Wst Blog 7

Ok, so this week I think I may have broken my brain (is this possible?) over the midterm plus illness is resulting in a very fuzzy head. Anyways, I have been trying to think about how the articles pertaining to pop culture we have been reading relate to feminism, and for some reason i've been thinking about Mr. Louis Althusser. Althusser says that the state apparatus reproduces the conditions of production through the repressive state apparatus and the ideological state apparatus which includes includes religion, culture, education, etc. For feminists, the ideological state apparatus is something which can be interrogated, because it is encompasses so many aspects of society. Education particularly can be examined because it is a major influence on individuals in our society, and this portion of the ideological state apparatus can be said to reproduce conditions of production in several ways.
I guess what got me thinking about all of this was the ways that sexual education is taught in our schools. In elementary school, I was taught that sexual education meant that a man and a woman who "really loved each other" got together and made a baby. This form of education reinforced heterosexual norms in society, and in my school there was never any mention of family structures that were different. Also, 'sex ed' surrounding sexual abuse or assult often centered around telling children that if they were touched innapropriately, this constituted an offence and they should report it. However, there was little mention of other forms of sexual assult, such as verbal abuse or controlling behaviour, and the perpetrator was most often male. This served to propagate the male as 'dominant,' and sexual abuse as something which occurred in the private realm. As I got older, sex education focused on abstinence, and I witnessed several presentations which painted a picture of youth who had sex too early as being abnormal or 'bad.' This seems to reinforce some kind of a hierarchy where the kids who are having sex are the 'bad kids' or those from the 'wrong side of the tracks' and the kids who aren't are 'good' and have been properly educated by their upper class parents. This also generally applies to girls, because girls who have sex early are labelled 'sluts' whereas if menI am of course, basing a lot of this on personal experience and what I witnessed in school.
Anyway, in this example the methods of sex education serve to reinforce the conditions of production (where what children are taught to normalize certain relationships while abnormalizing or 'othering' others, as well as normalizing social hierarchies of class).