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Media impact on people and politics
Introduction to the impact of mass media on political and social issues
Introduction to the impact of mass media on political and social issues
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After reading three different stories by three different authors, there are many similarities shared that are woven in these stories. Andrew Solomon’s Son, Beth Loffreda’s Losing Matt Shepard and Susan Faludi’s The Naked Citadel have similar themes relating to society’s tendency to not accept gender or sexuality. Son is about Andrew Solomon’s search for identity and being forced by society and his parents to become someone he is not. Losing Matt Shepard showed us how media affects society into thinking a certain way and having set images on what homosexuals should “look” like. The Naked Citadel showed us how society still has a clear gender bias. What these three stories have in common is the blatant hypocrisy of society and the human mind. …show more content…
The main question of Losing Matt Shepard is – was Matt privileged and thus garnered immense amount of media attention while others who were discriminated against and met with a similar fate did not. After Matt’s death, there was considerable discussion about why was Matt killed in such a manner. Gender role anxiety could have played a part in the murderers’ uncertainty of homosexuals believing in the Laramie “cowboy mentality” and upholding to one’s pride, “macho-ness,” further led them to commit such an act. The residents of Laramie stated that Matt Shepard was “someone we could identify with. Matt was the boy next door. He looked like everybody’s brother and everybody’s neighbor. He looked like he could have been anyone’s son” (Loffreda 252.) Many people could have been confused because the media and society had depicted an image and shown them what homosexuals should look like and Matt looked too “normal” to be gay. In both Loffreda and Faludi, they face strong traditions and the opinions of others that will not change that easily. After Matt Shepard’s death, Matt’s fellow classmates would openly make remarks such as Matt “got what he deserved” or “I hate gays and I’m not changing my opinion” (Loffreda 248). Correspondingly it was difficult for the students of the University of Wyoming to change their opinions about homosexuals after adhering to and following …show more content…
This diversity while in itself is not an issue but has often induced a structure of discrimination and gender bias. In
Shepard was a homosexual man, and his murder was labeled as a hate crime, a murder which, in the late 90's, dominated the airwaves: “Matthew Shepard” was the name at the tip of everyone's tongue, but what made his murder special? JoAnn Wypilewski points out in her essay “A Boy's Life” that, “Gay men are killed horribly everywhere in this country, more than thirty just since Shepard – one of them in Richmond, Virginia, beheaded” (609). When so many men are killed in a similar context why do we specifically care about Matthew Shepard – or why don't we? Searching simply the name “Matthew Shepard” in the Google database yields thousands of results in the form of articles, news periodicals, and videos. The media exposure of the Matthew Shepard case is overwhelming. The overload of information can leave us clueless. As college students of the twenty-teens who are fifteen years removed from the incident how do we care about Matthew Shepard?
The first story centers on Gene Robinson, now the first openly gay Episcopal bishop, and the son of a loving, church-going couple from Kentucky. Next, we meet the Poteats, a Baptist family from North Carolina with a gay son and daughter. Then there are the Reitans, from Minnesota, whose son Jake comes from a long line of Lutheran pastors. When Jake came out of the closet, some of the locals threw a brick through their windshield and wrote “fag” in chalk outside the house. The mother’s description of immediately scrubbing the profanity off the driveway was very poignant. Perhaps the most heartbreaking story was that of Mary Lou Wallner, a Christian fundamentalist who rejected her lesbian daughter, which ...
In the short story "Two Kinds," by Amy Tan, the mother in the story tries to do what is best for her daughter to become a world-renowned prodigy. This issue could also be connected to the short story "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," by Ursula K. LeGuin, where the people of Omelas are happy in their lives but also see that there is this person sleeping in a closet and being treated like an animal, but still carry on with their lives. There are people who speak up against these hateful laws towards homosexual people, but there is also the group of people that keep silent and do not say anything with fear that they might be labeled with words such as "gay" or "faggot." The two stories have a deep connection with each other in the sense that they affect the different reactions that citizens have to laws that limit the lives of others. Confo...
In the past decades, the struggle for gay rights in the Unites States has taken many forms. Previously, homosexuality was viewed as immoral. Many people also viewed it as pathologic because the American Psychiatric Association classified it as a psychiatric disorder. As a result, many people remained in ‘the closet’ because they were afraid of losing their jobs or being discriminated against in the society. According to David Allyn, though most gays could pass in the heterosexual world, they tended to live in fear and lies because they could not look towards their families for support. At the same time, openly gay establishments were often shut down to keep openly gay people under close scrutiny (Allyn 146). But since the 1960s, people have dedicated themselves in fighting for
Andrew Sullivan, author of, What is a Homosexual, portrays his experience growing up; trapped in his own identity. He paints a detailed portrait of the hardships caused by being homosexual. He explains the struggle of self-concealment, and how doing so is vital for social acceptation. The ability to hide one’s true feelings make it easier to be “invisible” as Sullivan puts it. “The experience of growing up profoundly different in emotional and psychological makeup inevitably alters a person’s self-perception.”(Sullivan)This statement marks one of the many reasons for this concealment. The main idea of this passage is to reflect on those hardships, and too understand true self-conscious difference. Being different can cause identity problems, especially in adolescents.
In The Way to Rainy Mountain, the author Scott Momaday uses the theme of a journey to drive this story. He begins his journey after the passing of his grandmother, the journey to reconnect and rediscover his own culture. He shares this moment on page 10, “I remember her most often in prayer. She made long, rambling prayers out of suffering and hope, having seen many things…the last time I saw her she prayed standing by the side of her bed at night, naked to the waist, the light of a kerosene lamp moving upon her dark skin…I do not speak Kiowa, and I never understood her prayers, but there was something inherently sad in the sound, some merest hesitation upon the syllables of sorrow”. The passing brought a realization upon him to have to keep the culture going. He can barely speak Kiowa, while his grandmother was one of the few members who were completely fluent. I believe this book is a call out to his tribe to take the same journey Momaday took.
The case has been portrayed in a movie, "Boys Don't Cry", in which the lead actress, played by Hilary Swank won an Oscar in 1999. Because the crime rates have dropped, crimes against homosexuals have risen in the past few years. Laws in several states do not cover crimes related to homosexuals. There are four states in America that have no safe haven for homosexuals, states must establish crueler punishment for men and women that commit heinous hate crimes based on sexual orientation In a statement released by Judy Shepard, Matthews mother, she says. Matt is no longer with us today because the men who killed him learned to hate.
The murder of Matthew Shepard who was gay and only had 21 year’s old, happened in the state of Wyoming in 1999. Just before Matthew was murdered, he was in a bar and ask Russell Henderson and Aaron McKinney for a ride home. These two agreed to take Matthew home, however they had different intentions. “Subsequently, Shepard was robbed, severely beaten, and tied to a fence in a remote area” (Burns & McNamara, 2008, p. 182). Unfortunately, the attack on Matthew left him with a fractured skull and severe brain damage. This cause death of Shepard four days after the attack occur. There was no doubt this was a hate crime that Aaron and Russel committed against Shepard just because of his homosexual orientation.
Discrimination has always been prominent in mainstream society. Judgments are quickly formed based on one’s race, class, or gender. The idea that an individual’s self-worth is measured by their ethnicity or sexual preference has impacted the lives of many Americans. During the early colonial period, a social hierarchy was established with white landowners at the top and African-American slaves at the bottom. As equality movements have transpired, victims of discrimination have varied. In the late 1980’s when Paris is Burning was filmed, gay rights were still controversial in society. The lack of acceptance in conventional society created hardships in the lives of transgender women and gay men.
Life for most homosexuals during the first half of the Twentieth century was one of hiding, being ever so careful to not give away their true feelings and predilections. Although the 1920s saw a brief moment of openness in American society, that was quickly destroyed with the progress of the Cold War, and by default, that of McCarthyism. The homosexuals of the 50s “felt the heavy weight of medical prejudice, police harassment and church condemnation … [and] were not able to challenge these authorities.” They were constantly battered, both physically and emotionally, by the society that surrounded them. The very mention or rumor of one’s homosexuality could lead to the loss of their family, their livelihood and, in some cases, their lives. Geanne Harwood, interviewed on an National Public Radio Broadcast commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, said that “being gay before Stonewall was a very difficult proposition … we felt that in order to survive we had to try to look and act as rugged and as manly as possibly to get by in a society that was really very much against us.” The age of communist threats, and of Joseph McCarthy’s insistence that homosexuals were treacherous, gave credence to the feeling of most society members that homosexuality was a perversion, and that one inflicted was one to not be trusted.
“The unprecedented growth of the gay community in recent history has transformed our culture and consciousness, creating radically new possibilities for people to ‘come out’ and live more openly as homosexuals”(Herdt 2). Before the 1969 Stonewall riot in New York, homosexuality was a taboo subject. Research concerning homosexuality emphasized the etiology, treatment, and psychological adjustment of homosexuals. Times have changed since 1969. Homosexuals have gained great attention in arts, entertainment, media, and politics. Yesterday’s research on homosexuality has expanded to include trying to understand the different experiences and situations of homosexuals (Ben-Ari 89-90).
Additionally the text book Understanding and Managing Diversity also highlighted that we have to consider the multiple dimensions of diversity:
When most people think “Diversity” they think of the most communal characteristics: such as: Age, race, gender, sexual orientation, body type, ethnicity, and a person’s
Politics- changing diversity pattern may also shift the existing balance of power in the organization. Company may not remain male dominated. Individuals /groups empowered under current arrangement may be threatened with losing these political advantages in the advent of
When one hears the words “LGBT” and “Homosexuality” it often conjures up a mental picture of people fighting for their rights, which were unjustly taken away or even the social emergence of gay culture in the world in the1980s and the discovery of AIDS. However, many people do not know that the history of LGBT people stretches as far back in humanity’s history, and continues in this day and age. Nevertheless, the LGBT community today faces much discrimination and adversity. Many think the problem lies within society itself, and often enough that may be the case. Society holds preconceptions and prejudice of the LGBT community, though not always due to actual hatred of the LGBT community, but rather through lack of knowledge and poor media portrayal.