Film review #1 Middle Sexes (correction)

Justin Orndorff

SOC 360

Film review #1

Middle Sexes

1. The thesis of “Middle Sexes” is how society perceives and determines the transgender life style.  Transgender has nothing to do with being gay or straight, it’s about how a person or transgender person wants to live their life.  Biology creates sexual diversity.  Biology gives birth to children born everyday with both sexual organs.  As I watched Middle Sexes it bothered me when they described how an Army soldier was beaten to death because he was dating transgender women.  
2.  Transgender is described as a transsexual or transvestite who identifies with or expresses a gender identity that differs from the one which corresponds to the person's sex at birth. (1)  The film Middle Sexes discusses transgender as the brain not developing along with the sex organs.  The main arguments that support the thesis would be the death of the soldier, the two young men that killed Gwen and the way young Noah is treated by peers. Gwen was beaten, strangled and her head smashed in so bad that her face was undeniable. Society perceives transgender as deviant.  Noah the young boy who lives in the Midwest and is very feminine and enjoys playing with dolls and wearing girl’s clothes is ridiculed as and asked repeatedly if he is a boy or a girl or gay or straight.  Even Noah’s dad states “I hope when his hormones kick in that he’ll change and start acting more like a young boy should.”  (1) (2)
3. This film relates significantly to this course by just the subject of transgender.  Transgender itself is seen as deviant or a deviant lifestyle hence the course entitled Social Deviance.  But being born with both sexes termed “Intersex” isn’t deemed as deviant as being transgender because it’s more biological related and something that is considered ascribed meaning you were born this way while transgender is something achieved meaning it’s a personal choice seen as a more deviant act in societies eyes.   
4. What I found most convincing of the film Middle Sexes was the devotion of the Hindu women who sacrificed her male genital organs.  This Hindu women’s mother, father, and family was beaten and thrown out of her home because her parents believed that her transition would bring shame upon their family.  This Hindu women graduated College but had only two choices prostitution or begging and she choose prostitution over begging.  That’s how important it was to this Hindu woman to be who she knew she had to be, a transgender.  This entailed losing her family and a life of prostitution.     
5. What I found least convincing of the film Middle Sexes were the laws set by the British government in pre-colonial times of life in prison with homosexual acts with a transgender person.  In a way it demonstrates just how far society has come since those times.
6. As I watched Middle Sexes I reflected on the notion why would a transgender woman get breast augmentation, Adams apple augmentation, facial reconstruction, and other body modifications but keep their male penis?  Why not get the complete sex change surgery and have the penis removed?  I would enjoy finding empirical data on this subject, and interviewing transgenders who have not fully committed to the full sex change operation.

(1)   http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/transgender Feb 2012

(2)   Thio, Alex, Thomas C. Calhoun, and Addrain Conyers. Readings in Deviant Behavior. 6th ed. Boston: Pearson Education, 2010. Print.

.

Film Review "Live Nude Girls"

Justin Orndorff

Soc 360

Film Review “Live Nude Girls”

            This film documentary “Live Nude Girls” begins by discussing how stripping or sex work can help many young women work their way through college or start small businesses.  The women in the film describe it as a “sexual service.”  The documentary focuses on a strip-club located in Seattle Washington called the “Lusty Lady.”  The women explain that you can make up to twenty dollars per hour working at the “Lusty lady.”  The women then explain how the management at the Lusty Lady discriminates against them buy firing and re-hiring them because their overweight or not pretty enough all just to lower their working wage.  So basically when the girls start to earn top wage management looks for any reason to fire them so they don’t have to pay them top dollar wage.  Management would also only schedule one women of color per shift to have predominantly white girls working at any one given time. 

            One of the main problems at the Lusty Lady was that there was one way glass so the customer could see the stripper but the stripper couldn’t see the client.  The client would come in and put money in and the client could watch the stripper dance but the stripper couldn’t see what the client was doing.  This caused problems.  The girls were turning up on porno videos on the internet.  Management didn’t do anything about the one way mirrors for the strippers.  This in turn caused the strippers to try and start their own union.

            The strip-clubs and the Lusty lady wanted to remain a union free workplace.  Most strip-clubs only hired girls or strippers as individual contractors this enabled the strip-clubs to remain a union-free workplace.  The stripper hired a lawyer named Stephanie to represent them and help them start a union after being turned down by many lawyers. 

            To prevent to the strippers from forming a union they used reverse therapy by increasing the strippers pay, but they were still unwilling to give the strippers health insurance.  Many of the managers tried to “pimp-out” the strippers as prostitutes to make more money. 

           The main stripper in the film was a lesbian and had a famous mother that was a doctor and an advocate for gay rights.  So the main stripper could tell her mother that she was gay but couldn’t tell her that she was a stripper.  Her mother could accept the fact that she was gay but couldn’t accept the fact that she was a stripper.  Strange I know but as a father myself I can understand her opinion. 

            Society views most strippers as lower-class and that they have to strip because it’s their only option in life and that most strippers are prostitutes.  I thought this documentary depicted the life of “sex workers” or strippers especially good.  The documentary demonstrated that all levels of class have to deal with the issues these strippers were going through by using the main strippers mother “Dr. Wallis” as an example.  The documentary did this when the main stripper told her mother “Dr. Wallis” that she was a stripper at the 1997 prostitution conference. And Dr. Wallis replied to her daughter that “it’s better to get money using your mind rather than your body.”  Dr. Wallis was a hypocrite.  How could she accept that her daughter was a lesbian but not a stripper?  At the end of the conference Dr. Wallis told her daughter that she wasn’t proud of her even though she was there to advocate for the “sex workers.”