The One Event in My Life that Most Affected My Perception of Gender in Our Society

Gender. The word Gender brings to mind many things. I think of the way women were treated less then a century ago, when they had little rights and no voting rights. When I hear the word gender I also think about how our society tells us how a masculine man and how a feminine girl should act. Society tells us how each sex is supposed to look aesthetically. Perhaps the main thing I think of when speaking of gender is how society tells us is how we are to associate with ourselves and importantly how we act with each other and those of the opposite gender. This last example of gender is what exactly my life experience deals with. It deals with how men and women each haze differently and how sometimes women submit themselves to men on a certain level. In my experience women put others of their organization into a submissive position under a man. My experience is a collection of things people told me and they shocked me into wondering why women would put others of their kind purposefully into a submissive position with a man. By evaluating the symbolism and the embedded ideals it becomes clear that men and women act to each other in extremely different ways; and this is most likely due to unknown social factors that make examples like these all too frequent in my opinion.

My experience in life that has had the greatest impact on my perception and understanding of Gender happen earlier this school year. It was not more then 3 weeks into my first college semester when I had a conversation with a few of my friends that would change how I understand gender ever since. We were in the sub eating lunch together when one of my friends invited me and the others to start attending his frat's meetings so that we could join that semester. Immediately the conversation topic changed from frats in general to one particular aspect: hazing. One by one my comrades began to disclose 1st & 2^{nd hand accounts of hazing in Greek life. After a few stories it began extremely noticeable that those stories involving frats and those involving sororities had entirely different goals. The frats tended to be more physical; dealing with consumption of large amounts of alcohol, physical harm, physical tasks, etc. Whereas the sororities seem to be aimed at more the mental side: degradation and embarrassment for the most part but some sexual in nature as well.}

There is one sorority story in particular that most impacted me. The story went something like:

At so-and-so sorority they make all the pledges line up in front of all the frat pledges and they had to strip and put their underwear on the ground between their legs and then had to masturbate until they wet the underwear on the ground; while standing naked in front of the boys.

An extremely shocking scenario, I know. Put the entire issue of how hazing is wrong aside; it is very interesting that in this instance women force other women from their Greek organization (which have incredibly strong bonds with each other) via peer pressure to submit themselves sexually to these men. This ritual particularly highlights a few passive messages. These women are being degraded and embarrassed by being naked in front of strangers. Then they are forced to further degrade themselves and also to put on a show for them. It is as if the leaders of this ritual were attempting to force the idea into their heads that they are there to serve these men.

The fraternity hazing ritual which impacted me most is a first hand account by a 3rd year student. His account of his experience went something like:

He had joined a frat one year earlier. He and the other three pledges had made it through all the hazing except for the last final initiation ritual. For this ritual they put the four guys in a room with six -1.75 Liter bottles of Goldenschlager Cinnamon flavored liquor. They were told they were not allowed to leave the room until all the bottles were empty. The older members brought trashcans, and shot glasses to the pledges and then left the room. He and the other pledges drank liquor straight up, because they were not supplied with anything to chase or mix it with, for hours. Vomiting occasionally but cleaning up quickly and resuming drinking. Eventually they accomplished the daunting task of drinking a bottle and a half of liquor and were officially inducted into the fraternity: which my friend subsequently quit.

This experience is interesting because these men are made to have to physically withstand drinking mass quantities of alcohol. It is almost as if they were intentionally putting these men in a life-risking position. Apparently society has this frat thinking that doing things like putting your life in jeopardy by drinking mass amounts of alcohol is a cool thing. Dive deeper into that statement and it's clear that they are testing the physical toughness and mental will power to accomplish daunting physical tasks which will cause sure physical harm to themselves. Somehow by these students perceptions of gender they determined that to test an individual in these areas could best be achieved by the above method.

By evaluating the symbolism and embedded ideals in the initiation rituals it becomes clear that men and women act to each other in extremely different ways. My experience is a collection of things people told to me in 1st and 2nd hand accounts. The intriguing way of initiating their own shocked me into evaluating the differences in the way the genders interact both amongst themselves and with the other sex. The trends were clear: Women degrade their own a great deal generally and, in the story I was told, put the women into a subservient role to men. Men present their own more often with physical tasks intended to test physical toughness and will power; they are given a very challenging physical task and are made to complete it. I believe these trends represent the imaginary picture of how the perfect fraternity boy or sorority girl is supposed to hold themselves, and these groups of people aim to achieve this imaginary archetype by these symbolic yet barbaric (at times) rituals. In essence, how the above mentioned experiences changed my perception of gender is understanding the different tendencies exemplified that signify something about our culture; the experiences also made me acknowledge that sometimes these social norms even make the genders (especially women it seems in our society today) betray their own in order to maintain some kind of status quo known as "Tradition".