Girl Rising comparison

                Suma is a young girl from Bardiya, Nepal. At the age of 6 Suma was sold by her parents to be a kamlari, a worker bonded to a family in order to live. She worked as a forced laborer; cooking, cleaning, tending animals, watching children, going into the forest to get wood, whatever was necessary to the family. With some families, she was treated ok, in others, she was forced to live with the goats and eat scraps off of the plates of her masters. Through the years Suma wanted nothing more than to go to school and return home to her family. Poetry and song were the only things that got her through her life as a kamlari. At age 11, Suma arrived at her third masters where the work was long and hard, but the masters were nicer. At this house lived a schoolteacher that convinced Suma's masters to enroll her in a night class where she was able to learn to read and write. The school was run in the attic of her master's house and was taught be social workers and other kamlaris. It was then that Suma learned that being a kamlari was equal to being a slave. Her teachers went house to house of kamlari owning girls and told that masters that keeping a kamlari was illegal. Suma's master refused to release her from her bond at first, but eventually the social workers freed Suma and returned her to her parents. Suma was the last bonded worker in her family and now uses her freedom and power to help set other kamlari girls free and give them a chance at a life and an education.

                Down in Freetown, Sierra Leone lies Mariama. Mariama leads a relatively normal life listening to Rihanna, brushes her teeth, gets dressed from a choice of clothing, listens to the radio, texts...Mariama's dad died when she was young so her mother married her dad's brother, who also got married to a woman named Halla. Mariama is the first person in her family to go to school and she loves science and thinks Isaac Newton is pretty cool. She was lucky enough to land a job at the local radio where she hosts her own show and gives advice to girls all around the country. She enjoys helping young girls solve their problems and she also tries to educate them and encourage them to go to school. Mariama has large dreams, like being the first African in space and having her own TV show where she can help people with their problems. At one point, Mariama's dad was being harassed by the neighbors for letting her host at the radio station and hang out with her friends after her show and in turn he forbade her from working at the radio. For a while, Mariama wasn't allowed to host the show until she went to her mom Halla and had her talk to him. Halla told him how good the show was and how it was teaching young girls everywhere. Her dad agreed to let her go back to hosting her radio show and now calls herself "the lucky one."

                Suma and Mariama come from two very different places and cultures. Suma lives in a more rural, rugged, and closer to nature way of life while Mariama lives a very modernized industrial way. Mariama has been privileged to live in a loving, though unique, family, while Suma has been taken from her birth family and forced to live with people that didn't care if she lived or died. These girls are worlds apart, but both use their education to help girls. Suma uses her education to free other kamlaris and Mariama uses her education to help young girls around the country solve their problems. While Suma has lead a presumably harder life than Mariama, she hasn't let that stop her from achieving her goals and doing something important in life. Both these girls have lofty goals that revolve around helping other young girls make their lives better, especially by telling them to get an education.  

                All the girls in Girl Rising contradict everything I've known about education. Going to school has been a chore for me pretty much ever since I left pre-school. But, for these girls, education is a dream, an urging desire so powerful that they would literally die for an education. The little girl from Afghanistan has such incredible perseverance and  motivation for education and change in her country that she won't let anyone stand in her way, even if it means death by one of her country men. She spent her days learning to read and write on a small chalkboard against a wall while her and her classmates sit outside, a sharp contrast to the beautifully constructed classrooms we've become used to. For the majority of American girls, education is a chore and a requirement. We sit in class, often miserable, thinking about literally anything other than learning. We often fail to realize our privilege, especially when it comes to higher education and college. We have these opportunities that people would literally die for and we take them for granted every single day. It's truly eye opening to see the perseverance of a young girl surrounded by death and ruble of her old home in Port au Prince, Haiti learning and loving every second of it. Girls all around the world are incredibly motivated and their love and desire to learn is truly inspiring.

Gendered Slang and Language

                Is our language gendered? To an extent,  I would have to say yes. When discussing topics of mankind, we often have male focused words, like mailman, policeman, fireman, freshman, mankind, businessman, chairman, fatherland, forefathers, man of the world, manpower, or seaman, these terms used for all people regardless of gender but are still emphasizing men. It is common in English that male pronouns are gender neutral when they are, in fact not. How about the phrases "all men are created equal," "one of the guys," and "you guys?" These are all male dominated phrases. These words and phrases are seemingly benign, but subconsciously reinforce the ides of male dominance.

                Our words tend to exist on a gender binary to identify between men and women. This leads us to words like witch and warlock, sir and madam, mom and dad, monk and nun, lord and lady, duke and duchess, or bride and groom. Also, gendered words often have women's words ending with -ess. Such as mister and mistress, emperor and empress, count and countess, prince and princess, and steward and stewardess. It is seemingly impossible to avoid gendered words. They seemingly go unnoticed, but once you start thinking about gendered words, you start to notice they are everywhere and that gender neutral words, especially nouns, are still uncommon.

                But, at the same time, we are collectively working to make words gender inclusive and get rid of their gendered meanings. We are changing terms like to policeman to police officer or police person, from fireman to firefighter. We are working to change these gendered words by making them more gender inclusive. For example, we're changing waiters and waitresses to the gender neutral term server, or stewards and stewardesses to flight attendants. We do have non-gendered terms like captain, farmer, shop keeper, leader, criminal, and others. While we have non-gendered words, which is fantastic, we still have to work on making our other words gender neutral and inclusive.

                We have words like dude, bro, or player while we have words for women such as whore, chick, slut, or bitch. We have slang terms for anatomy like dick and pussy we use in day to day conversation. As  a way of cursing you may shout "balls!" to get out your emotions. To me personally, these gendered terms are becoming more gender neutral and I apply most of them to all people regardless of gender. Changing gendered terms is not an easy feat. To de-gender terms, you have to start small and alter your own vernacular to be more gender inclusive and gender neutral.  The key to making change is questioning norms.

Ch 28 Inventing the Cosmo Girl: Class Identity and Girl-Style American Dreams

                In the mid-1960s, Helen Gurley Brown created Cosmopolitan magazine and thus created the Cosmo Girl, an 18-34 year old female reader and purveyor of the sexual revolution, freed sexually and liberated them from class and gender roles prominent in the day. Brown was interested in not only sexually liberating young women and addressing the double standard placed on women and sex, but also wanted to create women who could self-manage themselves and be better more equal members of society.

                Brown started her journey with her bestseller Sex and the Single Girl in 1962 and became an overnight celebrity. The book was for women of all backgrounds and had advice on personal appearance, housing, working, and most importantly, flirting. Brown's book taught young women how to woo men, have affairs, attract the best of the best, and get the men to buy them and take care of them like queens. She discussed birth control, mandatory motherhood, divorce, work outside the home, and financial and general independence. This book was revolutionary during this time as sexual promiscuity was frowned upon and women were only allowed to be sexual beings while married where women were often reliant on their husbands. Due to the success of Sex and the Single Girl Brown wrote many sequels and advice columns, but the most important thing the book led to was her creation of  Cosmopolitan.

                Cosmopolitan was a magazine that provided emotional, business, and social advice for young women to have a better life, in addition to advertising traditionally feminine consumer goods and fashion and ads for places that allowed women to pursue jobs outside the home. Brown's advice and Cosmo as a whole provided advice for women during the transitional time of men as solely bread winners to a combination of men and women as breadwinners and their changing roles in society. Over the years, the image of the Cosmo Girl became a sexualized symbol of femininity.  The creation of Ms. magazine in 1972 provided competition for Cosmopolitan and took some of its readers, altering the face of the Cosmo Girl to a sexualized object and high powered executive at the same time. These commercial women's magazines provided women with an idealized image of themselves, but that idealized image was rooted in male expectations of femininity.

                Cosmo promised all girls the luxurious lifestyle of celebrities and the models in their magazine, but only if they followed their rules and bought the necessary clothes, makeup, accessories, and whatnot. The problem with this was that it led women to constantly recreating themselves to fit the societal trends, and never fully finding themselves. Fakeness and "lying" about beauty, taping breasts to look better and usage of wigs and fake nails, became celebrated. The average Cosmo Girl was a white heterosexual upper-middle class woman, with other minorities being pretty much ignored. The Cosmo Girl could accomplish the girl-style American Dream and  pink-collar labor and in turn have increased class position and economic capital to use it in the dating and marriage game. The advice in Cosmo to these pink-collar workers, women who worked as secretaries  and office positions, attracted men with more education, money, and resources by appropriating cultural signifiers of class as shown in Cosmo.

                The most important thing Cosmo has done was place its emphasis on female sexuality, with features on ways to increase libido, orgasms, casual sex, masturbation, and other topics that are still taboo today. These articles and the quizzes that go along with them are helped pave the way for the sexual revolution, leading to some of the most sexually experienced group of women in western history.

                Cosmo paved the way for women's sexual freedom and gratification in addition to preaching independence and empowerment to women.  

The Nuclear and Modern Family

                The nuclear family is the stereotypical picture of a 1950s American dream life. It consists of two parents, more than likely to be a heterosexual couple, and their children. The children are traditionally offspring of the mother and father, but sometimes the children can be adopted. The nuclear family also probably had a pet of some sort, most likely a dog. In the traditional nuclear family, gender roles were highly evident and the couple often strictly stick to them. The mother is traditionally seen as a homemaker, caring for the children, cleaning, making dinner, and generally keeping the home and children in line and presentable. On the weekends she is still seen taking care of the house and children. The father is traditionally the breadwinner where he goes to work 9-5 every day and then comes home from work to bond with his family before retiring to bed. On the weekend he can most likely be seen doing handiwork around the house, working on cars, or maybe even grilling, typically doing traditionally "many" things. In the traditional nuclear family, working mothers and stay at home dads are small and hard to come by. Traditionally, you are more likely to see two working parents before you see a working mother and a stay at home dad.

                The modern family is very different as there is no real way to describe a specific modern family. Modern families can really be anything these days. Today we have families where there are two married individuals, either hetero- or homosexual or somewhere between, where they may have their parents live with them, the couple may or may not have kids, the couple may or may not have a pet, friends may cohabitate the home with the couple and the family; there's really no way to define the modern family.  There may be families consisting of a couple and a pet because the couple doesn't want to have kids. Some people consider a family as a bunch of their close friends living together. A family can be a single parent household where the mom/dad has to  take care of the kids and the house and work all at the same time. A modern family can be an extended family where aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, children, nieces, nephews... all live together and coexist. Traditional nuclear families are still around, but you're more likely to see both parents working to support their family, or it's starting to become more common to have working mothers and stay at home fathers. The modern family can't be easily defined, because there are so many versions of the modern family. In the modern family, gender roles are not as strict as they used to be, and sometimes there isn't a man or woman in the picture to even do those gender specific actions. Men and dads are seen cooking and cleaning and taking care of the kids, women are seen going to work and doing handiwork around the house. Of course there are men and women who do their traditional gender specific actions, but they aren't being forced to. More common than not, these new modern families split the household and family duties equally to create a happier house. In short, in today's modern families, gender roles are a thing of the past.

Ch 26 Image-Based Culture: Advertising and Popular Culture

                In "Image-Based Culture: Advertising and Popular Culture" by Sut Jhally, the author looks at how advertising has changed over the years and its role in our daily lives. Jhally tells us that our society is currently a consumer society, but it wasn't always like this. Only about 150 years ago, our society was agrarian based and family, community, ethnicity, religion, and other factors were dominant in creating cultural forms and what was deemed "popular" in society. During the 1880's-1920's, marketing and advertising starting to form. During this time those familial and community factors that were one useful in deciding what was useful to society were no more; we stopped listening to family and community and instead started listening to the "reason-why" ads telling us why we should spend our hard earned money on theis product. Word of mouth wasn't enough to get you to buy a product anymore.

                By the 1920's, advertising changed again. The dilemma now was that the marketplace had a surplus of goods from its recent industrialization and now the market had to devise a way to get people buying these "nonessential" commodities. To do this, they relied heavily on printing and color advertising, like ads in the local paper. This visual imagery is an incredibly useful tool in the world of advertising, but the everyday people didn't quite understand how to decipher this new technology.  So the advertisers and their agencies, they had to learn how to sell products and teach consumers how to read their modern ads.

                Jhally's description of the history of advertising  shows us how we got to where we are today. Our current society is a consumer society, heavily influenced by the marketplace and our emphasis on buying commodities. This is where we get the idea "the more stuff you have, the happier you are." To reaffirm this notion of buy buy buy and buying makes you happy, advertising is everywhere you look and almost impossible to escape. Jhally describes a study where people said what they searched for in life and the overwhelming answers were: personal autonomy, control over one's life, self-esteem, a happy family life, loving relations, a relaxed tension-free leisure time, and good friendships. These findings are important in advertisement creation, and these findings often make advertising more difficult as none of those wants are from commodities, but are more-so social factors instead. This leads advertisers to focus on telling us how the commodities they're selling improve our lives and social life, I mean, who wouldn't want a product that made everyone like you and you could lead a relaxed tension free life? Advertising promotes the idea of the "good life," where everything is perfect; they heavily rely on this principle to sell you relatively useless commodities.

                Jhally describes and important theme that arises through media advertising, and that is partipulation. Partipulation is essentially where the viewer/buyer is partaking in their own manipulation. In the terms of advertising, what is being advertised is heavily reliant on social needs and wants, which is created by the viewer/buyer, which then creates an endless loop. This loop leads us into a "joyless economy," as Jhally says, where our happiness relies on our commodities, but the endless loop of new commodities makes it impossible to truly be happy in the end.  This overwhelming barrage of commodities at all times leads buyers confused and vulnerable, often enabling the buyers to buy more and they're not quite sure why. Jhally also points out that our current media advertisement system has now moved to a "vignette approach," where our commercials are getting shorter and short and rely on people buying things by emotion rather than thought. And, to make these quick successive ads memorable, sexuality is thrown in and emphasized to help them stand out. This "vignette approach" leads to more radical advertising where advertising companies are constantly competing with each other with who can be the most memorable.