Sociology Week 10

This week we talked about how the media negatively affects girls' body images of themselves. Girls are always being bombarded with images of very conventionally "beautiful" women. Women who are thin with virtually no flaws. The crazy thing is that these women girls are looking up to usually aren't even real. Thanks to our ability to transform images, the models and celebrities we see don't appear as purely themselves. These women have their own flaws too- like Britney Spears' cellulite that was taken away- we just don't see them. We watched the movie "Killing us Softly 4". This movie talked about all of these points in detail. The only thing I didn't like about it was how it portrayed thinness. I am someone who is naturally thin and I feel like the way the woman presented it in the video wasn't right. She showed pictures of very thin models to shock the audience at how thin girls are becoming. Although I agree it's very bad that girls who aren't naturally that thin are aspiring to be, it also needs to be recognized in the media's new movement against promoting being too thin that it's okay to be thin if that is your body type. I think the message should be to be healthy through eating well and getting exercise and whatever body you end up with through being healthy, is beautiful. For some girls that's bigger, for some it's just "perfect", and for some it's more on the thin side. Similarly, I don't think it's fair for campaigns like Dove to only feature women above a certain size, or for some companies to only hire models above a certain weight. I think that in order to promote all natural body types as beautiful, all women, sizes 0 and above, should be featured as models. As bad as it is to only feature models who are a size 0, I think it's just as bad to exclude them completely.

Sociology Week 9

This week in sociology we discussed nature versus nurture. We talked about the things that make us human and how the 'nurture' part is vital in our process of becoming human. Connection and interactions with other humans at a young age is very important. We talked about cases like Genie where a child was raised in terrible conditions, isolated in a room with very little human interaction for their entire life. Sadly, once a critical period is passed, there is only so much progress a child like that can make as far as language and independent functioning go. Children like these weren't born with mental impairments, they had the "nature" part. But without the nurture, they ended up only being able to function on a level of someone who was born with mental impairments. Human interaction and connection is so important. It made me think back to the Brene Brown video when she said that we're here to feel connected to others, that's how we are wired. Although she was speaking on a more emotional level, its interesting how that also applies to this situation at a very young age. It just reinforced the importance of forming strong, loving relationships with others.