#jayachinnaya

By: Jaya Chinnaya

         Over Thanksgiving break, my 12 year old cousin expressed her love for the country/pop star Taylor Swift, showing us all her albums on her iTunes and bragging about the concert ticket she snagged for her “Red” tour. I have always had a small issue with Swift’s songs, as they all seem to focus on one thing: boys. My cousin argued with me when I said that her songs are only relatable in a very superficial, on-the-surface manner and that Swift only talks about her life in respect to relationships with boys. She responded by asking, “well what else am I supposed to care about”? 

         Taylor Swift is undeniably an accomplished singer/songwriter. She has won multiple Grammys, her album “Fearless” was named album of the year in 2010, and was named Billboard’s Woman of the Year in 2011. But I believe that her career has been based off of being safe with the content of her songs, with a serious a lack of depth to her lyrics. They all contain similar elements or emotions, either anger or happiness or sorrow as a consequence of falling for a boy, and the message to girls like my younger cousin is that that is the extent of what matters to a teen girl. Artists like P!nk, with her song “Stupid Girl”, push young girls to value their minds and individual drive rather than focusing on love. Swift’s song always reference being an outsider but in the perspective of an innocent straight white girl. What about the LGBT community? I find Swift’s ideas around traditional opposite sex relationships and fairytale endings (she has a song called “Today Was A Fairytale” for crying out loud) to be counterproductive to feminism. 

By: Jaya Chinnaya

        The media loves a juicy high profile sex scandal, and they rarely know when to let such stories unfold on their own. The most recent buzz has been around the surfacing of CIA director David Petraeus’ extramarital affair with Paula Broadwell, the co-author of his biography All In, forcing Petraeus into resignation. When looking at all the news articles and television segments on the story, they tend to very much revolve around the women involved, pining them up against each other like a cat fight. I have seen this in a lot of the way the media portrays women, trying to create this female against female throw down scenario that I find both degrading and nonsensical.

By: Jaya Chinnaya            

             On November 8th, 2012, the UMD School of Public Health in cooperation with the Global Public Health Scholars program hosted a viewing of parts of the PBS documentary, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide. The documentary travels to ten different countries, following the stories of women who have struggled through the most severe situation and survived to help others in similar positions. Reporter Nicholas Kristof, along with various celebrities investigate the communities and cultural norms in these countries that breed such gender inequalities, while trying to formulate solutions to these issues.