Scenarios to Probe into Our Notions of Power, Social Status and Sexuality

  • Objective: To challenge participants on how they think about power, social status, sexuality and discrimination.
  • Materials/Preparation: —
  • Participants: To challenge participants on how they think about power, social status, sexuality and discrimination.

Steps

Participants are presented with the following scenario:

Within a few moments a powerful bomb will explode. There is room for only six people to be saved in an atomic shelter before the bomb goes off, but there are ten people who want to come inside. Your task is to choose the six who – in your opinion – should be allowed in. These six people will be responsible for rebuilding the world after the bomb. The ten people include:

  • Police officer with a gun
  • 16-year-old mentally disabled girl
  • Olympic athlete, 19 years old, homosexual
  • Female pop singer, 21 years old, very beautiful
  • 50-year-old black woman, religious leader
  • Peasant woman, pregnant for the first time
  • Philosopher, 70-year-old grandfather
  • Biochemist (male) 35 years old, in a wheelchair
  • Communist (male), specialist in medical sciences
  • ‘Retired’ prostitute, 40 years old

Following the selection of people and discussion around it, participants are asked:

  • What does this exercise reveal about status? Discrimination? Stereotypes? The relative value to society of certain people? Power? Privilege?
  • How did considerations about reproduction (fertility, suitability for reproduction, etc.) affect choices?
  • Do we have enough information to make assumptions and judgments about the ten candidates?
  • What are some qualities of women that give some women more status or power over other women? What are some qualities of men that give some men more status or power over other men?
  • If the retired sex worker could choose the six people, who do you think she would choose?
  • Which forms of power do we manipulate in our own lives? ➤ How did it feel to have the power to decide who was important enough to survive and who should die?
  • How are social status and power connected? Is low status a result of little power, or is little power a result of low status? Where does social power come from?
  • Why do groups of lower social status often remain ‘invisible’?
  • How does power affect your relationships? Do men and women share equal power in sexual relationships? How does power affect the way men and women search for a life partner? The way men and women communicate?
  • How do you negotiate power in your relationships? Is it something you are conscious of?
  • In general, men have greater decision-making power and control in sexual interactions. How does this translate in terms of attitudes and behavior? What does this mean for safer sex? Sexual violence? Sexual pleasure?

Variation

In a similar exercise outlined in the Social Analysis and Action Toolkit, the facilitator reads the following scenario to participants:

A woman goes to buy her vegetables every day from the market across the river, and then comes back home to her husband. One day she crosses the river to get her vegetables and falls in love with another person. After she meets this person, she still goes to the market every day, and every day returns to her husband.

One day there is a massive thunderstorm that has swollen the river and she cannot return across the river to get home her usual way, stepping across the rocks. It is getting dark. She has three options:

  • Swim across the swirling, fast river, but she will almost certainly die.
  • There is a boatman who can take her across the river, but he will only do it if she has sex with him first.
  • She can walk the long way through the forest but there is a man, an un-convicted rapist, living there and he may rape her.

The facilitator challenges participants, in groups, to decide what they would do if they were the woman and try to convince others to take their position. Some interesting questions raised from CARE Vietnam’s experiences with this exercise include:

  • Based on the description of the woman, what assumptions have participants made about her? (i.e. in Vietnam participants assumed the person that she loved was a man, and that she was in a sexual relationship with him).
  • How would the woman be perceived differently if she chose option 2 versus option 3?
  • How would the scenario change if the story involved a man who needed to cross the river instead of a woman?
  • How would the scenario change if the woman were your wife? Your daughter? What does this say about the significance of women’s sexuality?

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