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Contributions will be added to the top of this collection as I receive them

SUCCESS:
 A successful woman is a woman who achieves or exceeds the goals she personally set in life. Financial, relational, mental, emotional, physical, spiritual (etc.) achievements which come to fruition are things that enrich the individual and bring about sense of satisfaction unlike the success of someone else's goals for you.
 From birth, certain standards are enculturally impressed upon us. Ideals of what is ladylike and what is feminine are imposed upon us from family, friends, television and innumerable other sources. These expectations can be damaging unless a personal reconciliation between what others say and what a person knows can be at peace.

POWERFUL:
 Women have a constant struggle for power. There is a need to adapt to be equal to men and inpendent from them. To be poweful, women need to be wives, mother and benefactors for their famillies. Older women need to change for the new perception of a powerful woman. Women are constantly changing throughout their lives.
pretty=powerful, smart=powerful, money=powerful, respect=powerful, sexual attractions = powerful.

BEAUTY:
 Beauty is constantly expossed in society. Everywhere we turn we can see a beautiful image on magazine covers, billboards, bus stops and T.V. The "new fad" in our society today is reality today, and some of the most popular series are those which take average everyday woman and turn them into what we see on the covers or Vogue or any other top magazine.  As a woman, we see these extravagent images and feel like we too have to look that way. Because our culture is constantly exposing "beauty." women are easily persuaded into this new way of life..

Hey Everyone,
I know that I am a bit behind on the discussion but I noticed that no one responded to Duncan's very eloquent and well thought out blog.  That was really cool.  The only arguments (and perhaps this is why no one responded) that I could give would simply end up being semantics.  Like, for example, whether or not homosexuality is genetic.  I don't think that's really your point though Duncan.  Just like Keno's comment about passion, anything that humans do is very hard to distinguish where nature ends and nurture begins.  We can look as much as we like at other animals and say, "We are animals, so what they do must be natural for us!"  But that's a little silly.  After all, you wouldn't think it very natural for bird to drill a hole in a tree then sit in it all day eating nuts and chattering at anything that bugged it, would you?  Just because it's natural to one animal does not follow that it is natural to another.  If there is an answer somewhere about what is natural for us and what we just learn I'm not entirely sure I want to know.  Think of all the trouble the semantics about passion being genetic or social has caused this little social group.  If we actually had scientific data to prove one or the other, do you think that the discussion would have been any less heated?  I think the key point in Duncan's blog is essential to this discussion; WE CAN LEARN!  Any inequalities that nature may or may not have given us can be seen and acted upon.  Not only that but it seems we can go against any natural impulses.  That makes any discussion about what is and isn't NATURAL unimportant.  If it’s natural for women to be more passionate then men and men figure that it’s an advantage in politics and they want to have that advantage too, then I'll start teaching classes today!  If it’s that women have learned to be more passionate because society has taught them women are more passionate then I'm still opening class today!  If that's a bunch of nonsense and it is simply that some men are more demonstrative of passion and some women are the same, then I guess I have lost my new business and those of you who think you are not passionate can apparently learn it on your own!

All my best to all you passionate people! (And I personally believe we all are)  I'm glad to count myself as one of you, male and female both!
Allison
:) Ok, a bit silly maybe, but is it really?

Hello All!

I'm writing this past 11 pm on thursday night, so I don't expect that anyone will have read this before tomorrow's class, but I feel the need all the same to throw in some of my thoughts on the issue of gender inequality. I may incite some controversy in doing this, but I'm going to dare it anyway.

Any discussion of gender inequality I've ever heard gets bogged down sooner or later in the Nature vs. Nurture argument, so I think it's worthwhile to take a little detour from talking about males and females to just think a little bit about this.

There are unquestionably behaviours in the animal world (of which we homo sapiens are a part, weather we like it or not) that are determined entirely by genetics. To use the clich� example, salmon know to swim upstream all at the same time without being taught. It's instinct, and no amount of cultural conditioning will change it.

The argument against this is obvious: we may be animals, but we DO learn things, and we DO have culture. We homo sapiens, with our culture, do all sorts of crazy things which make little or no sense in purely Darwinian my-genes-must-survive terms.  Take suicide for instance: how does suicide make any Darwinian sense at all? I know that umpteen studies have declared some probable link between genetics and a predisposition towards suicide, but ultimately the idea that there's an evolutionary advantage to killing ourselves doesn't pan out.  So, the answer must lie in culture. Culture is such a powerful force on our actions that it can make us go totally against everything our genes are trying to do. Because of culture, we can choose to make ourselves non-productive

I use 'non-productive' rather than 'dead' because in purely Darwinian terms, celibacy and homosexuality go as much against our genes as suicide does. The question of where the genetic predisposition to suicide, and homosexuality for that matter, fits in is more complicated than I have the knowledge to take on. But my best guess is that it exists under the same principle that sickle cell anaemia does- the same genes that put the carrier at risk can, under certain circumstances, provide an advantage that outweighs the risk.

Anyway, getting back to Nature vs. Nurture stuff. I like to think of the Nature vs. Nurture argument as a continuum. Like any continuum, it has two extreme ends. At the extreme end of the Nature side, we have the eugenicists, who hold the blood chilling belief that, like the salmon swimming upstream, our behaviour is determined entirely on genetic grounds and there's no point in trying to culturally fix what is inherent in the genes. The blood chilling bit is how they intend to go about fixing it.  At the other extreme (the Nurture extreme) we have (and this is the part I fear may cause some controversy) the feminists, who hold that culture is what makes us who we are and, like those who commit suicide, our 'I' will always triumph over our genetic code. I'd like to very quickly state that I'm not in any way saying feminist beliefs are blood chilling at all. On the contrary, they're quite humane. But the extreme Nurture view, that if we RAISE boys and girls exactly th! e same they will BE exactly the same needs is just that: an extreme view. While feminist views have an enormous moral superiority to the views of eugenics, neither of them make 100% rational sense.

What I'm saying out of all this is that, while culture does an enormous part in determining our personality traits, biology has something to do with it too. And with that includes the biological characteristic of being male or female.

Now here's the bit where I think I'm running a risk of being branded a backward male chauvinist pig because I am saying that there are biologically (not culturally) rooted differences in the way males and females behave. And I'm even going to go way out on a very un-PC limb here and say that those differences DO have something to do with the stereotype of females being nurturing and males being aggressive.

Take testosterone for example. The guys have a lot of more of it than the gals do (though this isn't always true as we get older). It's also been experimentally shown to increase aggressiveness, making people do things like interrupt conversations more often. And testosterone is only one ingredient in the hormonal soup we all carry around with us, especially those of us who happen to be 19 or so.

(I realize that I'm not providing a reference to the experiments I mention, but as this is a blog I don't feel they're necessary. If someone really gets irate over this entry and demands I prove what I say, I do have enough confidence that I'll be able to track down the magazine article or whatever it was I read and name the study that I'm willing to say things like "It's experimentally shown...")

...And I'd better start wrapping this up if I want to get any sleep tonight. This has already ballooned into something considerably larger than I intended. The bottom line is that there is no simple answer to Nature vs. Nurture. I know this is a bit of a cop out conclusion, but the fact is our behaviour does have a biological component that's universal to our species in addition to the powerful cultural element we're all studying in Sociology 100. And I just think it's worth bearing that in mind.

Thanks for your patience,
  - Duncan

PS- I'd just like repeat what has already been repeated by almost EVERYONE so far: saying that women are more passionate than men is a STEREOTYPE and NOT ALWAYS TRUE. (sheesh people, give Keno a break! I think he gets the message!)