Transcript:
Hey, what’s up? My name is Lauren Taylor, and this is my podcast: Yo, is this sexist? This topic is one that is very important to me. So, I’m super excited to share my thoughts and hear yours as well about this. So yeah, let’s get started.
In one of my diary of systemic injustice entries I wrote about something I had witnessed on the vice presidential debate with Pence and Harris. And as I’m sure many people observed, Vice President Pence talked over and cut off vice president, President Elect Harris numerous times, and it went on until Harris finally pushed back and kind of reestablished her position as a speaker, she was just like, ‘hey, *insert pissed off smile here* I’m speaking’. I believe that action, that assertion, struck a chord in the hearts of many American women, including me.
The main reason this kind of this interaction between the two of them really caught my attention is because I worked in a hardware store for over two years in high school. And I worked my way up from scrubbing down the toilets, and cleaning the popcorn machine, to being the youngest ever shift manager and the only woman to ever hold that role in the store. And every day, I demonstrated my knowledge and my skills and despite that, I had customers continuously, and coworkers too, dismissing me and doubting the work that I would do. So some customers, like wouldn’t even let me try and help them. I had some that just explicitly asked, you know, “is there a man I can talk to?” Like what? like, this is the 21st century, and people still say that? It’s just kind of crazy to me. I just, I wanted to be given a chance. And I don’t, I don’t know everything there is to know but I do know quite a bit. And I’m really eager to learn about what i what i don’t know as much about. So I kind of just began to think that this was a problem in that particular retail environment, because, you know, in a hardware store, there’s a certain demographic of people that come in with more outdated views. So you’re going to see and experiences kind of interactions more. And, you know, to their credit, I was pretty young, my parents didn’t even trust me to have my own credit card at that point. So why should somebody trust me with repairs around their house or updates in their house? So I get it. I mean, that’s, that was me trying to justify it, and make sense of it all because it, it was really, really frustrating, and really hurtful, I think.
But, um, once I got to college, and I was closely following this election, and other American politics and news, I began to realize that this is a problem that is much bigger than just old dudes in my local hardware store. A woman can be overly qualified and skilled for a role that she’s competing for or performing in, and she will still be met with criticism and unfounded judgments no matter how high or low on the ladder she is. And I just, I wonder, why is that? You know, I, I just can’t, I can’t wrap my head around it. It doesn’t make much sense to me. So through the readings and concepts you’ve explored so far, this semester, I really tried to look for some half decent explanations and while none of them served as justification, I do believe a lot of them, a lot of the pieces we’ve read, can help explain and lay out what’s truly happening and kind of on a subconscious level.
Um, so if you if you look back in time, sexism like a lot of other social issues was just explicitly clear. Women didn’t have basic human rights, and it’s no doubt that we’ve made tremendous progress over the last 100 years, like insane amount of progress. That being said, most of the issues that perpetuate sexism go beyond laws and legal issues. You know, they’re, they’re cultural, and they’re systemically enforced, and I think that makes them a lot harder to combat and change. So many people, they’ve been raised, you know, both men and women have been raised to accept the idea that men are above women are every way. And they de Beauvoir in the Second Sex outlines this very well. She, she states that “otherness is a category of human thought,” and she also explores different aspects that force women to be submissive and accepting of male sovereignty. Usually, people are taught to think this way through socialization, and how they’re raised by their parents, which makes it a really hard thing to stop because it can be passed on from generation to generation, and, yeah, it’s just, it’s really, really hard to stop. So if we look through the lens of Hegel’s master-slave dynamic, and the, the one versus the other, we can find a more abstract way to approach the issue of sexism. And almost all cases of sexism, women are seen as the other as the slave, to the one or the Master Man. Sometimes, as Hegel points out, the roles of master and slave switch, but unfortunately, in the case of sexism, the scale is disproportionately tipped in favor of men being the master while women must remain submissive. Both Hegel and de Beauvoir seem to suggest that this categorization that humans experience and place on one another is primitive, and hardwired into our brains. I think even if that is the case, it doesn’t mean it’s accurate. And it also doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to reform and improve.
In my time, at the local hardware store, I was objectified in addition to the experiences I mentioned before. I had customers tell me that my uniforms needed to be tighter. I had one particular instance where a customer refused to leave the store without my phone number. I had another customer invite me to his invite me and give me the address to his unnamed, unmarked “jewelry store” in his basement. And I talked about these things with my coworkers and with my bosses and like, ‘you know, this is going on, is it just me like, what do I do when customers are creepy?’, and only the women in the store have experienced similar things. And it makes me think a lot about Ortiz-Cofer’s the story of my body. The community I grew up in was not very ethnically, racially, economically diverse in any way. It was mostly white, upper middle class, upper class neighborhood, and because of this, i’ve never, I probably never will have to experience the same discrimination that Ortiz did, as a minority in a big city, but the objectification of her body and the way she was always kind of seen in this sexual lens by others, mostly men, around her is something, is an experience that I definitely I share with her. And objectification is a form of sexism that brings a different, a different type of pain when it’s experienced. Over the years, it’s something that I’ve observed and I’ve become more aware of, and it’s experienced by women, both in high powerful positions and by women who are, you know, frequently forgotten, forgotten by most of society. So, I guess all that goes to show that whether you agree with Kamala Harris’s policies and views or not, um, I think it’s clear to see that she is a powerful, smart woman. And I, like many other American men and women can’t wait to see what follows having not only the first woman but having the first woman of color be in the White House. Sexism isn’t a political issue. Women have all sorts of backgrounds and beliefs experience it daily.
For far too long, the same type of people who would dismiss me in the hardware store and, you know, doubt my abilities are the same types of people who hold office and reinforce the injustices that women face. And I truly believe that American women are ready for change, and we are more than capable of succeeding in our efforts for it. Yeah, I just, I think it’s gone on for far too long, and like I said, we are ready for change, and I think I think we’ll get there. Thanks so much for listening! Bye.