Sports and Masculinity

Americans are so interested in sports because it gives people a sense of belonging. Whether it be a fan in a crowded place or a parent proud of their own kid playing everyone gets wrapped p in the excitement. It gives adults and kids something in common with those they're around and a sense of coming together. Now granted being a sports fan now a days is gotten to be kind of ridiculous. Having to buy all the different, expensive merchandise to people getting ad over things that aren't and would never be in their control to people right out rioting after games flipping over cars and what not. Now don't get me wrong I'm as much of a fan as the next person but I know how to control myself but guys take things way to far. Guys, when it comes to well everything, like to turn stuff into a competition ALL the time! I remember in gym class when we would play dodge ball or any other game the girls in my class would never want to play, there was only like 6 of us anyway. But we never wanted to participate because the guys were so into it and quite frankly dangerous enough to injure us. Well one day I was just collecting dodge balls to give them to the guys as always and a guy in the other team was near the line and not paying me any attention so I hit him with a dodge ball and got him out. He got so mad and told his whole team to go after me so I could be out and he could be back in. Talk about being scared for your life, guys throwing dodge balls at you hard, ya no thanks I really didn't want to participate after that.

So i guess negative aspects are that guys turn EVERYTHING into a competition. Another is how some sports highlight one player as the star and everyone thinks that that's going to be them when their older but it doesn't happen to often. I think the worst negative effect instilled in young boys is how violence is okay. They are taught that if they are hurt they have to suck it up and keep on going. Their taught that violence is a good thing in sports but then end up taking it outside the world of sports. Parent's also pressure their kids  to always be better and that they have to be the best and that there isn't any room for error. Because let's face it all parents think/want that their kids to go on to the pros and be the star. Losing isn't really an option in America's eyes and it's a shame because sports are truly supposed to be about making friends and having fun. With the pressure not to lose that sucks all the fun out of it. But there are some positive aspects of sports. Sports promotes unity among a team or just being apart of a team. Kids aren't seen as losers or outcasts if they are involved in sports. But if a boy isn't in some kind of sport he's judged by everyone like there is something wrong with him.

So I think that sports has become way to much of an aspect in our daily lives with mostly negative effects, especially on young boys.

Happily Ever After? More Like Caught In A Bad Romance...

It's said that people want a fairytale relationship. Meaning a girl wants to be swept off her feet by a knight in shining armor. Little kids learn from a young age that when you're older and in a relationship/get married you have love at first sight and then live happily ever after, which is never true. Even though this reading focused on movies for the older generation, it's very much seen in Disney movies as well. Even as teens and adults we see movies portray romance as this easy thing that we think that we should have this too. Movies say that even if there's an obstacle in your way it's easy to overcome and you still get the girl in the end. They also say that the nerdy, unpopular guys get the popular, cheerleader girls every time when in actuality it rarely happens in reality at all. An example of this can be in the movie Aladdin, Aladdin lies to Jasmine and tells her he's a prince when actually he's poor and at the end of the movie they still end up together living happily ever after. Movies also never show the reality after "and they lived happily ever after," which is what we all have to live in. People get sick of who they're with, people cheat on their spouses, and people do get divorced; but hey you never see that kind of thing in a Disney movie now do you? Now I know that this isn't a shocker to anyone but we always believe that this won't happen to us because we have a "perfect" relationship and that we'll be happy and in love together forever. Well if you believe this about your relationship then you have already fallen victim to what movies say about romance.

Apperance and Advertising

The power of advertising is very strong with how we perceive outward beauty. We believe this is how people should look in order to be considered beautiful when in all actuality it's an unreachable thing because everything is so photo shopped now a days and even the model in the ad doesn't even look like that. So women see the girls portrayed in ads and believe that's what men like and want. So they try to make themselves like that so they do various extremes from starving themselves and having eating disorders to having plastic surgery to completely alter their appearances. Men actually only find women in ads attractive as a fantasy romance, they don't actually want their woman to look like that. Now this is hard to believe because most women all feel that they need to look like those girls to be good enough. I personally believe that some men, the good ones left out there anyway, take personality into account first and looks second; but that seems to rarely occur. Some ultimate results that can be seen from this modern trend are: eating disorders, death, low self-esteem, suicides, extreme plastic surgery, and loss of money on various beauty products and weight loss supplements.

Relationships Between Technology and Sexuality

In Ten Seconds to Love, the author talks about Pamela Anderson's sex tape, which is one of the things that she is most famous for. So here he talks about how since she has a sex tape society automatically labels her as a whore; whereas Marilyn Monroe, may not have had a sex tape but she still got around, is viewed as classy. They were both married several times but in Monroe's time sex wasn't public but rather hidden unlike in Anderson's time where sex has become more public and that celebrity seems to gain more publicity from it; which is what they want to begin with so there's no "accidentally getting out" about it. So the technology in this reading shows how movies in Monroe's time made her more famous, secretive, and pure; and how sex tapes in Anderson's time made her more public and a "whore."

In Porn, the author talks about how the porn industry helped develop the Internet because it was an incentive for people who bought the over sized and expensive equipment. It also talks about how in turn the Internet helped the pron industry by making it available to everyone in their homes. But in the past couple of years the porn industry has suffered because of technology getting better because now they face the problem of piracy and "tube sites." In the video we watched, it said that the companies have to go through every website to see if their content is on there without permission, if they find it they send them a message asking them to take it off and they do but it's back up within days; so it's a constant scan of websites daily. The industry is also suffering because on the video a guy said that people aren't in to watching porn for the quality anymore, they just want a quick video. This costs the companies making quality videos a lot of money because it takes a lot to make these quality videos and then if no one is going to watch them they're losing a lot of money. But with new technology the porn industry is finding ways to adapt by doing things that can't be pirated, i.e. live, etc.

So technology in a way is hurting celebrities with labels and the porn industry with piracy but it is also helping them at times too.