I found this to be an article that was difficult for me to understand. I kept asking myself what exactly is" Keller trying to say?"However, after reading it over about three times it finally came to me on how she viewed the power in nature with men, and male and female heterosexual relationships as a whole.
As I continued to read and take this essay apart I decided that as a society people have the tendency to label what is masculine and what can be feminine. Although when you look at images in the media it obvious that the male and female bring forth different thoughts and feelings in different people. The images of women are often affected by the government, economy, religion and culture as well as other systems of inequality.
When I take a look into the pursuit of Nature's secrets and I began to think about what is secreative to men but yet still visible to women I am reminded of the stage of pregancy and motherhood that sustains life afterwards. In this I am refering to breast milk. This stage is influencial to infants because it creates a connection between the mother and child along with the necessary and only nutritions for a human child in its first stages of life. Breast milk is yet still a mystery for men and often times can be mistaken for diary. All in all, the entire pregancy phenomeon baffles men, from conception to nursing a child.Thus proving, the female body still holds secrets beyond a man's knowledge.
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It is astounding how much energy we, as society, put into labeling thing as masculine and feminine. The “pinks and the blues” ideology leaks into every aspect of our being. When considering the division in science, I have mixed feelings. As men and women are different, we should be considered differently, but not so much that one side of the brain is considered feminine and another side labeled masculine. It’s too much. I was thinking about what else in our world do we label as “a girl thing or a boy thing”. Steak- man food. Salad- woman food. Taking out trash- boy chore. Washing dishes- girl chore. Martini- woman drink. Beer- man drink. Considering this, it seems only natural that this form of thinking would reveal itself in all parts of society. It’s unfortunate.
It's interesting that you mention breast milk. It's a little known fact that men can generate breast milk if necessary. How would more widespread male breast feeding impact our notions of gender and sex?
What I hope we will come to see is that the way men and women relate to one another in our society, the assumptions we make about them are not natural. They shift and change with time and location. Hopefully we will see this in other readings.
"Who's got milk?" An immediate response would be, a woman. However, if we delve into nature's secrets we find that men do too. This was interesting to me being that I have always thought of the production of milk as being exclusive to females. This thought is fueled by the scientific nature of social reality. American science seems to be based in maintaining the binaries that structure human exisitence. Quite disturbing. It was science that revealed men produce milk too! Yet, this finding was silenced in order for the patriarchal system to remain. For a secret such as this to become widespread would rivet American society as we know it. The Power Elite would no longer have the essence of a strong, masculinist dominating order. But what if society, learned to accept the biological sameness of males and females and in turn embraced this physical uniqueness that humans posses. Perhaps then men would share a similar bond that a mother and child have (that is from breast feeding). I think for there to be changes in people's mind, groundbreaking science that reveals striking similarities has to be put in textbooks. Textbooks that will educate America's children. I say this because it starts with the children. Changing or at least influencing the way that the young ones think is vital to changing the perceptions of the nation.
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