This class was not exactly what I expected it to be when I signed up for it, but I was pleasantly surprised. It is definitely unlike any other class I have taken, and probably will ever take. I remember walking to class with a friend my first semester at Penn State, and he was going to soc119. On the way there he was telling me a little about the class and how “every one needs to take this class.” This is something I now definitely agree with. Even my roommates who do not have to take a sociology class for their major want to take it because of all the stuff I come back to the apartment talking about. Sometime I come back laughing about the topics we talk about, other times I come back angry or sad. But I think any class that can stir up such emotion like that in an hour and 15 minute time period, is worth taking. It has definitely been my favorite class this semester.
I think the biggest thing it has taught me, is just to think differently about anything and everything. That seems so broad but I really find myself using knowledge from this class every day. Now because of this class, I try to take myself, and my emotions, out of a situation and try to look at it in the other person’s point of view. To some extent I have always tried to do this, and have known it was the right thing to do, but I do not think I knew how to do it correctly. By that I just mean, I do not think I realized how much other people’s lives are impacted by things I never thought would have harmed themed. This class has taught me to be aware of little things. Such as the phrase colored people versus people of color. If it was not for this class I could have easily offended somebody one day without ever realizing I have. And also about huge, macro scale topics.
Hearing Sam’s travel stories and interactions with people really makes me jealous. This class has really made me want to get out and experience the world. I know realize how sheltered I am and how sheltered I will continue to be if I do not get out and experience the world on my own. I now want to meet all kind of new people and learn about so many different cultures! I have always wanted to travel, but that was more about being able to see different things. But now I am more interested in experiencing different things. I have never even been out of the country before, expect to the Bahamas and since I was in a resort the whole time, the culture was pretty much the same as it is in America. So now the main thing on my list of things to do before I die is to experience as many different cultures as I can.

I know Sam always says the next lecture is going to be “the best lecture ever” but this could have possiblly been one of the best lectures. I felt pretty awkward at first, but then when the initial awkwardness of the topic wore off, it was very entertaining. This lecture seemed more comical and jovial than some of the others have been, which was fun. I also liked how Sam’s wife was there. It was nice hearing a woman’s perspective on things and to have someone to kind of clarify some of the things Sam says. I really liked Laurie as a speaker.

Another great part of this lecture was the title. I like how it forced you to look at the issue from another perspective. It is interesting to have to think of what it would be like if this was a women centered world. It would definitely be different, that’s for sure. It makes me think that the world would be more nurturing and loving. I am also interested in other peoples’ perspectives on this lecture as well. Like how would lesbians fit into it? Probably feeling pretty lucky they are attracted to girls after hearing some of those points and statistics. But I wonder who they “dress for.” Sam and Laurie talked about how girls dress for men, so would that mean that lesbians dress for women, or does this male centered world still affect the decisions of what lesbians wear as well. And straight girls still care about what other women think, probably because they are competition, but straight men aren’t competition for lesbian girls so I wonder if they would not even be considered about what guys think.

There are a lot of people who think our world is now very equal when it comes to the differences between men and women, but there is still a lot of inequality. Even about things that you wouldn’t normally think about. Like this lecture! I have always thought of the reason men seem to be more into sex than women is just because it feels better for men or they are just more horny, but I never really thought of it as something that could be the man’s fault. That is because that is how it is socially explained. It makes a lot of sense though. The sex world is male centered and gives guys the wrong impression of what girls want. But again it normally gets looked at as the female problem, but the lecture made me realize it really is not. It actually sounds like a story cosmopolitan would write an article about. I would not be surprised if they picked up on these ideas soon.

I thought Thursday’s lecture was very eye opening. I wish Sam could have been there in person so I hope he gets better soon!! But at first when I heard we were watching a movie that was over an hour I wanted to get up and leave, but I am glad that I did not. I thought that Thursday’s lecture did a great job at instilling empathy in the classroom by putting us in someone else’s shoes.

It is sad that so many people base their views and opinions about others solely on what the media is showing them. I would be lying if I said I was not guilty of doing this myself. But the things we are shown are what the media thinks most people would be interested in. Sadly most people will not tune into the news if it’s all about people happy and getting along or just going on with their everyday tasks. However, people will tune in if it’s about violence and people doing radical things. That’s why most things we see on tv do not represent the whole Middle East, but instead just the extremists and the radicals. And Americans see them as the enemy so there is such a negative connotation that goes along with these pictures. However, as Sam pointed out, Christians do not do thing much differently. Just as there are radical Muslims, there are also radical Christians. The clip we watched about the children being trained to be “warriors of Jesus” or whatever was just creepy. My jaw actually dropped when it first came on. It shows that there are also radical Christians out there as well that are brainwashing children to believe and fight for the cause they feel so passionately about. And just as we only see the negative and extremists of the Middle East, the people in the Middle East mainly see the negative and extremists side of the United States! No wonder some of them hate America or are afraid of us, I would feel the same way. It seems to me that the most of our problems are due to miscommunication. Which is so sad because it could be such an easy thing to fix. Maybe if people started to put themselves in other peoples’ shoes then there would not be as much conflict. It sounds so silly and simple but maybe what we learned when we were little as too “treat others how you would like to be treated” would be relevant to this situation. But everyone is out to protect their power and become more powerful, so the interests of others don’t really seem to be relevant. All in all this lecture made me change my view on some of the worlds problems.

I have always believed that being gay is something you are born with, not something people choose to be. This is just what has always made sense to me. It has never really made sense to me why someone would “choose” to be gay. In our society networks matter a whole lot and it is incredibly hard to go against the norm of things. I have heard stories of high schoolers being bullied, and left out, and wanting to kill themselves just because they are gay. If it really was a choice, instead of ending his or her life wouldn’t he or she just “choose” to be straight at that point? It doesn’t make much sense that someone would choose to be something that made them an outcast to their peers. And then there are stories of families disowning their own children after they came out as gay. If someone were about to get disowned from their own family, wouldn’t they just choose to be straight then? Or how about the fact that homosexual couples have fewer rights than heterosexual couples, I’m not sure that there are many people who would choose to get their rights taken away. I just have never believed it was a choice because of all the unfair consequences that seem to be connected to being gay.
My mom has always felt that way too and has gotten into arguments with her very religious friend about it many times. My mom’s main point is that people do not choose who they fall in love with. For example, I have been dating the same boy for three years, and unfortunately he attends school three hours away at Pitt. Long distant relationships are not easy, and if I had the choice it would make life so much easier to just end things and find someone at Penn State to date. But it doesn’t just work like that. I can’t help that I fell in love with my boyfriend and couldn’t imagine not being with him. Trust me, if it was possible to pick who you fall in love with I would find someone who I saw more than twice a month to have feelings for. I feel like it is that same with homosexuals not being able to control their feelings towards people of the same sex.
I think in the case of my mom’s friend, she has to believe that people choose to be gay. Because if they were born that way, then that would mean God made them that way, and if that is true then you can’t really say that there is anything wrong with that can you? But the bible apparently does say that it is wrong. I feel like for my mom’s friend if one thing in the bible is not right, then that means that anything in there could be wrong as well. And when you base your whole belief system off something, the thought of it not being right is too much to handle. It would almost turn your life upside down. Therefore it is easier to just believe that everything is true and that it all fine and dandy so you can go on living the life you’re used to.
Or maybe for other people, the thought of not being able to control your own sexuality is too much to handle. Maybe they have homosexual desires but have always been taught that was so wrong, so they push those feelings down and convince themselves that they are straight. And knowing that it something they can’t control, would make it harder to convince them that they are straight. I guess at that point they would be choosing to be straight to avoid the consequences of coming out as gay.

I definitely agree with Sam’s statement about how coming in contact with different groups of people help’s your understanding of them. Most of the time we hear all these stereotypes and form stigmas about groups of people different than us, and because of these stigmas we think we know more than we actually do. I think these stigmas give us minimal incentive to get to know other groups, but when contact is actually made I think most people are pleasantly surprised.

One experience I have had that is related to this topic is while job shadowing the occupational therapist (OT) at my local elementary school. I am currently going to school to become an OT, but before I decided that was definitely the major I wanted to commit to I wanted to job shadow an OT. After making these arrangements with the OT working in the elementary school, I found out she works mainly with autistic children in a school setting, where I want to work with injured kids in a more clinical setting. I have not come in much contact with kids with autism, or any other disability for that matter, and was a little nervous about what my day was going to be like. I was mainly nervous about not knowing how to act, or being able to say the right thing around these kids. But I soon found out that I had no reason to be nervous. All the kids were as friendly as they could be, and using all their polite manners even if they had to be taught what was polite and not. I realized how silly it was to be worrying about tip-toeing around certain words because most of the kids would be the first to talk about their disabilities. I had no idea why I thought talking about what makes them different was some sort of secret. Being in contact with the kids I realized how educated they were about their disability. And there was really nothing you could say to offend them. The teachers would tell them not to do certain things based simply on the fact that it is different and other students will make fun of them. It was just different than the unspoken environment I thought it was going to be like.

I think contact changes a lot of things. Like for instance canning for THON. Shaking my can on the side of the road, I can’t help but thinking why people would drive by without donating to this amazing charity. But then if I take myself out of the situation I honestly don’t think I would go out of my way to donate to a charity I knew nothing about. But since I have come into contact with all these four diamonds families and kids I can’t help but feel so passionate about it.

In general I think contact is all around better in helping to understand others and having more empathy for charities.

Sam made a point in class that most of our beliefs are often based on misinformation. This honestly is not too surprising to me. Just thinking about high school and how rumors spread around the school. People believed someone was a “slut” or someone else was mean or something like that even when they were basing these beliefs off of a story they heard from someone else. Half the time these stories are not even true and just made up by catty people. However people still believed them without much convincing, and then used these stories to form opinions about these people. So I can see it happening later in life too. Just think about the Penn State scandal. How many people now believe Penn State students all support child molesters, or that our whole faculty was part of a big conspiracy. This is all based on misconception people heard from the media or word of mouth. Just the other week my mom’s friend, who went to University of Pennsylvania, not Penn State, was wearing a sweatshirt with his school name on it. Someone then proceeded to yell derogatory things at him based on the recent scandal. This whole situation was based on misinformation. They were misinformed about what our school was even named, and even if he was wearing a Penn State sweatshirt, the stranger must have been misinformed about the student and alumni’s part in the whole event. People need to start being aware that not everything they hear is true. It makes me sad that people or whole institutions get bad reputations based on facts that aren’t even true! But to say that you should check every source before you form a belief is pretty unrealistic. Some things it would be easy and beneficial to double-check. Like if you hear a rumor about someone, you may want to meet him or her before making any judgments about them. But some beliefs are not formed from one basic fact, but instead from a wide range of things. For example, most people are so worried about their children getting abducted by a stranger and think that is a very common thing. I was one of these people. If it happens it is always all over the news, crime shows always base their plot around it, and adults are always teaching their kids stranger danger. Since I have heard so many things and been taught safety precautions I thought I was very common. I was shocked to see the actually statistics. However, even knowing this I don’t think I will be any less worried about it. No matter how slim the chance, it’s still not worth the risk if it’s something avoidable. But basically I have learned you have to take everything with a grain of salt.

I feel like it is very common for people’s beliefs to not match up with their actions. In my other sociology class, Soc001, we talked about religion and the affect it has on teenager’s decisions about having sex before marriage. One of the types of influences we talked about was “inconsistent” influence. This is when behaviors and attitudes do not match up. In that class we had a theory that it has to do with the structural changes in society; for example, how people get married a lot later today than people used to. Meaning that even when adolescents attitudes about sex is that you should wait until marriage, they may not because the wait is now so long and with more time comes more temptation. I think this reasoning can be used to explain why people in the “what would you do” video said they were not racist but discriminated against the white and black bike stealer anyway. I think that their attitudes have changed because of the structural changes and change of views in our society, which is good! But attitudes do not always determine our behaviors. I noticed that both people they interviewed were older, white men. I think because of their race, gender, and especially age, they have these predetermined stigmas. By this I just mean that in the era they were brought up, there was a lot of known discrimination and racism. Because of this I think they just are unaware they have these biases so they say they aren’t racist and color doesn’t really matter but subconsciously they have these predetermined stigmas. Or maybe they know they discriminate but don’t want to admit it, especially on T.V., because they want to seem socially desirable. They don’t want to be judged or look like a bad person for calling 911 about a black boy stealing a bike, but knowing they would do nothing if it were a white boy. So maybe once these men took the first step, for which ever reason, then a crowd joined because once one person steps in it is easier for others to do they same. Another explanation could be due to what people are used to seeing. I feel like there are these stereotypes that black people commit more crimes than white people do, even if this is not the case. I think that the media could play a big part in this, especially movies and T.V. shows. I feel like it is more common to see people of color performing these crimes than it is white people in the media. So maybe people were more alarmed because they recognized the scene of the black boy sawing the bike chain as something wrong, but they scene of a white boy doing the same thing as just a lost key.

I am sure as of most people in this stage of life, deciding whether to go to college or not is among their biggest decisions they have ever made in life. For me the decision was easy, you graduated from high school and then go to college. Sure this was my own choice, I used my free will to apply to Penn State and attend school here, but there is an incredibly large amount of outside factors that made the decision easy for me. For example, I did not choose the township I grew up in. The decision to move to Cranberry Township was determined by my parents before I was even in the world. Even that decision was controlled by outside factors my parents had no control over such as where the office was my Dad’s company assigned him to, and a thousand others. So because I grew up in Cranberry it meant I got to go to a nice public school with a good education system. Because of that education I was prepared enough to attend a university. Not only that but also most kids that I was around in my high school were going to college as well. It’s just what most people did after school, almost a given for everyone in my friend group. To make the decision even easier, I knew my parents were paying for my four years at college. That was already determined when my older brother was going to college and my parents made the agreement with us that they would pay for the first four years, and if you didn’t graduate on time or wanted to go to graduate school or something, that was on you. Which was fair enough and I’m extremely fortunate for it. However, what if my brother had gotten really bad grades in high school and could not get accepted to any universities he would want to go, to so he had to go to community college for two years before transferring to Penn State? Would that have sparked an agreement where I had to start off in community college to save money if I wanted my parents to pay for my school, because that was what would have been fair regarding my brother? Or what if my brother just never went to college at all and my parents would not pay for my school because they never gave my brother that same amount of money? And then when it came to choosing Penn State, it was almost a given as well. Of course I wanted to go to Penn State and made the decision on my own free will, but there were outside factors influencing my choice as well. It was where both my parents graduated from and same with my older brother. I was brought up loving Penn State and hearing great things about it so it was the only college I wanted to attend. If my family had never decided to go to Penn State, I might not have either. And what if my parents didn’t decide to live in Pennsylvania? Then I would have to pay out of state tuition and maybe my parents would want me to go to a cheaper instate school. There are just too many factors I have no control over that influence the decisions I make every single day.

There were a lot of different views to explain the differences between household income rates among different races, but no one seemed to really have a straightforward answer. I for one am pretty clueless as well. However if I had to guess, which I do since I picked this blog post, I would say it has a lot to do with the king of the hill game Sam explained in class. After taking the land from the Native Americans, Whites have always been the majority and had all the power. Therefore they were able to “lock their doors” and keep their power safe by making rules and legislation to keep it that way. And once you have money, it can just keep getting passed down from generation to generation, keeping the money in the hands of white people. It is like the Matthew effect, which we talked about in my soc001 class, which basically states: the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. If your parents have money you will most likely be better off since you will get better schooling, which leads to better colleges, which you most likely will not have to pay for, and then graduate and have better connections through your parents, and the list goes on and on. On the other hand, black people came here as slaves, and through out history have had many struggles. According to the Matthew effect, it makes sense that blacks are on the lower end of the household income scale. In addition to the race having a rocky start in this country, the troubles did not stop after slavery ended. Black people were discriminated against and kept from obtaining good jobs. Times have changed now but it makes sense that it is hard to come back from such hard times. Now to make sense of Asians having a high-income rate as well. I feel like a lot of Asians that come here are already very educated and have money. It takes a lot of money to be able to uproot your life and move to another country. So I think that a lot of them come here already well off and get good jobs, making a high income, in America. On the other hand, I think that Hispanics come here for a different reason. It seems like a lot of Hispanics come to America with nothing, to start a better life. I really feel like that is stereotypical to say but it seems to fit the patterns of income. If that is the case, it is really hard to start with nothing. For example, when you see in movies all those people trying those get rich quick schemes…but they never actually work. I feel like it would be hard for anyone to get rich quickly, so the same pattern seems to continue.

Most men, at least all the ones I know, would not think it was attractive if a girl never shaved her legs or armpits. But even though they think that way, it does not mean they just like made up that rule one day and told all women they better go shave their legs right now! Social norms like that are taught to us. In other cultures it could be the exact opposite. If hairy legs and unshaved armpits started showing up on the models on the cover of magazines like cosmopolitan and vogue, then people would eventually stop thinking all girls needed to shave. We’ve even been taught it’s just a hygiene thing and it’s dirty or gross to let our natural hair grow out, but most boys don’t shave and they don’t seem dirty. It’s all just the way society views something and that could change overtime. Even what to shave can go through trends like anything else can. Such as a certain topic brought up frequently by the characters on Sex and the City, if you know what I mean. So going against the grain is fine because eventually things change, and who knows! Maybe you will be a trend setter one day for it. It’s not like anything is wrong with not shaving your legs, if you are strong enough to face some social criticism. On Thursday in class Sam showed us a picture of a female student from Ohio State who had facial hair. Some person sneakily took her picture and posted it on the Internet, which lead to some nasty comments. However instead of getting embarrassed so wrote a very empowering message back. She explains that she was baptized Sikh and they believe you body is sacred and you should always keep in intact, so therefore no shaving. After her statement the person who put up the photo apologized and many others continue to make admirable comments. It just shows you that what is normal in one culture can be completely different. So I would not say boys are telling us we must shave, it just that as a society we collectively agreed upon that over time. One girl in class stood up and said that she chooses not to shave her body hair, and that is fine! All the power to her! It’s hard to swim against the current that everyone else is following. I for one don’t know if I could have the confidence to do that, and as for now I have become so used to having smooth legs, I think it would be uncomfortable not to. But who knows, trends change and maybe one day the majority of guys will be saying it’s attractive when a girl has hair on her legs.