Susan Bordo "(Re)discovering the male body"

Derrick Brooks, et al. "Who is gazing at whom? A look at how sex is used in magazine advertisements." Journal of Gender Studies 17.3 (2008): 201-209. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 28 Oct. 2011.

In this article "Who is gazing at whom? A look at how sex is used in magazine advertisements" by the Journal of gender studies, the researchers observed how often sex was used in advertisement overall. What they found was that more often than not sex was used in order to capture the male audience. This strenghtens Bordo's argument where she points out that while Playboy is very prominent, Playgirl and Viva which are the same but aimed at women, aren't as popular. However, this doesn't necessarily mean that it is because women are uninterested, rather it is because society is just becoming accustomed to this new age where men's bodies are portrayed as sex symbols. The journal of gender studies also includes that "both male and female audiences see advertising characters posed in an alluring manner or wearing provocative clothing" this goes back to Bordo's section on Rocks and Leaners in which she states that usually the lean in photos and the angle of the camera is very provocative and give an aura of masculinity in men. Where before, gazing at men might have been something of a "homosexual" connotation, today it is slowly becoming as normal as gazing at women. All in all, although some parts of this article contradict Bordo's opinion, other aspects of it do strenghten her views. Society is becoming such that male beauty is being appreciated or seen much more than in the past, with commercials like those for hanes underwear and old spice, less is being left to our imagination and more is being portrayed.

David Foster Wallace's Speech

   I really wish that I would've experienced this speech first hand. There was not a dull moment where I was bored or his thoughts seemed monotone. He kept me wondering about what point he would make next. For one, I was shocked but enveloped in his theme of discovering ourselves through our education, not through our acquired knowledge but through changing our "default setting" the one that makes us see everything as happening only to US. I think he makes a great point with the anecdote about the two men in a bar. I would've thought that the atheist man after being saved by Eskimos would've believed in G_d and perhaps wondered if G_d sent the Eskimos to save him, however this was not the case. This made me realize again how everyone is different and while perhaps my "default settings" would cause me to believe this, it might not apply to everyone. When Wallace describes the routine-like day involving the traffic and tedious super market experience, I was captured because although I'm still an undergrad student I've been in that position at times. I laughed a couple times throughout his speech as I realized how he got every last detail on that routine down perfectly. I liked how he began his speech with the story about the big fish talking to the little fish about water and he also ends his speech with that same message "this is water". I guess my interpretation of that is just that this "water" is life, and sometimes we "swim" around life unaware of our surroundings and the meaning of events in our life slip us by because we are so accustomed to over analyzing things that we forget there is such a thing as simplicity.

The "Banking" Concept of Education

   I personally admire this wonderful piece by Freire. As I read on I came more doubtful of my "learning" experiences and I began to see learning in another light. For one, Freire makes a great point that "education is suffering from narration sickness" and in a way I see the seriousness yet light-hearted comic relief this line contains. I can relate to being "sickened" by the "narration" of education especially throughout my high school years. Essentially throughout high school I was never really required to learn, in the full meaning of that word. I was given information and I regurgitated that information on tests and it always got me by. Now reading Freire makes me realize that it isn't only me, the student is as much at fault as the teacher and society itself. Freire made me wonder, what constitutes "true knowledge". What I consider "true knowledge", will it be the same for another person? Can we blame a teacher for trying to "deposit" what he/she considers "true knowledge" into student's "depositories"?
   I found it quite interesting how Freire dissociates the world and human beings. Freire states that a person is merely "in" the world but not quite with it. Then, could it be that each one of us is just a mix of every person we've ever met and every experience we've ever had? Maybe not any one single person is original. Freire makes a wonderful statement about reality, claiming that it cannot take place in an "ivory tower". He alludes to the ivory tower which represents a "dreamer's" state of mind a place where one is not conscientious of the world and surroundings. Freire does this to make the clarification that only on a day to day basis communicating with others just like ourselves is that we can really begin to be a "corpo consciente". I think that Freire makes a great argument through the use of his allusions and philosophy. He left me trying to answer my own questions, one of them being, have I experienced my existential moment in life and what if I have and do not know it? Is it no longer existential? And will I ever actually know?

Research Prospectus

When I was trying to come up with a topic of research I went through many different questions I’ve always wanted to answer about my career field, criminal justice. I particularly chose to explore how birth order might affect criminal tendencies because it truly brings together two fields I very much enjoy which are psychology and criminology. For many years, I volunteered at an Orphanage in Miami, Florida called “His House”. I truly had a wonderful experience and I took so much from volunteering, but I was also curious because the personalities of the children I worked with were all so bizarre. The children at His House have many different ages, starting from as young as newborns to emerging adults. While volunteering at His House I met children from the same biological parents however their personalities were extremely different. Although there were brothers and sisters from the same mother and father, usually one seemed to portray stronger delinquency tendencies than others. In psychology, there is a condition called “middle child syndrome” which basically supports the idea that usually the middle child is the outcast and more introverted than the younger and older child. I have decided to tie in the middle child syndrome with the delinquent tendencies to create a thesis revolving around these two ideas. Perhaps, many people would be surprised to learn that birth order can have an effect on delinquent tendencies but I will demonstrate that the order in which children are born, does affect criminal activity, specifically the middle-born child’s. To support my thesis, I will need to conduct some thorough research on the middle-child syndrome so that I can clearly define it for my audience and thus strengthen my argument. I will also need to evaluate criminological theories and research some statistics that I may evaluate to see if my thesis is reasonable. I hope to find if indeed birth order can affect criminal behavior, and if so, is the middle child in the family more prone to this behavior. I came across an article titled “Birth Order and Risky Behavior” by Laura Argys from the University of Colorado, in this article Laura speaks of some empirical research that has been conducted regarding birth order and risky teen behaviors such as smoking marijuana, drinking, and crime. The article states that the results from this research provides the strongest evidence that bird order, particularly middle and last-born children are prone to these risky behaviors. Additionally, there is an online publication from the Legal and Criminological Psychological journal that refers to the characteristics of some sexual offenders, one of these is indeed birth order which according to this journal affects personality in a negative way. I can synthesize these two articles and make a unified argument open to the idea that birth order in general has an impact on criminal behavior, as proven by research. The American Psychological Association (APA) also has many publications; I found a particular one that carried a study involving criminal demographics and family history. The APA came to the conclusion that a father figure is important in the correct development of children, especially in the teenage years. The presence of a father figure in the family can be correlated with birth order, because as is very common in America, the risk of divorce is usually higher after the first child, perhaps leaving that middle child at a disadvantage with no father figure for guidance. Hopefully with much more research I will be able to create a strong argument to convince my audience that something as unpredictable and insignificant as it may seem, birth order, can indeed affect someone’s personality and success in life.

Richard Rodriguez's "The Achievement of Desire"

   As I was reading Rodriguez's piece I found myself being able to relate to many of his experiences. For one, the line "[the scholarship boy] brings books into the house,they don't take their place with other books which the family are reading" caught my attention instantly because I can think of a point in my childhood when I was that "scholarship boy". When I was younger growing up in an immigrant, Hispanic family I considered myself at a disadvantage compared to other children my age. My parents couldn't read to me, help me with my homework, or even be in the PTA because of the language barrier. Although at the time I denied it I know realized that I resented them for quite some time because of the difficulties I faced in school. On the contrary to Rodriguez's parent's, my mother and father were always educated, however, once we moved to the United States, they had to support our family, leaving no time for reading or any other educated activities. As the first from my family going to college in the United States, I'm always celebrated at family reunions or Christmas parties. I am very familiar with the comment "your parents must be very proud of you" as Rodriguez is. As I grew older, I now realize that everything my parents did has gotten me to this point in my life. Although at first I might have felt like they weren't supportive, they always tried to give me the best life possible and I thank them for that. Unlike Rodriguez, I have a very positive relationship with both my mother and my father and I look up to them because they are exactly the type of parent I hope to someday be.

My interpretation of The Pain Scale

   There are undeniably many interesting ideas in Eula Biss' "The Pain Scale", at first I didn't quite know how to approach so many different ideas and thoughts put together, and to be honest I still don't grasp exactly what she is trying to communicate to her audience. However, I did realize that like our thoughts, which are sometimes a random jumble of emotions and occurrences, perhaps this piece is just that. Perhaps, this was Biss' thought process and her method of organization was to arrange it into a scale, into "The Pain Scale."   
   There are several statements in this piece that make me question what I have always believed in, or at least "thought" to be true. For example, I find it particularly curious that she cites Anders Celsius, who introduced the scale himself, and how he had originally made zero the point at which water boils. We have always been taught that the lower the temperature the colder it gets, but how interesting would it be if reality were just the opposite? What if, zero is truly the point at which water boils and turns into nothing, as it evaporates it becomes "zeroed". This brings me to the word "zeroed", as I read over Biss' description of how a chicken upside down becomes "zeroed" I realized that although it isn't a word, I knew exactly what she meant. This is because, I believe I at one point have felt "zeroed" myself. As a baby I was burned by an exploding pressure cooker and although I was young and cannot recall much my mother always says that I never cried, I just stared at her almost as if seeing through her. When I read the word "zeroed" those events from my childhood came back almost as if to aid me in understanding Biss' purpose for including the word.
   Apart from the section on zero that left me so heavily intrigued, I was especially drawn to number five. I assume it is because this is the number I can relate to most. As Biss described "the tyranny of the mean" I chuckled because I knew just what she was referring to. As a runner, I have suffered from many injuries, from shin splints, to runner's knee, bruised knees, you name it. If there was one thing I would've wanted to avoid more than the pain of the injury it would've been trying to get my trainer too understand the intensity of the pain I was in. He would never understand me, and so when using a pain scale, I would always rate my pain five, I figured it is enough pain to need treatment but not enough to be rushed to a hospital or get an x-ray. Sometimes, I would be in excruciating pain, knowing that it was more than a five, but nonetheless I would rate it a five because in my trainer's eyes a five would allow me to run the next day's race and not to sit it out. It is interesting how everyone has their own definition of pain and hence their own scale and so trying to fully understand someone else's pain is close to impossible and I assimilate this to the saying "beauty is in the eye of the beholder," because each individual is quite different and what we see, feel, or experience varies so much from one person to another.

Michael Pollan Summary: Blog Post

    Pollan begins his article with the same predictable arguments many of us use to fabricate excuses for ourselves for why we advocate for change but sit back and do absolutely nothing about the way we live. At first he ironically comments on Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth’” as he points out that switching our light bulbs seemed a miniscule cure to a gigantic world issue. I found myself agreeing with this statement and then quickly overturning that thought. As Pollan argues, our passive way of fixing things will not work out satisfactorily in this urgent situation. He includes that everyone seems to think what they personally do doesn’t matter because in another part of the world their “carbon foot-print doppelganger” is rapidly replacing every last bit of CO2 that they struggle to prohibit themselves from emitting. At first his view is unclear but it quickly becomes evident that Pollan does support these small changes, because they trigger our neighbors and friends to become motivated to change their lives too, and eventually we will influence others to carry on our “green” habits. However, Pollan states that rather than taking initiative, we feed ourselves the lie that we must depend on technology to come up with smarter ways to conserve and believe that “ethanol and nuclear power–new liquids and electrons to power the same old cars and houses and lives.” We come to have faith in our own “cheap-energy mind” and as we do so, we ask “why bother?” hence the intriguing name of Pollan’s article. Pollan is assertive when he says we should bother, because living in the dark is what has gotten us up to this point. He is an advocate for planting a garden of our own, because it is just the start of a self-subsisting and rewarding life. He reasons that by planting this garden we begin to “heal the split about what you think and what you do” and that not only will it benefit the environment but it will strengthen relationships with friends and neighbors as we borrow “tools” from them.  Pollan ends with the thought that our “relationship” with the planet need not for the sole benefit of one and not another, because as long as we are capable of planting, and the sun still exists, there is always a better way to do things for ourselves without harming and “diminishing the world we live in” a truly symbiotic relationship with our surroundings.


Work Cited


Pollan, Michael. "Why Bother?" New York TImes Magazine 20 Apr. 2008:
19+. Rpt. in The Allyn and Bacon Guide to Writing. John D.
Ramage, John C. Bean, and June Johnson. 6th ed. New York:
Pearson, 2012. 88-94. Print.