One of the points that hit me in Guyland was that calling something gay or calling someone a faggot is the go to insult for any locker room or middle school and high school boys. The speaker was absolutely right that it had nothing to do with being gay or anything to do with homosexuals, it was just the insult that young adult men favored to call each other. I think that Steve Carrel acting as Michael Scott does a really good job of explaining how young adults use the word faggots after he accidently called a closeted homosexual co-worker a “faggot.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOLbuFVG0fs

This strikes close to home for me because Junior year of high school one of my close friends came out of the closet. Up until that point my friends and I treated him like anyone else and would mess with him, call him gay or faggot just jokingly like adolescent males do to anyone other males their close with. But then when he came out, everyone in my friend group had to take a step back and say that it was pretty messed up to call him all of those insults now that we knew that he was a homosexual. However, if he had never come out we would have never considered anything we said to him to be wrong or to be offensive, or as Michael Scott would say, “in bad taste.”

Obviously being gay is much more accepted now than it was when my parents grew up, and even when I was born in the 90’s. However, the way that young men talk to each other hasn’t really changed. The speaker in Guyland talked about how when he was a kid calling something gay was still insulting. But it’s not the 90’s anymore and the stigma towards homosexuals is significantly less than it was and is almost disappearing entirely in my generation. However, we still talk the same way that young men have talked for years and there needs to be a change. It’s no longer acceptable (not that it was in the first place) to use a person’s sexual identity as an insult, or as a way to describe something that you think is dumb or unfair.

So, because of this change, my group of friends had to change the way we talked, but most adolescents don’t have an experience like this, and for us it was still too late to make a difference for our friend. It makes a lot of sense in retrospect that he seemed to be sad more often than most of my friends. It will be interesting to see in the future with generations that are more accepting of different sexual preferences if the language adolescents will change or remain the same.

Pornland:
-Porn is an industry
-Porn promotes sexual violence
-Porn is becoming more violent
-Porn affects the way that men view women

Guyland:
-Adults are developing slower
-Young adults are switching jobs horizontally instead of working at a career vertically
-Gender inequality is perpetuated a a male dominated society

The Navajo are a tribe of American Indians that traditionally resided in pueblo dwellings in Southwest of the United States. These dwellings were traditionally governed by female patriarchs and consisted of several closely related matriarchal families. the Navajo depended on horticulture as their means of providing for themselves. While both men and women were involved in farming, women engaged in foraging and domestic tasks as well, only spending part of their time working in the fields while men traditionally spent all of their time working in the fields. Men were also responsible for creating raiding parties that would engage in raids and wars of local Navajo and American settlers.

The head of a Navajo dwelling is always a matriarch. Family ties are decided by the mother’s lineage. Men work for their mother’s family until they are married, in which case they go to live with their wife’s family and work for them. However, men in Navajo culture still have rights. They are allowed to own property, typically sheep, and their property will transfer from their family with them to their wife’s family in marriage. Both men and women can ask for a divorce and rates of spousal abuse are extremely rare in Navajo culture. Especially early in a marriage divorce was fairly common. Men would only bring over a token number of their livestock at first in a marriage and then slowly bring more over as the relationship became more stable. Men are allowed to take multiple wives, however will typically marry sisters as they must live with their wife’s family.

Unfortunately, gender roles have changed since the Mexican-American War. After slaughtering all but 8,000 of the Navajo in the Indian Wars U.S. officials refused to negotiate with matriarchs and instead insisted on communicating with male leaders. For this reason, men became responsible for interacting with the United States government and have since held more of a leadership role. In the great depression, many Navajo men and women had to go into wage labor in order to sustain their families. Gender differences occurred in the Navajo community because men were paid more for their labor than women were. The types of jobs that men and women took were also gender linked. Men worked in construction, building maintenance, railroad and highway repair, mining, and forestry while women were employed as service sector employees, school aides and as factory operatives. For the first time in Navajo history men and women’s work was wholly separated. Although men and women held different responsibilities before relying on wage labor they still held common ground while working the fields.

Despite these western based gender differences male dominance has not developed. Women’s autonomy is respected and their rights have in no way been undermined. Although women’s economic contributions have been weekend underlying social and religious ideologies have maintained balance between the genders.