Susan Bordo

The article "Eroticizing Men: Cultural Influences on Advertising and Male Objectification" is a perfect scholarly source that Susan Bordo could have used in her essay. Much of the article echoes the points that Susan made throughout her essay of male sexualization and backs it up with various statistics from studies such as the consumer demographics of a magazine and the depiction of males in various magazines through a sample. On these point alone the article is useful to Susan's arguments as it serves as a bolster of her various assessments through more concrete data. More than that though, the article makes a great comparison of the growing emphasis that men are having toward their body and the already established thought of women toward their body that Susan briefly touched on. The article makes a case that the ideal body is becoming something that is no longer something only women do but something men now do as well, the body has become something "packaged, and used to sell everything". This fits in Susan's line of thought of the change over the years of how a man's body can now be used to sell products through more direct means, sometimes even more provocative and sexualized means than was previously accepted. The article also makes a point that through the use of the "gay dollar" there has come a change in the accepted depiction of males in advertisements, this point almost parallels Susan's argument and further showcases how much the article could be used by Susan Bordo in much of her essay.

http://www.public.asu.edu/~kleong/eroticizing%20men%20in%20advertising.pdf

DFW Commencement Speech

The commencement speech by David Foster Wallace is one where I truly feel like he had quite a bit on introspective knowledge to pass on to the graduate students of Kenyon College. It starts off with the quip of "what the hell is water?" which stuck out to me as quite a way to catch the attention of the students and he then went on to talk about the importance of how one views and copes with their daily life rituals. David brings up the notion of how we as people have a fairly centric view of reality, we never look for or bother to think about the people around us as much as we think about ourselves and how these people interact with us. I feel like this is a very key point and probably my big takeaway from the article as possibly the most effective way to really coping with many of our problems is to take a grander view of the world rather than the largely centric view we tend to take. We can of course always concentrate on how awful our lives are and how annoying the people around us are with their slow moving cars or annoying and loud behaviors but if we can actually take a moment and consider that they as other people have their own situations happening simultaneously as ours it can do a lot to take away this narcissistic mindset. By taking away this mindset I believe we can then do a lot to curb our behavior and become better with coping with our daily grind since then we will not only think of "why are these people always getting in my way" but more in the sense that "these people may be in my way at the moment but they probably have their own situations going on as well" which helps as we become much less central minded and are less likely to become upset when things do not go our way. This change in thinking I think is something that we should do but don't do enough on a daily basis and I thought it was nice that David Foster Wallace brought it to the attention as it really is possibly the most important thing if one plans to survive the daily grind of real life. One can not plan to survive in this world if one only thinks about themselves and becomes ignorant to the idea that the people around us also have their own goals and needs.

"Banking Concept of Education"

The "Banking Concept of Education" by Paulo Freire is an interesting piece of literature and makes a very valid point toward the weakness of modern day education that I have to absolutely agree with on a larger level. Though there are some areas that I feel are an inherent weakness in the process of educating the youth such as the preliminary education where one has no basis of knowledge to have an opinion yet I still concede that it doesn't change that by feeding them this education that were are falling into an act of domination. The act of problem-posing education is not something new and in fact stems from way back to the days of the great philosopher Socrates and as a result shows that it has indeed had a history of successful running with people. I agree that a problem-posing education is indeed the best way to truly teach someone as merely being able to regurgitate what one is taught means nothing compared to knowing why they know something and what it really means.

I found it interesting how Paulo linked this sort of treatment of students to the way a dictator would dominate his subjects and in some ways I feel this is a bit of an unfair comparison as unlike the setting where a dictator allows no speech at all against him, the modern education however allows free and opposing opinions once one has some ground to stand on such as college. It still doesn't change that it still becomes a matter of "end justifies the means" issue that then links the two even more closely due to the ideological similarity in philosophy which then as a result makes the comparison all the more valid. It really doesn't help though that in some cases a teacher really does take the form of an absolute ruler, that what they say is always correct no matter the issues and all students must simply accept what they say as fact, this being something I have personally experienced from time to time. Whether I agree or disagree about the direct comparison it still doesn't change that the comparison has quite a bit of validity at its very core.

Evolution of Schizophrenia Treatment (17th to 21st Century) [Take Two]

Schizophrenia is a mental disease that has been part of human society for thousands of years, while not seen as one for much of what one would call the modern eras of human history it has come to pass in recent years that schizophrenia came into prominence as a recognized disease. Keeping this in mind it is evident that the medical field has changed quite a bit over the years to allow this to happen but nonetheless when we look at how the medical field has evolved in their treatment of people with schizophrenia from the 17th century to the 21st century it becomes quite interesting and in many cases jarring how much has changed. The specific way of finding out how much has changed lies mainly in analyzing how the medical field has changed in their doctrine of the disease and the change in medical treatments for it. There may of course be the inevitable arguments that although the widely accepted public view has changed toward schizophrenia that there still is indeed quite a bit of negative practices that could also be directly correlated to medical practices of earlier history. This may be true on some level but I feel that there is actual concrete reasoning and logic to our practices in our day and age even if the treatment may seem cruel as compared to earlier centuries where medical practices were based on nothing but ease and predetermined beliefs.

By examining several texts and old literature over schizophrenia and comparing it to modern day texts I hope to find a correlation toward either an evolution or continuation of medical practice toward schizophrenics. Through researching this question I hope to find out how much the medical field, and as an extension humanity, has truly evolved and progressed over the centuries as compared to how much is merely what we imagined to have been progress in the field through examining the change in schizophrenic treatment.

http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015054285682

http://www.gjpsy.uni-goettingen.de/gjp-article-kyziridis.pdf

http://ww1.cpa-apc.org/Publications/Archives/CJP/1997/April/review2_0497.htm

The first link is an e-book which I feel will fill in the certain gaps that I may or may not have over what exactly entails schizophrenia and may help me understand why a treatment may or may not have been deemed worth use and why. The second is a brief history of schizophrenia and I believe something that will help in finding the roots of schizophrenia and some more background over the disease and the evolution in treatment. The third is a bit of an odd pick but I feel something to explore and possibly expand on considering that medical treatment in this day and age has a lot to do with drug treatment.

                All in all I hope by looking into schizophrenia and the evolution of medical treatment toward it I may find something I hadn’t thought or looked at before that may open my eyes to future endeavors and questions of interest.

"The Achievment of Desire"

The idea of the scholarship boy is an idea very near to myself due in large part due to the similar circumstances that the author describes as the boy going through and lot of my own personal experiences. Due to this connection between myself and the text I found it very interesting how he went on to describe the scholarship boy as a bad student. Upon reading that statement in the passage by Richard Rodriguez I felt quite shocked how he could call someone who had diligently dedicated their life to academic success and done so well on paper a bad student. I looked over the passage where he explained why the scholarship boy was in fact a bad student and I thought over the validity of what was said and eventually came to the conclusion that he was on some level correct. The charge that the scholarship boy was a person with no real opinion for themselves is extremely valid and something that I have not only bared witness to myself but have actually been guilty of myself doing at times. To see people become great "imitators" of the education system is something I never truly thought about until reading but upon retrospect it is quite jarring as I think of how people give up "themselves" and then turn toward their educators for how to act and think. This critique of the education system and those students that follow its coattails so closely is on some level a bit too critical insofar that one may still be able to learn and adapt while still being true to yourself and keeping your own beliefs. Overall it's a very poignant point and one that I'll keep in mind when looking to the education system and the scholarship children so highly praised.

"The Pain Scale"

"The Pain Scale" by Eula Bliss is an interesting read to say the very least and does a fairly good job of making the reader think about what exactly defines pain through various examples as she goes through the different numbers of the pain scale. Although Eula isn't exactly very linear in her thought pattern as she goes on through the scale and it at times comes off as confusing she nonetheless is able to convey and makes us question ourselves and our conventional understanding of pain. Her anecdotes are interesting and sporadic but still serve as an interesting quirk to her essay as she evolves the pain higher and higher through her essay.

One of the points that most stuck out to me as Eula talked about the pain scale was her paralleling the various levels to the levels of Hell, as described in Dante's Inferno, as she goes through her essay but then suddenly making note that there is no tenth level of Hell as she goes on to talk about the final threshold of pain. Perhaps it is due to my own religious side of the issue that I find this a very interesting point of note, that is to say to compare the pain scale and the levels of Hell side by side and then to state that there is no actual tenth level as if to totally make the comparisons she had made arbitrary. I can imagine that this is a sort of indirect statement then that the tenth level of pain is left to our imagination and something that will never be explicitly known or stated. To put it this way, although no one will ever be able to directly prove that they are or are not experiencing the greatest pain imaginable people as a whole will always have the idea that there is indeed a greatest pain possible beyond what they are experiencing no matter the pain they are in. This is a parallel to Dante's Inferno in that although we look at the Devil and his locked state in ice as the final level of Hell as described in the story, one can also wonder if there is a level even deeper in the depths of Hell as in the story he was not able to delve any further than the described level. Perhaps there is a level of hell reserved for those that are even more despicable then those who betrayed the son of God, a special place where one is tortured beyond what had been previously described for their awful crimes against heaven. The imagination is perhaps the biggest reason why then that we refuse to quantify ten or the max to anything because we are to be honest an unsure people. When we quantify the max to anything then that means that is the end, there is no beyond that and we must work around the known maximum. It is then the fear of the max and our imagination of the true that keeps all our numbers quantifying in reality between 1-9 on the pain scale.

Evolution of Schizophrenia Treatment (17th to 21st Century)

When we look at schizophrenia in this day and age we look at it as an unfortunate disease that a select few have unfortunately been inflicted with and that we, as the understanding and civilized people we are, must understand that they have a problem that must be accepted and treated. Now compared to the 17th century thinking this was to say the very least near nonexistent, the very thought that one must make consolidations toward what was viewed as a menace to society was foolhardy thought. This sort of disparity between now and then in the treatment of those with schizophrenia can be noted at the very least for how staggering it is in scope, to come so far in our treatment is a sort of testament in the growth of understanding people have obtained.

When one looks at the evolution of treatment one must keep note that the introduction of many of the facilities to help treat many mental diseases such as schizophrenia were actually rooted in an attempt to try to isolate and exclude them from society. Insane asylums and hospitals for example in the 17th century were used for the most part as containers for people with schizophrenia. This inevitably lead to a feeling of fear and misunderstanding as people came to only understand that people with mental diseases such as schizophrenia were to be isolated from the population. When we compare this sort of tact to today where there is an almost limitless amount of resources and information spread about every known mental disease and an active push by many organizations for people to understand these diseases it's astounding to see.

Whether we actively think about it or not we as a society have come to evolve to accept and work around those that have issues outside of their control. Whether this be in changing the form of how we act or changing the environment to accommodate them, in today's day it is simply a fact that people try their best to make everyone fit into society. To try to compare this line of thought to 17th century thinking is a task of monumental proportions due to how much of our behavior has evolved. When one thinks about treatment of schizophrenia in the 21st century for example, almost none think about an intrusive surgery that would result in the destruction of the frontal cortex of the brain along with destroying the very part of patients' brains responsible for judgment, emotional control, and personality but rather one would think to try medical treatment and psychotherapy. Though that is the issue, that sort of procedure back in the day was seen as the primary and perhaps best way to deal with schizophrenia and other mental diseases. Something today we would see as disgusting to even consider were the main source of treatments and all in all it's very jarring.

To put it lightly and to conclude, our view and treatment of schizophrenia has dramatically changed from the 17th century and it's an interesting but perhaps a little morbid to see how much we have evolved.