Living Old

A young person always thinks about the next thing to do on the to-do list, waking up for a new day and to be as active as always. But when you become older, you realize that you cannot do the same things you used to do. The young people never think about what’s going to happen to them when that happens, so they don’t even bother thinking about how the elderly deal with their situation. We take for granted that most of the elderly have been working and have been helping this country to grow. This makes me think that I am ageist. I always thought that when my time comes, then I’ll just die happy, but there are so many things to worry about than just that. The video “Living Old” presented me with a lot of questions regarding all these complicated decisions that we have to make. Like deciding if it’s time for you to go, or all the complications that sickness and living older brings.

Last year, my grandfather died, I think he was 80 years old or something like that. He was the first close person to me to die. I really felt hopeless but then I said to myself that live goes on. Ever since I was young I thought that when you died then everything would be okay. But I recently talked to one of my aunts and we were discussing death. She said something that I never thought before. She said that some people, even though they are old, don’t want to die yet because there are so many things that have not been accomplished yet, and they want to do something to help. This has made me think that ageism is wrong and the way I would be against it is to help the elderly accomplish all their goals so that they can rest in peace.

Gimp

When watching the video “Gimp”, I was blown away by their effort and body expressions. Their dance moves were really powerful and sometimes I would be in awe by how they wound make the dance seem like another able person doing it, but looking twice and seeing their muscular dystrophy it amazed me even more. It was something I don’t see every day. It made me think that they could dance just as well or even better than the usual able performers. It also made me think as to all the things that disable people could do that most people don’t realized.

I now prefer the definition of someone who does things different than able people instead of disable. They can do a lot of things that able people do, but they have to recur to other methods in order to do them. But most people think when they see disable people that they can’t do anything for themselves, or that they are cripple or retarded. All these names further the damage that we do towards disable people. Ableism forms our way of thinking by diminishing them with all these names, and also by ignoring their necessities. We need to change the way we see them and treat them as another person just like us.

Beautiful Daughters and Trans Woman Manifesto

The video “Beautiful Daughters” and the article “Trans Woman Manifesto” taught me a lot of things that I did not know about transgender people. In the article, Julia explained that transgender women need to embrace their feminineness and fight for equal rights as a feminist. She encouraged other feminists to do the same because just as women need to be valued, so do trans women. She also explains all the oppression from different sides of society. She talks about how transphobia affects trans women by expressing insecurity about someone’s own gender. She also talks about how cissexism affects trans women because people who were born with their desired gender prejudice transgender people by saying that they are inferior to them and that cisgender people fit in the norm of a binary gender society. Finally she mentions misogyny towards women as a problem that affects trans women. This is true because in society we are ruled by patriarchy and when someone does not follow the norm, men tend to ridicule the, just because they don’t want other people to embrace their femininity.

We as people need to take into account all these prejudices against transgender people and help them by respecting their choice or the way they were born. We need to include them in society as normal people who just want to live happy, have dreams, and have a voice.

Biphobia

I’ve never heard the word biphobia before so when I was reading the book, it was the first thing that caught me attention. Even the squiggly red line appeared below this word just after I finished typing it. Biphobia is the fear towards the other and fear of the space between categories. We live in a binary world. Either you are a man or woman, or you like men or women, but never think of someone who may like both sexes. Just as Marcia and Robyn point out in their article, bisexualism has a lot of stereotypes that make other people neglected it or simply ignore it. One of the stereotypes of a bisexual is that people say that they are confused and haven’t really decided yet. Or they are “just experimenting”. And also that just because they are bisexual, they can like anyone, men, women, friends, etc, because people think they are willing to have relationships with anyone.

All these ignorant comments create a stigma that has built thanks to the heterosexual society in which we live in. These problems are closely related with the gay and lesbian community but because they don’t belong in a specific group, so bisexuals are also rejected by some people of that community. But there are people who are still fighting for equal rights for everyone. And in order for bisexuals to be respected, they have to create their own lives, music, art, and express to everyone that they can be a great ally in society to prosper.

Kill Us Softly and Tough Guise

On the video Killing Us Softly 3 and Tough Guise, we saw what the media and society in the United States and in other parts of the world is demonstrating as to how men and women should be. The advertisement of products using women shown on Jean Kilbourne’s video was degrading and sometimes even ridiculous. Such as putting women in passive and dangerous situations and explicitly saying that it’s okay for them to act as child or innocent or naïve so that men could take advantage of them. Another thing about women’s ads was that women’s goal is to have the perfect body or aim to be perfect beauty and that frustrates women because no one can be like that.  All of this is created to keep patriarchy alive. And the other part of this scheme is showing men that they have to be strong, show no emotion, muscular, be violent, and put other people down to feel good about themselves.

We also have to take into account the race and class factor. Most ads showing women are of white female, with expensive jewelry or expensive clothes, and that affects the other types of races and lower classes that know that they can’t get what the media wants them to be or have. And lastly we have to notice that capitalism plays a big role on the oppression of the poor or the other races. Capitalism tells them to buy more stuff and that way they can get closer to perfection, which deludes their hope for acceptance in society.

This video is somewhat recent and I think is a different spin on the same heterosexual version of it. I think it’s interesting but I’ve never seen it anywhere. I think this video was only showed on TV that targets the gay audience.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bB90Vkyqrts&feature=related