and the other side of the coin: what this male collective socialization means to women. From the video, he says men are taught that 'they are in charge, which means women are not; that men lead, and you should just follow and do what we say; that men are superior; women are inferior; that men are strong; women are weak; that women are of less value, property of men, and objects, particularly sexual objects.’ This socialization makes men think women are lesser people and in many cases it has been the societal justification for violence against women. He ends the TED talk by calling on men to redefine what manhood means because the liberation of men is tied to the liberation of women.

Killing us softly is a documentary that looks at how media shapes the socialization of men and women. Kilbourne starts by outlining the role of media, which is more than selling products. Advertising spreads values and concepts about love, sexuality, romance, success, and subtly defining what normalcy should be and who we should be. As part of the socialization process, we grow up inundated by advertisements of what the ideal woman should look like and what it takes to achieve the perfect body, for example make up, nip here, tuck there.

Perhaps the most negative effect of advertisement is the objectification of women and the propagation of violence against women.  She says objectification is the first step of violence “ turning someone into a thing, and making them less than a woman is the first step to violence. The second half deals with the ideas about gender roles that are passed down to us. For example men should be powerful and dominating, while women should be passive; when women are given power and freedom, it is trivialized. She gives great examples of how women’s body parts are used to sell products and the pornographic nature of advertising that plants the idea of casual sex.The big take away from this talk is that the kind of socialization that upholds masculinity and devalues femininity robs us of the whole person that we have the potential to be.

These two videos are directly related to the chapter on Socialization in that they both talk about the various agents of socialization and the life course. Killing Us Softly talks about the role of media in shaping who we should be and how we go through live shaping and reshaping the concept of ourselves at a particular stage of life. For example when girls get to adolescences they start feeling insecure about bodies. A Call to Men explains the effect his peers had on him with the example about the girl she was supposed to rape; and the influence of family when he gives the example of father appreciating his strength as they go through a family tragedy. 

Heath's paper Parents Socialization of Children  highlights the importance of parents in a child's life and the outcomes as a result of parenting styles. it gave three types of parents: authoritarian, permissive and authoritative and the consequent personalities they children get. NYMag's Retro Wife talked about the choice of a small section of well-educated career women opting to stay at home and raise their children instead of pursuing careers or jungling both careers and children like the rest of the modern women. Well, two things - one this article was about financial freedom, and two - I do understand the importance of parents being there to teach their children to mind their Ps and Qs, but we have made so many strides as women such that in circa 2013, we should not be having a conversation about women choosing between kids and careers. I personally think articles like these fall into the whole socialization of gender roles that belongs in the past.

 

Blog #5: POWER

"The social psychology of this century reveals a major lesson: often it is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act." –Stanley Milgram, 1974

I read with utmost interest Iris Marion Young’s article “the many faces of oppression.” According to her, oppression comes in five different shades: violence, exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, and cultural imperialism. Powerlessness stands out the most to me because it is lack of power - the inability to demand better and equal treatment - that makes people continue to live in oppression.

The chapter on power is the most interesting topic on Experience Sociology yet. It defines power as the ability to bring about an intended outcome, even when opposed by others. Power has two sides to it: the power to do something (positive) for oneself or others and the power over someone or something. The ‘power over’ approach focuses on individual enhancement and achievement while the ‘power to’ approach focuses on overcoming opposition and dominating others. It is the latter form of power management that is responsible for oppression and other social ills.

There are three important uses of power that directly affect our lives: economic power affects resource allocation; political power affects how and what rules and decisions are enacted; finally there is cultural power which defines the reality we live in. this last use of power interests me very much. Dominant culture, social institutions and the media we consume define social reality in a particular way. People in positions of power have the capacity to manufacture the reality they want the masses to believe.

For power to work it has to be met with compliance (or disobedience). In trying to understand how Germans would let and why some ordinary citizens participated in the holocaust, Stanley Milgram, a Yale University psychologist, conducted a series of social psychology experiments where teachers were asked to administer electrical shocks of varying degrees to students who did not give proper answers. I found the prompts from the professor inside the room with the teachers very interesting. He just told the participants they needed to continue with the experiment, clarified any questions the teachers had and reassured them that the student will not die from the voltage. This is a good example of the trust we bestow on people who wield expert and informational power.  This is not to say compliance is a bad thing, we all need to comply with a lot of laws, rules and regulations set by the social institutions we interact with to ensure the smooth running of society. But when power has negative results, to change the circumstances we live in, it is essential that we revolt.