“Mothers, Daughters, and Sexualities” Brown Bag Reflection

Author of Your Daughter's Room: Insights for Raising Confident Women, Joyce McFadden stopped by for a brown bag this week along with her fifteen year old daughter, Olivia, in order to discuss expanding honesty within mother/daughter relationships.

To start, McFadden talked about her study, which was conducted online. She read from a survey that was submitted by a Colgate graduate that dealt with feelings and practices surrounding masturbation. While the surveyer was very positive about masturbation, they admitted feeling a sudden guilt for it but could not explain the origin of that response. McFadden found that many woman-identified individuals were uncomfortable with their sexuality and that these women had not received positive attitudes surrounding sexuality from their parents.

From here, there were many different facets to discuss - from the disappearance of fathers in their daughters lives once they hit puberty to how mothers pass down their shame about their own sexuality to their daughters when they refuse to discuss it openly. The audience engaged in dialogue about how their own parents had or had not addressed sexuality in their lives, and how this affected their relationships today. 

Olivia, although a bit shy or distracted when addressed with a question, was very honest about the relationship between her and her mother, saying that talk about sexuality or the body was simply a normal part of the household. She said something along the lines of not knowing any other way to be raised so it was difficult to say whether discussion about sex had made their relationship closer. But, given the examples that McFadden uses in her book, there seems to be a knowledge that any question asked (and in whatever context) will be answered honestly.

It is this kind of freedom that McFadden advocates in her book and believes can be enacted in any child/parent relationship.

By Che J. Hatter

Politicians, Sex Scandals, and Biology... Oh My!

Living in the Colgate bubble, I have found it difficult to keep up with the news and current events. Without a TV and no time to read a newspaper, I rely on The New York Times application on my iPhone to send me updates on breaking news and headlines of the day. Recently, my phone has been buzzing frequently due to the recent sexual allegations involving the leading presidential candidate for the Republican Party, Herman Cain. For those of you who also live in the bubble, over the past few weeks several women have come forward and accused Cain of sexual harassment and unwanted sexual advances. What fascinates me most about these recent events is their striking similarity to the Anita Hill hearings about Clarence Thomas in 1991. This shows that very little (if anything) has changed with regards to sexual harassment in the workplace, especially among men in power. If one looks at the past year, sex scandals are becoming more common and even expected from men in power (Strauss-Kahn, Schwarzenegger, Edwards, etc.). Why is this happening? What drives these men to believe that these actions are okay?

I was prompted to write this blog post in response to an article I recently read titled The Real Reason Men Cause More Sex Scandals Than Women by Michael E. Rice. Coming from a background of psychology, Rice proposes that these men act this way due to their biological makeup. He explains his theory by saying that we are a product of evolution and evolution’s goal is to reproduce. An individual’s goal in the game of evolution is to pass on their genes to future generations. Women are guaranteed to have their genes passed on (if they choose to have kids). Therefore, because women invest much more time and effort in the raising of a child, they are choosy when picking a mate. On the other hand, men are not guaranteed to have their genes passed on and their parental investment is not nearly as demanding. Thus, men tend not to be picking when choosing a mate, but rather in order to maximize the chances of their genes getting passed on, they try to have as many mates as possible.  This is a biological explanation as to why men prefer having more sexual partners than women. With this biological explanation in mind, Rice continues to explain why powerful men are especially more likely to pursue more sexual partners. Due to the fact that these men in power are seen as “catches” (financial security, power, etc.) they find themselves being pursued by more women than the average man. Driven by evolution, these men find it hard to turn down these opportunities. Thus, Rice argues that powerful men are expected to a certain degree to be sexually unconstrained.

I believe that this argument lets these men off the hook too easily. The idea that “boys will be boys” is not an excuse. While I do believe that genetics and biology do play a role in people’s actions, there are plenty of men in power who are not involved in sex scandals (as far as we know). Clearly there are also some environmental and social factors that come into play. Maybe these men are having more partners to assert their masculinity? Does the media/social life encourage men to push the limits on sexual advances? Rather than point the finger and say these men’s actions are simply due to genetics or due to social pressures, I think it is much more important to think about how these two factors work together. Like many problems, this one is rooted in many different places and thus in order to fully understand this phenomenon and ultimately change it, we need to analyze them all. 

-Michelle Van Veen

Introduction to 11/8 BB: Joyce McFadden

Today at 11:30am, the Center for Women's Studies will host Joyce McFadden, MSW and psychoanalyst, for a talk on "Mothers, Daughters, and Sexualities."  McFadden is the author of Your Daughter's Bedroom: Insights for Raising Confident Women, which explores how mothers can support their daughters to be comfortable and aware of and with their sexualities.  Her research is based on the Women's Realities Study, in which 450 women between the ages of 18 and 105 responded to questions about relationships, motherhood, and mental health.  In the study, respondents' emphasized the importance of daughters' relationships with their mothers and how that influenced women's sexual well-being and confidence throughout their lives.  


She will be here to discuss her book and findings today, along with her daughter, and we are very excited to have her here.  We'll continue the conversations later this evening at 8pm in the Center for Women's Studies during an Our Bodies, Ourselves Consciousness Raising session in which we utilize our own experiences and Our Bodies, Ourselves as a guide.  We hope to see you at both of these fantastic events!




By: Kimmie Garner

BB Reflection: Daily Double

This week I had the pleasure of going to both of this week's WMST brown bags. (SPOILER ALERT: They were both awesome.) The first one was on Tuesday and was a celebration of Dia de Los Muertos. Fun, fun fun all around! It was a wonderful afternoon where we contrasted the American idea of mourning the dead to the Mexican idea of celebrating life. We celebrated the lives of several incredible women all over the world who were significant and extraordinary in their own right. We heard the work of Caribbean poets and African activists heard the story of a Syracuse woman who's death was a landmark case in the persecution of hate crimes in the state of New York and the United States. After the presentations from interns (myself included), faculty and students, we ended the brown bag on a positive note with arts and crafts. There were rooms for skull and matchbox decorating, mask coloring and COOKIES! It was an overall great time and I'm glad I arranged my schedule so that I could attend.
I'm currently posting LIVE from today's brown bag: Same-Sex Marriage and the Limits of Equality. I was unable to go to Anne Pellegrini's lecture last night, but if it was anything like the current conversation I definitely missed out! Pellegrini is actually discussing a side of LGBTQ issues that people often do not consider. Many Americans see religion and sexuality as mutually exclusive ideas, but it seems like Anne Pellegrini and I disagree with that.
I think it is unfair that everyone should have to be governed by the religious ideals of one particular religion. I am a Christian, but I know that everyone is not. I am also an American who supports equality for all Americans regardless of their lifestyles or what they believe. I do not think that these 2 parts of my identity have to go to bat with one another.
Pellegrini also established that tolerance cannot be the moral language in the United States. This really struck a chord with me because it is something about which I feel very strongly. I agree with her point that the idea of tolerance is just a way to exacerbate oppression and domination of a majority group. The rhetoric of tolerance implies that there is one way that things are supposed to be and if something is different, it can exist only because it is allowed to by those doing things appropriately. I disagree with this mentality. I hope that one day (in a perfect world) other people can understand that there are ways for us to peacefully disagree with one another without stripping others of their humanity.

- Renyelle Jimenez

The new/old consciousness rasing

I was recently passed along a link about a consciousness raising project called "A Feminist Tea Party" (link the the project is at the end of the post). It actually took me a while to wrap my head around the concept of this project that was started by Caitlin Rueter and Suzanne Stroebe. Without reading their description of what the project is, I immediately thought, "what kind of tea party are they actually talking about? The 50s kind where women sit and talk about weather and health? Or the Tea Party?" The first tea party made more sense because tea parties are considered very feminine but the second made sense for its political implications.

Rueter and Stroebe joined the two very different interpretations of tea party and this is how they explained their project:

"We wed two conceptions of a tea party: (1) the tea party as historical referent and site of political debate (think: the Boston Tea Party or the Beck/Palin “Tea Party”) with (2) the tea party as a gendered and highly-stylized ritual (think: 4 o’clock tea). Provoked by the Tea Party protests, our project recasts the “tea party” as a playful, progressive, inquisitive and inclusive space."

While I have never seen/took part in this "feminist tea party," I'm very interested by what it might imply about feminism being more acceptable when it is toned down or "feminized." This consciousness raising encourages discourse in a setting that is less intimidating and even slightly humorous, but I wonder if it suggests that people don't feel comfortable talking about feminism or taking part in it if it does not hold some characteristic of femininity.

Sure, feminism doesn't always have to be serious and I would probably enjoy a good consciousness raising in a very different/gendered kind of setting, I am just a little worried that if in real life, people won't take part in consciousness raising if it isn't in a setting that was not feminine.

To learn more about the Feminist Tea Party

http://afeministteaparty.wordpress.com/about/

-by Catherine Yeh