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Reversing Roe v Wade is a very serious and dangerous decision that is in the works of this country. Not only does it deteriorate the safety and health of women of this country, but it also puts anyone in the LGBTQ community at risk as well. If this is overturned, reproductive rights will almost completely stripped from everyone. Men clearly do not care because they are not held responsible for a child when one is conceived.

In an article I read about how the reversal of Roe v Wade is an attack on the transgender community, there was a headline that read; “The ‘violence’ of forced pregnancy” which I never thought as much about how the transgender community would be so impacted until I read this. A transgender male or woman often struggle with gender dysphoria. A transitioning female is still able to get pregnant until any reproductive correctional surgeries are done. If they were to get pregnant accidentally, that could cause a lot of issues with their transition and also their view on themselves which would impact their mental state.

Overall, this whole talk about reversal of Roe V Wade is an attack on women, but it affecting a lot more people than just people who identify as women. The aim is to keep people oppressed and in poverty so that the ones who are already in power right now continue to stay in power.

Reproductive rights has always been a big issue in our world. Starting with women having virtually no rights over their body to then being given way more opportunities, to now possibly having them stripped away. Women have already had to endure the hardships of being looked down upon for having children, which was started by men, so birth control became a way to prevent that from happening. It is still something that is looked down upon, but definitely not as much as it used to be. It’s very hard for women to find jobs and keep them with a busy schedule of taking care of children at home at the same time especially if she has no help. Most jobs also don’t offer paid leave for women as well. Deciding to have a baby is a big thing where finances have to be on point so that there is no added stress and to ensure that the child can be well taken care of.

Abortions are something that should be decided by the person who is carrying the baby because statistically, she will literally be the one taking care of it most, if not all of the time. Like I said, men started this narrative of it being bad to have children young, but now they want to get rid of safe reproductive options like plan B, abortions, and hopefully not birth control in the future. This is to further oppress women so that they have a reason to not get equal opportunities as men. There should be no opinion of men on this matter unless they are the ones carrying the actual child. Eventually, if Roe v Wade gets reversed, women’s rights and feminism will be on the path of complete destruction because of men once again.

After reading Audre Lordes “The Master’s Tool’s Will Never Dismantle The Masters House”, I think it’s important for us to recognize that if you are a women, you are a women period. She outlines the problems within the feminist community and how it is divided by race and sexual preference and that is what the issue is. She says that women are naturally nurturing so we should take that into consideration when trying to reform the world of feminism today. I agree completely that we all need to take into consideration that we are all women and that should be the only thing that is looked at. Accepting differences between women could help us all come together and make it a positive movement – not an uncomfortable one.

Intersectionality is the concept of how different circumstances based on race, class, gender and others happen all the time and how everyone should be aware of the actions upon those groups of people. It’s important to see how different forms of oppression interlock because there are ways that groups of people are targeted for their appearance or identities in which they are strung along through legal systems to have the ultimate outcome against them. An example would be that federal charges on people cause them to not be able to vote in America. Because rights were so recently given to the black community, it is often noted that simple charges are turned into something federal, and in turn, making them incapable to legally vote. That is what Collin’s suggests by race, as an example, being more salient than others because race seems to be the most outstanding difference of why some people get treated the way they do and then on top of that is class and gender that need to be accounted for. The three dimensions of oppression that Collin’s identifies are institutional, symbolic, and the individual. The institutional aspect of it is no matter what the race, class or gender, there will always be a group of people comprised of individual sub groups (similar in race, class, and gender) who are awarded or deprived of certain rights. The symbolic aspect pertains to how people see the characteristics of groups of people. Collin’s uses gender (Male and Female) and automatically the results of a survey proved that most people, when comparing characteristics of Male and Females.

The #metoo hashtag that originated on Twitter is a movement started by a women that survived sexual harassment and was set out to start a chain of responses from other women who has experienced it as well. This created not only a safe place for women to speak freely, but it being on Twitter, it is public. The hashtag on Twitter allows anyone to see it. The amount of women that have had to and do experience things like that were able to speak on it publicly is which is very empowering. I thought it was amazing that there was a public platform for women, but then I started to think about how the comments posted were just the people that were willing and ready to share. There were already a lot of them to begin with so imagine how many women didn’t share. It’s also very important to get word out about people who have sexually harassed others because usually when they do it, they don’t stop at just one person.

Covid has definitely impacted many people around the whole world. One big thing that is impacted is women’s rights and feminism. This connects back to our intersectionality talk because as the pandemic hit, women were almost expected to stay home and be the care takers as schools closed and children and other family members needed care. Men, in the majority have the higher paying jobs in a two income family, but once Covid happened that became more of an issue. Many Mothers and women either had to leave their jobs or were not able to work due to unemployment from places closing. Statistically, women work in care taking jobs like schools, daycares and others. Those were all shut down however. In other instances like I said when there is a family with children who need care the women will stay home to do so. This causes a lot of issues that arise in feminism because it’s almost as if times were set back 100 years. Women stayed home while men worked. This impacts the financial value of women and the codependency in many house holds. We went from bringing equality to the work force with women, to being put back to having to rely on men and being the stay at home care takers once again.

Subversive body image is basically an aim at destroying gender norms of what a body should look like. This pertains more to women because of how society is set up. For example, women have to be beautiful to be successful and men have to have money which is very extreme differences, but that is the way it is right now and has always been unfortunately. In recent times however, women have learned to embrace any differences on their body that aren’t seen as “beautiful” in other words, “text book beautiful”. Differences in bodies with shapes, sizes, colors is what makes up the whole meaning of beauty and diversity. Having a subversive body is taking back that title of being beautiful no matter what you look like. Whether that is with body hair, piercings, tattoos, physiques. Really anything that might be labeled as something a man would have or look like.

This short movie called “Miss Representation” was a very eye opening film for me. I did not realize how backwards the world is today especially in the media. Men say that women shouldn’t be in power because they are too emotional and would cause too much damage because that would get in the way. However, men on the news and in politics will literally sit and talk about how a women looks ugly, or has gotten too much surgery and wears too much makeup. That sounds like emotions to me! It’s very hypocritical the way society is set up today which makes it hard for anyone to actually get anything done – men and women. To me it seems like women are more focused than the men since all they care about is what women look like when they should be focusing on real world problems.

The more important thing that the film outlined was the impact that society has on body image for women. There have been advances in this because women are starting to realize that they are given one body for the rest of their lives so might as well love it and embrace it. Although that is a good thing, there are still so many young women and girls that are being influenced by these expectations of what an unrealistic body should look like. The desired bodies in the modeling industry are very skinny and unachievable unless you eat air for every meal or curvy with a big butt and breasts which requires surgery. It can definitely be frustrating growing up and seeing beautiful women that you look up to and knowing that you can achieve that desired body unless you mutilate it, whether that be starving yourself or going under the knife.

Gender is constructed in a way to divide men in women in my opinion. Men seems to find any means to oppress women so that they do not have more power than them. This raises concepts of stereotypes that we discussed in class. These gender roles are almost expected of us in society today and is abnormal if you display traits of the opposite gender in any way. For men, most expected stereotypes are to be strong, powerful, money maker and to take care of most things financially when in relationships. Women’s expected stereotypes are to be dainty, nurturing and to not take up a lot of space or be small. These stereotypes are set in place to keep things in a patriarchal stance which makes it much harder for women to exhibit more powerful traits. When they do, they are seen as emotional and crazy. In reality, this just means women want to be able to have power as well, we are all born the same and holding stereotypes against both genders will not allow any equality in the future. This impacts me because I don’t know if in the future when I get a job if I will be paid the same or treated the same as my male counterparts. I might not be given the amount of opportunities that others could have even if I were to work harder than them which is very frustrating.