#response4

Lux Alptraum’s book “Faking It” is an all too true social commentary on sex, women, and the expectations that come with those things. Lux brings up a lot of good points that make you question why there is this taboo around sex and orgasms. In middle school, you couldn’t get through a sex ed lesson (if you even had one in school) without a few snickers. It might be just the hormone fluctuations in the average middle schooler’s mind, but you have to admit sex talk is not normalized in society. I think that is because we aren’t educated young on how it works because they preach abstinence—not safe sex. And with that lack of education, we are left confused with our bodies and are more vulnerable to articles aimed towards girls and women placing the blame on our bodies while providing home remedies to actually orgasm and no longer “fake it” in order to satisfy your partner (usually assumed it’s a man). The blame is placed on the woman, or anyone with a vagina, that we are the problem in the connection and haven’t fulfilled our part of the transaction. Reading about sex in media has built this idea that sex is this transactional thing, and not something to enjoy with someone else for your own pleasure. Certain outcomes are expected and if you don’t see those results, then you fucked up somewhere.

Another point in Lux’s book is we live in a “world that all too often equates ‘beautiful’ with ‘white’” (Alptraum 81). I find our fashion trends fascinating, especially with the Kardashians leading the way by perpetuating cultural appropriation. And somehow, they don’t see the consequences of their actions and instead get praised and become icons for girls and women to follow. After Kylie Jenner got lip injections to look more black by exploiting their natural features, we saw a trend of people getting lip injections, makeup products producing pouty lips, and even a lip challenge by bruising your lips with a shot glass. These expectations and normalizations of what is “pretty” is an awful environment for young girls to grow up in which endangers their mental health and how they view themselves. We try so hard to fit into society by buying the clothes, cutting our hair, braiding our hair, altering our face, and makeup. If you like those things and you like doing it for you, then you do you girl. I like wearing makeup and feeling cute. Braiding my hair in a French braid makes me feel powerful, almost Katniss Everdeen like. But doing those things from a place of societal pressure is not healthy. I know it’s hard to escape those norms and try to fit in. But one thing I realize, trends are so fluid. One thing can be scorned and then be a world trend that so many try to achieve. For instance, the thin tweezed eye brows penciled in was the trend and girls with thick eyebrows were the outcasts. But now look, thick eyebrows are the trend and those people with the thin eyebrows go lengths to microblade and fill in their eyebrows to get those prized thick eyebrows. You should love your features, because while it might not be in trend right now, a year or two they’ll be the ideal feature. But also, fuck conformity.

Where these expectations stem from come from media and the scorn of the male counterpart. Living in a patriarchal society, men dictate how we look and how we treat ourselves which all center around pleasing them. We alter ourselves for the pleasure of the male gaze. Lux makes a scary good point, “There are no real-life Snapchat filters to protect women from the come-ons, the catcalls, and propositions they frequently endure. But there is another strategy that a woman can employ when she wants an interested man to leave her alone. It’s just one that might involve being dishonest” (Alptraum 105). By dressing up and putting makeup on, even if you do it for yourself, the men you pass claim that confidence from you and take it for their own enjoyment. But sadly, you can also go unnoticed by not wearing makeup. This mentality takes away our confidence and freedom to do what we want to our bodies.

We know that the cow skull photograph was staged and well-thought out on how best to manipulate the intended audience. The skull was photographed in multiple locations to fit how the photographer felt it best fit his purposes; Rothstein wanted to shoot the skull to promote a film sequence. Evans, on the other hand, manipulated the items in a sharecroppers home, leading to much controversy over his reputation. In this sense, he is not consistent on following his own set of rules—or at least draw questions to what his set of rules are, as his actions of moving the bed, mirror, and clock disagree with his reputation as an “honest filmmaker.” I think there is an important distinction to be made between these photographers. 

Sennett’s piece on the craftsman is in and of itself a well-crafted essay. He most definitely realized that in writing about the craftsman as a universal, non-exclusive title, that he needed to craft his writing in order to help demonstrate this, which he did successfully. Art writing fits in well with Sennett’s example of the architecture’s problems with CAD, and the story of Georgia’s Peachtree Center, an “excellent” but "disembodied” computer-designed metropolis. Some writing about art, in all honesty including a few that we have read in this class, contains beautiful, high-level, conceptually complex, but utterly unapproachable language. This also tackles my problem with lots of academia in general, but specifically scholarship about art. Sure, someone writes something that they understand and probably a highly-educated peer would too, but that piece will never reach a common practicality, will not provide many people with education on something new and exciting, because this art-writer is so removed from the hypothetical “site-visit,” from viewing the art written about through a layperson’s eyes, or even through the eyes of an educated artist or art critic, perhaps themselves, for the first time. As the art begins to exist in the mind of the writer as a confident memory, the words used to describe it are furthered from reality and a common audience.

“What Makes People Powerful” is an article that displays the main qualities and skills of powerful people like Steve Jobs.  The article demonstrates how these qualities make powerful people by showing a wide range of real-life examples from powerful people whom possess these qualities. As I was reading through the article many of my views on the qualities of powerful people were challenged, as I was exposed to new ideas related to this. However, these new perspectives  also allowed me to  learn new things.

It did not took long for my views on what really made people powerful to be challenged, as in the second paragraph I encountered an idea that challenged my views on what made people powerful. I always thought that the qualities of powerful people were a high I.Q., lots of money and especially charisma. Charisma for me is the main quality that makes up powerful people. This is something that I’ve learned through reading texts like “The Tragedy of Julius Caesar”, where one of the main characters, Julius Caesar, is a very powerful person who at same time is very charismatic, and after seeing this I thought that charisma made up powerful people. However my views on what made people powerful, especially the one of charisma were challenged after encountering the following quote on the text: “Pfeffer’s argument is that there’s a crucial skill set that separates alphas like Steve Jobs and Google cofounder Larry Page from the omegas–and that potentially matters more than I.Q., charisma, and even hard work.”  After encountering this, my views were really challenged because, as I said above, I thought that high I.Q., money and charisma made powerful people, but this segment from the text was proving me wrong.

Aside from the previous point of challenge, there were still other segments in the text that led my viewpoints to be challenged. After reading the following quote: “Worry about spending too much time with people you know, as opposed to meeting new people in unrelated areas.”, my views were once again challenged, as I had never thought about this as a quality of powerful people, mainly because my idea of or image of powerful people is one of somebody who cultivates relationships with people in his area, but none or very little with people in other areas, so this was why that segment challenged my views.

Apart from there being points of challenge and disagreement throughout the text, there were also several points in which I agreed with what the text stated. One of these points which I agree is that powerful people acknowledge that they are “under constant public scrutiny”. Basically I agree with this because I also believe that this is true, that powerful people acknowledge that they are constantly being examined due to their position. I also found a point which strengthened my views, mainly that charisma was one of the qualities of powerful people. The text stated: “Bill Clinton, Nancy Pelosi … [they] got to where they are because they understood how to get other people to sponsor and support them,”. This shows how their charisma has helped them to become powerful people, therefore this is why this served as a boost to my views. There is also a real-life experience which I can connect to this. While I was at my P.E class, our instructor asked the entire class to fit in a small circle all together. It was a disaster, but it was then fixed thanks to some of my classmates whom were able to motivate us after we thought that it was impossible(charisma), and after the exercise, our teacher gave praise to those students, because they were the real leaders that motivated us and proposed a solution to the problem.