Blog 33: Douche Bags are Relevant

If you’ve read my other blogs on the subject, this paper will be one that provides the reader with a way to deal with relevant issues of douche-baggery in their lives. Primarily, it will appeal to the vastly diverse student bodies of American universities; as every student is either a douche, has one in their lives, or knows someone impacted by the crimes of douche-baggery.

Understanding and coping with unpleasant people is a skill set that will always be useful if not essential in our success as educated individuals hoping to enter the workforce. Socially, it’s a skill that is crucial to our emotional health and relationships.

I aim to make the paper relevant to even those who occasionally act like jerks, or are the unfortunate holders of douchey personalities. Sometimes rehabilitation is possible, but other times it’s more relevant to promote and understanding of these cases and spread tolerance.

Like I’ve said before, everyone is affected by douche bags in some way or another. The real challenge of my paper will not be to make it relevant to readers, but to make it appealing in a way that my peers take it seriously. I chose to tackle a stereotype, and admittedly a quite hilarious phenomena that effects us, but I fear that the frank tone of my paper might distract from the very serious message of tolerance and understanding. There is a real and important message about the relevancy of my argument that I hope won’t be overshadowed by the humor involved. 

Blog 32: Douche Bags are Timely

This is a topic that will always be current, modern, and timely. At this point in our lives, the monstrous experience that is college, we are thrust into a sea of people and forced to consider how to interact with a diverse mob of people. Before education at such a large level, I had never encountered so many jerks in my entire life. I’ve become almost immune to the drunk guys trolling about on weekends, and have stopped listening to anyone sporting a backwards ball cap, wearing an Ed Hardy T-shirt, or chewing brown mystery tobacco. Ultimately, college is the time in our lives where we’re finding out that sometimes you have to face a douche in the form of your boss or professor and that there’s really nothing you can do to avoid it. Sometimes they make life unfair, and our parents can’t fix it.

Political leaders act like pricks, as Muammar Ghadafi bans internet in Libya, the douche move that launched a revolution. Our celebrities act like it’s ohkay to interrupt a young girl accepting an award and tell the world that someone else deserves it more. Soccer fans offend people around the globe with inappropriate and disrespectful sound bytes. More and more, the rigid manners of our grandparent’s generation are rotting away to reveal a very ugly facet of human nature.

I want to communicate to my peers that we can’t just ignore the problem, and that one day very soon we’ll have to assume the very dangerous adult responsibility of facing it and reducing the damage. Ultimately, “haters gonna hate”.

Blog 31: Commonplace Topic

Douche Bags: the plague of society for all communities ever

I plan to address the problem of douches in society. These pricks, jerks, tools, and sourpusses fill an essential role in social groupings. Without their existence, it would be far more difficult to appreciate the nice people in life. Still, they have the appalling power to mess with our self esteem, best laid plans, and general well-being. Assuming that you’re not a douche bag, we usually just distance ourselves from their bad attitudes.

            Instead, I argue that the solution to their problem is to figure out why they are the way that they are. In some cases, you’ll find that the suspected d-bag’s identity is not in question, only the way that he or she acts. Sometimes douche-baggery is a front and breaking down this wall can reward you with a wonderful relationship or friendship. More often, everything is exactly as it seems. Some people are unfixably horrid. When you come across these cases it is still important to try and understand why they are the way that they are. Understanding a person’s flaws will enable you to know how to interact with them more successfully in important social situations.

            Maybe you’re a douche bag. They come in all shapes, sizes and even genders. I have been in the past and I will probably be in the future. The important thing in life is to respect others, hold some sort of value system, and maintain a grounded idea of yourself. Most importantly, everyone is allotted a little attitude now and then. 

Blog 16: Integrate a Quote

Establishing evidence for the greater negative violence of men:

Our society predispositions us to associate women with virtue; in actuality, are females less violent and transgressive or does it just seem that way? To get a perspective independent of gender bias, the empirical data must be considered. In Darrell Steffensmeier and Emile Alan’s statistical review of gender and crime, they find that in addition to participating in fewer serious offenses, females “commit less harm.” They also assert that when women do commit acts of physical violence, they result in “fewer injuries and less serious injuries.” (para 6) The authors are explaining that in comparison to males, females do not commit as many or as violent of crimes.

Following paragraph topic sentence: Surely, there must be a reason for this.

I’m relying on this quote and specifically this source to give me legitimacy in my factual claim. I wonder if I should find another quote with numbers, rates, etc.

I have yet to develop the following paragraph. I’m finding it hard to tie in possible explanations for female reluctance to commit crime with the episode of my choice. I need to figure out a way to assert that Penny’s gender made her fundamentally virtuous; however most analyses of the statistical gap are not psychologically-based, but strive to explain how the data itself is biased (bias in reporting, collecting, etc). For this segment I need to continue to search for more abstract articles. 

Blog 10: Preliminary Research

Although my prospectus still needs some work, my research focus is going to remain on exploring whether or not males have a predisposition to crime and violence and why.

First, I focused on finding sources that establish that there is in fact a higher crime rate among males. Statistics provided by the U.K. Government (on a website as cited below) gave me a good foundation of the specifics; a breakdown of what types of crime they surveyed and their breakdown by gender. In all cases, males were more likely to be prosecuted for crimes, and interestingly enough, be the target of them. I found very relevant facts that I will most likely quote within my paper.

I also explored sources that gave me a perspective of gender inequalities in crime from a sociological viewpoint. These focused on finding explanations for why the gap is so large in the context of contemporary society. Although the statistical evidence is necessary to provide factual support for my claims, I feel that I could and will focus on this aspect for the bulk of my research. Sociology is not a topic that I am familiar with, and I need to explore it in much more depth to get a grasp of how these articles are addressing the issue. A key thing that I did take away from them is that there are different theories regarding gender inequality in crime; this is a greatly appreciated discovery as I plan to discuss all of the ones that I can reasonably find in the body of my paper.

Although I am not yet set on sources, the links below provided me a general idea of what information I need to look for as stated in this blog. 

Sources:

http://law.jrank.org/pages/1256/Gender-Crime.html

http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=442

http://tutor2u.net/blog/index.php/sociology/comments/gender-and-crime/

http://jrc.sagepub.com/content/34/3/275.short

Blog 9: Prospectus

Dr. Horrible’s Sing a Long Blog makes an untraditional statement about how gender influences the iconic roles of the villain and the hero. By redefining these roles beyond the black and white concepts of good and bad, Joss Whedon claims that the social pressures associated with masculinity inherently predisposition males to villainy. He makes this argument in two ways: by presenting the audience with two examples of the dangers of masculinity and showing how inherently feminine characteristics more adequately fulfill heroism.

Specifically, Whedon’s depiction of Captain Hammer, the show’s proclaimed superhero, demonstrates that society’s traditional view of masculinity is incompatible with what it means to be a true hero. Captain Hammer is muscular, attractive, and dominant. To Whedon, this makes him brutish and arrogant; his saves the girl from danger then treats her poorly and is overwhelmingly self-absorbed. In the end, these masculine characteristics make him the true villain; he ends up killing the innocent girl as the result of his dim-wittedness and desire for violence.

Unlike Captain Hammer, Billy (Dr, Horrible’s quite normal and un-horrific other side) is slight and largely unsuccessful. Socially, he’s an adolescent who doesn’t know how to deal with adult issues that include peer pressure, romantic relationships, and establishing a successful career. He goes from being a nice guy in the wrong career to a truly twisted individual. This shows how the pressure to conform to traditional criteria of masculinity can drive well-intentioned individuals to evil decisions.

 In contrast, the female lead of the show is undoubtedly feminine; Penny is charitable, small, and delicate. She is subordinate to the leadership of Captain Hammer in their relationship, but only to the point of becoming aware of his faults. She decides to help those that can’t help themselves, and remains uncorrupted until she dies at the end. Surely, Penny is the hero of the story- a role that the men of the story weren’t able to fulfill.

The worth to what the show is arguing is not one of complete role-reversal, but the challenge of how society associates gender with such bold statements of good and evil. Superman is just that; a man. He is a hero because he uses his strength and courage to be successful. Whedon is pointing out that true heroes work towards the success of others and use their strength and courage to withstand tribulation, not to impart it. He says that our stereotypes of masculinity can push one to villainy, and that the writers of popular comics may just have had it wrong. I’ve observed that he’s right. Men often make decisions in the real-world for the for the sake of their own manliness that result in aggression and crime.

Is Whedon right? Are men predisposed to crime and aggression? What about the genders makes it easier to associate females with altruism? 

Blog 8: High School is Hell

“High School is Hell” argues that Buffy the Vampire Slayer deliberately addresses contemporary social issues for teens in by using metaphor. The drama of using characters that are both good and inherently evil (demons, vampires, beasts, and monsters) reflects the drama of high school life. Even details of the series show how teens face challenges that more often than not, adults are blind to.

The article continues on to argue that throughout each season, the show metaphorically models how these fears develop and change over time. For example, it describes each season as focusing on separate themes, each more advanced than the previous one. Season one describes the elementary state that entering high school poses, the uncertainty of identity and how others perceive you. The second season focuses on “love gone wrong”, or the terrifying development of relationships and how to deal with them. Finally, the last season addresses how the end of high school is the end of the world that high school students know.

Clearly, the article first establishes how the series show the anxieties of modern teenagers through metaphor and then how these evolve throughout a person’s high school development.

                I think that Whedon’s use of metaphors dramatizes the anxieties of high school, but in an appropriate way. To a high school student, these anxieties are truly matters of life and death, the development of who they are or will be, and determining factors in their futures. The assignment of metaphors with such strong imagery emphasizes the importance of these issues to those they affect, something that makes the series relatable to a teenage target audience.

Blog 7: Genetic Engineering in Star Trek TOS

I’ve been a “Trekkie” for some time now, and decided to explore ARP topics in episodes that I haven’t seen. Today, I focused on an episode from The Original Series. Before starting this project I have mostly neglected the older adventures of the Enterprise mostly because it’s hard to endure the shoddy special effects.

Underneath the cosmetic flaws, the episode, “Space Seed”, was very thought-provoking and made me consider writing about Eugenics for my paper. In the episode, the crew of the Enterprise discovers an old Earth ship; it contains Khan, a character with super strength thought to be the product of genetic warfare in the 1990’s. The crew discovers that many genetically engineered supermen were left unaccounted for after this time, and that Khan was a very powerful leader on Earth.

It made me laugh to think that the writers of the series projected genetically engineered people to be force in warfare of the nineties. Obviously, we have lived through those years and no super-people took over the world. What exactly would be the timeline for such technology? I wonder if it’s possible now, and that society hasn’t done so because of the cautionary tales of old shows such as this one. With the controversial nature of genetic engineering in politics today, I’d like to research its use in militaristic situations. With the amount of popular fiction regarding the topic, I’m sure that I would not have trouble writing about how governments reconcile the possibility of effective new technology and the moral ambiguities attached to it. 

Blog 4- Holodecks

Tonight I watched an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation in which the entertainment of the future was explored. The spaceship on which the characters live is equipped with rooms called holodecks. These function as more elaborate movies; one can program them to align to certain scenarios and even walk through the scenes. Instead of watching characters and plots unfold, those wishing to be entertained take part in the story. In this particular episode, “Elementary, Dear Data”, Data and his friends create a program capable of defeating the android. This program, in the form of a Professor Moriarty, then gains access to the ship’s computer and real danger ensues.

Although the world of Star Trek seems far away, the invention of a working holodeck is closer than I originally thought. The technology exists to match real-world movements to those in a videogame with commercially-sold game consoles. This is something I plan on exploring more as a possible topic for my paper.

What I really took away from this episode was how the writer explores the ever-present concern that the ability of technology will surpass that of humans. Instead of posing the conflict as one between a human and a computer, Roddenberry pits the program of the holodeck against the whole crew of the ship, and specifically against a human-created android. In the end, he seems to suggest that the human collective mind will always be able to overcome such obstacles; at the same time the success of Data leaves the boundaries of human creation open to interpretation.