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Twitter: @Strong_4_life

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/S4LGA

Dear strong4life,

I understand the reason for your campaign is to prevent obesity from occurring in young children, but by posting images like the one on the right is obscene! Just by the few words, “It’s hard to be a little girl if you’re not”, makes children who are overweight even more self-conscious about themselves, don’t want to show their faces at school because they’re afraid of getting picked on and bullied, and makes them have a higher chance of becoming depressed and eventually having some kind of eating disorder. Regardless of how overweight a child may be, they still can have a childhood and don’t need advertisements like this showing them that they can’t just because they’re overweight. I was once that young, overweight girl myself and I can tell you from my own experience, my childhood was ruined whenever I saw images like this one or advertisements on TV because I never felt like I was good enough and would never be excepted unless I lost weight. I would constantly wonder what people were thinking about me, I’d always have my hands rapped around my stomach, I was socially awkward, and ended up doing whatever I could to try and lose weight. I remember one summer all I wore were sweatshirts because I thought that that would be a good way to lose weight. Even in high school my sophomore year I could hear people talking about me, and stuff like that hurt. It’s not fair to this girl by displaying an image of her thinking she, or any other overweight girl for that matter, won’t be able to cherish the same childhood as those who aren’t overweight. I know your website means well and is trying to send a message that obesity rates in children are increasing,  but don’t do it in such a hurtful way. In my opinion, try to approach it in a supportive and positive way so overweight children can have a normal childhood and become more motivated to lose weight for themselves instead of feeling pressured.

Sincerely,

Danielle

Effect of Media

I always knew the media is very stereotyped towards woman but I never realized the extent of it. Woman are constantly being contradicted for what they wear, how they display themselves on television, who they're dating, and what happened here that they could have done differently, but what bugs me the most, and always will, is why just the woman? Why not the men? In my opinion, I feel like it's the whole double standard where men have the power to do anything and what ever they do is okay, but if a woman does it all hell breaks loose and it's the next big thing being covered in the media. For example, that whole thing about newscaster Katie Currac, who only is trying to prove that woman are just as confident as men and know just as much as they do, where the media focuses on her hair or how much leg she's showing instead of the important things she's covering in her newscast.

 I found it interesting when the person stated how media plays a crucial roll in defying who we are. The reason I found this so interesting was that the only reason media defines who we are is because it's what they want to see. If there are woman who don't look like the ones displayed on television or in magazines, and the media is saying that that is what you need to look like to be accepted into society, then those woman are going to go out and do what they can so they feel accepted and all are long letting media shape and define who they are.  

Subculture & You Are What You Eat

This week in sociology, I found a lot of the things we learned very interesting! I never really thought about Barrington High School as its own subculture and how something as little as the rules we have in our student handbook separates us from any other school out there. When we were talking about our school being its own subculture, we also discussed some of the positive and negative sanctions we see happen when we’re at school. Sanctions are expressions of approval or disapproval given to people for upholding or violating norms. An example of a negative sanction I commonly see is when teachers give a student four detentions for having their phone out during class. I noticed an example of a positive sanction in the beginning of this semester of this class. My teacher gave us all coupons that we can use for late assignments so we don’t get points taken off for it being late and if we don’t use the coupons, it would boost our grade up by a percentage point.  

It was really interesting to me thinking about how people identify themselves through food and how we judge people through eating habits. I’m not the kind of person who judges someone by the way they eat because I know I’m not perfect and I know at times I can be a really sloppy eater, slow eater, don’t eat much, pig out on food, and so on.  When I thought in depth about it, I see where people would be judgmental about someone who’s a sloppy eater because they would probably think that they are a sloppy and messy person in general, or when a girl is on a date with a guy and the girl orders only a salad to eat, the guy would probably assume she’s nervous and is masking what her real eating habits may be.  

Ethnocentrism & Cultural Relativism

This week in sociology we began learning about culture. Culture is defined as the language, beliefs, values, norms, behaviors, and even material objects that are passed from one generation to the next. The first thing we started discussing was how ethnocentrism judges another's culture as in terms of ones own norms and values. I thought it was interesting that what we believe is normal to us is different in other cultures. For example, we think our food is normal and smells good, but food in other cultures is wrong and smells bad, or how we think it's normal to sit on a toilet when we go to the bathroom, but in japan they think it's normal to squat because it's more sanitary. We also learned about the alternative to ethnocentrism, which is cultural relativism, and what that is, is understanding unfamiliar values and norms and suspending cultural standards we've known all our lives. In my opinion, I feel like most people should stay open-minded about other cultures and not be judgmental about the way they do things differently because it can decrease competition and limit peoples opinions of another culture due to race.