The author touches on young women afraid of feminism. But there are some people who feel that young women have far less to lose by becoming feminists, than older women. I, personally don’t think that age has anything to do with it. There are a lot of women that feel that marriage is a critique of feminism, but that is not true in all marriages. The author feels that it is helpful to draw a distinction between gender consciousness and feminist consciousness. Gender consciousness takes two forms: awareness of women’s vulnerability and celebration of women’s difference. Intimate relationships become the testing groung for identity, a reality that has enormously damaging consequences for teenage girls in particular. There are some who feel that feminist identity puts them out of the pool for many men, limits the options of who they might become with a partner how they might decide to live. The author also touches on survivors of men’s violence for women who have not experienced men’s violence hate being asked to identify with; they see the threat to their emergent sense of  autonomy and freedom not in the fact of men’s violence, but in feminist analyses that make them identify with it. But, I feel that if a person is confident in themselves, when discussing men’s violent would not bother them, in many ways it could be helping someone else who is being abused.

The main focus in which Karen McCarthy Brown touched on was Religious fundamentalism. As she stated, it is very difficult to define, however there are many who think they know it when they see it. I feel that women have gone through so much, just to get respect and rights. In the early times, women were confined to their homes or even had limited access to the public sphere. There were so many restrictions that women had and even today there are still restrictions placed on women by their spouse or significant other. Karen also stated that in her view, religion of the stressed and the disoriented, of those for whom they world is overwhelming. It is  the religion of those at once seduced and betrayed by the promise that we human beings can comprehend and control our world. The Anti-Abortion Movement is quite a different kind of consistency maintaining strong and clear social boundaries. This is a group centrally concerned with social order and social control. There is also fundamentalism cross-culturally, for example in India, where the cult that developed around the recent immolation of a young woman on her husband’s funeral pyre has been described as as instance of fundamentalism. I would therefore suggest that fundamentalism is not primarily a religion of the marginalized, as Karen stated it is more salient feature is that develops among people caught off balance.

Her husband was the “terrorist” in the story, she was too afraid to tell anyone because she was afraid no one would believe her or she thought that she would be judged, but all along her friends knew that something was going on, but she still would not open up to them. He was making her loose her jobs, but he was still expecting her to provide her paycheck whenever she was able to hold on to a job. I feel that had she ever opened up to her friends and her co-workers then she would not have felt as depended on her husband as she was. She was poor due to the constant job changing and her husband not working to help out with their living expenses. He was very controlling, she did not know how to drive, and he told her that if she did not know how to ride a bike, then it was not a good thing for her to learn. She then became pregnant and miscarried, which could have been a good thing, because I think that would have just been another reason for him to control her. She finally built her nerves and gained confidence in herself and asked him for a divorce, after hearing him say that was having a lot of bad dreams, making him paranoid and he started locking the door to the bedroom.

Popular cultural forms in particular are very seductive, they reflect and create societal needs, desires, anxieties, and hopes through consumption and participation. Popular culture provides so many stories and narrative that shape our lives and identities. They give us pleasure at the end of a long day and enable us to take our minds off work or other anxieties.  In this regard some scholars have suggested that popular culture regulates society by “soothing the masses” meaning that energy and opposition to the status quo is redirected in pursuit of the latest in athletic shoes or tickets to an award-winning movie.  The internet is also transforming society, making personal computers a necessity for communication, entertainment, and advertisery. When it come to new electronic technologies, we find that again, it is a field overwhelmingly dominated by men. Women generally have been less interested in those technologies and fields of expertise that have been coded a masculine. Many young women have fought to make a place for their own activist Web sites, blogs, and computer games. Still, by far I feel that technology remains a male domain. Television is one of the most influential forms of media. Daytime soap opera’s or evening family sitcoms for example. Commercials are aimed at women and focus on beauty and household products.  Why is it that people feel that women are more influenced by TV than men are?

We as women work long hours because work for us often involves unpaid domestic labor and care of dependent family members as well as paid labor. The fact that women on the average do over two-thirds of all household work. Gender norms that associate women, the home, and domesticity reinforce the assumption that housework and childcare are women’s work. I don’t agree with this because women should not be the only one who is expected to do the household work. It should also be the man’s job as well. Even taking care of the kids as well, should be a shared household duty. This just keeps the relationship strong and equal. In chapter 8, it is also discussing that Domestic work is one occupation traditionally held by women of color.  With low pay, little power, and few or no benefits. This is so true, because as a young child growing up, my mother and her sister’s due to their education level (not being high school graduates), were only able to get the Domestic jobs (which include cleaning of homes, ironing and taking care of their bosses children). Today, we have  a much better opportunity with the possibilities of education for better career opportunities, that there is no reason for us not to be as successful as men.

Women of color in the U.S. negotiate their reproductive lives in a system that combines various interlocking forms of oppression. It is because of these intersections that women of color advance a definition of reproductive rights beyond abortion. Their critique of “choice” does not deny women of color agency; rather, it shows the constraints within which women of color navigate their reproductive lives and organizing. The key words are “if she chooses.” Bitter experience has taught the black woman that the administration of justice in this country is not colorblind. Black women on welfare have been forced to accept sterilization in exchange for a  continuation of relief benefits and others have been sterilized without their knowledge or consent. We must be ever vigilant that what appears on the surface to be a step forward, does not in fact become yet another fetter or method of enslavement.  The mainstream movement, largely dominated by white women, is framed around choice: the choice to determine whether or not to have children, the choice to terminate a pregnancy, and the ability to make informed choices about contraceptive and reproductive technologies. “Choice” implies a marketplace of options in which women’s right to determine what happens to their bodies is legally protected, ignoring the fact that for women of color, economic and instutional constraints often restrict their “choices.”

What would it be like if men could menstruate? It would  become an eviable, boast-worthy, masculine event: Men would brag about how long and how much. That is for those men who are always trying to out do women, but for those who are weaker minded than a female, they would do nothing but complain and whine, because they could not deal with the pain, that some women cope with. What does this have to do with patriarchy and androcentrism?  Military men, right-wing politicians, and religious fundamentalists would cite menstruation as proof that only men could serve in the Army (”you have to give blood to take blood”). Of course, male intellectuals would offer the most moral and logical arguments. How could a woman master any discipline that demanded a sense of time, space, mathematics, or measurement, for instance, without that in-built gift for measuring the cycles of the moon and planets-and thus for measuring anything at all? And how would women be trained to react? One can imagine traditional women agreeing to all these arguments with a stomach and smiling masochism. Reformers and Queen Bees would try to imitate men, and pretend to have monthly cycles. All feminists would explain endlessly that men, too needed to be liberated from the false idea of Martian aggressiveness just as women need to escape the bonds of menses-envy.

Sexual scripts reflect social norms practices, and workings of power, and they provide frameworks and guidelines for sexual feelings and behaviors. There is often embarrassment, shame, and confusion associated with these sexual scripts, and they easily become fraught with potential misunderstandings. For many women, sexuality is shrouded in shame and fear and rather than seeing themselves as subjects in their own erotic lives, women may understand themselves as objects, seen through the eyes of others. Sexual self-schemas can be defined as identities or congnitive generalizations about sexual aspects of the self that are established from past and present experiences and that guide sexual feelings and behavior. We know that heterosexual relationships are a source of support and strength for many women. When heterosexual intimacies are grounded in unequal power relationships, it becomes more and more difficult for women and men to love in healthy ways. In heterosexual relationships sexual scripts tend to encourage men to be sexual initiators and sexually more dominant. Although this is not always the case, women who do initiate sex often run the risk of being labeled. The sexual practices can include: kissing, hugging, petting, snuggling, caressing. Emotional intimacy can be defined as sharing aspects of the self with others with the goal of mutual understanding.  I feel then in relationships today, we should not depend on the male partner to be something equally shared within the relationship.

Masculinities do not first exist and then come into contact with femininities; they are produced together, in the process that constitutes a gender order. We are so accustomed to thinking of  gender as the attribute of an individual, even as an unusually intimate attribute, that it requires a considerable wrench to think of gender on the vast scale of global society. The substantive questions remain: What is the shape of that structure, how tightly are its elements linked, how has it arisen historically, what is its trajectory into the future? The unevenness becomes clear when different structures of gender (Connell 1987; Walby 1990) are examined separately. These structures include: The Division of Labor, Power Relations, Emotional Relations and Symbolization. Men’s bodies are positioned in the gender order, and enter the gender process through body-reflexive practices in which bodies are both objects and agents-including sexuality, violence, and labor. At the level of collective practice, masculinities are reconstituted by the remaking of gender meanings and the reshaping of the institutional contexts of practice. Let us consider each in turn. More important, I would argue, is a process that began long before electronic media existed, the export of institutions. We must however, recall two important conclusions of the ethographic moment in masculinity research: that different forms of masculinity exist together and that hegemony is constantly subject to challenge.

Homophobia- the original fear and hatred of those who love and sexually desire those of the same sex. Homophobia works effectively as a weapon of sexism because it is joined with a powerful arm, heterosexism. Heterosexism creates the climate for homophobia with its assumption that the world is and must be heterosexual and its display of power and privilege as the norm. The attack has been led by fundamentalist ministers across the country. The two areas they have focused on most consistently are abortion and homosexuality and their passion has led them to bomb women’s clinics and to recommend deprogramming for homosexuals and establishing camps to quarantine people with AIDS. We have yet to understand clearly how sexual identity develops. Isn’t it odd that there is so little concern about discovering the causes of  heterosexuality?  There are many theories: genetic makeup, hormones, socialization, environment, etc. But there is no conclusive evidence that indicates that heterosexuality comes from one process and homosexuality from another. I, personally feel that individuals should be able to be whatever they choose to be and no one should pass judgement against them because no one is perfect. But in today’s society, there is still a great number of homophobia. We have to ask, are those individuals not confident in their sexual preference? I, personally feel it is only a sign of ignorance.