Public Spaces

I was actually quite entertained by the things that happened during our discussion on the differences in expectations in public spaces, so I figured I'd actually share what I thought we would have discussed (as well as my thoughts on what we DID discuss).

Anyway, so what we came up in class basically boiled down to "men can act in a more coarse fashion whereas women are expected to be more refined. Also, men are judged on the basis of how threatening they are whereas women are judged based on how easily they are victimized." Great. We just combined all of our collective street smarts and formulated a stereotype. Yay for progress. In any case, what we came up with seems fairly general, and I can't really react to it other than to say "yeah I guess this makes sense." But I think we did miss a crucial point in our discussion, which is how men and women judge others, instead of the other way around. And I don't intend on making a claim that men just blindly wolf whistle at attractive women on the street or something. Or do I? Because strictly speaking, the people that you meet in public areas tend to be strangers. And you can only really judge them in the following two ways: what stereotypes apply to them (and how you can will react accordingly) and how they are physically. Think about it. You are simply collecting faces (and you won't even be putting names to those faces) and so you will be judging those faces for all that they're worth. Granted, I lack the insight of how a woman thinks, so I cannot speak for them. But I assume it's the same -- you're going to look at someone and based on that look decide how you will treat him or her. If this is not true, then I have no idea how we formulated our ideas in class, because if we cannot assume that others look upon us like this, then how could we have come up with our response?

In any case, it appears that in order to impact how you are received in public space, you will have impact the stereotypes that apply to you. For example, if I saw an Asian kid walking along the hallways of Troy High with an AP chem textbook, I'd automatically assume that he/she is a fairly bookish person that works really hard under intense parental stress. But if the Asian stereotype was, say, "Asian people are ridiculously greedy, but they hate studying and anything to do with school," then I would react to the same person by reasoning that he/she is trying to just take AP chem to get up the proverbial ladder and make tons of money later in life. But what does that matter? If that stereotype was true, I'd be too busy skipping school and burning my textbooks.