Professor Greta LeFleur’s talk on sexuality and place of origin was another talk that once again opened my eyes to phenomenons that have always been in front of me and visible, but that I have never given much thought too. The part that I found most interesting was when she talked about how people, specifically women, are characterized based on where they are from and what they look like.
Carl Linnaeus’s designations and classification of people, which examined today would be classified as extremely racist, are still prevalent in much of pop culture. I decided to read more about Linnaeus and his classification of beings. He states that, “europaeus was, of course, ‘governed by laws’, americanus was governed ‘by customs’, asiaticus ‘by opinions’, and the African subspecies afer ‘by impulse’*.” Obviously, Carl Linnaeus, a white, European male would assert that “Europaeus” or Europeans were a people who were governed by laws rather than opinions, customs, or impulse. This seems to imply that this is a more dignified way of living and that only Europeans seemed to live in that dignified manner. This is reminiscent of much of the reasoning used by imperialist in their campaigns to “civilize” indigenous peoples.
While almost everyone can agree that Carl Linnaeus’s findings are very out of date and inherently false, the stereotypes that he created almost three hundred years ago are still being perpetuated today albeit in a much subtler manner. Women of certain races are shown to be more buttoned up and obedient than women of other races. Some women are often shown to be more modest than others while some are portrayed as overtly sexual. Much of this is based on the color of a person’s skin and where they or their family came from. This all relates back to the governing forces Linnaeus prescribes to each classification of people. As I said earlier in this blog post, this part of the talk was eye opening to me. The fact that so much of today’s society is still thinking in ways that we as a species thought three hundred years ago is such an odd realization to make yet not surprising.
On a lighter note, I also found it amusing, yet interesting that Professor LeFleur brought up the idea of “Cuffing Season.” Around the beginning of fall, social media is often flooded with posts and memes about the start of Cuffing Season in which people joke about the fact that this is when many people start relationships. It is interesting that just a simple change in temperature and climate leads to people feeling pressured to settle down with a partner and start a relationship. I don’t necessarily think that this is a bad thing but that it is an act of human nature to designate socially appropriate times to do a a certain thing. I also don’t necessarily think that there is any compelling reasoning for why this is the case, I just find it to be an interesting wrinkle of the human condition.
*David Notton and Chris Stringer
http://iczn.org/content/who-type-homo-sapiens