Blog Assignment #2

Interview Questions:
1. What kind of toys did you play with when you were little?
2. Who did you look up to more when you were a child; your mom or dad?
3. When you were a child, what did you want to be when you grew up; what job or career did you want to do?
4. What was your favorite TV character when you were a child?
5. What does the phrase "doing gender" mean to you?

Who Was Interviewed:
The people I interviewed ranged from age 76 to 18, all friends and family. They were people of different race including American, Pakistani, Columbian, and Bolivian. A majority of the people who were interviewed were middle class, but two were upper class and one was a retired man.

Results:
According to Simone de Beauvoir, “One is not born a woman, but becomes one.” And the same thing goes for men. What exactly does that mean? She is saying that people are taught by other people (society) on what gender they are ‘supposed’ to be. The questions I formed were done to prove, or disprove, this quote.

For the answers to my first question, all of the women I interviewed said they played with dolls, Barbies, Polly Pockets, and pretend kitchen sets when they were children. The men on the other hand played with Power Rangers, Tinker Toys, GI Jo’s, and sports related things. For the second question, all of the women looked up to their mom when they were young, and all except for one man looked up to his dad. The women, for the third question, wanted to be teachers, nurses, and lawyers, whereas the men wanted to be builders, fire fighters, and electricians. For the fourth question the women’s favorite television characters, when they were children, were Rogue (from X-Men), Ariel (from the Little Mermaid), and Big Bird (from Sesame Street). On the other hand, the men’s favorite characters were Bugs Bunny, Dean Autry (a cowboy movie star from many years ago), and Big Bird. For the fifth question, I asked people what the phrase ‘doing gender’ meant to them. One person thought it meant being a hermaphrodite, someone else thought it meant separating the boys from the girls, and the rest had the same general idea of doing the things that your gender normally does.

The interviews shaped my understanding of Beauvoir’s comment by helping me discover that what she said it basically true. Women and men start from childhood doing the things that their gender should, based on society, be doing. People are formed into being the gender of their sex by the toys they play with, the influences in their lives, and the people they look up to.

From my interviews, I learned that race and class do have a part in gender identity. Although, what I realized is that people of different races were raised the same way with the same types of toys and television shows. Depending on the class, some people had more toys, or higher quality toys, growing up than others did. Also, when I interviewed my granddad, I had asked him question four, but he then reminded me that he did not even have television as a child. His toys were also made out of wood compared to the plastic toys we have today.

The most surprising discovery I made during this exercise was that my friend who grew up in Columbia watched the same television shows as a child as we do in America, like Sesame Street. Her favorite TV character was Big Bird, which was also my boyfriend’s favorite character who grew up in America. It was also surprising that a woman and man both chose their favorite television character as the same one.

My thoughts going into this exercise were confirmed by the results of my interviews. I was guessing that the women played with girly toys and looked up to their moms, while the men would play with boyish toys and look up to their dads, and this turned out to be true except for one man who looked up to his mom more because his dad was in the army for a lot of his childhood. I also assumed that the women and men would want to have the types of jobs that they saw represented by their gender when they were young, and this proved to be true.