Blog 5

Social construction was represented throughout most of the entire Radio Lab podcast about football.  The podcast started out talking about some of the early days of football and then went more in depth about it when the Indian school named Carlisle started to play football against some of the Ivy League schools such as Harvard.  The schools founder, Richard Pratt, originally was a little opposed to the Indian kids playing such a violent sport such as football because he didn’t want people to look at them and start stereotyping them further as savages or overly aggressive.  Eventually Pratt let in and allowed football to be played at the school if they followed some rules. “Never slug, people looking on will say ‘that’s the Indian in them. Just see them, they’re savages.”-Pratt. 

During one game against either Yale or Harvard the referee at the game called a bad call against Carlisle.  The stands from the Ivy League school were upset because everyone there knew it was a poor call and it was deliberately meant to hurt Carlisle in the game.  The reason the referee called such a bad was because he did not want a school like Carlisle to defeat one of the leading academic schools in the nation, which also happened to be one of the best football teams.  Along with that reason it would have looked negative to have “civilized” students be defeated by a group of students from another school that were looked on as negative at the time. 

An example of social construction I saw reading the Lorber text was when the person on the subway saw a young child wearing blue clothes and the father put a Yankee hat on the head of the child.  The person on the subway assumed this was a young little boy until he noticed the shoes had some flowers and also the young child had pierced ears.  That is when he pieced it together and realized that the young child was indeed a little girl.  The subway rider assumed because of the colors of the clothes and the baseball hat that the child must be a boy but then the rider was proven wrong.  At that point the subway rider could have thrown out a lot of assumptions he made of the child once he realized he got the child’s sex incorrect. “You couldn't tell if it was a boy or a girl. The child in the stroller was wearing a dark blue T-shirt and dark print pants. As they started to leave the train, the father put a Yankee baseball cap 011 the child's head. Ah, a boy, I thought. Then I noticed the gleam of tiny earrings in the child's ears, and as they got off, I saw the little flowered sneakers and lace-trimmed socks. Not a boy after all. Gender done.”

I am not too sure about my thoughts on social construction because I tend to look at things with an attitude like “that’s the way things are because that’s the way they are.”  I always have gone with the flow in life because I guess I have always been part of the groups of people that tend be on the more privileged side of life.  At home things have always been fairly traditional.  My brother and I always worked outside on the property with things such as landscaping or doing other manual labor that needed to be done.  On the flip-side my sister tends to work a lot inside with our mother on things such as dishes, food preparation, and other basic cleaning around the house.  I would say we all got thrown into those jobs because of our sex.  My brother and I are of course guys and we are both the stereotypical manly men that you would think of.  That may be because we were brought up to be that way because that is what is deemed to be normal where we are from.  My sister is the stereotypical teenaged girl.  She likes to cook food and keep things clean and organized.  This is probably because she was brought up to believe that is just the way things need to be done.  In today’s world you could easily flip the gender roles for working around the house.  Women could do a lot of the work that is done outdoors and men of course could cook and clean the inside.  Maybe in more progressive places like larger cities on the coasts there are cases that they do but that is not simply the case in western Nebraska where I am from.  It is pretty traditional there and not a whole lot has changed with social construction there.