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.