Matthew Jarosz Discussion 1

Hi. My name is Matthew Jarosz. My major is Gender and Women’s Studies. I work as a cook while attending school. I am in the process of transitioning but the pandemic has both facilitated and halted that, paradoxically. Ideally my name would be Deany, a name I developed while writing a book years ago. There was a boy inspired by Hippolite from The Idiot by Dostoyevsky.  Then there was a couple, and the girl was named Deany. I found that character very interesting but difficult to write as I wasn’t quite sure how to write as a woman without being stereotypical. Being presented with that situation led me to a thorough examination of what I feel it means to be a woman. My upbringing was in a very hyper-masculine setting so I do not choose to fault myself for the limits of my understanding. Of course that act of forgiveness was arrived at over time.

I really loved everyone of these videos. I felt a special relationship to the instances where eating disorders were discussed. Such as in Disappearing and Reappearing Act, You Did It Girl,  and I also found myself relating to this ideal of beauty discussed in Eczema. With the latter I just felt deeply affected by the idea that society creates this ideal which you can never uphold as you are not considered ideal due to race. This was an interesting example where racism and sexism overlap. In the other videos on eating disorders, I noticed how the two women received compliments for being skinny. In You Did It Girl, the woman said ,”compliments fed her.” In my experience, I was not really encouraged, my own motivation was more internal, owing to an ideal that did not exist, but rather I hoped to create.

My gender story is maybe a bit unusual. I want to focus on my struggles with eating disorders. I remember as a child I was given undue attention by my family. I then became very judgmental of my appearance based on the affections I would receive in regards to them. I suppose in some facet there was a lack of warmth that gravitated me toward this. I think I was given perhaps a false perception of who I was, as in all honesty I can’t look back and say I was anything but average. Anyway I always struggled with looks, owing in part to a glasses prescription that I refused to wear, so in the mirror I would see myself as being much bigger than I was. I remember feeling with my friends that I was never good enough to deserve their company based on my looks. I always felt like I was failing to achieve an ideal that would necessitate acceptance. Of course I saw this ideal as reflective of a masculine “cool” rather than a feminine ideal of beauty, but I believe we can draw parallels. At around 16 a close friend decided to end our relationship due to my image. Prior to this I only had weird quirks where I would fidget in the car constantly to not gain weight, but I didn’t really care too much about being fat. Then suddenly I was obsessed with weight loss following the loss of my best friend. I would starve myself, and rather than purge, as I didn’t know how, I would run very far distances after every meal. It was horrifying to feel out of control of your life: I remember my mother and parents watching in horror as I binged by emptying out the cabinets to eat everything, after I had already run seven miles, and then I cried as I knew I ate too much so I would have to run again. I was starving myself to where I could barely socialize as my thoughts were consumed with food. I wanted to be as skinny as I possibly could be. The following quote  from the article was lost on me at this point in my life, “Your identity is your sense of self or how you define yourself”(Murphy 12). I had no identity, I had no one I wanted to become, my gender was eradicated: I only wanted to be skinny. I think a loss of gender definition is a gender story.

In the article they discussed frequently how individuals try to appeal to others according to gender,“Social learning theory says you learned to be who you are by observing others, imitating them, and being rewarded or punished for certain behaviors”(Murphy 13). For either gender there are certain expectations which must be manipulated in order to present yourself as uniquely self-defined. In the beginning you always attempt to appeal by matching those around you, then later, sometimes, you decide you don’t agree with these prescribed behaviors. There were examples of individuals who were homosexual who felt trapped in their situation and so they were considering suicide. They did not agree with their situation but felt helpless to use agency to change it. I think it’s interesting to consider how gender can feel like something you must conform to based on the examples given in the article where individuals were rebuked for stepping outside the common parameters of their gender. We saw that in the video Be A Man also, as this man was told that he should not be cooking  and instead the “girl”  should be the only one cooking. In this instance a man was confronted for doing something that was not considered masculine. 

I appreciated how the article gave us different examples of reframing a situation just to elaborate the idea. Reframing is ,“Reframing  means shifting perspectives so that you view a situation from a different vantage point”( Murphy 21). There were numerous instances in this article where choosing to see reality from a different perspective enabled one to accept their gender. This is interesting, but I see this possibility where the validity of someone’s experience may be called into question based on this limitless possibility of reframing a situation. At what point do we accept problems related to our gender if we operate under the assumption that someone outside our life can always argue for a different perspective? Does reframing ask us to accept a bad situation and then adjust to it? I worry that reframing can lead one to question their perception even when they are in the right, in all situations related to gender.