Equal rights for women are suppressed by patriarchy. “Practicing” by Marie Howe and “Experience” by Carrie Fountain explore womanhood through the lenses of feminism in response to patriarchy. “Practicing” presents the speaker’s first experience towards becoming a woman when she explores her sexuality with other pre-mature girls while “Experience” unfolds the speaker’s ambiguity towards entering womanhood in comparison to the initiation of manhood.
Social constructions teach young girls to feel ashamed and fearful of homosexuality. In “Practice”, the speaker expresses her guilt after experiencing her first sexual encounter involving not only a girl, but multiple girls. Instead of recalling her first moments with passion and warmth, the speaker …show more content…
With the gender roles, they are disciplined to possess certain characteristics such as power, strength, emotionlessness and dominant in order to internally define themselves as men. Using a man’s power to illustrate and represent their dominance over women, the first scene describes the speaker and another girl being “driven out to the desert to be the only girls there.” By explicitly stating how two women did not go there willingly, but were taken by men, the speaker manipulates the word choice, indicating an unpleasant and disinterested tone. The tone is created in order to display how society views men as natural born leaders while women are followers. In addition, the word “only” is a representation that emphasizes the ratio of men and women where the men completely outnumber the girls. This male supremacy explicitly presents the advantages men have over women since their power is more apparent due to social norms because women are perceived as weak, emotional, sensitive, and …show more content…
In “Experience”, the men are depicted as violent, drunk, and sloppy while women are shown as observant, analytical, and composed. In “Experience”, the woman acts like lady by not participating with the boys’ drinking and violence. On the contrary, if the girls had participated, they would be severely punished and publicly shamed for not acting like a lady while the men did whatever they want and could still be excused for their actions. This is based on the belief that boys will be boys. Alcohol is so subtly mentioned in “Experience” in order to focus on how women are more self-critical due to society’s high expectations that are set for women to be lady-like. Under those circumstances, they blame themselves for not being able to define their womanhood. While they observe a group of men defining their manhood by bringing “strict order to the evening”, the women in the poem cannot fathom to what internally defines them as a women since they do not have a certain routine in order to become a
Social constructions teach young girls to feel ashamed and fearful of homosexuality. In “Practice”, the speaker expresses her guilt after experiencing her first sexual encounter involving not only a girl, but multiple girls. Instead of recalling her first moments with passion and warmth, the speaker …show more content…
With the gender roles, they are disciplined to possess certain characteristics such as power, strength, emotionlessness and dominant in order to internally define themselves as men. Using a man’s power to illustrate and represent their dominance over women, the first scene describes the speaker and another girl being “driven out to the desert to be the only girls there.” By explicitly stating how two women did not go there willingly, but were taken by men, the speaker manipulates the word choice, indicating an unpleasant and disinterested tone. The tone is created in order to display how society views men as natural born leaders while women are followers. In addition, the word “only” is a representation that emphasizes the ratio of men and women where the men completely outnumber the girls. This male supremacy explicitly presents the advantages men have over women since their power is more apparent due to social norms because women are perceived as weak, emotional, sensitive, and …show more content…
In “Experience”, the men are depicted as violent, drunk, and sloppy while women are shown as observant, analytical, and composed. In “Experience”, the woman acts like lady by not participating with the boys’ drinking and violence. On the contrary, if the girls had participated, they would be severely punished and publicly shamed for not acting like a lady while the men did whatever they want and could still be excused for their actions. This is based on the belief that boys will be boys. Alcohol is so subtly mentioned in “Experience” in order to focus on how women are more self-critical due to society’s high expectations that are set for women to be lady-like. Under those circumstances, they blame themselves for not being able to define their womanhood. While they observe a group of men defining their manhood by bringing “strict order to the evening”, the women in the poem cannot fathom to what internally defines them as a women since they do not have a certain routine in order to become a