#mp1318

I was shocked to learn that nail salons were so cutthroat to their employees. We always hear that America is a land of opportunity, a place of diversity, but the ugly side of it, with the hatred and discrimination of immigrants, rarely comes up in the propaganda. Because we live in a modern age, and surely we’re better than that now, right?

I thought the excerpt provided by the class reading was interesting, because it completely contrasted with the image of poverty provided by Pam Fessler’s plenary. Ms. Tirado’s poverty is an angry, bitter kind, with not much to be thankful for, and constant stress and annoyance as an armor against the privileged, uncomfortable world that doesn’t know how lucky they have it. Ms. Fessler, on the other hand, presented to us people that may live in apartments, who may have TVs and other tech, but still had to work a bunch of jobs, and didn’t seem quite so irritated.

I agreed with a lot of the issues raised via skits, but one thing that annoyed me about it was the mixup over sexuality and romance. For example, being asexual doesn’t mean you can’t fall in love. It means you don’t desire sex. There are plenty of asexuals in romantic relationships. Being aromantic is when you don’t want a relationship. And if you’re a girl still attracted to men even if you only have relationships with women, that would make you a bisexual homoromantic, technically.

Pam Fessler’s speech was pretty interesting to me, both as a feminist and someone willing to discuss poverty. I didn’t realize the number of women in high-ranking journalism positions was so low, nor had I known that 46% of Americans still languish in poverty. That’s practically half the population! I’m not particularly interested in Welcome to Night Vale, or particularly interested in listening to radio, but hearing her snippets of reporting during the plenary gave me a new perspective on this medium, although I probably will still prefer the internet to getting news over radio.

While I’d already known about the objectification of women in modern-day society, I’ve never had a film shove it so thoroughly in my face as Dreamland 3 did. The sheer volume of undulating bodies, sexualized clothing, and misogyny present throughout the movie actually made me feel a little nauseous, and if my faith in humanity had been negative before, it’s now in the imaginary numbers region thanks to Dreamland 3.

This week’s plenary had a strong theme of spirituality running through it, and how to use that to empower women. Such a topic would normally leave a lot of room for an evangelist to blather on about how accepting God would open someone to possibilities of equality or some religious rot like that, but Ms. Jackson was incredibly earnest and in fact rejected the possibility of worshipping God to empower women, which made me respect her a lot. Most of the plenary was actually about converting negative energy to positive energy, and a lot of people seem to take that as forcefully churning the anger inside you (like butter) into happy thoughts, like “haha, this is so unproductive, what am I doing”, but I disagree.

Not about the negative thoughts being unproductive - because they are. But why do the “positive thoughts” always have to be about tamping down the anger? How is suppressing the bad feelings until next they rear their heads anything but running away from the problem and even more unproductive, in some ways, than the anger and vengeful thoughts were in the first place?