#response1

In “The Women Men Don’t See,” James Tiptree Jr. explores in his short story how the main character, who is a man, learn of the oppression women face in the patriarchy and through that experience we have insight into the mind of an exemplary male in our society.

The protagonist learns the inner thoughts of a woman, Ruth, as he is spending copious amounts of time with her as they are stuck together in an unknown area. What I found interesting was all the sexual innuendos he made up in his head at all situations with Ruth. This provided the reader to enter the male mind and as a result the core of the patriarchy. Just like in “The Husband Stitch” that was the first time I really read a female character be open about her sexual desires and feel comfortable in asking what she wanted. In this short story, Ruth is a suspicious and devious character according to the protagonist and I liked this side of her as this is an archetype we don’t see much of. We see the man get nervous under her scrutiny with his mind-whirling narration, “Could she have intended to come here? No way. Where she planned to be was Chetumal, which on the border. Come to think, Chetumal is an odd way round to Tikal” (15). We don’t see this deviousness of women portrayed in literature that much because the expectation for women is for them to be modest and obedient to their male counterpart, plus male authors can’t speak the same volume. So to read the audacious reaction of the man quaking, it shows the abnormality of the idea of a woman having an agenda to achieve something that the man does not know anything about as society functions on “women have no rights. . . except what men allow us” (20).

Portrait of Jason documented the interview of a black, homosexual, American man named Jason Holiday.  Jason spoke extensively about many aspects of his life, including jobs, relationships, and childhood.  In the beginning of the interview, Jason talks about his experience with much confidence, humor, and self-assurance; he laughs jokes about his employers.  As the interview progresses, his responses become more emotional and personal, especially when speaking about his parents and directly addressing the interviewer.  

Portrait of Jason documented the interview of a black, homosexual, American man named Jason Holiday.  Jason spoke extensively about many aspects of his life, including jobs, relationships, and childhood.  In the beginning of the interview, Jason talks about his experience with much confidence, humor, and self-assurance.  As the interview progresses, his responses become more emotional and personal.  

This is a picture of a resort center named “Emeralda” situated in Ninh Binh, Viet Nam. The building in the middle of the frame seems to be the center of attention, wrapped by many other points of interest. Most noticeable are the people riding bikes. They are classmates enjoying a vacation together. The green rows of trees on both sides and the pond in front of the building provoke a deep sense of relaxation and peace. The lone-standing vase in the middle of the pond brilliantly stresses on that peace. However, the exaggerated clouds and a dim glare from the sun down across the frame suggests a grandeur that somehow conflicts with the peace in the scene.

I see the skyline of downtown Los Angeles.  Two different frames.  Bright circular light bulbs.  The words “Expectations” and “Reality”.  Two smiling people touching hands and one sad person alone with a bottle of beer in his hand.  An orange candle.  A white ball in the top right corner of the left frame.  A lit skyline in one frame and a non-lit skyline in the other.  Palm trees.  Buildings (non-skyscrapers).  A flower in the bottom right of each frame.  A colorful dress.  A dull suit and tie.  Eye contact.  Staring aimlessly.

This is an image from (500) Days of Summer.  Contextually it’s important to know that Tom’s relationship with Summer is rapidly declining.  Tom is a hopeless romantic while Summer does not want to label their relationship.  This image is Tom’s expectations of how a night with Summer will go and the reality of what happens.  

This is a photograph shows the sky as a pale strip, visible over a reflective lake, which is surrounded by grey, evergreen-covered mountains which become bluer as they get farther away from the viewpoint. The trees that are closer to the point of view are in sharp focus—though some are so close the detail is lost in shadows—allowing the detail of the leaves and variety of color to show through. The lake shore is visible through shallow water, only to drop off.

“…Huh?” 

The trainer looked up at Clair, staring at her with a curious expression from her seat. She didn’t seem to pay much attention to what she had said in the beginning, but after a moment… 

On the Surface: A Guide to Modern Day Friendships

My experience on social media is not a particularly exciting one. I have largely taken a back seat to interaction on social media. In fact, I’d say that my most regular form of activity on social media would be best described as “passive engagement”--in general I just check other people’s activities, and browse through their profiles and pictures. Something I’ve learned, however, is that it’s pretty hard to ever be free from social media once you create it and put yourself out there. By creating a social media account, you are, in a way, committing to being accessible to the public.

The moment I truly realized how the internet had changed the nature of friendships and relationships is when I received messages from people I’ve never met before. But somehow, with the invention of social media, the term friendship has taken on another meaning. The term is used to describe everything from your “relationship” with someone you met once to the relationship you’ve built with a person through years of sacrifice, support, mutual interests, etc. Rather than work to have that, we have all these relationships with people we’ve met for a moment or never even met at all. I don’t agree with it, but most of these random guys who messaged me thought they had a right to just because we had mutual friends

The change in friendship dynamics has raised many questions that touch on various schools of thought. One of the best things I came across in the readings was in “What Are Friends For?” Aristotle believed that people really only had time/the capacity for a few core friendships. We’re not programmed to have the large network of acquaintances that we spend our time on. When we waste our time on these shallow relationships, we take away from the time we’re supposed to spend “getting to know the characters of a few trusted individuals” who are supposed to guide us and have “the responsibility of directing our moral course” (Bloor, p. 153). The entire nature of friendship has changed, and our friendships are less about the content of the people we’re interacting with and rather the amount. We barely know each other on social media--it’s not a social networking requirement. Thus, the quality of friendship decreases. In “Faux Friendships”, Deresiewicz (2009) describes friendship in ancient times as “precious and hard-won”, a “high calling, demanding extraordinary qualities of character” (p. 2). In our day and age, even if such people with these “extraordinary qualities of character” exist, we don’t take the time to get to know them to find out if it’s true. These guys who messaged me didn’t want to get to know me because I’m me. They probably just thought my profile picture was pretty.Truly, we seek relationships that are resemblant of friendship but without the, you know, friendship aspect. To use an example given by Professor Murray, friendships are like purses. A real purse and a knockoff that you buy in Chinatown look the same on the outside--the difference, though not immediately visible on the surface, is significant: the quality of the knockoff is significantly inferior to that of the genuine purse. This is much like the quality of online relationships. You have the knockoffs (the social network relationships) and the genuine friendships, whose quality is in the depth of the friendship, in the “nature of connection/sharing” two friends share (Murray, 2014).

But it’s not really a surprise that friendship has turned out this way; that merely seeing someone’s photo should be enough to establish a relationship. As Sarachan (2010) explains in “Profile Picture, Right Here, Right Now”, we use images to make us real. So we put a whole lot of  thought and effort into our pictures so that they will achieve maximum “punctum”--we want our photos to leave the viewer emotionally impacted in a single glimpse, we want something that “sticks” (p. 53). We craft the picture to look a certain way because we want the viewer to get a sense of our “air” in that one moment. We build identities with a series of images that capture immediate moments. Somehow our efforts to communicate our air leads to a distorted view of ourselves--how can we lead people to know what we’re made of if we’re too busy trying to communicate an image of ourselves that we’re constantly adjusting? This manipulation of our self image to make us come off a certain way shows why it’s so hard to have a friendship of depth. We don’t know who the other person really is. Social media has largely made for a culture of superficiality that is made up of people who carefully craft how the world sees them and form ingenuine, surface relationships and friendships with one another.

Works Cited

  Murray, D. P. (2014). Friendship in the Age of Facebook. [Powerpoint        Slides]. Retrieved from Rutgers University Sakai site.

  Bloor, C. What Are Friends For? pp. 147-157

  Deresiewicz, W. 2009. Faux Friendship. The Chronicle of Higher        Education. pp. 1-13.