Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository

eality and “truth,” perspective, and “self” to an even broader
aspect of their identity: their existence as “males” and
“females,” “men” and “women.” In essence, what is the
difference between “sex” and “gender” and even “sexual
orientation”? What is the relationship between them and what is
the meaning of that relationship? For this third unit of the
class, then, the students were asked to explore the questions of
how perceptions of “men” and “women” define the reality or
“truth” of what it means to be a “male” or a “female” in
American society, what influences the exact nature of those
definitions, and how such perceptions mold and shape their lives
and their world – again, their sense of “self.” The students
had to read Aaron Devor’s “Becoming Members of Society:
Learning the Social Messages of Gender,” Jean Kilbourne’s “’Two
Ways a Woman Can Get Hurt’: Advertising and Violence,” Jackson
Katz’ “Advertising and the Construction of Violent White
Masculinity,” and Alexa Hackbrath’s “Vanity, Thy Name Is
Metrosexual.” In addition to these articles, the students also
watched two documentaries: HBO’s Middle Sexes: Redefining He
and She from 2005 and the Discovery Channel’s Born a Boy,
Brought Up a Girl from 2006, both of which complicate further
the “Nature versus Nurture” debate with regards to those
questions of “sex” and “gender.” These readings and
documentaries and the freewriting, class discussions, and
reading responses that were done about and around them brought
the students to the third, and last, “exploratory paper” of the
class, “What Makes a Man a ‘Man’ and a Woman a ‘Woman’?”
Inherent to this essay were the following questions:
What is the relationship between gender and sex (and,
to complicate things further, sexual orientation)?
[…] How do society and culture influence children’s
perceptions of what they will come to define as
“male” and “female”? “Masculine” and “feminine”? Or
is gender “natural,” a thing predetermined by
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