Gender, Families, Kinship and Marriage, Essay Example

The topic of this essay, “Gender, families, kinship, and marriage” is about so much more than about women‘s obsession with beauty and thinness and the consequences thereof, as talked about in Killing Us Softly, Nos. 01, 02, 03, and 04. This student believes that women—and men—should take reasonable care of their bodies and feel good about them. However, while their weight should be kept under control for their health’s sake, undue dieting—especially to the point of becoming anorexic is just wrong. Even photoshoping and airbrushing are used frequently these days to make women look thinner than they already are and to hide blemishes and to actually change bodily features. Kate Middleton and William Wales’s engagement picture was airbrushed. One wonders why that was necessary when the now Duchess of Cambridge is considered to be too thin as it is and when blemishes and wrinkles do not present a problem for her or for her husband the Duke of Cambridge.

This student kept wondering while watching the videos about whatever happened to the movement of feeling good about your bodies and about who you are, which will result in higher self-esteem than countless beauty treatments and visible cleavage. This student is always amazed at pictures that show women in short strapless flimsy dresses while men wear a shirt, tie, (vest) and suit. If the men are not too warm dressed like that, then the women must be willing to freeze to bare as much as possible to be the best sex object she can be so that her man’s eyes do not rove too much.

The speaker seemed to blame the media to a large extent as to why women have become sex objects and the lengths they will go to in order to achieve that. That to this student, is a bit of a flimsy excuse. The media presents a lot of things, especially the drug and the crime cultures, but that does not mean that a sizeable portion of the population follows their lead. The speaker, in passing, mentioned that even at a young age, boys already portrayed the strong male and the young girl looks up at him with a smile, having learned her lessons well. That certainly may be true in some cases but it does not even hint at the brave and effective women in the armed forces, in the police force, in the CIA, in the FBI, in the government, in the Red Cross and in humanitarian services. Nor does it even hint at the wives and mothers who keep their families together by working outside the home and then without any help also doing all of the housework.

Nothing was said about the fact that when imprisoned in foreign countries, women actually seem to fare better than men. Finally, if men were to have babies, there would be no population problem.

While there was emphasis placed on specific women’s body parts, especially the breasts, there were no couples and nobody living together or getting married. Granted the families of the 50s and of the 60s no longer exist, except, perhaps, as a definite minority, families do, however, exist; and they are an important part of sociological study. Today, it is not uncommon to have single parent families, heterogeneous or homogeneous couples with or without children, and women, as well as men, choosing to remain single. Nowadays slightly more women than men go on to university and high paying jobs and for many of them their jobs are all consuming. The pill and society’s acceptance of premarital sex let singles “have it all” without the problematic and often very costly liaisons as they disintegrate.

As more and more mothers entered the workforce, childcare was often a problem. Childcare facilities did not always exist. However, more grandmothers were still not in the workforce than today and, consequently, were available and willing to babysit. Going back to the early 1990s, the extended family was still quite common and, consequently, obtaining a babysitter—and a free one at that—was not a problem. Even though the number of extended families began to decrease in the early 1990s, in 1996, 21% of all people were part of an extended family. An extended family is defined as “two or more adults from different generations of a family who share a household. It consists of more than parents and children. It may be a family that includes parents, children, cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents, foster children, etcetera” (Extended Family). Extended families live together for many reasons, commonly for financial reasons, to take care of an ill person, and to help raise children. Apparently, the number of extended families have increased by 40% over the last ten years, which may be due to financial reasons (ibid.). This student has noticed that children are leaving home later and later and even returning when they find it difficult, if not impossible, to make it on their own. What does surprise this student, however, is that the article says that “most Canadian seniors live in an extended family” (ibid.) There seem to be so many senior homes filled to capacity along with constant pleas to build more of them.

Polygamous families also qualify for the label of an extended family. Although members of Hutterite colonies have only one spouse and their own living quarters, they do, however, share a lot of the work as well as their meals; and their children attend the same school. As for communal living, The World Communal Scene says that “At no time in history have so many people lived communally and never has there been such a variety of forms of communal living.”

The topic of this paper is, indeed, an interesting and thought-provoking one. As the years go by, it will be interesting to observe the changes in the family.

References

Family Ties. Extended family. Retrieved on April 30, 2012, from http://www.edu.pe.ca/southern kings/family extended.htm.

Killing Us Softly (1979). Retrieved on April 30, 2012, from http://www.youtube.com/watch?V=cIE4ehx3Usk+feature=related. Video.

Still Killing Us Softly, No. 02. Retrieved on April30, 2012, fromhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTlmho_RovY. Video.

Killing Us Softly, No. 03. Advertising’s Image of Women. Retrieved on April 30, 2012, from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTlmho_RovY. Video.

Killing Us Softly 04. Advertising’sImage of Women (Trailer)Retrieved on April 30, 2012, from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTlmho_RovY.

The World Communal Scene. Retrieved on April 30, 2012, from http://www.communes.org.it/world.htm.