Are You Registered To Vote?

Hey everyone!

As Vice President of the Shepherd Young Dems (and your friend), I want to take this opportunity to ask all of you: are you registered to vote?

If not, please come see me on Monday in the Ram's Den. I'll be there before ten and then between eleven and twelve. If you can't make it during those times, just stop by and approach the SU Young Dems table and say you want to register. It's super easy and only takes a few minutes.

Don't be apathetic about voting- especially if you're a girl. Seriously. I cannot stress this enough. Women less than a hundred years ago were harassed, ridiculed, and even tortured so that we could gain the right to fully participate in our political system.  While this entire presidential campaign process has definitely been stressful (at least for me, anyway), there is value in casting your vote, no matter what people try to tell you. Also, you can't really complain about our elected officials if you don't vote. Sorry.

So come register to vote if you aren't already registered on Monday in the Ram's Den, and the Shepherd Young Dems will help you out. Also, registering to vote at our table doesn't in ANY way mean you have to register as a Democrat. I want to make clear that this is not a partisan thing. We're just encouraging everyone and anyone to come register to vote- we don't care about your party affiliation. We know that's your business.

Hope to see at least one of you on Monday at our table.

Clarity

So in my final paper, I expand upon the argument in the Movie in Context Paper about how in Big Hero 6 Hiro and Dr. Callaghan act as parallels of toxic masculinity. Here is the portion itself, so please tell me if I should elaborate more on how Zootopia adresses toxic masculinity as well.

As a big fan of Disney films, particularly the more feminist films produced in the 1990s, I really enjoy more recent films like Big Hero 6 and Zootopia because they promote feminist ideals of multiculturalism and combatting toxic masculinity. Big Hero 6 shows how Hiro’s emotional development is important to the overall message of the film—one where his sadness and tears tell young children that boys do not need to be tough all the time. Hiro’s stages of grief challenge traditional masculine traits that do not allow for men to be emotionally weak or reliant on others. Hiro’s reactions to loss fight the ideals of toxic masculinity in regards to emotions like grief and sadness that men experience in their lives.

In contrast, Hiro’s parallel, Dr. Callaghan, shows the negative consequences that result of traditional masculine ideals that stunt emotional growth. To put it simply, Dr. Callaghan is unable to handle his own emotions so he bottles them up until he lashes out negatively. Dr. Callaghan is a victim of the patriarchy, one that tells men that the only “healthy” way they can express their grief is through anger and revenge. Due to the fact that Dr. Callaghan grew up with this being ingrained into his mind, he felt that his actions against Alistair Krei were justified because he was doing “the right thing.” As Tyson states in Critical Theory Today, “that anger and other violent emotions are the only emotions permitted, and anger usually produces the kind of aggressive behaviors associated with patriarchal manhood” (88).  In the film, Dr. Callaghan exemplifies this concept in his revenge plot against Krei, evident with his words, “You took everything from me when you sent Abigail into that machine. Now I’m taking everything away from you. You’re going to watch as everything you built disappear. Then, it’s your turn.” In addition, Tyson points out how “men are not permitted to fail at anything they try because failure in any domain implies failure in one’s manhood” (87). Dr. Callaghan could not allow himself to fail when he tried to kill Krei, and admitting that his actions were wrong would make him look and feel like a failure to his daughter and to others. Hiro, in contrast, did not grow up with patriarchal ideals that stunt emotional growth, so he was able to see the fault in his actions when he tried to kill Callaghan, thus enabling him to heal.

Zootopia also shows that it is okay for men to express their feelings openly. During Nick Wilde’s childhood he encountered fierce bullying from prey for his predator status. After escaping his abusers, he fled outside where he finally allowed himself to cry, later ending his flashback by stating “Never let them see that they get to you.” Nick reveals himself to be a victim of the patriarchy because he was told to not express his emotions, especially “weaker” ones, in front of others. However, later in the film he shows a willingness to express “feminine” emotions like fear. Nick and Hiro represent the third-wave feminist viewpoint of males and shows how when toxic masculine ideals are removed, men can learn to express their emotions in a healthy way.

So, tell me if you love it, if you hate it, or what I could clarify or explain more in this portion.

 

Rain Rain

In my essay, I have been looking at the positives technology has for sleep, primarily apps. My favorite type of app helpful for sleep is sound machines. These apps produce noises to relax and soothe the downloader to a restful sleep, if you couldn't tell by the app type. Some of these apps even lead meditation to put you to sleep. Most play sounds from nature like a crackling fire, rain, wind, or a running river. One app I found and love is called Rain Rain which has a unique library of sounds including rain, as title obviously implies, and sounds that Tim Gostony, the app’s creator, picked himself that he thought would be easy to fall asleep listening to, such as a washing machine, ceiling fan, dehumidifier, or ticking clock. The app also has a selection of animal noises to choose from like frogs, crickets, and other animals you often hear during the night. What I like most about the app is that you can mix and layer three of the sounds from the library in the app. I actually am glad I found this app because now I can fall asleep each night to a thunderstorm, one of my favorite things to fall asleep to.

End of the Semester Sap Fest

It's crazy to think how close we are to the end of the semester. We've spent a whole lot of time talking about technology, its advantages, and its disadvantages. I would like to take second to focus on one interesting (in my opinion) advantage.

Throughout our course, we had many class discussions. While they focused mostly on readings and assignments from the syllabus, we were also able to get to know each other a little better. But we only meet for 50 minutes three times a week. That isn't much time to get insight on a person, especially when there are ten or so others to get to know. Blogger has acted as a little insight pusher. With weekly posts, we get to see what each of us are doing in our personal lives, how other classes are going, how technology is affecting us in everyday situations, and even just seeing interests that may not be relevant to bring up in class.

Sometimes it slips my mind that the blog post deadline is coming up, and I think to myself, "Man, I wish we didn't have to do those." At this point in the semester, though, I can't tell you how interesting of a social media platform blogging is. I'm glad to have gotten to know you guys better than I could have if we only talked ("talked" virtually, too) in class.

This was kinda sorta sappy, but I'm not sorry. Much love for all of you!

Thanks a lot Technology

I was working on my paper today in the library. The library of all places should probably have the best WiFi signal on campus, but no. The library WiFi was terrible today. I moved from one room to the next just trying to get enough service to do some research. Then technology decided to waste more of my time. I was attempting to copy and paste a few charts from an article onto my paper. Again this couldn't be easy for me. I ended up re-typing all of the information into excel. Then tried to replicate the charts. It was time consuming and didn't even help me in the end. Thankfully I was meeting with Dr. Hanrahan today and she helped me copy and past the charts I needed. But for the last time today technology really disappointed me. My computer's battery life is worse than my phone's battery life, so as soon as I began to write my blog for this week my computer shut down. I lost everything that I had written. So this weeks blog deserved to be written about how GREAT technology is.

Technology Isn’t So Bad

So I was thinking about how useful technology can be. Yesterday evening I was at a free concert that Shepherd put on. It took place out in front of the dining hall. I really loved this one particular band that was playing, so I recorded some of their songs on my phone so that I could listen to them later. I was able to take pictures of them and even look them up on the internet. Now, don’t get me wrong, they were just a college garage band, but all of this technology allowed me to find this band that I loved. Technology has many disadvantages, but it also has many positive effects. So I think that all of those people who say such harsh things regarding technology are just bigoted. They refuse to look at all of the good things that technology can achieve. It makes me laugh that those that bash technology, are also the people that use technology the most. Like the elderly that say that the younger generation is so absorbed in technology that they can’t even hold conversations, yet they are the ones that are so absorbed with Candy Crush that they play it even at the dinner table. 

Be Careful With What You Live-Stream

Recently I was on Buzzfeed, while taking a break from doing some of my homework, just looking at some of the articles when I came across one that caught my attention in a negative way. As I’m sure you guys know by now the topic for my critical essay is about sexual assault, and it’s something I feel very strongly about, so as I was looking on Buzzfeed and came across this article you can imagine I had some pretty strong opinions about it.

The article is about an 18-year-old girl facing multiple charges for live-streaming her friend getting raped, by a 29-year-old man. Apparently, the three of them had been drinking all night before the attack had occurred, so of course alcohol was to blame in this situation. I’m not saying that alcohol didn’t play a role in this incident, but I don’t believe that the alcohol forced this guy to rape the victim.

Let’s not forget about the victims so-called friend, who thought it would be a funny or good idea to pull out her phone and live-stream a girl getting raped, and ruin her life even more. This poor girl’s life was already going to be hard enough without the help of a smartphone app. The live-streaming app that the other girl used just made it that much easier to tear someone's life apart.

If the pair end up getting convicted, they face potentially more than forty years each for the multiple charges.