Another interesting piece here, if you want to talk about advertising. This article reviews the different viewpoints surrounding a stir in the media a few weeks back when a J Crew ad featured a mom painting her son's toenails hot pink. Some viewers claimed the ad was unacceptable, and that it promoted a mother encouraging homosexuality in her son. Opposing viewers said there's nothing wrong with a boy wanting pink toenails, or with J Crew featuring pink-loving boys in their ads. This particular article, from ABC news, also provides you with links to the original responses from both sides.

If you're having trouble thinking of a topic for the paper, this might be a good one. Take a look at the ad, and at the responses, and write a paper discussing what messages you think the ad is sending. Are those messages positive? Negative? In between? How do you feel about the response in the media?

Video on Toys and Gender

Here is a youtube video (one we tried to watch in class, although the volume wasn't working) that discusses the implications that toy ads make about gender. If you're into analyzing pop culture, this might be a good place to look.

Sample Essay 2

And now, one from me. This is a personal story, about the ways that kids police each others' behavior. It's slightly different from the one at the link in that it's an analysis of how OTHERS are treated, but it's through the lens of something that happened to me. It's about how discrimination starts, and why it continues.


Growing up, I was what you might call a "goody two-shoes." So were most of my friends. We hung out with people who mostly stayed clear of trouble and did as they were told (within reason), so moments when we suspected we might possibly get in TROUBLE were a very big deal. One such incident occurred in the 4th grade when my friend Alexandra (Alex) and I had wandered into the bathroom at the end of recess and were late getting back to class. Not surprisingly, the memories of that we-might-get-in-trouble feeling are much stronger than the memories of why, precisely, we were about to get in trouble. I sense that this particular incident had something to do with not tucking in our uniform shirts. We were on the playground when a group of kids nearby got seriously harangued for their un-tucked shirts. Ours must have been disheveled too, and we ran to the bathroom to either (1) escape notice and remain untucked or (2) tuck in our shirts ourselves before we got chewed out too. This seems ridiculous, but I’m almost positive it’s true.

So Alex and I were hiding out in the bathroom, waiting out the bell signalling us to return to our rooms, when we heard someone coming down the outdoor corridor leading up to the women’s restroom. ”Quick!” said Alex. ”Someone’s coming! It might be Ms. Ditch. Hide!” We turned to hide and, without really formulating a plan, ran into the same bathroom stall. As soon as we shut and latched the door, the sound of some older girls (5th graders, no doubt) echoed off the tiles. The noise hadn’t been Ms. Ditch after all, and we weren’t in trouble for our shirttails. But now we faced a very different menace: the specter of homosexuality.

“Stand on the toilet!” Alex hissed to me. I was confused about why I might do this. What was wrong with being in the same bathroom stall? But whether or not I understood didn’t really matter; the girls saw our feet before I had time to act.

“Are there two girls in that bathroom?” one asked.

“Who’s in there?” another called.

We didn’t know exactly why we were being taunted, but we knew for sure that we couldn’t show our faces now.

“Come on out!” they shouted. ”We won’t tell!” Tell what? What could they possibly do to get us in trouble? Were they going to tell Ms. Ditch about our shirts? About our generally unkempt appearances?

Whatever the possibilities, we knew that saying “we won’t tell” meant that they most certainly would tell someone something, even if we didn’t see what that something was. Alex signalled to me that we would remain incased in our fortress until the girls were gone. We were late for class, but this was the price we had to pay in order to avoid being in trouble for something worse – something unidentified.

The 5th graders were pretty determined. And we were still extremely naive. When we thought they had finally left, they were merely outside the door, waiting around the corner for us to emerge. When we finally did come out we were met with a chorus of taunts. I don’t really remember what they said, specifically. But I knew the general idea – that they thought we had been kissing in the bathroom stall.

As you learned from Erin’s previous post, kissing in general was not at all allowed, and kissing another girl was clearly outside the realm of possibility. I am certain that the word “lesbian” was brought up directly that day. And the day after that. It was a week or two before Alex and I would live down the accusations whispered on the playground. I distinctly remember one moment in particular, when an older girl – a cool girl I knew only by sight – summoned me over to the tennis court fence and whispered to me, “Is it true you and that tall girl are lesbians?”

I don’t know what rudimentary understanding I had of homosexuality at that time. But whatever that sense was, it could not possibly have been helped along by the hisses and jeers of the other students, taunting us for being something we’d never even heard of before. As with Scott’s PG-porn-for-kiddies scheme, we came away from this incident with the idea that something about us was shameful. We were dirty, and we should have gotten in trouble. We were just lucky the older girls hadn’t elected to tell Ms. Ditch or one of her other cohort.

This strange incident in my life was followed by several moments of childhood worry that my relationships with others might be taken out of context. When I went to the movies with my recently widowed grandmother, I worried that other people would think we were lesbians. Whatever that meant. I worried that she would be seen as the one responsible for this, and that she would get in trouble. Looking back at this story now, I also realize that Alex must have known at least a bit more about the topic than I did. She clearly understood that we had a situation on our hands as soon as I ran into the stall with her. I had no idea that this was a bad choice until long after the girls had begun their taunting. But what I don’t understand to this day is where this topic injected itself into the culture of the Unnamed Religious School. After all, this was the late 80′s and the early 90′s in the deep South. While gay culture was developing a newfound voice outside of our walls, battling the AIDS epidemic and fighting for civil rights, very little in mainstream popular culture existed to bring this voice to kids like us. Where did my 5th grade tormentors learn their lingo? I had no idea what a lesbian was. So how did they?

Alex and I eventually became yesterday’s news, and the 5th grade girls found new kids to tease. But the incident left a tiny little bump in my experience. I had always been a kid who was close to my friends. I was affectionate and – for lack of a better word – cuddly. So was Erin. This is how we operated. We followed each other pretty much everywhere, and I’m even pretty sure we bathed together once or twice when we were still pretty young. But my week in the queer spotlight lead to a new understanding of intimacy – even spatial intimacy, like sharing a bathroom stall – as yet another object of shame.

Essay Sample 1 - Final Paper

In class the other day, we talked about how one option for the paper was to write about a time when you realized you were different from others - that you didn't quite fit in, or were treated differently because of something about yourself you'd never noticed before. The essay at this link is a perfect example of that - a young girl being treated differently, not because of one of the big obvious categories we've been discussing in class, but more because of the way she dresses or the image she conveys. It's a simple story about being a teenager, but it's also something I think we can all kind of relate to. If you're thinking about doing an essay about a personal experience, take a look at hers. Yours doesn't have to be quite this long; but I'd like you to notice how she gives you a mixture of two things:

1. description of the experience
2. analysis of how the experience made her feel then, and how she thinks about it now

Links for Final Essay

Here are some links to excellent essays that might help you in forming your own ideas about discrimination, stereotyping, etc:

- This one will take you to a blog about discrimination based on weight. If focuses on a collection of personal narratives. Notice how the author gathers together the stories of other people, tells some stories of her own, then analyzes those stories together.

- For those of you interested in the topic of weigh discrimination, here's another essay, this one entirely personal, about how doctors/the medical community sometimes treat overweight patients differently. This is a great use of a single personal narrative.

- If you happen to have Netflix streaming and are interested in issues of class discrimination, check out the documentary Born Rich by Johnson & Johnson heir Jamie Johnson. It's about the differences between the wealthy elite and the poor; Johnson - himself a socialite - attempts to present a balanced view of the lives of the kids of wealthy families.

- If you're more interested in writing an essay that examines pop culture/media/advertising rather than using personal narratives (your own or others), a great website is Sociological Images. It's run by two female sociologists who are interested in examining the ways that pop culture presents a variety of different groups. Some great posts from them include:

1. This one about using sex to sell ovens

2. This one about the politics of Secretary's Day

3. And this one about the ways that women are treated as "other" or "outside normal" by advertisers.


I have some full-length essays coming too, as well as more links. Stay tuned! Keep in mind that you're also welcome to write something responding to one of the above links, if you see something you're interested in.

Profile Sample - Pickup Artists

Original article at http://www.tbd.com/articles/2011/02/under-guidance-of-pickup-artists-men-learn-how-to-pick-themselves-up-49208.html; author Daniel Victor

The group of 30 men looks out of place in the Pentagon City mall food court on Sunday afternoon. They're impeccably groomed, wearing designer jeans and expensive shoes. They range in age from early 20s to late 40s. At 2:30 p.m. they rise from their chairs and huddle in between the kiosks selling $8.99 earrings and 3-for-$25 sunglasses. Time to get started.
After a final pep talk, they fan across the mall. Each group has three to five amateurs and one professional guiding their way. Their mission is to approach and charm every woman on site. Get a few phone numbers if you can. They’re attendees of the Global Pickup Conference, and the students are here to learn from the masters.

They’re practicing a scorched-earth strategy for meeting women: Leave no stone unturned, leave no woman unflattered. Understand and embrace that very few of the women will actually give you their phone numbers. When rejections don’t hurt you, one phone number and 99 rejections is better than no phone numbers and no rejections.
Getting his team of four ready for action, Vince Kelvin, 43, author of Same Night Sex System, reminds them that the important thing is how you feel after the women walk away. If they reject you, they’re not ready for you. You’re better than them. You’re awesome. You need a woman who can handle you.

"We need daring women,” Kelvin tells the men. “Let's go find them!"

“But let's move away from the food court, because there's a lot of security here."
Then they depart on a three-hour adventure that will include one student commenting on a woman's underwear choices at Victoria's Secret while a professional listens in on a hidden device, and another student getting kicked out of Macy's for hitting on a 16-year-old. Such are the pitfalls when you're learning how to talk to women.

The conference's website makes some fascinating promises. On its Products page, it asks: “ARE YOU READY TO LAY EVERY GIRL YOU MEET?” Every girl, 100 percent. Perhaps this goal might be a tad ... unattainable. Think of all the women you encounter, at least in passing, every year. Business associates, waitresses, grocery shoppers, the Metro; we’re probably talking a few thousand women per year. And really, there are only so many hours in a day. At some point it just becomes burdensome.

The hyper-sexuality sells, but it’s actually not why most of the men say they paid $300 for two days of training at the Georgetown Holiday Inn and the mall excursion. There are a few attendees who are already doing well with women, and strive to be every-nighters. There are far more who lack conversational skills, work up a sweat before approaching women, and suffer from a paralyzing lack of self-confidence.

The gathering was organized by the quick-witted Speer, creator of The Speer Method, who looks like a less fit version of Johnny Depp. He asked if the students were there to learn how to have a lot of sex, and four men raised their hands. Asked if they wanted to learn how to eventually meet that one special someone, about 25 hands shot in the air. If they have more sex in the meantime, all the better.

Sex is merely the carrot; the whole event is a self-help conference in disguise. The pickup community – they call themselves "the community" for short – has veered away from scripted ruses and “negging,” a concept that teaches men to build attraction by making negative comments about a woman. Now they teach men that they just need the confidence to approach women, coupled with the ability to present how great they already are. And they state over and over: Don’t lie to women. Have a plan, but be yourself.

“Things will happen as long as you have personality, as long as she likes who you are, and as long as you’re not fake,” Speer tells the group. “Most women can see through this bullshit that we try to feed them. So the more bullshit you try to feed, the less successful you are with women.”

The Tale of Miss M

When you work in retail, you make a lot of snap judgments about people, even if you don’t mean to. Everyday you’re faced with hundreds of customers in all shapes and sizes, customers who can either make or break your day. When they exit the doors of your store, they likely have very complex private lives that indicate their identities as multi-faceted human beings. But when all you know about them is the way they treat you in the span of a few minutes, it’s difficult not to make judgments about who they are. As an employee at a local gift store, I was certain I had a knack for understanding who my customers really were. I didn’t realize how wrong I was until the day I was faced with someone whose story disagreed with mine, despite the fact that we were making our judgments based on the very same information.

Our store played host to a handful of regulars, mostly older women who came in a few times a week while walking the mall. The most infamous of these regulars was Miss M, an 80-year-old woman who visited us once, sometimes twice a day EVERY SINGLE DAY of the week.

Miss M was a small woman with fragile, bone-sharp features. She had the heavy wrinkles of an elderly woman, but none of the customary fattening and softening that often comes with ages. She was thin and angular, and her dyed-brown hair was generally pulled into a tight bun and wrapped in an old-fashioned snood - a kind of fancy hairnet that held the bun in place. She wore expensive tailored blouses and pants, and several large diamonds on her fingers that she insisted on turning upside down so that they faced her palms because, as she put it, “You never know who might see it and decide to beat you up for it.” Her lips were thin and often pursed into a look of disapproval.

I was not a fan of Miss M, as you can probably tell from my description. To me, the expensive clothes and fancy rings were a means of showing off. “If she’s so afraid someone’s going to steal her ring, WHY does she WEAR IT??” I’d complain to my co-workers. “She WANTS someone to steal the damn thing, just so she can complain about it!”

But her upper-class presentation wasn’t the thing that really bothered me. I felt justified in hating Miss M because - in my eyes- she thought that she was better than us. She ordered us around and made absurd demands. On one particular occasion, she came into our store to purchase one of several glass oil lamps that we had on display in the window. She pulled me aside and told me that, while she liked the lamps we had on display, she really needed one to match her bathroom - one that came in a very specific shade of purplish-pink called “thistle.” When I explained that the lamps we had on display were the only ones available from the company, she told me that I needed to get on the phone right away and demand that they make her one in the specified color. “Miss M, I just can’t do that,” I said, trying to be polite but forceful. “They just don’t make them in any other color.”

“Just because they don’t RIGHT NOW doesn’t mean they CAN’T,” she said. “All of these lamps were clear at some point. I know how these things work. They just have to be told what to do; so call them and tell them.”

While I continued to insist that I couldn’t call the company for this special request, customers were piling up at the register and my coworker, Jenna, was motioning for me to come and help her. I tried to shoo Miss M away, but she insisted that I get her what she wanted. I told her that I would need to step into the back room and speak with the manager to see if calling the company would be possible. My plan was to gather my wits and find the best way to approach her before returning to the sales floor. But I had only been in back a few seconds when she marched through our Employees-Only door, told me she would be leaving, and that I was clearly “not in the shape to provide the best customer service” that day.

I was fuming. I ran to the front to help Jenna with customers, then reported to my manager about the situation with Miss M. “I just can’t stand her!” I whined. “She’s so demanding! She thinks she’s so much better than everyone, that we have to help her and ONLY her, not anyone else!”

Before I could finish my rant, my manager - a kindhearted woman I’d known for years - stopped me. “Sharon, she’s lonely. Haven’t you ever heard her talk about her children? She has five of them, and they’ve all moved away. Her husband died last year, and she’s clearly in the early stages of alzheimers. She just doesn’t know how to conduct herself. It isn’t badly intended. She just wants someone to pay attention to her, to talk to her for a while. And she wants to be helpful. She tells you all those things about calling the company because she really thinks she’s telling you something useful. She thinks the company SHOULD do what you’re asking. She thinks she’s helping you give better customer service.”

I was baffled. I’d spent weeks complaining to my coworkers and friends about the mean old wealthy woman who wanted nothing but to boss me around. And all that time, my manager had seen someone completely different - a helpless victim of loneliness and dementia, a fragile person who needed our help and our attention. We had been looking at the same person, had heard the same words, but had interpreted them completely differently. Through the story of Miss M, I realized how much our descriptions and stories are influenced by our opinions - and how easily those stories can be shaken by the presence of an opposing viewpoint.