Beautiful Bodies

Chapter ten is all about body rhetoric and what our bodies do not only to our self image but also to what others think about us from first glance.  The chapter ranges from things such as tattoos to how we portray "beauty" from advertisements.  Throughout chapter ten there are ranges of article and stories all about these topics and how we are affected by what image we think we should convey with our bodies.  

One of the first articles is titled "Fat Is an Advertising Issue" by Susie Orbach and I find it to be a very informative and influential article.  Basically, the author is describing how Dove takes a "'real' woman's image" approach in their advertisements so that women aren't compelled to think that they have to look like skinny, beautiful, supermodels in order to use the product.  This is a great tactic! I, personally, find myself looking at ads wondering how I could make myself look like the skinny, perfectly tone women in each ad that I come across. I feel like I could never use the product (for instance if it's clothes - I could never wear the clothes and look as good in them) like they do, so I'm turned off from buying it.  

Taking Dove's approach, if I were to see a girl who had my amount of body fat and weight in an ad, I'd most likely connect with her more and therefore be impelled to buy whatever she was advertising.  I commend Dove for their idea and Ms. Orbach for supporting the whole thing. 

Beauty, as cliche as it sounds, is on the inside; anyone can look the same on the outside. 

Lovely research

To be honest, I am not a big fan of research. I learn a lot when I actually complete my research, but the process isn't something I'd choose to do on a Friday night, or any other night given.  The research I completed for teen pregnancy was actually interesting.  It's quite a surprise to see how many teens in the world are pregnant, and also how common it is among some cultures!

I found it easy to find books about teen pregnancy and what should be done if that happens, but I never found a book that actually gave me statistics about how common it used to be compared to today's society. Websites were easier to mull through for that information.  Magazine articles, I found, are pretty much impossible to find about this topic.

Bibliography's (works cited pages) are easy enough to get the hang of; they don't trouble me very much.

Teenage Pregnancy

The first on my list of possible research topics is teenage pregnancies.  I feel that as I've grown up, this has become a bigger and surprisingly less of a "no-no" topic than it used to be, especially in America.  In high school at my graduation, I counted eight - yes EIGHT! - girls in a class of 230 students that were pregnant and walking across stage. This isn't counting the two that I knew of that were out due to their pregnancies.  That's way too much!  I guess the shock has worn off among some of society as seeing this in teenagers but for me, I am still not sure exactly how I feel about the thought of someone my age being a mother.  Is it wrong and hindering or is it something that I should accept and cope with on my own time?

When an adult, married woman is with child, everyone can't seem to coo and congratulate her enough on her expected child, but when my friend got pregnant in high school, she didn't get the same congratulations, well at least not by everyone. Even though some of our society is changing the way they look at teenagers that are pregnant, there are others who still would disown you if you were their own family.  My friend that was pregnant was among those who wouldn't be looked at again if they were unveiled as being unclean or unpure, so she, without telling many others than myself, went to an abortion agency and had things "dealt with". 

She wasn't the only one of my friends to get pregnant in high school... another was pregnant our senior year.  This paper isn't about abortions though, so I'm not going into the controversy about that, it just goes to show that the pressures of the world are sometimes at east, but depending what values and morals your family has been brought up on, being pregnant will have its different pressures.  

There are many countries in our world where being a pregnant teenager is normal to them.  When the women don't have college to go to after high school, it isn't out of the ordinary to see pregnant girls walking among the rest of society in the masses.

Going back to my first paragraph, wondering how acceptable this situation is really becoming, and thought just popped into my head and I wonder, is America actually more lenient about this topic than I let on?  I just remembered that a new popular TV series that just came onto the family safe channel of HBO is called The Secret Life of an American Teenager where the main character is pregnant.  If this can be openly shown to families across America with children that watch and learn most of what they base life off of on the TV, then there's obviously some acceptance for the situation.  Are people finally coming out and saying, "It's okay"?

Is it really okay?  What should our views be on the topic of teenage pregnancies?  I want to compare America and its moral values along with the opportunities girls are allotted here on the free land with the rest of the world and figure out what's different and what's changing.

Learn How to Edit

I loved the new ways of editing that Deanna told us to use in class today. Honestly, whenever I edit a paper, all I do is read and re-read looking for the same kinds of mistakes over and over. When we sat with our partners I got more editing in than I could ever have done on my own. Elizabeth helped me so much by telling me what didn't make sense and what sentences I should change or fix.  We spent about thirty minutes on each other's papers but in the end, our papers argued the points we were trying to argue much more effectively.

I didn't get around to trying the two other editing techniques, but I will before Tuesday.