"Look at me, I will Never pass for a Perfect Bride"

Society has been corrupted in terms of the perception of beauty standards. Humanity has been taught at a very young age about what is respectable . Social media and culture have been a very important influential factor in the game of killing self esteem.

I especially have noticed the effects of Disney on a child's development and perception of beauty. While they may not realize it, several Disney movies set up children for a false ideal of beauty. Starting from the beginning, stories such as Snow White (1937), Cinderella (1950), and Sleeping Beauty (1959), have set up the standard for gender roles. For every little girl watching this movie, they walk away knowing that it's okay to be a damsel in distress and for every little boy, they remember that they will have to battle the big scary monster to rescue the damsel.
The best movie that does, however, contradict the stereotype is Mulan (1998). While it does have its flaws (The song Reflection, despite its inevitable grace, has connotations which imply the beauty standards of China are critical, especially when assessing for a "Perfect Bride"), Mulan is one who breaks the limit of acceptable means to bring a family honor, and does so with impeccable accuracy.

Once these seeds start to create roots in a culture, the people who realize they don't fit the norms quickly learn that nothing they do will help them assimilate. They make assumptions, wrongfully, that there must be something entirely wrong with them. Toni Morrison, a Nobel Prize winning author, claims that "Victims of self loathing" are actually "accepting rejection as legitimate" (The Bluest Eye).  Mostly affected by this hatred are children, racial minorities such as Blacks, and women, who have been experiencing the exclusion from the beginnings of history. The self deprecation becomes so bad that the comments that others make upon an individual are almost better than the comments that an individual makes on themselves.

In recent times, studies have been trying to reveal the disparaging nature of such standards. Dove, for instance, has created a clip that exposes the cruelty of self denigration.

When first watching this clip, I was baffled at the differences in the images, but when reflecting later, I realized that most, if not all of us, including myself, have experienced the same critical and harsh analysis of ourselves, which does not in any sort portray the same image that others see in us.

Incidents in the Life of a Modern Day Slave

While slavery was abolished in America in the 1860's, it still to this day exists in various types or forms. Perhaps, in the greatest sense, slavery can be pegged as any evil which swamps a human into an everyday lifestyle of torture.

For example, take standardized tests. Now this may seem like a very trivial and naive way to interpret slavery, but for a while I've felt like I wasn't really living life, I was just functioning. In the regular cycle of going to school, coming back home, and studying for large state based tests like the SAT, it was almost as if the education system had had me under a torturous spell of life's disillusionment.

Of course, slavery in the U.S reaches far beyond the life of a normal schoolgirl. To up the scale to another level, let's consider prejudice. Since 1860's, America has been able to claim that all men have equal rights. Its claims, however, are mostly false. Prejudice in America has been long standing, even existing today. Take Brent Staples for example. His literary piece called Black Men and Public Space details how prejudice can be a type of slavery. The never ending cycle of feeling inferior can be analogous to the life of an African American slave in the 1800's.

The highest level of slavery in Modern America is actually slavery. Better known as Human Trafficking, this kind of slavery is almost unimaginable to the normal viewer, but is actually more common than expected.

Human Trafficking is the illegal selling of adolescents and young adults, especially girls, into sexual servitude and prostitution. All girls are kidnapped from their homes or taken off the street and are beaten violently.

This girl has been labelled into 1 of millions of modern day slaves

Clemmie Greenlee, a young woman who escaped from such terrible clutches exclaimed that “If you’re putting a whip on my back because I’m not picking enough cotton, or if you’re beating me because I’m not earning my quota, it’s the same thing. It’s slavery.”

To read more, check out this link: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/07/opinion/slavery-isnt-a-thing-of-the-past.html?_r=0

What makes a villain a villain?

It's a Chilling (worth) feeling in the cool October air. As Halloween approaches, I can't help but remind myself of the dark and spooky creatures that go bump in the night.

So when reflecting upon the ending of the Scarlet Letter, I made a quick connection from Chillingworth to the hollowness associated with Halloween (see what I did there, hollow, hallow?). Roger Chillingworth, the scariest character in a classic novel that I've ever read, met a fateful doom at the end of the novel, but his death, in my opinion, cemented his villainous character.

I mean, what would have happened if we saw the thoughts behind his thinking? What was he doing handing all of that money over to Pearl? Obviously, he wanted his legacy to continue. He wanted to find another way to live, even if his main reason for living seemed to fade away. We can only ponder as to what evil stores he had in mind for the innocent daughter of his estranged wife.

His timely death made me reconsider what truly made up the characteristics of a villain. While Hawthorne made Chillingworth "wither away", he points out that each villain has to have some sort of downfall. During his life, Chillingworth was portrayed as some sort of devil, with "a writhing horror [that] twisted itself across his features"(Hawthorne 58) . However his death was sort of...anticlimactic. Based on all his evil ventures, one might suspect he would die a gruesome or more cataclysmic death. Instead he fades away, like any mundane human would.

This led me to the conclusion that Chillingworth really isnt a villain. He's just an antagonized human being with a soured heart. Hester's fault actually. Villains, in my opinion, have to show a stark contrast to heroes. Any tragic hero, such as Dimmesdale, has to have a major weakness that surpasses his or her strengths. So shouldn't that make the villain, as a result of the contrast, virtually indestructible?

Take Crowley, a character from a popular culture show called Supernatural, for example. To this date, this "King of Hell" has yet to be defeated. He stands strong as a villain, and probably will continue to do so, in pestering the two main heroes lives and in making the world a HORRIBLE place.

Warning: Crowley Creepiness Overload....!

The Ice Queen: A single woman

As far back as I can recollect, I've been called "bossy", "mean", "dramatic", and "sarcastic". Those words seemed singled out by my childhood guy friends as words specifically for me. Now I know, those words actually meant that I had "leadership skills", "authority a woman shouldn't have", "the power to express my emotions as an individual",  and "humor".

The words hurt. As I grew up, I began to realize that I wasn't the only one facing the humiliation. Many others, almost all women, face the disasters of being pinned as something they are not. Little girls, especially, will be classically conditioned to stop telling jokes and trying to be a leader after being mocked for their actions. In fact, today's society has recognized this diffidence and prominent female CEO's (such as Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook) of companies have started a campaign called Ban Bossy to remove the word bossy from society's vocabularies and promote self confidence within young girls.

A brief overview of Ban Bossy: http://banbossy.com/

So does the cliche, "Better safe than sorry" work? No. I think no matter what we do as women we will be compromised on every nook and turn. By keeping quiet, like many girls do, we restrict our own creativity. Society shouldn't be able to define our genuine comedy as satirical. For example in Deborah Tanner's piece There Is No Unmarked Woman, she identifies a common woman as being marked for her appearance and actions even when they appear to be acceptable to society. The point is, if all women are inevitably marked, there is no reason to be "safe" if in the end we all end up being "sorry.

Some women have accomplished great feats by stepping outside their "safe" boxes. They break the stereotype that "Women are Ice Queens", meaning we are harsh and passive to the world.

Ellen Degeneres, for example, is one such comedian. Very renowned for her work, Ellen shows her skill, as one of the funniest people I know, and proves that women are not cold towards others.

She even explains in the video (above) that women are more conversational than men (and does so in a way that makes us laugh :P). The fact did shock me but it seems true. We are more conversational, but we tend to become reserved as soon as we are put down by society for being so loquacious.

So next time, men, when proceeding to call a woman bossy, rethink the situation and ponder why she behaves in such a way. Most likely, it is because she has to carry the burdens of stereotypes that society throws on her.