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The Reflection Letter
Coming from high school, teachers do not prepare you for what college classes are going to be like. The teachers just tell you that class will be hard and you will be writing a lot of essays, so begin to like writing because you will be doing a lot of it. What they do not tell you is how understanding and creative college teachers are with their prompts and writing assignments. When I came into college I was expecting to be a horrible writing and fail all of my essays that I had to write. As you can see I was pretty scared for college English classes because I had only heard about the worst of them and no one had told me about all the qualities it helps you with. Going through high school was hard enough, but there was no way I would make it in college English classes but something changed this year and now I am more confident than ever in my writing ability.
When I came out of high school I was a “By the Books” writer. I rarely ventured out of my comfort zone and just tried to pass every essay that I wrote. I did not try to expand my mind or look deeper into text because I thought I would embarrass myself if I tried too hard and received a bad grade. My senior year in high school I had a teacher that was not helpful in advise for writing essays. He did not give us prompts that ask for our opinion or input but just asked for information about a novel or about an event. So I thought that this was how college was going to be, just monotonous writing where you just recite information on a page and turn it in. After all I could not go into depth about a novel or a short story because I have never done that before. I was always taught that an essay had to have five paragraphs, one introduction, three body paragraphs, and a conclusion. This was how it was suppose to be written and there was no other way to write an essay. And then I came into Professor Barnhart’s class and my whole stereotype about writing disappeared.
When I walked into the first day of class I thought to myself there is no way that I can do all these essays that he is talking about and how am I ever going to pass this class. I was scared walking into that class because it was my first college English class and I did not know what to expect. The first thing I knew was going to be a challenge for me was putting down my ideas onto paper. I can think and going into depth about novels and texts before but it has always been difficult to put my ideas down on paper. To overcome this difficulty I began to take a lot of notes in class and write down everything I was thinking about during the lecture and how it came into my mind. This helped me a lot when it came time to write about a certain subject I could go back to the notes that I had written and refer back to what I had been thinking of when I was writing it down and that was a big help for me. Another problem that I faced was expanding my mind so instead of just reciting information down onto a page and turning it in, I would go into depth and really get down to the main points of arguments and symbols. Professor Barnhart helped me into expanding my mind and writing from the heart instead of just putting down information by giving us prompts that we are passionate about and we can really have fun writing about. Even though I had a great year and expanded many aspects of my writing techniques there are still a few things that I must work on in the upcoming classes. One thing that I still need to work on is my word choice and making my essay flow easier so they are not so choppy. I understand that vocabulary is a hard thing to expand but I am currently trying to work on it by putting better words in place of small and easy words. I still need to work on my transitions from one paragraph to another and work on sentence structure and where each sentence should go. I am still learning each and every day, but this year has really helped me became not only a better writer but a more creative writer as well.
Coming from high school, teachers do not prepare you for what college classes are going to be like. The teachers just tell you that class will be hard and you will be writing a lot of essays, so begin to like writing because you will be doing a lot of it. What they do not tell you is how understanding and creative college teachers are with their prompts and writing assignments. When I came into college I was expecting to be a horrible writing and fail all of my essays that I had to write. As you can see I was pretty scared for college English classes because I had only heard about the worst of them and no one had told me about all the qualities it helps you with. Going through high school was hard enough, but there was no way I would make it in college English classes but something changed this year and now I am more confident than ever in my writing ability.
When I came out of high school I was a “By the Books” writer. I rarely ventured out of my comfort zone and just tried to pass every essay that I wrote. I did not try to expand my mind or look deeper into text because I thought I would embarrass myself if I tried too hard and received a bad grade. My senior year in high school I had a teacher that was not helpful in advise for writing essays. He did not give us prompts that ask for our opinion or input but just asked for information about a novel or about an event. So I thought that this was how college was going to be, just monotonous writing where you just recite information on a page and turn it in. After all I could not go into depth about a novel or a short story because I have never done that before. I was always taught that an essay had to have five paragraphs, one introduction, three body paragraphs, and a conclusion. This was how it was suppose to be written and there was no other way to write an essay. And then I came into Professor Barnhart’s class and my whole stereotype about writing disappeared.
When I walked into the first day of class I thought to myself there is no way that I can do all these essays that he is talking about and how am I ever going to pass this class. I was scared walking into that class because it was my first college English class and I did not know what to expect. The first thing I knew was going to be a challenge for me was putting down my ideas onto paper. I can think and going into depth about novels and texts before but it has always been difficult to put my ideas down on paper. To overcome this difficulty I began to take a lot of notes in class and write down everything I was thinking about during the lecture and how it came into my mind. This helped me a lot when it came time to write about a certain subject I could go back to the notes that I had written and refer back to what I had been thinking of when I was writing it down and that was a big help for me. Another problem that I faced was expanding my mind so instead of just reciting information down onto a page and turning it in, I would go into depth and really get down to the main points of arguments and symbols. Professor Barnhart helped me into expanding my mind and writing from the heart instead of just putting down information by giving us prompts that we are passionate about and we can really have fun writing about. Even though I had a great year and expanded many aspects of my writing techniques there are still a few things that I must work on in the upcoming classes. One thing that I still need to work on is my word choice and making my essay flow easier so they are not so choppy. I understand that vocabulary is a hard thing to expand but I am currently trying to work on it by putting better words in place of small and easy words. I still need to work on my transitions from one paragraph to another and work on sentence structure and where each sentence should go. I am still learning each and every day, but this year has really helped me became not only a better writer but a more creative writer as well.
Carrying
the Fire Essay #3
In a world full of death, destruction, and cannibalism what keeps a man to go on and still fight through everything. The love for one’s son can drive a man to incredible lengths. In the novel, The Road by Cormac McCarthy, there is a father and a son who are trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic society. They experience many difficult and painful situations while trying to accomplish their goal, survive. The love between this father-son team is unbreakable, so much that they hardly leave each other side and will die for each other if it comes down to it. In this new world there are things that are done that are controversial, like the act of cannibalism and hunting humans. This tears the basic understanding of a society down and puts many questions into what it means to be human. The acts committed in this book can be called monstrous but not that surprising if you really think about it. People that are stranded with no food and water have done many disputed actions but all in the name of survival. Is eating a human in order to survive acceptable or is it monstrous? Throughout the book there are many different forms of cannibalism and it will make you question whether you would do what is necessary to survive. The man and the boy encounter many different threats and challenges while journeying through the road, the road is their only chance of survival which causes them and others to make decisions that could ultimately lead to the downfall of human behavior and the beginning of monstrous actions.
When in despair we are judge by our actions and how we carry ourselves thorough these hard times. When the man was sick he remembered a memory from his past, “Watching while they opened up the rocky hillside ground with pick and mattock and brought to light a great bolus of serpents perhaps a hundred in number… The men poured gasoline on them and burned them alive, having no remedy for evil but only for the image of it as they conceived it to be” (McCarthy 188). The man when he was no older then the boy’s age now he went into the woods and burnt them. In this world people are being eaten and killing each other not because they are trying to be evil or be a monster but in order to survive and keep living. When the man and the boy come back to the camp and find that all their supplies are gone they immediately panic and try to find the person who did it. When they finally catch up to the man they find him with all the supplies and after a little hesitation agrees to give them back. But this is not enough for the man so the man orders the thief to take off all his clothes and give them to him. He said that he left them with nothing and that’s how he will leave him. The man is not doing this action out of evil but for the image that is created by it. The thief is only trying to survive and came up on a camp ground that ha supplies so he took them. The man is so angry that he cannot think straight and takes the man’s only chance of survival. But with the boy innocence when they get back to the road they leave the clothes on the road for the thief to pick back up. The road symbolizes hope and they left these clothes on the road for someone to pick up. Even though we never know if the thief ever finds his clothes, but what we do know that someone will find the clothes and have a little more hope of survival. When the man took the clothes away from the man it took away all his hope of surviving and almost certain killing him, but he had a change of heart from his monstrous survival instincts to his human nature of caring and left the clothes on the road for him or someone else to find and survive.
One of the worst acts a human can commit in almost every society ever known is the act of cannibalism. This is the very worst of humans when they are so desperate for food that they will eat one of their fellow humans. Some would argue that because there is no laws or supervision that the very worst of human nature to run wild and be free. In the books there are different types of cannibalism that happens. The first is when there are people on the road who are looking for dead people to eat. That are not going around and killing people but are just picking up dead bodies off the ground. This is the least extreme situation that deals with cannibalism. They are doing what they need to do in order to survive and this is very understandable in a situation such as the world they are in. The second time they deal with cannibalism is when they go into a house and open a hatch and found, “Huddled against the back wall were naked people, male and female, all trying to hide, shielding their faces with their hands. On the mattress lay a man with his legs gone to the hip and the stump of them blackened and burnt” (McCarthy 110). This is what happens when there are no laws governing over people and they are allowed to run wild. These people are just normal people trying to survive while they make their journeys on the road. While the road is a sign of life and a chance of survival, there is also death and danger on the road as well. These people were not as skilled as the man and the boy are in survival and elusiveness so they are captured while trying to stay alive. This is different from the other group of scavengers because these people are going around and actively hunting humans and keeping them alive in order to eat them instead of finding bodies that are already dead to eat. This is the difference between monstrosity and humans in the act cannibalism. While some people go around and try to find food, they are not going and capturing live people in order to eat but eating what they can find. This is human behavior and acceptable in this world of death and destruction. But going around and finding people just to capture and eat is monstrous and is the very worse of human behavior. The last insistence of cannibalism is when they find a group of three people on the road. It is one pregnant woman and two other men walking on the road. When they see the boy and man the run for the hills and we never see them again. Later in the novel they are in the woods and come upon this campfire and, “What the boy had seen was a charred human infant headless and gutted and blackening on the spit” (McCarthy 198). Even though it is not said we can interpret that the baby is from the pregnant lady and two other men and they wanted to eat the baby because they did not have any food. This is the ultimate downfall of a society, when people start eating their own offspring it usually leads to the extinction of a species. But the baby was not eaten. What probably happen was that they were so mortified but what they had just done that they couldn’t bring themselves to eat their own child. This is a very hard decision to make as a human. In order to raise a baby it needs a lot of care and food, something that cannot be provided in this world so most likely the baby would not have survive anyways. The people are nowhere to be found leading to that they probably left and headed for the road again. This road offers a new beginning and a new start from what they had just done. In order to survive they must keep moving and hopefully find more food along the road and just keep trying to survive.
While journeying along the road the man and the boy experience many different situation that put the boy and the man to the test, but they know that the only way of survival is to keep moving on the road and dealing with whatever may come up. Throughout the book the boy and the man talk about carrying the fire. There is no fire that they are carrying but the fire that is in both of them. The fire is the human desire to keep surviving and hoping something better will come along. Whenever the boy wants to give up the father reminds him to keep going and never quit. Right before the man dies, he tells the boy to keep carrying the fire. This is the father telling his son to not give up and to keep hope in this world of hopelessness. Throughout the book there are people who have lost the fire and are ok with dying. This is worse thing that could happen to someone. The will to die is greater than the will to live. And when someone loses that will to survive they are not human anymore and become a monster because they are ok with whatever happens to them and the human race.
In a world full of death, destruction, and cannibalism what keeps a man to go on and still fight through everything. The love for one’s son can drive a man to incredible lengths. In the novel, The Road by Cormac McCarthy, there is a father and a son who are trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic society. They experience many difficult and painful situations while trying to accomplish their goal, survive. The love between this father-son team is unbreakable, so much that they hardly leave each other side and will die for each other if it comes down to it. In this new world there are things that are done that are controversial, like the act of cannibalism and hunting humans. This tears the basic understanding of a society down and puts many questions into what it means to be human. The acts committed in this book can be called monstrous but not that surprising if you really think about it. People that are stranded with no food and water have done many disputed actions but all in the name of survival. Is eating a human in order to survive acceptable or is it monstrous? Throughout the book there are many different forms of cannibalism and it will make you question whether you would do what is necessary to survive. The man and the boy encounter many different threats and challenges while journeying through the road, the road is their only chance of survival which causes them and others to make decisions that could ultimately lead to the downfall of human behavior and the beginning of monstrous actions.
When in despair we are judge by our actions and how we carry ourselves thorough these hard times. When the man was sick he remembered a memory from his past, “Watching while they opened up the rocky hillside ground with pick and mattock and brought to light a great bolus of serpents perhaps a hundred in number… The men poured gasoline on them and burned them alive, having no remedy for evil but only for the image of it as they conceived it to be” (McCarthy 188). The man when he was no older then the boy’s age now he went into the woods and burnt them. In this world people are being eaten and killing each other not because they are trying to be evil or be a monster but in order to survive and keep living. When the man and the boy come back to the camp and find that all their supplies are gone they immediately panic and try to find the person who did it. When they finally catch up to the man they find him with all the supplies and after a little hesitation agrees to give them back. But this is not enough for the man so the man orders the thief to take off all his clothes and give them to him. He said that he left them with nothing and that’s how he will leave him. The man is not doing this action out of evil but for the image that is created by it. The thief is only trying to survive and came up on a camp ground that ha supplies so he took them. The man is so angry that he cannot think straight and takes the man’s only chance of survival. But with the boy innocence when they get back to the road they leave the clothes on the road for the thief to pick back up. The road symbolizes hope and they left these clothes on the road for someone to pick up. Even though we never know if the thief ever finds his clothes, but what we do know that someone will find the clothes and have a little more hope of survival. When the man took the clothes away from the man it took away all his hope of surviving and almost certain killing him, but he had a change of heart from his monstrous survival instincts to his human nature of caring and left the clothes on the road for him or someone else to find and survive.
One of the worst acts a human can commit in almost every society ever known is the act of cannibalism. This is the very worst of humans when they are so desperate for food that they will eat one of their fellow humans. Some would argue that because there is no laws or supervision that the very worst of human nature to run wild and be free. In the books there are different types of cannibalism that happens. The first is when there are people on the road who are looking for dead people to eat. That are not going around and killing people but are just picking up dead bodies off the ground. This is the least extreme situation that deals with cannibalism. They are doing what they need to do in order to survive and this is very understandable in a situation such as the world they are in. The second time they deal with cannibalism is when they go into a house and open a hatch and found, “Huddled against the back wall were naked people, male and female, all trying to hide, shielding their faces with their hands. On the mattress lay a man with his legs gone to the hip and the stump of them blackened and burnt” (McCarthy 110). This is what happens when there are no laws governing over people and they are allowed to run wild. These people are just normal people trying to survive while they make their journeys on the road. While the road is a sign of life and a chance of survival, there is also death and danger on the road as well. These people were not as skilled as the man and the boy are in survival and elusiveness so they are captured while trying to stay alive. This is different from the other group of scavengers because these people are going around and actively hunting humans and keeping them alive in order to eat them instead of finding bodies that are already dead to eat. This is the difference between monstrosity and humans in the act cannibalism. While some people go around and try to find food, they are not going and capturing live people in order to eat but eating what they can find. This is human behavior and acceptable in this world of death and destruction. But going around and finding people just to capture and eat is monstrous and is the very worse of human behavior. The last insistence of cannibalism is when they find a group of three people on the road. It is one pregnant woman and two other men walking on the road. When they see the boy and man the run for the hills and we never see them again. Later in the novel they are in the woods and come upon this campfire and, “What the boy had seen was a charred human infant headless and gutted and blackening on the spit” (McCarthy 198). Even though it is not said we can interpret that the baby is from the pregnant lady and two other men and they wanted to eat the baby because they did not have any food. This is the ultimate downfall of a society, when people start eating their own offspring it usually leads to the extinction of a species. But the baby was not eaten. What probably happen was that they were so mortified but what they had just done that they couldn’t bring themselves to eat their own child. This is a very hard decision to make as a human. In order to raise a baby it needs a lot of care and food, something that cannot be provided in this world so most likely the baby would not have survive anyways. The people are nowhere to be found leading to that they probably left and headed for the road again. This road offers a new beginning and a new start from what they had just done. In order to survive they must keep moving and hopefully find more food along the road and just keep trying to survive.
While journeying along the road the man and the boy experience many different situation that put the boy and the man to the test, but they know that the only way of survival is to keep moving on the road and dealing with whatever may come up. Throughout the book the boy and the man talk about carrying the fire. There is no fire that they are carrying but the fire that is in both of them. The fire is the human desire to keep surviving and hoping something better will come along. Whenever the boy wants to give up the father reminds him to keep going and never quit. Right before the man dies, he tells the boy to keep carrying the fire. This is the father telling his son to not give up and to keep hope in this world of hopelessness. Throughout the book there are people who have lost the fire and are ok with dying. This is worse thing that could happen to someone. The will to die is greater than the will to live. And when someone loses that will to survive they are not human anymore and become a monster because they are ok with whatever happens to them and the human race.
Media’s
Portrayal of Men Essay #2
In a culture that values men’s power, the media has changed the values of a culture over the last ten years. Before the media portrayed men in a role of power, where their looks did not matter. But over the last ten years people have put more emphasis on how the man looks. In television now it is hard for a non-good looking guy to get started in this business. This is because the United States only wants to judge a person by their looks and not by the content of their character. Advertisements have been a big contributor toward this in their way of portraying men and the successful man. In their commercials, in order to be successful men need to have good facial structure, muscular bodies, and a lot of women hanging all over them. This translates to real people to think in order to be successful they need to look like that and have women like that. It has high schools were you don’t fit the body mold of the “high school kids” they show on television, and then you are made fun of and constantly ridiculed to try to change your body type. The media’s portrayal of men has caused an unreal and unjust image of how men are supposed to look in society by manipulating the media and challenging their looks in the real world, but with new television shows today there is a chance to change the identity crisis we are dealing with.
In today’s society the media has so much influence over the people it is boarder line scary. They control what is cool and what is not by what they display in the world. Every commercial you see on the television you find muscular men with good facial qualities. While kids watch these they automatically believe that these people are the normal and this is what everyone is supposed to look like. But the only problem with this is that these are not what the average human looks like. The media puts these unreal pictures of guys into our heads and then tells us that this is what people look like. In this axe advertisement, like most of theirs, it pictures a man with the axe shower gel with two women all over him. And in big letter it has the phase, “Lose the Flakes, Get the Girls” on it. What this picture is saying is that in order to have the girls chase you; you need to use their product. This advertisement uses the insecurity of teenagers that are looking to have women attracted to him and if they use this axe product then he will not have problems finding women, because they will chase after him. But what the media is mostly selling in this picture is the sexual interest that it causes. Having two women half naked hanging on this guy causes teenagers to think that this could be them. They what men to think that in order to get women as easily as this guy they need to buy their product. There has been more pressure put on men to look good and muscular than ever before. In a commercial by axe called “When Angel’s Fall” it confirms the fact that the media uses women to judge men success. The commercial starts out in a town and all of a sudden a bunch of girls start to fall from the sky. When you see the girls you see they have wings and halos around their heads. You can assume that these girls are Angels that have fallen from the sky. They all gather towards this one guy and at the end of the commercial they take off their halos and throw them to the ground breaking them. The message in this commercial is that if you put this body spray on, even the best and nicest girls will turn bad for you and find you attractive. This is another incident where the media uses women to measure success for men. Also they use sexual interest in order to persuade the guys that they would want to this use this spray by making all the Angels really attractive. And if you buy this spray, you might not be able to have Angels fall for you, but you will have attractive women wanting you. With this constant portrayal of men in the media, it has a direct correlation to how men in real life view themselves and how they try to be like these men.
Even in real life men are under constant pressure to look attractive and have ladies be all over them. When the media puts this image into television and advertisements then people see this and have an unreal image of what they are supposed to look like. Regular men around the world are now being judge by how attractive they are compared to these advertisements. In Mirror on America, by Joan T. Mims and Elizabeth M. Nollen there is an articles written by Dan Barden where he explains how his nose felt to when he, “Had walked around for twenty years with a sponge of meat above my mouth, but I was terrified of a perfect nose” (Barden 182). He had felt bad about his nose for a long time and felt inadequate with other people because his nose had stood out. This could be because he was used to seeing perfect noses everywhere he went and he finally wanted to have a “normal” nose. In order to be viewed as attractive in today’s culture, men need to make themselves look like these men in commercials and advertisements. In many advertisements show these men that are attractive and women that are idolize them. So in order to have women notice them, they have to make themselves look like these unrealistic people in commercials. This makes men feel inadequate and have to change their bodies in order to be viewed as attractive. In Mirror on America, Barden explains how he felt when he had just got his nose job done and, “ As I recovered, I wondered, floating in the Vicodin clouds, whether I had betrayed some cosmic rule by changing my flesh” (Barden 182). This is something new for guys, because normally guys are not the ones having surgery done to them but in order to keep up with the media’s idea of attractiveness more and more guys are having surgery done. This is not a problem because people should have the right to be happy in their skin and do whatever they want to their body. But it is not ok for the media to decide what is attractive and what is not attractive. With the media now they emphasize looks over the personality of someone. Instead of judging a man on their actions, men are constantly judged on their looks in the main stream media. They are telling us this by their many commercial where men are getting ladies, and these men all look the same with no diversity to them. They are all muscular guys with good hair and nice facial structures, while the man who is not muscular and as good looking as him never gets the girl and is there for comic relief. The media puts unreal regulation on what good looking is supposed to look like.
With all this negative media attention towards men’s looks it is hard to imagine how this problem could be fixed. But it can be fixed by the same people who are putting this image out into the public. The media has such a powerful influence over people today that it could be the solution to the identity crisis. In a Forbes article by Meghan Casserly, she explains how the media depicts men and a perspective on how males should be portrayed in media today, “Turns that in the hundreds of TV shows, movies and commercials targeting men on the airwaves, male viewers are seeing too many “skirt-chasers,” “metro-sexuals” and “macho-men” and not enough characters depicting the kind of guys they really are. Just what kind of guy is that? Good-hearted, hard-working and self-sacrificing men who are just trying to take care of their friends and families” (Casserly 2). Casserly argues that in order to reverse the bad attention that males have been getting in T.V. shows and movies is to offer up a different kind of man and idolize him. She believes that in order make men feel more realistic is the media, they need to show men for who they truly are. Those in commercial and movies we should be investing in more male role models that do not fit the mold of men in the media, but fit what men look like and act like in the real world. This will not be an easy task but in order to stop this media manipulation on how men are supposed to look like, it is up to us to tell them that we want more realistic people in commercial, movies and T.V. shows.
The media has portrayed an unjustified image of how men are supposed to look in today’s society. They use their advertisement powers and commercials to tell people what the image of a good looking guy is. They use women to show how successful men are and if a man is good looking then they will have women all over them as well. These men in the media are muscular and all have nice facial construction where if you do not fit in this category then you are deemed “ugly”. In order to change this media influence we need to demand that there should be more realistic role models in the media. By changing the way we view what successful is, from men who get girls, have nice bodies, and have a lot of money, to what is really important which is caring, loving and being there for their families. In order to change our identity crisis, we need to change our role models.
In a culture that values men’s power, the media has changed the values of a culture over the last ten years. Before the media portrayed men in a role of power, where their looks did not matter. But over the last ten years people have put more emphasis on how the man looks. In television now it is hard for a non-good looking guy to get started in this business. This is because the United States only wants to judge a person by their looks and not by the content of their character. Advertisements have been a big contributor toward this in their way of portraying men and the successful man. In their commercials, in order to be successful men need to have good facial structure, muscular bodies, and a lot of women hanging all over them. This translates to real people to think in order to be successful they need to look like that and have women like that. It has high schools were you don’t fit the body mold of the “high school kids” they show on television, and then you are made fun of and constantly ridiculed to try to change your body type. The media’s portrayal of men has caused an unreal and unjust image of how men are supposed to look in society by manipulating the media and challenging their looks in the real world, but with new television shows today there is a chance to change the identity crisis we are dealing with.
In today’s society the media has so much influence over the people it is boarder line scary. They control what is cool and what is not by what they display in the world. Every commercial you see on the television you find muscular men with good facial qualities. While kids watch these they automatically believe that these people are the normal and this is what everyone is supposed to look like. But the only problem with this is that these are not what the average human looks like. The media puts these unreal pictures of guys into our heads and then tells us that this is what people look like. In this axe advertisement, like most of theirs, it pictures a man with the axe shower gel with two women all over him. And in big letter it has the phase, “Lose the Flakes, Get the Girls” on it. What this picture is saying is that in order to have the girls chase you; you need to use their product. This advertisement uses the insecurity of teenagers that are looking to have women attracted to him and if they use this axe product then he will not have problems finding women, because they will chase after him. But what the media is mostly selling in this picture is the sexual interest that it causes. Having two women half naked hanging on this guy causes teenagers to think that this could be them. They what men to think that in order to get women as easily as this guy they need to buy their product. There has been more pressure put on men to look good and muscular than ever before. In a commercial by axe called “When Angel’s Fall” it confirms the fact that the media uses women to judge men success. The commercial starts out in a town and all of a sudden a bunch of girls start to fall from the sky. When you see the girls you see they have wings and halos around their heads. You can assume that these girls are Angels that have fallen from the sky. They all gather towards this one guy and at the end of the commercial they take off their halos and throw them to the ground breaking them. The message in this commercial is that if you put this body spray on, even the best and nicest girls will turn bad for you and find you attractive. This is another incident where the media uses women to measure success for men. Also they use sexual interest in order to persuade the guys that they would want to this use this spray by making all the Angels really attractive. And if you buy this spray, you might not be able to have Angels fall for you, but you will have attractive women wanting you. With this constant portrayal of men in the media, it has a direct correlation to how men in real life view themselves and how they try to be like these men.
Even in real life men are under constant pressure to look attractive and have ladies be all over them. When the media puts this image into television and advertisements then people see this and have an unreal image of what they are supposed to look like. Regular men around the world are now being judge by how attractive they are compared to these advertisements. In Mirror on America, by Joan T. Mims and Elizabeth M. Nollen there is an articles written by Dan Barden where he explains how his nose felt to when he, “Had walked around for twenty years with a sponge of meat above my mouth, but I was terrified of a perfect nose” (Barden 182). He had felt bad about his nose for a long time and felt inadequate with other people because his nose had stood out. This could be because he was used to seeing perfect noses everywhere he went and he finally wanted to have a “normal” nose. In order to be viewed as attractive in today’s culture, men need to make themselves look like these men in commercials and advertisements. In many advertisements show these men that are attractive and women that are idolize them. So in order to have women notice them, they have to make themselves look like these unrealistic people in commercials. This makes men feel inadequate and have to change their bodies in order to be viewed as attractive. In Mirror on America, Barden explains how he felt when he had just got his nose job done and, “ As I recovered, I wondered, floating in the Vicodin clouds, whether I had betrayed some cosmic rule by changing my flesh” (Barden 182). This is something new for guys, because normally guys are not the ones having surgery done to them but in order to keep up with the media’s idea of attractiveness more and more guys are having surgery done. This is not a problem because people should have the right to be happy in their skin and do whatever they want to their body. But it is not ok for the media to decide what is attractive and what is not attractive. With the media now they emphasize looks over the personality of someone. Instead of judging a man on their actions, men are constantly judged on their looks in the main stream media. They are telling us this by their many commercial where men are getting ladies, and these men all look the same with no diversity to them. They are all muscular guys with good hair and nice facial structures, while the man who is not muscular and as good looking as him never gets the girl and is there for comic relief. The media puts unreal regulation on what good looking is supposed to look like.
With all this negative media attention towards men’s looks it is hard to imagine how this problem could be fixed. But it can be fixed by the same people who are putting this image out into the public. The media has such a powerful influence over people today that it could be the solution to the identity crisis. In a Forbes article by Meghan Casserly, she explains how the media depicts men and a perspective on how males should be portrayed in media today, “Turns that in the hundreds of TV shows, movies and commercials targeting men on the airwaves, male viewers are seeing too many “skirt-chasers,” “metro-sexuals” and “macho-men” and not enough characters depicting the kind of guys they really are. Just what kind of guy is that? Good-hearted, hard-working and self-sacrificing men who are just trying to take care of their friends and families” (Casserly 2). Casserly argues that in order to reverse the bad attention that males have been getting in T.V. shows and movies is to offer up a different kind of man and idolize him. She believes that in order make men feel more realistic is the media, they need to show men for who they truly are. Those in commercial and movies we should be investing in more male role models that do not fit the mold of men in the media, but fit what men look like and act like in the real world. This will not be an easy task but in order to stop this media manipulation on how men are supposed to look like, it is up to us to tell them that we want more realistic people in commercial, movies and T.V. shows.
The media has portrayed an unjustified image of how men are supposed to look in today’s society. They use their advertisement powers and commercials to tell people what the image of a good looking guy is. They use women to show how successful men are and if a man is good looking then they will have women all over them as well. These men in the media are muscular and all have nice facial construction where if you do not fit in this category then you are deemed “ugly”. In order to change this media influence we need to demand that there should be more realistic role models in the media. By changing the way we view what successful is, from men who get girls, have nice bodies, and have a lot of money, to what is really important which is caring, loving and being there for their families. In order to change our identity crisis, we need to change our role models.
Social
Literacy in Today’s Society Essay #1
In today’s society we are programmed to have goals in our life and achieve those same goals. And you are marked as a failure if you fall short. I am here to tell you that I have fell short on my most important dream of all. I am here to tell you that it is ok to fail. When it comes down to the regrets we have in life I would rather look back and say “I failed” then to have never tried in the first place. And if you do fail, you pick yourself back up so fast that the world does not even see you have stumbled in the first place. When I was a senior in high school I had everything going for me. I was the captain of the football and track team, and I had just received a scholarship to play football at New Mexico State University. We had just came off a great season of football were we made it all the way to the CIF Semi-Finals. And then I started to prepare for what I would be doing for the next four years of my life. I went up to New Mexico State University and realize that this was not the place I wanted to spend the next four years of my life. So I made the hardest decision I have ever made in my life and came back home. In this life we are faced with difficult situations and sometimes we fail but that does not define us, what defines us is how we get back up after we have been knocked down.
When it came time to leave for New Mexico State University, I packed up all my belonging and said my goodbyes to everyone I knew. I felt like a hero leaving for war, everyone was congratulating me and wishing me the best. This is a normal thing most high school students go through and I was feeling really excited about starting the next four years of my life. So my parents and I packed into our car and we prepared for the two day drive for New Mexico. The best things in life are the things we cannot touch or see, but feel. Love, Accomplishment, and Pride were some of the best feeling I had that trip. Not only did I have the love and support from my parents, but from the city of Saugus itself. I was the first player to receive a Division I scholarship from Saugus since 2008. I had random people coming up to me in the store telling me how proud they were of me and that they were rooting for me. This was a blessing but turned out to be a curse in the end. While on the drive my parents would remind me that I had received such a blessing having my education paid for, and I agreed. For the first time in my life, I was heading for where I exactly wanted to go.
When we finally reached New Mexico I came to the campus and saw where I would be living for the next four years. I can honestly say it was exciting moving in and setting up my new dorm room. The one thing I was not excited about was meeting the whole team was meeting the whole team and making new friends. When I was back at home I had a close group of friends and I rarely ventured out of that group. But I decided that if I was going to make it out here I would have to make new friends so I became more interactive to the guys there. Then it came time for my parents to leave, it was hard letting them go but I knew that in order to make a better life for them and myself I had to do this. I found myself fine for the first couple of weeks because we were so busy all the time I didn’t have time to think about home. We had our whole days planned for us, from the time we woke up; to the time we fell asleep. It was hard waking up at six o’clock every morning and working out all day, getting back to my dorm room around ten o’clock every night. I would tell myself that this is only temporary and this is what I signed up for when I wanted to play Division I football. The months passed by slow and I began to think about home more and more. I realized that all college students feel this way so I would just talk to my mom as much as I could. She would calm me down and always made me feel better about what I was doing. As the practices began to get harder and harder, I began to doubt myself as to why I was there in the first place. I began to think that this dream that I had once thought was my life goal, was not the vision I had hoped it to be. This was not the dream that I had pictured when I first started playing when I was nine years old. Then came the day. It was a normal day at practice and I went in to tackle the running back when my thumb jammed on his thigh. I shrugged it off and thought to myself that I only sprained it and to stop worrying about it. After a week had passed, my thumb was feeling even worse than when the injury first happened. I finally decided to go to the training staff and confront them about my thumb injury. They told me that there is no way that it was broken and that I have to play through the pain. This made me feel that they cared little about me and more about my performance on the field. I would have played though the injury regardless of what the outcome was but it didn’t feel right that they would look at it at all. They told me that if I did get an x-ray, that if the results came back bad then it could keep me out of practice. So I continued playing on it until I left a couple of months later, when I came back I found out that I had fractured my thumb and torn all my ligaments in the thumb which required surgery to fix. I was already having doubts about my future at New Mexico State and this was the last straw for me. This was not the place that I would be spending my next four years of my life at and I wanted to leave as soon as possible. Later that night, without telling my parents, I went up to the coach’s office and told him that I would not be playing football at New Mexico State University anymore. But after this the hard part was just beginning.
Telling my parents of my decision was the hardest thing I have ever done in my life. In one single day I had let my college, high school, and parents down. Coming home I was met with a lot more challenges then I was ready for. Facing my friends and family was hard for me, to be face to face with everyone you love and tell them you failed. Most of the people I talked to would encourage me and I am thankful to have those people in my life because without them I could not have made it through this. Even to this day I still see people that knew me in college and ask what happened. It was hard for me to tell them in the beginning but as time passed it got easier and easier to explain the situation that I was in. I was certain that I was going to play college football for NMSU and be there for the next four years but life has a funny was of changing and David Foster Wallace pointed that out in his speech, “Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the hard way, as I predict you graduates will, too” (Wallace 3). What Wallace was saying is that there are no certainties in life and the more we think we have a hold on it, the more it changes. Just because I thought that I was going to be in New Mexico for the next part of my life, it didn’t work out like that. And it ok that you have failed. That life isn’t always going to go the way it’s planned but that’s what makes it so interesting.
Sometimes we fall down in life and everyone fails one time or another, but the character of a person is defined of how they pick themselves up again. And I do believe that this is the essence of the term Social Literacy. How you can adapt and communicate with people when you are at your worst and lowest point in life. It was a hard decision to turn my whole life around, but it has made me a better and stronger person for it. I believe that I was not meant to be there and call it fate or a higher being, I feel I was meant to come back home and start a new adventure. Just because I have given up on NMSU football, doesn’t mean I have given up all together. I am currently on the College of the Canyons football team and it is still my dream to play Division I football somewhere. It is ok to fail and it doesn’t define you as a person. How you rebound from failure is the true character of a person.
In today’s society we are programmed to have goals in our life and achieve those same goals. And you are marked as a failure if you fall short. I am here to tell you that I have fell short on my most important dream of all. I am here to tell you that it is ok to fail. When it comes down to the regrets we have in life I would rather look back and say “I failed” then to have never tried in the first place. And if you do fail, you pick yourself back up so fast that the world does not even see you have stumbled in the first place. When I was a senior in high school I had everything going for me. I was the captain of the football and track team, and I had just received a scholarship to play football at New Mexico State University. We had just came off a great season of football were we made it all the way to the CIF Semi-Finals. And then I started to prepare for what I would be doing for the next four years of my life. I went up to New Mexico State University and realize that this was not the place I wanted to spend the next four years of my life. So I made the hardest decision I have ever made in my life and came back home. In this life we are faced with difficult situations and sometimes we fail but that does not define us, what defines us is how we get back up after we have been knocked down.
When it came time to leave for New Mexico State University, I packed up all my belonging and said my goodbyes to everyone I knew. I felt like a hero leaving for war, everyone was congratulating me and wishing me the best. This is a normal thing most high school students go through and I was feeling really excited about starting the next four years of my life. So my parents and I packed into our car and we prepared for the two day drive for New Mexico. The best things in life are the things we cannot touch or see, but feel. Love, Accomplishment, and Pride were some of the best feeling I had that trip. Not only did I have the love and support from my parents, but from the city of Saugus itself. I was the first player to receive a Division I scholarship from Saugus since 2008. I had random people coming up to me in the store telling me how proud they were of me and that they were rooting for me. This was a blessing but turned out to be a curse in the end. While on the drive my parents would remind me that I had received such a blessing having my education paid for, and I agreed. For the first time in my life, I was heading for where I exactly wanted to go.
When we finally reached New Mexico I came to the campus and saw where I would be living for the next four years. I can honestly say it was exciting moving in and setting up my new dorm room. The one thing I was not excited about was meeting the whole team was meeting the whole team and making new friends. When I was back at home I had a close group of friends and I rarely ventured out of that group. But I decided that if I was going to make it out here I would have to make new friends so I became more interactive to the guys there. Then it came time for my parents to leave, it was hard letting them go but I knew that in order to make a better life for them and myself I had to do this. I found myself fine for the first couple of weeks because we were so busy all the time I didn’t have time to think about home. We had our whole days planned for us, from the time we woke up; to the time we fell asleep. It was hard waking up at six o’clock every morning and working out all day, getting back to my dorm room around ten o’clock every night. I would tell myself that this is only temporary and this is what I signed up for when I wanted to play Division I football. The months passed by slow and I began to think about home more and more. I realized that all college students feel this way so I would just talk to my mom as much as I could. She would calm me down and always made me feel better about what I was doing. As the practices began to get harder and harder, I began to doubt myself as to why I was there in the first place. I began to think that this dream that I had once thought was my life goal, was not the vision I had hoped it to be. This was not the dream that I had pictured when I first started playing when I was nine years old. Then came the day. It was a normal day at practice and I went in to tackle the running back when my thumb jammed on his thigh. I shrugged it off and thought to myself that I only sprained it and to stop worrying about it. After a week had passed, my thumb was feeling even worse than when the injury first happened. I finally decided to go to the training staff and confront them about my thumb injury. They told me that there is no way that it was broken and that I have to play through the pain. This made me feel that they cared little about me and more about my performance on the field. I would have played though the injury regardless of what the outcome was but it didn’t feel right that they would look at it at all. They told me that if I did get an x-ray, that if the results came back bad then it could keep me out of practice. So I continued playing on it until I left a couple of months later, when I came back I found out that I had fractured my thumb and torn all my ligaments in the thumb which required surgery to fix. I was already having doubts about my future at New Mexico State and this was the last straw for me. This was not the place that I would be spending my next four years of my life at and I wanted to leave as soon as possible. Later that night, without telling my parents, I went up to the coach’s office and told him that I would not be playing football at New Mexico State University anymore. But after this the hard part was just beginning.
Telling my parents of my decision was the hardest thing I have ever done in my life. In one single day I had let my college, high school, and parents down. Coming home I was met with a lot more challenges then I was ready for. Facing my friends and family was hard for me, to be face to face with everyone you love and tell them you failed. Most of the people I talked to would encourage me and I am thankful to have those people in my life because without them I could not have made it through this. Even to this day I still see people that knew me in college and ask what happened. It was hard for me to tell them in the beginning but as time passed it got easier and easier to explain the situation that I was in. I was certain that I was going to play college football for NMSU and be there for the next four years but life has a funny was of changing and David Foster Wallace pointed that out in his speech, “Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the hard way, as I predict you graduates will, too” (Wallace 3). What Wallace was saying is that there are no certainties in life and the more we think we have a hold on it, the more it changes. Just because I thought that I was going to be in New Mexico for the next part of my life, it didn’t work out like that. And it ok that you have failed. That life isn’t always going to go the way it’s planned but that’s what makes it so interesting.
Sometimes we fall down in life and everyone fails one time or another, but the character of a person is defined of how they pick themselves up again. And I do believe that this is the essence of the term Social Literacy. How you can adapt and communicate with people when you are at your worst and lowest point in life. It was a hard decision to turn my whole life around, but it has made me a better and stronger person for it. I believe that I was not meant to be there and call it fate or a higher being, I feel I was meant to come back home and start a new adventure. Just because I have given up on NMSU football, doesn’t mean I have given up all together. I am currently on the College of the Canyons football team and it is still my dream to play Division I football somewhere. It is ok to fail and it doesn’t define you as a person. How you rebound from failure is the true character of a person.