COP: Practical 1

This task was hard, I felt one hour wasn't enough time to do much of anything, and I had 45 minutes when I actually left LCA. I decided to head to Leeds Uni Student Union as I felt it was the best place to go in the travel radius I had available. I was looking to continue my study into a similar area to last year, last year being heteronormativity, so I knew I was looking for anything linked to heteronormative ideas, gender politics, etc. 

Can men not smell of grapefruit? What if the men want to smell of grapefruit? 

There were only two 'Happy Anniversary' cards available and they both had a man and a women on it, no gender neutral ones.

Toxic Masculinity? No. Hyper Masculinity? Yes? Not much wrong here to be honest.

The "best" things in my haul were NHS victim support leaflets. I picked up "Helping a Child after a Crime", "Domestic Violence" and two "Rape and Sexual Assault" leaflets, one for men and one for women. I was pleased to find that there was leaflets for both, and upon reading the one for men I was also glad to see how it was covered how men can be raped by men and women, and how the crimes have little to do with sexuality and if the victim got aroused or not. 

Although it , at the back does state "him or her" which is good, but I feel it would be suited putting it at the front too, such as with the male one, that women can rape women. Crimes where women assaulted by women is likely to be belittled, but can have the same effects on a victim as any case of assault. 

The one thing which is definitely missing from these leaflets is help for transgender people.

As one of the most likely sections of people to experience sexual violence, especially when some studies have shown that 50% of all trangender people have experienced sexual abuse/assault in their life, where is the section for them? I worried about what the protocol with these leaflets was, does a trans women pick up a leaflet marked "men" or "women"? The "men" leaflet is more likely to contain health information that might be important to her, but as a women how would she feel having to pick that leaflet up, especially after having something as traumatizing as sexual assault happen to her. Or worse have it given to her? (Same for a trans man but flipped) 

In the end I got a few useful things, I didn't really enjoy the task, and I certainly didn't have time to do any drawing, but I think I did ok gathering various things to do with my line of study.