censored

When the announcements played as I sat in Physics, I was shocked when a video was played with school faculty and students pledging to end "The R Word". I understand why people would want this medical term to be avoided, why they would feel offended, and why they'd pledge to stop saying it. Ultimately, they don't want students to be hurt or offended, and they took a drastic measure to avoid this. So drastic, that my peers have been pressured to pledge to put an end to a word just based off of how others feel. Now, while they may not frequently use this word, they now must tiptoe around their vocabulary and make sure that what they say is okay to everyone else. The simple "superman" to "superperson" as seen in The Word Police is something that must be carefully crafted as not to hurt anyone. Now, politically correct words are usually targeted at schools and the youth, such as seen through this announcement video. If the children have politically correct words, perhaps they'll grow into adults that won't offend one another? By attempting to water down the world around us, we overlook intent and focus on restricting speech. What people say isn't significant, it is the actions that people take. Last year as I prepared a piece for the Cranbrook gallery, I had been bouncing ideas off my mom as to what I should create. One morning at 1am my mom woke me up to an idea that had come to her in the night. She presented a sketch of a naked woman standing with her arms and legs apart. Naturally, this startled me, my mom being a Baptist woman, but what startled me more was that the word "censored" was placed somewhere unexpected. The word censored was placed over the womans mouth. Words are held to a higher standard than actions. It is our words that truly are censored, just look at YouTubes recent policy to ban the swearing of content creators. We carefully tiptoe around using offensive diction. We punish children for saying words or phrases that culture collectively deems as bad due to an unofficial ranking of how offensive it is. But, censorship causes us to restrict what we think, and to stifle original thought. Say what you will and take responsibility if you offend someone. As long as your intent is in the right place, referring to someone by the wrong pronouns the first time or swearing once or twice may be a disappointment but it shouldn't cause a huge issue.

Hypocrite

It seemed ironic, our class sitting in the Socratic circle discussing how we as a generation need to help our environment, but when we arrived home from school that day we continued to leave our environmentally destructive footprints. The entire idea of protecting the place that we live in has lost all meaning. We say that we must "protect the environment" constantly, through every kids show and emblazoned across every media platform. But, we will still leave the lights on when we leave in the morning and use more paper than we need. We ridicule those who don't recycle their plastic bottles from lunch, but we don't think about the manufacturing of the product and we don't think about the other things that we do everyday that make such impact. This weekend while at the DECA State Competition in Detroit, litter was scattered all over the street. Half used water bottles were thrown away, and paper was strewn all over the floor at roleplay events. Horrified at this waste, I realized that people are passionate about something they don't really think of as their problem. We are hypocrites. We seek to achieve the minimum; the "safe" amount of pollution instead of as little as possible. Do we really care about the fate of our children or the future of Earth? We work so hard to make wills and divide our assets to take care of our future generations financially, but the Earth is what holds these materialistic things.To actually make an impact first we must actually care to make an impact. You cannot get results if you're not willing to make the effort. Because it is human nature to destroy we must take conscious effort to make change.

Soooo who isn't marked nowadays?

I wanted to expound on our in class discussion on being marked and why I think that both men and women cannot be unmarked with this new age media and self expression.

I think that before the mainstream use of social media, men fit easily into one category and had the ability to be invisible to judgement in society; but now with this overt concentration of aesthetics, men can't just don a suit and blend in. One tap on a screen can bring us past appearance and into the lives and decisions of others through their posts. We now even mark ourselves by choosing defining fashion that fits into one category or another. You can just tell what a guy does in his spare time by how he dresses, especially in highschool. An Aeropostal hoodie is usually paired with a nerd who doesn't shop for himself, and a Calvin Klein hoodie is associated with a sporty and popular guy. In the Tannen piece, the men were unnoticeable because of their similarities, but nowadays variety is the new self definition. Just because someone fits into their own self defined category doesn't mean that they fit into other categories, other places. I don't think any one person can go anywhere without getting compared to someone else, without being judged in some sense.

Tanned says that "Some days you just want to get dressed and go about your business. But if you're a woman, you can't because there is no unmarked woman." As I read this piece, I felt that what Tannen said doesn't apply to now. That there is no unmarked man. Now as the millennials ideals penetrate the population, tattoos peek out from under business suit cuffs and hair becomes styled in different ways. Self expression is normalized, yet your appearance ends up defining you (from highschool to the work world).

When we say that men are unmarked, we think about things such as the most recent theater production put on by our school, Guys and Dolls. The men had the ability to be uniform, to not stand out. The women on the other hand were either prudes or prostitutes, defined by their bright makeup or subtle looks. The gangsters all blended together as one macho man, they were unified in their label, they weren't marked beyond their occupation. But this shows us that this is of the past, that now everyone is marked. Everyone stands out in some sense, everyone has something that can be noticed or picked apart. Appearance doesn't make you fade into the background, this is left to personality. Women still face a substantial amount of sexism that, in my opinion, is worse compared to the sexism that men face (which still needs to be addressed) but both men and women are marked.