Exploring Gender

Have you, or one of your opposite-sex friends ever been in the friend zone and didn’t want to be?             “The friend zone refers to a situation where there is a mismatch in romantic feelings between two individuals. For example, sometimes this is a sexual attraction mismatch, where one person is interested in romance while the other wants to just be friends,”(Nicholson, 2013, p. 1). Why does the friend zone exist? Better yet, on a broader scale, the real question and purpose of this post is, can heterosexual men and women be strictly platonic friends?  According to Adrian Ward’s (2012) study, investing the capability of truly platonic opposite-sex friendships, “Two people can experience the exact same relationship in radically different ways,” (p. 2). The results of this study found large differences in how both men and women experience opposite-sex friendships. Men were found to be much more attracted to their fema...

(Trigger Warning) “A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze,” (Atwood, p.165). -The Handmaid's Tale             When a rat is in a maze it believes it is free. It thinks because it can move around it is no longer in a cage, when in reality it is still trapped. Sexism has been a continuous maze in our society, and folks, it is still here. We are still holding up those elaborate walls to the kingdom patriarchy and just because we almost had a female president doesn’t mean woman are equal, it means women are just now being allowed to move around. Pharr (2001), “Sexism, that system by which women are kept subordinate to men, is kept in place by three powerful weapons designed to cause or threaten women with pain and loss,” (p. 143). These weapons include economics, violence, and homophobia, (Pharr, 2001). Holding up Sexism Keep wages, education, and training opportunities scarce and wi...