The new iPhone is coming out in a few months, and many people give in the social pressure and wait hours in line to get it. We get different types of social pressure from friends, work or online. Social pressure can happen to you or a friend, just like it happened to Teddy in the story My Flamboyant Grandson by George Saunders, when his peer in school bullied him for not being normal, or like Janet Tyler in the episode “Eye of the Beholder” from The Twilight Zone where she is force to get plastic surgeries in order to comply with the social norms Both authors use emotions and symbolism to demonstrate how societal pressure isolates individuals.
When we are stuck in a bad situation in our life we start to think that nothing is going to change. We have mixed emotions when we have financial issues or problems at home, yet we tell ourselves that the grass is greener in the other side hoping for change. Well this is not that case for the main character Janet Tyler in the episode “Eye of the Beholder” from The Twilight Zone series. We get introduced to Janet, after her eleventh and last surgery she is allowed to have in order to live in this alternate universe. Janet face is bandaged and she cannot see anything. She is kept in a dark room where she is not allowed to go outside. Janet has lost hope after the doctor tells her that if the surgery is not successful she will have to go live in a village with people of her kind. She expressed that she would rather be alone than to be segregated with a bunch of freaks. All this isolation she been put through can be harmful not just for her but anybody emotions. Sociology studies show that when a person feels that his or her future is bleak and there is no way for situation to improve they see...
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...o it to feel accepted by others, they don’t want to be isolated by their peers. Different people have different options on what is true beauty. Similar to “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” One person might think something is beautiful while another may think is ugly.
Societal Pressure can happen to anyone. It happened to me when I was in middle school. I had a unibrow, and people would make fun of me. My feelings where hurt and I felt like an outcast, I just wanted to fit in. I gave in the pressure and got my dads razor and shaved it. The next day I went to school thinking I was not going to get made fun of, but my classmates stilled made fun of me because now my eyebrows were uneven. Social pressure just keeps getting worse with this new age of technology. Kids write hateful things on social medias without knowing if it will affect someone’s feelings.
In many high schools, there is an unspoken social order amongst peer groups; teenagers are either included in the popular group or the unpopular group. These social standings are determined by the popular group whether they will accept certain people based on shared interests and values but mainly on appearance. For example, some groups may isolate a student who does not have clothing considered attractive enough. Teenagers belonging to the popular clique label individuals as outcasts who do not fit the clique’s standards of a perfect appearance. This repression can cause a build up of anger if an outcast seeks to be accepted into that popular group.
Visualize a teenage girl watching television, surfing the internet, and reading magazines. She sees beautiful women everywhere she turns. She is looking in her bedroom mirror wondering why she does not have similar beauty. She begins to feel self-aware because she reads and hears criticizing comments about the females who are just like her. She says to herself, “Am I not considered beautiful because my skin is not as clear as Angelina Jolie? Do I not fit in the category “pretty” because I do not dress like Beyoncé? Or am I not referred to as “cute” because my hair is not as straight and silky as Taraji P. Henson?” Now imagine yourself being that teenage girl. How would you feel if you were consistently exposed to a judgmental society that does not accept you? You would want to be considered beautiful because you are unique, you are an individual, and you are a person made with both inner and outer beauty.
As a child you are always told to not give into peer pressure via programs such as DARE or DFYIT that instruct us to not only stand up to peer pressure, but they also tell us to not shun or bully others. This is a problem for the human brain because, as author Alexander Robbins states: “From the age of five, children increasingly exclude peers who don’t conform to group norms. Children learn this quickly. A popular Indiana eighth grader told me ‘I have to be the same as everybody else, or people won’t like me anymore’” (150). The human brain is wired such that children will end friendships with kids that they find different.
How do the actions and words of a society affect the way people act? In Never Let Me Go, author Kazuo Ishiguro depicts a society in which individuality is threatened by the pressure to conform through methods such as peer pressure and social expectations. Without a doubt, peer pressure is most commonly found in schools today just as social expectations are suffocating the middle class’ desire to become their own unique person.
I view the world from the sociological perspective of social interactionism, which uses symbols to view human interaction (Henslin, 2013). A symbol can be anything a person assigns a meaning to (Henslin, 2013). For instance, the symbol of a bed might conjure an image the person’s bed at home. My world is defined through a series of symbols and how I perceive those symbols. For example, in my mind, the symbol of a smart phone equates to an image of an iPhone. This view of a smart phone is influenced by popular culture and my own personal experiences. In the United States, I observed that many people have an iPhone for a smart phone instead of a Samsung Galaxy or another type of smart phone. For a while, even I had an iPhone. When my dad informed me that my new smart phone would be a Samsung Galaxy S4, I was upset. I did not want to learn how to use the Samsung Galaxy. I also argued that it would be too big to fit in my pocket. Eventually, I got used to my Samsung Galaxy but I still feel sad that I did not have the latest
“Beauty is not in the face; beauty is a light in the heart” (Kahlil). People focus more on the outward appearance instead of the inward appearance. One’s inward appearance is comprised of their character, values, morals, and the true nature of their heart. On the other hand, the outward appearance is composed of one’s dress and grooming. The inward and outward appearance determines whether or not a person is ugly or beautiful. The choices that we make also define whether or not one is ugly or beautiful; choices made in the past can sometimes be repeated in the future.
This is a theme that can be seen quite a bit in The Uglies by Scott Westerfeld. Tally, who is the main character in this book, thinks that being pretty is the best thing that could happen. This is because of how she was raised and the way her society thinks. To some people, conformity isn’t a big deal. But it can be, because
Black is beautiful. Skinny is beautiful. A lack of knowledge is beautiful. The world that we live in is indulged with the concept of what people find beautiful. From the color of skin to the idea of what weight is the most attractive, we have taught ourselves to judge others based upon what we believe is ideal. This concept varies across the world, as is discussed within the novel Scheherazade Goes West, as well as within different upbringings and cultures, as discussed in Adios Barbie.
When you were younger, did your parents and teachers always encourage you to express yourself and that it’s okay to be different? Not a lot of people seem to realize it, but as children grow up, the amount of pressure to blend in grows, too. In schools all over the U.S., innocent students get ridiculed just because they are unique and stand out from the crowd. In the book, “Speak” by Laurie Halse Anderson, the main character, Melinda experiences something similar to this type of bullying, otherwise known as peer pressure. Melinda was just a normal girl who loved her friends, until the night she attended a summer party where alcohol was being served. Her friends were all drinking, so Melinda thought she was supposed to as well, and a senior
The focus on a woman’s appearance reflects the idea of women being objects whose only role was to look pretty for the males around her. Also, the better a woman looked the more beautiful the couple’s children would be. Beauty reflects health.
So the beginning of the article starts out with the explanation of an episode in the Twilight Zone that has to do with conformity. What’s funny is I remember this episode that they described so I knew this article was already off to a good start. The author talked about conformity and how it affects you, “Of course, there is healthy conformity. Listening when your mother tells you to wash the dishes is considered healthy...the unhealthy kind, in which teens blindly follow the ideas and actions of a group of people...,”(Bhatia, 2017, par.5). I see the healthy conformity as informational conformity, while the unhealthy one as normative. The author mentions perfect models in magazines and all over social media as a factor to a rise in conformity and I completely agree with this. Photoshop has made standards of teens go up to something unreachable. One fact that stood out to me was, “Makeup usage has shot up by 90 percent just in the last decade”(Bhatia, 2017, par 9). I mean, little girls are now out wearing lipsticks and stuff id never have worn in public at their age. As a teen I recognize how people want to not be different from others, and fear comes along with that burden(Bhatia, 2017). At the end of this article, the author explains how parents can change this overbearing conformity by giving their children sympathy. I don’t understand how that would
Peer Pressure is undeniably avoidable in adolescent development. There are many types of peer pressure. These types include: Individual, direct, and indirect. What are these? Individual peer pressure can be explained as self pressure. In other words, it is pressure that comes from one’s own self. Being and feeling different from a group of friends or a certain clique can cause hardship, stress, and insecurity. What does this look like? One might drastically change their style of clothing, music, the way they carry themselves, and how they talk. Common ways of trying to fit in include, experimenting with drugs that one is not in full understanding of and this can further emotional damage to them. Another
In many cultures the word "beauty" is plastered across tabloids and televisions with little thought given to the true nature of the
All of us have peer groups or friends that we always get along and hang out with. However, at some point of our lives, we tried and did crazy stuffs that we regret because you, yourself, know at that point it is wrong but still did it because of peer pressure. Then what is peer pressure? Peer pressure is when a person cannot decide for oneself and just depend of what their friends’ decision is. It is being very dependent on your friends that a simple decision can be hard to decide if alone. For example is when attending a class, but your friends told you that they will not attend, surely the student being “pressured” will also not attend the class.
Across the globe, few people have difficulty recognizing someone who is considered beautiful. Beauty is often sought after, revered, and sometimes interpreted as a personal virtue. Standards of beauty are usually social marker determining cultural status, social acceptance and suitability as a mate.