Socialization

Killing us softly by Jean Kilbourne, talks about how women are being advertised and seen as “objects”. Women showing their bodies with all these “perfect curves” on advertisement and magazines trying to show society that’s how women should look. Women exist in a world where their bodies are constantly judge, and their worth depends on how they look. In the video Jean said breast can never be ok, society places so much emphasis on them that girls seem always to have their self-esteem plummet when they hit adolescence. Boys do not suffer in the same way.

Jean Kilbourne mentioned that cogitation of feminism occurs because the ultimate message of how women are portrayed in advertising is be sexy but be passive and powerless. Thus, sexuality is defined in a clichéd way. The use of sex to sell everything is more pervasive than ever. This is important because it results in little or no emphasis on relationships or intimacy. Throughout the video Jean compare women to men but focusing on how women are being viewed in society and the huge impact in young women’s lives. The video Killing us softly is related to the article “Retro wife” by Lisa Miller because is mainly about women and their role in this culture, the video and the article also showed me how women’s lives have change from the old fashion way to modern women.

“A call to man” by Tony Porter tells men to stop being so violent and start respecting women. His story is about manhood and his experience as a male and a father. He explains the collective socialization of men, as the “man box”. The man box contains a set of norms by which every man is “supposed” to live by. And all these sets of norms are like rules that men are taught from birth and their parents expect them to follow it.

When Tony Porter uses himself as an example to describe the way he was raised, he points out all the things he was taught like for example: “as a man you are expected to be dominant and brave. Going back to chapter #6 socialization page 137 it says that through socialization we learn who we are, what is expected of us, how society operates and where we stand within our social world; this description about socialization relates to the video when Tony is telling the story when he was 12 and his oldest friend who was 16 and always alone at his father’s apartment had a girl in the room who didn’t even know what they were going to do with her, she was on drugs therefore she was out of her mind. Jonny the 16 years old call all his little friends to go to the room and have sex with this women but Tony knew what was going on was wrong and pretend he did have sex with the woman by putting his pants down. My point is when tony started to socialize with people who had more experience than he does, he was learning who he really was and not all the norms are true like the one in his box “demonstrate power control especially over women”.  This video is also relate to the article parents ‘socialization of children because as in the video the article is also about how parents influence their children to behave and the different styles they use like Authoritative, Permissive, and Authoritarian.

Both videos and the two articles are related to chapter #6 socialization; we can see how the agents of socialization influence us since birth. Newborns are not born human, at least not in the social or emotional sense of being human.  They have to learn all the nuances of proper behavior, how to meet expectations for what is expected of them, and everything else needed to become a member of society.  A newborn in the presence of others, interacting with family and friends typically acquires their socialization by the time they reach young adulthood.  

This picture shows how boys and girls socialized; school is the main social institution where we learn the norms established by society.