Welfare and Workfare: wrong or right?

Most of us grew up in homes where everyday commodities and privileges were taken for granted. What would you do if you had to go to bed hungry, sleep in a one room rundown apartment, or worry about even having a place to live after eviction? It’s easy for people who have never had to worry about such things to look down on those who do and judge. But the truth is you don’t know what it is like until it’s you.
Many would agree that the word “welfare” does not have the greatest connotation. Most people classify those seeking government aids as lazy moochers. In all honesty, the same adjectives used to come to my mind as well. Being young and naïve, I didn’t understand why someone could not acquire a job, there is always McDonalds. But what I have come to find is that the world is not the pretty, perfect place I had imagined years ago.
Growing up, I had plenty of experience with those who are less fortunate but I never could fully comprehend what they were going through. Before entering kindergarten, my babysitter and I would volunteer at a soup kitchen every Tuesday. I made friends with many of the homeless, or what I called the dirty people. I then proceeded to go home to a well cooked hot meal and quickly forgot my friends who would not be dinning like me. In my catholic elementary school, I remember constantly doing can drives, raising money for the sick, and donating at church to the poor. In high school around Christmas, each homeroom would adopt a needy family and every year I would insist on paying out of my own pocket for the children’s clothing. Although I had developed a sense of sympathy for those who were struggling, I still was unaware of how easy it was to loose it all.
Today I have mixed emotions about welfare, workfare, and similar types of government aids. Not having a system would be unjust but at the same time having such a system can also deplete a budget that is not there in the first place. Watching the three videos in class provided clear evidence to the fact that there will always be people of need, in good times and in bad. One clip highlighted the dirty jobs required for workfare and the time limits that kept cyclists from benefiting after five years. However, one film gave statistics from 1996, when the economy was riding high. Currently, our economy is in the worst recession since the Great Depression. Over 750,000 people in the U.S. lost their job just last month. There is no way possible our government could provide aid to everyone who is suffering. Too many people are still working the system and those who really need the help are not getting their fair share. Just as our text said, there needs to be a reformation.
I believe providing welfare or workfare is a necessity to keep our country afloat; however, abuse of this governmental aid could sink the U.S. trillions of dollars under. Until we experience the struggle ourselves none of us will fully understand the turmoil. What we can do is join forces and try our hardest to lend a helping hand. No one wants to live in poverty. We all dream of living in comfort. The U.S. can help the dreams of thousands of struggling citizens come true through an improved welfare and workfare system. Nobody deserves a stroller ride through their entire life but sometimes we all need short piggyback.

Reflect on the controversy surrounding whether, how, and why Western feminists should be involved in promoting gender justice in lesser-developed part

Looking at Western feminism from either a global or transnational standpoint, both have pros and cons. For many, the issue begins with whether we have the responsibility to even bother with the extreme issues of Western countries. Others ridicule the U.S. for its lack of donation, time, and effort to others in need. However, there is one topic that both global and transgender feminism agree on, something needs to be done about the inequalities of women in deprived parts of the world.
Global feminism takes a direct stance on generating awareness about gender justice. These feminists believe that violation of human rights should be intolerable, no matter what country you inhibit. Global feminists feel that going across borders and fighting for the abolishment of oppressive acts, like female gentile cuttings and underage arranged marriages, is the most effective method. By acting is such ways, many label these feminists as ethnocentric and hegemonic.
In my opinion, approaching gender issues in such a domineering way will actually prove to be more detrimental. For example, most college students will admit to drinking before they reached the age of 21. How would you feel if the Chinese came over to America and started telling all teenagers that underage drinking was bad? Just like American laws establish the drinking age at 21, other countries also have laws against underage marriage, but people still do it anyway. Going back to the drinking example, a more effective way to get through to the rebellious teenagers would be to tell them a story of how your best friend died will drinking and driving.
Transnational Feminists utilize a more culturally sensitive methodology. Like with the drinking example, these feminists believe that dialogue is the way to connect with victims of oppression. Transnational Feminism acknowledges country boundaries and crosses them in a peaceful manner. Culture, gender, and intersectionality are all taken into consideration when entering a new area of the world. On the flip side, this group receives the greatest amount of criticism for not accomplishing enough due to their subtle approach.
I side more with the Transnational Feminists for several important reasons. First, their main goal is to not come into a needy area and tell them to change their entire culture along with traditions, but to educate, facilitate, and alert women experiencing injustice that there are alternatives. Providing education to younger women will increase their chances of avoiding oppression in the future. Facilitation could be provided through small loans for women that struggle to get funding in their country. Finally, awareness is the easiest way to reach a large group of women and persuade them that they are not alone, and there is a way out.

Blinded by Heterosexuality

Of all my twenty years of life heterosexuality has been the dominating norm. When I think of love and intimacy the first thing that comes to mind is a man and a woman. Growing up in Catholic school, from grade school to high school I was taught that marriage was between a male and a female. God made the two sexes to fit each other perfectly in order to procreate. Of course, I wasn’t just being taught this topic everyday in religion class but I was also experiencing it. I had never met a gay person until I reached high school where there where assumptions that two of my classmates were not like the most of us. I found the fact that these two girls were gay disgusting and repulsive. When the love affair was made public the two students were suspended and eventually left the school by the end of the year. The no tolerance policy for homosexuality was all I had ever known.
College, as many can agree, opened my eyes to a whole new “real” world. Freshmen year was the time that most of my high school friends ‘came out’. Although it shocked most of us, as we IMed each other as soon the news broke, gradually our reactions became more open. I had finally broken out of the Catholic bubble and saw the other side. However, I still lacked the exposure with others who strayed away from sexual orientation norms.
The fact is it took me years to become comfortable with others different than myself. The movie “Broke Back Mountain” came out around my freshmen year of college and one of my suitemates forced me to watch it with our group of friends. She warned me ahead of time to be open to the love story. In reality, I still wasn’t ready to accept the foreign love of homosexuals. After viewing the movie, I was not moved, showed little to no emotion, and at some points was completely grossed out. Although I wasn’t able to justify attraction between a man and another man as ok, this film was my first introduction into understanding that all love is the same.
Not until recently have I come to fully comprehend homosexuality. One of my close friends went to Belgium last semester, coming back with a new group of buddies. One of them happens to be gay, although he hasn’t admitted it yet. I can see our many differences but for the first time I’m fine with them. I no longer believe gays are abnormal and inhuman. They are just like the rest of us, heterosexuals. My step-father recently did some home improvement work for two gay partners and instead of avoiding them like the plague, I was drawn to them. They were openly gay, making a joke about something inappropriate every two sentences, and I found humor in their ‘gayness’. Sometimes approval takes time, in my case years. But it is not until you accept someone for who they really are, can you then appreciate them for all their differences.

My personal experience with Ableism

Think about the different processes you go through during your day. Now focus just on the morning activities after just waking up. You sit-up out of bed, walk to the shower, clean yourself, brush your teeth, dress yourself, make breakfast, feed yourself, and drive to work or school all in, usually, a timely manner. Now think of yourself as disabled, not having use of your legs or even just one arm. Would you be able to do all or even any of the same daily activities in the same amount of time? The privileges of physical and mental ability are one of the most taken for granted capabilities. Even I never knew how good I had it until I was forced to live a month in a disabled shoe.
In the summer before the eighth grade I was home babysitting my younger sister when I decided to go for a joy run through the house and literally took a turn for the worse. As I rounded a corner in the hallway my left foot hit the love sofa with blunt force. Being a dramatic pre-teenager I screamed bloody murder and begged my younger sister to call 911. Knowing my theatrical tendencies, my sister just laughed as I crawled across the floor in pain. Once my parents came home and got out their laughter too, it was decided that I wouldn’t be making the seven hour bus ride to Ellis Island, New York the next day. Thus, after a night spent with my left foot propped nearly 90 degrees in the air I went to the emergency room to assess the problem. Just as I thought, and no one else believed, my left foot baby toe was broken.
My last month of summer before entering the eighth grade was pure misery. About a week following the broken toe diagnosis I used my mother’s crutches around the house to keep my weight off the foot and keep the swelling down. I soon received a special shoe to wear because my foot was too sensitive and large to fit in close-toed-shoes. However, when it came to attending the annual end of the summer pool parties I was not a happy camper. I never realized how difficult it is to watch your friends play in the sun and splash in the pool while forced to happily sit there and smile. But what I found even more difficult was when school began for the new year. I wobbled around in my Velcro hospital shoe always barely making it to class on time. When I told my peers it was just a broken toe, they would laugh at me. For once, this time the pain was real. The first day back to gym class I forgot my doctor’s note and my PE teacher threatened to fail me if I didn’t participate in soccer practice. By that time I had had enough of my minor disability.
After a quick and unexpected reset of my toe and hundreds of calcium supplement pills my left foot baby toe was good as new. I learned my lesson about inside joy runs the hard way. My greatest frustration of it all was not being to keep up with my friends, and the pace of life around me. However, before that dreadful day I never appreciated my ability to run, walk, or even just stand without assistance or pain. Maybe ableism cannot be fully understood until it is lost, or like the saying, “You don’t know what you got till it’s gone.”

Media's affect on body image in relation to MY life on SB 09

Over my Spring Break I observed several issues pertaining to our recent studies in Women Studies.
It’s Spring Break ’09 and seeing that I am not on an exotic island baking in the sun I decided to go on a shopping trip on my one day off of work. I started off in the mall in my town, with a rather small selection of shops. However, the same problem I usually encounter was waiting for me at the door. I can search through piles of clothes, ask the attendants to look in the back for more sizes, and I can even try to squeeze into the extra small to test the waters. But in the end, the clothing sizes that most regular sized women are, are NEVER there. You would think clothing stores would realize that the medium-large sizes always seem to go the fastest and the oversupply of extra smalls would be a good indicator that the average woman isn’t built to be a twig. But every shopping trip and every store visit, it’s the same deal. I fall in love with the shirt, skirt, pants, etc. and what do you know, my size is already sold out.
So I continued on my hunt to find something that fit at another mall. Walking into Forever 21, one of the stores frequented by most girls my age, I get all excited when I look at the manikins wearing the clothes and accessories so well. However, what I have come to find is that a size 0 manikin looks better in a strapless, body-skin tight dress than I do. Why not get models who look more like the a real woman, with hips and a real bottom? What’s the point of faking us out? Now I understand the store’s no return policy. They probably save thousands of dollars that way.
Finally, my last encounter with issues we are currently studying in Women Studies was during the filming of a DVD orientation video for my mother’s work. I was volunteered to be the inappropriately dressed employee. I had to stand in front of a camera and was the product of “Male Gaze”. The camera even had a setting that glided the lens from the feet up . I felt mortified. I guess you really don’t know what ‘the gaze’ feels like until you experience it yourself.
Now that I have studied many issues related the media’s portrayal of the female body, I am able to relate such topics to the outside world and in some cases realize when I am product of my environment.

How have media representations of women’s body/beauty changed over your lifetime? Have the changes been empowering to women? Why or why not?

H Looking back both at my life and the lives of others around me it’s shocking how powerful media changes can be on society. Being born in the late 1980s the notion of leading women had been around for decades already. Growing up with a mother who had started and owned her own business, it didn’t faze me that women’s equality status in the business world was still an evolving issue. Now enrolled in an entrepreneurship class I recently learned that the number of women now studying the profession is still much lower than men. As a girl I was so oblivious to the real world. When it came to discussion of my future all I knew was that I wanted a red convertible like my Barbie and wanted to be a professional ice skater just like all the pretty girls in the winter Olympics. Now that I am “older” I am able to see how trends affected my way of thinking, my dreams, and in actuality the way I lived my life.
I would say media took its affect on my around the age of ten or eleven, a time where most girls are trying more to fit rather than finding themselves. My best friend was boy-crazed and I was trying to grow up way too fast. Grace, my best friend, and I began reading teen magazines, watching the bad parts of PG 13 movies, and worrying about boys. Of course every girl wants at least one boy to like them, especially around the preteen age. To accomplish this task we turned to the representation of older women to try and land a man. I remember watching Christina Aguilera and Brittany Spears gradually make more provocative videos and thinking if I could only be “sexy” like them. So I bought the makeup and the hot clothing and I got my first boyfriend. Mission accomplished. However, as I grew up the media’s latest fads did too.
Maybe I just need to hit that point in my life where I started to see the world in a more realistic way in order to finally see that the media really did have a power over me. I would say this time came around my senior year of high school. For most of the past three years I had hung around the type of girls who modeled to every type of media trend that came about. I finally realized that it was ok that I wasn’t the promiscuous teenager girls were supposed to be. Since pre-teen times the image of girls and women had become much more provocative. What was not acceptable to wear ten years ago was now considered conservative. Tan was the new pale. Bleach blonde hair was hot. And the more cuss words in the song the better. Times had definitely changed and I had finally hit the age where I could be different and be ok with it. I’m not saying I didn’t follow any trends and totally did a 180 but I didn’t want to turn into one of those girls that looked and acted just like everyone else. To me that was not cool anymore.
Now I am in college and I have more exposure with older women and women in the workforce I can see how the media affects this group as well. Today it is more common to see a woman balancing a career with family life. Twenty one years ago this fad was still growing. In addition, the number of both girls and women suffering from eating disorders has sadly increased. I blame 95% of this on the media and depiction of a thinner and thinner woman. Even as a teenage I suffered from a period where I believed I was bigger than all my friends and therefore dieted for two years. Thus, it can be said that the media has influenced women in both positive and negative ways. It all depends on the woman, and how much power she allots to the media to control her life.

Tactics of media's construction of the female body and "Killing Us Softly 3"

The film “Killing Us Softly 3” video was a great portrayal of the media’s construction of the female body. The movie went in depth discussing the seven different tactics of advertisements and how this harms women in more ways than one.
The first approach to depicting women is through objectification. In most cases, women are made into sex objects. Women are supposed to be sexy, and make men want them. In one add a woman’s head and lower half of her body were cut off and all viewers could see was her torso (which is also a form of dismemberment later discussed). The print of the advertisement read, “Sick of men who want you for your personality”. It was promoting a New York gym but in actuality it was saying men should only want women for their body and looks.
The second method of the media is called dismemberment, showing only part of the body of a woman. In an advertisement for a special type of lamp, a table made of skinny legs of a woman in heels, held the light. Showing only the long legs in a sexual position with the bright red high heels is dismembering a woman’s body.
The third and popular tactic is the media’s obsession with thinness. Today, skinniness is a worldwide issue. People are finally lashing out again the models who are barely skin and bones. The recent order for models to have a certain body mass for their height was a step in the right direction. However, the problem is far from over. Open up any type of magazine and guaranteed there will at least one overly thin woman. The affects from this are overwhelming. It’s almost the norm to be or know someone who suffers from an eating disorder. Society looks up to thin, good-looking women and frowns upon “the fat”. One picture shown in the movie was of a woman where you could literally count every protruding rib in her body.
Another way the media constructs the female image is through silencing, the covering of a woman’s mouth. This is done mainly in print ads where an article of clothing or hands will be placed over a girls lips. Although silencing may not look disturbing, it’s the underlying meaning that is. It takes away a woman’s voice, suppresses her, and regresses back to the days where women were inferior and not allowed to speak. Of all the issues this may be most difficult tactic to notice.
Infantilization, the idea that sex sells so women should stay young looking, and Ageism, the notion that the majority of women in advertisements are under the age of 35, are two similar approaches of the media. Look at Hollywood and try to count the number of women who have had some kind of surgery to stay youthful looking. Now open a popular magazine and guess the average age of women depicted. Today everyone is trying to stay younger longer and the media’s portrayal of women is a major cause for this trend. Botox and face creams and diet pills fill the ads of these magazines with only young women. No wonder wrinkles and laugh lines are considered unacceptable. Dove has come out with ads that show older, women who are happy in the own bodies. But it is going to have to take a world-wide commitment in order to change the “older is ugly” trend.
Finally, the last method the media uses to represent women is through violence. An ad showed in the movie was of a thin girl laying on a bathroom floor, fragile and helpless, while a muscular man is crotched over her. It was obvious that she was a victim of some abuse but society considers such advertisements as acceptable. In addition, the brawny man was headed towards the woman in a sexual manner, thus adding a notion of objectification into the picture as well. Why do we have laws against abuse and violence yet it’s socially acceptable to depicted such events within an advertisement? We ban video games that promote violence but allow teenage girls to look at pictures and think it’s ok if a man beats her. No wonder society is so messed up.
The movie “Killing Us Softly 3” was eye-opening. It is time that women take a stand against the way they are being represented in the media. Advertisements have labeled women as sex objects, condoned eating disorders, taken away a woman’s voice in matters, labeled aging as ugly and to be avoided, and promoted violence. Just as the movie suggested, women need to join forces and finally say ‘enough is enough’.