Women Hunters, Part 1: An Ethnographic study

A few weeks ago (Jan 12), I posted the beginning of a sentence here as well as on my personal Facebook page. The sentence started: "Women Hunters..." The following are the responses that I got on FB. The picture is of me and my best friend Jodie who is also a hunter.

1. rock!
2. should bring me some meat...
3. Turn me on. (earned 1 like)
4. can climb my tree stand anytime !
5. Are awesome!
6. ...are probably not vegetarians (earned 1 like)
7. Get bigger animals than boys do. (earned 1 like)
8. SUCK!!!! Lmao. But I love you!!!!
9. are the same as men hunters
‎10. . . .are a better shot :-)
11. have pet squirrels.
12. aim to please
13. scare the hell out of me..because they can shoot well ;o

4 of the 13 comments are men (#2, #3, #4 and #13)
To my knowledge, only two are hunters (#1 and #4)
Two are my best friends (#1 and #7)
One is my sister (#9)
One is my pseudo brother (#13)

Things that I noticed:
~ None of the comments made by men are encouraging or positive (although #13 is far better than the others)
~ 2 out of the 4 comments made my men have sexual undertones
~ 2 of the 13 comments have the 'women are better than men' tone (#7 and #10)
~ 2 out of 13 hate hunting (#6 and #8)
~ My friends like exclamation points!!!!! =)

Questions:
~ WHY are there ANY comments that have a sexual undertone to them?? I would wager a guess that when I post the second half of this test (men hunters...), no one will make a sexual comment. But why not? Why is it ok to sexualize a woman that hunts but not a man?
~ Will as many people respond? (I will post the 'men hunters' this Thursday at 9:16am -same day of the week and time)
~ Why do my FB friends (I currently have 98 and usually keep it around 100), who know I am a hunter, still post comments like this?

And I would love to hear what you all think! I will have 2 more parts with this topic; one after I post the second half with the results and the last one to wrap it up.

Comments

Healthy Coyote coming through

I still have a few trail cameras out to see what the deer are up to. I have gotten pictures of the big buck that is around and most recently, I got these pictures. Normally, I wouldn't be too freaked out but now that we have a dog, it is a little unnerving. Add that this camera is about 50 feet from our lawn and less than 100 feet from our front door... I hope that this one is just passing through. (Sidenote: I put new batteries in this camera so the date and time are wrong BUT I walked in front of it so it would take my picture and I could figure out what the actual time and date were: 7am Saturday morning.)

Where are the women?

This week, my interview with Steve at The Maine Outdoorsman went live. Steve said yesterday 200 people hit his site viewing over 500 pages. That is a lot of people reading about little ole me and hunting. Why? When I think of women who are in the general public's eye and hunt, I can think of 2 - Country singer Miranda Lambert and Sarah Palin. Why only two? Why is the female hunter such a fascinating thing? (I should probably note that I do not have cable so any and all female hunters on the hunting stations are lost to me. I'll keep it to the general public because that's what I am familiar with.) People/media were fascinated by the fact that they could get footage of Palin and her gun, shooting (and gutting) animals but I feel like the nostalgia would be lost if they had the same footage of McCain. Lambert and her hubby Blake Shelton tweet photos of their kills, and comment on what/where they are hunting. I only know this because I follow both. That's it....

Utilizing technology to make you more aware

Staci and I were roaming around the woods on a piece of property that she knew. It was snowing and we were chasing deer tracks to see if we could find some early sheds. It was a perfect day to be out in the woods and we were relaxed and not really paying attention to where we were going. We knew the border of the property and we knew that if we walked long enough we would hit roads or the bog and find our way back. We got to a point where we thought we knew where we were but we were not sure. Staci got out her compass to take a waypoint to make sure we were going in the right direction to get back to the truck. I took out my phone and turned on OnX. Within seconds we knew where we were, where the property borders were in relation to us and we could watch the dot (that represented us) on the map move as we walked out of the woods and got closer to the truck. In another adventure, my son and I headed out on a shed hunting mission. When we got into the woods, I turned on the trac...

and a strong cup of coffee

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